As we look ahead to 2025, the landscape of cybersecurity is shifting faster than ever. With ransomware attacks getting more sophisticated, AI transforming the way hackers operate, and identity breaches on the rise, organizations face a new wave of threats.
But it’s not all doom and gloom—preparing for these challenges today can make all the difference tomorrow. Here’s a glimpse of what you can expect in 2025 and how to stay one step ahead of cybercriminals.
Sadiq Iqbal, Cyber Security Advisor, Check Point Software Technologies
Ransomware will continue to dominate the threat landscape, posing significant risks to organisations of all sizes. These attacks, in which cybercriminals encrypt an organisation’s data and demand payment for its release, can result in substantial financial losses and operational downtime. In Australia, the challenge is particularly acute in the healthcare sector. Here, organisations are grappling with ageing, legacy IT infrastructure that is challenging to effectively secure. The challenge is further accentuated by a lack of regulatory guidelines that clearly spell out the steps that healthcare providers should be taking. Despite growing awareness, human error remains the leading cause of ransomware breaches. Employees may inadvertently click on malicious links or fail to recognise phishing emails, opening the door for attackers.
As a result, organisations must prioritise education and training to reduce vulnerabilities. Simultaneously, investments in advanced endpoint protection, network segmentation, and robust backup solutions are essential to minimise the impact of successful attacks.
Norman Rice, Chief Commercial Officer, Extreme Networks
In 2024, many organisations assumed that AI adoption would deliver “automation for anything and everything.” As reality has set in, AI in the enterprise is evolving more toward incremental efficiency improvements to existing processes, rather than wholesale disruption or replacement. As the AI hype cycle enters the trough of disillusionment, companies will shift focus to more practical, ROI-driven uses of the technology. AI is much more likely to deliver value in specific, well-defined use cases, leading to a more pragmatic approach in networking and security. This includes faster certification for specific network technologies (which helps workers obtain skills in the face of uncertainty), more accurate detection of real-time IT issues and other productivity improvements.
Raja Mukerji, co-Founder and Chief Scientist, ExtraHop
The rise in ransomware and extortion attacks will push organisations of all sizes to invest in solutions that simplify the process of meeting regulatory requirements. We’ll see organisations take more notice of the legislation, fines, and lawsuits that come with a cyber incident, and businesses will move towards tools rationalisation. Solutions and platforms built with proactivity and compliance in mind will unanimously be a more attractive investment. This creates opportunity for vendors to offer integrated packages that address both regulatory, legal, and cybersecurity needs, making it easier for companies to manage all aspects of their compliance requirements.
Darrell Geusz, Product Lead – Neo, Ping Identity
2025 will be the year payments and identity begin to merge. It will be the norm for individuals to leverage verifiable credentials (creds) on their phone to make a payment in-person or virtually. We will also see AI assistants everywhere – even in our cars, that will take advantage of creds. The use of creds and delegation will enable humans to empower their AI assistants and their vehicles to take action on their behalf safely and securely, including purchasing.”
Steve Wilson, Chief Product Officer, Exabeam
By 2025, hackers will have access to dramatically advanced AI tools, transforming the threat landscape. Generative AI, with significantly improved reasoning abilities, will allow cyber attackers to execute highly realistic phishing scams, including deepfake voices and video avatars. Expect nearly flawless, real-time impersonations and highly complex automated probing for vulnerabilities, which could overwhelm traditional defenses. Organisations must implement AI-driven security tools that continuously learn from and adapt to emerging attack patterns, particularly to counter advanced social engineering attacks. Training employees to recognise AI-powered threats will also become essential.
Corey Nachreiner, Chief Security Officer, WatchGuard Technologies
GenAI hasn’t quite yet found its footing in the business landscape to deliver transformative changes to organisations or produce the returns on investment so far promised. Even if the broad impact hasn’t materialised, the technology has seen dramatic improvements in areas involving audio and video generation used in deep fakes, but not without widely publicised gaffs. As the crest of the GenAI hype cycle peaks and trends downward into a trough of disillusionment around its practicality and potential, people’s feelings about GenAI not yet being impressive downplay the complete picture of potential harm.
Whether GenAI continues to dominate mainstream headlines or not, the technology itself will continue to improve exponentially in the background. As humans tend to remember the instances of bad deep fakes and other issues, they may believe GenAI is a far-off promise and that cannot fool them. This will open up new attack vectors for bad actors to profit by combining GenAI with other sophisticated tactics to earn the trust of organisations to perform what they believe is a legitimate business transaction.
James Maude, Field Chief Technology Officer, BeyondTrust
In 2025, organisations will face more identity compromises that, initially appear insignificant at the outset, but represent Paths to Privilege that allow an attacker to assume control of significant resources through privileged escalation. These major threats will metastasize out of seemingly minor identity issues such as hidden, convoluted, or otherwise non-obvious trust relationships, misconfigurations, or granting of obscure entitlements. Attackers will continue to innovate and show enhanced understanding of cloud permissions, roles, and entitlements that allow them to gain the upper hand against defenders who weren’t even aware of the risks. Unfortunately, these attacks will escalate in 2025 and use traditional attack vectors for exploitation. These will range from misconfigurations to spray attacks (all preventable), and much more.
The open opportunity for threat actors to gain privileged access based on low level accounts will lead security professionals to re-evaluate their hygiene so they can prevent path to privilege attacks via lateral movement.
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