Matthew RosenquistFounder & CISO Advisor, Cybersecurity Insights · CISO, Cybersecurity Strategist, & Industry Advisor

Rising Geopolitical and Nation State Cyber Threats

23 Apr 2025 · 2 min

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1:33

In this briefing, the speaker presents a 2025 outlook on nation‑state cyber threats, asserting that attacks by aggressive states will intensify. Four primary actors—Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran—are highlighted as targeting critical infrastructure, especially financial systems, cryptocurrency platforms, and increasingly, healthcare services. The analysis frames cyber operations as a strategic tool of foreign policy, employed to exert pressure and influence amid ongoing hot and cold conflicts such as the wars in Ukraine and Israel and the broader Russia‑West tensions. The overall tone is cautionary, warning that the cyber threat environment is becoming more pervasive and weaponized across essential sectors.

Chapters

Give us an angle on your latest thoughts of the geopolitical landscape and nation-state threats and really how bad is it out there? I don't want to scare anybody, but, so, you know, I have outlined some interesting thoughts in my 2025 predictions. And one of them, in fact, the first one, was the fact that we're going to see more nation-state attacks, aggressive nations. And we got 4 big ones out there, Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran. And we've seen that. We've seen them go after our critical infrastructures, particularly our finance infrastructure, cryptocurrency, things of that sort. And we expect that we're also going to see healthcare get hurt even more than it did last year. And we've got a lot of turmoil going on right now in the world. If we look at it, we've got cyber being used essentially as a tool for foreign policy by many different countries out there. We've got hot wars going on, we've got cold wars going on, right? Look at Ukraine, Israel, look at what's going on with Russia and the West in Europe, right? We've got all these things happening. And because of that, nation states are using cyber as a tool to push that foreign policy to influence or to inhibit certain things. And put pressure on countries and people and things of that sort.