Cybersecurity: Global Threat Report

CrowdStrike recently published its 2025 Global Threat Report, which provides an overview of the current cyber threat landscape.  The report says that cyberattacks are escalating in speed, volume, and sophistication, and that once inside organizations, attackers act within seconds. Here are some of the report’s significant findings:

– Breakout time — how long it takes for an adversary to start moving laterally across your network — reached an all-time low in the past year: The average fell to 48 minutes, and the fastest breakout time we observed dropped to a mere 51 seconds.

– Voice phishing (vishing) attacks, where adversaries call victims to amplify their activities with persuasive social engineering techniques, saw explosive growth — up 442% between the first and second half of 2024.

– Attacks related to initial access boomed, accounting for 52% of vulnerabilities observed by CrowdStrike in 2024. Providing access as a service became a thriving business, as advertisements for access brokers increased 50% year-over-year.

– Among nation-states, China-nexus activity surged 150% overall, with some targeted industries suffering 200% to 300% more attacks than the previous year.

– GenAI played a pivotal role in sophisticated cyberattack campaigns in 2024. It enabled FAMOUS CHOLLIMA to create highly convincing fake IT job candidates that infiltrated victim organizations, and it helped China-, Russia-, and Iran-affiliated threat actors conduct AI-driven disinformation and influence operations to disrupt elections.

The report emphasizes the growing sophistication of attackers, and among other things notes that threat actors are expected to continue aggressively targeting devices at the network periphery, through end-of-life (EOL) product exploitations targeting network appliances. It also points out that 2024 saw the emergence of threat actors who use cloud-specific skills to exclusively target cloud environments, and that the focus on targeting cloud environments is likely to intensify in 2025.