Workload and Application Security Blog

Top 10 Cybersecurity Predictions for 2025 and the Role of AI

Written by Virsec Team | Dec 19, 2024 11:41:07 AM

As we approach 2025, with all the recent developments in artificial intelligence, one question resurfaces over and over again: How will AI affect cybersecurity?

This article answers that question. It presents our top 10 cybersecurity predictions for 2025 vis-à-vis the current AI revolution. From novel threats in critical industries to innovation in AI-driven security, these predictions highlight the challenges and opportunities shaping the future of cybersecurity, near and far.


What to Expect in 2025


1. Global Growth of Ransomware-as-a-Service

Ransomware accounted for 70.13% of cyberattacks in 2023. With the average payout currently at $2.73M, there’s no doubt we’ll continue to witness a barrage of ransomware attacks in 2025 — with one or two trends likely to grow: a rise in Ransomware-as-Service (RaaS) and AI-assisted attacks.

RaaS has already revealed its devastating impact on MEA economies. As AI becomes even cheaper to develop and easier to deploy, it’s reasonable to expect an explosion of its use as part of this cybercrime model.

Why?

The short answer is because AI makes ransomware attacks affordable, it refines them, and it’s hard to defend against.

The long answer is because it can:

  • Automate ransomware development by generating malicious code and highly evasive polymorphic malware components, removing the need for rare and costly development skills.
  • Enhance social engineering attacks by crafting persuasive personalized phishing emails and text or voice messages that mimic human communication.
  • Improve targeting by analyzing voluminous datasets from compromised databases, conducting OSINT to identify easy, high-value targets, and determining the best timing and methods to attack.
  • Facilitate vulnerability exploitation by automating the discovery of security risks and customizing exploit kits to target specific systems and evade advanced defense.
  • Streamline payout operations by powering bots that negotiate ransom and laundering payments through complex blockchain transactions that are difficult to track.
  • Democratize ransomware by allowing threat actors to create infrastructure for non-technical users and provide instructions, troubleshooting, and multilingual support to global affiliates through AI-powered chatbots.
  • Increase attack efficiency by optimizing payload distribution methods, such as embedding ransomware in the most common file formats and applications.

 

2. Aggravated Vulnerability Risk Management Fatigue


As things stand now, there’s no good reason to believe that vulnerability management fatigue will recede soon. Quite the contrary, we predict it to worsen.

The key reasons are the following:

  • Amount of vulnerabilities caused by the continuously growing and changing threat landscape
  • Overload of security alerts that SOCs and security analysts face daily
  • High rate of false positives that security solutions identify regularly
  • Stacks of non-exploitable bugs that nonetheless, require analysts’ attention
  • Substantial lack of trained professionals that widens the gap between what’s needed and what’s available.

AI can play a profound role in alleviating these problems. As an automation and efficiency instrument, it can help fill in workforce shortage gaps, decrease false positive rates, and accelerate data processing.


3. Widened Security Gap

The widening security gap continues to reflect the growing challenge organizations face in keeping their security proportional to the size and complexity of the modern threat landscape.

Cyberattacks such as APTs are becoming increasingly sophisticated, and technologies like cloud computing, IoT, mobile phones, and APIs are continuously expanding the attack surface. At the same time, many businesses are struggling with budget constraints, outdated tools, insufficient security measures, and overstretched teams. 

This disparity leaves vulnerabilities exposed, increasing the likelihood of breaches, non-compliance, and reputational damage. And it will continue to do so in 2025.

In this case, AI will play a twofold, contradictory role: 

  • It will continue to contribute to the security gap by threat actors in the cyber kill chain and their tool stacks.
  • It will have the potential to become instrumental in helping security teams protect digital assets and developers follow secure coding practices.


4. Piled up Tech Debt

The technical debt in 2022 was estimated to be approximately $1.53 trillion in just the US. Today and globally, the number is likely much higher.  

In the cybersecurity context, technical debt manifests as vulnerabilities, inefficiencies, or outdated software components, leading to heightened security risks.  

The following factors will continue to play a prominent part in increasing the existing technical debt:

  • Legacy software
  • Suboptimal code
  • Outdated protocols and security mechanisms
  • Short-term fixes favored at the expense of long-term solutions
  • Inconsistent security policies due to the coexistence of modern and old software


AI will ensure a more sustainable approach to managing technical debt by automating repetitive tasks, helping improve code quality, and enabling proactive maintenance and modernization.


5. Increasingly Sophisticated Attack Vectors and Increased Cybersecurity Budgets in Response

Cyber threats are evolving dramatically precisely because of the recent developments in artificial intelligence, especially in generative AI.

Key emerging attack vectors include:

  • Deepfake impersonation and AI-powered social engineering/phishing, which make it difficult to differentiate between legitimate and fraudulent communication.
  • Zero-click malware that can execute without user interaction and bypass traditional detection methods.
  • Adaptive malware that can adjust to different environments to evade detection and increase its damaging effect.
  • Inaudible commands that exploit voice-activated systems like Alexa to execute unauthorized actions.
  • AI system jailbreaking which manipulates AI models, such as Meta’s Llama 3 and OpenAI’s GPT-4, to force them to perform unintended actions.

We expect CISOs to increase information security spending and invest in innovative technologies, attempting to close the workforce gaps while meeting the sophistication of these new advanced AI-powered security threats.

