The digital battlefield: What's keeping security leaders awake in 2025

AI tops the list of cybersecurity fears in 2025, but outdated tools and missing basics still keep leaders up at night.

- Jagrati Rakheja

IT'S 3 AM, and somewhere around the world, a cybersecurity professional gets an alert. Another potential breach. Another sleepless night. This scenario plays out thousands of times daily, as revealed in Arctic Wolf's comprehensive 2025 Trends Report, which surveyed 1,200 IT and security decision-makers across multiple countries.

AI Takes the Crown as Top Security Concern

For the first time in four years, artificial intelligence has overtaken ransomware as the #1 cybersecurity worry. Nearly 29% of security leaders now rank AI-related threats as their primary concern, pushing ransomware down to second place at 21%. This shift reflects growing worries about AI-powered attacks that can craft more convincing phishing emails and identify system vulnerabilities more quickly than ever before.

However, experts warn against getting too distracted by AI hype. Traditional threats, such as malware, business email compromise, and ransomware, remain everyday realities that cause significant damage to organizations.

The Sobering Reality of Cyber Attacks