Dire Predictions for 2025 Include 'Largest Cyberattack in History'

Politico asked an "array of thinkers — futurists, scientists, foreign policy analysts and others — to lay out some of the possible 'Black Swan' events that could await us in the new year: What are the unpredictable, unlikely episodes that aren't yet on the radar but would completely upend American life as we know it?"

Here's one from Gary Marcus, a cognitive scientist and author of the book Taming Silicon Valley: How We Can Ensure That AI Works For Us:

2025 could easily see the largest cyberattack in history, taking down, at least for a little while, some sizeable piece of the world's infrastructure, whether for deliberate ransom or to manipulate people to make money off a short on global markets. Cybercrime is already a huge, multi-trillion dollar problem, and one that most victims don't like to talk about. It is said to be bigger than the entire global drug trade. Four things could make it much worse in 2025.


First, generative AI, rising in popularity and declining in price, is a perfect tool for cyberattackers. Although it is unreliable and prone to hallucinations, it is terrific at making plausible sounding text (e.g., phishing attacks to trick people into revealing credentials) and deepfaked videos at virtually zero cost, allowing attackers to broaden their attacks. Already, a cybercrew bilked a Hong Kong bank out of $25 million. Second, large language models are notoriously susceptible to jailbreaking and things like "prompt-injection attacks," for which no known solution exists. Third, generative AI tools are increasingly being used to create code; in some cases those coders don't fully understand the code written, and the autogenerated code has already been shown in some cases to introduce new security holes.

And finally 2025 may see a U.S. government "determined to deregulate as much as possible, slashing costs," Marus speculates, a scenario where "enforcement and investigations will almost certainly decline in both quality and quantity, leaving the world quite vulnerable to ever more audacious attacks."


Elsewhere in Politico's article there's other even less-cheery predictions for 2025. The executive director of an advocacy group for public health professionals describes the possibility of an epidemic "that we had the tools to control" which "winds up killing thousands" (while also "sending the economy back into a Covid-like downward spiral.")

And a law professor predicts 2025 will see a decisive breakthrough in quantum computing. "Those little padlocks you see beside URLs? They would, overnight, become a fiction."

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