$25 million vanished in a single phone call

It sounds like a Hollywood script, but it happened in reality: an employee received an urgent conference call from the CEO and CFO. The voices were familiar, the tone was authoritative, and the instruction to transfer the funds was unequivocal. He executed the transfer. In hindsight? It wasn't them. It was a Deepfake perfectly tailored to the situation. No one hacked the company's computers; they hacked the employee's perception.

�� The equation has changed: Forgery is cheap, detection is expensive. While producing deepfakes has become cheap, accessible, and instantaneous (any teenager with a laptop can do it), detection technology is struggling to keep pace. And when you can't trust what you see, legal chaos ensues: How do you prove "chain of custody" in court? And how do you protect privacy when the forgery looks more credible than the original?

⚖️ What about the law? It's trying, but it's too little, too late. Recently, a bill was introduced establishing that publishing a deepfake to fraudulently obtain something or focusing on a person's sexuality will be considered a criminal offense. It's an important step, but a drop in the ocean. Existing law still leaves massive "blind spots" in evidence law and defamation, forcing the legal system to improvise solutions on the fly.

�� This is exactly what I discussed this month at Lahav Executive Education at Tel Aviv University's Faculty of Management: Deepfakes turn human trust into a vulnerability that is exploited in numerous ways. Until legislation catches up with technology, organizations and authorities must take their own initiative. We need to adopt strict protocols for dealing with deepfakes to prevent financial fraud, privacy breaches, and the disruption of truth-seeking in legal and investigative proceedings.

In our new reality, saying "It sounded or looked real" is no longer a valid defense-it exposes the organization to immense risk. The combination of accessible forgery technology and legislative gaps requires us, as legal professionals and executives, to stop waiting for the law and start building proactive defensive walls. Human trust, once the foundation of a functioning workplace, has become the new vulnerability, and the responsibility to protect it-and the organization-now rests entirely on us.