The Convergent Cyber Threat Horizon in Financial Services: Artificial Intelligence, Agentic Systems, Deepfakes, Quantum Computing, and the Mythos of Large Language Models

Stephen Coraggio

doi:10.70528/IJLRP.v7.i4.2134

The Convergent Cyber Threat Horizon in Financial Services: Artificial Intelligence, Agentic Systems, Deepfakes, Quantum Computing, and the Mythos of Large Language Models

Author(s)	Stephen Coraggio
Country	United States
Abstract	Financial services institutions are entering a period of simultaneous and interacting technology shocks whose combined impact on the cyber threat landscape is qualitatively greater than that of any single force. This paper examines five such forces — generative artificial intelligence (AI), agentic AI, synthetic media (deepfakes), cryptographically-relevant quantum computing, and the institutional mythos surrounding large language models (LLMs) — and analyses their combined implications for banks, insurers, asset managers, payment providers, and market infrastructure operators. Drawing on primary standards documents, sector incident reports, and the emerging academic literature, we argue that the traditional cybersecurity program, built on assumptions of scarce adversary labour, durable cryptography, trustworthy media, and human-only identity, is structurally misaligned with the 2026–2032 threat environment. We contribute a five-vector threat taxonomy for financial services, a unified seven-domain defence framework mapping to NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 and the EU Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), and a prioritised 24-month preparedness roadmap. We highlight under-researched risks including non-human identity proliferation, indirect prompt injection against agentic pipelines, harvest-now-decrypt-later (HNDL) exposure of long-retention financial data, and the governance gap introduced by uneven institutional understanding of LLM capabilities. The paper closes with research and policy recommendations including the establishment of sector-wide cryptographic inventories, standardised AI red-teaming protocols, and content-provenance requirements for material financial communications.
Keywords	cybersecurity; financial services; generative AI; agentic AI; deepfakes; post-quantum cryptography; large language models; prompt injection; non-human identity; operational resilience; DORA; NIST AI RMF
Field	Computer > Network / Security
Published In	Volume 7, Issue 4, April 2026
Published On	2026-04-23
DOI	https://doi.org/10.70528/IJLRP.v7.i4.2134
Short DOI	https://doi.org/hbx8t6

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The Convergent Cyber Threat Horizon in Financial Services: Artificial Intelligence, Agentic Systems, Deepfakes, Quantum Computing, and the Mythos of Large Language Models

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