For years, cybersecurity was understood through familiar battlefields: malware, ransomware, phishing, insider threats, zero-days, nation-state espionage. Defenders built firewalls, SIEM platforms, EDR stacks, IAM controls, SOC teams, and playbooks around these known patterns. But a deeper shift is now underway. The next era of cyber conflict may not focus on stealing files, encrypting servers, or crashing networks. It may focus on something more powerful: Destroying trust at scale. We are entering an age where adversaries can weaponize artificial intelligence, synthetic identities, autonomous decision systems, and poisoned data pipelines to make organizations doubt their own systems, users, evidence, and reality. This is not traditional hacking. This is trust compromise engineering. * Phase One: From Breaking Systems to Manipulating Systems * Legacy cyberattacks aimed to penetrate defenses. Modern attacks increasingly aim to manipulate outputs.…