Some of the predictions forecast to shape 2025 include the hard-hitting topics and technologies, like AI, the Edge, and 5G, as well as predictions in more specific industry spaces, such as healthcare which foresees coexistence testing, medical device batteries and the reconsideration of wireless protocols, to name a few.
Predictions in healthcare
Brad Jolly, Senior Applications Engineer at Keysight Technologies said he saw, among other trending topics, a collaboration between hospitals and medical device manufacturers in an effort to target cybersecurity risks associated with legacy medical devices, as well as an implementation of tools to address ransomware attacks which hospitals in 2024 were significantly affected by.
“Millions of connected medical devices are already being utilised and few are designed to address today’s cybersecurity risks,” explained Jolly. “Many of these legacy devices can’t be updated and therefore pose a significant cybersecurity risk that cannot be solved via firmware or software patches.”
In 2024, a notable ransomware attack on London hospitals resulted in major disruption on both planned operations and outpatient appointments, serving as a reminder that hospitals run the risk of being targeted for their sensitive data and severely disrupted as a result.
“The alarming increase in ransomware attacks against hospitals, insurers, testing laboratories and other healthcare entities shows no signs of slowing,” Jolly noted. “As a result, the healthcare industry is stepping up its efforts to prevent future attacks by limiting exposure and building resistance and resilience into systems.”
Other topics mentioned by Jolly were the implementation of rules to improve the safety of medical device batteries, smaller microwave sensors facilitating new detection and diagnostic applications, cybersecurity concerns triggering device manufacturers to reconsider multiple wireless technologies, weighing up the risks and rewards of Wi-Fi 7 on medical devices, and coexistence testing becoming more important.
“Cybersecurity concerns cause manufacturers to reconsider multiple wireless technologies on medical devices,” continued Jolly. “The new FDA regulations for medical devices require ongoing testing of every communications interface … Medical device manufacturers may want to limit their testing obligations by reducing the number of interfaces.”
On the point about coexistence testing, Jolly said: “Coexistence testing is essential in healthcare settings to ensure devices maintain their functional wireless performance despite numerous interfering signals. Failure to do so can impact patient care and result in harmful outcomes.”
Predictions in OT security
The team at Zscaler released their top 10 predictions for 2025 – among them, they anticipate OT security becoming a greater priority and Zero Trust micro-segmentation becoming standard practice among industries.
“Operational technology (OT) security has become a growing concern as a result of the integration of IT and OT infrastructures,” said Tony Fergusson, CISO in Residence and Sebastian Kemi, CISO in Residence EMEA. “Driven by the urge to limit the external attack vectors, organisations will increasingly seek efficient methods to overcome the challenges of converging IT and OT networks.
“2025 will be the year of security segmentation and ultimately, micro-segmentation will become standard practice across industries,” added Yaroslav Rosomakho, Field CTO. “Segmentation helps to contain breaches, preventing them from spreading like wildfire, enhancing overall resilience.”
Other predictions they noted were data centres fighting back against an increase in nation-state and ransomware attacks; AI-powered attacks driving research and development into AI security solutions; and ubiquitous security services becoming the norm.
“Enterprises want to know that they are protected wherever they operate, but crucially they don’t want to be tasked with having to operate the solutions that deliver this,” Nathan Howe, Group President of Innovation, stressed.
On the subject of AI-powered attacks, Ev Kontsevoy, CEO of Teleport said: “I think 2025 is going to be the year of ‘The Great AI Awakening’ among cybersecurity professionals. They’re going to find out just how easily AI agents can be manipulated to act in unintended ways to carry out harm, including data leaks.
“When they do, the pace of AI deployment will slow to a crawl because of the amount of work security teams will have to do to retrofit current-day security models to address AI agents’ vulnerabilities.”
Kontesvoy continued by warning people of existing computing infrastructure, which has “always operated on the assumption that the user is a human or machine. But that distinction will stop making sense in 2025 because these tools were never built for AI agents.”
Kontsevoy concluded by recommending a shift in viewpoint, to treating all software and hardware the same as humans are treated as a security risk. “This will require consolidating the identity of AI agents with all other identities … into one unified inventory that provides a single source of truth for identity, policy, access relationships and real-time visibility of what is going on.”
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