At HUMAN, we believe that the future of digital commerce depends on trust. As we look ahead to 2025, this foundation of trust will face increasingly significant challenges. The Human Defense Platform provides deep insights into the interconnected nature of modern threats, allowing us to ensure that every interaction is genuine, every transaction secure, and every digital journey is safe from start to finish.
This mission has never been more critical. As we move into the new year, one certainty has emerged with stark clarity: cybercrime shows no signs of slowing. The convergence of AI-powered capabilities and traditional cyber threats is transforming automated attacks into prodigious digital fraud engines, with global losses from cybercrime projected by Forrester to reach a staggering $12 trillion in 2025.
The expanding digital battlefield
Organizations' aggressive pursuit of digital transformation is creating a perfect storm. As businesses rapidly automate and expand their digital footprints, they’ve inadvertently created new attack surfaces with new vulnerabilities across customer digital journeys. Simultaneously, decreased operating costs and greater access to attack tools are dramatically improving ROI for cybercrime operations, making the business of automated attacks more attractive than ever.
Entering the era of hyperscale bot attacks
One crucial component of the AI attack revolution is the speed of adaptation. What might have taken humans days or weeks to retool, AI-aided attacks can accomplish in minutes. And what’s more, they’re reaching a stage at which they will be able to mutate and adapt to evade detection in real-time. As artificial intelligence democratizes attack development, speed, and complexity, HUMAN is observing the rise of botnets capable of launching coordinated attacks at a massive and dynamic scale, setting the stage for a surge in both the volume and sophistication of automated attacks throughout 2025 and beyond.
Digital advertising: The AI challenge ahead
For digital advertising, 2025 will mark a pivotal year. As the ecosystem continues to recover from the pandemic, we expect parallel growth in the impacts of AI’s power to scale existing threats.
The quantity and sophistication of made-for-advertising (MFA) sites will continue to rise, as these sites can be created rapidly with AI’s help, with new fraudulent sites being created faster than they can be identified and incorporated into block lists. This flood of artificial ad inventory will dilute market quality and create new opportunities for fraud.
Similarly, the use of malicious landing pages will gain greater momentum. With fraudsters able to mass-produce scam pages and innocent-looking “shield” pages that hide malicious content from detection systems. AI-aided tools can quickly produce and test multiple versions of scam-and-shield pages, optimizing for conversions while evading detection.
Sophisticated bots will be used to capitalize on this environment, with bad actors launching complex fraud campaigns generating impressions, clicks, and conversions that simulate human behavior to manipulate engagement metrics and drain advertising budgets, impacting all players in the advertising ecosystem. At HUMAN, we're strengthening our detection and product capabilities to protect platforms, publishers, and brands throughout the ecosystem, which you will hear more about in the coming months.
The duality of web scraping
In 2025, content publishers will encounter increasingly sophisticated web scraping attacks as large language models (LLMs) and AI systems evolve their crawling methods. HUMAN observed an increase in web scraping attacks from 30% of traffic arriving on-site to 36% over the past year, and we expect this trend to accelerate as tools emerge that make web scraping attacks more effective. HUMAN is pioneering solutions that help organizations differentiate between legitimate scraping (like search crawlers) and malicious scraping, and to respond to each type appropriately. For 2025, we're introducing new capabilities enabling publishers to monetize content access by automated bots.
Account protection in the AI era
Customer accounts continue to face dual threats as we move into 2025. On the account takeover (ATO) front, our data shows that one in five visits to login pages was an attempt to break into a user’s account. As AI enhances the sophistication of credential stuffing and cracking tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) and traditional CAPTCHA challenges prove increasingly ineffective, we expect this rate to rise in 2025 and beyond.
These ATO attacks will primarily target accounts with the following:
- High-value financial transactions
- Stored payment methods
- Loyalty points, bonuses, and rewards
- Premium service access
- Personal and privileged data
Simultaneously, we predict a surge in sophisticated fake account creation attacks. Powered by AI, these synthetic identities will become increasingly difficult to distinguish from legitimate users. Bad actors will deploy these fake accounts at scale to exploit:
- Account opening incentives and promotions
- Content manipulation opportunities
- Review and rating systems
- Inventory scalping and hoarding schemes
The evolution of AI chat platforms
The AI chatbot landscape is poised for significant transformation in 2025. As these platforms mature, we anticipate a shift toward hybrid revenue models incorporating paid search and advertising into chat results alongside the existing subscription model. This evolution will inevitably attract sophisticated fraudsters seeking to exploit these new monetization channels.
Looking ahead: Our strategic position
As threat actors continue to innovate, organizations need a force multiplier that delivers comprehensive protection across their entire customer digital journey. HUMAN has pioneered this approach across advertising, application and account surfaces with unrivaled protection at every step of the customer journey, combining deep detection capabilities, advanced decision-making using adaptive machine learning, and actionable threat intelligence into one powerful platform. Our solutions deliver high-fidelity decisions at light speed, ensuring organizations can trust every digital interaction.
Looking into 2025, HUMAN is strengthening the Human Defense Platform to combat increasingly sophisticated automated threats. As we continue to enhance our detection capabilities, modular solutions, dashboards, architecture, and extensive technology partnerships, we will continue to empower organizations to adapt and scale their defenses while maintaining cybersecurity, compliance, and control. We look forward to sharing these enhanced capabilities and innovations with you in the coming months, all designed to ensure every interaction remains authentic, secure, and human.
A call to arms
In a world where the distinction between human and automated traffic becomes increasingly blurred, the need for sophisticated defense mechanisms has never been more critical. At HUMAN, we're not just observers of these trends – we're actively shaping the future of cybersecurity. Our commitment to protecting organizations and their customers from sophisticated bot attacks and digital fraud remains unwavering, and we invite you to join and continue to participate with us in this crucial mission.
Holiday wishes
As we look to close out 2024 and welcome in 2025, I want to personally wish our customers, partners, and industry collaborators happy holidays and a very prosperous and safe new year.
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