You're Going to Get Hacked: A Computer Security Survival Guide

It’s almost impossible to not get hacked. Scary, right? With AI-powered malware, deepfake scams, and super realistic phishing attacks, everyone's vulnerable. Remember that deepfake demo where someone was turned into a dude from a trailer park? Or the AI Taylor Swift singing? Wild stuff.

So, what can we do? This post will break down the top 5 cybersecurity threats you NEED to watch out for in 2025, and what you can do to prevent them. It's time to rethink how we protect ourselves, our families, and even our companies. Let's become Zero-Trust Humans!

Bitdefender is making this possible. They fight cybercrime. They even have a super elite covert cybercrime unit within their company called the Draco team. How cool would it be to spend a day with them and see what they do? Check them out to learn more about their two decades of cybersecurity excellence.

Computer Security Basics: Are You Making These Mistakes?

Before we get to the scary new stuff, let’s cover some basics. You should already be doing these things.

A Bitdefender consumer report talked to over 7,000 people. Guess what? 37% write their passwords down. Seriously? And 18% use the same password for three or more accounts. Let's be honest, it’s probably all of them, right?

Password Management

First, passwords. Use a password manager. It doesn't matter which one. Just use one. Bitdefender is a great option. Pick one. Use it. Create strong, unique passwords for every account. Never use the same password twice.

Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)

Please, please use multi-factor authentication whenever you can. That means you put in a password. Then you have to do something else. Get a text message. Use an authenticator app to get an OTP, or a one-time passcode. Two forms of authentication, always.

Data Backup

Next, your data. Pictures, documents, videos, back it up. Put it somewhere safe. Have a copy of it. Use the 3-2-1 backup strategy:

• 3 copies of your data

• 2 of those on different types of storage media

• 1 completely offline

Why? A lot of the threats we're going to talk about involve getting your data and locking it up. You want to have a copy of that data that's offline. It can't be touched by some system.

Software Updates

Update your software. Stop ignoring that notification. Do it right now. Your OS, your applications, update them. They're doing that for a reason. You're either getting new features. Or they're patching a mistake they made, and you're about to get hacked. Update as soon as you get the notification.

Antivirus Software

Have some sort of antivirus on your computer. Again, Bitdefender is a solid choice. They have all kinds of cool bells and whistles to keep you safe. Just have something and leave it on. Don't get in the habit of turning it off to test things. Turn it back on. It only takes one moment of leaving yourself wide open to get hacked, and your day is ruined.

Stay Informed

Stay informed. Stay up to date. Update your brain with new information. You're already doing it. You're watching this video and reading this blog post. Good job. But also, don't skip the other security basics.

Guess what? One in four consumers has been hit by a security incident. They got hacked. That was probably you, wasn’t it? It can happen again. It's not like getting the chicken pox.

The Top 5 Cybersecurity Threats in 2025 (and How to Fight Back)

Okay, here we go. The top 5 computer security threats.

Threat #5: AI-Powered Hacking

AI is amazing. But it's also scary when hackers use it. In a cybersecurity assessment report, 96% of IT professionals are concerned about AI's impact on the threat landscape. That should tell you something.

AI Social Engineering and Phishing

Let's talk about phishing. Phishing emails are when an attacker tries to impersonate someone trustworthy. They try to get you to do something. Give them information. Give them money. Download malware.

The goal is to trick you. In the past, phishing emails were often easy to spot. They'd be full of grammar mistakes and spelling errors. Not anymore.

With AI, with large language models (LLMs), the phishing emails are perfect. The same technology you're using to make sure your emails don't sound stupid, the hackers are using to try and trick you.

Phishing emails are still the main way cybercrime is done. It's the most common form. 3.4 billion emails a day are sent out. Email impersonation accounts for 1.2% of all email traffic globally. Darktrace reported a 135% increase in malicious email campaigns in Q1 2023. And AI has only gotten better since then.

It's more than just fancy writing. They're using AI to find out more about you to make it more targeted.

According to Mailgun, there are four pillars of AI phishing:

1. Data Collection: They'll use AI to find out more information about you. They collect data on your interests, behaviors, and preferences.

2. Personalized Targeting: Instead of asking you to support a Nigerian prince, they will target your specific interests or hobbies. They personalize every hacking attempt.

3. Impersonation: They can even impersonate your friends and family. They copy their writing style.

4. Automation: They can scale this process. They automate it. Suddenly, they're scamming thousands of people with personalized phishing emails.

   
   

They're also using obfuscation techniques to evade anti-phishing services. Obfuscation is when they trick the NLP (natural language processing) that email providers use to detect bad emails. 78% of discovered malicious emails use two or more obfuscation techniques.

Dating App Chatbot Scams

It's not just phishing emails. There are SMS messages or texts and chatbots. Dating app chatbot scams are becoming prevalent. There's been a 287% increase in scammers using chatbots.

