Authorities found it challenging to trace the location of the culprits behind President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s controversial deepfake speech, a senior official from the National Intelligence Coordinating Agency (NICA) said on Thursday.

In a televised public briefing, NICA Deputy Director General for Special Concerns Abelardo Villacorta said the perpetrators may have used a virtual private network (VPN) to hide themselves.

“Although we know that they came from one country, it turns out their VPN is in another country. So it is becoming very challenging on our part to identify these people involved in this kind of activity,” Villacorta said.

“But we have some partnerships with other intelligence agencies not only domestic but international; our partnership is very strong,” Villacorta added.

Asked about the identities of the people involved, he said: “Yeah, we have identities already.”

Villacorta also mentioned that they are coordinating closely with the Department of Information and Communications Technology, our cybersecurity agencies, the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP), and the Philippine National Police.

“We held a meeting (last week) with the AFP and established a framework for joint operations, focusing on identifying those responsible for disseminating deepfakes of the President,” Villacorta said.

Artificial intelligence is used to make deepfake video or audio, which looks or sounds like a person being copied. A deepfake audio that circulated online last month sounds like Marcos speaking and telling the AFP to act against another nation. It was timed during rising tensions between China and the Philippines over their overlapping territorial claims in the West Philippine Sea.

But Malacañang clarified that Marcos never gave the military such instructions, adding that a ‘foreign actor’ is behind the fake audio.

Last week, an official from the Presidential Communications Office (PCO) said that Marcos’ deepfake audio could have affected the Philippines’ foreign policy.

“It’s a big news because it’s foreign policy that’s affected there,” PCO Assistant Secretary Dale de Vera said in a mix of English and Filipino on the Bagong Pilipinas Ngayon public briefing.