A familiar theme in security right now is that the barrier to entry for attackers is at an all-time low. AI tools can spin up websites within minutes that can easily direct data to disposable external data stores and send alerts for new captures — all without code. 

One such case was recently detailed in the latest Cisco Talos Incident Response Quarterly Trends report.

Proof-of-concept code for exploiting new vulnerabilities used to take attackers months to create. Now they take hours.

All of this is very concerning for defenders. Yesterday, my colleague told me about a recent conference Q&A he hosted, where he was asked to provide some hope to those in the room who have faced an overwhelming amount of change in recent months. 

His answer was to focus on the here and now. Focus on what you can control, and what you have influence over. We can’t change what may or may not happen in six months’ time, but we can prioritize what’s important now. 

The other key thing for defenders to bear in mind is that even when attackers move fast, they still don’t behave like your normal users. At the end of the day, you’re still looking for anomalous behavior – whether that behavior is machine- or human-generated.

As we come to the end of our Year in Review content release (if you haven’t seen it yet, we published videos, podcasts, and topic specific blog posts), we’d like to end by summarizing the key priorities for defenders. 

Here are five of them that are worth considering when it comes to spotting malicious, unusual behaviour in your environment.

1. Identity is the main battlefield 

The Year in Review highlights how frequently attackers rely on valid accounts and credential abuse throughout the attack chain. We see this across multiple areas:

• MFA spray attacks targeting IAM platforms directly 
• Device compromise attacks increasing 178% year over year 
• Attackers registering their own devices as trusted multi-factor authentication (MFA) methods
• Ransomware attack chains largely relying on valid accounts, credentialed tools, or both

Network infrastructure is a key part of this. VPNs, Active Directory Controllers (ADCs), and firewalls are being exploited to steal session tokens, bypass MFA, and impersonate users.

However, when attackers successfully authenticate, where they go from there tends not to fall in line with normal user behavior. They start to access new systems outside of their role, move laterally using tools like PsExec, execute commands at unusual times, and overall operate at a scale that normal users don’t.

Therefore, having a baseline understanding of normal user behavior is more important than ever.

Prioritize:

• Treating identity infrastructure as Tier 1 critical assets and apply the strongest monitoring and protection controls to IAM and PAM systems
• Securing MFA device registration workflows with strict verification procedures and limited administrative approval rights
• Hardening authentication systems against automated attacks by enforcing rate limiting, anomaly detection, and strong conditional access policies
• Building baseline detections around what users do, not just how they log in

2. Prioritize the vulnerabilities that have the most exposure

One of the most important callouts in the report is how attackers select targets. The rapid exploitation of vulnerabilities such as React2Shell and ToolShell shows that exploitation can begin immediately after disclosure with readily available proof-of-concepts. Attackers then prioritize what is exposed and reachable. 

Attackers also like to exploit the vulnerabilities that are closest to identity, session handling, and access logic.

At the same time, older vulnerabilities such as Log4Shell remain among the most exploited, over four years after disclosure.

This creates a dual reality where some new vulnerabilities are weaponized instantly, but old, highly-valued vulnerabilities are never fully eliminated.

Prioritize:

• Remediating vulnerabilities based on internet exposure and access impact, not just CVSS scores
• Reducing time-to-patch for externally accessible systems 
• Continuously reassessing what is reachable from the outside

3. Address the long tail of legacy and embedded risk

The Year in Review highlights that nearly 40% of the top 100 most targeted vulnerabilities impact EOL systems, and 32% are over a decade old. Many of these vulnerabilities exist in deeply embedded components such as PHP frameworks, Log4j, and ColdFusion.

These components are often poorly inventoried, difficult to patch, and tightly coupled to business-critical systems.

It’s a frustrating fact that the most persistent risks are often the least visible,
and the hardest to remove. They create long-term blind spots, which are an attacker’s favorite thing to find and exploit.

Prioritize:

• Improving visibility into software dependencies and embedded components 
• Treating development frameworks and libraries as part of your attack surface 
• Establishing clear strategies for isolating or retiring legacy systems

4. Secure the systems that broker trust

Attackers are increasingly targeting systems that provide maximum operational leverage. This includes network management platforms, application delivery controllers (ADCs), and shared software platforms running across multiple devices.

These systems are attractive to adversaries because they store credentials, control configurations across large environments, provide visibility into the network, and enable changes at scale.

Unfortunately, these platforms are also traditionally less monitored than endpoints, more complex to patch or upgrade, and have centralized points of failure.

Prioritize:

• Identifying management-plane and control-plane systems that need securing
• Applying enhanced monitoring and access controls to these platforms 
• Limiting administrative access and enforce strong segmentation

5. Keep focusing on patterns, even with increased automation and AI-driven attacks

Yes, automation and AI are changing the threat landscape. As we’ve spoken about, attackers are increasingly able to rapidly identify and exploit vulnerabilities, launch large-scale identity attacks, generate convincing phishing lures that mimic real business workflows, and accelerate parts of the attack lifecycle using AI-assisted tooling.

However, all these things do not remove a key constraint for adversaries: Automated attacks still produce patterns of unusual behavior, and patterns are detectable.

Even highly scalable attacks tend to reuse the same infrastructure, tools, and techniques. They also follow predictable sequences of activity and generate anomalies.

Prioritize:

• Focusing detection efforts on anomalous events (e.g., unusual authentication flows, abnormal system access, anomalous device registration) 
• Reducing alert fatigue by prioritizing a smaller number of meaningful detections over broad, low-confidence alerting 
• Supporting triage and enrichment with automation where possible, alongside human decision-making
• Ensuring teams are equipped to investigate patterns of behavior, not just isolated alerts

Final thoughts

Much of the current concern in and around the security community is the new reality that anyone can create a malicious campaign. The Year in Review doesn’t disagree.

However, Talos data also shows something equally important:

• Attackers still rely on the same vulnerabilities 
• They reuse the same tools and techniques 
• They follow repeatable patterns 
• And, critically, they don’t behave like your users

Even when they successfully authenticate, move laterally, or establish persistence, their activity introduces detectable anomalies.

That’s where the opportunity lies for defenders. 

Read the 2025 Cisco Talos Year in Review

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In this episode, we unpack state-sponsored and phishing trends from the 2025 Talos Year in Review. Amy and Martin Lee explore the alarming rise of internal phishing campaigns that bypass traditional perimeter defenses, including the widespread weaponization of Microsoft 365's Direct Send feature. Beyond simple phishing, we analyze the aggressive, blended operations of state-sponsored actors from China and North Korea who are combining high-level zero-day exploits with sophisticated social engineering. From the "Dear Leader" interview test to the reality of fake developer personas, we break down exactly how these adversaries are infiltrating modern organizations.

View the 2025 Year in Review here.

In 2025, attackers increasingly targeted weaknesses in multi-factor authentication (MFA) workflows, and phishing attacks leveraged valid, compromised credentials to launch lures from trusted accounts. The trends focused entirely on trust, or the lack thereof, in everyday business operations.

Phishing

In 2025, phishing attacks were used for initial access in 40% of incidents, maintaining their prevalence. Attackers ramped up cascaded phishing campaigns, where attackers leveraged the trust of the initial compromised account to create specialized phishing attempts, within the network and out of it, aimed at trusted partners and third parties.

Email composition trends

The content of phishing emails changed somewhat. Transitioning away from spam offers, they took the form of workflow-style emails — IT, travel, and other everyday business tasks that look familiar to employees and executives. Travel and logistics lures in particular surged, while political lures dropped off. Internal expensing and travel emails, even when legitimate, are often repetitive and come from disparate sources with changeable formats or poorly-rendered templates, leading to a lowered guard toward spotting malicious intent. Attackers were likely aiming to steal credentials, payment information, or MFA tokens via fake single sign-on (SSO) pages.

In reviews of thousands of blocked-email keywords, 60% contained subject lines with "request," "invoice," "fwd," "report," and similar. IT-focused phishing keywords turned more technical, to words like "tampering," "domain," "configuration," "token," and others, showing that attackers were making plays toward IT and security workflows.

Attackers also abused Microsoft 365 Direct Send to capitalize on internal email trust. Direct Send is the method by which networked devices like printers and scanners deliver documents to users. The messages appear to be sent and received by the same email address. These internal messages do not receive the same scrutiny that external emails do, from employees or automated email filters. Direct Send allowed attackers to spoof internal email addresses and deliver highly convincing lures from inside the organization, without compromising real accounts, to target key attack services and deliver high-impact damage.

MFA and identity attacks

Identity and access management (IAM) applications have grown popular with organizations hoping to consolidate user privileges. Unfortunately, it has also grown in popularity with attackers. Nearly a third of 2025 MFA spray attacks targeted IAM, turning the tools companies used to maintain access control into a point of failure. Device compromise surged by 178%, largely driven by voice phishing designed to trick administrators into registering malicious devices.

MFA spray and device compromise

MFA attack strategy changed by sector. A successful attack could glean SSO tokens and give adversaries the ability to change user roles and credentials, or even the MFA policies themselves. Attackers increasingly exploited authentication workflows to gain and maintain access.

Spray attacks were deployed against networks with predictable identity behavior, while diverse, unmanaged, or high-turnover device ecosystems proved weaker to device compromise attacks.

Notably, higher education was the most targeted device compromise sector. Several factors could contribute to the trend:

·       Diverse unmanaged device population

·       Poorly patched and managed operating systems

·       Necessarily low new-device verification policies

·       Large, public-facing directories for targeted phishing

Higher education was a very unfavorable target for MFA spray attacks, however. Passwords and MFA are also highly varied and segmented, and most universities have strong login portal policies, enforced lockouts, and login attempt limits.

Guidance for defenders

As always, prioritize based on your own environment.

Organizations should keep in mind that living-off-the-land binaries (LOLBins) and open-source and dual-use tools, which are not inherently malicious, are key to further exploitation. Blocking external IPs from using a feature, enabling Microsoft’s newer “Reject Direct Send” control, tightening SPF/DMARC enforcement, and treating “internal-looking” emails with the same scrutiny as inbound mail are currently the most effective defenses.

Likewise, MFA attack protection should be tailored to the style of environment and sector.

MFA spray attacks work well on stable, scaled identity controls. Counter these attacks with strong lockout policies, good password hygiene, and conditional access.

Device compromise works best on variable networks where devices change over fast and MFA use is spotty. Work on establishing better device hardening and management, session controls, and strict phishing-resistant MFA with enrollment governance. Solutions such as Cisco Duo provide controls for phishing-resistant MFA, device trust, and secure enrollment, helping reduce risk from phishing and identity-based attacks.

