The Rising Threat of Deepfake Attacks in Cyber Warfare

Deepfakes are no longer viral gimmicks—they’re tactical cyber weapons, and the more they learn the more realistic they get. Leveraging AI to create hyper-realistic audio, video, or images, attackers now impersonate public figures, military leaders, and executives to spread disinformation or manipulate events.

For instance, in 2022, a deepfake of Ukrainian President Zelensky appeared urging troops to surrender. While it was quickly debunked, the potential for chaos was real. Imagine a forged video of a CEO ordering a fund transfer, or a fake general issuing retreat orders. So, now we are not talking some "silly prank" - now we are talking about a infofield manipulation in a cruicial fields, like markets.

The danger is twofold: the damage done by a convincing fake, and the doubt cast on real footage. In intelligence and defense operations, trust in source material is critical—and deepfakes undermine that trust.

If you stay up to date on social media and scroll through comment section under the AI video, you could have possibly already seen that some people have difficulties telling whether the media was created by AI or not.

For techies, this involves generative adversarial networks (GANs), synthetic voice synthesis, and metadata manipulation. For others, the takeaway is simple: don’t trust your eyes and ears blindly.

At Verto, we research adversarial AI to develop defenses, including deepfake detection algorithms and digital watermarking. Education is key—we must train both machines and humans to be skeptical, verify, and respond quickly.

Key takeaway: Tomorrow’s cyberattacks will look and sound real. Trust, once broken, is a new front in cyber warfare.