2025 Cyber Incident Trends: What Businesses Must Know

The cybersecurity landscape continues to evolve at an alarming pace as malicious actors exploit increasingly sophisticated techniques to disrupt organizations across all sectors. From artificial intelligence-powered intrusions to intensified nation-state campaigns, businesses face unprecedented challenges in protecting their digital assets and maintaining operational resilience. Understanding these emerging threats and implementing robust defensive strategies has become critical for organizational survival in today's interconnected digital ecosystem.

Artificial Intelligence Transforms Cyber Attack Methods

Artificial intelligence has fundamentally changed how threat actors conduct cyber operations. Recent data reveals that approximately sixteen percent of reported cyber incidents now involve attackers using AI tools, particularly image and language generation models, to execute sophisticated social engineering campaigns. Generative AI has dramatically increased attack effectiveness by creating more convincing deceptions and enabling widespread automation of intrusion tools.

Threat actors deploy AI technology in several dangerous ways. Deepfake technology allows criminals to create realistic audio and video impersonations of executives and support personnel, which they use to authorize fraudulent wire transfers, steal user credentials, and compromise accounts. One particularly devastating incident involved attackers using publicly available footage to create convincing deepfake videos of a company's Chief Financial Officer and employees, successfully deceiving a victim into transferring over twenty-five million dollars to the criminals.

Voice phishing, or "vishing," represents another AI-enhanced threat vector. Attackers leverage AI-generated scripts and voice clones in targeted telephone campaigns designed to persuade victims into downloading malicious payloads, establishing remote support sessions, or disclosing their login credentials. Additionally, threat actors use generative AI tools to produce highly tailored phishing emails and text messages that include contextual details and natural language patterns, significantly increasing the likelihood that victims will click malicious links and surrender their credentials.

Ransomware Attacks Grow More Aggressive and Costly

Ransomware continues to plague organizations across every industry sector, with recent reports showing a twelve percent year-over-year increase in ransomware-related breaches. Attackers have adopted increasingly aggressive extortion techniques and deployed more sophisticated tools to maximize pressure on victims. Modern ransomware campaigns combine traditional data encryption with disruptive tactics including employee harassment and threats to critical operations, resulting in extended downtime and substantially higher recovery costs.

Several notable ransomware groups have dominated recent headlines. The Scattered Spider threat group has resurfaced by employing advanced social engineering techniques to gain initial access to organizations across diverse industries. Meanwhile, the LockBit ransomware operation re-emerged in early 2025 with its updated toolkit, LockBit 4.0, launching aggressive extortion campaigns particularly targeting the private sector throughout the United States.

Interestingly, organizational responses to ransomware attacks appear to be shifting. Recent industry research indicates that approximately sixty-three percent of surveyed organizations declined to pay ransoms over the past year, representing an increase from fifty-nine percent in 2024. This trend suggests growing resistance to criminal extortion demands, though it also highlights the need for robust backup and recovery capabilities that enable organizations to restore operations without capitulating to attackers.

Nation-State Threats Intensify Amid Geopolitical Tensions

Nation-state threat actors have significantly intensified their cyber operations, targeting telecommunications infrastructure, critical systems, and strategic third-party service providers. These sophisticated campaigns commonly employ cyber espionage techniques and advanced deception tactics to steal user credentials and gain unauthorized access to sensitive networks and data.

China-based threat actor groups have dramatically escalated their activities over the past year, with certain targeted industries experiencing a two hundred to three hundred percent surge in attacks compared to the previous year. Two high-profile intrusion campaigns captured global attention: Salt Typhoon and Volt Typhoon. The Salt Typhoon operation successfully infiltrated major telecommunications networks in a wide-reaching cyber espionage campaign, while Volt Typhoon involved prepositioning malicious code within critical infrastructure systems, raising serious concerns about potential escalation into physical harm or widespread disruption.

