CrowdStrike's 2026 insights and the insanity of vendor nomenclature for threat actors.

Throughout 2025, adversaries grew more evasive than ever before.

As defenses became more sophisticated, threat actors increasingly exploded the inherent trust in supply chain partners, legitimate software, internal systems, and employees to gain initial access and move undetected.

This relentless targeting of trusted relationships defines 2025 as the year of the evasive adversary.

If only there was a strategy or an intelligent approach to removing trust from inherent systems or inherent trust from systems, that would be revolutionary.

If only there was a thing about that somewhere out there, gosh, someone should come up with something.

Adversaries of all motivations exploited AI technology throughout 2025 to accelerate, optimize, and troubleshoot their existing techniques.

Demonstrating increased fluency with AI tools, adversaries used the technology for attack types such as social engineering and information operations.

Most that integrated AI increased their attack volume compared to 2024.

There was an 89% increase in the number of attacks by AI-enabled adversaries year over year.

Yikes.

Throughout 2025, Big game hunting or BGH.

What the fuck is that? But okay, fine, we're going to introduce another thing.

GH adversaries continue to dominate the e-crime landscape by driving high-impact ransomware operations while tailoring tradecraft to exploit security blind spots and evade detection.

That sentence there was written by AI.

Highly evasive threat actors such as Scattered Spider and Blockade Spider, okay, sure, challenge defenders by rapidly moving laterally across traditional servers, hypervisors, cloud environments, unmanaged hosts, and SaaS applications, underscoring the growing threat of cross-domain attacks.

Okay, great.

I'm not going to read through some of that because it just gets with lots of words that don't really mean anything, but yes.

Okay, so here's some stuff from CrowdStrike.

Another one with their no-hawked emoji guy.

24 new adversaries named in 2025, including Belarus adversary Umbral Bison.

Cool.

281 total adversaries now tracked by CrowdStrike.

150 active malicious activity clusters and emerging threat groups tracked.

Adversary naming conventions.

Now, at the end of this, when I get done reviewing this, I'm going to go run you through a little thing that I've built using AI because I'm like everybody else.