Unique Research · Forecast · December 5, 2024
Gen has published its 2025 cybersecurity forecast, outlining expected shifts in scams, digital-identity risk, and financial theft.
CTO Siggi Stefnisson framed the year after major AI advances and a wave of breaches: “We believe 2025 will bring significant change in scams and digital-identity risk. Cybercriminals will use large-scale breaches either to steal identities outright or to craft highly personalized, convincing scams.”
The report expects AI — especially large language models — to power sophisticated, personalized fraud. By late 2024, ChatGPT already had 200M+ weekly users; everyday use may reshape perception and fuel ethics debates about AI’s social impact. “It’s bound to be a year of change — people need to protect their digital lives more than ever,” Stefnisson said.
Deepfakes: Gen expects deepfakes to reach a point where even experts struggle to tell real from fake — enabling personal abuse (fake images) and state-level disinformation. Countermeasure: verifiable digital credentials to prove content authenticity and sustain online trust.
From data theft to identity theft: After a year of major breaches, identity theft is expected to rise sharply. Criminals will fuse leaked PII with other sources into detailed dossiers — enabling higher-grade impersonation of trusted companies and more ransomware-style extortion.
Hyper-personalized scams: Focus shifts from tech exploits to manipulating human behavior. Attackers using breach data may echo recent U.S./Canada sextortion campaigns that leveraged Google Street View imagery — highly targeted messages hard to distinguish from legitimate mail.
Financial theft: New vectors via mobile banking and crypto — deepfake celebrity faces or voice-cloned officials luring victims into fake investments, as in 2024’s CryptoCore campaigns.
What Gen urges: Know current scam tactics; use a VPN; treat “too good to be true” offers with skepticism; verify sources; use trusted security suites (e.g. Norton 360 Deluxe, Avast Premium Security); enable Dark Web Monitoring and Identity Advisor Plus for alerts and help when identity is compromised.
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