How Professional Services Firms Can Recognize and Prevent AI-Powered Attacks

Deepfake Fraud in 2026: How Professional Services Firms Can Recognize and Prevent AI-Powered Attacks

Why A.I. Powered Cybersecurity Threats are an Urgent Risk

You’ve undoubtedly heard of frightening cybersecurity breaches. And now there’s a new terrain of attacks, which, due to our human nature, make us less likely to recognize their danger.  When we hear about a break-in at a home nearby, we feel compelled to take extra precautions to lock our doors and windows. But cyberattacks are not visible, and we rarely become aware of them unless they are dramatic enough to shut a system down. As a result, we don’t see our digital data as similarly vulnerable. The increasing use of A.I. powered tools can greatly increase not only the number of threats attacking the gaps in our digital security, but the capacity for deceiving us into letting hackers in without realizing it.

While ransom attacks are still popular, “data theft and extortion” have become much more successful and lucrative that hacker groups are actually “aggressively recruiting” and even franchising. They are obviously having great successes in our industry by targeting our “platforms that centralize legal documentation and business-critical info.” 

Consequences of Successful A.I. Powered Attacks

While reports that law firms last year experienced an average of the jaw-dropping sum of over $5 million per cyber incident, the outcome of data theft, for instance, makes it possible for the stolen data to be exploited repeatedly.
If you suffer a successful cyberattack, you will need a backup system to continue operations, you will incur incident-recovery/response costs that are typically going to much higher than the investment of a good plan. One successful cyberattack can quickly lead to repeated attempts as the attacker quickly tries to exploit other open doors they likely discovered.
The immediate costs may also climb with fines for lack of compliance to industry regulations, and cyber-insurance audits, that may reveal lack of compliance which nullifies the insurance coverage. The longest-lasting damage however will come from the damage to your reputation, your brand, and the potential loss of clients who “migrate to competitors” in businesses that rely on relationships.

These Are Your Firm’s Cyber Attacks Risks

We have seen how our industry attracts cybercrime due to their large volume of sensitive and desirable info. Preventing attacks boils down to understanding, in general terms, how and where they can happen.  The targets range from “ransomware, credentials theft, email fraud and targeting” the use of third-party suppliers.

The primary methods of most cybercrime have shifted away from the technology itself, as it changes so frequently. It now relies heavily on using the same old gaps more effectively and more frequently through A.I.’s vastly increasing capacity, speed and ability to to deceive us.
With sophisticated fakes-fake faces, voices, and other identifiers-cyber attackers use A.I. technology as a tool to deceive our people into allowing them access to valuable data. The human element has become the target! You could receive a fake email from a supplier about an invoice, a fake voice-message from your I.T. support, or a fake request to issue a new access pass. How you respond, or don’t respond, will make the difference between a breach or a save!

This means we can be very successful in our cybersecurity prevention plan as we can exercise control over those gaps! Our people are our best assets so let’s bring them full awareness of improved cybersecurity habits. A.I., with its great speeds, can also quickly detect gaps regarding how your devices and your software have been set up. By improperly configuring how we connect to our suppliers, how we share documents, or who can connect to either of these, those gaps can be quickly discovered with the speed of a hacker’s A.I. tools.

It can then use that same data to write an email about a real invoice, or refer to a real meeting, or cite the contents of a real document, thereby adding to the credibility of a fake sender, and impersonating a real contact. This can result in an employee being deceived, then convinced to skip the usual digital protocols.

2 Pathways To Lock Down and Prevent Cyber Attacks

Cybersecurity is not a technical issue or glitch-it is a destructive business risk, and we can dramatically lower it. Although devising plans to prevent cybersecurity weaknesses falls on our cybersecurity professionals, who will investigate and audit the current configuration of the technology, devices and software you use, it will also be our implementation of those plans, and adherence to the protocols they dictate, that decide whether an attack will be successful.

The first vulnerable pathway to lock down is the way we use any digital product. We’ll need all our people to develop a stronger awareness and understanding of the risks with the use of every device, every application, every platform, in every location, and from any person using any digital platform.

In order to implement any cybersecurity plan, we need to provide all of our people with the best set of “practices and habits that promote good cybersecurity”, that safeguard our vital digital systems and data. This is known as cyber-hygiene. Cyber-hygiene will need to expand just as the way A.I. has expanded the threat landscape in numerous ways.

The second vulnerable pathway we need to lock up is the one created by gaps in the way all our digital products are configured, both within our own systems, and with third-party providers; such as our suppliers, and the third-party digital tools we use in our firms, such as document platforms, file-sharing applications, and anyone in our supply chains.

Your professional cybersecurity team can set all the tools to be used in specific ways, with specific limitations and procedures often restricted to specific people and devices.  While the daunting prospect of requiring extra time, cost and effort to configure our digital tools, and to train our teams to adapt to these new habits, it will be those high-impact defense habits that will create the most friction to hackers, making your firm a pointless target or one that’s not worth their effort.

Get the Right Help to Create and Implement Your Updated Cybersecurity Plan

One final thought as you begin the process of evaluating your current cybersecurity plan; don’t forget to check the qualifications and certifications of any cybersecurity team you engage. In this A.I. era, not only are there potentially more falsified claims of I.T. professional qualifications, they may be untrained, or they may be highly trained bad actors looking for access to your system. We recommend at least these two top-tier certificates: CISSP, CISSM. 

At GLC we take cybersecurity so seriously that we will only reach out to the strongest I.T. security partners to help you develop the best lock-down plan for your firm.

We know you want these bases covered so Consider It Done!

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