The growing impact of nation-state cyber-attacks on businesses
Nation-state cyber threats no longer stop at government and defense. Here's what makes these attackers different, and what it actually takes to raise the bar against them.
Cyber threats from nation-state actors have broken out of the shadows of government and defense, and are now casting a wide net over the technology, identity systems, cloud platforms, suppliers, and service providers that everyday businesses rely on.
The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) describes state actors as continuing to present a significant threat to both UK and global cyber security; its 2025 Annual Review showed that the number of nationally significant incidents reached 204 during the reporting year, up from 89 the year before, and the number of highly significant incidents had also increased for three years in a row.
At the same time, the distinction between state activity and the wider cyber-criminal ecosystem is becoming less useful from a defensive perspective. State-backed groups, cyber criminals, commercial intrusion providers and state-aligned hacktivists employ many of the same techniques and exploit many of the same weaknesses.
For IT leaders, this raises an uncomfortable question: what can an individual organization realistically achieve when the potential adversary has the resources of a whole nation-state at its disposal?
We shouldn’t be trying to out-hack state-sponsored groups. Instead, organizations should be focused on becoming much harder to compromise, limiting lateral movement, and improving recovery capabilities.
The first step is cyber hygiene.
The unique threat of nation-state attacks
Nation-state adversaries display characteristics that distinguish them from conventional cyber criminals.
Resourcing and persistence
State-sponsored attackers have access to significant financial, intelligence, and technical resources. Their campaigns can last a long time, letting them wait for chances that most financially motivated criminals would give up on.
Strategic objectives
Financial gain is often not the main goal. Instead, these attackers may focus on espionage, stealing intellectual property, gaining political influence, surveillance, causing disruption, or setting up long-term access for future use.
Supply-chain targeting
Rather than attacking organizations directly, advanced threat actors may compromise trusted technology providers, suppliers, or infrastructure components to reach their real targets further down the line.
Stealth and patience
Advanced attackers often keep a low profile after getting in. They use legitimate tools and credentials, and make their actions look like normal user or administrator activity.
Pre-positioning
Attackers do not always act right away. Sometimes, they gain access in advance, expecting it will be useful for them later.
Recent NCSC reporting illustrates the breadth of the threat. It identifies China as a highly sophisticated cyber actor targeting organizations globally, while Russian, Iranian, and North Korean actors pursue objectives ranging from espionage and disruption to revenue generation. The NCSC has also warned of state-linked campaigns that compromise large numbers of internet-connected devices and target critical networks.
One important lesson for businesses is that you do not have to be a high-profile target to get caught up in a nation-state campaign.
Your organization might give attackers a way to reach another target. Your systems could become part of a network they control. Your credentials might let them access a customer or partner. Or you could be using the vulnerable technology they are attacking on a large scale.
Achievable security standards for organizations
No single business can match the resources of a major intelligence service, but that is not the standard organizations need to meet. Attackers still depend on the technical environment they find. They need vulnerabilities, credentials, trust relationships, misconfigurations, or other ways to get in and expand access. Every unnecessary privilege removed, critical vulnerability patched, and exposed service eliminated reduces their options.
At CovertSwarm, we use continuous offensive security testing to validate whether the controls an organization relies on hold up against that kind of realistic attacker behavior. For anyone worried about sophisticated adversaries, the question isn’t simply whether the right controls are in place; it’s whether they work when someone is actively trying to break them.
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