A familiar voice calls the finance department with an urgent instruction to transfer funds. The caller sounds exactly like the CEO, knows the details of an ongoing transaction and insists that the payment must be completed immediately. To reassure a hesitant employee, the executive even joins a video conference. Everything appears legitimate, from the voice and facial expressions to the business context.
Morey Haber, Chief Security Advisor at BeyondTrust
Yet the person making the request may not exist beyond a collection of AI-generated audio, manipulated video and stolen personal information.
This is the emerging reality of deepfake-enabled cybercrime, where attackers no longer need to compromise an executive’ s account to exploit their authority. Increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence tools allow criminals to manufacture convincing identities and manipulate the trust that underpins everyday business interactions.
AI-generated voices, synthetic identities and convincing video impersonations are transforming social engineering into a sophisticated enterprise threat. As deepfake attacks become harder to detect, security leaders from BeyondTrust, Fortinet and Check Point explain why identity assurance, continuous verification and stronger business controls must become central to cyber-resilience.
For organisations across the Middle East, the implications are particularly significant. Rapid digital transformation, expanding financial technology ecosystems and increasingly interconnected enterprises have created new opportunities for innovation. They have also expanded the attack surface for criminals capable of exploiting digital identities.
Morey Haber, Chief Security Advisor at BeyondTrust, believes deepfakes represent a fundamental shift in the threat landscape.
“ Deepfakes are fundamentally changing the cyber threat landscape because threat actors no longer need to compromise a digital identity to exploit its authority. They can simply impersonate it.”
The challenge for CISOs is therefore moving beyond the detection of manipulated content. It is about ensuring that a convincing impersonation cannot translate into an unauthorised financial transaction, compromised account or disclosure of sensitive information.
The industrialisation of impersonation
Traditional social engineering has long relied on exploiting human trust. Attackers impersonate colleagues, suppliers or senior executives
Criminals can exploit these processes through manipulated identity documents, synthetic photographs, fabricated personal information and attempts to defeat remote verification mechanisms.
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