E-Business
Firm Explores 2025 Potential IT Outage and Supply Chain Risk Scenarios
As part of its annual Kaspersky Security Bulletin, the company’s experts have analysed significant supply chain attacks and IT outages from the past year and explored potential future risk scenarios, providing insights aimed at helping businesses of all sizes enhance cybersecurity, build resilience, and prepare for possible emerging threats in 2025.
In 2024, supply chain attacks and IT outages emerged as dominant cybersecurity concerns, demonstrating that virtually no infrastructure is immune to risk.
A faulty CrowdStrike update affected millions of systems, and sophisticated incidents, such as the XZ backdoor and the Polyfill.io supply chain attack exposed the risks inherent in widely used tools.
These and other high-profile cases highlight the need for rigorous security measures, robust patch and update management, and proactive defenses to safeguard global supply chains and infrastructure.
In its “Story of the Year”, the Kaspersky Security Bulletin reflects on 2024’s past incidents, while contemplating hypothetical future scenarios, and considering their potential consequences, as follows:
What if a major AI provider faced an outage or a data breach? Businesses are increasingly relying on various models such as those from OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic and others.
However, despite the excellent user experience these integrations offer, they introduce significant cyber risks. Reliance on a single or limited number of AI service providers creates concentrated points of failure.
If a major AI company experiences a critical disruption, it could significantly impact dozens or even thousands of services that depend on them.
Furthermore, an incident at any major AI provider could result in one of the most severe data leaks, as these systems may store vast amounts of sensitive information.
What if on-device AI tools were exploited? As AI becomes more integrated into everyday devices, the risk of it becoming an attack vector grows significantly.
For instance, the Operation Triangulation campaign, uncovered by Kaspersky in 2023, demonstrated how attackers could compromise device integrity by exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities in the system software and hardware to deploy advanced spyware.
Similar potential software or hardware-assisted vulnerabilities in the neural processing units powering AI – both broadly and in specific platforms like Apple Intelligence – could, if discovered, extend or present an even greater threat. Exploiting such weaknesses could harness AI capabilities to significantly amplify the scope and impact of such attacks.
Kaspersky’s research into Operation Triangulation also revealed the first of its kind case reported by the company: the misuse of on-device machine learning for data extraction, highlighting that the features designed to enhance user experience are already being weaponised by sophisticated threat actors.
What if threat actors disrupted satellite connectivity? While the space industry in general has been encountering various cyberattacks for a while, the new target for threat actors may be satellite Internet providers as important elements of the global connectivity chain.
Satellite Internet can provide temporary communication links when other systems are down; airlines, ships, and other platforms may rely on it to provide onboard connectivity; it may also be used to enable secure communication services.
This presents cyber risks: a targeted cyberattack or a faulty update from a leading or dominant satellite provider could cause Internet outages and potential communication breakdowns, impacting individuals and organisations.
What if major physical threats to the Internet occurred? Continuing the topic of connectivity, the Internet is also vulnerable to physical threats. 95% of global data is transmitted through subsea cables, and there are nearly 1,500 Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) – physical locations, sometimes within data centers, where different networks exchange traffic.
A disruption to just a few critical components of this chain – such as key cables or IXPs – could overload the remaining infrastructure, potentially causing widespread outages and significantly impacting global connectivity.
What if severe vulnerabilities in Windows and Linux kernel were exploited? These operating systems power many of the world’s critical assets, including servers, manufacturing equipment, logistics systems, IoT devices, and others.
A remotely exploitable kernel vulnerability in these systems could expose countless devices and networks worldwide to potential attacks, creating a high-risk situation in which global supply chains could face significant disruption.
“Supply chain risks may seem overwhelming, but awareness is the first step toward prevention,” said Igor Kuznetsov, Director of Global Research and Analysis Team (GReAT) at Kaspersky.
“By testing updates rigorously, leveraging AI-driven anomaly detection, and diversifying providers to reduce single points of failure, we can reduce weak elements and build resilience. A culture of responsibility among personnel is equally vital, as human vigilance remains the cornerstone of security. Together, these measures can safeguard supply chains and ensure a more secure future”.
