The New Weak Link in Compliance Isn’t Code – It’s Communication

This report argues that as technical defenses have strengthened, adversaries increasingly target communication workflows—using deepfakes, MFA fatigue, SIM swapping, and compromised collaboration tools—to bypass controls and subvert compliance, making conversation the new attack surface; it recommends evolving compliance to embed Zero Trust at the message layer through continuous identity verification, cryptographic message authentication and agile key rotation, automatic containment and rapid remediation of compromised identities, and minimized reliance on centralized servers to safeguard decision integrity.