Faith-Based Daily Awareness Post 17 July 2025

These updates are shared to help raise the situational awareness of Faith-Based organizations to best defend against and mitigate the impacts from all-hazards threats including physical security, cybersecurity, and natural disasters. 

House Of Worship Homicides

The Violence Prevention Project maintains multiple databases tracking hostile events including one dedicated to homicides at U.S. houses of worship (HOWs). Their research places such incidents in the broader context of mass public violence, the database is broken into sections like victims, the list of HOWs, the yearly trends, and more. The Violence Project’s work emphasizes comprehensive data collection including life histories, motives, and incident context to understand these tragedies and create prevention efforts.

Since they began tracking incidents in 2001 there have been 417 incidents across the U.S. with 533 victims killed, and an additional 193 injured.

Analyst Comments: The dataset underscores that while attacks on religious spaces represent a small percentage of mass shootings, they carry high community impact. These incidents often follow patterns seen in other mass violence events, including warning signs and personal or grievance-based motives. This highlights the need for faith-based organizations consider building practical, layered safety plans, like training staff to recognize concerning behaviors, having emergency procedures, and maintaining strong ties with local law enforcement.

Cyber officials warn Canadians of malicious campaign to impersonate high-profile public figures

Cybersecurity agencies in Canada are warning that cybercriminals are using AI-generated voice calls, texts, urgent financial request, malicious links and phishing links to impersonate government officials and executives in Canada, stealing money and personal information. This campaign uses urgent, personalized messages to pressure victims. Authorities advise verifying requests through known contacts, avoiding suspicious links, and reporting suspected fraud to law enforcement immediately.

Analyst Comments: This alert highlights how threat actors are evolving by using AI voice cloning and deepfake tactics to increase the believability of scams targeting Canadian executives and officials. Previously this year the FBI released a statement noting similar scams impersonating U.S. officials, confirming that these operations are linked and part of a broader global campaign. Organizations may want to think about briefing executives and updating staff awareness training to include AI-enabled scams.

How Threat Actors Use AI to Hide Malicious Sites

Threat actors are increasingly leveraging AI-power-tools from large language models to cloaking-as-a-service platforms to enhance the stealth, speed, and sophistication of cyberattacks. SlashNext notes attackers employ AI-powered cloaking services to hide malicious sites and bypass detection tools while using LLM-generated phishing content to evade filters. ReliaQuest highlights how AI accelerates deepfake and voice/video impersonation attacks, making social engineering campaigns more scalable and convincing. Together, these trends show AI is not creating new attack types but is dramatically amplifying the speed, scale, and effectiveness of existing cyber threats.

Analyst Comments: The use of AI to cloak malicious sites and generate highly tailored phishing lures is a reality for threat actors. SlashNext’s and ReliaQuest’s findings align with attackers blending AI-powered automation to bypass defenses. AI’s capacity to generate realistic phishing emails, deepfake voices, and cloaked infrastructure significantly reduces the friction for criminals while forcing defenders to move beyond traditional detection methods. Organizations may want to prepare for a threat actors that may use AI and be aware of scams that include AI.