An unknown individual or group using artificial intelligence impersonated Secretary of State Marco Rubio to contact at least five high-level government officials in mid-June, according to a State Department cable obtained by NBC News.
The cable was first reported by The Washington Post.
“The actor likely aimed to manipulate targeted individuals using Al-generated text and voice messages, with the goal of gaining access to information or accounts,” the memo said.
At least three foreign ministers, a U.S. governor and a member of Congress all received outreach from the fake Rubio, the cable said. It sent at least one of the targets a text message urging them to speak on Signal, and sent Signal voice messages to at least two of them.
The sender used the display name marco.rubio@state.gov, which is not a functional email address, as their Signal nickname. Signal allows users to choose their own nickname, and such a nickname would not necessarily mean that the user has access to that email address.
Rubio was among the senior Trump administration officials who were a part of “Signalgate,” an incident in March in which the group discussed sensitive military strikes in Yemen after inadvertently adding Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg into a group chat on the Signal app .
The cable noted that the campaign to impersonate Rubio echoed another effort to impersonate unnamed senior U.S. officials that was investigated by the FBI in May. The White House confirmed that month that someone had been impersonating President Donald Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, in texts and phone calls to government officials.
A senior state department official confirmed the clandestine campaign and said the agency is investigating the matter.
“The department takes seriously its responsibility to safeguard its information and continuously takes steps to improve the department’s cybersecurity posture to prevent future incidents,” the official said. “For security reasons, and due to our ongoing investigation, we are not in a position to offer further details at this time.”
It was not immediately clear how the individual or group impersonated Rubio, but foreign disinformation operations have begun to routinely use generative AI chat apps like ChatGPT in order to create text in convincing English.
Meanwhile, AI-enabled voice cloning technology has rapidly become extremely sophisticated, and it can be very difficult for many people to distinguish a synthetic voice from a real person’s voice.
While there is no direct cyber threat to the State Department from the campaign, the diplomatic cable warned that “information shared with a third party could be exposed if targeted individuals are compromised.” The cable signed by Rubio was sent to all domestic and overseas U.S. diplomatic posts last week, said U.S. diplomats may warn their external partners that cyber threat actors are impersonating State officials and accounts.
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