Cybersecurity spending rises as AI increases hacking risks

In short: Companies are spending more on cybersecurity as AI helps criminals attack, and investors have pushed up big security vendors’ stock prices.

What's going on

Businesses and governments are dealing with more cyber attacks, and many of them are linked to AI tools. AI can help criminals write convincing scam emails (phishing, messages that trick you into handing over passwords), create deepfake videos, and persuade automated “agents” inside companies to leak data.

The Financial Times points to examples where AI systems were breached or misused, including incidents involving Hugging Face and the Australian government. As worries rise, shares of major cybersecurity firms like Palo Alto Networks, CrowdStrike, and Fortinet have more than doubled over the past six months.

Money is following that fear. Cybersecurity spending is forecast to grow by about 10 percent per year on average from 2025 to 2030, based on a TD Cowen report citing Gartner data. Analysts also expect strong revenue growth for large vendors such as Palo Alto and CrowdStrike over the next two years.

What to watch

A key question is who ends up providing the most protection. The same kind of AI behind many new risks, often called LLMs (large language models, the text generating systems behind many chatbots), can also find software bugs and suggest fixes, like a tireless proofreader for computer code. But getting those fixes applied across a big organization, and spotting attacks that start with stolen passwords, still tends to favor established security vendors that already sit inside company networks.

Source: Financial Times