Hacktivists’ Threat to Infrastructure and AI Among Largest Cybersecurity Trends

Orange Cyberdefense has released its Security Navigator 2025, a report summarizing its research into cybersecurity threats and latest trends. The scope of the report covers a broad array of cybersecurity threats, including threats to mobile networks, hacktivism and generative AI-enabled attacks.

Hacktivism in particular has been highlighted as an emerging threat, with Orange Cyberdefense's head of security research, Charl van der Walt, saying during a press event in London yesterday that the term has evolved in the last ten years or so and is now dominated by state-aligned groups, blurring the line between state and criminal. These groups carry out attacks aligned with a country's geopolitical goals, with a step change in the volume of such attacks following Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

The research focused on one specific group, said to be the most prolific one with 6,600 attacks since 2022, which targeted Europe in 96% of cases. The most common strategy, van der Walt said, are distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. The targets they select focus not only on tangible disruption, but also erosion of public trust in the state.

At the same time, the Security Navigator also points to an increase in more sophisticated attacks on assets like utilities, factories, transportation and telecom infrastructure attributed to hacktivists. "They seem to be developing a proficiency which is actually very scarce, which is the ability to attack and impact complex industrial control systems," van der Walt said.

Related:Consumer Sector Becomes Top Ransomware Target

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