Global cyber spend to rise 15% in 2025, pushed along by AI

Worldwide end-user cyber security spending is predicted to grow by just over 15% year-on-year over the course of 2025, hitting a new high of $212bn (£160.5bn), according to the latest predictions from analysts at Gartner.

A great deal of this increase comes as adoption of artificial intelligence (AI), and generative AI (GenAI) in particular, hits the mainstream, forcing investment in application security, data security, privacy measures and network infrastructure protection, said Gartner.

Since GenAI made its dramatic debut in 2021 and 2022, with the launch of tools such as DALL-E and ChatGPT, threat actors have increasingly employed tools using large language models (LLMs) to enhance their social engineering attacks.

Gartner now predicts that by 2027, a couple of years hence, 17% of cyber attacks or data breaches will involve some element of GenAI. However, said senior research principal Shailendra Upadhyay, such novel technologies will not necessarily be the only factors in play.  

“The continued heightened threat environment, cloud movement and talent crunch are pushing security to the top of the priorities list and pressing chief information security officers to increase their organisation’s security spend,” said Upadhyay.

“Furthermore, organisations are currently assessing their endpoint protection platform and endpoint detection and response needs and making adjustments to boost their operational resilience and incident response following the CrowdStrike outage,” he said.