2025 CrowdStrike Global Threat Report

Don’t Underestimate Today’s Enterprising Adversaries

CloudStrike’s latest research demonstrates that adversaries are becoming more efficient, focused, and business-like in their approach — in many ways, more like the enterprise organizations they prey upon. As such, the theme for the 2025 CrowdStrike Global Threat Report is “the enterprising adversary”.

• Highly effective adversaries across all major categories — nation-state, eCrime, and hacktivist — have become early and avid adopters of generative AI. The “force multiplier” impact of off-the-shelf chatbots has made Gen AI a popular addition to the global hacker toolbox.
• Easy access to commercial large language models (LLMs) is making adversaries more productive. Using LLMs shortens learning curves and development cycles and enables attackers to increase the scale and pace of their cyber attacks.

Evidence of the impact of Gen AI and LMMs is seen in these statistics:

48 The average Breakout Time, in minutes, it takes an attacker to begin moving across your network and systems. Cyber attacks are moving quicker and more efficiently through victim’s environments, making it more difficult to identify and respond before significant damage occurs.

422% The growth in Voice Phishing (vishing) attacks between the first half and second half of 2024. Victims easily fall prey to persuasive social engineering techniques when they believe they are speaking to a known person on the phone.

52% The growth in initial access attacks in 2024. As the name implies, Initial Access Attacks provide cyber attackers with access to your systems and data. This access is then sold to others who use this access for data exfiltration, impersonation, cryptoware, and ransomware attacks.

150% The percentage increase in cyber attacks originating or executed by Chinese-based organizations and/or the Chinese government.

The purpose of this whitepaper is to arm you with the knowledge you need to keep a step ahead of these threat actors — and to never, ever underestimate them. Use this information as you assess your cybersecurity posture, solutions, services, investments, and budge