Gartner: 41% of CISOs Faced Deepfake Audio-Call Attacks in Past Year

A Gartner survey of 297 senior cybersecurity leaders (March–May 2026) found 41% experienced deepfake incidents on employee audio calls, prompting calls for verification-first workflows and incident-response playbooks updated for multimodal impersonation.

At the Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit in London, Gartner released a survey of 297 senior cybersecurity leaders conducted from March to May 2026. In the prior 12 months, 41% of respondents reported at least one deepfake social-engineering incident on an employee audio call, and 36% reported one during a video call. Traditional channels remained even more prevalent: 79% reported email phishing, spearphishing, or business email compromise, and 58% reported vishing or smishing. Gartner analyst Craig Porter urged organizations to adopt verification-first (verification-by-default) workflows for risky requests, deploy phishing-resistant authentication, and update incident-response playbooks to cover multimodal impersonation and misused or compromised AI agents. The findings were contextualized with real-world cases: the 2024 Hong Kong deepfake video-call scam that cost a multinational over $25 million, and North Korean operatives using deepfakes to infiltrate companies as remote IT workers.

• Gartner surveyed 297 senior cybersecurity leaders between March and May 2026, with results presented at the Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit in London.
• 41% of CISOs reported at least one deepfake social-engineering incident on an employee audio call in the prior 12 months.
• 36% reported a deepfake incident during a video call in the same period.
• 79% reported email phishing, spearphishing, or business email compromise; 58% reported vishing or smishing.
• Gartner recommends phishing-resistant authentication, verification-by-default for risky requests, and incident-response playbooks updated for multimodal impersonation and misused or compromised AI agents.
• Gartner analyst Craig Porter is the cited source of the recommendations.
• Cited precedent: a 2024 Hong Kong deepfake video-call scam caused a loss of over $25 million for a multinational company.
• North Korean operatives reportedly use deepfakes to pose as remote IT workers and infiltrate companies.