China, Russia and Iran will “very likely” use artificial intelligence to try and disrupt Canada’s next federal election, a new assessment from the Communications Security Establishment Canada says, but are unlikely to undermine the overall integrity of the vote.
The annual report on cyber threats to Canadian democracy, released Thursday, said cybercriminals linked to those countries will most likely use generative AI tools and methods like deepfakes to spread disinformation “designed to sow division among Canadians and push narratives conducive to the interests of foreign states.”
Canadian politicians and political parties will likely be targeted with phishing scams and hack-and-leak operations to further sow discord, the report said.
“We assess that the PRC, Russia, and Iran will very likely use AI-enabled tools to attempt to interfere with Canada’s democratic process before and during the 2025 election,” the report from the CSE and its Canadian Centre for Cyber Security says, using the acronym for the People’s Republic of China.
“However, we assess it very unlikely that hostile actors will carry out a destructive cyber attack against election infrastructure, such as attempting to paralyze telecommunications systems on election day, outside of imminent or direct armed conflict.”
The report also underscores the “heightened risk” Canadian public figures, particularly women and LGBTQ2+ people, face from deepfake pornography. Such content can deter people from running for political office, and will continue to grow unabated without proper regulations, it warns.
“Further, we assess it likely that, on at least one occasion, that content was seeded to deliberately sabotage the campaign of a candidate running for office,” the report says.
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The final report from the federal public inquiry into foreign interference released last month said disinformation represents the greatest threat to Canadian democracy. It said the rise of artificial intelligence was behind that assessment.
The CSE report said improvements in quality, affordability and accessibility of generative AI technology has enabled a rise in the use of those tools to target elections worldwide.
The agency said more than a quarter of all elections between 2o23 and 2024 saw interference and influence attempts using AI, compared to just one identified in the previous two years.
It pointed to multiple cyber-related incidents during last year’s U.S. presidential election, including AI deepfakes of candidates and the hack of U.S. President Donald Trump’s campaign by Iran-backed actors, as notable examples.
The agencies said China and Russia were behind most attributable AI-enabled campaigns against elections around the world in the last two years — while noting they were unable to attribute a majority of those campaigns to specific actors — and will continue to be in the future.
Deepfakes and material generated by foreign actors are typically amplified by “witting or unwitting actors from within the targeted state,” it said, noting such foreign-generated material does not gain much traction on its own.
“CSE stands ready to conduct foreign cyber operations to defend our country against hostile threats, if needed. At the same time, Canadians can help safeguard democracy by thinking critically about the information they see online,” CSE chief Caroline Xavier said in a statement accompanying the report.
At the same time, the agency said AI is also being used to help foreign states more quickly analyze data collected from targeted systems through mass hacking operations.
“Nation states, in particular the PRC, are undertaking massive data collection campaigns, collecting billions of data points on democratic politicians, public figures, and citizens around the world,” the report said.
“Advances in predictive AI allow human analysts to quickly query and analyze these data. We assess it likely that such states are gaining an improved understanding of democratic political environments as a result,” it added, and are “almost certainly enhancing their capabilities to conduct targeted influence and espionage campaigns.”
A threat bulletin released Monday by the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security warned China-sponsored cyber actors were targeting all levels of Canadian government, including federal, provincial, municipal and Indigenous institutions.
It noted federal government agencies had been compromised by PRC cyber threat actors more than 20 times over the past few years, and warned of “near-constant reconnaissance” activity by China against Canadian government systems.
“Taken together, PRC cyber actors have both the volume of resources and the sophistication to pursue multiple government targets in Canada simultaneously,” the bulletin said.
The foreign interference inquiry came after Global News and other media outlets reported on repeated alleged attempts by actors like China to meddle in Canadian elections and democratic institutions. The final report confirmed that multiple alleged interference attempts did indeed occur.
The government has launched new measures since then to monitor and alert the public about foreign interference attempts, including a task force that oversees elections for threats.
Last month, Chrystia Freeland’s Liberal leadership campaign was warned of a Chinese-sponsored disinformation campaign spreading false news articles about her on WhatsApp.
