We are fast approaching the end of (another) turbulent year for cybersecurity. Looking back, it's hard to believe that so much can happen in such a short time. As we finish up our work for the year, head home to our families, and prepare to close the book on 2024, it's worth considering what's next. And who better than Fortra's experts to offer insights into the year to come?
Keep reading for expert predictions of cybersecurity in 2025.
AI Could Improve Cybersecurity…
In the past couple of years, AI has been inescapable. The technology has dominated cybersecurity trade shows, marketing materials, and even global news headlines. One could be forgiven for thinking the chatter might die down in 2025—but our experts say it won't. They believe we have just seen the tip of the AI iceberg.
"We're not done with hearing about AI by any stretch - but this is the year that the hype could start becoming impactful," said Chris Hudson, Professional Services Cybersecurity Technical Architect at Fortra. He argues that while cybersecurity has long been exploring algorithmic processing to keep ahead of detecting threats, rapidly evolving Large Language Models (LLMs) and related technologies are now poised to become a larger part of the mainstream and enable better support for busy security teams.
"The prospect of easier using the large datasets that security, forensic, and audit tools have been capturing for years may open up new avenues for faster responses to risks than ever before," Chris continued.
But it Could Mean Companies Lose Sight of the Basics
Although AI seems set to transform threat detection and response, our experts have expressed concerns that overreliance on the technology could cause organizations to neglect foundational cybersecurity measures.
"All the tooling and technological advancements in the world don't make up for a solid foundation and proper security hygiene. I worry that enterprises will be distracted by flashy, shiny products that were rushed to market, and they'll forget about the products that more broadly secure their networks and organizations," said Tyler Reguly, Senior Manager of Security R&D at Fortra.
The key takeaway here is the importance of balancing technological advancements with industry staples. Amir Gerges, Senior Systems Engineer at Fortra, notes that AI threat detection solutions work by correlating information from traditional controls—like data loss prevention (DLP), email prevention, and firewalls—and would be useless without them.
Geopolitics Will Have a Greater Impact
Anyone with half an eye on the news will know that geopolitical relations are, to put it mildly, a bit testy. As a result, much of the world is nervous about what the future may hold, mis-and-disinformation is rife, and, frankly, people are scared. Tyler believes this fear is fuelling scams and social engineering attacks.
"Until the geopolitical climate cools down, I suspect that people who wouldn't normally fall for email, social media, and phone scams, will be more inclined to click a link or press a button… increasing the number of victims available to these scammers," he said.
Chris, however, hopes that the prospect of widening cyberwarfare will prompt organizations and individuals alike to strengthen their cyber defenses.
"Recent news headlines have talked about getting households ready for war, and we should expect that to include intrusions on not just key infrastructure but any points of cybersecurity weakness that can be found and exploited in a "long game" attack. Hopefully, that means further investment and changes that push security by default and modernization of security in organizations that have let security become lax over time," he said.
Disruption Prevention in the Spotlight
The July 2024 CrowdStrike outage drove home the reality that even the smallest mistakes can have massive consequences. It brought about a series of short-term process changes and questions surrounding the testing, updating, and rollback process for vendors of all sizes and scopes.
For Wade Barisoff, Director of Product for Data Protection at Fortra, the outage has prompted a change in mindset. "2025 will see companies execute longer-term strategies from creating automated testing sandboxes to diversification and segmentation of their environments to ensure a simple update cannot take their entire company down for multiple weeks," he said.
Antonio Sanchez, Principal Evangelist at Fortra, also believes that the CrowdStrike outage has had a significant impact on cybersecurity. He argues that 2025 will see tighter collaboration between security teams and IT teams to evolve incident response plans and business continuity strategies.
We Will See a Renewed Focus on Threat Discovery and Prioritization
Earlier this year, Gartner published an article urging organizations to focus on cybersecurity "threats, not episodes." Chris hopes that this initiative will drive a renewed focus on threat discovery and prioritization in 2025. However, he argues that to improve threat discovery and prioritization, the industry needs a more "joined-up" mindset that takes advantage of advanced integrations and emerging technologies.
"I'm hopeful for more advanced integrations between tools to give a better overall picture of what's happening and when. Combined with the benefits of smarter, AI-driven analysis, there's the potential for making big data work for us and offering a deeper understanding of the detection and reasoning behind the priorities that will drive security team workloads," he said.
Hungry for More?
These predictions barely scratch the surface of what our experts have to say about cybersecurity in 2025. And how could they? Cybersecurity is an extraordinarily broad, diverse, and dynamic industry – it would be impossible to sum up the entire year to come in a single blog post. Fortunately, we've got a whole lot more where that came from.
Check out our other blog, What's On the Security Horizon for 2025? Fortra's Experts Predict, or watch the full webinar for more cybersecurity predictions for 2025.
