February will be another exciting month at Between the Towers!

This time, we’ll be diving into the world of cybersecurity and deepfakes—two topics that have gained more rapid importance in 2025 than almost any other. We’ll be talking about how attack scenarios are changing, the risks posed by AI-generated content, and how companies need to prepare for this now.

Experiences on the attack path: current lessons from real cyber attacks in the age of AI and Co – What attacks us today and how we can defend ourselves sustainably.

Donald Ortmann is an information security specialist from Hamburg with proven experience as an ethical hacker and in operational incident support.

He analyzes modern attack methods – from social engineering to AI-supported attacks to technical exploits – and supports organizations in analyzing, containing, and hardening after security incidents.

In this presentation, you will learn more about modern attacks on our ecosystems and why medieval strategies are still indispensable.

Deepfakes in the financial industry: progress, limitations, and practice

Deepfakes are no longer a future scenario. The presentation shows how deepfake technologies have developed, how powerful they are today, and where the trend is heading. It explains the methods that can be used to detect AI-generated content and where their limitations lie. Finally, specific challenges and attack vectors in the financial industry are discussed – from KYC processes to internal communication.

Philipp Dewald is CEO at Detesia and an expert in the detection of deepfakes. He studied IT security at Saarland University and led a research group at the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security that focused on technical methods for detecting deepfakes.

Princes, pixels, and political hackers

We discuss current cybersecurity issues and which new technologies are being used for attacks. You will learn why Nigerian princes no longer write to you, what ChatGPT has to do with it, and how industrialized fraud works today. In the second part, we look at hybrid threats resulting from the changed geopolitical situation in Europe.

Dr. Boris Hemkemeier is Director of Cyber Foresight and Policy in the Group Cyber Risk and Information Security division at Commerzbank AG. His main areas of focus are payment security, fraud prevention, cybersecurity, and new technologies.