Warnings from security experts increase after reports of a 26 percent rise in cyberattacks in quarter three of 2024, highlighting a rising cybersecurity crisis, as businesses brace for even more of these threats in 2025.
In the lead up to winter, power and energy companies also faced up to four-times higher number of attacks than the industry average.
The application security SaaS company, Indusface, has identified three key cyber threats to look out for in 2025: DDoS attacks, malware, and software vulnerability exploits.
Software Vulnerability Exploitation
Software Vulnerability Exploitation is on the rise, and is also named in the top types of cyber attacks against applications in 2024. The Indusface State of Application Security report found that attacks on vulnerabilities grew by 124 percent in the last three months, compared to Q3 of 2023.
Because of the widespread use of tools such as ChatGPT enabling novice hackers to easily find and deploy scripts that could exploit open vulnerabilities, the accessibility has lowered the barrier to entry for cybercriminals, resulting in an unprecedented rise in vulnerability exploitation.
This also comes with the growing prevalence of zero-day attacks targeting unpatched software, which is a tactic heavily employed by ransomware actors and predicted to be on the increase in 2025.
Malware
Malware has cemented itself as the main type of cyberattack experienced by organisations worldwide in 2024, with 75 percent of organisations reporting being affected by ransomware more than once in the past 12 months – a jump from 61 percent last year. But how can businesses protect themselves? Investing in endpoint security solutions like Antivirus and training employees on phishing can prevent malware from devices can help, according to Indusface.
DDoS Attacks
Indusface revealed that In Q3 2024, 6 out of 10 sites witnessed a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. DDoS is also the #1 attack vector for SMBs, where each website/app sees 175 percent higher number of DDoS attacks compared to the enterprise apps.
A DDoS attack involves multiple compromised systems working together to overwhelm a target with excessive traffic, resulting in service disruptions or shutdowns. As a result, Indusface recommends, the business’ website would be unavailable or slow to access. Depending on the severity of the attack, the website could be down for a number of hours or days at a time.
If an eCommerce business experiences one of these attacks, they may face large scale revenue losses, posing significant risk to SMEs. In severe cases, these revenue losses can lead to a company shutdown. To defend against these attacks, the Indusface report recommends that businesses start with a robust network infrastructure capable of handling heavy traffic.
