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Ahead of the August 2026 edition of Professional Security Magazine with a feature about cyber and AI – both in defence and in attack – here’s a round-up.
Fraud
While AI tools are being harnessed to enhance fraud detection, AI-enabled frauds are a key concern says the accountancy and advisory services firm BDO. In a survey of fraud cases it points to use of deepfakes โ AI-generated audio, video, images, and text that mimic real people – which can lead to executive impersonation, authorisation fraud and misleading communications. Stephen Peters, BDO partner and Head of Investigations said: โFraud is becoming more technologically enabled, more adaptive and more resilient. Yet despite significant advances in detection and prevention, billions of pounds continue to be lost each year. If regulatory and legal frameworks are to remain effective, they must evolve at pace. Renewed focus, modernised enforcement tools and genuine cross-sector collaboration will be required. Without sustained reform, the financial and societal costs will continue to rise.โ
Police
In a June 10 speech to launch PoliceAI, at the College of Policing to evaluate AI for the police, the Home Office policing minister Sarah Jones spoke of โanย epidemic of everyday crimeโ, and needing to make sure we have enough police in our communities to focus on that crime.ย She acknowledged that โwe arenโt joined up at a national level, so the criminals are sometimes one step ahead of usโ. She raised the prospect of AI meaning new evidential leads. She said: โYou look atย counterย terror (CT) and serious organised crime, two separate parts of policing, so you might be investigating the money laundering at the National Crime Agency,ย but actually,ย that money laundering is driving terrorism that is dealt with through CT. We need to bring these things together.โ She admitted that โtheย infrastructureย of policing hasย not been invested for a long time, so whether itโs the physical infrastructure or whether itโs the tech, we know that we are in some cases very far behind the times.โ ย ย
Financial
Due to a recent rise of AI-aided cyber threats, a wave of open source remediation efforts is forming across the public and private sectors, including vendor coalitions, commercial vulnerabilities clearing houses and open source vendors. Each is valuable, but the risk is of creating fragmentation, and new lock-ins (a user has to use only that vendor). Hence an Open Source Enterprise Resiliency Alliance (OSERA), a global, vendor-neutral, membership body seeks to keep the remediation of shared, non-differentiating infrastructure in an open, standards-based, vendor-neutral layer, so a fix is verifiable and consumable by whoever produced it – vendors as partners, not gatekeepers. And while most of the software sector’s attention has so far been on producing fixes, for regulated firms in the finance sector, โat the scale large financial institutions operate, producing fixes is only half the challenge – consuming them reliably across a complex, regulated estate is just as important,โ said Dov Katz, Managing Director and Distinguished Engineer, at the bank Morgan Stanley, one of the members behind a pilot phrase. “OSERA helps align the ecosystem around practical, implementation-led standards for how open source fixes are produced, validated, and consumed, so critical dependencies can be secured once and adopted broadly in a verifiable way.”
โAI has collapsed the time to discover serious vulnerabilities from weeks of expert effort to minutes of automated scanning, and the sector should expect a flood of new CVEs โ across both current and the older versions institutions still run,โ said Gabriele Columbro, executive director, FINOS (the open source foundation behind OPERA). โWe started exploring mutualised backpatching and adopting common supply chain standards in late 2025, now AI has made this approach urgent at scale.โ
FINOS recently announced a Fund for financial services to shape the governance and standards, needed for responsible agentic AI adoption in regulated financial services.
Military
In a striking phrase, General Sir Roly Walker, Chief of the General Staff, in his opening remarks at the London-based defence think-tank RUSI’s 25th Annual Land Warfare Conference in London in June spoke of โour century’s tank versus horse momentโ. He gave the example of an agentic AI enabled corps headquarters, that is using the ASGARD [the Army’s Transformative Capability Initiative] DECIDE systems in its MVP profile. That was unveiled on Exercise ARCADE STRIKE, which was a CPX (Command Post Exercise) for three weeks, โliterally in the underground underneath Trafalgar Squareโ, as pictured in the July 2026 edition of Professional Security. Walker said that a corps planning cycle that once took 72 hours can now take one. โWhat they’re going to do with the other 71 hours I do not know! A corps that once prosecuted 24 targets a day, because that was the speed with which they moved, can ten-times that now. In fact, they’re limited only by the munitions that are available to fire into the sky.โ
