Blog Five Cybersecurity Predictions for 2025

With the New Year comes the urge to speculate about what 2025 might bring in terms of cybersecurity. So here are our five top predictions of what might dominate the headlines over the next twelve months.

#1: President Trump will mandate more cybersecurity

Given the fears of the incoming administration over the threat of China, and the trend towards greater collaboration between Russia, China, North Korea and Iran, we wonder whether President Trump will issue an executive order stating that many more organizations in the private sector will need to meet a cybersecurity standard, such as NIST Cybersecurity Framework or 800-53.

#2: Misinformation Will Go into (even more) Overdrive

With the rolling back of fact-checking on social media platforms, the ease with which AI produces fake news and the changed political agenda in the USA, the stars will align for a perfect storm of misinformation. The idea that people can no longer tell what the truth is will become a stark reality.

#3: A major global outage will occur

The Crowdstrike issue during 2024 was not caused (directly) by malware but it had a global impact that showed how pervasive such software is, and its vulnerability to incorrect updates. It could be that a similar outage of global proportions will happen in 2025, possibly due to malware this time.

#4: Car hacking will become a real fear

Supported by governments as part of a climate change agenda, electric cars that are basically computers on wheels have become commonplace. This has widened the attack surface for cybercriminals and this year may be the first time we see a significant upsurge of car-related hacking.

#5: AI-enabled fraud will take us all to the cleaners

Despite the best efforts of the banks, fraud continues to be widespread and the ability to create human-like interactions such as videos easily and convincingly using AI will increase the effectiveness of cons that fleece the general public of their money. The phrase “you should have known better” will become meaningless.

How did we do last year?

At the beginning of last year we made five predictions for 2024. How did we do? They were:

1. Climate Hacking Will Become a Thing – We didn’t see many instances of this during 2024, so no points here.
2. Misinformation Will Go into Overdrive – An obvious one perhaps, but we feel as if this did happen to a great extent, both in the UK and USA.
3. Supply Chain Breaches Will Worsen – We could claim the Crowdstrike incident as an example of this, although it was due to a bad update rather than malware.
4. Attacks on IoT Devices and Robotics Will Cause Real World Pain – We didn’t see the level of incidents we predicted, but we’ve doubled down on this one for cars this year.
5. An Artificial Intelligence Will Escape into the Wild – As we said last year, how would we know?

Last Words

There you have our five cybersecurity predictions for 2025. In recent years it seems as if the world has become more and more unpredictable every year, and 2025 shows no sign of bucking this trend. We’ll meet you back here in 2026 to see if we got lucky.

Written by Ken Holmes CISSP, CIPP/E. Ken is an ISO27001 Lead Auditor and has helped to implement, operate and audit ISO certifications over a varied 30-year career in the Information Technology industry. 

Cyber Awareness Training

If our cybersecurity predictions have got you thinking about your requirements, CertiKit’s Cyber Awareness Training Platform can help with:

• Cyber Security Awareness Training – Interactive training courses that cover core infosec and compliance topics.
• Phishing Simulator – Trackable simulated phishing campaigns with ready-made and custom templates.
• Breach Monitoring – Dark web scanning that detects exposed user data that could be leveraged for a cyber attack.
• Policy Management – Centralised mechanism that simplifies and tracks policy reviews and approvals.
• Human Risk Scoring – Real-time reports of individual and company-wide risk scores.

Start 14 Day Free Trial