Looking Back at 2025
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Looking Back at 2025: Cybersecurity at a Turning Point
Detection didn’t fail in 2025.
It reached its limits – and many teams only realized it after the fact.
The threat landscape didn’t suddenly become more sophisticated-it became faster, more scalable, and less predictable. Attacks stopped behaving the way detection-centric security was built to handle.
OT systems were no longer an abstract risk. Incidents translated into physical consequences teams had to explain beyond IT.
AI shifted from accelerating defender workflows to amplifying attacker scale-often faster than humans could keep up. And security teams learned that moving faster didn’t feel like progress. It felt like staying afloat.
In this special end-of-year episode of Threat Talks, Lieuwe Jan Koning is joined by Luca Cipriano, Yuri Wit, and Rob Maas to examine why the cybersecurity trends of 2025 mark a structural break – not a gradual evolution.
The conversation moves past headlines and tooling to focus on what actually changed operationally: where pressure surfaced first, and why familiar approaches began to bend under new conditions.
What you’ll learn
• How attacker economics shifted in 2025
AI-powered attacks and early autonomous malware compressed timelines and lowered the cost of scale-quietly redefining what “normal” looks like for defenders.
• Why OT and critical infrastructure moved to the front line
From power grids to industrial environments, attacks crossed from digital disruption into real-world impact-raising stakes IT security models were never designed to absorb.
• Where SOC automation helps-and where it misleads
Automation became unavoidable, but not sufficient. Faster response didn’t reduce pressure-and in some cases, it amplified it. Human judgment still defined the edge cases.
• How Zero Trust and preemptive security are being reinterpreted
Zero Trust shifted from concept to necessity-a way to limit blast radius, reduce decision pressure, and move defense earlier in the chain.
Your cybersecurity experts
Episode details
This end-of-year episode steps back to look at what 2025 revealed when viewed as a whole.
Across the year, a pattern emerged. Attackers scaled faster than defenders could reason in real time. OT incidents moved from edge cases to board-level concerns. AI appeared repeatedly-sometimes as a defensive aid, increasingly as an accelerant for attacks. And SOC teams felt the cumulative pressure of volume, speed, and shrinking windows-with less room for mistakes.
Rather than revisiting every incident, the discussion connects these moments to explain why familiar security models started to strain. Zero Trust evolved from architectural intent to operational discipline. Threat research and SOC experience grounded the conversation in what teams actually lived through, month by month.
The episode closes by looking toward 2026 – not as a list of predictions, but as lessons drawn directly from the year just passed.
Prevention over reaction.
Control over visibility alone.
Strategies built for a world where speed is no longer the differentiator.
This isn’t a highlight reel.
It’s a reflection on what 2025 taught us – and why it matters next.
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