5 Cybersecurity Predictions For 2025 From A Cyber Safety Company
Cybersecurity experts say AI is likely to ramp up more sophisticated attacks.
What a year for cyberattacks. From Microsoft executives hacked by Russians to AT&T’s massive data breach that compromised the accounts of over 70 million current and former customers, it’s been an onslaught of cybersecurity news.
Generative AI has escalated the cybersecurity battlefield. “The power of generative AI cuts two ways: It is a powerful tool for those who perpetrate cybercrime and an equally powerful tool for cybersecurity teams responsible for preventing and mitigating the risk of cybercrime,” Palo Alto Networks said on its website.
Cybersecurity companies are sounding the alarm about a ramped-up threat landscape in 2025. Cyber safety company Gen shared its cybersecurity predictions for 2025:
- AI Will Blur Reality
“Large Language Models (LLMs) will begin to create hyper-personalized experiences as people work more with AI. In late 2024, over 200 million people used ChatGPT on a weekly basis. While convenient, these technologies will likely begin shaping individual perceptions and reality, prompting ethical discussions on AI’s impact on human thought. As AI becomes more integrated into complex areas like parenting and education, ethical concerns about its role in society will grow. We can anticipate more debate addressing the technology’s boundaries and influence on personal development. The European Union and several US states have already introduced legislation to advance AI protections, and we expect that there will be increased activity across the US and around the world in the coming year,” Gen said in a news statement.
- Unrecognizable Deepfakes
“AI will become sophisticated enough that even experts may not be able to tell what’s authentic. People will have to ask themselves every time they see an image or watch a video: Is this real? Unfortunately, people with bad intentions will take advantage. This can be as personal as a scorned ex-partner spreading rumors via fake photos on social media or as extreme as governments manipulating entire populations by releasing videos that spread political misinformation. As deception becomes increasingly sophisticated, verifiable digital credentials—a combination of verifiable information used together as a digital authenticity signature—will evolve into powerful tools for proving what’s real. As our realities become increasingly blurred by AI, this is an example of how to help ensure AI is used as a force for good, providing a critical foundation for maintaining trust online.”
- Data Theft Becomes A Pathway To Identity Theft
“Criminals will stitch together personal information extracted from data breaches, publicly available sources and information stolen from devices to create comprehensive profiles of individuals, putting individuals at higher risk of identity theft. This will fuel sophisticated extortion attempts and enable attackers to convincingly impersonate trusted companies, especially those previously compromised.”
- Online Scams Become More Sophisticated
“Armed with personal data from past breaches and dark web exchanges, attackers will develop hyper-targeted strategies to deceive their victims, similar to the sextortion campaign we uncovered in the US and Canada in 2024 which used Google Street View images to startle victims. Combining psychological insights and social engineering, these schemes will disarm people, deploying convincing phishing and fraud tactics across platforms like social media and messaging apps. Hyper-personalized, human-targeted methods will make it incredibly difficult to distinguish between legitimate communications and scams.”
- Uptake In Financial Theft
“We anticipate a notable surge in financial theft, driven by increasingly sophisticated mobile banking threats and the growing popularity of cryptocurrencies. Fraudsters will employ advanced techniques like deepfaked celebrities promising high ROI on their fake investment platforms, universal income announced by voice-cloned government officials or fake giveaways to deceive investors and traders alike. The CyrptoCore campaign in 2024 showed signs of this future trend, taking over a million dollars from victims in just a few days leveraging Elon Musk deepfakes as a lure. Additionally, cybercrime and the physical world will collide as there are more cases of street muggers forcing people to unlock their phones and provide access to financial apps to transfer funds to attacker-controlled accounts,” Gen said.
“After a monumental year in AI—and a somewhat catastrophic year in breaches—we believe we’ll see significant shifts in both scams and digital identity risks in 2025,” Siggi Stefnisson, CTO at Gen, said in a news release.
“Cybercriminals will capitalize on large breaches to either steal identities outright or utilize the information to create hyper-personalized and believable scams. AI will exasperate the issues, not only helping criminals make their scams more sophisticated, but also forcing people to question how the technology is shaping human thought. It’s sure to be a year of change, and it will be more important than ever for people to be protective of their digital lives,” he said.