Security Awareness Training Month: Preparing Employees for Deepfakes.

“We’re not sure what to do about deepfakes and we’re exploring options.”

Every October, organizations spotlight Security Awareness Month to reinforce best practices that protect employees and businesses from evolving cyber threats. While phishing emails and social engineering remain major risks, a newer and far more sophisticated threat has entered the landscape powered by AI: Deepfakes. What was once a novelty has morphed into a very real threat. Hyper-realistic, AI-generated audio and video manipulations are no longer hypotheticals; they are now being weaponized in cyberattacks.

This makes Deepfake Awareness Training a vital addition to any modern security program.

Why Deepfake Awareness Matters

Cybercriminals are already using them to:

• Impersonate executives or colleagues in audio calls to authorize fraudulent money transfers.
• Manipulate video messages to spread misinformation or prompt employees to take harmful actions.
• Exploit trust within organizations where voices or faces once served as reliable authentication clues.

With advancements in generative AI tools, producing convincing fake content is faster, cheaper, and easier than ever. One convincing voice message could bypass years of phishing training if employees do not understand the threat or are simply just not aware.

The Role of Deepfake Awareness Training

Deepfake Awareness training helps employees:

• Recognize red flags in AI-generated phishing.
• Verify suspicious requests through secondary channels before acting.
• Report suspected deepfake attempts quickly to IT and security teams.
• Build healthy skepticism toward unexpected digital communications, even when familiar voices or faces are involved.

Protecting the Digital Trust Layer

Deepfakes are fundamentally an attack on trust. In the workplace, trust in leadership communications and team collaboration is critical. By training employees to spot deepfake manipulation, organizations protect what can be called the digital trust layer: the shared understanding that information flowing through the organization is authentic and reliable. Without that, confidence in digital communication erodes.

Making Training Engaging and Effective

Instead of overwhelming employees with paranoia, deepfake training should be practical, engaging, and scenario-based. Awareness modules can include:

• Simulated deepfake attacks where employees practice identifying and reporting suspicious content.
• Interactive exercises highlighting examples of deepfake audio and video.
• Real-world case studies of recent deepfake-driven fraud to show the stakes.

By keeping sessions relevant and hands-on, organizations not only inform employees but also empower them to respond decisively in real-life situations.

Security Awareness Month is the Perfect Time

Security Awareness Month is designed to remind organizations that security is everyone’s responsibility. Introducing deepfake awareness as part of this initiative ensures teams stay prepared for one of the most pressing emerging threats. Just as phishing went from fringe to mainstream, deepfakes are on the same trajectory. The earlier organizations build resilience, the stronger their security posture will be.

Deepfake Awareness Training is not optional: it is an essential component of a forward-looking cybersecurity program. In a world where seeing and hearing is being manipulated:, employee readiness can be the line that separates a strong defense from a devastating breach.

How to align Awareness Training to Business Objectives.

Many security awareness programs failed to predict the magnitude and the rapid maturity of Deepfakes and promoted visual identification of Deepfakes by looking for irregularities. This is a fundamentally flawed approach. Much of the Awareness training is generic and canned as well, users tune it out.

Deepfakes unlock a new opportunity to change that dynamic and make awareness training incredibly effective and relevant to users. Additionally, by teaching a context based approach employees can apply the same principles on the homefront too..

We recommend a simple framework that sticks: STOP Framework

Slow Down – Any situation that applies an unusual amount of pressure or urgency to act…Slow down instead. Attackers often use this tactic to coerce a user to act on a request quickly. Hang up and call back etc…

Trust Less – Scrutinize unusual or suspicious interactions, requests or media. Verify through secondary channels if possible.

Out of Band Verification – Use a secondary secure channel to verify the authenticity of something. As an example, if a phone call verify through a corporate teams chat.

Policy, Procedure, Process – Always stick to corporate policy for handling data or communications.

This framework is simple, memorable and effective. No matter how advanced Deepfakes or AI get, these will always hold true. This is why we believe this approach is more effective. Using a contextually based approach will beat visual detection any day.

Align Training to Role, Process and Business Objective.

Much of the awareness training today is generic awareness training and focuses on Cybersecurity threats. Where we believe programs fail is not aligning or making education relevant to the user and their day to day job.

Using Deepfakes, you can change this.

Here’s how..
Interactive Training Bots.

These are highly interactive chat bots that can use a Deepfake voice clone of someone in the organization. It’s highly impactful when a user can interact with a Deepfake of someone they recognize to understand how advanced these threats have gotten. The dialouge can be custom tailored to the organization and made contextually relevant. We typically distribute these broadly to an organization as an awareness training module or baked into one of our custom tailored courses.

Micro-Modules.

Short interactive training modules that feature Deepfake video’s of executives or audio clips so users can see how advanced they’ve gotten.

Simulations.

Testing the process and control vs. the user… This is where we deviate from most awareness training providers. We believe in testing the functional role of the user and aligning it to an objective. As an example, we test if wire transfers are vulnerable to Deepfake manipulation.

Instead of generic, canned awareness training and phishing simulations we focus on high quality, advanced testing in small focused engagements. We believe awareness training should be broad and high level for a user base, but also focused on a micro-level for functions and departments that are impacted the most.

Ready to test your organization’s deepfake readiness? The first step is understanding your unique risk profile and vulnerability landscape. Because when it comes to deepfakes, one size definitely doesn’t fit all.

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