USA Trends and Developments Contributed by: Brock Dahl, Beth George, Timothy Howard and Megan Kayo, Freshfields
programs. Megan helps clients with security governance, including risk assessment and management, breach mitigation, business continuity and disaster recovery planning, oversight of third- party service providers, due diligence in corporate transactions and board of directors’ advice and counselling. She helps her clients develop strategies to collect, use, share and sell data in compliance with privacy and data protection laws.
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If there is one trend that has been constant in the cybersecurity and incident response fields, it is that cyber-attacks have consistently been increasing in sophistication, speed, and severity. This will likely continue to be the case due to: • increasingly capable technological tools, includ - ing advances in agentic AI that could be used to increase the efficacy and efficiency of cyber- attacks, as well as the future risk of quantum com - puters cracking encryption that is currently used to protect data; • an increasingly turbulent geopolitical landscape, which can increase nation-state-sponsored and affiliated cyber-attacks; and • an increasingly interconnected world in which companies rely on third-party service providers for day-to-day operations, increasing the attack surface and reducing their visibility and control over the systems that support and protect their operations.
Being aware of these interconnected trends and developments, their prevalence, and their potential impacts is critical for companies looking to build resil - ient systems and combat or minimise the impact of these attacks in a realistic and prioritised way. Threat Actors Leveraging Agentic AI in Cyber- Attacks The emergence of powerful frontier AI models and AI agents capable of autonomous reasoning and execu - tion has had major implications across industries, and this impact is only expected to grow. This trend is also evident in cybercrime, as threat actors reportedly lev - erage AI tools and agents to make their attacks more effective and efficient. For example, threat actors have used AI tools to con - duct extensive research and reconnaissance of target companies to prepare highly personalised, tailored phishing emails, making them highly effective. Addi - tionally, threat actors use AI tools for translation to draft polished phishing emails in languages they are not fluent in. Threat actors are also deploying hyper-
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