Threat Actors in Cybersecurity: Types, Examples, and Defense 

What Is a Cyber Threat Actor?

A cyber threat actor is any individual or group that deliberately conducts malicious activity against digital systems, networks, or data. The intent is to compromise confidentiality, integrity, or availability for financial, political, strategic, or personal gain.

A threat actor is not the same as a hacker or a cybercriminal. A hacker is a broad term describing someone who explores or manipulates systems, and it can include both defensive and ethical work. A cybercriminal is a subset of threat actors whose primary motivation is financial gain. 

Threat actor is the umbrella term used by security teams because it captures motivation, capability, intent, and targeting behavior, which are critical for risk-based defense.

Threat Actor Targets and Objectives 

Threat actors pursue outcomes that directly align with their motivations and resources. These objectives shape the tools they use, the dwell time they seek, and the risks they create for defenders.

Common objectives for threat actors in cybersecurity attacks include:

• Espionage and data theft: Exfiltrating PII, intellectual property, or trade secrets.
• Financial gain: Moving money directly or via extortion (ransomware).
• Operational disruption: Halting production or services to cause chaos or leverage negotiations.
• Persistence: Gaining long-term, “low and slow” access for future exploitation.

What makes an organization attractive varies by threat actor type and motivation. The industry sector plays a significant role, with healthcare, finance, critical infrastructure, defense contractors, and technology companies facing elevated targeting from both nation-state and cybercriminal groups. 

Large enterprises offer rich data environments and multiple entry points, while smaller or mid-sized organizations often have leaner security teams and may be perceived as easier targets. Public exposure through media coverage, stock listings, or controversial business practices can draw hacktivist attention or raise an organization’s profile among adversaries.

Operational dependency is another critical factor. Organizations where uptime is mission-critical face heightened ransomware risk because attackers know disruption creates immediate pressure to pay. 

This includes operational technology environments in manufacturing and utilities, customer-facing portals in e-commerce and financial services, and just-in-time supply chains where even brief outages cascade into significant business impact.

Threat Actor Types and Attributes

Threat actor types in cybersecurity attacks vary in their objectives and sophistication. This section focuses on who these actors are and what motivates them.

Nation-state and state-linked groups

Nation-state and state-linked groups conduct operations aligned to national interests such as espionage, intellectual property theft, and strategic disruption. These actors prioritize stealth, persistence, and long-term access over speed or noise.

They are commonly tracked as Advanced Persistent Threats (APT) that operate over extended periods with clear objectives. According to Group-IB’s High-Tech Crime Trends 2025, government and military organizations were the most affected sector in 2024, making up 15.5% of APT attacks.

Cybercriminal groups and affiliates

Unlike nation-state actors, cybercriminals operate on shorter timelines and prioritize monetization speed. Many now function as structured ecosystems, using affiliate models and ransomware-as-a-service platforms. 

The UK National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and National Crime Agency (NCA) describe today’s cybercrime ecosystem as a mix of highly organised groups that can look “much like legitimate businesses” and smaller, less-organised actors that trade criminal microservices on illicit forums and marketplaces, supporting each other. This professionalization and interconnected structure make the cybercriminal economy resilient and difficult to disrupt.

Hacktivists

Hacktivists are ideologically motivated actors who conduct cyber operations to advance political, social, or environmental causes. Hacktivist operations tend to be opportunistic and higher-volume than nation-state campaigns. Their objectives include publicizing information they believe should be public, disrupting operations of organizations they oppose, or creating reputational damage. 

“Compared to other cybercrimes where there is financial motivation, hacktivism is fueled by ideology, protest, and politics, and APAC remains one of the most active regions.”

• Nikita Rostovcev, APAC Technical Head of Group-IB

Insider threats

Insider threats originate from individuals with legitimate access to systems and data. This category includes malicious insiders who deliberately abuse their access for personal gain, revenge, or ideology, as well as negligent insiders whose careless behavior creates exploitable security gaps. These actors are difficult to detect because they blend into normal user behavior. Identity misuse, privilege abuse, and anomalous access patterns are common indicators.

Supply chain and third-party compromise

Supply chain compromise involves threat actors targeting vendors, service providers, or software dependencies to gain access to downstream organizations. This allows adversaries to bypass direct defenses by exploiting trust relationships between organizations and their suppliers.

Threat Actor Tactics and Capabilities 

Threat actors deploy a mix of strategies and tactics that vary depending on their objectives and intended targets.

Phishing, credential theft, and social engineering

Phishing and social engineering are highly effective initial access methods and rank among the top three reported cybercrimes in the US. These techniques exploit human decision-making rather than technical vulnerabilities, making them reliable entry points even in well-defended environments.

Phishing campaigns range from mass-distributed emails to highly targeted spear-phishing operations tailored to specific individuals. Advanced threat actors conduct extensive reconnaissance to craft convincing pretexts and deliver payloads that evade email security controls. Credential theft often follows, with attackers using phishing pages that mimic legitimate login portals.

Malware development and deployment

Modern malware encompasses viruses, ransomware that encrypts data and demands payment, trojans that masquerade as legitimate software, and specialized tools for reconnaissance or data exfiltration.

Ransomware has evolved into a professionalized industry, with Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) platforms enabling affiliates to conduct operations using pre-built tooling. In 2024, Group-IB observed a 44% increase in advertisements for RaaS affiliates on dark web forums. 

DDoS attacks

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks overwhelm target systems with traffic, rendering services unavailable to legitimate users. Threat actors use DDoS for multiple purposes; hacktivists employ it to disrupt operations and generate attention, cybercriminals use it as an extortion mechanism, and some advanced actors deploy it as a distraction technique while conducting data theft in parallel.

