This article is part of VentureBeat’s special issue, “The cyber resilience playbook: Navigating the new era of threats.” Read more from this special issue here.Deepfakes, or AI-driven deception and weaponized large language models (LLMs) aren’t just cyber threats; they’re the new weapons of mass exploitation. Adversaries aren’t just hacking systems anymore; they’re hacking people and their identities.Impersonating executives, bypassing security with stolen credentials and manipulating trust at scale are all redefining the new threatscape. It’s an all-out cyberwar with identities hanging in the balance. AI and generative AI are giving adversaries an edge in how quickly they can fine-tune and improve their tradecraft.The result: Massive breaches and ransomware demands that are setting new records and fueling double extortion demands.CrowdStrike’s 2024 Global Threat Report highlights this concern, revealing that 60% of intrusions now involve valid credentials, revealing the growing threat of identity-based attacks. Jeetu Patel, Cisco’s EVP and CPO, describes the fundamental problem enterprises face: “The attacks are getting very coordinated, but the defenses are very isolated. That dissonance is not a healthy distance to have.”Shlomo Kramer, cofounder and CEO of Cato Networks, echoed that view: “The era of cobbled-together security solutions is over.” Cato’s rapid growth underscores how businesses are moving to unified, cloud-based security to eliminate these gaps.Adversaries ranging from rogue attackers to nation-state cyberwar units are prioritizing the exfiltration of identities at scale and profiting from them for financial and political gain (sometimes both).It’s on security leaders and their teams to shift their security postures to adapt and stop identity-driven attacks, beginning with continuous authentication, least privilege access and real-time threat detection

This article is part of VentureBeat’s special issue, “The cyber resilience playbook: Navigating the new era of threats.” Read more from this special issue here.Enterprises run the very real risk of losing the AI arms race to adversaries who weaponize large language models (LLMs) and create fraudulent bots to automate attacks.Trading on the trust of legitimate tools, adversaries are using generative AI to create malware that doesn’t create a unique signature but instead relies on fileless execution, making the attacks often undetectable. Gen AI is extensively being used to create large-scale automated phishing campaigns and automate social engineering, with attackers looking to exploit human vulnerabilities at scale.Gartner points out in its latest Magic Quadrant for Endpoint Protection Platforms that  “leaders in the endpoint protection market are prioritizing integrated security solutions that unify endpoint detection and response (EDR), extended detection and response (XDR) and identity protection into a single platform. This shift enables security teams to reduce complexity while improving threat visibility.”The result? A more complex threat landscape moving at machine speed while enterprise defenders rely on outdated tools and technologies designed for a different era.The scale of these attacks is staggering. Zscaler’s ThreatLabz indicated a nearly 60% year-over-year increase in global phishing attacks, and attributes this rise in part to the proliferation of gen AI-driven schemes. Likewise, Ivanti’s  2024 State of Cybersecurity Report found that 74% of businesses are already seeing the impact of AI-powered threats. And, nine in 10 executives said they believe that AI-powered threats are just getting started.“If you’ve got adversaries breaking out in two minutes, and it takes you a day to ingest data and another day to run a search, how can you possibly hope to keep up?” Elia Zaitsev, CTO of CrowdStrike noted in a recent interview with VentureBeat​.The new cyber arms race: Adversarial AI vs