This blog only scratched the surface on 2025 threat trends. See the full Year in Review report for a detailed explanation of Microsoft 365 Direct Send and how it was used for attacks, infographic breakdowns of MFA spray vs. device compromise attacks, the full list of targeted tools and sectors by percentage, and more.

Across the Talos 2025 Year in Review, state-sponsored threat activity from China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran all had varying motivations, such as espionage, disruption, financial gain, and geopolitical influence.

But when you look at how these operations actually unfold, similar tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) keep appearing: access through vulnerabilities and identity, and access that remains under the radar for a considerable period of time.

Here are the dominant themes from the state-sponsored section of the Talos Year in Review, available now.

China

China-nexus threat activity stood out this year for both volume and efficiency, with Talos investigations increasing by nearly 75% compared to 2024.

Newly disclosed vulnerabilities were exploited almost immediately (e.g., ToolShell), sometimes before patches were widely available. At the same time, long-standing, unpatched vulnerabilities in networking devices and widely used software continued to provide reliable entry points for these types of adversary.

Once inside, the focus shifts to persistence. Web shells, custom backdoors, tunneling tools, and credential harvesting all support long-term access. 

There’s also more overlap than ever before between state-sponsored and financially motivated activity. It is likely that in some cases, state-sponsored actors conducted operations for personal profit alongside espionage-focused missions, while in others, cybercriminals collected valuable information during an attack that could be sold to espionage-motivated actors for further exploitation, providing them dual revenue streams.

Russia

Russian-linked cyber activity remains closely tied to their geopolitical objectives, particularly the war in Ukraine.

Many operations continue to rely on unpatched, older vulnerabilities (especially in networking devices) to gain initial access. These flaws provide a dependable way in for adversaries and support long-term intelligence gathering.

Russia’s offensive cyber activity is highly correlated with developments in the larger geopolitical sphere. For example, the announcement of sanctions intended to apply pressure on Russia by both the U.S. and E.U. often corresponded with our observed levels of Russian cyber activity.

Common malware families like Dark Crystal RAT (DCRAT), Remcos RAT, and Smoke Loader appeared frequently in Talos investigations on operations against Ukraine in 2025. These families aren’t exclusive to Russia-nexus threat actors, but they continue to be effective in environments where patching and visibility are inconsistent, and should therefore be high priority targets for defense and monitoring.

North Korea

North Korea cyber operations leaned heavily into social engineering and insider access in 2025. These operations were both for financial and espionage purposes.

Campaigns like Contagious Interview (orchestrated by Famous Chollima) used fake recruiters from legitimate companies to socially engineering targets to execute code or hand over credentials. From there, actors stole cryptocurrency, exfiltrated data, and established persistent access.

North Korean cyber actors also pulled off the largest cryptocurrency heist in history in 2025, stealing $1.5 billion. Additionally, thousands of IT workers used stolen identities and AI-generated profiles to secure positions at Fortune 500 companies, generating billions in annual revenue for North Korea’s nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles programs.

Iran

Iranian cyber threat activity in 2025 combined visible disruption with long-term access.

Hacktivist operations increased by 60% in response to geopolitical events, particularly the Israel-Hamas conflict. These campaigns, which include distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, defacements, and other disruptive operations, are often designed to generate attention and shape narratives.

At the same time, more traditional advanced persistent threat (APT) activity focused on persistence. Groups such as ShroudedSnooper targeted sectors like telecommunications, using custom compact backdoors designed to blend into normal traffic and remain undetected. 

ShroudedSnooper is an APT that public reporting widely attributes to Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS). It is very likely an initial access group that passes operations off to secondary threat actors for long term espionage or destructive attacks.

For current threat intelligence related to the developing conflict in Iran, follow our coverage on the Talos blog.

Guidance for defenders

Though the state-sponsored activity that we tracked for the Talos Year in Review have different objectives, they still have the same reliance on gaining and maintaining access. The following guidance is recommended for security teams:

• Don’t ignore older systems: Both newly disclosed and long-known vulnerabilities are actively exploited. 
• Prioritize identity security: Credentialed access and social engineering remain reliable entry points. 
• Increase visibility into network and edge infrastructure: These systems are common targets for persistent access.
• Expect activity to follow global events: Sanctions, conflicts, and political developments often correlate with spikes in activity. Follow the Talos blog to keep informed of new state sponsored activity and campaigns.
• Inspect for long-term presence: Many state-sponsored operations are designed to persist stealthily over time, not trigger immediate disruption. 

Read the 2025 Cisco Talos Year in Review

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One of the clearest trends in the 2025 Talos Year in Review is just how quickly vulnerabilities are now being turned into working exploits. What used to take weeks or months is now happening in days, sometimes hours — and in some cases, exploitation is beginning almost immediately after vulnerability details are made public.

The process of exploitation itself is changing. With the increasing availability of proof-of-concept code, automation, and AI-assisted tooling, certain vulnerabilities can very quickly become weaponized, which is what we saw with React2Shell.

At the same time, the data shows that attackers are not just chasing new vulnerabilities. They are consistently targeting what is exposed, accessible, and valuable.

On one end of the spectrum, near-instant exploitation.
On the other, long-standing vulnerabilities that remain unaddressed.

Attackers are using a combination of speed, scale, and accessibility to reduce the window defenders have to respond, while increasing the impact when they can’t.

In the latest episode of the Talos Threat Perspective, we explore what the ‘industrialization of exploitation’ looks like in practice, and what it means for defenders trying to prioritise risk in an increasingly compressed timeline.

▶️ Watch the full episode below.

Read the 2025 Cisco Talos Year in Review

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Every year, Cisco Talos publishes Year in Review, a comprehensive look at the previous year’s threat landscape. It’s drawn from an enormous volume of telemetry, such as endpoint detections, network traffic, email data, and boots-on-the-ground Cisco Talos Incident Response (Talos IR) engagements. 

As incident responders, we see threats mid-detonation in the wreckage of an Active Directory environment, or in the lateral movement artifacts left behind by an affiliate who got in using nothing more than a valid account. The Year in Review distills those raw observations into structured intelligence, but that intelligence loop works both ways. The same report that our IR casework feeds into is the report that defenders should be feeding back into their own preparation cycles.

IR casework shapes the Year in Review, the Year in Review shapes your readiness 

When Talos IR closes out an engagement with customers, the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) we observe through forensic work and analysis are catalogued, aggregated, and analyzed alongside broader Cisco telemetry. When we track the emergence of a new exploit like React2Shell redefining attacker speed, or when we see Qilin rise to dominate the ransomware landscape while legacy groups like others maintain rare, sustained momentum, those shifts in the adversary ecosystem become the intelligence that informs what we are on the lookout for during the next investigation. When we observe patterns of behavior, they may form trend lines that span multiple years and reveal how the landscape is evolving. 

For defenders, this means the Year in Review is not a theoretical document. It is a distillation of what actually happened to organizations we respond to, investigated by the people who were in the room when things broke down. Here are some suggestions on how to operationalize these findings.

Turning findings into tabletop scenarios 

One of the most immediate and practical applications of Year in Review is raw material for tabletop exercises. The report hands you the adversary playbook. For example, the 2024 Year in Review highlighted that identity-based attacks accounted for 60% of all Talos IR cases, with Active Directory being the focal point in 44% of those incidents. Attackers were not breaking down doors with zero-days; rather, they were walking through the front door with stolen credentials, often bypassing multi-factor authentication (MFA) through push fatigue, misconfigured policies, or the simple fact that MFA was never fully enrolled in the first place for some accounts.  

The 2025 Year in Review reinforces and deepens this picture. Attacks against MFA evolved significantly, with MFA spray attacks doubling down on identity and access management (IAM) infrastructure while expanding efforts against high-value privileged accounts. Device compromise attacks saw a significant rise in activity, showing that actors increasingly value reliable, repeatable access methods over one-off exploitation. These are adversary preferences that should directly shape your exercise scenariosand cybersecurity preparedness. 

That is a ready-made tabletop scenario. Work with your team on this exact entry scenario and walk through it just as adversary would. An adversary authenticates to your VPN. MFA fires, but the user approves the push because they were already expecting a login prompt. The attacker is now inside your perimeter with legitimate access. What does your detection look like? How quickly do your analysts identify the anomaly? Who makes the call to force a password reset and revoke sessions? These are some good questions to cover in this scenario. The 2025 Year in Review found that actors tailor their MFA attack style depending on the sector, and that manufacturing was the most impacted sector for ransomware in 2025, underscoring persistent risk to repeatedly targeted industries. If you operate in manufacturing, health care, or another sector that has appeared consistently in ransomware targeting data, your tabletop should reflect the specific TTPs directed at your vertical — not a generic ransomware exercise. These are just some ideas to get started on scenarios.

Validate your detections against real-world tradecraft 

Beyond tabletops, the Year in Review provides a prioritized list of what to test your detections against. Year after year, Talos IR engagements reveal a consistent core of adversary tradecraft that organizations are still struggling to detect. Tools like PowerShell and Mimikatz appear in a significant portion of engagements. Remote services such as RDP and SSH continue to be abused for lateral movement. Ransomware operators are increasingly disabling security solutions before deploying payloads, and in 2024, they succeeded in doing so at an alarming rate. 

The 2025 Year in Review adds critical nuance to detection priorities through its vulnerability analysis. The top 10 most targeted vulnerabilities tell a story about what attackers reach for. React2Shell redefined attacker speed and targeting, compressing the window between disclosure and exploitation. ToolShell's quick rise to the top five highlighted the sheer volume and impact of attacks exploiting development tool vulnerabilities. 

For defenders, this is a checklist. Can your endpoint detection and response (EDR) detect and alert on the disabling of its own agent? Do you have detections for credential dumping from LSASS or web shell deployment? What about a scenario where direct exploitation takes place, but no web shell is deployed? Are you monitoring for anomalous Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) sessions originating from unexpected source hosts? The Year in Review tells you what the adversary is actually doing, not what they might hypothetically do. That distinction is critical when you are prioritizing detection engineering across your organization. 

Map these findings to the MITRE ATT&CK framework, which the Talos Quarterly IR Trend Reports and the Year in Review already reference, and you have a structured way to assess your coverage gaps. If valid account abuse is the dominant initial access technique and your detections are heavily weighted toward exploit-based intrusions, you have a mismatch between your defensive posture and the actual threat landscape.

