Adrian Hia, Managing Director for Asia Pacific at Kaspersky
Russia’s Kaspersky has raised urgent concerns about the rising weaponization of artificial intelligence (AI) in wagging cyberattacks across APAC region. This has been revealed at its Cyber Insights 2025 forum recently held in Seoul.
According to Kaspersky experts, 2024 saw over 3 billion malware attacks globally, with a daily average of 467,000 malicious files detected. Windows systems were most frequently targeted, and Trojan detections rose by 33 percent year-over-year.
Financial cybercrime also surged worldwide, with a 2x increase in mobile financial threat victims and escalating phishing attacks targeting cryptocurrencies. Misleading apps, including fake VPNs, also proliferated, as did threats against gamers and children. Alarmingly, 45 percent of passwords could be cracked in under a minute.
“Cybercriminals are leveraging AI to create phishing content, develop malware, and even launch deepfake-based social engineering attacks,” says, Vladislav Tushkanov, Machine Learning Technology Research Group Manager at Kaspersky. He has warned of LLM-native vulnerabilities, AI supply chain attacks, and the growing problem of shadow AI, the unauthorized use of AI tools by employees that may leak sensitive data.
Vladislav Tushkanov, Machine Learning Technology Research Group Manager at Kaspersky
Adrian Hia, Managing Director for Asia Pacific at Kaspersky, says, “AI is reshaping both the threat landscape and the defenses.” “To stay ahead, organizations need more than just tools, they need intelligent SOCs (security operations centres) that combine automation, threat intelligence, and human expertise. That’s the foundation for resilient, AI-ready cybersecurity. At the end of the day, the winners in cybersecurity will be those who don’t just adopt AI, but secure it,” elaborates Hia.
In one alarming example, Kaspersky researchers found malicious AI models hosted on public repositories, and corporate environments are now vulnerable to prompt injection, hallucination errors, and insecure account handling within generative AI systems.
A SOC is a centralized command center that monitors, detects, analyzes, and responds to security incidents within an organization’s network and systems. By investing in the right resources, technology, and people, you can enhance your security posture, mitigate risks, and protect sensitive data, safeguarding your reputation and business continuity in an increasingly complex threat landscape.
Speakers at the Seoul event also addressed how next-gen SOCs (Security Operations Center) must evolve with AI integration for detection, response, and automation. Live demos featured Kaspersky’s own AI-enhanced tools for threat hunting and vulnerability management.
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