These DDoS attacks are typically executed as a three-step process:

1. Massive distribution: Multiple sources are targeted, usually a network of compromised computers (a botnet) controlled remotely by the attacker.
2. Coordinated flooding: Target network or server resources are overwhelmed by traffic requests from the network of compromised devices.
3. Service breakdown: Target’s network slows down or crashes, rendering the website or online service unavailable to users.

Exploiting known vulnerabilities

While zero-day exploits receive significant attention, the vast majority of successful intrusions exploit known vulnerabilities for which patches exist but have not been applied.

Threat actors continuously scan for exploitable systems, often beginning mass exploitation within hours of a vulnerability’s public disclosure. High-value targets include internet-facing services like VPNs, web applications, and email servers. 

For security teams, vulnerability management and rapid patching are foundational defenses, but detection remains critical for environments where patching cannot occur immediately.

AI-enabled exploits 

In the blog, “Cyber Predictions for 2026 and Beyond”, Group-IB CEO Dmitry Volkov warns that AI is accelerating the pace and sophistication of cyberattacks, with AI-powered phishing, deepfake-based social engineering, and adaptive malware becoming more prevalent

Group-IB’s Fraud Protection team uncovered over 1,100 deepfake fraud attempts targeting an institution’s loan application process, in which AI-generated deepfake photos were used to bypass their digital KYC process. 

The most concerning development is live deepfakes – real-time video streams simulating legitimate individuals speaking and reacting naturally in meetings.

In 2026, autonomous AI agents are expected to become more capable of managing key stages of the kill chain, from vulnerability discovery through exploitation and lateral movement at scale. 

Furthermore, Volkov also predicts that “threat actors designing AI-driven self-propagating malware will potentially lead to the first truly AI-driven worm epidemic.” 

What Are Some Examples of Threat Actors?

There’s no shortage of threat actors behind today’s cyberattacks, but a smaller set keeps appearing across major incidents. For deeper context on the most active groups, including TTPs and targeting patterns, see Group-IB’s Top 10 Masked Actors. 

Here are a few of the most prolific groups in recent years:

Defense Strategies for SOC Teams

Defending against diverse threat actors requires SOC teams to reliably detect the threats most likely to cause harm in your environment, then respond decisively when intrusions occur. The goal is to minimize noisy alerts, improve signal quality, and make containment repeatable under pressure.

Key strategies include:

• • Detect compromise progression. Focus detection on the phases adversaries must complete to achieve their objectives, including credential abuse after initial compromise, lateral movement across network segments, and persistence mechanisms that enable long-term access.
  • Implement identity-first telemetry. Modern threat actors rely heavily on credential theft and abuse of legitimate access. Prioritize telemetry from authentication systems, privilege-escalation events, and anomalous access patterns to sensitive resources.
  • Hunt for persistence signals. Threat actors who achieve their objectives often maintain long-term access through persistence mechanisms. Proactive hunting for these signals helps identify intrusions that evade initial detection, including scheduled tasks, registry modifications, new user accounts, and web shells on internet-facing systems.

• Operationalize initial access. Common initial access vectors include phishing and credential theft, exploitation of internet-facing vulnerabilities, compromised third-party relationships, and exposed remote access services. Regularly review which initial access paths pose the greatest risk to your environment and ensure detection coverage focuses on these areas.

• • Correlate endpoint, network, and email signals. Detection programs that analyze these signals in isolation miss critical context. Effective SOC operations correlate signals across domains to increase confidence and reduce false positives.

• Standardize rapid incident scoping. SOC teams should maintain standardized procedures for quickly determining the scope of compromise, affected systems and accounts, data accessed or exfiltrated, and persistence mechanisms requiring remediation. Consistent scoping processes reduce the time between detection and containment, thereby limiting the adversary’s impact.

• Pre-approve fast containment. Pre-approving specific containment measures for defined threat scenarios allows SOC teams to act quickly without waiting for executive approval during an active incident. This is particularly critical for ransomware or data theft scenarios, where any delay can significantly increase the impact.

• Use threat intelligence to tune detections. Generic detection rules generate excessive false positives and alert fatigue. Custom threat intelligence allows security teams to focus on the actor behaviors and intrusion paths most likely to affect their environment, reducing noise and improving detection relevance.

How Group-IB Protects Organizations Against Threat Actor Cyber Attacks

Malicious threat actors could be targeting you right now. Waiting for a clear breach signal is often too late. Reducing impact depends on having a comprehensive security approach that detects early indicators, validates risk quickly, and supports decisive response under pressure. 

Group-IB helps SOC teams achieve these outcomes through the following capabilities:

• Threat Intelligence Platform provides real-time insight into active threat actors, infrastructure, and campaigns. The platform delivers adversary-specific intelligence, including TTPs, targeting patterns, and indicators of compromise for threat actors relevant to your industry and geography.
• Managed XDR provides 24/7 monitoring that correlates identity, endpoint, network, email, and cloud telemetry to detect the progression of intrusions across the attack lifecycle. This approach reduces the burden on internal SOC teams while ensuring threats are identified and contained before they escalate.
• Incident Response provides expert-led support and access to experienced DFIR specialists during high-pressure incidents involving advanced threat actors. Group-IB’s incident response team brings deep expertise in forensics, containment, and remediation across diverse threat actor types.

“We live by five principles: zero tolerance, do the right thing, research and investigate, innovate, and reinvest everything we earn into the fight.”

Dmitry Volkov, CEO of Group-IB

Talk to our experts today to stay ahead of threats with adversary-aware defense.