Combating Cyberattacks on Digital Transformation by David D Geer

Digital transformation accelerates business growth but widens exposure to cyber threats. In 2025, AI-driven attacks, supply-chain exploits, and multicloud breaches surged, blurring lines between criminal and state-sponsored activity. Generative AI enables voice cloning, fake credentials, and automated phishing, overwhelming traditional defenses. Phishing remains the top breach entry point, with over 3.4 billion emails daily. Identity-based attacks exploit stolen credentials, emphasizing the need for zero-trust architecture, phishing-resistant MFA, and user awareness.

DevOps pipelines and containers speed innovation but invite risks through exposed keys and compromised build servers. Embedding automated security scans and enforcing least-privilege access reduces costs and vulnerabilities. Cloud complexity and third-party dependencies amplify risk—organizations must monitor configurations, enforce vendor accountability, and detect anomalies early.

Ransomware now blends data theft with file manipulation, often powered by AI. Continuous behavioral analytics and immutable offline backups ensure resilience.

Security and transformation must progress together. Embedding cybersecurity into strategy, applying zero-trust segmentation, and simulating AI-driven threats strengthen defenses. As transformation evolves, so must protection. The leaders of 2026 will innovate securely—making preparation, not prediction, the foundation of digital resilience.

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.