Ahead of the new year, Google Cloud has predicted that cyber threat actors will increasingly use AI for sophisticated cyber-attacks in 2025.

The company’s Cybersecurity Forecast 2025, which uses current trends to project what could happen in the coming year, anticipates a “second phase” in AI’s deployment in security on both defence and malicious offense.

They expect to see the rapid adoption of AI-based tools by cyber-criminals to continue, leveraging the use of large language models (LLMs) and deepfakes too improve social engineering tactics and create new avenues of cyber espionage.

Further, the report forecasts that threat actors will increasingly turn to AI for other use cases, including code development, reconnaissance, and vulnerability research.

AI for IO

Threat actors targeting Information Operations (IO) will increasingly use generative AI tools to support their crimes.

The use of AI in this realm has already progressed from the early used of generative adversarial network-created profiles used to backstop inauthentic personas, and has evolved to use LLMs to create more seemingly genuine content posted to fraudulent websites.

Google Cloud expects this trend to continue, with threat actors using more commonly available genAI tools for a range of ends, at scale, to reach more victims than ever before.

Geopolitics

Cyber is the new frontier in warfare, and the rise in geopolitical tensions is set to make the cyber landscape all the more tempestuous.

Conflicts across the world are set to be a major driver in threat activity across the cyber world, with Russia, China, Iran and North Korea set to remain actively engages in espionage operations and cyber-crime.

The report says there is no sign that the targeting of critical industry, public services, and government organisations will decrease in the coming year.

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Cloud Security

In EMEA countries in particular, Google’s Mandiant incident response teams observed increases in investigations stemming from cloud misconfigurations, inadequate monitoring, weak security practices, and credential reuse within unmanaged cloud environments.

This region is also experiencing rapid cloud adoption, so Google expects this trend to only increase as more and more organisations take up the cloud.

Securing cloud environments is therefore expected to be a major priority for EMEA countries in the coming year.