6. Growing Software Supply Chain and Third-Party Risks


2023 marked a record 58% year-over-year increase in entities affected by software supply chain cyberattacks in the US. It seems that we still haven’t learned our lessons from the notorious SolarWinds attack.

The software supply chain and third-party dependencies will continue to be a frequent target for threat actors and one of the major headaches for CISOs in 2025. They provide a roundabout — but due to subpar security measures and monitoring — often easier way for attackers to penetrate deep into their target systems without being noticed.  

Our expectations for the next year include:

  • Continuing upward trend of security incidents involving the software supply chain.
  • More open-source vulnerabilities affecting a greater number of IT ecosystems.
  • Heightened regulatory compliance pressure in the form of strict requirements focused on supply chain risk, such as NIS2 and DORA in the EU.
  • Higher emphasis on SBOMs, demanding the provision of detailed inventories of software components and dependencies for the sake of transparency and, by extension, security.

Here, too, AI will play a dual role. Defenders will harness its power to boost smart monitoring, response, and vulnerability discovery in the supply chain. Attackers, in contrast, will abuse it to conduct an efficient reconnaissance and optimize their attacks.


7. Continued Struggle with Tool Sprawl

When organizations rely on too many security tools from different vendors, they inadvertently create a complex and inefficient security toll stack plagued by redundancies. The result is fragmented systems that do not integrate well, leading to multiple blind spots and, contrary to expectations, reduced cybersecurity visibility.

This state naturally translates into serious challenges for security teams in the form of:

  • Lack of specialized knowledge for managing disparate platforms.
  • Inconsistency in data formats.
  • Alert fatigue and work burnout.
  • Missed critical vulnerabilities due to the lack of cohesion across tools.

With the expansion of the cybersecurity tool market, organizations have a plethora of solutions to choose from, and this situation is here to stay. Emerging AI-powered security tools have the potential to worsen the current state of sprawl, but can be countered if businesses make a concerted effort to identify their actual needs, approach strategically, invest wisely in AI tools and consolidate their existing tool stack.


8. AI SOC Automation with a Security Copilot

One of the best ways to streamline repetitive tasks and analyze overwhelming volumes of relevant security data in real time is to implement AI SOC automation with a security copilot.  

Security automation copilots are intelligent assistants that:

  • Search for data patterns that point to potential threats.
  • Run predefined playbooks and escalate incidents in response to specific threats.
  • Integrate with threat intelligence sources to provide updated information, correlating data from multiple feeds.
  • Prioritize alerts, minimize noise, and offer remediation guidelines.
  • Monitor applications, networks, and endpoints in real time to detect suspicious activities.
  • Suggest solutions based on past incidents, providing step-by-step guidance for less experienced security analysts.
  • Orchestrate workflows across tools like SIEMs, firewalls, and EDRs.

As a result, SOCs can enjoy:

  • Fast detection and threat response.
  • Improved accuracy.
  • Reduced alert fatigue.
  • Decreased skill gaps.
  • Scalability.

By combining these benefits, this innovative technology allows security teams to respond more effectively to current and future complex cybersecurity challenges. That is why we expect it to be one of the cybersecurity trends in 2025.


9. Advanced Threats using AI Models to Target AI Models

We already discussed various ways in which threat actors can use AI to facilitate their attacks. However, the abuse of AI for nefarious purposes doesn’t stop there.

Other AI systems can also be targets of AI-fueled attacks, thus making the exploding use of artificial intelligence in different industries, from healthcare to energy to automotive, a grave security risk in 2025.

These attacks will tend to exploit AI models’ intrinsic weaknesses, targeting either the training, decision-making, or operational phases.

Examples include the following:

  • Crafting inputs to deceive AI models into making bad decisions
  • Reverse-engineering AI models to leak sensitive personal or proprietary data
  • Injecting biased data in the AI model’s training phase
  • Stealing an AI model through API queries, resulting in unauthorized use of proprietary technologies
  • AI-powered bots committing malicious actions that disrupt automated processes like market trading and autonomous vehicle navigation

Take the first point as an illustration. Can you imagine the life-threatening consequences of this type of abuse in the healthcare or automotive industries?


10. Accelerated Adoption of Zero-Trust Architecture

Organizations will continue to adopt zero-trust architecture at an accelerated pace because it’s the only way to protect against modern, multifaceted malware and zero-day threats. 

By applying the “verify first, then allow” principle, zero trust ensures that only approved processes, libraries, code, and software components run, stopping unauthorized changes, regardless of whether they come from a known or unknown agent or threat. 

In addition, the zero-trust approach ensures that every third-party component and interaction is authorized correctly, preventing incidents in the software supply chain.

Advances in automation and AI will make implementing zero-trust easier, helping companies stay ahead of severe existing and new advanced risks.

Considering that remote work and cloud services — which imply that sensitive information is no longer confined to a single location — are becoming the new default, this approach will continue to resonate strongly with organizations in the years to come.


Conclusions

Cybersecurity in 2025 will be a battleground in which AI will be both the sword and the shield. As threats become more creative, so must our defenses, blending human inventiveness with AI accuracy. 

The predictions we’ve presented should not be understood only as glimpses of what’s to come. The right way to see them is as a timely call to action. Let’s set our priorities straight and solidify our protection against old and new threats for a more secure and better future.

Learn more about Virsec’s zero-trust runtime defense and how to stop threats before they even start.