In today’s world, many countries quietly fund state-sponsored hacker groups — crafting zero-day exploits, breaching power grids, and launching sophisticated cyberattacks. Incidents like the Saudi Aramco breach and NotPetya attack show how far these capabilities have evolved.
But from the most advanced nation-state operations to the simplest online scams, one thing rarely changes: the weakest link is still the human being.
The Path of Least Resistance
Anyone who’s just beginning to explore cybersecurity quickly learns this: if you wanted to hack into someone’s WhatsApp, you could try to exploit the app itself. But Meta spends hundreds of millions securing its systems. A far easier path is to compromise the person’s phone — because humans, not software, are often the softest target.
This “path of least resistance” has been exploited for decades. Take Kevin Mitnick, one of the most famous hackers of the 1990s. In a well-known case, he impersonated a Motorola employee, convincingly using internal jargon and pretexts to trick a VP into granting access to restricted source code. No malware, no zero-days — just social engineering.
Even long before the internet, intelligence agencies used HUMINT (Human Intelligence) — the art of “hacking people.” That same principle applies today, only now it’s powered by artificial intelligence.
Deepfakes and the New Era of Deception
The rise of AI has ushered in a terrifying new phase of cyber threats. We’re no longer talking about fake emails from “Microsoft Support.” Nation-state groups like North Korea’s APT units are deploying real-time deepfake technology capable of manipulating faces and voices during live video calls.
The seeds of this were easy to spot. Snapchat and Instagram filters were early hints of what was coming. But in just the past six years, deepfake technology has leapt forward. What once took hours of technical effort on high-end machines now takes seconds on consumer hardware — with frightening realism.
A chilling example: in 2024, an employee at the UK engineering firm Arup in Hong Kong was tricked into transferring $25 million after joining a video call featuring deepfake versions of his company’s CFO and colleagues.
This wasn’t Hollywood CGI — it was a scam.
When Reality Becomes Optional
Text-to-video and text-to-speech models are rapidly closing the gap between real and synthetic content. Soon, scam groups on the dark web will have access to one-click tools that can fake your voice or mimic your face in real time.
For years, cybersecurity experts have warned: don’t overshare online. Why post your location, your children’s school, or your family photos? Yet staying “off the grid” is almost impossible. Every app login, every account creation leaves behind digital breadcrumbs — IP addresses, metadata, and personal details often sold by data brokers or leaked in breaches.
The question now is:
how much information do threat actors really need to clone you?
Some AI models can already replicate a voice with just three minutes of audio or a few dozen sentences. That’s today. What about tomorrow?
Will it even be safe to answer calls from unknown numbers? What if a scammer collects a few seconds of your speech — enough to clone your voice and use it weeks later to impersonate you?
As the saying goes, only the paranoid survive.
The Next Generation’s Digital Exposure
It’s easy to focus on adult victims, but the next generation faces even greater risk. Today’s children grow up surrounded by screens — often handed a phone before they can speak. Social conformity makes it almost impossible to opt out; how many people do you know without a smartphone or social media account?
Every photo, video, and post adds to an ever-growing data set that can be used to train or exploit AI models. It’s not far-fetched to imagine a deepfake call that lures a teenager to danger — their “friend’s” familiar face and voice convincing enough to be fatal.
The Final Thought
We once trusted computers because digital information seemed more reliable than paper. But we’re now entering a future where nothing we see or hear can be fully trusted.
The tools we built to connect us are becoming the tools used to deceive us.