Cybersecurity News
Why 2025 Was the Year of Zero-Day Exploits
2025 is ending with record-breaking activity around zero-day vulnerabilities, as attackers increasingly target flaws that have no available patch at the time of exploitation.
According to a report by Cybernews, cybersecurity researchers have tracked a surge in zero-day activity across browsers, VPN appliances, and enterprise software. Attackers are racing to weaponize freshly discovered bugs before defenders can respond.
Trends Contributing to Zero-Days
Several trends made 2025 a breakout year for zero-day exploits.
Attackers are leaning on bug-bounty intelligence, leaked proof-of-concept code, and commercial exploit brokers. This is giving even moderately resourced threat actors access to high-end capabilities.
“Nation-state buyers now compete directly with criminal syndicates for vulnerabilities that offer leverage across cloud services, identity platforms, and operational technology,” said Morey Haber, Chief Security Advisor at BeyondTrust.
Furthermore, supply chain and third-party software providers have become high-value targets. A single unpatched vulnerability in a widely used product can provide reach into hundreds of financial institutions at once, as recent vendor and platform breaches have demonstrated.
Impact on Investment Firms
For investment firms, the operational impact is twofold.
First, incident response assumptions must change. Defenders can no longer assume that high-severity vulnerabilities will be exploited only after patches are released. The prevalence of zero-days means exploitation can become long before the public disclosure of a problem and the release of cybersecurity patches.
Risk management must extend beyond the perimeter of the business supply chain. Third-party risk can be introduced through SaaS products, analytics providers, and trading platforms. Firms must be able to coordinate with these partners and track how quickly they can detect and remediate zero-day exploitation in their own environments.
Key Suggestions
- Prioritize defense-in-depth over single-layer patching strategies, including network segmentation, application approval, and least-privilege access. This will prevent a single zero-day exploit from providing total access.
- Strengthen vendor risk management practices, including contractual SLAs around vulnerability disclosure, participation in coordinated vulnerability disclosure programs, and validated incident reporting timelines.
- Invest in managed detection and response (MDR) or a 24×7 security operations capability that can detect anomalous behavior independent of specific CVE signatures. This includes lateral movement, unusual authentication, and data exfiltration patterns.
Security Analysts Predict an AI Arms Race and Autonomous Malware in 2026
Looking ahead to 2026, cybersecurity researchers and practitioners say they expect to see an emerging AI “arms race” in which defenders and attackers both accelerate the use of AI.
According to a report by DarkReading, analysts note that AI is already being used to generate convincing phishing content, automate vulnerability scanning, and adapt payloads in real time based on target defenses. At the same time, organizations are adopting AI for detection, correlation, and response, but often without fully aligning security controls and governance to these new tools.
Autonomous Malware is Becoming More Capable
One of the most worrying predictions for 2026 is the rise of increasingly autonomous malware. This refers to malicious code that can make basic decisions about targets, timing, and techniques without direct human control.
Emerging AI malware toolkits now have “the ability to hide their code from cybersecurity software, create attack capabilities on demand, and dynamically generate scripts,” said a report by Cybersecurity Dive that cites Google research.
In practice, this could mean ransomware that dynamically identifies the most valuable assets inside a hedge fund’s environment, or infostealers that pivot across APIs and SaaS platforms linked to a private equity firm’s portfolio companies. The concern for regulators and boards is that this automation compresses the time between initial compromise, privilege escalation, and data theft, reducing the window for human intervention.
How Financial Firms Can Prepare
Firms must treat AI risk as an extension of existing cyber and model risk frameworks. They need clear governance of AI use in both offensive (red teaming, threat simulation) and defensive (detection, automation) contexts.
Firms must also evaluate cybersecurity vendors on their use of AI. That means moving beyond statements made by vendors and demanding transparency into security models, data handling, and alignment with their regulatory obligations and risk policies.
Firms can also build playbooks that assume “sub-second” attack timelines, where automated response (such as isolating endpoints, revoking credentials, or blocking network segments) is triggered before human analysts can review alerts.
