Good Cybersecurity Practice in 2025

Effective cybersecurity in 2025 relies on a multi-layered approach that integrates people, processes, and technology to create a robust defence against digital attacks. Key practices include:

• Cybersecurity Awareness Training: Employees are often the weakest link, so robust data security policies combined with security awareness training are crucial. This helps users understand how actions like oversharing on social media or ignoring operating system updates can increase risk, and teaches them to recognise and avoid phishing and malware attacks.
• Data Security Tools: Implementing tools like data loss prevention (DLP) can detect and block attempted data theft. Security controls such as encryption can render stolen data useless, enhancing protection.
• Identity and Access Management (IAM): This involves controlling how users access digital resources and what they can do with them. Practices such as multifactor authentication (MFA) require multiple credentials for login, making it harder for threat actors to breach accounts. A zero trust security architecture is a critical way to enforce strict access controls, removing implicit trust and replacing it with adaptive, explicit trust based on continuous verification.
• Attack Surface Management (ASM): Continuous discovery, analysis, remediation, and monitoring of an organisation’s cybersecurity vulnerabilities and potential attack vectors, approached from a hacker's perspective.
• Threat Detection and Response: Utilising analytics- and AI-driven technologies, such as Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR), and Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR), helps identify and respond to attacks in progress. These are typically part of a formal incident response plan.
• Disaster Recovery: Maintaining business continuity and remediating threats after a cyberattack is vital. The ability to fail over to a remote backup can help businesses resume operations following a ransomware attack, sometimes without paying a ransom.
• Regular Software and Operating System Updates: Crucial for patching vulnerabilities and enhancing security against potential threats.
• Strong and Unique Passwords: While not sufficient on their own, they remain an important component of security.
• Critical Infrastructure Security: Protecting the computer systems, applications, networks, data, and digital assets that society depends on for national security, economic health, and public safety is paramount.
• Network and Endpoint Security: Focuses on preventing unauthorised access to computer networks and systems and protecting endpoint devices (desktops, laptops, mobile devices, servers) against cyberattacks. Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) solutions manage all endpoints from a single console.
• Application Security (AppSec): Identifying and repairing vulnerabilities in application software to prevent unauthorised access, modification, or misuse, often integrated into modern development processes like DevOps and DevSecOps.

Organisations should benchmark their security capabilities across people, process, and technology to identify gaps and prioritise investments. The NIST cybersecurity framework is a respected model that can guide organisations in identifying attacks, protecting systems, detecting and responding to threats, and recovering from successful incidents.

Threats Over the Coming 5 Years

The cybersecurity landscape is constantly evolving, with threats growing in sophistication and frequency. Key trends and threats anticipated or already observed leading into and beyond 2025 include:

• AI-Powered Attacks: Cybercriminals are increasingly leveraging artificial intelligence (AI), including generative AI, to create malicious code, phishing scam content, and fake emails/applications rapidly. Threat actors might use prompt injection or data poisoning to manipulate AI tools into leaking sensitive information or spreading misinformation.
• Expanding Attack Surface from Emerging Technologies:Cloud Computing and Multicloud Environments: While offering efficiency, they increase network management complexity, leading to risks like cloud misconfigurations, improperly secured APIs, cloud sprawl, fragmented security capabilities, and heightened human error.
• Distributed Work: Remote and hybrid work, along with bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies, mean more connections, devices, applications, and data to protect, offering more opportunities for exploitation.
• Internet of Things (IoT): Many connected IoT devices are unsecured or improperly secured by default, making them easy targets for hijacking by bad actors.
• Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS): The convergence of operational technology (OT) with information technology (IT) creates unique and growing vulnerabilities, particularly in critical infrastructure.
• Sophisticated Cybercrime and Nation-State Actors: Threat actors, including nation-states, are demonstrating never-before-seen levels of coordination, automation, and prowess, elevating risk from data breaches to widespread disruption. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, for example, has highlighted the threat of destructive malware attacks and potential fatal outages to critical infrastructure globally.
• Persistent Ransomware and Malware: Although ransomware attacks saw a decline in 2023, they remain a significant threat, evolving to target more sectors. Malware (malicious software) is involved in almost every modern cyberattack. Attackers are also increasingly combining DDoS attacks with ransomware threats.
• Phishing and Credential Theft: Phishing remains the most common type of cyberattack, using fraudulent messages to steal sensitive data or funds. Hackers employ various techniques to steal credentials and take over accounts, with identity-based attacks making up 30% of total intrusions.
• Supply Chain Attacks: Vulnerabilities in partners, vendors, or third-party assets can create attack vectors into enterprise systems.
• Cybersecurity Skills Gap: The global attack surface is expanding faster than the cybersecurity workforce, with a projected gap of 85 million workers by 2030. This shortage leads to higher data breach costs for organisations.
• Cybersecurity Debt: New digital initiatives, especially in the public cloud, are often deployed before security issues are fully addressed, leading to increased vulnerabilities.

The cost of cyberattacks is also growing significantly, with the average cost of a data breach reaching USD 4.88 million in 2025, a 10% increase from 2023.

InfoSecurity People and the Importance of Cyber Essentials for Aerospace Manufacturers

InfoSecurity People offers services to help organisations achieve Cyber Essentials accreditation. This certification, described as a government-backed, industry-supported scheme, proves that an organisation actively safeguards sensitive data and protects against common online threats.

For aerospace manufacturers, achieving Cyber Essentials (and potentially Cyber Essentials Plus, as assisted for Farnborough Aerospace Consortium) is of paramount importance, especially if they wish to be involved as supply chain partners:

• Government Contracts: Holding an up-to-date Cyber Essentials certificate enables businesses to bid for government contracts where the handling of financial or personal data is involved. Given the significant role of government in aerospace and defence, this is a critical requirement.
• Supply Chain Security: The scheme is increasingly being used by businesses, including leading UK banks, to ensure good cyber security in their supply chains. In the highly interconnected aerospace supply chain, where sensitive designs, operational data, and intellectual property are shared, this ensures a baseline level of protection across all partners, mitigating cascading risks.
• Building Trust: Obtaining Cyber Essentials certification demonstrates a commitment to cyber security to customers and suppliers. In an industry where trust and reliability are paramount, this external validation reassures partners that an aerospace manufacturer takes data protection seriously and has robust measures in place.
• Protection Against Common Threats: Aerospace manufacturers, regardless of size, are not immune to common online threats like malware, ransomware, and phishing. Cyber Essentials provides a set of standard technical controls to defend against these prevalent attacks.
• Critical Infrastructure: The aerospace sector is part of the nation's critical infrastructure. Ensuring its cybersecurity resilience at every level of the supply chain contributes to national security and economic stability.

Therefore, Cyber Essentials is not merely a badge but a foundational requirement that underpins security, trust, and eligibility for critical partnerships within the aerospace industry.