What are your projected cybersecurity trends for 2025?

Attackers are outpacing defenders in every aspect. This trend likely to continue in the AI era too. The appropriate use of trustworthy, secured, explainable AI models is key to Cybersecurity. Security complexity and risk increases whenever a tool is introduced to defend sophisticated attack vectors. A collaborative security ecosystem works best where diverse tools can talk to each other, share information, proactively identify threats, remediate with explainable automation.

In 2025, cybersecurity teams will continue to balance rapidly-evolving threat vectors with the classic vectors they've been managing for years.

Here's how: 

Intersection of AI & Cybersecurity

Recent reports indicate that nearly 100% of IT leaders consider AI models as crucial for their business success, but only 48% of IT professionals are confident about their ability to execute a strategy for leveraging AI in cybersecurity. We can anticipate the knowledge gap to widen, as AI models' technical capabilities might outstrip IT teams' ability to govern their responsible use.

The gap can be closed by providing technical teams with advanced AI training, adopting company-wide responsible AI usage policies, and encouraging users to access generative AI solutions that are formally "blessed" by your organization.

Explosion of AI-Powered Malware

Industry reports show that three-quarters of IT professionals are concerned that AI will be utilized for cyberattacks and other malicious activities. Throughout this year, we can anticipate an ongoing battle between AI being leveraged by white-hat organizations to quickly remediate their security vulnerabilities and AI being utilized by black-hat attackers to develop more effective attack techniques. 

Although this battle isn't easy to win, your company can get an advantage against cyberattackers by utilizing the latest issue-detection software, providing user education on a quarterly basis, and implementing effective processes to prioritize IT security threats. To prevent downloads of malicious code, users should always be reminded to follow traditional IT procurement procedures for software access.

Ransomware:

Ransomware was an $800 million+ illicit global business in 2024. 

We can anticipate the following developments this year:

1) Sophisticated ransomware-generated extortion attacks will continue to target larger businesses and government entities, whose data contains Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and  has higher "resale" value. The same organizations' reputations are more significantly impacted by successful cyberattacks, so they are more likely to make proactive ransom payments to prevent data exfiltration.
2) Traditional ransomware attacks will continue to target small- and medium-sized businesses that lack ransomware detection and recovery technology.
3) Cyber-insurers will continue to scrutinize their insureds' ransomware protection and data recovery activities closely.
4) Total global ransom payments are expected to increase as ransomware gangs continue to disband and re-form under new affiliations. 

The best way to manage the threat of ransomware is by adopting ransomware detection and snapshot recovery technology, and to educate your users about the potential dangers of phishing attacks.

Proliferation of Wiper Technology:

If there's any cybersecurity topic you need to familiarize yourself with now, it's the increased usage of wiper technology by cyber-criminals. With ransomware, the goal is to encrypt data and then to collect a ransom to restore the target company's data. The goal of wipers is to destroy the target company's data, making incident recovery nearly impossible. As a result, wiper technology has major value in an adversary's hands and could potentially be leveraged by malicious insiders and even business competitors who want to gain an illicit market advantage.

Although this technology space is moving quickly, effective Business Continuity & Data Recovery (BCDR) procedures can go a long way in preventing debilitating wiper attacks. In addition, you should consider snapshot recovery solutions that take snapshots of your data environment on a routine basis. Finally, immediate detection of suspicious log-ins into your IT environment can discourage such attacks.

I believe the increased use of AI, particularly Generative AI, by threat actors will be a significant trend in 2025. Cybercriminals are anticipated to leverage artificial intelligence to conduct highly sophisticated phishing, vishing, and other social engineering attacks. Furthermore, the development of intricate malware will become a less challenging task due to advancements in AI technology.