The Rise of Deepfake-Driven Whaling Attacks in 2025

In an era where looking is no longer thought to be believing , deepfake technology has emerged as a cunning  tool for cybercriminals, making it hard to differentiate the line between reality and fraud.  One of the most concerning trends in 2025 is the use of Deepfake technology to improve cyberattacks,  particularly whaling attacks, which are more convincing and harder to detect.

 Deepfakes look realistic but  in reality, they are fake video or audio media produced by using different artificially intelligent tools to duplicate the voice or looks of an individual. Contrary to outdated methods of email phishing , deepfake whaling makes employees or common individuals believe that they are communicating with actual persons or executives through voice or video messages.

We are now talking about how such attacks are used to lure the targets into paying money which  results in a loss of money for the businesses and individuals who fall prey to such scams.

What are  Whaling Attacks?

 A Whaling attack is a specific form of phishing where the target is a higher authority such as CEOs, Directors, senior managers , and CFOs. These higher authorities are referred to as whales because they are the powerhouse of a company and have access to confidential data. During a whaling attack, a cyber attacker typically impersonates one of such CEOs to create realistic video clips of the CEO to deceive an individual into transferring funds, validating false contracts or payments and now with AI-powered Deepfakes the entire game is changed.

Real-World Case of Whaling Attacks

The year 2024 witnessed a lot of high-profile deepfake scams making it to the news. Deepfake technology has paved the way to a new dimension to whaling attacks, enabling cybercriminals to impersonate executives with alarming realism.

Arup Engineering Firm Deepfake Video Call Scam (2024)

For  instance,  a Deepfake Video Call Scam faced by  Arup Engineering Firm (2024) a UK-based company that is internationally well-known, fell victim to a deep fake-facilitated whaling attack during a video conference. The call was made using a deepfake featured representation of senior executives,  which caused a loss of $25 million. The staff member believed that the request was legitimate and authorized the transfer, indicating the growing menace of deep fake-facilitated whaling attacks.

Deepfake Video Call Scam in the Philippines(2024)

Election Disinformation (2024), In April 2024 , Deepfake Video Call scam in the Philippines,  a video appeared that manipulated Philippine President Bongbong Marcos to falsely depict him as ordering military action in response to an attack by China. This was one of the larger waves of election-related disinformation, highlighting how Deepfakes are being used to arm political deception. 

The Three Pillars of Modern Whaling Attacks

Whaling is a form of cyberattack that involves targeting key company individuals such as CEOs or finance directors. Whaling is risky as it appears extremely real and usually manages to trick people into giving away sensitive details. Whaling uses three principal techniques to succeed :

1. Emotional Manipulation(Social Engineering):

Whaling attacks are emotional. They make people pretend to be an important person, such as the CEO, and send urgent emails requesting immediate responses. The emails may read something like,” This is a confidential affair, don’t mention it.” This is effective because workers do not want to disobey orders, particularly from senior authorities.

2. Person Research and Custom Emails:

Attackers do their research before launching an email whaling attack. To gather information on the company and its executives they source LinkedIn and company sites. They discover who is partnered with whom, what initiatives are underway, and even how executives draft their emails. Then they generate counterfeit messages sometimes including correct names, actual events, and comparable writing styles that are extremely convincing. Since the message seems so familiar and personal, the target usually accepts it and acts upon it.

3. Abusing Company Systems

Contemporary Companies operate on emails, approvals, and digital tools. Whaling attacks leverage these systems against the company. For instance, an attacker can make a spoofed invoice that appears to be from an actual vendor. Often, hackers hijack the email of an actual executive and use it for spoofing instructions. Such attacks are difficult to detect because they adhere to standard company protocols. Everything looks normal until it is too late.

Whaling vs Phishing

Whaling and Phishing are both types of cyber-attacks where sensitive information is stolen through trickery, with a common scope and target. Phishing is a wide strategy whereby attackers pretend to be legal sources , like popular platforms or banks to dupe regular users by making them provide confidential information or clicking on  harmful links. 

Whaling, on the other hand, is an advanced more focused form of phishing that particularly targets high-level executives such as CEOs and CFOs. The real-world scenario in this regard is the Snapchat attack in 2016, when an employee was phished using a spoofed email  pretending to be from the CEO, resulting in transmitting confidential employee’s payroll data  to the attacker. This shows  how whaling attacks use authority and trust to access confidential information.

How Deepfakes Are Supercharging Whaling Attacks in 2025?

Deepfake rendering whaling attacks have become increasingly more believable and menacing significantly in recent years. Multiple factors can contribute to it like:

• Digital Fatigue and Remote Work Exploitation: This threat has grown more severe in the post-pandemic time when hybrid and remote work was standardized. Most of the employees never met their top authorities in person , making it easy for deepfake impressions to go undetected.
• Publicly available personal information: Easy access to  publicly available interviews, podcasts, and videos provides all the material to create precise replicas of individual voices and appearances.
• Psychological Exploitation: Psychological pressure is also a tactic used to manipulate employees using techniques such as hierarchy, time pressure  , and confidentiality. Whaling attacks  benefit from Deepfake because they can  see or hear a boss telling them to act. This increases the emotional stress  which is often more impactful than rational thought during a stressful situation.

What is the way forward to hinder these Attacks ?

Sophisticated Facial Deepfakes call for bringing innovation in deepfake detection solutions, calling for charter applications of advanced deepfake detection tools like Facial biometrics and  Liveness detection to identify real and counterfeit users. These tools  analyze an individual’s facial characteristics and introduce an added layer of protection of  eye movement and instant reactions. Among  all the methods, Biometric detection is the most effective solution against deepfake attacks.

• Deepfake Detection software: Deepfake Detection software can be used as a strong tool to defeat deepfake-based whaling attacks by verifying through video or audio. Deepfake detection tools can also be used in e-meeting.
• Employee Training programs and workshops: Employee training and workshops are very important in mitigating  deepfake-based whaling attacks by raising awareness and educating them about identifying the signs of doctored content.

Prevent Whaling Attacks and Save Billions with Facia’s Deepfake Detection

• To mitigate this increasing menace effectively, companies need to move quickly by embracing innovative solutions. Facia’s deepfake detection technology is designed to identify synthetic media in real-time with high accuracy, including the most authentic  deepfake utilized during Live video call. The solution equips organizations with a proactive defense against cybersecurity threats. Its accuracy and elasticity positions it as one of the most trusted solutions in detecting deepfakes for businesses that want to secure their operations in an AI-infused threat environment.
• Facia’s advanced deepfake detection solution has been tested on Meta’s dataset which implies that it is capable of detecting pixel-perfect deepfakes meant to spread misinformation on social media.
• Facia’s deepfake detection is a strong defense. Facia’s algorithm has been tested on DFDC dataset and it showed 100% accuracy, whereas the in-house dataset, the accuracy achieved was 89.01%.

• Facia’s higher level of assurance in offsite deepfake detection coupled with advanced 3d liveness detection for remote identity verification provides a strong safeguard for detecting  deepfakes during E-meetings. With Facia , organizations can stay one step ahead of emerging threats , and save billions.