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Key Findings
- The number of newly formed ransomware groups increased by 30% during the 12 months to the end of October 2025
- New, white-label Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) platforms now enable cybercriminal groups to create their own brands
- Cybercriminal groups are abandoning encryption in favour of pure data exfiltration for faster, lower-cost cyber-attacks
- Global vulnerability disclosures rose 21% to exceed 35,000 in the year to the end of October 2025
- First evidence of a nation-state-backed threat group leveraging Claude’s agentic capabilities to orchestrate attacks, with AI agents performing up to 90% of the intrusion activity
- Threat actors from Russia, China, and Iran remain the top threats to the public sector as they sustain large cyber espionage campaigns, while nation-state-sponsored bad actors likely earned over $2 billion from cybercrime in 2025.
- Organised crime remains a severe threat to the manufacturing sector as threat actors exploit exposed remote-access services, legacy equipment, and weakly segmented Operational Technology (OT) adjacent networks
- Cyber activity targeting the sector increased by 14%
- Threat activity spanned 57 target countries with the US, Germany, and
- Israel being targeted most frequently
- Ransomware remained the sector’s most prominent threat, with targeting growing by 12% Data breaches saw an 11% decline
Take Action
Every sector faces cyber security challenges. Our range of managed security services and incident response services are designed to defend and protect organisations wherever they are on their security journey.
To explore how intelligence-led security approaches translate into practical defensive outcomes, organisations are encouraged to participate in the Microsoft Threat Protection Workshop.





