The Top Cybersecurity Threats In 2025

The CISO is the arbiter of confidence and protection for the business in a world of geopolitical strife and shifting allegiances; regulatory hurdles and changes to AI and tech; quickly emerging and changing technologies in generative AI (genAI); and constantly evolving cybercriminal activity, including deepfakes. In 2025, five threats will affect security teams more than any other: global regulatory disruptions, high-quality deepfakes, tech exuberance over genAI, job loss radicalization, and genAI-driven extortion. Security pros need to prepare in advance.

Key takeaways: 

• Global regulatory disruptions: Data-related policies, regulations, and standards are becoming less aligned between domains and across countries.
• High-quality deepfakes: Attackers are increasingly using deepfakes because of their ability to cast doubt on security, trust in the media, and brand reputation. Deepfakes impact verification and authentication for almost every user group, including customers, business partners, and workforce members.
• Tech exuberance over genAI: Enterprise adoption of genAI continues to accelerate as models proliferate, training costs come down, and deployment options increase. But tech and security leaders are learning hard lessons about how different models behave — and the work required to make them secure — as new models emerge.
• Job loss radicalization: A new economic reality has emerged in 2025 with a flurry of activity that saw job cuts to 4% of the US federal government workforce, massive tech layoffs, and job cuts in Europe. Employees who remain after layoffs are not happy.
• GenAI-driven extortion: Between continued law enforcement disruption of ransomware gangs and enterprises’ greater focus on business resilience and data backups, ransomware became less lucrative for cybercriminals in 2024. Before genAI, stealing data was only so useful — reviewing millions of emails takes far too much time. Now, with genAI, attackers can perform a quick sentiment analysis on troves of stolen data for extortion schemes.

Target audience level: intermediate