With every passing minute, the need to ensure online security becomes more apparent. And given that almost everyone is seeking customer data, the importance of online safety can never be overemphasized. In fact, according to CloudTalk, close to 65% of organizations plan to make fully data-driven decisions by 2026.

As profitable as this could be for those companies, there could be more pressure to acquire customer data, which might encourage online attacks. Remember, after hacking user accounts, cybercriminals often steal personal information, which they usually sell to different organizations on the dark web. This only means that more online care has to be exercised not only in 2025 but also in the years to come.

What are some of the attacks you’re likely to encounter in 2025?

There are quite a number of online scams that you need to beware of, and before you can understand how to keep yourself safe, you need to know some of them. And one of the most common types of online scams you’re likely to meet in 2025 is phishing. In this cybercrime, cybercriminals impersonate a trusted entity to trick you into giving them personal information. They mostly happen through fake emails or text messages that resemble a bank, employer or tech support.

According to a recent study, about 57% of companies experience phishing attacks either daily or weekly. And as if that’s not enough, about 1.2% of all emails are malicious, accounting for about 3.4 billion phishing emails daily. In another place, professionals noted that about eight in ten security incidents resulted from phishing. And given that businesses lose close to $17,700 per minute due to these types of attacks, you definitely do not want to be a victim.

Romance scams and tech support fraud are other types of attacks that you may encounter. In romance scams, fraudsters often manipulate unsuspecting victims using fake profiles on dating sites or social media. As long as you can trust them, then that’s it – they’ll concoct stories needing financial help, acquiring huge amounts of money from the victim. On the other hand, tech support fraud involves scammers requesting remote access to your machine or even asking for money to solve non-existent issues.

In addition to these scams, you may also meet the following:

• Social media scams
• Identity theft
• Scam calls
• Invoice scams
• Threats and extortion

How can technology help minimize exposure to attacks?

The role of artificial intelligence

It’s actually almost impossible to think of a sector where AI is not making waves. This technology boasts unusual computational ability that’s able to crunch enormous data and provide critical insights in real time. For example, let’s assume you have a platform that welcomes over a million weekly visits. How can you quickly note suspicious behaviour with such a number of individuals visiting your website? Well, humanly speaking, it might be impossible, but not with AI.

By allowing real-time detection of attacks and rapid response and mitigation, artificial intelligence strengthens cybersecurity efforts greatly. In fact, a study by Secureframe revealed that experts who adopted AI to strengthen their security efforts reduced data breach costs by at least 18%. Remember, automating cybersecurity using AI often depends on existing use cases in different business environments, which can really be helpful, especially now that finding an expert security staff can really be expensive.

Some AI applications in cybersecurity

Vulnerability management

One thing you should never forget is that cybercriminals are also becoming more sophisticated as technology evolves. As a result, more vulnerabilities are discovered and reported every now and then. Expectedly, businesses have to struggle with managing the large number of new vulnerabilities, which their traditional systems may be unable to handle.

Thankfully, AI-powered solutions like user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) can really help with this. UEBA allows for the analysis of device, user, and server activities and helps identify unusual behavior that would have otherwise indicated a zero-day attack.

Password protection and authentication

By now, you may be aware of multifactor authentication features like 2FA. These tools often improve security by adding extra layers to secure information and prevent further attacks from malicious persons. Well, as much as the tools are already secure, AI can improve their efficiency even more. For instance, have you heard about adaptive MFA?

This infrastructure uses contextual data to determine the risk of a user’s login and selects a user authentication method based on it. Different pieces of information like location and IP address help in this calculation. For instance, if someone logs in from two very different locations, AI might detect that as suspicious and request more authentication before access can be allowed.

Plus, AI tools like CAPTCHA and facial recognition have become popular ways of improving online safety. Especially when you want to deal with tactics like brute-force attacks and credential stuffing, these tools can really come in handy.

Parting words

Just like in recent years, 2025 may see the number of cybercrimes increase as more attackers continue to scramble for customer data. And since you don’t want to be a victim of attacks, you’d want to do anything possible to improve your online safety.

Thankfully, technologies like artificial intelligence are here to help us. Even if you already use infrastructures like 2FA and VPNs, this technology offers much more for your cybersecurity efforts.