Business
AI-Generated Media Drives Real-World Fraud, Identity Theft, and Business Compromise
Trend Micro uncovers the criminal playbook for deepfake-enabled cybercrime
HONG KONG SAR – Media OutReach Newswire – 10 July 2025 – Trend Micro Incorporated (TYO: 4704; TSE: 4704), a global cybersecurity leader, today released a new report exposing the scale and maturity of deepfake-enabled cybercrime. As generative AI tools become more powerful, affordable, and accessible, cybercriminals are rapidly adopting them to support attacks, ranging from business fraud to extortion and identity theft.
To read the full report, Deepfake it ’til You Make It: A Comprehensive View of the New AI Criminal Toolset, please visit: https://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/hk/security/news/cybercrime-and-digital-threats/deepfake-it-til-you-make-it-a-comprehensive-view-of-the-new-ai-criminal-toolset
The report shows how deepfakes have moved beyond hype into real-world exploitation, undermining digital trust, exposing companies to new risks, and accelerating the business models of cybercriminals.
Tony Lee, Head of Consulting, Hong Kong & Macau, at Trend: “AI-generated media is not just a future risk, it’s a real business threat. We’re seeing executives impersonated, hiring processes compromised, and financial safeguards bypassed with alarming ease. This research is a wake up call—if businesses are not proactively preparing for the deepfake era, they’re already behind. In a world where seeing is no longer believing, digital trust must be rebuilt from the ground up.”
The research found that threat actors no longer need underground expertise to launch convincing attacks. Instead, they are using off-the-shelf video, audio, and image generation platforms, many of which are marketed to content creators, to generate realistic deepfakes that deceive both individuals and organizations. These tools are inexpensive, easy to use, and increasingly capable of bypassing identity verification systems and security controls.
The report outlines a growing cybercriminal ecosystem where these platforms are used to execute convincing scams, including:
- CEO fraud has become increasingly harder to detect as attackers use deepfake audio or video to impersonate senior leaders in real-time meetings.
- Recruitment processes are being compromised by fake candidates who use AI to pass interviews and gain unauthorized access to internal systems.
- Financial services firms are seeing a surge in deepfake attempts to bypass KYC (Know Your Customer) checks, enabling anonymous money laundering through falsified credentials.
The criminal underground is actively trading tutorials, toolkits, and services to streamline these operations. From step-by-step playbooks for bypassing onboarding procedures to plug-and-play face-swapping tools, the barrier to entry is now minimal.
As deepfake-enabled scams grow in frequency and complexity, businesses are urged to take proactive steps to minimize their risk exposure and protect their people and processes. This includes educating staff on social engineering risks, reviewing authentication workflows, and exploring detection solutions for synthetic media.Hashtag: #trendmicro #trendvisionone #visionone #cybersecurity
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The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement.
About Trend Micro
Trend Micro, a global cybersecurity leader, helps make the world safe for exchanging digital information. Fueled by decades of security expertise, global threat research, and continuous innovation, Trend Micro’s cybersecurity platform protects hundreds of thousands of organizations and millions of individuals across clouds, networks, devices, and endpoints. As a leader in cloud and enterprise cybersecurity, the platform delivers a powerful range of advanced threat defense techniques optimized for environments like AWS, Microsoft, and Google, and central visibility for better, faster detection and response. With 7,000 employees across 65 countries, Trend Micro enables organizations to simplify and secure their connected world. www.TrendMicro.com
Business
Why AI alone can’t guarantee business success, expert cautions
As companies around the world race to adopt artificial intelligence (AI), strategy expert Shotunde Taiwo urges business leaders to look beyond the hype and focus on aligning technology with clear strategic goals.
Taiwo, a finance and strategy professional, cautions that while AI offers transformative potential, it is not a guaranteed path to success. Without a coherent strategy, organisations risk misdirecting resources, entrenching inefficiencies, and failing to deliver meaningful value from their AI investments.
“AI cannot substitute for strategic clarity,” she explains, stressing the importance of purposeful direction before deploying advanced digital tools. Business leaders, she says, must first define their objectives, only then can AI act as an effective enabler rather than an expensive distraction.
Taiwo stated that many organisations are investing heavily in AI labs, data infrastructure, and talent acquisition without clearly defined business outcomes. This approach, she notes, risks undermining the very efficiencies these technologies are meant to create.
For example, a retail business lacking a distinctive value proposition cannot expect a recommendation engine to deliver meaningful differentiation. Similarly, manufacturers without well-structured pricing strategies will find limited benefit in predictive analytics. “AI amplifies what’s already there,” she adds. “It rewards businesses with strong foundations and exposes those without.”
According to Taiwo, the true value of AI emerges when it is guided by intelligent, strategic intent. High-performing organisations use AI to solve well-defined problems aligned with commercial goals, often framed by business analysts or strategic leaders who understand both operational realities and broader business priorities.
She cites Amazon’s recommendation engine and UPS’s route optimisation algorithms as models of effective AI deployment. In both cases, technology served a clear purpose: boosting customer retention and streamlining logistics, respectively. When guided by strategy, AI becomes a force multiplier, enhancing forecasting, enabling automation, and improving personalisation where workflows are already well-defined.
On the other hand, even the most advanced AI systems falter in the absence of sound strategy. Common pitfalls include deploying machine learning models without a business case, focusing on tools rather than problems, collecting data without a clear use, and optimising narrow metrics at the expense of enterprise-wide goals. These missteps often result in underwhelming pilots and disillusioned stakeholders, issues strategic professionals are well-equipped to navigate and avoid.
In this sense, AI adoption can serve as a strategic diagnostic. Taiwo suggests that when business leaders struggle to define impactful AI use cases, it often reflects deeper ambiguity in their organisational direction. Key questions, such as where value is created, who the primary customer is, or which decisions would benefit most from improved speed or accuracy, are not technical, but fundamentally strategic.
AI, she says, acts as a mirror, revealing strengths and weaknesses in how a business is positioned, differentiated, and aligned across functions. Strategic leaders and business analysts are uniquely positioned to interpret these insights, inform course corrections, and guide effective technology investments.
Looking ahead, Taiwo argues that strategy in the AI era must be data-literate, agile, ethically grounded, and above all, human-centred. Leaders must understand what data they have, and how it can be harnessed, without needing to become technologists themselves.
Organisations must be nimble enough to act on AI-driven insights, whether through supply chain reconfiguration or dynamic pricing. Ethics, too, are critical, especially as AI increasingly impacts areas such as hiring, lending, and content moderation. “AI is not a replacement for strategy – it is a reflection of it,” she said.
In organisations with clarity and discipline, AI can unlock significant value. In those without, it risks adding cost and complexity. The responsibility for today’s leaders is to ensure that technology serves the business, not the other way around.
Business
No imminent change to tax-free allowance
There will be no immediate changes to cash Individual Savings Accounts (Isas), the BBC understands.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves was widely expected to announce plans to reduce the £20,000 tax-free allowance.
The move was aimed at encouraging more investment in stocks and shares, which the goverment says it will still focus on.
“Our ambition is to ensure people’s hard-earned savings are delivering the best returns and driving more investment into the UK economy,” a Treasury spokesperson said.
The Treasury is expected to continue to talk to banks, building societies and investment firms about options for reform.
An Isa is a savings or investment product that is treated differently for tax purposes.
Any returns you make from an Isa are tax-free, but there is a limit to how much money you can put in each year.
The current £20,000 annual allowance can be used in one account or spread across multiple Isa products as you wish.
Business
UK economy shrank unexpectedly in May
The economy shrank by 0.1%, the second month in a row it has contracted.
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