Combating Cyberattacks on Digital Transformation by David D Geer

1. Combating Cyberattacks on Digital Transformation By David D. Geer Summary: Digital transformation drives business growth, but it also magnifies exposure to cyberattacks. In 2025, threat actors weaponized artificial intelligence, exploited supply chains, and infiltrated multicloud environments. Staying secure means integrating resilience into every part of digital modernization, not after it. The transformation that invites attack Organizations have moved nearly everything online—operations, workflows, data pipelines, even AI development stacks. This massive shift has expanded the attack surface at record speed. According to Microsoft’s 2025 Digital Defense Report, AI is significantly accelerating threats and highlights a sharp increase in destructive attacks targeting cloud environments. The line between criminal and state‑sponsored cyber activity has blurred. Generative AI lets attackers clone voices, fabricate credentials, and automate spear‑phishing at scale. The same automation that accelerates innovation empowers adversaries to exploit trust faster than most enterprises can respond. Traditional perimeter defenses cannot protect hybrid ecosystems built of APIs, SaaS links, and remote devices. Identity‑based attacks outpacing perimeter defenses Phishing remains the single largest entry point for digital transformation breaches. Over 3.4 billion phishing emails circulate every day, and AI has made them indistinguishable from real corporate communications. In the first half of 2025, identity‑based attacks rose significantly. Once they steal credentials, adversaries use infostealer malware to harvest tokens that allow silent logins across systems. Security teams need a zero‑trust mindset: verify each session, limit privileges, and apply phishing‑resistant multifactor authentication. Email gateways, browser

2. isolators, and behavioral filtering stop some intrusions, but user education remains indispensable. If staff recognize signs of manipulation—unusual sender addresses, urgent payment requests, or synthetic voices—they can break the attack chain before intrusion. Protecting DevOps and containerized apps Containers and CI/CD pipelines accelerate digital projects, yet they introduce new weak links when security is an afterthought. Compromised build servers, exposed API keys, and unverified images have become top attack vectors. Embedding automated scanning inside development pipelines can identify flaws before deployment. Data from 2025 industry surveys shows that fixing vulnerabilities in early testing costs up to 30 times less than patching production systems. Teams should harden pipelines with least‑privilege access controls, segregate secrets from repositories, and perform penetration testing before every major release cycle. Cloud complexity and third‑party risk Modern organizations run dozens of interconnected platforms, often across multiple vendors. Each signed contract adds a potential pathway for attackers. Many breaches now begin with trusted suppliers who fail to secure their own digital environments. The answer is visibility and accountability. Maintain an updated inventory of all third‑party services and enforce contract language that specifies security baselines, patch schedules, and reporting timelines. Continuous cloud configuration monitoring and anomaly detection tools help flag suspicious activity across providers before threat actors exfiltrate data. Rising ransomware, stealthy sabotage As ransomware matures, attackers no longer rely solely on encryption. Hybrid extortion models combine data theft with integrity disruption—altering files subtly to force ransom payments without obvious encryption locks. According to

3. 2025 research from Cybersecurity at MIT Sloan and Safe Security, approximately 80% of ransomware attacks were powered by artificial intelligence tools. Early detection is critical. Behavioral analytics that track sudden surges in file access, unexpected process spawning, or network throttling reveal compromise within moments. Backups must be immutable, offline, and regularly tested through recovery exercises. This ensures business continuity even under data‑destruction pressure. Building resilient transformation Security and transformation are not sequential goals—they are simultaneous disciplines. To embed resilience from the start: Integrate cybersecurity readiness into all digital projects and board reporting. Measure vendor and system security performance as a standard business metric. Align with zero‑trust segmentation to limit blast radius across cloud workloads. Simulate AI‑driven attack scenarios during red‑team training. Update the cybersecurity insurance policy to cover AI‑based intrusions explicitly. The closing perspective Digital transformation is not a one‑time overhaul; it is a continuous evolution. Each integration, automation, and new API connection changes the attack surface. As adversaries use the same technologies to accelerate compromise, only an equally agile defense can match them. When innovation moves as fast as today’s cloud economy, preparation replaces prediction as the most reliable safeguard. The organizations that lead in 2026 will be those that innovate securely as cybersecurity evolves in real time alongside transformation.