Are deepfakes rewriting the rules of cybersecurity?

SJUK hears exclusively from Myles Bray, CEO of CyberSentriq about how businesses can protect themselves against sophisticated deepfakes.

Deepfakes are no longer a future threat.

Advancements in generative AI and machine learning have turned them into practical tools for cyber-criminals to bypass traditional security controls, impersonate trusted individuals and manipulate business processes.

It’s easy to assume that deepfakes are isolated incidents, yet at the enterprise level, the narrative is shifting.

76% of UK organisations have experienced an impersonation attack, while other reports have found the average cost of a successful attack has risen to more than £750,000, with more serious cases incurring losses up to £5 million.

For managed service providers (MSPs) and the businesses they protect, this has fundamentally altered the threat landscape.

Security teams are no longer just protecting the perimeters; they are now expected to defend user identities across security environments.

This has created a new challenge for the enterprise sector: how can businesses manage deepfakes at a time when traditional cues, like recognising a familiar voice, face or email sender, are no longer reliable?

Deception is getting harder to spot

As deepfakes continue to evolve, business leaders must plan for a future where highly convincing social engineering campaigns become more difficult to distinguish from reality.

The deepfakes that once required vast amounts of resources to create can now be created and deployed in a matter of minutes.

Because criminals only need a small amount of source data to create highly convincing impersonations, basic security tools are not reliable enough on their own, as these attacks are designed to weaponise trust and exploit the human element in a cybersecurity strategy.

Highly convincing deepfakes are now able to mimic natural pauses in speech, eye movements and blinking, whilst recreating realistic lighting conditions.

Audio deepfakes are even incorporating background noise to simulate real environments.

For businesses and decentralised teams, the danger comes when deepfakes are used in combination with other tactics.

Attackers have been known to send phishing emails and then follow up with a deepfake to escalate their attacks and trick employees into issuing payments.

While the financial implications of a successful attack are important, business leaders must recognise that not all deepfakes are focused on monetary gains.

Multi-million-pound scams make for an interesting headline, but attackers are increasingly using deepfakes to play the long game and harvest data.

On the surface, this data might not be sensitive, but in the hands of criminals, it provides more context to produce hyper-personalised attacks that enable them to escalate account privileges and operate stealthily within business networks.

Why recovery is just as important as prevention

Given that a successful deepfake attack can expose sensitive data, cause widespread disruptions and lead to significant recovery costs, the question is no longer whether a business can detect a deepfake; it is also how quickly they can recover if an attempt is successful.

If criminals have the means to create highly convincing impersonations of senior leaders and employees, then business systems need to be robust enough to contain a breach and minimise recovery efforts.

Achieving this level of resilience requires MSPs and business leaders to shift the focus from reactive support to proactive threat hunting.

Leveraging MSP expertise to conduct a susceptibility assessment across workflows is an effective way to prepare teams for deepfakes, as this approach allows businesses to evaluate their operations against real-world threats.

This involves close collaboration with MSPs to map out critical workflows, focusing on what processes require manual or verbal authorisation to progress, what forms of identification teams are dependent on, who has access to these credentials, who has authority over important decisions and finally, the potential impact if these systems are compromised.

Armed with this knowledge, MSPs and business leaders can proactively design processes that are secure by design, close critical vulnerability gaps that may have gone unnoticed and implement policies to ensure employee alignment.

Crucially, it allows MSPs to enforce least-privilege-access, zero trust and multi-factor authentication practices across a business.

These tests may seem excessive, but rather than just looking for technical vulnerabilities, they evaluate how human behaviour and system defences hold up against highly sophisticated social engineering attacks, which is the layer that deepfakes are engineered to manipulate.

A security stack is not a standalone solution

The rapid evolution of deepfake technology is a challenge that every business must prepare for, yet the answer is not simply to buy more security tools or to deliver more awareness training.

When verification processes are inconsistent, approval workflows are unclear and critical decisions rely on trust alone, even the most sophisticated technology can be circumvented.

Business leaders and MSPs must assume that deepfakes will continue to improve until they are effectively indistinguishable from reality.

The businesses that remain resilient will not be those trying to spot every fake, but rather those that build security into every process, enforce robust verification controls and remove single points of trust from critical operations.

The question is no longer whether deepfakes will become convincing enough to deceive employees, but whether your business can continue to operate securely when they do.