Understanding Threat Actors: Who’s Behind Cyberattacks and How to Stay Protected

Every cyberattack has an origin. Behind every phishing email, ransomware infection or insider breach is someone with a goal. These individuals or groups are known as threat actors, and understanding who they are is just as important as knowing how they operate.

In our guide to successful cyberattack vectors, we explored the most common techniques attackers use to infiltrate organizations. This blog looks at the people and motivations behind those attacks. To build effective defenses, businesses must understand the risks they’re facing: who threat actors are, what drives them, how they attack and how to stop them before data is exfiltrated.

Threat actors are not a one-size-fits-all threat. They have a wide range of sophistication, resources and motivations. Knowing who’s behind an attack helps organizations tailor their defenses, anticipate risks and act faster when threats emerge.

Generally, the types of threats businesses will face will fall into one of these categories:

• Nation-States: Highly skilled and well-funded, these groups are backed by governments and often target critical infrastructure, political institutions, or intellectual property. They have significant resources and focus on stealth, the goal often being to exfiltrate data without being detected.
• Cybercriminal Groups: These financially motivated networks are responsible for the majority of ransomware and extortion attacks. They prioritize profit and data theft and can rapidly adapt to new defenses.
• Insider Threats: This covers employees, contractors or partners. Their actions are harder to detect due to built-in trust. Motives may include sabotage or financial gain – or breaches may stem from carelessness.
• Hacktivists: Ideologically-driven hackers seek to disrupt, deface or leak data in protest. They may lack advanced technical skills, but can still cause significant reputational damage with targeted attacks.
• Script Kiddies: These inexperienced individuals usually use off-the-shelf tools to exploit known vulnerabilities. While often seen as low-risk, their unpredictable behavior and access to powerful malware kits can still cause real harm.

While the tools and techniques may vary depending on the type of cybercrime, threat actors always have a goal. Understanding their motivations helps organizations prioritize defenses, particularly as attacks become more strategic and targeted.

• Financial Gain: The most common motive. Threat actors typically deploy ransomware to encrypt or exfiltrate data, then extort payment. Double and triple extortion models increase pressure by threatening public release or resale of stolen data.
• Espionage and Surveillance: Nation-states often aim to gather intelligence, monitor activity, or steal intellectual property (IP) from rival nations, defense contractors, or critical industries.
• Ideological or Political Goals: Hacktivists and politically motivated groups seek visibility or disruption. Targets may include corporations seen as unethical, or governments viewed as oppressive.
• Corporate Sabotage: Insider threats or hired actors may seek to damage a competitor’s reputation, leak trade secrets, or get inside information about IP or future plans.
• Notoriety and Challenge: Less skilled actors may attack systems simply for bragging rights or to test their capabilities.

No matter their motive, threat actors rely on proven tactics to target attack surfaces, breach systems and exfiltrate data. While new techniques continue to emerge, most successful attacks still fall into a few well-established categories. These include:

• Ransomware: Delivered through malicious links or exploited vulnerabilities, ransomware encrypts data or steals it outright. With 94 percent of attacks now involving data theft, tools like anti data exfiltration (ADX) are essential to containing the damage.
• Phishing: Phishing uses fake emails, messages or calls to trick users into revealing credentials or installing malware. Thanks to AI, these attacks are more convincing than ever.
• Social Engineering: These attacks manipulate human behavior, bypassing technical defenses to target employees – who are often the weakest link in the security chain. Even well-trained employees can be caught off guard, making continuous awareness training vital.
• Network Vulnerabilities: Weaknesses in infrastructure such as unpatched software, misconfigured firewalls or open ports offer direct paths into internal systems. Once inside, attackers can move laterally to access sensitive data.

The fallout from a cyberattack can be severe and far-reaching. Financial loss is often the first and most damaging consequence. IBM’s 2024 Cost of a Data Breach Report puts the global average breach cost at $4.88 million, rising to over $10.9 million in healthcare. These expenses include ransom payments, legal fees and the cost of recovery and investigation.

Operational disruption is also significant and can lead to major costs. For example, the 2024 attack on Change Healthcare caused major outages in pharmacy and billing systems, with total estimated losses exceeding $2.4 billion.

In the longer term, reputational damage is a major issue. The most obvious result of this is a loss of trust, which in turn leads to lower revenue as customers abandon the brand. It can take years to recover from this, especially if sensitive personal data is compromised.

To avoid these outcomes, proactive defense against threat actors is not just best practice, it’s business critical.

With the threat of these consequences greater than ever, prevention alone isn’t enough. Cybercriminals use increasingly sophisticated tactics. Indeed, even once-basic vectors like brute force attacks are now highly advanced, so businesses must assume that a breach will occur. The most effective strategy is therefore a defense-in-depth approach that layers protection across users, endpoints and networks to detect and neutralize threats at every stage.

A proactive security strategy starts with fundamentals like multi-factor authentication, access control and regular employee training to reduce human risk. But it also requires visibility into what happens after a perimeter is breached.

This is where solutions like anti data exfiltration (ADX) technology play a vital role. Unlike traditional tools that focus solely on stopping intrusions, ADX is designed to prevent attackers from stealing data. By monitoring and blocking unauthorized outbound traffic in real time, ADX stops exfiltration before damage is done.

Combined with endpoint protection, network monitoring and continuous risk assessment, this layered approach gives businesses the resilience to withstand modern cyberthreats.

As threat actors grow more organized and well-resourced, their tactics are becoming more calculated, evasive, and difficult to detect. One of the biggest drivers of this is AI.

This is already being used by cybercriminals to automate reconnaissance, craft convincing phishing messages and even identify exploitable vulnerabilities faster than traditional scanning tools.

For example, one recent study found AI-supported spear phishing attacks can fool more than 50 percent of targets, which could make traditional employee training processes less effective.

Meanwhile, the shift toward multi-layered extortion, where attackers encrypt, steal, and then threaten to leak or auction data, continues to rise. These tactics are particularly effective in sectors like healthcare and finance, where data sensitivity and regulatory pressure are highest.

To combat these threats, businesses must invest in intelligent, adaptive solutions that go beyond static defenses and meet the new challenges posed by today’s ever-more sophisticated threat actors, from early identification to faster incident response.