Next-gen AI attacks are engineered to fracture internal trust and turn employees into the primary battleground.
By Erich Kron
It’s Monday morning, and your company’s CFO is doing a Zoom presentation beamed to offices worldwide. From out of his mouth comes a tirade of shockingly racist remarks. Within hours the video goes viral. Wall Street hammers the stock. Major clients sever ties. But the most visceral reaction comes from inside: employees are protesting, demanding the CFO’s resignation. Except, the CFO was in Hawaii and never Zoomed anyone. This is a deepfake incident —a meticulously crafted synthetic media attack designed to implode your organization from the inside out.
While hypothetical, the scenario represents a relatively new corporate risk. Malicious competitors, hacktivists, and state actors now possess the ability to abuse AI to create hyper-realistic forgeries—audio, video, text—indistinguishable from the real thing to the untrained eye.
The target isn’t just data or systems; it’s reputation, trust, and something easily overlooked —the human capital that sustains the entity. This is cyber warfare fused seamlessly with cultural warfare, exploiting the very emotions and social dynamics that bind a company together. In short, the true insidiousness of the attack unfolds internally.
Employees become the primary battleground. Individuals fragment into three distinct groups:
The Believers: Some employees, horrified by the content and lacking immediate context or tools for verification, blindly accept the deepfake as truth. Their sense of safety evaporates. Trust in leadership, and by extension, the company’s stated values, is shattered. They vocalize their anger publicly or internally, demanding swift action to oust the offender without secondary evidence.
The Skeptics: Others, perhaps with closer ties to the CFO or a deeper understanding of the company’s culture, instinctively question the video’s authenticity. They rally to defend the company’s reputation, sometimes clashing directly with their disillusioned colleagues.
The Uncertain: A significant portion remains paralyzed in the middle, unsure whom to trust or what to believe. This uncertainty breeds anxiety, saps productivity, and creates a toxic atmosphere of suspicion.
Countering the Synthetic Onslaught: Building Human-Centric Defenses
Surviving and mitigating such an attack requires moving beyond purely technological solutions. While AI detection tools can help, the first and most critical line of defense lies in empowering the human factor. A resilient organization builds its bulwarks on human risk management and security awareness training, specifically tailored to counter the mental manipulation inherent in deepfake attacks.
Rapidly deploy trained ambassadors. These are not IT security personnel, but respected peers from diverse departments trained to coach workshops. The focus isn’t just on what deepfakes are but on how they manipulate us emotionally and how to cultivate verification habits:
- Sourcing: Always check the original source. Was it posted on a known platform by a verified account? Or did it appear mysteriously on obscure sites or social media?
- Context: Does the content align with the person’s known character and past statements? Was the timing unusual or suspiciously convenient for adversaries?
- Technical Tells: While improving, deepfakes often have subtle anomalies, unnatural blinking or stiffness, lack of throat movement, odd lighting or shadows. Training helps people spot these potential red flags, prompting further verification.
- Pause Before Sharing: The most critical habit is breaking the auto-reflex to react and share immediately. Encouraging a culture of “verify first, share mindfully” is paramount.
Leadership must address employees first, acknowledge the incident, express understanding of the distress caused, and unequivocally state the deepfake is under investigation. Silence breeds speculation and distrust. There should be channels for employees to voice concerns, ask questions, and access support without fear of retribution. This helps to mitigate panic and rebuild a sense of community.
Ensure a unified public response, coordinating Comms, Legal, and HR. This includes issuing clear statements about the investigation, leveraging third-party forensic analysis, and even providing tools or resources explaining how others can verify synthetic media authenticity.
Balancing Skepticism and Trust
Organizations must foster a healthy skepticism, an understanding that seeing is no longer believing without scrutiny. Employees must be trained to feel empowered (and equipped) to question the authenticity of sensational content.
The antidote to synthetic mistrust is authentic trust, built through consistent leadership, transparent communication, and demonstrable commitment to shared values. The goal is to create an environment where verification habits are second nature. It’s about discerning malicious fabrication from human error or disagreement.
The New Leadership Mandate
The incursion of deepfake threats marks a pivotal moment. Defending an enterprise now requires defending its employees, its human core, and its values, against technologically amplified emotional manipulation.
Leaders must prioritize:
- Investing in Human Firewalls: Continuous, engaging security awareness training focused on behavioral change (verification habits) and mental manipulation tactics is non-negotiable. Peer-led initiatives can dramatically increase engagement and adoption.
- Elevating Human Risk Management: The workforce must be equipped to manage the fallout of digital attacks and serve as stalwart defenders. AI and machine learning can deliver training content that adapts to employee behavior, role, threats, and individual risk profiles.
- Cultivating Resilience: Actively build a security-conscious culture strong enough to withstand attempts to fracture it, where trust is earned daily and healthy skepticism is balanced with collective purpose.
The deepfake targeting the CFO wasn’t just an attack on an individual or a stock price; it was an assault on the company’s credibility. The organizations that survive these emerging synthetic threats won’t be those with the strongest firewalls alone, but those that have invested most deeply in the resilience, awareness, and trust of their people.
Erich Kron is Security Awareness Advocate for KnowBe4, the world-renowned cybersecurity platform that comprehensively addresses human risk management with over 70,000 customers and more than 60 million users. A 25-year veteran information security professional with experience in the medical, aerospace, manufacturing, and defense fields, he was a security manager for the U.S. Army’s 2nd Regional Cyber Center-Western Hemisphere and holds CISSP, CISSP-ISSAP, SACP, and other certifications. Erich has worked with information security professionals around the world to provide tools, training, and educational opportunities to succeed in information security.