GenAI cyberattacks to grow by 17%, says Gartner

By 2027, 17 per cent of total cyberattacks will involve generative AI (genAI), leading to an increased amount of spending on security, a new report from Gartner has revealed.

According to the technology research firm, global information security spend will grow to $212 billion in the next three years, up by 15 per cent from 2024’s estimated spend of $183.9 billion.

Gartner highlighted the alarming growth of large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s ChatGPT to carry out large-scale social engineering attacks.

The report also predicts that as more organisations move to the cloud, the number of cloud-based security solutions, particularly cloud-native solutions, will continue to grow.

Gartner estimates the combined cloud access security brokers (CASB) and cloud workload protection platforms (CWPP) market is estimated to reach $8.7 billion in 2025, up from forecasted $6.7 billion in 2024.

Elsewhere, Gartner said the global skills shortage in the cybersecurity industry is a major factor driving investment in the security services market and this is expected to grow faster than the other security segments.

“The continued heightened threat environment, cloud movement and talent crunch are pushing security to the top of the priorities list and pressing chief information security officers (CISOs) to increase their organisation’s security spend,” said Shailendra Upadhyay, senior research principal at Gartner.

“Furthermore, organisations are currently assessing their endpoint protection platform (EPP) and endpoint detection and response (EDR) needs and making adjustments to boost their operational resilience and incident response following the CrowdStrike outage.”