As the year draws to a close, increasing ransomware threats, supply chain interruption, and artificial intelligence (AI) exposures will all challenge clients in the New Year, according to a newsletter by cyber carrier Coalition.
And so businesses must enhance their cyber readiness and security practices in 2025, Coalition says.
Dominant threats
One main risk is supply chain and business interruption caused by escalating cyberattacks on sectors like healthcare and telecoms.
“We will also see increased attention to businesses’ ability to recover financially from widespread digital disruptions,” says Sezaneh Seymour, vice president and head of regulatory risk and policy at Coalition.
To reduce this risk, companies should maintain analog operations in case of digital outages, Coalition recommends.
Also, bad actors will increase their ransomware tactics. Expect their threats to become more aggressive and personal.
“To keep profits high, threat actors increasingly turn to physical threats,” says Coalition’s incident response lead Leeann Nicolo. “Coalition Incident Response (CIR), our affiliate, has recently witnessed increased aggression through targeted and personalized attacks on C-suite leaders and their families.”
Will AI-generated deepfakes create more havoc in 2025? Don’t count on it, says Coalition.
“We’ve seen a few examples of this type of attack. Still, they require far too much computing power to execute in real-time at a high quality for the average cybercriminal,” says Tiago Henriques, Coalition’s vice president of research.
Threat actors will continue AI attacks through sophisticated phishing emails and voice cloning. To limit their vulnerability to these attack methods, clients should verify any digital-sourced requests directly with a team member before sending money, gift cards, or the like.
Soft market persists
There’s good news coming down the pipeline. The cyber insurance market will continue to soften, albeit slower than before. “Pricing decreases will likely sit in the single digits — around 5% to 7%,” says Coalition’s head of insurance, Shawn Ram.
After a historically challenging market, many underwriters tightened their rules to bring performance back up.
But once returns began yielding better results, these rules softened once again. Although such softening leads to short-term benefits such as growth, another Coalition expert says managed service providers (MSP) and their customers will see negative downstream effects.
“Relaxed underwriting rules lead to lax security practices, which means more costly incidents and tough conversations between MSPs and their customers,” says John Roberts, general manager of security at Coalition.
Feature image by iStock.com/thomaguery