Stress-test your IR plan, not just your tooling 

The Year in Review also reveals patterns in where organizations struggle that go beyond technology. Across multiple years of IR engagements, common security weaknesses keep surfacing: incomplete asset inventories, inconsistent logging, missing or misconfigured MFA, inadequate network segmentation, and unpatched or end-of-life network devices that remain exposed. The 2024 report noted that some of the most targeted network vulnerabilities affected end-of-life devices with no available patches, yet those devices remained in production environments. The 2025 data reinforce this with even sharper clarity:  Legacy systems remain highly vulnerable to attack, CVE age distribution data highlights systemic patch delays, and a small number of vulnerabilities in network infrastructure continue to drive outsized risk. 

Two additional areas from the 2025 report deserve attention in your planning cycle. First, phishing continues to evolve. Phishing plays a key role in both initial access and post-compromise activity, with business email compromise-style and workflow-based lures remaining the primary theme. Travel and logistics lures surged, while political lures dropped off and IT-themed lures became more prominent. These shifts matter for security awareness training; if your phishing simulations are still heavily weighted toward current-events lures, they may not reflect what your users are encountering. 

Second, the AI threat landscape warrants monitoring. The 2025 observations include dedicated coverage of how AI is shaping the threat environment. While the full scope of AI-enabled threats is still emerging, defenders should consider how AI may be lowering the barrier for adversaries in areas like phishing content generation, vulnerability discovery, and social engineering at scale. Your IR plans should be tested, validated, and updated to handle the new security regime we find ourselves in. 

Build a year-round preparation cadence 

Rather than treating the Year in Review as a one-time read, consider building a recurring preparation cycle around it. When the report drops, review the top-level findings with your security leadership and identify the three or four trends most relevant to your environment. In the quieter early months, run a tabletop exercise built around the most applicable scenario. Through the middle of the year, use Quarterly IR Trend Report data to adjust detection priorities and validate coverage. Before year-end, when threat activity tends to intensify, conduct a focused review of your IR plan. 

Join Amy and Pierre Cadieux as they unpack the ransomware and vulnerability trends that defined 2025. From the persistent ransomware threats targeting the manufacturing sector to the rise of stealthy living-off-the-land tactics, we break down what these shifts mean for your defense strategy.

Why are attackers are increasingly targeting your management infrastructure? How do you spot the difference between a system admin and a threat actor? Tune in to hear Talos' insights on how to move beyond reacting to threats and start building a more resilient, proactive security posture for the year ahead.

View the 2025 Year in Review here.

Speed and age shouldn’t be allowed to pair up, but that is the theme of the Talos 2025 Year in Review vulnerability findings.

The year was characterized by an unending beat-down on infrastructure that relied on older enmeshed dependencies (e.g., Log4j and PHPUnit), while React2Shell rocketed to the highest percentage of attacks for the entire year within the last three weeks of 2025. Agentic AI's capacity for building and deploying new proofs-of-concepts and exploit kits lowered attacker time-to-exploit, and the landscape shifted for defenders. 

“The speed at which these CVEs climbed into the top tier reflects a larger systemic challenge: Newly disclosed vulnerabilities in widely deployed software can generate significant, organization-wide impact long before typical patch cycles catch up, leaving defenders with small reaction windows and escalating consequences for even short-lived exposure.” – 2025 Talos Year in Review

Top-targeted infrastructure 

Outdated infrastructure continues to expand the attack surface. Components like PHPUnit, ColdFusion, and Log4j are often embedded within applications, tightly coupled to legacy applications. Technologies age quickly, and companies are under pressure to adopt first, ask questions later. Low-use systems in a network can fossilize, unnoticed and unpatched. Others become mainstays that often cannot be swapped out or even patched without destabilizing an organization.  

Attackers prioritized software and firmware inside network appliances, identity-adjacent systems, and widely deployed open-source components: 

• Remote code execution (RCE) flaws, which enable access without requiring user interaction, avoiding a need for social engineering  
• Legacy systems and widely used components 
• Perimeter devices, especially without endpoint detection and response (EDR) 

The theme was identity, identity, identity. Controlling identity meant controlling access, so attackers focused on components that authenticate users, enforce access decisions, and broker trust between systems. A small number of vulnerabilities targeting these vectors drove outsized risk. This can invalidate multi-factor authentication (MFA) checks and bypass segmentation. 

Defender recommendations 

Attacker prioritization is now guided less by vulnerability age or maturity and more by exposure, exploitability, and proximity to trust, reshaping how organizations must think about risk in modern environments. 

Attackers exploit patching gaps and policy weaknesses in vendor lifecycles. Organizations should evaluate their identity-centric network components and management platforms and prioritize patching of network devices accordingly. 

For a more in-depth analysis of these trends, as well as how company size impacted CVE targeting trends, why the management plane matters, and the shortening window defenders have for putting defenses in place, see the 2025 Year in Review report.

In this episode of the Talos Threat Perspective, we explore how identity is being used to gain, extend, and maintain access inside environments. 

Drawing on insights from the 2025 Talos Year in Review, we break down how attackers are: 

·       Targeting identity systems and MFA workflows 

·       Establishing persistent, high-trust access 

·       Using internal phishing to move laterally 

·       Could potentially exploit over-permissioned AI agents and identity-linked access 

·       Blending into normal user behaviour 

This episode focuses on how identity enables attackers to scale their operations, and what that means for defenders trying to detect and contain them. 

Read the 2025 Cisco Talos Year in Review

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Every year, the Cisco Talos Year in Review captures the patterns shaping the threat landscape. The 2025 report paints a clear picture: Attackers are moving faster than ever, while using identity-related attacks as the primary battleground.  

To unpack the biggest takeaways and what they mean for security teams, we brought together Christopher Marshall, VP of Cisco Talos, and Peter Bailey, SVP and GM of Cisco Security. 

Here’s their conversation. 

Old vulnerabilities, new speed 

Marshall:
 One of the clearest trends in this year’s data is the contrast in how vulnerabilities are being exploited. We saw React2Shell disclosed in December and within weeks it became the most targeted vulnerability we tracked. 

At the same time, a 12-year-old vulnerability still appeared in the top 10 most exploited list. So we’re seeing very rapid weaponization (likely fuelled by AI given the compressed timeline from initial proof of concept to large-scale exploitation, across multiple languages and platforms) alongside continued success with legacy flaws.  

Bailey:
 There’s always a lot of focus on the latest zero-day, and rightly so. The industrialization of vulnerability exploitation is extremely concerning. But at the same time, many attacks are still leveraging vulnerabilities that have been around for years.

Organizations are dealing with complexity. Large environments. Long device lifecycles. Change management processes that take time. But attackers don’t care about those constraints. They actually count on them. 

This is where we need to repeat that the fundamentals still matter. Patch management, asset visibility, lifecycle discipline... We still have work to do there as an industry.  

Marshall:
 And then you have 40% of the top 100 exploited vulnerabilities being effective because organizations were running end-of-life devices. That’s a measurable problem. When infrastructure is no longer supported, attackers know it. They scan for it, and then they target it. Technical debt becomes operational risk.  

Bailey:
 Absolutely. In most cases, it’s not that customers don’t want to patch. It’s that their critical networking infrastructure has been stable for years, and taking it offline can disrupt the business. 

As an industry, we need to reduce that friction. Cisco is a big part of that, with built-in protections in our networking equipment that can be applied without downtime, and options to shield systems when patching can'thappen immediately.  

Identity as the primary target 

Marshall:
 If there’s one area where attackers are consistently investing their time and energy, it’s identity. In 2025, identity-based attack techniques were central to major phases of operations, like lateral movement, privilege escalation, and persistence. Controlling identity effectively means controlling access across the environment.  

One of the most striking data points in the report is that fraudulent device registration increased 178 percent year over year. In many cases, attackers convinced administrators to register devices on their behalf through vishing (or voice phishing). They targeted administrator-managed registration flows at three times the rate of user-driven ones. There’s a clear preference for high-value victims. 

Bailey:
 And unfortunately these stolen credentials are widely available. Logging in is often easier than breaking in. Once attackers obtain legitimate access, they can blend in.  

For defenders, identity controls need to go beyond authentication. You need continuous monitoring. You need risk-based adjustments to access. You need to detect abnormal behavior quickly. 

Marshall:
 We’re also seeing a rise in internal phishing. More than a third of phishing incidents we observed involved attackers sending messages from already compromised accounts. 

Once inside, they create mailbox rules to hide replies and suppress visibility. They explore shared drives and collaboration platforms. They look for sensitive information that can help them expand access. This all means defenders need strong visibility into normal user behavior. If accounts suddenly start sending far more messages than usual or accessing data they never touched before, that should stand out. 

Bailey: 
Identity is no longer just an authentication problem. It’s a monitoring and governance problem, as well.  

State-sponsored activity and the blurring of motives 

Marshall:
 We observed continued evolution in state-sponsored activity throughout the year. Talos investigations into China-nexus campaigns increased nearly 75 percent in 2025. These actors are exploiting both zero-day and n-day vulnerabilities while also engaging in financially motivated activity to support their broader goals. 

Russian-linked activity continues to correlate closely with geopolitical developments. We consistently see these actors exploiting unpatched networking equipment to establish long-term access. 

North Korean affiliated actors refined their “Contagious Interview” campaigns. They compromised developers through fake job opportunities and expanded IT worker schemes using AI-generated personas. 

Iranian-linked actors increased hacktivist-style operations by roughly 60 percent last year, and we’ve seen that type of activity rise again during the ongoing conflict in the Middle East. At the same time, actors such as ShroudedSnooper are deploying highly evasive and stealthy backdoors to maintain long-term access to critical telecommunications infrastructure. 

Bailey:
 These groups are adaptive and pragmatic. From a defender’s perspective, the distinction between state-sponsored and criminal actors is less useful than it used to be. Techniques overlap, tools are shared, and infrastructure gets reused.  

What matters is speed. These actors move quickly and often target the edge of the network through unpatched devices and legacy infrastructure.   

That’s where intelligence becomes critical. At Cisco, when Talos identifies a campaign or toolset, that intelligence feeds directly into protections for customers. Speed of detection and response must match the pace of the threat.  

AI and the acceleration of attacks 

Marshall:
 In 2025, AI was most commonly used to automate and scale parts of traditional attacks, especially social engineering. It lowered the barrier to creating convincing phishing lures and fraudulent sites. 

The Year in Review is based on trends throughout 2025, but we also want to call attention to the fact that the AI threat landscape is changing fast, even in the first few months of 2026. Research into threats like VoidLinkshows how AI can accelerate malware development. The tasks that previously required extended development cycles are now being completed quicker than ever.   

We’re also seeing early examples of AI-enabled malware in mobile environments. Agentic capabilities can analyze screen content and determine next actions. It’s still early, but the pace of change is notable. 

Bailey:
 Organizations also need to think about how they deploy AI internally. 

