Number of ransomware victims increased year-on-year.
Around half of all cyber-attacks were attributed to financially motivated cyber-criminals in 2024.
According to Cognyte’s Threat Landscape Report for 2025, 49 percent were due to those cyber-criminals, while state-sponsored actors accounted for 36 percent of attacks. Hacktivists accounted for four percent of attacks in 2024.
The number of attacks attributed to nation-state actors increased from 33 percent to 36 percent year on year, with Cognyte suggesting this could be due to the ongoing regional and global conflicts, and the involvement of cyber-attacks as a tactic to support the different sides of the conflicts.
Elsewhere, ransomware gangs claimed responsibility for targeting 6,133 victims in 2024, an increase from 5,336 claimed victims in 2023.
Written by
Dan Raywood is a B2B journalist with 25 years of experience, including covering cybersecurity for the past 17 years. He has extensively covered topics from Advanced Persistent Threats and nation-state hackers to major data breaches and regulatory changes.
He has spoken at events including 44CON, Infosecurity Europe, RANT Forum, BSides Scotland, Steelcon and the National Cyber Security Show, and served as editor of SC Media UK, Infosecurity Magazine and IT Security Guru. He was also an analyst with 451 Research and a product marketing lead at Tenable.
