Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2025 (World Economic Forum Financial Services)

Summary

• Some 35% of small organizations believe their cyber resilience is inadequate.p.4
• 71% of cyber leaders at the Annual Meeting on Cybersecurity 2024 believe small organizations have reached a critical tipping point where they can no longer adequately secure themselves.p.5
• 54% of large organizations identified supply chain challenges as the biggest barrier to achieving cyber resilience, and nearly 60% say geopolitical tensions have affected their cybersecurity strategy.p.6
• While 66% of organizations expect AI to have the most significant impact on cybersecurity in the year ahead, only 37% report having processes in place to assess the security of AI tools before deployment.p.7
• 72% of respondents report an increase in organizational cyber risks, and 42% of organizations reported phishing and social engineering incidents.p.7
• In 2024 the largest IT outage in history caused an estimated $5 billion in losses.p.9
• Ransomware remains the top organizational cyber risk, ranked as a top concern by 45% of respondents.p.12

Key insights

1. Cyber-enabled fraud is the second-highest organizational cyber risk at 20%, followed by supply chain disruption at 17%.p.12
2. 47% of organizations cite adversarial advances powered by generative AI as their primary GenAI concern.p.15
3. 55% of CISOs stated that deepfakes pose a moderate-to-significant cyberthreat to their organization.p.16
4. There were 124 further recorded cyber operations against the space sector in the context of the conflict in Ukraine.p.18
5. 69% of smaller organizations lack adequate safeguards for the secure deployment of AI technologies.p.20
6. 48% of participating CISOs indicated that ensuring third-party compliance with their security requirements is the main challenge to implementing cyber regulations.p.25
7. In 62% of high-resilience organizations board members received regular cyber updates, versus only 29% in low-resilience organizations.p.29