Season 7, Post 8: Cyber on my mind
It’s hard to escape from AI. The topic remains on the lips of every industry executive. Column inches abound about its potential. Fundamentally, AI is (and always has been) about the intelligent manipulation of data. However, data have no value unless secured, stored and analysed, a view we first enunciated over a decade ago. It was therefore with interest that your author received three novel reports on the state of the cyber industry (a topic we last wrote on in September 2024) in his inbox recently. A brief summary of each follows:
Security software vendor, Darktrace’s annual State of AI Cybersecurity Report is a must-read for anyone interested in cyber. Its insights are the results of surveying 1,500 security leaders. 78% of CISOs (Chief Information Security Officers) are of the view that AI-powered cyber threats are having a significant impact on their organisation. Even if AI solutions to this challenge may be the future – a view endorsed by 95% of CISOs polled – almost 50% of those polled said that they were not prepared for the reality of AI threats. It sounds to us as if businesses need to get spending on cyber, although the report says that only 11% of participants are planning to increase cyber staff in 2025.
Similarly cheery reading is available in the form of the Global Threat Report issued annually by CrowdStrike, another cyber vendor. It begins by reminding readers that similar to in the jungle or the desert, it does not pay to underestimate your adversary. Needless to say, CrowdStrike has a vested interest in making such an observation, but the numbers back its claim up. The report notes how the amount of time it takes for an adversary to start moving laterally across a network it has compromised has fallen in the past year from 48 minutes to just 51 seconds. At the same time, new threats are emerging. Watch particularly for ‘vishing’, or voice-phishing attacks, which have risen more than 400% (albeit from a low base) in the last 12 months.
If vishing were not worrying enough, then what about the risk of remote identity incidents, camera attacks and face swaps? These emerging threats are addressed in detail in iProov’s latest Threat Intelligence Report. With at least a 300% increase in these novel formats of attack over 2024 (again from a low starting point), the report demonstrates just how quickly the cyber landscape continues to evolve. Deepfakes are becoming increasingly commercialised and commoditised. iProov (whose Chief Scientific Officer we interviewed in a prior Blog post) says that at least 115,000 different known attack combinations in this format currently exist. The scale and the vectors through which cybercriminals are seeking to penetrate organisations continues only to grow.
6 March 2025
The above does not constitute investment advice and is the sole opinion of the author at the time of publication. Past performance is no guide to future performance and the value of investments and income from them can fall as well as rise.
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Alex Gunz, Fund Manager
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