Nation-state affiliated actors have also exploited social engineering tactics beyond technical intrusions. North Korea-affiliated threat actors infiltrated US companies by fabricating documentation and creating convincing candidate profiles to secure employment in IT support roles, positions they subsequently leveraged to harvest user credentials and execute fraudulent financial transactions. Iran-linked actors have notably adopted generative AI tools, with one group reportedly amplifying leaked information through AI chatbots following a hack-and-leak campaign targeting journalists' sensitive data in July 2025.

Third-Party Supply Chain Attacks Present Growing Risks

Third-party attacks occur when threat actors compromise supply-chain partners, vendors, or software providers and leverage that access to infiltrate target organizations' networks. These attacks frequently cascade across interconnected systems, impacting multiple downstream entities and customers who depend on the compromised software or services. Recent threat intelligence data highlights a rise in financially motivated cybercrime targeting software providers as initial entry points into broader corporate ecosystems.

By breaching third-party vendors, attackers can bypass traditional perimeter defenses and gain privileged access to sensitive business environments. These threat actors frequently exploit hosted environments such as cloud platforms and software-as-a-service ecosystems, moving laterally across customer instances, harvesting credentials, and exfiltrating proprietary data at scale. This tactic enables widespread impact, particularly when vendors serve multiple clients across different industries.

Third-party supply chain compromises have become among the most costly and persistent cyber threat vectors facing organizations today. Recent data indicates these breaches incur an average cost of nearly five million dollars and require longer periods to identify and contain than any other form of cyber intrusion. The complexity of vendor relationships and extended dwell times contribute to delayed response efforts and increased exposure for affected organizations.

Essential Recommendations for Cyber Resilience

Maintaining a comprehensive, risk-based cybersecurity program remains the most effective defense against evolving cyber threats. Organizations should prioritize incident response preparedness by conducting tabletop exercises involving key executives, board representatives, and departmental heads to validate roles, escalation procedures, and decision-making frameworks. These exercises should incorporate emerging threats such as malicious use of generative AI to ensure teams are prepared for realistic scenarios.

Policy management requires ongoing attention. Organizations must regularly review and update incident response plans, business continuity procedures, and communication approval processes to ensure they reflect current threats and comply with rapid notification requirements such as the European Union's NIS2 Directive twenty-four-hour initial notification requirement and the SEC's four-business-day disclosure rule for material incidents. Updated policies should be circulated to appropriate stakeholders and should address risk tolerance for emerging technologies like generative AI.

Mitigating third-party risks demands robust vendor due diligence and contractual safeguards. Organizations should perform criticality analyses to identify vendors and components whose compromise would cause the greatest operational impact. Key protective measures include requiring vendor attestations of secure software development practices, implementing strong contractual protections with prompt incident notification requirements and audit rights, conducting regular assessments of vendor security practices, and testing response efforts through tabletop exercises involving third-party supplier scenarios.

Vulnerability management processes must be prompt and systematic given the frequency of security patches and exploit developments. Organizations should maintain documented processes to identify, assess, prioritize, remediate, and track vulnerabilities while assigning clear ownership and deadlines for remediation activities. Implementing continuous monitoring and proactive patch management tools that produce auditable logs enables organizations to address vulnerabilities before threat actors can exploit them.

Finally, engaging with industry groups and staying informed about regulatory and law enforcement updates strengthens organizational security posture. Despite recent legal uncertainty around cybersecurity information sharing following the expiration of certain statutory provisions, timely and coordinated information sharing remains vital. Organizations should join industry-specific cybersecurity groups to stay informed of sector-specific threats and best practices while monitoring updates from government agencies and subscribing to law enforcement threat intelligence bulletins.

While eliminating cyber risk entirely remains impossible, prioritizing incident response readiness and regulatory compliance builds technical resilience and positions organizations more favorably from both operational and legal perspectives when they inevitably become targets of cyberattacks.

Source: https://www.mayerbrown.com/en/insights/publications/2025/10/2025-cyber-incident-trends-what-your-business-needs-to-know