2025 Cybersecurity Trends

Expanding security automation by relying more heavily on security orchestration, artificial intelligence, and data analytics, as well as a more inclusive and expansive definition of threat intelligence signals, will dictate the success cyber teams realize in 2025. But the ability to expand security automation also will hinge on much-needed cultural changes within organizations—and financial institutions, in particular—where siloed environments built around anti-money-laundering efforts and information technology have stunted cyber development and foresight. In fact, some organizations will fail to see the need for more expansive security automation altogether, which ultimately will be a shortcoming they will struggle to overcome as emerging cyber threats, terrorism, and societal risks increasingly linked to disinformation and exploitation take aim at financial stability in developed economies. Disinformation—false or misleading information deliberately created and spread to obscure the truth for nefarious, criminal, and/or often sinister reasons—and misleading information, such as conspiracy theories, are extremely dangerous and are often traced back to nation-state threat actors. 

In 2025, the continual blurring of the lines that divide and differentiate cybercrime from cyber warfare will make attribution of cyber threat actors increasingly critical. Tracking and identifying the threat actors behind data security breaches, cyberattacks and cyber intrusions, and threat campaigns of all types— will require more investments in successful identification of indicators of compromise (IoCs) and collaboration across teams and industries that can help IoCs be traced and tracked to specific threat actors and sources. Anti-money-laundering tools can link to many dots. But because these tools for decades have been used in isolation, even within the banking institution itself, they have failed to make critical connections that could more readily detect fraud and preemptively prevent cybercrime and national security threats. 

By investing in cyber-fraud fusion centers, FIs can break down internal silos that prevent successful threat intel and information sharing connected to IoCs. A successful cyber fusion strategy enables organizations to improve security-driven collaboration by unifying, connecting, and sharing their teams, processes, and technology to detect fraud and cyber risk, and to attribute threats to specific actors. Artificial intelligence, which is nothing new, will help organizations build the bridge between disparate data and meaningful IoCs.