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Security Executives Urge Greater Family Protection as AI Deepfake Risks and Corporate Spending Rise
Corporate security leaders at the Fortune COO Summit described how AI deepfakes and open data sources have shifted protection efforts to include children and elderly relatives of top executives.
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Sid Kosaraju, president of Crisis24, told attendees at the Fortune COO Summit in Scottsdale that ethical hackers hired by his own team located his 12-year-old daughter in two-hour increments each day by accessing her school’s website and tennis club schedule. His daughter does not own a smartphone. Kosaraju said the exercise took place two years after he joined the firm.
The presentation followed the abduction earlier this year of Savannah Guthrie’s 84-year-old mother in Arizona. The FBI warned that proof-of-life videos can no longer be trusted because a kidnapper can create a convincing deepfake from a LinkedIn photo and a voicemail.
Kosaraju called the Guthrie case a “grey rhino,” a term popularized by Michelle Wucker in her 2016 book to describe an obvious threat that organizations have ignored.
Kosaraju said threat actors usually target children and elderly parents rather than the executives themselves. “It’s not just the principal. It’s the families that you have to protect against,” he told the audience.
Jacob Silverman, CEO of Kroll, said his firm receives constant impersonation attempts that now include AI-generated voices and images. U.S. companies was under $100,000 as recently as 2023.
The figure has risen sharply since then. At the Fortune 100 level, companies maintain dedicated business resiliency teams staffed with former CIA and FBI analysts that deliver daily threat summaries generated by AI. Silverman said Kroll’s Resolver platform uses AI to ingest security data and guide risk managers through remediations while maintaining an audit trail.
He added that threats now arrive together: a physical incident is typically linked to supply-chain, business, and cyber elements. Kosaraju and Silverman listed three baseline measures for companies without Fortune 100 budgets: vetted transportation instead of rideshares, company email accounts for board members, and subscription services that monitor social media and geopolitical developments.