Threat Actors Are Increasingly Using This Scam Verification Tactic to Install Malware
A concrete example of how attackers blend social engineering and automation surfaced this year in the form of “verification” scams. These scams trick users into running malicious code under the guise of resolving a problem or proving they are not bots.
How Verification Scams Work
Recent research by Sophos highlights campaigns where threat actors prompt users to copy and paste commands into a terminal or PowerShell window. These commands are often presented as steps to fix a login, remove supposed restrictions, or complete a cybersecurity check.
Once executed, the commands silently download and install malware, such as infostealers and ransomware loaders, bypassing many traditional email and endpoint controls.
These attacks frequently masquerade as CAPTCHA or “I am not a robot” verification flows, sometimes embedded into compromised websites or fraudulent support portals. By positioning the malicious step as a “necessary verification,” attackers exploit user trust in process and policy, particularly when the page visually resembles a familiar cloud, trading, or banking interface.
An Indicator of the Malware-as-a-Service Trend
This pattern echoes broader “toolkit- and malware-as-a-service” trends. Currently, sophisticated brokers and threat actors are packaging phishing templates, infrastructure, and step-by-step instructions so that less-skilled criminals can run highly effective campaigns.
This democratization of cybercrime means that the number of credible-looking scams is growing, making reliance on user judgment alone increasingly fragile.
Suggestions for Financial Firms
At financial institutions, staff regularly interact with complex portals and admin consoles. There is a risk that even technically savvy users can be persuaded to follow these instructions if they appear to come from a respected vendor or internal IT.
We suggest taking the following steps:
- Update cybersecurity awareness training to explicitly cover “copy-paste” and verification scams. Emphasize that staff must never run commands at the direction of unsolicited prompts, email, or chat, even if they appear to come from IT or vendors.
- Enforce application control and script execution policies. This can include restricting PowerShell and terminal access for non-technical roles and requiring signed scripts or admin approvals for sensitive commands.
- Partner with a security firm to monitor unusual command-line activity and script-based behavior. Incorporate this into user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) to flag out-of-pattern administrative actions.
Cybersecurity Tips
Researcher, Author, and Business Leader Explains How Collaboration Strengthens Cybersecurity
Beyond tools and threats, one of the most consistent messages from cybersecurity leaders is that collaboration is a critical multiplier for cyber resilience. This collaboration can take many forms, but it often spans across internal teams, vendors, and industry peers.
Researcher and Business Leader Emphasizes Collaboration
A recent article in CIO Magazine by cybersecurity-focused researcher, author, and business leader Kate Vitasek underscores this perspective.
Siloed security teams cannot keep pace with systemic threats affecting cloud, AI, supply chains, and regulatory obligations. Instead, high-performing organizations treat cybersecurity as a shared responsibility spanning IT, risk, legal, operations, and the business lines that own client relationships and trading strategies.
According to Vitasek, “Potential partners with different approaches to data security must find alignment before collaborating where potentially sensitive information will be shared.”
Often, this begins when partners “first agree on a clear governance framework and solutions that’ll facilitate data-driven collaboration, while still ensuring all security compliance needs are met.”
Such frameworks “should clearly establish what data can be shared, and with whom, as well as set guidelines for storage and management.”
Vitasek supports “The Vested Model,” which is an approach based on research from the University of Tennessee. This model focuses on “shared goals and outcomes rather than traditional transactional buyer and seller agreements.”
Achieving Internal Collaboration
Within financial institutions, collaboration starts with aligning cybersecurity and business objectives.
Security teams that understand portfolio strategies, trading hours, and client expectations are better positioned to design controls that protect the firm without creating operational friction. Conversely, investment leaders who engage with cybersecurity as a core part of fiduciary duty are more likely to fund necessary investments in monitoring, incident response, and resilience.
Achieving External Collaboration
Collaboration with vendors and managed service providers is equally important. Third parties now function as extensions of a firm’s own attack surface, and security expectations must be embedded into contracts, onboarding, and ongoing oversight.
Working with specialized partners that understand SEC, FINRA, and DORA expectations and that can provide SOC 2-compliant infrastructure gives investment firms additional leverage to manage growing regulatory scrutiny and cyber complexity.