We saw rapid adoption of consumer AI tools, followed by a realization that guardrails were necessary. Prompt injection, data exposure, unauthorized model access... These are real concerns.  

Now we’re seeing companies implement controls such as semantic inspection of prompts, model scanning, and discovery of shadow AI deployments. Secure AI deployment will quickly become standard practice. It has to. 

Using the report as a prioritization tool 

Marshall:
 We designed the Talos Year in Review to help defenders prioritize. And in terms of those priorities, I’d like to leave people with a few that stand out. 

The data shows that attackers consistently pursue access for scale and leverage. They want the keys to the kingdom, so they target identity systems, administrators, and end-of-life infrastructure because it gives them broad access. 

Strengthening your identity controls, understanding your environment, and safeguarding and removing EOL infrastructure are three of the most important actions organizations can take. 

Bailey:
 I agree. Patching is still crucial, but just as important is ensuring you have visibility across devices, strong segmentation, and continuous monitoring for abnormal behavior. 

We’re also seeing attacks happening faster, increasingly amplified by automation and AI.  Agentic AI is opening the door to a catalogue of features that will automate manual work and allow adversaries to greatly expandtheir capabilities. Now more than ever, defenders need architectures that are resilient and observable in the face of these developments.  

I encourage everyone to read the full Talos report. It’s filled with data and practical guidance.   

Marshall:
  

Thank you, Peter. This report represents a tremendous amount of effort across Talos and it's built with our customers in mind. I'd like to extend a sincere appreciation to my team and all of our partners who contributed to its life and launch.  

Our goal with the Year in Review, much like our general mission at Talos, is simple: Show where adversaries are succeeding, and provide clear guidance on how to reduce that success rate.  

In addition, I would ask all of our customers to use this report to challenge us, challenge Cisco. We strive to give you the greatest protection, products, and services possible. Let us know how we can be better. 

Read the 2025 Cisco Talos Year in Review

Download now

Ransomware attacks aren’t smash-and-grab anymore. They’re built on access that already looks legitimate — closer to positioning chess pieces than breaking the door down.

That’s the big trend that comes through in the ransomware data from the Talos 2025 Year in Review. Once attackers have initial access (and 40% of the time it’s through phishing) they move the way a user or administrator would: logging in, checking systems, and using the same remote access tools that are already installed.

In fact, one of the biggest challenges for defenders today is that ransomware actors are deliberately trying to overlap with everyday activity. RDP, PowerShell, and PsExec are the top three tools that are used by ransomware actors, but in many environments, these tools are part of normal operations.

The difference is how they’re being used. If they’re being used to expand access and move across systems, this should raise a few red flags. I’m not sure it’s possible to emphasise enough how important your asset management comes into play here — having clear asset inventories and network behaviour baselines and conducting continuous anomaly monitoring.

Like the rest of the Talos Year in Review, identity is what ties everything together. Valid accounts show up across nearly every stage of ransomware attacks: initial access, lateral movement, and execution. 

Top-targeted sectors

From our ransomware data analysis, manufacturing continues to be the most targeted sector, which reflects how challenging these environments are to monitor closely. There’s a mixture of systems, users, and processes, often with limited tolerance for disruption.

Professional, scientific, and technical services (second on the most targeted sectors list) face similar exposure, especially when access spans multiple systems or organizations.

Most prolific ransomware groups

The ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) groups have had a bit of a shakeup. After LockBit topped our 2024 report, the group fell to 35^th this year following sustained law enforcement pressure. Qilin, a constant pain in the “you-know-what” for our incident responders for over a year now, came in at No. 1.

Qilin uses a double-extortion approach, combining data encryption with threats to release stolen information publicly. According to their data leak site, in 2025, Qilin targeted more than 40 victims every month except January, signaling that this ransomware group will remain a persistent and significant threat in 2026.

Akira and Play (No. 2 and 3 in the chart) had continued success, which can likely be credited to their evolving and adaptable tactics and absorption of affiliates from defunct ransomware groups (i.e., LockBit).

An opportunity for defenders

What’s interesting to note is that for the second year running, January saw lower activity, likely tied to holiday slowdowns and Eastern European public holidays.

It may be wise for security teams to consider testing ransomware defenses in months where activity levels are generally lower, such as January, as there is a reduced chance of interfering with real incidents.

Defender recommendations

• Strengthen identity protections. Actors predominately targeted the person who holds the key rather than the lock itself (i.e., the target’s infrastructure). Phishing and social engineering training is highly recommended.
• Monitor the use of built-in administrative tools such as RDP, PowerShell, and PsExec for lateral movement. Look for unexpected usage patterns, and abnormal access requests.
• Basics, basics, basics! They very much still hold true. Strengthen your backup, EDR, segmentation, logging, and recovery capabilities.
• Regularly test ransomware response readiness.

Read the full 2025 Talos Year in Review to dig deeper into ransomware trends, vulnerability exploitation, phishing and MFA bypass, state-sponsored activity, and how AI is shaping the threat landscape.

In this episode of Talos Takes, Amy is joined by William Largent (Cisco Talos) and Lou Stella (Splunk) for a "double-header" discussion. With the recent release of the Cisco Talos 2025 Year in Review and the Splunk Top 50 Cybersecurity Threats report, we’re breaking down the most critical trends that shaped the security landscape last year — all based on Cisco telemetry, Talos' original research, and Talos Incident Response engagements.

From the professionalization of ransomware-as-a-service to the persistent challenge of decade-old vulnerabilities, this episode moves beyond the headlines to provide a practical roadmap for defenders. You’ll get tips on how to prioritize your defenses and reduce your attack surface for the year ahead.

View the 2025 Year in Review today.

The Beers with Talos B team (that’s Hazel, Bill, Joe and Dave) break down (sometimes in the literal sense) the 2025 Talos Year in Review which is available now.

The team dives into the biggest cybersecurity trends of the year, including:

• The rapid weaponization of new vulnerabilities
• Why identity abuse showed up everywhere 
• Ransomware trends
• A rise in APT investigations
• What defenders should prioritize heading into the year ahead

Before that, we discuss the cyber activity tied to the situation in the Middle East (full details on our blog).

There’s also an alarming amount of discussion about glutes. And gravy. Listen here:

Download the full 2025 Talos Year in Review today.

The 2025 Talos Year in Review is now available to view online.

The pace and scale of adversary activity in 2025 placed sustained pressure on security teams across industries. As with each annual report, our goal at Talos is to provide the security community with a clear analysis of the tactics, techniques, and procedures that shaped adversary operations, and to help organizations prioritize the actions that reduce exposure and strengthen defenses.

What defined 2025

Three themes emerged consistently across Talos’ threat research, telemetry, and incident response engagements:

1. Exploitation at both extremes

New large-scale vulnerabilities were operationalized almost immediately, but adversaries also continued to exploit CVEs that have been exposed for years. This rapid operationalization of new vulnerabilities reflects a rise in automated exploit development, public proof-of-concept code, and mature adversary coordination.

React2Shell, released in December, ranked first by year’s end only three weeks after disclosure, while a vulnerability disclosed 12 years ago ranked seventh. That range tells a story about organizational technical debt: Long-standing exposure continues to be reliably and successfully exploited.

2. The architecture of trust

In 2025, adversaries focused on the systems that manage authentication, authorization, and device trust.

Attackers who gained access through compromised credentials stealthily extended that access through internal phishing and abuse of identity controls within network infrastructure. Control of identity often meant control of the environment.

3. Targeting centralized systems for more leverage

Threat actors targeted centralized infrastructure, management platforms, and shared frameworks to expand the impact of a single compromise.

Approximately 25% of the vulnerabilities in the Top 100 targeted list affected widely used frameworks and libraries that are embedded deep within the software stack. Because these components underpin applications and network appliances across vendors, a single CVE can create mass exploitation potential across industries. Compromising these shared foundations enabled lateral movement across environments. 

Read the full report

View the full report online (it’s not gated and never will be) to see where attackers are gaining ground, and how to disrupt their playbook. 

Read the 2025 Cisco Talos Year in Review

Download now

The 2025 Cloudflare Radar Year in Review is here: our sixth annual review of the Internet trends and patterns we observed throughout the year, based on Cloudflare’s expansive network view.

Our view is unique, due to Cloudflare’s global network, which has a presence in 330 cities in over 125 countries/regions, handling over 81 million HTTP requests per second on average, with more than 129 million HTTP requests per second at peak on behalf of millions of customer Web properties, in addition to responding to approximately 67 million (authoritative + resolver) DNS queries per second. Cloudflare Radar uses the data generated by these Web and DNS services, combined with other complementary data sets, to provide near-real time insights into traffic, bots, security, connectivity, and DNS patterns and trends that we observe across the Internet. 

Our Radar Year in Review takes that observability and, instead of a real-time view, offers a look back at 2025: incorporating interactive charts, graphs, and maps that allow you to explore and compare selected trends and measurements year-over-year and across geographies, as well as share and embed Year in Review graphs. 

The 2025 Year In Review is organized into six sections: Traffic, AI, Adoption & Usage, Connectivity, Security, and Email Security, with data spanning the period from January 1 to December 2, 2025. To ensure consistency, we kept underlying methodologies unchanged from previous years’ calculations. We also incorporated several new data sets this year, including multiple AI-related metrics, global speed test activity, and hyper-volumetric DDOS size progression. Trends for over 200 countries/regions are available on the microsite; smaller or less-populated locations are excluded due to insufficient data. Some metrics are only shown worldwide and are not displayed if a country/region is selected. 

In this post, we highlight key findings and interesting observations from the major Year In Review microsite sections, and we have again published a companion Most Popular Internet Services blog post that specifically explores trends seen across top Internet Services.

We encourage you to visit the 2025 Year in Review microsite to explore the datasets and metrics in more detail, including those for your country/region to see how they have changed since 2024, and how they compare to other areas of interest.

We hope you’ll find the Year in Review to be an insightful and powerful tool — to explore the disruptions, advances, and metrics that defined the Internet in 2025. 

Let’s dig in.

