The report reflects Kaspersky’s broader commitment to responsible business, protecting people and organisations from cyberthreats, supporting law enforcement cooperation, investing in secure technologies, and helping strengthen the digital resilience of societies and economies.

In 2024-2025, the company continued advancing digital sustainability and strengthening global cyber resilience, reducing thedisruption, financial losses and social risks caused by cyber incidents, and enabling safer and more stable conditions for digital adoption across economies and societies.

Over the period, the number of detected advanced persistent threat (APT) groups and operations has increased significantly, by 74% compared to 2023, supported by intelligence gathered through five dedicated Expertise Centers.

Building a safer cyberworld

A significant part of Kaspersky’s social impact comes from the company’s cooperation with global law enforcement agencies. During the reporting period, the company contributed to joint operations with INTERPOL and AFRIPOL that resulted in the arrest of more than 2,600 suspected cybercriminals.

From a sustainability perspective, this shrinks the opportunities attackers can exploit, making digital environments safer for governments, businesses and individuals, and lowering the long-term economic and social costs associated with cyber incidents.

During the reporting period, Kaspersky formalised its collaborations with AFRIPOL, signing a five-year cooperation agreement, and delivered cybersecurity training to law enforcement representatives from 23 African countries, covering the fundamentals of Security Operations Center (SOC) operations and advanced threat hunting techniques.

This capacity-building work has a compounding effect: as local teams become more capable of independently detecting and responding to threats, the overall resilience of the digital ecosystem increases, while the cost and duration of cyber incidents decrease over time.

Implementing future tech

To effectively protect people, businesses and public institutions from evolving cyberthreats, Kaspersky constantly improves its security solutions and conducts cybersecurity research to stay one step ahead of attackers.

In 2024–2025 the company was granted 155 patents, including 135 AI-related ones. Its global R&D team of around 3,000 employees also produced 373 research publications.

Together, these efforts help advance the baseline of secure technologies available to the market. This reduces systemic vulnerability in digital infrastructure and supports more stable technological adoption at scale.

Responsible innovation frameworks further reinforce this effect. By joining the European Commission’s AI Pact and supporting the UN Global Digital Compact, Kaspersky has aligned its development practices with emerging global governance standards.

This contributes to sustainability by helping reduce the risks of unsafe AI deployment, such as misuse, bias or system exploitation, which could otherwise undermine trust in digital transformation.

The company’s Cyber Immunity approach, implemented through KasperskyOS, adds another layer of long-term sustainability impact by shifting security from reactive protection to architectural resilience.

Instead of repeatedly patching vulnerabilities, systems are designed to be inherently resistant to compromise, which reduces maintenance overhead, lifecycle risk and resource inefficiency in securing digital environments.

Among the new product launches, the Kaspersky eSIM Store expanded the company’s offering beyond cybersecurity into mobile connectivity.

By reducing reliance on physical SIM cards and making global mobile access more seamless, the solution supports more sustainable travel and digital lifestyles.

Together with that, Kaspersky also released Kaspersky Cloud Workload Security for protecting cloud workloads wherever they reside: on servers or virtual machines, or in private, public, or hybrid clouds, etc.

“At Kaspersky, we see cybersecurity not only as a technology issue, but as a social one. Every day, people rely on digital services to work, communicate, study, receive services and manage their lives and they need to be able to do this safely. That is why our sustainability agenda starts with our core expertise: protecting people, organisations and critical systems from cyberthreats.

But it also goes further, through responsible innovation, transparency, partnerships and support for communities.

This report shows how our technologies, research and cooperation with partners translate into practical impact: fewer risks, stronger resilience and a safer digital environment for everyone,” said Maria Losyukova, head of ESG & Sustainability at Kaspersky.

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• ESET Research has released its H2 2025 Threat Report with statistics covering the period from June through November 2025.  
• Phishing accounted for 45.7% of all detected cyber threats in South Africa during the reporting period, representing a higher share than the African average.
• ESET researchers observed continued evolution in scam activity globally, including higher-quality deepfakes, signs of AI-generated phishing websites, and short-lived advertising campaigns designed to evade detection. 
• While AI-powered malware emerged globally in H2 2025, ESET experts note that established social engineering techniques remain the primary attack vector affecting South Africa. 

ESET Research has released its latest Threat Report summarising the threat landscape trends observed in ESET telemetry and analysed by ESET threat detection and research experts in the second half of 2025.

According to the data, in South Africa, phishing remains the highest risk category impacting users and organisations, accounting for 45.7% of detected threats compared with 32.5% in Africa.

“Phishing remains the leading initial access vector affecting South African companies,” says Tony Anscombe, chief security evangelist at ESET. “The higher proportion of phishing detections reflects both attacker focus and the continued effectiveness of social engineering. Attackers are prioritising threats that allow them a greater opportunity for monetisation.”

While phishing dominates the South African market, there has been an accelerated evolution in scam activity globally. According to the report, detections of HTML-based scam campaigns such as the Nomani investment scam, have grown by 62% over the past year.

In ESET telemetry, detections of Nomani scams grew 62% year-over-year, with the trend slowing slightly in H2 2025.

Nomani scams have recently been expanding from Meta to other platforms, including YouTube. These threats have come with improved techniques that include higher resolution deep fake videos, AI-generated phishing websites and short-lived advertising campaigns which are increasingly difficult to detect.

AI remains a pervasive threat, both locally and abroad. In the second half of 2025, ESET discovered PromptLock, the first known AI-driven ransomware capable of generating malicious scripts on-demand at speed.

While AI is primarily used for crafting convincing phishing and scam content, PromptLock is an example of  a growing body of AI-driven, intelligent threats signalling a new era in cybercrime.

NFC threats are also gaining momentum, growing in both scale and sophistication, with an 87% increase in ESET telemetry and with notable upgrades and campaigns observed in the second half of 2025.

Anscombe notes that South Africa’s widespread reliance on card-based payment systems makes this class of attack more relevant than in regions where mobile money platforms dominate. These attacks rely on social engineering to persuade victims to install malicious Android applications that relay card data and PINs in real time.

Ransomware has continued its global momentum with ESET Research projecting a 40% year-on-year increase in publicly reported ransomware victims compared with 2024.

While South Africa isn’t one of the most affected countries globally, the largest number of analysed ransomware attacks were aimed at companies in the United States, followed by Spain, France, Italy and Canada, Anscombe points out that South African organisations have experienced a number of ransomware incidents during the reporting period. Two of the ransomware-as-a-service solutions dominating the market at present are Akira and Qilin, with a newcomer, Warlock, introducing innovative evasion techniques.

EDR killers are proliferating as well, underscoring the relevance of endpoint detection and response tools in mitigating the threat.

South Africa is also actively participating in efforts to counter cybercrime. The country took part in Operation Sentinel, a joint law enforcement initiative coordinated by INTERPOL and AFRIPOL, which resulted in 574 arrests and the recovery of approximately $3 million linked to cyber-enabled crimes.

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