By Ravi Srivatsav, CEO
As crazy as it may seem, 2025 is upon us. As we look ahead to the coming year, we’re standing on the precipice of a new era in cybersecurity. It’s not just about defense anymore; it’s about innovation, about turning challenges into opportunities. We’re excited to share what’s top of mind for us as we head into a new year, based on conversations with our customers, technology leaders, and cybersecurity innovators.
AI Will Expand Data Exposure and Data Poisoning Risks for Enterprises
The Challenge:
When companies use open AI models, as many organizations do, they unintentionally make sensitive information accessible to untrustworthy parties. Using confidential information to train AI and machine learning (ML) models and for generative AI queries and outputs exposes such data to malicious access and exploitation. Companies know the risks, but monitoring every employee’s use of AI and the information they share is extremely challenging without prohibiting the use of AI altogether.
AI also presents risks with data and model poisoning. At the same time, attacks like phishing and ransomware target AI models or systems in production, data and model poisoning target AI models in development. With data poisoning, bad actors inject faulty data to create errors and misclassifications and control AI-generated outcomes. With model poisoning, threat actors inject tampered data into training AI or ML models to manipulate the output and “poison” results. Such actions intend to create a significant divergence in the AI model’s behavior, manipulating business decision-making.
DataKrypto Prediction:
Companies will take critical steps to protect data and minimize the impact of such attacks:
- Increasingly limit or prohibit the use of open AI models and instead rely on closed models to minimize data exposure.
- Implement more stringent data access and monitoring policies to limit malicious data access.
- Leverage data encryption to ensure data protection. While other steps can help stop malicious actors from accessing sensitive data, they are not failproof. When threat actors find their way through, encryption ensures that the data they access is unusable and can’t be tampered with or poisoned.
Government Regulation and Rising Costs of Data Breaches Will Pressure Companies to Prioritize Data Privacy
The Challenge:
With data breaches continually rising, data privacy is as significant a concern as ever. Standards around the globe, such as the UK’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), also pressure the U.S. government to keep up. At the same time, the cybersecurity industry demands regulation to help companies protect their customers and their brands.
Many non-technology industries need to be faster to update their legacy infrastructure, but struggle due to cost constraints and limited resources. With the continued movement toward digitalization and the use of vast cloud data storage, this situation cannot continue. Businesses simply can’t afford the high cost of a breach. This scenario is especially true in healthcare, which remains a primary target of cyberattacks.
Many organizations have relied on cyber insurance for protection in the event of a breach, but the sheer volume of breaches triggers insurance providers to terminate coverage when negligence is deemed a factor. Company executives and Boards of Directors are now being held personally liable when customer data falls into the wrong hands, tainting their reputations and subjecting them to punitive action.
DataKrypto Prediction:
Companies will increasingly address data privacy strategically and operationally, investing in new infrastructure and technology to develop stringent data protection to avoid the costly consequences of cybersecurity attacks. Innovative privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) like secure multi-party computing (SMPC), trusted execution environments (TEEs), confidential computing, and fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) will address new attack surfaces created by such investments.
Data Breaches Will Lessen as Developers Build “Secure by Design” Applications
The Challenge:
Today’s relentless onslaught of data breaches costs companies millions yearly and erodes trust in their brands. Traditional encryption methods leave data exposed and unencrypted during operations and data transitions, exposing companies to costly leaks. Sophisticated attackers exploit these vulnerabilities, leaving organizations scrambling for solutions that enable end-to-end data protection.
For several years, Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) was touted by cryptography experts as an ideal solution to close the gaps created by traditional encryption. New FHE innovations are now overcoming the technology’s complexities and performance issues, making it a viable way for development teams to build applications with inherent data protection mechanisms suitable for real-time business use cases.
DataKrypto Prediction:
New FHE innovations that make real-world deployment practical, affordable, and manageable will help companies across industries maintain continuous data protection and minimize the impact of many prominent attacks:
- Data Breaches: Continuous encryption during data processing minimizes the risk of exposing sensitive information if systems are compromised.
- Insider Threats: End-to-end data encryption limits the exposure of sensitive data to insiders with malicious intent.
- Cloud Security Risks: Continuously secure data processing enables outsourcing to cloud providers without exposing data.
- Third-Party Access Risks: Computations on encrypted data enable sharing of sensitive information with third parties without risk of exposure.
- Data Exfiltration: If attackers successfully breach systems, the data remains encrypted and unreadable.
Quantum Computing Will Drive “Quantum-Safe” Cybersecurity Solutions
The Challenge:
As quantum computing advances, organizations are increasingly concerned about its impact on cybersecurity. While experts estimate the post-quantum computing (PQC) era is still five to 15 years away, hackers are harvesting data now, anticipating future decryption capabilities. Advanced encryption algorithms like Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) are being adopted to overcome these gaps and ensure protection today and in the future.
DataKrypto Prediction:
In response to the quantum computing threat and the need for end-to-end data protection, two trends will emerge:
- Organizations will prioritize implementing advanced quantum-resistant cryptographic techniques, such as FHE based on symmetric encryption.
- Cybersecurity vendors will advance algorithms to create quantum attack-proof systems.
As we step into 2025, the cybersecurity landscape is at a pivotal juncture. Organizations that embrace advancements like FHE innovations, strategic privacy-enhancing technologies, and quantum-proof systems will safeguard their data and gain a competitive edge. 2025 will identify the trailblazers who turn challenges into opportunities, setting a new standard for resilience and trust in an increasingly digital world.