• Global Internet traffic grew 19% in 2025, with significant growth starting in August. ➜

• The top 10 most popular Internet services saw a few year-over-year shifts, while a number of new entrants landed on category lists. ➜

• Starlink traffic doubled in 2025, including traffic from over 20 new countries/regions. ➜

• Googlebot was again responsible for the highest volume of request traffic to Cloudflare in 2025 as it crawled millions of Cloudflare customer sites for search indexing and AI training. ➜

• The share of human-generated Web traffic that is post-quantum encrypted has grown to 52%. ➜

• Googlebot was responsible for more than a quarter of Verified Bot traffic. ➜

• Crawl volume from dual-purpose Googlebot dwarfed other AI bots and crawlers. ➜

• AI “user action” crawling increased by over 15x in 2025. ➜

• While other AI bots accounted for 4.2% of HTML request traffic, Googlebot alone accounted for 4.5%. ➜

• Anthropic had the highest crawl-to-refer ratio among the leading AI and search platforms. ➜

• AI crawlers were the most frequently fully disallowed user agents found in robots.txt files. ➜

• On Workers AI, Meta’s llama-3-8b-instruct model was the most popular model, and text generation was the most popular task type. ➜

• iOS devices generated 35% of mobile device traffic globally — and more than half of device traffic in many countries. ➜

• The shares of global Web requests using HTTP/3 and HTTP/2 both increased slightly in 2025. ➜

• JavaScript-based libraries and frameworks remained integral tools for building Web sites. ➜

• One-fifth of automated API requests were made by Go-based clients. ➜

• Google remains the top search engine, with Yandex, Bing, and DuckDuckGo distant followers. ➜

• Chrome remains the top browser across platforms and operating systems – except on iOS, where Safari has the largest share. ➜

• Almost half of the 174 major Internet outages observed around the world in 2025 were due to government-directed regional and national shutdowns of Internet connectivity. ➜

• Globally, less than a third of dual-stack requests were made over IPv6, while in India, over two-thirds were. ➜

• European countries had some of the highest download speeds, all above 200 Mbps. Spain remained consistently among the top locations across measured Internet quality metrics. ➜

• London and Los Angeles were hotspots for Cloudflare speed test activity in 2025. ➜

• More than half of request traffic comes from mobile devices in 117 countries/regions. ➜

• 6% of global traffic over Cloudflare’s network was mitigated by our systems — either as potentially malicious or for customer-defined reasons. ➜

• 40% of global bot traffic came from the United States, with Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud originating a quarter of global bot traffic. ➜

• Organizations in the "People and Society” sector were the most targeted during 2025. ➜

• Routing security, measured as the shares of RPKI valid routes and covered IP address space, saw continued improvement throughout 2025. ➜

• Hyper-volumetric DDoS attack sizes grew significantly throughout the year. ➜

• More than 5% of email messages analyzed by Cloudflare were found to be malicious. ➜

• Deceptive links, identity deception, and brand impersonation were the most common types of threats found in malicious email messages. ➜

• Nearly all of the email messages from the .christmas and .lol Top Level Domains were found to be either spam or malicious. ➜

To determine the traffic trends over time for the Year in Review, we use the average daily traffic volume (excluding bot traffic) over the second full calendar week (January 12-18) of 2025 as our baseline. (The second calendar week is used to allow time for people to get back into their “normal” school and work routines after the winter holidays and New Year’s Day.) The percent change shown in the traffic trends chart is calculated relative to the baseline value — it does not represent absolute traffic volume for a country/region. The trend line represents a seven-day trailing average, which is used to smooth the sharp changes seen with data at a daily granularity. 

Traffic growth in 2025 appeared to occur in several phases. Traffic was, on average, somewhat flat through mid-April, generally within a couple of percent of the baseline value. However, it then saw growth through May to approximately 5% above baseline, staying in the +4-7% range through mid-August. It was at that time that growth accelerated, climbing steadily through September, October, and November, peaking at 19% growth for the year. Aided by a late-November increase, 2025’s rate of growth is about 10% higher than the 17% growth observed in 2024. In past years, we have also observed traffic growth accelerating in the back half of the year, although in 2022-2024, that acceleration started in July. It’s not clear why this year’s growth was seemingly delayed by several weeks.

^{Internet traffic trends in 2025, worldwide}

Botswana saw the highest peak growth, reaching 298% above baseline on November 8, and ending the period 295% over baseline. (More on what accounts for that growth in the Starlink section below.) Botswana and Sudan were the only countries/regions to see traffic more than double over the course of the year, although some others experienced peak increases over 100% at some point during the year.

^{Internet traffic trends in 2025, Botswana}

The impact of extended Internet disruptions are clearly visible within the graphs as well. For example, on October 29, the Tanzanian government imposed an Internet shutdown there in response to election day protests. That shutdown lasted just a day, but another one followed from October 30 until November 3. Although traffic in the country had increased more than 40% above baseline ahead of the shutdowns, the disruption ultimately dropped traffic more than 70% below baseline — a rapid reversal. Traffic recovered quickly after connectivity was restored. A similar pattern was observed in Jamaica, where Internet traffic spiked ahead of the arrival of Hurricane Melissa on October 28, and then dropped significantly after the storm caused power outages and infrastructure damage on the island. Traffic began to rebound after the storm’s passing, returning to a level just above baseline by early December.

^{Internet traffic trends in 2025, Tanzania}

^{Internet traffic trends in 2025, Jamaica}

For the Year in Review, we look at the 11-month year-to-date period. In addition to an “overall” ranked list, we also rank services across nine categories, based on analysis of anonymized query data of traffic to our 1.1.1.1 public DNS resolver from millions of users around the world. For the purposes of these rankings, domains that belong to a single Internet service are grouped together.

Google and Facebook once again held the top two spots among the top 10. Although the other members of the top 10 list remained consistent with 2024’s rankings, there was some movement in the middle. Microsoft, Instagram, and YouTube all moved higher; Amazon Web Services (AWS) dropped one spot lower, while TikTok fell four spots.

^{Top Internet services in 2025, worldwide}

Among Generative AI services, ChatGPT/OpenAI remained at the top of the list. But there was movement elsewhere, highlighting the dynamic nature of the industry. Services that moved up the rankings include Perplexity, Claude/Anthropic, and GitHub Copilot. New entries in the top 10 for 2025 include Google Gemini, Windsurf AI, Grok/xAI, and DeepSeek.

^{Top Generative AI services in 2025, worldwide}

Other categories saw movement within their lists as well – Shopee (“the leading e-commerce online shopping platform in Southeast Asia and Taiwan”) is a new entrant to the E-Commerce list, and HBO Max joined the Video Streaming ranking. These categorical rankings, as well as trends seen by specific services, are explored in more detail in a separate blog post.

In addition, this year we are also providing top Internet services insights at a country/region level for the Overall, Generative AI, Social Media, and Messaging categories. (In 2024, we only shared Overall insights.)

SpaceX Starlink’s satellite-based Internet service continues to be a popular option for bringing connectivity to unserved or underserved areas, as well as to users on planes and boats. We analyzed aggregate request traffic volumes associated with Starlink's primary autonomous system (AS14593) to track the growth in usage of the service throughout 2025. The request volume shown on the trend line in the chart represents a seven-day trailing average. 

Globally, traffic from Starlink continued to see consistent growth throughout 2025, with total request volume up 2.3x across the year. We tend to see rapid traffic growth when Starlink service becomes available in a country/region, and that trend continues in 2025. 

^{Starlink traffic growth in 2025, worldwide}

That’s exactly what we saw in the more than 20 new countries/regions where @Starlink announced availability: within days, Starlink traffic in those places increased rapidly. These included Armenia, Niger, Sri Lanka, and Sint Maarten.

We also saw Starlink traffic from a number of locations that are not currently marked for service availability. However, there are IPv4 and/or IPv6 prefixes associated with these countries in Starlink’s published geofeed. Given the ability for Starlink users to roam with their service (and equipment), this traffic likely comes from roaming users in those areas.

^{Starlink traffic growth in 2025, Niger}

Of countries/regions where service was active before 2025, Benin, Timor-Leste, and Botswana had some of the largest traffic growth, at 51x, 19x, and 16x respectively. Starlink service availability in Benin was first announced in November 2023, Timor-Leste in December 2024, and Botswana in August 2024.

^{Starlink traffic growth in 2025, Botswana}

Similar services, such as Amazon Leo, Eutelsat Konnect, and China’s Qianfan, continue to grow their satellite constellations and move towards commercial availability. We hope to review traffic growth across these services in the future as well.

To look at the aggregate request traffic Cloudflare saw in 2025 from the entire IPv4 Internet, we can use a Hilbert curve, which allows us to visualize a sequence of IPv4 addresses in a two-dimensional pattern that keeps nearby IP addresses close to each other, making them useful for surveying the Internet's IPv4 address space. Within the visualization, we aggregate IPv4 addresses into /20 prefixes, meaning that at the highest zoom level, each square represents traffic from 4,096 IPv4 addresses. This level of aggregation keeps the amount of data used for the visualization manageable. See the 2024 Year in Review blog post for additional details about the visualization.

For the third year in a row, the IP address block that had the maximum request volume to Cloudflare during 2025 was Google’s 66.249.64.0/20 –  one of several used by the Googlebot web crawler to retrieve content for search indexing and AI training. That a Googlebot IP address block ranked again as the top request traffic source is unsurprising, given the number of web properties on Cloudflare’s network and Googlebot’s aggressive crawling activity. The Googlebot prefix accounted for nearly 4x as much IPv4 request traffic as the next largest traffic source, 146.20.240.0/20, which is part of a larger block of IPv4 address space announced by Rackspace Hosting. As a cloud and hosting provider, Rackspace supports many different types of customers and applications, so the driver of the observed traffic to Cloudflare isn’t known.

^{Zoomed Hilbert curve view showing the address block that generated the highest volume of requests in 2025}

This year, we’ve added the ability to search for an autonomous system (ASN) to the visualization, allowing you to see how broadly a network provider’s IP address holdings are distributed across the IPv4 universe. 

One example is AS16509 (AMAZON-02, used with AWS), which shows the results of Amazon’s acquisitions of large amounts of IPv4 address space over the years. Another example is AS7018 (ATT-INTERNET4, AT&T), which is one of the largest announcers of IPv4 address space in the United States. Much of the traffic we see from this ASN comes from 12.0.0.0/8, a block of over 16 million IPv4 addresses that has been owned by AT&T since 1983.

^{Hilbert curve showing the IPv4 address blocks from AS7018 that sent traffic to Cloudflare in 2025}

“Post-quantum” refers to a set of cryptographic techniques designed to protect encrypted data from “harvest now, decrypt later” attacks by adversaries that have the ability to capture and store current data for future decryption by sufficiently advanced quantum computers. The Cloudflare Research team has been working on post-quantum cryptography since 2017, and regularly publishes updates on the state of the post-quantum Internet.

After seeing significant growth in 2024, the global share of post-quantum encrypted traffic nearly doubled throughout 2025, from 29% at the start of the year to 52% in early December. 

