Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2025

The Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2025 highlights a widening 'cyber inequity' gap where small organizations and emerging economies struggle with resilience while larger entities progress. The report identifies generative AI as a dual-edged sword, augmenting both cybercriminal capabilities—particularly in social engineering and deepfakes—and defensive tools. It emphasizes that supply chain interdependencies and geopolitical instability have created systemic points of failure, while a growing global skills gap and fragmented regulatory environments further complicate the ability of organizations to maintain security.

• Cyber inequity is widening, with 35% of small organizations reporting insufficient cyber resilience, a sevenfold increase since 2022, while the share of large organizations reporting the same has nearly halved.
• Generative AI (GenAI) is significantly enhancing cybercriminal capabilities, with 47% of organizations citing the advance of adversarial capabilities as their primary concern. This has contributed to 42% of organizations experiencing successful social engineering attacks in the past year.
• There is a significant gap in AI security preparedness: while 66% of organizations expect AI to have the most significant impact on cybersecurity in the coming year, only 37% have processes to assess the security of AI tools before deployment.
• Supply chain vulnerabilities are a primary ecosystem risk, with 54% of large organizations identifying supply chain challenges as the biggest barrier to achieving cyber resilience.
• Geopolitical tensions are heavily influencing cybersecurity strategies, with nearly 60% of organizations reporting this impact. One in three CEOs identifies cyber espionage and intellectual property theft as their top concern in this context.
• The cyber skills gap has increased by 8% since 2024, with only 14% of organizations confident they possess the necessary talent. The public sector is particularly affected, with 49% of organizations lacking the talent to meet security goals.
• While regulations are seen as beneficial for improving security posture, their fragmentation is a major hurdle; over 76% of CISOs report that regulatory fragmentation across jurisdictions hinders compliance.
• Ransomware remains the top organizational cyber risk for 2025, cited by 45% of respondents.
• Regional disparities in critical infrastructure preparedness are stark, with 42% of respondents in Latin America and 36% in Africa lacking confidence in their country's ability to respond to major cyber incidents, compared to 15% in Europe and North America.

APA

World Economic Forum (2025). Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2025. https://reports.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Global_Cybersecurity_Outlook_2025.pdf

Chicago

World Economic Forum. Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2025. 2025. https://reports.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Global_Cybersecurity_Outlook_2025.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |author=World Economic Forum |title=Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2025 |date=January 2025 |url=https://reports.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Global_Cybersecurity_Outlook_2025.pdf |access-date=23 October 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{worldeconomicforum2025global, author = {{World Economic Forum}}, title = {{Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2025}}, institution = {World Economic Forum}, year = {2025}, month = jan, url = {https://reports.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Global_Cybersecurity_Outlook_2025.pdf}, urldate = {2026-10-23}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }