Deepfakes are no longer just a disinformation problem. They are your next supply chain risk

"For years, deepfakes were treated as a political or social media oddity, a strange corner of the internet where celebrity faces (of women 99% of the time) were pasted onto fake videos (porn in 99% of the cases) and nobody quite knew what to do about it. But that framing is now dangerously outdated, because deepfakes have quietly evolved into something much more systemic: an operational risk for corporations, capable of corrupting supply chains, financial workflows, brand trust, and even executive decision-making."

"Recent headlines show that synthetic media is no longer a fringe experiment. It is a strategic threat, one that companies are not prepared for. In February 2025, global engineering firm Arup fell victim to a sophisticated deepfake fraud. Attackers used AI-generated video and audio to impersonate senior leadership and convinced an employee to transfer $25 million in company funds. The World Economic Forum described it as a milestone event: the moment synthetic fraud graduated from experiment to enterprise-scale theft."

"For any executive who still thinks of deepfakes as a social media phenomenon, this should be a wake-up call. Arup had strong cybersecurity. What it didn't have was identity resilience -the ability to verify that the human on the other side of the call was actually human. In the past year, deepfake CEO-fraud attempts have surged, targeting CFOs, procurement teams, and M&A departments. A 2025 report noted that more than half of surveyed security professionals had encountered synthetically generated executive impersonation attempts."

Deepfakes have evolved from a social media oddity into a systemic operational risk for corporations, threatening supply chains, financial workflows, brand trust, and executive decision-making. In February 2025, attackers used AI-generated video and audio to impersonate senior leadership at Arup, convincing an employee to transfer $25 million. The event marked a transition to enterprise-scale synthetic fraud. Strong cybersecurity does not guarantee protection when identity resilience—the ability to verify that the interlocutor is actually human—is absent. Deepfake CEO-fraud attempts have surged, targeting CFOs, procurement teams, and M&A departments, with over half of security professionals reporting encounters.

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