^{Post-quantum encrypted TLS 1.3 traffic growth in 2025, worldwide}

Twenty-eight countries/regions saw their share of post-quantum encrypted traffic more than double throughout the year, including significant growth in Puerto Rico and Kuwait. Kuwait’s share nearly tripled, from 13% to 37%, and Puerto Rico’s share grew from 20% to 49%. 

Those three were among others that saw significant share growth in mid-September, concurrent with Apple releasing operating system updates, in which “TLS-protected connections will automatically advertise support for hybrid, quantum-secure key exchange in TLS 1.3”. In Kuwait and Puerto Rico, over half of request traffic is from mobile devices, and approximately half comes from iOS devices in both locations as well, so it is not surprising that this software update resulted in a significant increase in post-quantum traffic share

^{Post-quantum encrypted TLS 1.3 traffic growth in 2025, Puerto Rico}

To that end, the share of post-quantum encrypted traffic from Apple iOS devices grew significantly in September after iOS 26 was officially released. Just four days after release, the global share of requests with post-quantum support from iOS devices grew from just under 2% to 11%. By early December, more than 25% of requests from iOS devices used post-quantum encryption.

The new Bots Directory on Cloudflare Radar provides a wealth of information about Verified Bots and Signed Agents, including their operators, categories, and associated user agents, links to documentation, and traffic trends. Verified Bots must conform to a set of requirements as well as being verified through either Web Bot Auth or IP validation. A signed agent is controlled by an end user and a verified signature-agent from their Web Bot Auth implementation, and must conform to a separate set of requirements.

Googlebot is used to crawl Web site content for search indexing and AI training, and it was far and away the most active bot seen by Cloudflare throughout 2025. It was most active between mid-February and mid-July, peaking in mid-April, and was responsible for over 28% of traffic from Verified Bots. Other Google-operated bots that were responsible for notable amounts of traffic included Google AdsBot (used to monitor Web sites where Google ads are served), Google Image Proxy (used to retrieve and cache images embedded in email messages), and GoogleOther (used by various product teams for fetching publicly accessible content from sites).

OpenAI’s GPTBot, which crawls content for AI training, was the next most active bot, originating about 7.5% of Verified Bot traffic, with fairly volatile crawling activity during the first half of the year. Microsoft’s Bingbot crawls Web site content for search indexing and AI training and generated 6% of Verified Bot traffic throughout the year, showing relatively stable activity. 

^{Verified Bot traffic trends in 2025, worldwide}

Search engine crawlers and AI crawlers are the two most active Verified Bot categories, with traffic patterns mapping closely to the leading bots in those categories, including GoogleBot and OpenAI’s GPTBot. Search engine crawlers were responsible for 40% of Verified Bot traffic, with AI crawlers generating half as much (20%). Search engine optimization bots were also quite active, driving over 13% of requests from Verified Bots.

^{Verified Bot traffic trends by category in 2025, worldwide}

In September, a Cloudflare blog post laid out a proposal for responsible AI bot principles, one of which was “AI bots should have one distinct purpose and declare it.” In the AI bots best practices overview on Radar, we note that several bot operators have dual-purpose crawlers, including Google and Microsoft.

Because Googlebot crawls for both search engine indexing and AI training, we have included it in this year’s AI crawler overview. In 2025, its crawl volume dwarfed that of other leading AI bots. Request traffic began to increase in mid-February, peaking in late April, and then slowly declined through late July. After that, it grew gradually into the end of the year. Bingbot also has a similar dual purpose, although its crawl volume is a fraction of Googlebot’s. Bingbot’s crawl activity trended generally upwards across the year.

^{AI crawler traffic trends in 2025, worldwide}

OpenAI’s GPTBot is used to crawl content that may be used in training OpenAI's generative AI foundation models. Its crawling activity was quite volatile across the year, reaching its highest levels in June, but it ended November slightly above the crawl levels seen at the beginning of the year. 

Crawl volume for OpenAI’s ChatGPT-User, which visits Web pages when users ask ChatGPT or a CustomGPT questions, saw sustained growth over the course of the year, with a weekly usage pattern becoming more evident starting in mid-February, suggesting increasing usage at schools and in the workplace. Peak request volumes were as much as 16x higher than at the beginning of the year. A drop in activity was also evident in the June to August timeframe, when many students were out of school and many professionals took vacation time. 

OAI-SearchBot, which is used to link to and surface websites in search results in ChatGPT's search features, saw crawling activity grow gradually through August, then several traffic spikes in August and September, before starting to grow more aggressively heading into October, with peak request volume during a late October spike approximately 5x higher than the beginning of the year.

^{OpenAI crawler traffic trends in 2025, worldwide}

Crawling by Anthropic’s ClaudeBot effectively doubled through the first half of the year, but gradually declined during the second half, returning to a level approximately 10% higher than the start of the year. Perplexity’s PerplexityBot crawling traffic grew slowly through January and February, but saw a big jump in activity from mid-March into April. After that, growth was more gradual through October, before seeing a significant increase again in November, winding up about 3.5x higher than where it started the year.

^{ClaudeBot traffic trends in 2025, worldwide}

^{PerplexityBot traffic trends in 2025, worldwide}

ByteDance’s Bytespider, one of 2024’s top AI crawlers, saw crawling volume below several other training bots, and its activity dropped across the year, continuing the decline observed last year.

Most AI bot crawling is done for one of three purposes: training, which gathers Web site content for AI model training; search, which indexes Web site content for search functionality available on AI platforms; and user action, which visits Web sites in response to user questions posed to a chatbot. Note that search crawling may also include crawling for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), which enables a content owner to bring their own data into LLM generation without retraining or fine-tuning a model. (A fourth “undeclared” purpose captures traffic from AI bots whose crawling purpose is unclear or unknown.)

Crawling for model training is responsible for the overwhelming majority of AI crawler traffic, reaching as much as 7-8x search crawling and 32x user action crawling at peak. The training traffic figure is heavily influenced by OpenAI’s GPTBot, and as such, it followed a very similar pattern through the year.

Crawling for search was strongest through mid-March, when it dropped by approximately 40%. It returned to more gradual growth after that, though it ended the surveyed time period just under 10% lower than the start of the year.

User action crawling started 2025 with the lowest crawl volume of the three defined purposes, but more than doubled through January and February. It again doubled in early March, and from there, it continued to grow throughout the year, up over 21x from January through early December. This growth maps very closely to the traffic trends seen for OpenAI’s ChatGPT-User bot.

^{User action crawler traffic trends in 2025, worldwide}

AI bots have frequently been in the news during 2025 as content owners raise concerns about the amount of traffic that they are generating, especially as much of it does not translate into end users being referred back to the source Web sites. To better understand the impact of AI bot crawling activity, as compared to non-AI bots and human Web usage, we analyzed request traffic for HTML content across Cloudflare’s customer base and classified it as coming from a human, an AI bot, or another “non-AI” type of bot. (Note that because we are focusing on just HTML content here, the bot and human shares of traffic will differ from that shown on Radar, which analyzes request traffic for all content types.) Because Googlebot crawls so actively, and is dual-purpose, we have broken its share out separately in this analysis.

Throughout 2025, we found that traffic from AI bots accounted for an average of 4.2% of HTML requests. The share varied widely throughout the year, dropping as low as 2.4% in early April, and reaching as high as 6.4% in late June.

To that end, non-AI bots started 2025 responsible for half of requests to HTML pages, seven percentage points above human-generated traffic. This gap grew as wide as 25 percentage points during the first few days of June. However, these traffic shares began to draw closer together starting in mid June, and starting on September 11, entered a period where the human generated share of HTML traffic sometimes exceeded that of non-AI bots. As of December 2, human traffic generated 47% of HTML requests, and non-AI bots generated 44%.

Googlebot is a particularly voracious crawler, and this year it originated 4.5% of HTML requests, a share slightly larger than AI bots in aggregate. Starting the year at just under 2.5%, its share ramped quickly over the next four months, peaking at 11% in late April. It subsequently fell back towards its starting point over the next several months, and then grew again during the second half of the year, ending with a 5% share. This share shift largely mirrors Googlebot’s crawling activity as discussed above.

^{HTML traffic shares by bot type in 2025, worldwide}

We launched the crawl-to-refer ratio metric on Radar on July 1 to track how often a given AI or search platform sends traffic to a site relative to how often it crawls that site. A high ratio means a whole lot of AI crawling without sending actual humans to a Web site.

It can be a volatile metric, with the values shifting day-by-day as crawl activity and referral traffic change. This metric compares total number of requests from relevant user agents associated with a given search or AI platform where the response was of Content-type: text/html by the total number of requests for HTML content where the Referer header contained a hostname associated with a given search or AI platform. 

Anthropic had the highest crawl-to-refer ratios this year, reaching as much as 500,000:1, although they were quite erratic from January through May. Both the magnitude and erratic nature of the metric was likely due to sparse referral traffic over that time period. After that, the ratios became more consistent, but remained higher than others, ranging from ~25,000:1 to ~100,000:1.

OpenAI’s ratios over time were quite spiky, and reached as much as 3,700:1 in March. These shifts may be due to the stabilization of GPTBot crawling activity, coupled with increased usage of ChatGPT search functionality, which includes links back to source Web sites within its responses. Users following those links would increase Referer counts, potentially lowering the ratio. (Assuming that crawl traffic wasn’t increasing at a similar or greater rate.)

Perplexity had the lowest crawl-to-refer ratios of the major AI platforms, starting the year below 100:1 before spiking in late March above 700:1, concurrent with a spike of crawl traffic seen from PerplexityBot.  Settling back down after the spike, peak ratio values generally remained below 400:1, and below 200:1 from September onwards.

Among search platforms, Microsoft’s ratio unexpectedly exhibited a cyclical weekly pattern, reaching its lowest levels on Thursdays, and peaking on Sundays. Peak ratio values were generally in the 50:1 to 70:1 range across the year. Starting the year just over 3:1, Google’s crawl-to-refer ratio increased steadily through April, reaching as high as 30:1. After peaking, it fell somewhat erratically through mid-July, dropping back to 3:1, although it has been slowly increasing through the latter half of 2025. DuckDuckGo’s ratio remained below 1:1 for the first three calendar quarters of 2025, but experienced a sudden jump to 1.5:1 in mid-October and stayed elevated for the remainder of the period.

^{AI & search platform crawl-to-refer ratios in 2025, worldwide}

The robots.txt file, formally defined in RFC 9309 as the Robots Exclusion Protocol, is a text file that content owners can use to signal to Web crawlers which parts of a Web site the crawlers are allowed to access, using directives to explicitly allow or disallow search and AI crawlers from their whole site, or just parts of it. The directives within the file are effectively a “keep out” sign and don’t provide any formal access control. Having said that, Cloudflare’s managed robots.txt feature automatically updates a site’s existing robots.txt or creates a robots.txt file on the site that includes directives asking popular AI bot operators to not use the content for AI model training. In addition, our AI Crawl Control capabilities can track violations of a site’s robots.txt directives, and give the site owner the ability to block requests from the offending user agent.

