Author: Jeff Weeks, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer
- The biggest data breaches of 2025 were driven by familiar gaps, not new threats.
- Strong identity controls, patch discipline and vendor oversight make a measurable difference.
- Organizations that invest in fundamentals experience less downtime and reputational harm.
Complacency remains one of cybersecurity’s most expensive liabilities. During 2025, incident reports showed familiar root causes behind high‑impact breaches: delayed patching of known vulnerabilities, weak identity controls, and over‑trusted third parties.
The pattern echoes years of data from independent studies like Verizon’s Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR). The report also includes industry roundups of 2025 incidents and supply‑chain compromises.
What did the biggest breaches of 2025 have in common? First, attackers moved quickly on n‑days — known software flaws where a fix already existed but hadn’t yet been applied. Lagging patch cycles left externally exposed services and apps vulnerable for weeks.
Second, user access remained the primary battleground: password reuse, inconsistent multi-factor authentication (MFA) enforcement, and insufficiently restricted access controls allowed intruders to elevate privileges, create additional accounts, and access systems beyond the initial point of compromise, increasing overall impact.
Third, vendor ecosystems multiplied risk; organizations learned the hard way that a supplier’s misconfiguration can become their data breach and their headline.
For financial institutions and businesses, the operational lessons are concrete:
- Set clear timelines for applying critical security updates to public-facing systems (for example, within 7–14 days) and track how quickly patches are applied and where exceptions occur.
- Protect user access as carefully as your network perimeter by using stronger multi-factor authentication where possible (such as biometric or hardware-based logins), regularly reviewing who has elevated access, and automating access changes when employees join, change roles, or leave.
- Strengthen oversight of third-party vendors by requiring greater transparency into the software they provide, continuously monitoring for external security exposure, and setting clear contractual expectations for how quickly vendors must notify you of a breach.
- Demonstrate incident readiness by holding twice-yearly breach-response exercises with business leaders and preparing internal and external communications in advance.
- Consumers are not powerless in this story. Most fraud that occurs after a data breach happens because old passwords are still in use, are reused, or account recovery processes are too easy to exploit.
Individuals can reduce exposure by using unique passwords (a password manager helps), enabling MFA everywhere, setting transaction alerts, and freezing credit by default. The Federal Trade Commission provides detailed consumer recovery steps.
The economics are straightforward: every month of deferred hygiene adds compounded risk. Organizations that kept accurate system inventories, applied patches based on risk, practiced their incident response plans, and verified third-party controls experienced less downtime and lower legal and reputational costs.
Complacency is expensive. Disciplined fundamentals pay dividends.
About the Author
Jeff has been with First National Bank of Omaha for more than 26 years and is currently the Senior Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer. The executive leadership and oversight provided by Jeff in the development, management, and execution of information security for FNBO enables the company’s ability to posture and protect private, personal information, and assets of the company’s clients, employees, and business partners.
