San Diego’s Cyber Center of Excellence and the San Diego Business Journal hosted a quarterly cybersecurity panel in mid-August, warning local businesses that cybercrime attempts and financial losses are rising across nearly every industry as AI-driven attacks become more sophisticated.
Cybercrime-related financial losses reported to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center surpassed $20 billion nationwide in 2025, with total complaints rising more than 17% year over year. The global average cost of a single data breach has reached a record $5 million, a 12% increase from the prior year, according to IBM.
“More than half of these costly attacks are aimed at small and medium-sized businesses, which are our region’s economic engine,” said Gary Hayslip, secretary of the CCOE and field CISO for Zenity. “Now pair that with the continued shortage and rapidly changing roles and necessary skillsets of cybersecurity professionals to thwart these attacks and it becomes mission critical to address this universal risk.”
San Diego’s cybersecurity sector includes more than 1,350 cyber-related firms and the U.S. Navy’s Information Warfare Systems Command, providing more than 29,000 jobs and generating an economic impact of $4.3 billion — equivalent to 26 Comic-Cons.
Panelist Leonard LeVine, executive director for cybersecurity at the San Diego County Office of Education, said AI is accelerating the pace of attacks. “Now with AI, we know exploits are being identified just as fast, if not faster than the vulnerabilities themselves, let alone the fixes and the patches and the updates to follow,” he said.
LeVine noted that the SDCOE, which oversees 43 school districts, 128 charter schools, and five community colleges, has historically lacked the resources to adequately protect against increasingly sophisticated attacks, including convincing phishing emails and AI-generated voice and video content.
Blair Canavan of Thales argued the concept of critical infrastructure should be expanded beyond water and power facilities. “It doesn’t matter the size or the scope of your business, it’s the evolving threat and the sophistication of those exploits that’s affecting us all,” he said. “Often, they’ll use the lower-hanging fruit, the ones less protected and the ones most vulnerable, to test these theories.”
The panel also warned about risks from agentic AI systems, which can operate with minimal human oversight. Hayslip said businesses should treat AI agents as “digital employees” with appropriate access controls.
“In my three decades of being an information security executive, I’ve never seen technology evolve as rapidly as it is today,” Hayslip said.
Sources: San Diego Business Journal, SDBJ
