- Crowdstrikes Global Threat Report highlights worrying threats
- Chinese state -sponsored actors have increased activities reporting allegations
- Generative AI also allows attackers to develop rapidly
We are still in the early days of 2025, but Crowdstrik’s global threat report has determined what cyber security teams should expect for the coming year. The last half of 2024 experienced that the vulnerability threat landscape developed, with the adoption of generative AI, which gave a huge boost to social technical attacks around the world.
Crowdstrike identified seven new ‘China-Nexus’ opponents in 2024, with Chinese sponsored attacks increasing 150% overall. Some industries suffered an increase of 200% -300% in attack activity year to year, most significantly in financial services, media, manufacturing and technical sectors.
Concerned critical targets such as state agencies, technology and telecommunications sectors also an increase of 50% in Chinese threat acting events compared to 2023. It doesn’t come too much of a surprise to most, especially given the high profiled salt typhoon attack that violated 9 major telecommunications companies at the end of 2025.
AI striker
Generative AI lowers the barrier for entry for cyber criminals and is a tool that makes cybercrime more accessible. Most cyber security teams will tell you the frequency of attacks that criminals are capable of exploiting are skyrocketed with AI, but the technology also allows for the creation of more and more compelling fraud, especially social technical fraud.
Crowdstrikes research shows that Deepfake -Video and Voting Clones are used to scam companies and individuals, so cyber security teams will probably need to move some focus to tackle the threat of deep -faked in the workplace.
Looking ahead, the vulnerability utilization landscape is “remains a critical concern”, with threat players who are expected to aggressively target defective devices and life products, so crowdstrike confirms the importance of being proactive with patches, software updates and hardware upgrades.
These trends are expected to continue to develop into 2025 considering rising geopolitical tensions and the development of new technologies that will more than likely allow cyber criminals to perform more frequent and sophisticated attacks.