In a sobering revelation of the evolving threat landscape facing the digital asset ecosystem, blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs has disclosed that over $2.1 billion worth of cryptocurrency was stolen in the first half of 2025 alone, spanning at least 75 high-profile hacks and exploits.
This staggering figure marks a 10 per cent surge over the previous first-half record set in 2022 and nearly eclipses the total stolen in all of 2024.
But beyond the monetary scale, the report reveals a deeper concern: a growing trend of state-sponsored cyber aggression weaponising crypto assets for strategic and geopolitical purposes.
The most devastating breach to date occurred in February when Dubai-based exchange Bybit lost $1.5 billion—the largest crypto heist in history.
TRM Labs attributes the attack to North Korean state actors, noting that the incident alone accounted for nearly 70 percent of total losses during the period and doubled the average hack size to $30 million.
“The Bybit hack redefined the threat landscape,” the report stated.
“It exemplifies how digital asset theft has transcended criminal opportunism and morphed into a tool of statecraft.”
Indeed, North Korea-linked entities were responsible for an estimated $1.6 billion of the total stolen, further entrenching Pyongyang’s status as the most prolific nation-state threat actor in the crypto sphere.
Yet the menace is diversifying. On June 18, Iranian crypto exchange Nobitex was breached for over $90 million by a group reportedly linked to Israel, Gonjeshke Darande (Predatory Sparrow).
Unusually, the stolen funds were routed to unusable vanity addresses, underscoring symbolic and political motives rather than financial gain.
TRM Labs flagged this as a “disturbing shift,” with digital asset theft increasingly deployed as a weapon in asymmetric geopolitical conflict.
The report also found that more than 80 percent of losses stemmed from infrastructure breaches, including private key theft, seed phrase leaks, and front-end compromises— attacks typically ten times costlier than other vectors.
Meanwhile, DeFi exploits such as flash loan manipulations accounted for 12 percent of losses, reflecting persistent smart contract vulnerabilities despite years of scrutiny.
As digital currencies become enmeshed in global rivalries, TRM Labs warns that conventional cybersecurity approaches are now inadequate.
“Massive breaches, often tied to nation-state operations, require a new defence paradigm,” the firm asserted, urging industrywide adoption of advanced safeguards and cross-border collaboration among regulators and law enforcement.
Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) has inaugurated the pilot take-off of its new Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered registration portal.
A statement issued by the commission explained that Malam Hussaini Magaji, registrar-general of the CAC, made the announcement during the 2025 Stakeholders Forum in Port Harcourt.
According to him, “the initiative is a major milestone in Nigeria’s business facilitation drive.”
The Registrar further explained that the upgraded portal marks a complete overhaul of the Company Registration Portal (CRP), saying that it comes with advanced features designed to simplify and speed up business registration.
The new system, according to him, allows for instant name reservation approvals, likening the ease to creating an email account, and stressing that the AI-powered platform could suggest available alternatives to business names and approve them immediately.
Another innovation, he stated, is the ability to register a business using only the National Identification Number (NIN) of a director or proprietor, pointing out that there is an ambitious target of completing business registration and certificate generation within 30 minutes, subject to real-time NIN validation.
Bitget has launched its institutional services in Nigeria, offering fintech companies a robust platform to build innovative solutions on top of Bitget’s suite of institutional-grade offerings.
Gracy Chen, CEO, Bitget, in a statement said, “Our goal is to empower Nigerian businesses to innovate and leverage blockchain for wealth creation opportunities, hence, the institutional services empower fintech leaders with tailored solutions, as the offerings designed to cater for the unique operational needs of institutional clients, enabling businesses to embed trading functionalities like spot and futures markets, wallet management, and more, directly into their platforms.
“The Key services include White-label Broker Services which enabled Fintech companies to deploy customized crypto exchanges using Bitget’s infrastructure while managing branding and users independently. There is also API Solutions that can make the Developers to integrate trading functionality via APIs for spot, margin, and derivatives markets, ensuring fast execution and seamless experiences for end users.”
Chen added, “The ND Broker Model provides clients with complete autonomy over user-facing platforms, offering exclusive front-end flexibility while relying on Bitget for back-end market liquidity. Clients are able to employ Protection Fund and Proof of Reserves of over $600million secured in the Bitget Protection Fund and real-time Proof of Reserves, which gives clients assurance of maximum transparency and security.”
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