With 2025 in mind, cloud attacks have evolved faster than ever, with artificial intelligence (AI) being both weapons and shields. As AI rapidly changes how enterprises innovate, security teams are subject to a triple burden.
Secure AI embedded in every part of your business. Use AI to defend faster and smarter. Fight AI-powered threats that run in minutes or seconds.
Security is no longer about balancing speed and safety. In today’s cloud-native world, real-time context-ready defense is a baseline expectation and not competitive. The recent Sysdig Cloud Defense Report 2025 breaks down this structural shift. Below we unlock important insights to security practitioners, aiming to stay ahead of the accelerated threat landscape.
AI: Cloud Security Double-edged Sword
AI is transforming security paradigms. Both empower the defenders while creating an entirely new offensive surface.
AI for security: fight fire with fire
Attackers are automating faster. Campaigns like Crystalray allow enemies to tie open source tools together to perform reconnaissance, lateral movements, and qualification harvesting. These attacks show levels of adjustment and speed that would not be possible without automation. The security team handles the product in person.
Tools like Sysdig Sage™, a fully integrated AI cloud security analyst, reduce average time by 76%. Over half of Sysdig’s customers use Sysdig Sage, with the software and business services sector leading adoption.
Here are the main ways security teams can leverage AI:
Context enrichment: AI aggregates data that quickly correlates related events and allows you to understand alerts. Summary and deduplication: AI helps you link alerts to previous incidents and focus on what’s relevant. Workflow Automation: AI handles recurring tasks such as ticket creation, vulnerability analysis, and escalation logic. Accelerating decisions: By serving as a Tier 1 analyst, AI can help human defenders move faster and make informed decisions.
The lessons are easy. In a cloud world where attacks occur at machine speed, defenses must be equally agile.
AI Security: New Digital Crown Jewel Protection
But here’s the flip. AI itself is the main target that needs to be protected. The SYSDIG Threat Research Team has been identifying and reporting more attacks on LLMS and other AI tools since mid-2024. Sysdig observed a 500% surge in crowd workloads including AI/ML packages in 2024, indicating a large adoption. However, the recent 25% decline suggests that teams are succumbing to security and improving governance.
Recommendations for protecting AI systems include ensuring minimal privileges to control root access by authenticating and restricting access to public endpoints, protecting APIs by disabling open defaults such as unauthorized administrator panels, enforcing minimal privileges to control root access, limiting rising penetration, monitoring Shadow AI through workload auditing for workload auditing of rogue models, and implementing packages of packages. Conclusion: AI requires the same level of rigor and protection as other business systems, especially as it is embedded deeply in both customer-oriented and backend operations.
Runtime Security: Not an option, but basics
Prevention may be the best governance, but in today’s cloud-native, ephemeral world, runtime visibility is the perfect shot for sliding crack movements.
For real-time threat detection
Runtime detection is not just a defensive layer, but a strategic need in today’s cloud-native environment. The windows to detect and respond are very narrow, as 60% of the containers live within a minute and CI/CD pipelines appear as high-value targets due to false shortages and unstable defaults. The cloud attack was deployed in under 10 minutes, prompting the creation of 555 cloud detection and response benchmarks. This is a framework in which security teams can detect threats in 5 seconds, investigate in 5 minutes, and guide their security teams to respond within the next five minutes.
Why Runtime Context Is Important
Traditional vulnerabilities put the team’s burial team under noise. However, less than 6% of the high and critical vulnerabilities are proactive in production. That means the rest is distracting.
Runtime insights can help security teams:
Actual risk prioritization: Focus on vulnerabilities loaded in memory. Noise Reduction: Reduce vulnerability list by up to 99%. Better Collaboration: Provides clear context repair steps for developers.
CI/CD Pipeline: Growing Targets
CI/CD workflows are at the heart of modern DevOps, enabling fast, automated delivery. But in 2025 they also emerged as an attractive, increasingly exploited offensive surface. From compromised repository to misunderstood automation, attackers are finding creative ways to infiltrate build systems.
Several shocking vulnerabilities discovered this year reveal how exposed the CI/CD pipeline is. These incidents act as wake-up calls. The build system is part of the attack surface. Without real-time visibility, you won’t be able to find an attack until it’s too late.
Tools like Falco and Falco Actions help defenders stay one step ahead by detecting threats while they are running, not after the damage has occurred.
Open Source: The Heart of Modern Security Innovation
Security has always been about the community. The attacker must share the tool and the defender must also share it. Open source tools have strengthened many of our modern cloud defense strategies.
FALCO has evolved from a basic intrusion detection system (IDS) to a powerful real-time detection engine, and now supports the open source community and supports EBPF for deeper visibility into cloud-native environments. Integrate with tools like Falco Actions, Falcosidekick, and Falco Talon to provide a wider range of control, automation and workflow customization. This makes FALCO especially valuable in regulatory sectors such as finance, healthcare and government where optimal deployment and custom detection rules are important for compliance and control.
EU data law and the rise of sovereign security
With regulations that will take effect from the EU Data Law in September 2025, organizations are required to control and localize their data. Open source plays a key role in meeting these requirements by enabling self-hosted deployment, providing a transparent codebase for auditing and compliance, and fostering community-driven innovation that supports trust and flexibility.
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