2025 Cybersecurity in Review: Key Takeaways From Industry Reviews

As 2025 reviews show attackers repeatedly exploiting exposed systems and trusted access paths at scale, zero trust access and micro-segmentation offer a way to reduce exposure and limit impact when breaches occur.

This week’s newsletter brings together and highlights recent year-end reviews from Infosecurity Magazine, Forbes, and the World Economic Forum. Together, they highlight patterns that defined the cybersecurity landscape in 2025. Across these year-end reviews, large enterprises, critical infrastructure owners and operators, and consumer facing platforms were repeatedly impacted by ransomware, supply chain compromises, credential abuse, targeted phishing attacks, and exploitation of widely deployed technologies. The various articles describe how both sophisticated and relatively unsophisticated threat actors were able to achieve significant impact. Collectively, these reviews emphasize that many of the most damaging incidents of 2025 were driven less by novel techniques and more by scale, access, and systemic exposure.

Infosecurity Magazine Reviews the Top Cyber Attacks of 2025

Infosecurity Magazine has published a review of the top ten cyber attacks reported in 2025, choosing these incidents based on categories such as data loss, recovery costs, operational disruption, and broader geopolitical impact. The article highlights ransomware campaigns, software supply chain exploitation, and attacks against widely deployed enterprise platforms. These include the Clop group’s exploitation of a zero-day vulnerability in Oracle E-Business Suite, ransomware disruptions at Asahi that exposed data on nearly two million individuals, and a series of third-party integration based breaches affecting Salesforce customers. Infosecurity Magazine’s report includes attackers ranging from organized ransomware groups to loosely coordinated collectives, often relying on exposed systems, unpatched software, and trusted integrations rather than novel techniques. Taken together, these conditions allowed threat actors to achieve outsized impact across multiple industries.

Access the full article here.

Forbes Explores the Cyber Incidents and Trends That Marked 2025

An analysis published by Forbes provides a recap of cybersecurity events in 2025, highlighting a year when digital systems repeatedly broke and failed at scale, and how the next year is likely to be a continuation of this trend. The article talks about the fragility of critical infrastructure, cloud dependencies, and enterprise environments. It points to high impact incidents and systemic stressors, such as the major cloud outages and airline disruptions. It also highlights escalating nation-state activity, and the financial fallout from breaches at large organizations. Forbes notes in the article that government oversight and enforcement increased during the year, with cyber incidents increasingly carrying more regulatory, operational, and economic consequences. Rather than attributing impact only to highly sophisticated attacks, the review emphasizes how attackers capitalized on operational complexity, delayed response, and gaps in preparedness as systems and oversight struggled to keep pace.

Access the full article here.

World Economic Forum Reviews Cybersecurity Trends That Defined 2025

The World Economic Forum published a year-end review examining the cybersecurity themes that shaped 2025, combining headline cyber incidents with structural challenges affecting organizations globally. The review highlights the growing impact of AI enabled threats, persistent workforce shortages, and increased dependence on complex digital supply chains. The article notes a significant rise in phishing activity linked to generative AI, alongside heightened concern over cyber resilience as organizations confront geopolitical tension, cloud concentration risk, and uneven security maturity. The World Economic Forum’s analysis reflects a broader shift in 2025 away from purely preventative security models toward resilience focused approaches, as many organizations struggled to manage cyber risk at scale across interconnected environments.

Access the full article here.

Yisda Takeaways

Together, these industry reviews suggest that many of 2025’s most damaging cyber incidents were driven by exposed systems, inherited trust relationships, and uneven security baselines rather than novel or sophisticated attack techniques. The scale of impact described across ransomware campaigns, supply chain compromises, and platform breaches highlights how broadly attackers were able to move once initial access was obtained. While the articles emphasize resilience, enforcement, and preparedness, they also point to the practical value of reducing unnecessary access paths and limiting how far an intruder can move inside an environment. Approaches such as zero trust access and microsegmentation align with these lessons by narrowing entry points and containing blast radius, helping organizations reduce operational and financial fallout when preventive controls fail. Reviewing multiple independent analyses alongside incident reporting provides a clearer picture of where organizations consistently struggle and where focused defensive measures can deliver the most leverage.