They create fake accounts using AI automation on a massive scale. With the advances in AI, they can make it very convincing. They can create an entire backstory. They can generate a photo that's very realistic. It's a unique photo that isn't of any real person. It's just a person that the AI made up. It can maintain a conversation with you. It learns about you. Then it takes all your money.

Solution: Become a Zero Trust Human

How do we fight this? Become a Zero Trust Human. Don't trust anything.

When you get an email, you can open it. But that's all you can do. If you see a link, don't click that link. Never click a link in an email. It doesn't matter if it's from your bank or your grandson, your sister, or your mom. Always go to the source.

If you get a message from Chase Bank saying, "Hey, log into your account. We need you to check this." Don't click the link they sent you. Go to chase.com, log into your account, and see if you have any messages. If you don't, then you're good.

These emails are going to look real. Don't fall for it. Zero trust human.

Only interact with emails that you are expecting. If you try to log into a website, and they're like, "Hey, I just sent you an email to verify your login." Cool. You initiated that. You made that happen. That's real time. Anything else, just don't do it.

If you get an email asking for information about you, or asking you to do something that seems kind of off the wall, don't just do it off of that email. Use another communication method. Call them. Text them. You initiate to confirm what they're wanting to do. Do that across the board for every type of communication.

If it seems weird, and if you're a zero trust human, it all seems weird, you will initiate a call to them to verify. Always verify. You've heard the old adage, "trust but verify." No, don't trust. Verify. And then verify again.

Tell everyone about this. Tell your friends, your family, your company, your boss, everyone. The FBI is warning everyone, too.

AI vs. AI

Use AI to fight AI. If you get a weird email, if you get a weird text message, copy that and paste it into an LLM that you trust.

If you're looking for an all-in-one solution, Bitdefender includes a product called Scamio. This is their own LLM trained to look out for this kind of stuff. We're going to beat the hackers with AI vs. AI.

Threat #4: AI-Powered Malware

The social engineering stuff, the phishing emails, the texts, a lot of this is geared toward getting you to click on something and download something. That something is malware, malicious software. When executed on your system, it can ruin your day. It'll steal your cryptocurrency. Lock up your data. Just cause chaos.

While that's always been a problem, AI is making it worse. Writing malware is hard. Normally, you have to be a very experienced coder. You have to know the ins and outs of computer security. Normally, your malware will break because people will figure out what it's doing, and your antivirus will block it. So, they have to try and write new malware. This takes a ton of time and effort.

Not so much anymore. Thanks, AI. AI can help malware writers write more malware.

It's pretty hard to get a regular LLM to write bad code for you. They've got FraudGPT and WormGPT. These are things you can buy on the dark web. They're essentially unlocked, uncensored LLMs that will do whatever you want them to do. FraudGPT and WormGPT are tailor-made for nefarious activities.

What would require an extremely gifted and talented coder to write malware, anybody can do it now. The barrier to entry is super low. And LLMs are getting smarter and smarter.

For people who do know how to write malware, these tools make them even more dangerous.

Polymorphic Malware

We're changing malware. We now have what's called polymorphic malware. Malware that adapts.

We saw a first glimpse of polymorphic malware back in 2023ƒ when HIAS Labs created their proof of concept called Black Mamba. It exploited a large language model to dynamically modify its code at runtime. It modified benign code. Code that an antivirus didn't pick up on. Then it changed itself.

AI-powered polymorphic malware is still kind of a proof of concept. But hackers have made some progress, and they don't want you to know about it.

They can also use LLMs to further hide their code. Palo Alto's Unit 42 team used an LLM-based rewriting technique on some JavaScript-based malware to reduce the number of vendors on VirusTotal that found it as malicious.

They found that, given enough layers of transformations, many malware classifiers can be fooled into believing that a piece of malicious code is benign.

Malware can hide itself. Ultimately, what we may end up seeing is malware that can adapt to whatever environment it's in. If it is being detected, or it's been denied access because of defensive measures, it can learn and change without human input.

This is an emerging threat. We haven't seen a lot of evidence for this just yet. But with how fast AI is advancing, you have to know this is going to be applied.

Solution

How do we protect ourselves from the emerging threats and also the current threats? Malware is still a very big problem. First, basic IT security. Update your software. Most malware is trying to exploit bugs in unpatched software. Patch your software. Update it. You should be good most of the time.

Avoid installing things. Don't install stuff. Reduce your attack surface. Yes, you're going to need applications. Install Slack. Install Photoshop. Install trusted apps. But don't download random third-party software that no one's ever heard of. Use advanced antivirus software. Use antivirus software that you know is the latest and greatest. It's always looking for the emerging threats. It's even using machine learning and AI techniques to detect the latest stuff. Bitdefender is a good option.

Stay informed. Try to be aware of what's happening. Pay attention. Follow security news sources.