On Cloudflare Radar, we provide insight into the number of robots.txt files found among our top 10,000 domains and the full/partial disposition of the allow and disallow directives found within the files for selected crawler user agents. (In this context, “full” refers to directives that apply to the whole site, and “partial” refers to directives that apply to specified paths or file types.) Within the Year in Review microsite, we show how the disposition of these directives changed over the course of 2025.

The user agents with the highest number of fully disallowed directives are those associated with AI crawlers, including GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and CCBot. The directives for Googlebot and Bingbot crawlers, used for both search indexing and AI training, leaned heavily towards partial disallow, likely focused on cordoning off login endpoints and other non-content areas of a site. For these two bots, directives applying to the whole site remained a small fraction of the total number of disallow directives observed through the year. 

^{Robots.txt disallow directives by user agent}

The number of explicit allow directives found across the discovered robots.txt files was a fraction of the observed disallow directives, likely because allow is the default policy, absent any specific directive. Googlebot had the largest number of explicit allow directives, although over half of them were partial allows. Allow directives targeting AI crawlers were found across fewer domains, with directives targeting OpenAI’s crawlers leaning more towards explicit full allows. 

Google-Extended is a user agent token that web publishers can use to manage whether content that Google crawls from their sites may be used for training Gemini models or providing site content from the Google Search index to Gemini, and the number of allow directives targeting it tripled during the year — most partially allowed access at the start of the year, while the end of the year saw a larger number of directives that explicitly allowed full site access than those that allowed access to just some of the site’s content. 

^{Robots.txt allow directives by user agent}

The AI model landscape is rapidly evolving, with providers regularly releasing more powerful models, capable of tasks like text and image generation, speech recognition, and image classification. Cloudflare collaborates with AI model providers to ensure that Workers AI supports these models as soon as possible following their release, and we recently acquired Replicate to greatly expand our catalog of supported models. In February 2025, we introduced visibility on Radar into the popularity of publicly available supported models as well as the types of tasks that these models perform, based on customer account share. 

Throughout the year, Meta’s llama-3-8b-instruct model was dominant, with an account share (36.3%) more than three times larger than the next most popular models, OpenAI’s whisper (10.1%) and Stability AI’s stable-diffusion-xl-base-1.0 (9.8%). Both Meta and BAAI (Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence) had multiple models among the top 10, and the top 10 models had an account share of 89%, with the balance spread across a long tail of other models.

^{Most popular models on Workers AI in 2025, worldwide}

Task popularity was driven in large part by the top models, with text generation, text-to-image, and automatic speech recognition topping the list. Text generation was used by 48.2% of Workers AI customer accounts, nearly four times more than the text-to-image share of 12.3% and automatic speech recognition’s 11.0% share. 

^{Most popular tasks on Workers AI in 2025, worldwide}

In addition to the year-to-date analysis presented above, below we present point-in-time analyses of what is being crawled. Note that these insights are not included in the Year in Review microsite.

Within the AI section of Year in Review, we are looking at traffic from AI bots and crawlers globally, without regard for the geography associated with the account that owns the content being crawled. If we drill down a level geographically, using data from October 2025, and look at which bots generate the most crawling traffic for sites owned by customers with a billing address in a given geographic region, we find that Googlebot accounts for between 35% and 55% of crawler traffic in each region.

OpenAI’s GPTBot or Microsoft’s Bingbot are second most active, with crawling shares of 13-14%. In the developed economies across North America, Europe, and Oceania, Bingbot maintains a solid lead over AI crawlers. But for sites based in fast-growing markets across South America and Asia, GPTBot holds a slimmer lead over Bingbot.

In analyzing AI crawler activity by customer industry during October 2025, we found that Retail and Computer Software consistently attracted the most AI crawler traffic, together representing just over 40% of all activity.

Others in the top 10 accounted for much smaller shares of crawling activity. These top 10 industries accounted for just under 70% of crawling, with the balance spread across a long tail of other industries.

^{Industry share of AI crawling activity, October 2025}

The two leading mobile device operating systems globally are Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android. By analyzing information in the User-Agent header included with each Web request, we can calculate the distribution of traffic by client operating system throughout the year. Android devices generate the majority of mobile device traffic globally, due to the wide distribution of price points, form factors, and capabilities of such devices.

Globally, the share of traffic from iOS grew slightly year-over-year, up two percentage points to 35% in 2025. Looking at the top countries for iOS traffic share, Monaco had the highest share, at 70%, and iOS drove 50% or more of mobile device traffic in a total of 30 countries/regions, including Denmark (65%), Japan (57%), and Puerto Rico (52%).

^{Distribution of mobile device traffic by operating system in 2025, worldwide}

For countries/regions with higher Android usage, the shares were significantly larger. Twenty-seven had Android adoption above 90% in 2025, with Papua New Guinea the highest at 97%. Sudan, Malawi, Bangladesh, and Ethiopia also registered an Android share of 95% or more. Android was responsible for 50% or more of mobile device traffic in 175 countries/regions, with the Bahamas’ 51% share placing it at the bottom of that list. 

^{Distribution of iOS and Android usage in 2025}

HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) is the protocol that makes the Web work. Over the last 30+ years, it has gone through several major revisions. The first standardized version, HTTP/1.0, was adopted in 1996, HTTP/1.1 in 1999, and HTTP/2 in 2015. HTTP/3, standardized in 2022, marked a significant update, running on top of a new transport protocol known as QUIC. Using QUIC as its underlying transport allows HTTP/3 to establish connections more quickly, as well as deliver improved performance by mitigating the effects of packet loss and network changes. Because it also provides encryption by default, using HTTP/3 mitigates the risk of attacks. 

Globally in 2025, 50% of requests to Cloudflare were made over HTTP/2, HTTP/1.x accounted for 29%, and the remaining 21% were made via HTTP/3. These shares are largely unchanged from 2024 — HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 gained just fractions of a percentage point this year.

^{Distribution of traffic by HTTP version in 2025, worldwide}

Geographically, usage of HTTP/3 appears to be both increasing and spreading. Last year, we noted that we had found eight countries/regions sending more than a third of their requests over HTTP/3. In 2025, 15 countries/regions sent more than a third of requests over HTTP/3, with Georgia’s 38% adoption just exceeding 2024’s top adoption rate of 37% in Réunion. (Looking at historical data, Georgia started the year around 46% HTTP/3 adoption, but dropped through the first half of the year before leveling off.) Armenia had the largest increase in HTTP/3 adoption year-over-year, jumping from 25% to 37%. 

Seven countries/regions saw overall HTTP/3 usage levels below 10% due to high levels of bot-originated HTTP/1.x traffic. These include Hong Kong, Dominica, Singapore, Ireland, Iran, Seychelles, and Gibraltar. 

To deliver a modern Web site, developers must capably integrate a growing collection of libraries and frameworks with third-party tools and platforms. All of these components must work together to ensure a performant, feature-rich, problem-free user experience. As in past years, we used Cloudflare Radar’s URL Scanner to scan Web sites associated with the top 5,000 domains to identify the most popular technologies and services used across eleven categories. 

jQuery is self-described as a fast, small, and feature-rich JavaScript library, and our scan found it on 8x as many sites as Slick, a JavaScript library used to display image carousels. React remained the top JavaScript framework used for building Web interfaces, found on twice as many scanned sites as Vue.js. PHP, node.js, and Java remained the most popular programming languages/technologies, holding a commanding lead over other languages, including Ruby, Python, Perl, and C.

^{Top Web site technologies, JavaScript libraries category in 2025}

WordPress remained the most popular content management system (CMS), though its share of scanned sites dropped to 47%, with the difference distributed across gains seen by multiple challengers. HubSpot and Marketo remained the top marketing automation platforms, with a combined share 10% higher YoY. Among A/B testing tools, VWO’s share grew by eight percentage points year-over-year, extending its lead over Optimizely, while Google Optimize, which was sunsetted in September 2023, saw its share fall from 14% to 4%.

Application programming interfaces (APIs) are the foundation of modern dynamic Web sites and both Web-based and native applications. These sites and applications rely heavily on automated API calls to provide customized information. Analyzing the Web traffic protected and delivered by Cloudflare, we can identify requests being made to API endpoints. By applying heuristics to these API-related requests determined to not be coming from a person using a browser or native mobile application, we can identify the top languages used to build API clients.

In 2025, 20% of automated API requests were made by Go-based clients, representing significant growth from Go’s 12% share in 2024. Python’s share also increased year-over-year, growing from 9.6% to 17%. Java jumped to third place, reaching an 11.2% share, up from 7.4% in 2024. Node.js, last year’s second-most popular language, saw its share fall to just 8.3% in 2025, pushing it down to fourth place, while .NET remained at the bottom of the top five, dropping to just 2.3%.

^{Most popular automated API client languages in 2025}

Cloudflare is in a unique position to measure search engine market share because we protect websites and applications for millions of customers. To that end, since the fourth quarter of 2021, we have been publishing quarterly reports on this data. We use the HTTP referer header to identify the search engine sending traffic to customer sites and applications, and present the market share data as an overall aggregate, as well as broken out by device type and operating system. (Device type and operating system insights are based on the User-Agent and Client Hints HTTP request headers.)

Globally, Google referred the most traffic to sites protected and delivered by Cloudflare, with a nearly 90% share in 2025. The other search engines in the top 5 include Bing (3.1%), Yandex (2.0%), Baidu (1.4%), and DuckDuckGo (1.2%). Looking at trends across the year, Yandex dropped from a 2.5% share in May to a 1.5% share in July, while Baidu grew from 0.9% in April to 1.6% in June.

^{Overall search engine market share in 2025, worldwide}

Yandex users are primarily based in Russia, where the domestic platform holds a 65% market share, almost double that of Google at 34%. In the Czech Republic, users prefer Google (84%), but local search engine Seznam’s 7.7% share is a strong showing compared to the second place search engines in other countries. 

^{Overall search engine market share in 2025, Czech Republic}

For traffic from “desktop” systems aggregated globally, Google’s market share drops to about 80%, while Bing’s jumps to nearly 11%. This is likely driven by the continued market dominance of Windows-based systems: On Windows, Google refers just 76% of traffic, while Bing refers about 14%. For traffic from mobile devices, Google holds almost 93% of market share, with the same share seen for traffic from both Android and iOS devices.

