2025 has been a transformative year for cybersecurity, with emerging technologies and evolving threats changing the landscape as we once knew it. 

Reflecting on the year, there are several trends that come to my mind, both good and bad. Organizations prepared for a quantum future, foreign adversaries and cybercriminals alike made strategic moves, and industries as a whole found themselves targeted with waves of cyberattacks (such as the case with the retail sector). 

While many trends come to mind when reviewing 2025, I wanted to hear from those in the industry to learn what they considered the top trends that shaped the year. Below, experts share the top 3 cyber trends that made 2025 such a memorable year. 

1. Rapid AI and AI Agent Adoption Led to Greater Risks 

Dana Simberkoff, Chief Risk, Privacy and Information Security Officer at AvePoint:

2025 can easily be defined as the year that AI transitioned from experimentation to enterprise-scale deployments. Behind the scenes, we’ve also seen many fast-growing, ambitious initiatives leaving cybersecurity controls by the wayside in the name of rapid innovation, exposing the growing gap between AI-readiness and data quality/security. AvePoint’s own 2025 study found that more than 75% of organizations experienced AI-related security breaches — and 90.6% of organizations claim effective information management programs, but only 30.3% have implemented effective data classification systems. 

Especially with the advent of agentic solutions, this year marked a clear turning point for organizations’ data protection and management strategies. Companies are now increasing their investments in automated data governance and modernization solutions (with 64.4% surveyed reporting that they are increasing investment in these tools), to safely and effectively take advantage of AI and agentic tools on a larger scale. AI agents especially require dedicated oversight and constant workflow adjustments, to monitor and control what data they can access and who in the organization is using them. In the year ahead, security leaders will be seeking to employ data governance platforms that can drive proactive oversight, policy enforcement, and cost optimization in one interface.

2. Ransomware Exposed Organizational Vulnerabilities

Jeff Liford, Associate Director at Fenix24:

The biggest lesson from 2025 is this: ransomware isn’t the cause of catastrophic failures. It’s a symptom. It exposes technical debt, misconfiguration and poor alignment to security fundamentals. This isn’t improving; if anything, it’s accelerating.

Across our ransomware and eviction cases this year, the pattern was consistent: organizations weren’t “broken by ransomware.” They were exposed by it. These breaches expose what’s been fragile for years — these environments operate with assumed risk whether they realize or not.

Key observations:

1. 2025 was a year of misconfigurations, technical debt and unresolved flaws coming home to roost. For all the CVEs and zero days, poor design and technical choices are the real root cause. Notably, third party risk was on full display: your vendor needs to be fully aligned with your security posture (and it can’t be an assumption).
2. A single foothold — whether from a CVE, phishing, or one compromised system — routinely cascaded into a full systemic compromise within 24 to 72 hours. This shouldn’t be possible in a well-architected environment.
3. It’s not really a CVE issue — the fault is not with individual vendors or products. Zero days are inevitable.  It’s a fundamental breakdown in security basics: flat networks with excessive trust and minimal or no controls between critical systems, and an over-reliance on identity as the only security boundary.

Repeatedly observed patterns included:

• Firewall management interfaces exposed to the internet.
• Lack of MFA and, more broadly, poor password hygiene. We still routinely see variations of “adminpass” and “company1234” — and too many shared/common credentials.
• VPNs permitting non-corporate and unmanaged devices, often with direct access to crown jewel systems like hypervisors and backup infrastructure.
• Lack of network segmentation: user subnets can directly reach management interfaces on critical infrastructure devices and backends.
• Poor patch and vulnerability management: we frequently encountered critical CVEs unaddressed for months, unsupported systems in production, and no defined patching cadence or accountability structure.
• Domain Admins used as daily drivers or as a “catch-all” administrative role across the environment
• Third-party vendor failures: we saw repeated cases where MSP or vendor missteps amplified the impact of an incident. And notably, three of our eight largest breaches this year were directly caused by MSP procedural failures.
• Shadow IT and lack of asset visibility: during most events, organizations can’t provide a clear picture of their own environment. In several engagements we uncovered millions of dollars worth of shadow IT operating completely outside IT/Security’s purview
• Backups that were unmonitored, untested, unprotected: even when backups survived, they were often not viable for restoration. In many cases, threat actors deleted or encrypted backups entirely. Catastrophic resiliency failures were one of the most consistent patterns of the year.

We’re not losing environments because attackers are getting dramatically better.  We’re losing them because the underlying architecture cannot withstand a single point of compromise without total systemic failure.  This isn’t an SMB problem — we see common themes in large and small clients. 2025 was another year of “hard crunchy exteriors, soft chewy insides.”  The industry needs a fundamental reprioritization on security fundamentals. This isn’t a failure because we lack the tools — it’s a failure to prioritize and resource the correct work efforts. Some environments are legitimately under-resourced, but others are resourced incorrectly.

The rapid rise of AI-assisted tooling will dramatically accelerate threat actors’ ability to compromise poorly architected networks. Environments already struggling with fundamentals will face even faster and more automated exploitation chains in 2026. Recovery-based resilience desperately needs to move to the forefront of security planning.

3. Secure Development Remained a Challenge

Dipto Chakravarty, Chief Product Officer at Black Duck: 

Over the past year, I’ve observed that customers continue to grapple with several key challenges related to secure development. The evolving threat landscape, driven by advancements in AI and generative AI, has significantly impacted secure development practices. One of the primary concerns is the increasing sophistication of AI-enabled attacks, making it essential for development teams to integrate robust security measures into their workflows. 

Additionally, securing AI systems across their lifecycle is another critical challenge. This involves not only developing AI software securely but also protecting AI models and large language models (LLMs) from vulnerabilities such as data poisoning and prompt injection attacks. Traditional security measures, including monitoring, logging, and intrusion detection, are also crucial in managing AI systems. Supply chain attacks remain a significant threat. The compromise of software components, whether open-source or commercial, can have far-reaching consequences. Organizations must prioritize managing and monitoring software supply chain risks, including the use of software bills of materials (SBOMs) and rigorous patch management.

The proliferation of regulatory requirements around cybersecurity adds another layer of complexity. Organizations must navigate a fragmented landscape of regional and global compliance requirements, making it challenging to maintain compliance and ensure the security of their development processes.

Looking Back on 2025

With a little over a month left in 2025, now is the perfect time to reflect on the year’s trends in preparation for a new year. What can be improved? What must be improved? In order to make 2026 a more cyber secure year, these must be asked — and answered — before this year comes to a close.