All these things are called defense in depth. You want to have multiple things you're doing to secure yourself. Multiple layers. It's never going to be just one thing.

Threat #3: Encryption-less Ransomware

Let's talk about ransomware. You've probably heard of it. But you've probably never heard of encryption-less ransomware. That might sound weird. How does that work?

Ransomware encrypts. It's malicious software that, when executed, will take your data, your files, and lock them up. They put it into a locked room. The hackers are the only ones that have the key. If you want to unlock your data, you've got to pay them some money, cryptocurrency, whatever.

Once paid, they normally do unlock your data. They give you the code. They give you the key to unlock your data. If you've ever been through a ransomware attack, it's the worst. It's been happening for years. It can cripple a company. Even close a company down.

Overall, it's on the rise. There were 5,400 victims in 2024. That's organizations, not individuals. The average ransom demand is 2.73 million. These ransoms are often paid.

Encryption-less malware doesn't lock up your data. They borrow it. They borrow it with hopefully you not knowing about it. Then they send you a message saying, "Hey, if you don't pay us some money, we're going to release this data to the public."

If you're a healthcare provider, and you have a bunch of sensitive information about your patients, they might release that data. That would ruin you.

This type of ransomware is on the rise. It kind of sucks because, normally, to protect yourself against ransomware, a key thing you'll do is back up your stuff. If it gets locked up, you've got a backup. No big deal. But with encryption-less, your backup doesn't matter. They have your data, and they're going to release it.

As a criminal, that's the safer option. Companies like Bitdefender will release free tools to decrypt against popular ransomware software. As an attacker, you don't want to risk that. You're just going to take their data and make 'em give you money. You're not going to do anything else.

They can take it a step further and do double extortion or even triple extortion.

Double extortion is where they both encrypt your data and threaten to release it.

Triple extortion is crazy. They're going to encrypt your data, threaten to release it, and then also do a third thing. This could be a DDoS attack on your company. They might send a bunch of network packets to bring down your websites and your servers. They might harass your customers or employees.

Keep in mind, too, that ransomware is malware. All the AI-powered techniques we just talked about with malware, ransomware has that too. It's nasty.

Solution

What can we do? How do we protect ourselves? It's the same as malware. Backing up your data is still good, even with encryption-less.

Bitdefender has ransomware protection. As part of their antivirus solution, they protect against ransomware. This is why you'll want advanced antivirus software because it does anti-ransomware stuff.

Threat #2: Supply Chain Attacks

This cybersecurity threat is frustrating. There's really not much we can do about it. It's called supply chain attacks.

Starbucks can help explain this. In December of 2024, Starbucks got hacked. But they also themselves did not get hacked. Wait, what?

This hack disrupted Starbucks' operations. It impacted their payroll and scheduling software. It affected 11,000 stores in the US. All the employees had to keep their schedule and all their payroll information by hand. They had to write it down. But they didn't get hacked.

One of their vendors did. It's the software they used. Their payroll software, a key supply chain provider for Starbucks called Blue Yonder, they were hacked. Blue Yonder was a victim of a ransomware attack. The ransomware group was called Termite.

It didn't matter how secure Starbucks was. Their vulnerability was that their vendor, a company they depend on for a service, got hacked.

So many companies depend on other services. This is not an isolated incident. This happens all the time to all of us. From the biggest companies to individuals.

This can come in many forms. You may have a medical provider that has all of your data. They get hacked. Suddenly, your personal information is out in the wild. Or maybe a software you love and use all the time has a software update that's got malware in it. That has happened. It happened with 3CX just last year.

2024 was dubbed the year of supply chain attacks.

In the future, the biggest targets will be major AI providers. What if OpenAI got hacked? What if LocalAI got hacked? Apple intelligence was just rolled out. A lot of our phones now have AI built into it. That's very new technology. It's ripe for being hacked. Hackers could attack our satellites, our physical internet infrastructure. They could attack a cloud like Amazon AWS, Azure, Google Cloud. Which much of our internet is being hosted on.

Solution

As a regular induvidual this is hard, but many internet security experts say that updated must be tested. Try to use third party tools test the update before installing. In the long run it is better to patch your software, then to try to play it safe and not patch. As a business test before you deploy. The best result can be achieved by diversifing your cloud tools and spead out your data. This way if one gets hacked you are not left completly vunerable.

Threat #1: IOT (The Internet of Things)

Video Doorbells, home security cameras, outlets, switches, and many more smart devices. They can be hacked and access to your cameras for example.

Because the average home has 24 different devices keeping that updated and patch can be a dounting task.

Solution

Setup your IOT devices on a a seperate network. This can be setup in your router or hardware firewall. The term used is a VLAN. This creates network isolation is a process that allows IT to divide or partition a network into various segments or sub-networks.

Conclusion

Hacking tools are becaoming more and more complcated, but so are the tool to protect yourself. The most important step is to keep your guard up and and always verify before you click!