All AI-driven social engineering is essentially about exploiting human relationships. Scammers impersonate a CEO, a friend, or anyone who appears trustworthy to prey on people’s weaknesses. And with AI, these techniques will become extremely powerful, as today’s artificial intelligence enables truly dangerous actions.
Another topic expected to surge in 2025 is dark strategy, or disinformation as a service. Essentially, it’s the spread of disinformation through specialized services. Now, you can simply go to the dark web and pay someone to create thousands of accounts that target an individual, making it extremely difficult to debunk everything.
Another avenue is identity theft. We often think the data we share is minimal and insignificant, but attackers can cross-reference the vast amount of information we scatter online until they know everything about us—and then act like us.
The final aspect is smart security: the devices in our homes, which are becoming increasingly vulnerable, can be used to invade our private lives, spy on us, or even cause harm. Today, we have vacuum cleaners that might trip us up, but tomorrow we could have more advanced robots that, if they malfunction (or are tampered with), could inflict serious damage. In short, it’s another major threat.
These are the fundamental trends and the direction we’re headed. That’s why digital literacy is so crucial—I’m trying to spread it, and I ask you to help share it, because awareness is our true line of defense. On its own, technology cannot protect us from all of this.
