Each year, SecurityMetrics releases a blog post featuring our major cybersecurity predictions, featuring insights from our veteran team of cybersecurity, audit, and compliance staff.
Each year, SecurityMetrics releases a blog post featuring all of our major cybersecurity predictions, featuring insights from our veteran team of cybersecurity, audit, and compliance staff.
If you’ve ever wondered what trends, lessons learned, or cyber predictions may occur in the new year, then you’ve come to the right place. Each of our predictions are carefully researched and analyzed based on evidence we’ve experienced over the past year while protecting our clients.
Any time a threat actor has a tactical advantage with a new tool like AI, they tend to exploit it quickly, before any sort of counter measures can be developed. Some examples include AI being utilized by attackers to develop more deadly malware, ransomware, and viruses. We’re also seeing more examples of innovative AI phishing. Threat actors like to use AI to scan for publicly identifiable information from social media and other places regarding business owners, employees, or third-party vendors.
Threat actors are also using AI to search for specific pieces of information in order to be able to craft convincing emails, SMS texts, or deepfakes. AI is acting like a ‘force multiplier’ when it comes to developing phishing and deepfakes, reaching a whole new level of believability.
Additionally, as AI grows more popular, you’ll hear more stories in the news when it breaks down or returns bad responses to your questions. AI tools and learning models are also facing poisoning attacks, which compounds all of these issues.
As AI continues to mature, all business owners should consider providing their employees, staff, and contractors with some AI education, guidelines or policies.
You can learn more about AI phishing on our blog. Providing or updating your Acceptable Use Policy to cover AI activities is a great best practice. You can help educate your staff about knowing how to best use AI within your business.
Remember, uploading sensitive business, customer, and PII into any AI is not a good idea as these tools often will use any data uploaded to train their learning models. Responsible AI use is a shared responsibility of everyone.
This old axiom has never rang more true than it did in 2024. Several big organizations made the news for a variety of cybersecurity reasons. News stories included breaches, major outages, failed updates, and overall poor cyber hygiene or handling of customer data. Familiar names like Change Healthcare, Crowdstrike, and National Public Data (NPD) are just a few examples in the news that left countless people majorly impacted. Threat Actors realize that the bigger your business is, the harder it will fall.
However, that doesn’t mean small to medium sized businesses (SMB) are off the hook. They need to be just as diligent as ever when it comes to protecting their business environment.
The fallout and repercussions from these large scale incidents has led to a flurry of new proposed regulations that will impact businesses of all sizes. Over 20+ US states have passed or introduced state privacy laws. It’s generally a good idea to take a moment to become knowledgeable about the changing regulatory space that may impact your business. Privacy laws, PCI, HIPAA, GDPR and many other areas are changing rapidly. SecurityMetrics is only a phone call or email away to help you sort through these changes.
When Crowdstrike had their outage in 2024, millions of users were impacted. Many of these large scale outages occur when businesses have poor patch management, fail to manage updates properly, or just a lack of awareness of what software or hardware is running in their business.
This is where the SecurityMetrics’s Pulse Platform can help resource challenged or small sized I.T. teams gain a tactical advantage. Hackers are very aware of what a huge impact outages can have on both employees, customers, and businesses owners. This trend will only increase as we move into 2025.
Many business owners have an online shopping cart or ecommerce platform. Our analysis has seen an uptick of attacks on these sites. Hackers targeting digital shopping carts with eskimming tools has been a growing threat trend for many years. 2024 was no different. You can learn more about this threat by visiting our blog.
Our threat analysts have routinely observed an increased level of shopping cart attacks with enhanced levels of sophistication. We are seeing more merchants moving to full payment redirects, while smaller merchants scramble to implement payment page protection for PCI requirements 6.4.3 and 11.6.1. The industry as a whole is discussing more enhancements for iframe security including armored iframes.
SecurityMetrics has been on the forefront for developing solutions for merchants to help defend their ecommerce websites.
Our tool Shopping Cart Monitor can protect ecommerce payment pages by thoroughly scanning them during the checkout process. We can immediately identify any suspicious scripts while quickly reporting malicious activity back to the business owner.
Unlike most of the competition, Shopping Cart Monitor meets PCI requirements 6.4.3 and 11.6.1, without requiring an agent, software installation, development, compatibility testing, or website configuration.
Many business owners may not have the time to stay ahead of the changing threat landscape. In 2024, the 2nd most common attack type globally and in the USA was compromised credentials. Our threat analysts saw an uptick in this type of activity in our Security Operations Center. We have good indications that this type of threat will likely increase in 2025.
Compromised credentials is one of the attack types that impacts not only businesses but personal accounts too. Examples here include using the same login at your business and home, sharing logins between staff, poor password management, or leaving former employee accounts active. As a rule of thumb, never reuse passwords and logins between your place of business and your home.
It’s vital to exercise good best practices and cybersecurity hygiene.
Industry recommended best practices include complex password management, turning on multi-factor authentication (MFA), and routinely having environment scans done on your business to determine what assets you have running.
Tools and helpful guidance found in the SecurityMetrics’ Pulse Platform can help you secure your business to lower this type of risk.
Zero-day breaches are attacks that can occur when a threat actor takes advantage of a vulnerability that has not been announced to the general public. In 2024, the SecurityMetrics Threat Intelligence Center saw a large uptick in zero-day breaches globally.
Last year, SecurityMetrics threat analysts recorded a total of 768 vulnerabilities actively exploited by threat actors. That means we saw a 20% jump from 2023, when only 639 vulnerabilities were recorded. If you are a business owner with a resource challenged or smaller I.T. team, then you may want help.
SecurityMetrics’ offers a variety of Security Operations Services to businesses of all shapes and sizes, from managed-threat hunting, guided threat response, endpoint protection, external and internal vulnerability scanning with many other customized packages to help your business lower their risks to zero-day breaches.
Cryptocurrency and blockchain technology continue to gain mainstream adoption, making them an increasingly attractive target for cybercriminals. As more businesses and individuals invest in digital assets, hackers are shifting their focus to exploit vulnerabilities in crypto exchanges, wallets, and smart contracts.
As cryptocurrency adoption grows, securing digital assets must be a top priority. Businesses and individuals alike should treat crypto security with the same, if not greater, diligence as their traditional bank accounts.
The cybersecurity landscape is evolving at an unprecedented pace, with AI-driven threats, large scale breaches, and sophisticated ecommerce attacks reshaping the way businesses approach security. As we move further into 2025, organizations, regardless of size, must remain proactive in strengthening their defenses.
To stay ahead of emerging threats, ensure that you:
If you’re looking for actionable strategies to protect your organization, watch the SecurityMetrics Trends and Predictions video and subscribe to our Youtube page.
Additionally, our SecurityMetrics’ Threat Intelligence Analysts study the latest cybersecurity news, review the most dangerous phishing examples, analyze industry trends, and have leading edge conversations with other industry peers each week. If you would like to get access to the same cybersecurity, compliance, and phishing examples we see weekly, then please consider subscribing to our Threat Intelligence Weekly Email, delivered straight to your inbox every Wednesday.
You have many options and pathways to begin to lower your business risk. It never hurts to have an industry leader like SecurityMetrics on your team, protecting your customers and business.
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