4 Cybersecurity Threats to Have on Your Radar In 2025

If there’s one thing to know as we enter 2025, it’s that the bad guys are getting better and stronger. The statistics are daunting. In 2024, the costs of cybercrime were projected to be $9.5 trillion. From ransomware threats to phishing, the pace, number and sophistication of attacks will grow in the coming year.

How do you outpace the threat, if you even can? We’ve identified four of the biggest threats to be aware of, how you can prevent them and how you can mitigate damage if an attack does occur.

Cybersecurity Threat #1: As AI gets more sophisticated, so do the attacks.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) provides a host of benefits to organizations, helping them make better decisions and do more with less. But along with those benefits come a whole portfolio of threats from bad actors who will use AI against you. One way is to use AI is to create misinformation and disinformation against you. Another is voice cloning. These kinds of deepfake attacks can cause reputational and financial harm.

Other threats from generative AI come in these forms:

• Data manipulation leading to biased or incorrect outputs in your data
• Advanced malware generation that is hard to detect and defend against
• Sophisticated phishing techniques targeting individuals
• Privacy breaches that come from synthesizing personal information
• Smart malware that improves attacker efficiency
• Chat interfaces and large language models (LLMs), often connected to third-party providers outside your firewall, widening your attack surface

To protect and defend against these attacks, pay attention to your data quality control and carefully curate your data; regularly test AI models to identify potential vulnerabilities; develop or use AI that can explain its findings; train your users how to recognize suspicious AI content; implement robust security protocols to detect these kinds of attacks; and have a plan in place to address disinformation.

Cybersecurity Threat #2: Supply chain breaches pose ransomware threats and reputational damage.

Supply chain disruptions are another popular threat for 2025. This is when a bad actor targets someone in your supply chain, disrupting the flow of goods and threatening your network. This might happen through generative AI, phishing, ransomware or malware. Outside of using these techniques for extortion, they can create reputational damage, as well as production delays and the theft of personal information. Beyond creating disruptions, bad actors can also breach your network through your supply chain.

The best way to protect against supply chain attacks is to have strong cybersecurity protocols throughout the entire chain. In the software supply chain, the government requires a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) that lists all the third-party and open source code used, for example. Along with that, you’ll also want to:

• Conduct a vendor risk assessment, evaluating their security protocols
• Encrypt your data to protect it
• Train your employees to avoid phishing attempts
• Create an incident response protocol so you can recover faster if a breach does occur

Cybersecurity Threat #3: Personally targeted phishing is becoming harder to detect.

Spear phishing or advanced personally targeted phishing is another big threat in 2025. With AI providing assistance, bad actors can scavenge social media, corporate websites and other publicly available data to get personal information that they can then use in a phishing attack. For example, recent improvements make the difference between posing as a company with a lame excuse to click on the link and your company’s COO (or your Uncle Sid) asking you to click on a link or hand over personal information.

Because these phishing attempts come from “a trusted source” or mimic a familiar sender, they are more successful than other phishing attempts. You’ve probably already received a number of these this year. They usually contain grammatical errors, ask for personal information out of the blue, have some sort of urgency attached to them or want you to click on a link.

The key to thwarting this type of attempt is to not engage. Using strong password practices, keeping personal information off public sites, using email filtering tools and training users how to detect scam communications are mitigation measures that help.

Cybersecurity Threat #4: Ransomware threats get a boost from RaaS.

Let’s say you don’t have the time or skills to launch ransomware attacks, but you want to do it anyway. Ransomware as a Service (RaaS) may be for you.

In this model, a client pays a RaaS service to implement ransomware attacks for them. The client chooses the kind of malware they want to use, sets the ransom demands, communicates with the victim and holds the encryption fees. And the RaaS organization attends to all the details.

Clients can sign up for a monthly subscription to the service, pay a one-time license fee, or share profits, so there are many models suited to your budget.

It’s shocking. But it’s big business. In 2024, ransomware cost businesses over $40B with $75M being the biggest payout. Not bad considering a RaaS subscription can be had for as little as $40/month.

So what can you do to protect yourself?

• Perform continuous endpoint security and keep up with updates
• Make daily or frequent backups and store them in a remote location
• Implement Zero Trust or segment your network to contain breaches
• Install anti-phishing protection
• Train your users to build a culture of Zero Trust

Protect yourself from cybersecurity threats with the #1 mitigation approach.

The best way to mitigate all these attacks is to implement endpoint security, closing the doors on known vulnerabilities and reducing your attack surface.

Following proven, standardized STIG or CIS benchmark standards to create a secure baseline will significantly reduce your attack surface for up to 90% of the ways bad actors exploit systems to gain access that leads to ransomware threats, for example. Endpoint security, along with Zero Trust, can significantly reduce your chances of being breached in the first place, but can also help contain damage if a breach does happen.

SteelCloud’s ConfigOS automates the process of establishing STIG and CIS Benchmarks endpoint security. It reduces 90% of the effort of achieving these goals using traditional methods. Once a secure baseline is established, you can implement Zero Trust, train your users and focus on all the other mitigation approaches we’ve addressed in this article.

To learn more about endpoint/baseline security and see a demo of how easy it can be to establish and maintain continuously, request a ConfigOS demo.