Trend Micro predicts rise of deepfake-powered malicious digital twins
The report highlights a surge in AI-powered attacks and the emergence of hyper-personalised, deepfake-driven threats.
As cybercrime is projected to cost over $10 trillion in 2025, consumer data is expected to be a prime target, fuelling the underground economy. Criminals are anticipated to continue evolving their tactics to exploit vulnerabilities, with AI accelerating these efforts to enhance, speed up, and improve malicious operations, particularly through social engineering schemes that prey on user vulnerabilities.
Trend Micro predicts the emergence of malicious 'digital twins,' leveraging leaked personal information to create AI models mimicking individuals' behaviours. When paired with deepfake video/audio and compromised biometric data, these twins could drive advanced social engineering scams, such as business email compromise (BEC), fake employee schemes, and large-scale misinformation campaigns.
The 2025 Trend Micro Security Predictions report underscores Trend Micro's strong commitment to cybersecurity. This dedication is further evidenced in the Trend Micro Mid-Year Cybersecurity Report for H1 2024, which details how the company's sophisticated solutions successfully detected and blocked over 188 million threats in the MENA region.
'Cybersecurity in an AI-driven world demands foresight and expertise', said Tarek Jammoul, North Gulf & Levant Country Director, Trend Micro. 'Our deep understanding of emerging threats enabled us to craft the 2024 Security Predictions Report, equipping businesses with the insights needed to face the future with confidence. This same expertise powers our cutting-edge solutions, which detected and blocked over 4.9 million threats in Kuwait alone during H1 2024, reaffirming our commitment to securing the region's digital future'.
The 2025 Security Predictions Report also highlights critical areas of concern, including vulnerabilities like memory corruption bugs, API exploits, and legacy issues such as cross-site scripting and SQL injections, as well as the cascading risks from vulnerabilities in widely adopted systems like connected vehicle ECUs. In ransomware, threat actors are expected to outpace endpoint detection and response (EDR) advancements by exploiting under-protected environments such as cloud systems, IoT, and edge devices, while using techniques like disabling security tools, and disguising harmful codes. These developments signal the rise of faster, stealthier, and more sophisticated attack chains, underscoring the need for robust, proactive security strategies.
Image Credit: Trend Micro
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