6 Hacking Trends That You Must Know in 2025

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January 3, 2025

More politically motivated cyber attacks, Apple’s technology in the sights of hackers – what companies and consumers have to prepare for in the new year.

In general, 2024 was a good year. At least for cybercriminals and hackers. Cybercrime accounts for two thirds of the total damage caused to the global economy by data theft, sabotage, and industrial espionage.

And the shadow economy on the Internet is not only proving to be extremely profitable, but also highly innovative, as a survey of security experts shows. Let’s see which cyber trends and dangers will pose a particular challenge to companies and consumers in the coming year.

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More political hacktivism

While cybercrime was in the past a phenomenon primarily shaped by economic interests, security experts expect that cyberattacks will become increasingly political in nature in 2025. Cases such as Operation Aurora provide a foretaste of conceivable scenarios in which state or state-supported attackers carry out complex cyberattacks on operators of critical infrastructures. In that occassion, hackers from China infiltrated US companies to steal, among other things, business secrets on a large scale, while Israeli and American cyber actors probably sabotaged Iranian nuclear facilities with malware.

Such attacks, also known as advanced persistent threats, are likely to increase significantly in connection with the global increase in wars, warn experts.

Although politically exposed companies, parties and other institutions are particularly in the attackers’ focus, the threat extends far beyond that. Especially when it comes to spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt in Western societies – experts speak of FUD attacks (for “Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt”) – state actors attack any target where a failure causes public unrest and are happy to accept possible collateral damage to companies that may be accidentally affected.

Cybersecurity and the rise of AI cyber gangsters

The use of AI makes hacker attacks more efficient, cheaper and more successful. But companies, authorities and private individuals are not defenseless.

Two years after the launch of ChatGPT 3 seemed like an initial spark for the everyday use of AI, the smart algorithms have long since arrived in the business world. And in their criminal counterpart: cybercrime. This threatens to merge into an extremely unholy combination – especially in conjunction with the ever-increasing number of successful extortion attacks.

“After a monumental year for AI – and a catastrophic year for data leaks, we expect significant threats in 2025 both from fraud attempts and from attacks on digital identities,” says Siggi Stefnisson, Cyber Safety CTO at the IT security group Gen, which includes providers such as Norton, Avast and Avira.

In addition, not only legitimate software developers are increasingly using AI assistants when programming, but also the coders in hacker groups. This allows them to adapt malware, or malicious programs, in much shorter cycles in order to outsmart recognized protection mechanisms in the IT systems of their potential victims.

“We know that malware developers are already using large language models to speed up the creation of malware, because ultimately it is just a special form of software,” emphasizes Sabina Tushieva, security engineer in threat analysis at the IT service provider Acronis.

A flood of deepfakes

Security experts are also very concerned about the use of so-called deepfakes and other AI-generated simulations to deceive their targets with videos, images or voice recordings that are sometimes falsified and sometimes completely artificially generated. Last year, hackers tried to use such a strategy at sports car manufacturer Ferrari, among others, but failed.

What were still a few isolated cases in 2024 is likely to become a mass phenomenon in 2025. The attacks are becoming faster, have a greater reach and are increasingly supported by AI-generated fakes in order to use so-called social engineering to persuade victims to call up or install malware or to reveal access codes. He expects a large number of “professionally created deepfakes,” warns Jörg von der Heydt, regional director at cybersecurity service provider Bitdefender.

In general, the use of AI allows hackers to rely even more than before on “hyper-personalized, human-centered methods to manipulate human behavior,” in addition to the traditional tactic of exploiting technological vulnerabilities, warns genetic expert Stefnisson.

“As deceptions become more sophisticated, verifiable digital evidence – a combination of verifiable information as a digital authenticity signature – is becoming a powerful tool to prove what is real.”

Attacks using Microsoft’s own tools

One of the most common forms of cyberattacks used by hackers for years has been to inject their own malicious code into their victims’ IT systems. These programs then read sensitive data, log access codes and passwords, or encrypt computers and data storage.

However, such malware can be identified in well-monitored IT systems using special security software in a similar way to how infections with pathogens can be identified by the immune system in the human body.

In order to attract less attention, cyber criminals are increasingly using a tactic that is now known as “living off the land”. This means that they use the software tools that they find in the attacked IT systems in any case, because they are part of the operating systems or application programs that the hacking victims use.

Elements of the Windows operating system are particularly popular with hackers. “While the misuse of other software often sets off alarm bells for defenders, the misuse of a Microsoft program often has the opposite effect, because it is an integral part of Windows and normally has legitimate functions,” says a technology specialist at the security service provider Sophos.

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Apple devices as targets of attacks

For years, Apple has ensured that – with a few exceptions – users of its iPhones and iPads could only download software to their devices via Apple’s own software distribution service, the App Store. A strategy that guaranteed Apple billions in revenue every year through the revenue share that Apple received from app sales via the App Store and prevented software providers from selling their products via their own platforms and solely on their own account, among other things.

At the same time, Apple’s role as gatekeeper to the iOS world also made it more difficult, at least to a considerable extent, for hackers to smuggle malware onto smartphones or tablets.

With the Digital Markets Act, which came into force in 2024, the EU has now forced Apple to weaken its exclusive control over access to end devices, at least in Europe.

Since then, Apple has had to allow competition, including from competing app stores. This installation of programs via platforms other than the manufacturer’s own, known as sideloading, has been common practice with Google’s Android software for years.

Companies, but also private individuals who use corresponding devices, can no longer rely on Apple’s technology being less affected by cyber attacks.

Network infrastructure attacks

Cyber attacks on network infrastructure providers, such as those on Palo Alto Networks and SonicWall just this fall, show that the attacks on external data connections in companies that were carried out intensively by hackers during the early phase of the Covid pandemic – due to the massive increase in home office work – have not abated even after the pandemic.

Not only decentralized working is part of the “new normal” today, but also attacks on the corresponding data connections or manufacturers or operators of networking technology and virtual private networks, or VPN for short.

“The intensive search for vulnerabilities in VPN systems and the knowledge of previously unpublished security gaps, so-called ‘zero days’, have significantly increased the attack surface since COVID,” warn the experts at Arctic Wolf Labs.

The threat situation is also exacerbated by the brisk trade in access data for IT systems stolen in other cyberattacks or stolen with the help of social engineering. Such attacks are noticeably increasing, especially in the manufacturing industry.

Companies should definitely introduce multi-factor authentication, or MFA for short, for external access wherever possible and not yet implemented.

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In addition to the lack of MFA checks when logging in, another serious and self-inflicted vulnerability in many IT systems remains the operation of outdated applications for digital identity management in companies.

For example, it is alarmingly common for these to still use old versions of Microsoft’s Active Directory Server for which there are no longer any regular updates, criticize the security specialists at Sophos. Almost nine out of ten of the server versions still in operation (2019, 2016 and 2012) have now been compromised by hackers, according to security researchers.

In this way, negligent IT managers are creating the best conditions for attackers to carry out further attacks, both for unnoticed access to user accounts, unauthorized remote access – and countless other forms of cyberattacks. Tens of thousands of times!

It is to be feared that 2025 will be another good year – at least for the dark side of the Internet.

Author Profile

Julie Gabriel

Julie Gabriel wears many hats—founder of Eyre.ai, product marketing veteran, and, most importantly, mom of two. At Eyre.ai, she’s on a mission to make communication smarter and more seamless with AI-powered tools that actually work for people (and not the other way around). With over 20 years in product marketing, Julie knows how to build solutions that not only solve problems but also resonate with users. Balancing the chaos of entrepreneurship and family life is her superpower—and she wouldn’t have it any other way.