Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2025. Read them in this 17th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
By Angel Grant, SVP, Security Product & Market Intelligence, Mimecast
2024 was marked by a surge in AI-powered cyber threats, scams and breaches. Research shows a sharp increase in spam and malicious links in the first half of this year, as attackers evolved their strategies, leveraging generative AI to enhance phishing and impersonation tactics.
As we look ahead to 2025, the cybersecurity landscape will only continue to evolve, bringing both new challenges and opportunities for organizations to protect themselves against emerging threats. Let’s explore three key cybersecurity
trends I predict are poised to shape the year ahead, the implications for corporate security and the strategies organizations must adopt to stay ahead of the curve.
1. Deepfake Technology Will Accelerate Corporate Fraud
The sophistication and ease of access to deepfake technology will further redefine corporate impersonation attacks in 2025. Tools that enable the creation of hyper-realistic avatars are being used for legitimate purposes, such as training programs, but the same technology is becoming a potent weapon for cybercriminals. Threat actors are ramping up their use of both voice and synthetic identity deepfakes in hiring scams, executive impersonations, and scams leading to account takeover. With this technology becoming more convincing than ever, they will pose serious financial and reputational risks for businesses.
Organizations must prioritize advanced detection tools and anomaly monitoring to identify these threats early and
protect against potential damage.
2. Cyber Awareness Training Will Shift from Checking a Box to Adaptive Behavioral Changes
Organizations and their employees are facing training fatigue, increasingly seeing this crucial practice as a box to check versus an exercise to change behavior. In 2025, we will see a shift toward real-time and adaptive cybersecurity training embedded directly within collaboration tools to better pinpoint and prevent individual user errors. One size does not fit all when it comes to training, especially as attacks grow in sophistication. By looking carefully at the actions users take, the attacks that target them and the access they have, teams can build an individualized risk profile for each user to provide visibility into the degree of human risk that needs to be managed. This will allow security teams to engage users with adaptive actions like training and
interventions, or by proactively adjusting security controls to better protect them.
3. There Will Be a Renewed Focus on Compliance and Monitoring
In 2025, organizations will prioritize compliance and real-time monitoring in response to the complexities introduced by collaboration tools. As threats to intellectual property and regulatory compliance grow, businesses will adopt technologies that enable continuous oversight of user interactions and data sharing. This proactive stance will help mitigate risks associated with data leaks and ensure adherence to evolving compliance and privacy regulations.
As fraud and scams continue to plague enterprises in 2025, IT leaders will need to evolve their security tools, training and compliance processes to adapt to the dynamic threat landscape. In doing so, they will not only effectively navigate these
challenges but also position their organizations as leaders in cybersecurity innovation and therefore protect their brand reputation.
##