^{Overall search engine market share in 2025, Windows-based systems}

For additional details, including search engines aggregated under “Other”, please refer to the quarterly Search Engine Referral Reports on Cloudflare Radar.

Cloudflare is also in a unique position to measure browser market share, and we have been publishing quarterly reports on the topic for several years. To identify the browser and associated operating system making content requests, we use information from the User-Agent and Client Hints HTTP headers. We present browser market share data as an overall aggregate, as well as broken out by device type and operating system. Note that the shares of browsers available on both desktop and mobile devices, such as Google Chrome or Apple Safari, are presented in aggregate.

Globally, two-thirds of request traffic to Cloudflare came from Chrome in 2025, similar to its share last year. Safari, available exclusively on Apple devices, was the second most-popular browser, with a 15.4% market share. They were followed by Microsoft Edge (7.4%), Mozilla Firefox (3.7%) and Samsung Internet (2.3%). 

^{Overall browser market share in 2025, worldwide}

In Russia, Chrome remains the most popular with a 44% share, but the domestic Yandex Browser comes in a strong second with a 33% market share, as compared to the sub-10% shares for Safari, Edge, and Opera. Interestingly, the Yandex Browser actually beat Chrome by a percentage point (39% to 38%) in June before giving up significant market share to Chrome as the year progressed.

^{Overall browser market share in 2025, Russia}

As the default browser on iOS, Safari is far and away the most popular on such devices, with a 79% market share, four times Chrome’s 19% share. Less than 1% of requests come from DuckDuckGo, Firefox, and QQ Browser (developed in China by Tencent). In contrast, on Android, 85% of requests are from Chrome, while vendor-provided Samsung Internet is a distant second with a 6.6% share. Huawei Browser, another vendor-provided browser, is third at just 1%. And despite being the default browser on Windows, Edge’s 19% share pales in comparison to Chrome, which leads with a 69% share on that operating system.

^{Overall browser market share in 2025, iOS devices}

For additional details, including browsers aggregated under “Other”, please refer to the quarterly Browser Market Share Reports on Cloudflare Radar.

Internet outages continue to be an ever-present threat, and the potential impact of these outages continues to grow, as they can lead to economic losses, disrupted educational and government services, and limited communications. During 2025, we covered significant Internet disruptions and their associated causes in our quarterly summary posts (Q1, Q2, Q3) as well standalone posts covering major outages in Portugal & Spain and Afghanistan. The Cloudflare Radar Outage Center tracks these Internet outages, and uses Cloudflare traffic data for insights into their scope and duration.

Nearly half of the observed outages this year were related to Internet shutdowns intended to prevent cheating on academic exams. Countries including Iraq, Syria, and Sudan again implemented regular multi-hour shutdowns over the course of several weeks during exam periods. Other government-directed shutdowns in Libya and Tanzania were implemented in response to protests and civil unrest, while in Afghanistan, the Taliban ordered the shutdown of fiber optic Internet connectivity in multiple provinces as part of a drive to “prevent immorality.”

Cable cuts, affecting both submarine and domestic fiber optic infrastructure, were also a leading cause of Internet disruptions in 2025. These cuts resulted in network providers in countries/regions including the United States, South Africa, Haiti, Pakistan, and Hong Kong experiencing service disruptions lasting from several hours to several days. Other notable outages include one caused by a fire in a telecom building in Cairo, Egypt, which disrupted Internet connectivity across multiple service providers for several days, and another in Jamaica, where damage caused by Hurricane Melissa resulted in lower Internet traffic from the island for over a week.

Within the timeline on the Year in Review microsite, hovering over a dot will display information about that outage, and clicking on it will link to additional insights.

^{Over 170 major Internet outages were observed around the world during 2025}

Available IPv4 address space has been largely exhausted for a decade or more, though solutions like Network Address Translation have enabled network providers to stretch limited IPv4 resources. This has served in part to slow the adoption of IPv6, designed in the mid-1990s as a successor protocol to IPv4, and offers an expanded address space intended to better support the expected growth in the number of Internet-connected devices.

For nearly 15 years, Cloudflare has been a vocal and active advocate for IPv6 as well, launching solutions including Automatic IPv6 Gateway in 2011, which enabled free IPv6 support for all of our customers and IPv6 support by default for all of our customers in 2014. Simplistically, server-side support is only half of what is needed to drive IPv6 adoption, because end user connections need to support it as well. By aggregating and analyzing the IP version used for requests made to Cloudflare across the year, we can get insight into the distribution of traffic across IPv6 and IPv4.

Globally, 29% of IPv6-capable (“dual-stack”) requests for content were made over IPv6, up a percentage point from 28% in 2024. India again topped the list with an IPv6 adoption rate of 67%, followed by just three other countries/regions (Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, and Uruguay) that also made more than half of such requests over IPv6, the same as last year. Some of the largest gains were seen in Belize, which grew from 4.3% to 24% year-over-year, and Qatar, which saw its adoption nearly double to 33% in 2025. Unfortunately, some countries/regions still lag the leaders, with 94 seeing adoption rates below 10%, including Russia (8.6%), Ireland (6.5%), and Hong Kong (3.0%). Even further behind are the 20 countries/regions with adoption rates below 1%, including Tanzania (0.9%), Syria (0.3%), and Gibraltar (0.1%).

^{Distribution of traffic by IP version in 2025, worldwide}

^{Top five countries for IPv6 adoption in 2025}

Over the past decade or so, we have turned to Internet speed tests for many purposes: keeping our service providers honest, troubleshooting a problematic connection, or showing off a particularly high download speed on social media. In fact, we’ve become conditioned to focus on download speeds as the primary measure of a connection’s quality. While it is absolutely an important metric, for increasingly popular use cases — like videoconferencing, live-streaming, and online gaming — strong upload speeds and low latency are also critical. However, even when Internet providers offer service tiers that include high symmetric speeds and lower latency, consumer adoption is often mixed due to cost, availability, or other issues.

Tests on speed.cloudflare.com measure both download and upload speeds, as well as loaded and unloaded latency. By aggregating the results of tests taken around the world during 2025, we can get a country/region perspective on average values for these connection quality metrics, as well as insight into the distribution of the measurements.

Europe was well-represented among those with the highest average download speeds in 2025. Spain, Hungary, Portugal, Denmark, Romania, and France were all in the top 10, with both Spain and Hungary averaging download speeds above 300 Mbps. Spain’s average grew by 25 Mbps from 2024, while Hungary’s jumped 46 Mbps. Meanwhile, Asian countries had many of the highest average upload speeds, with South Korea, Macau, Singapore, and Japan reaching the top 10, all seeing averages in excess of 130 Mbps.

But it was Spain that topped the list for the upload metric as well at 206 Mbps, up 13 Mbps from 2024. The country’s strong showing across both speed metrics is potentially attributable to “UNICO-Broadband,” a “call for projects by telecommunications operators aiming at the deployment of high-speed broadband infrastructure capable of providing services at symmetric speeds of at least 300 Mbps, scalable at 1 Gbps,” which aimed to cover 100 % of the population in 2025.

^{Countries/regions with the highest download speeds in 2025, worldwide}

As noted above, low latency connections are needed to provide users with good gaming and videoconferencing/streaming experiences. The latency metric can be broken down into loaded and idle latency. The former measures latency on a loaded connection, where bandwidth is actively being consumed, while the latter measures latency on an “idle” connection, when there is no other network traffic present. (These definitions are from the speed test application’s perspective.) 

In 2025, a number of European countries were among those with both the lowest idle and loaded latencies. For average idle latency, Iceland measured the lowest at 13 ms, just 2 ms better than Moldova. In addition to these two, Portugal, Spain, and Hungary also ranked among the top 10, all with average idle latencies below 20 ms. Moldova topped the list of countries/regions with the lowest average loaded latency, at 73 ms. Hungary, Spain, Belgium, Portugal, Slovakia, and Slovenia were also part of the top 10, all with average loaded latencies below 100 ms.

^{Measured idle/loaded latency, Moldova}

As we discussed above, the speed test at speed.cloudflare.com measures a user’s connection speeds and latency. We reviewed the aggregate findings from those tests, highlighting the countries/regions with the best results. However, we also wondered about test activity around the world -– where are users most concerned about their connection quality, and how frequently do they perform tests? A new animated Year in Review visualization illustrates speed test activity, aggregated weekly.

Data is aggregated at a regional level and the associated activity is plotted on the map, with circles sized based on the number of tests taken each week. Note that locations with fewer than 100 speed tests per week are not plotted. Looking at test volume across the year, the greater London and Los Angeles areas were most active, as were Tokyo and Hong Kong and several U.S. cities.

Animating the graph to see changes across the year, a number of week-over-week surges in test volume are visible. These include in the Nairobi, Kenya, area during the seven-day period ending June 10; in the Tehran, Iran, area the period ending July 29; across multiple areas in Russia the period ending August 5; and in the Karnataka, India, area the period ending October 28. It isn’t clear what drove these increases in test volume — the Cloudflare Radar Outage Center does not show any observed Internet outages impacting those areas around those times, so it is unlikely to be subscribers testing the restoration of connectivity.

^{Cloudflare speed test activity by location in 2025}

For better or worse, over the last quarter-century, mobile devices have become an indispensable part of everyday life. Adoption varies around the world — statistics from the World Bank show multiple countries/regions with mobile phone ownership above 90%, while in several others, ownership rates are below 10%, as of October 2025. In some countries/regions, mobile devices primarily connect to the Internet via Wi-Fi, while other countries/regions are “mobile first,” where 4G/5G services are the primary means of Internet access.

Information contained within the User-Agent header included with each request to Cloudflare enables us to categorize it as coming from a mobile, desktop, or other type of device. Aggregating this categorization globally across 2025 found that 43% of requests were from mobile devices, up from 41% in 2024. The balance came from “classic” laptop and desktop type devices. Similar to an observation made last year, these traffic shares were in line with those measured in Year in Review reports dating back to 2022, suggesting that mobile device usage has achieved a “steady state.”

In 117 countries/regions, more than half of requests came from mobile devices, led by Sudan and Malawi at 75% and 74% respectively. Five other African countries/regions — Eswatini (Swaziland), Yemen, Botswana, Mozambique, and Somalia — also had mobile request shares above 70% in 2025, in line with strong mobile phone ownership in the region. Among countries/regions with low mobile device traffic share, Gibraltar was the only one below 10% (at 5.1%), with just six others originating less than a quarter of requests from mobile devices. This is fewer than in 2024, when a dozen countries/regions had a mobile share below 25%.

^{Distribution of traffic by device type in 2025, worldwide}

^{Global distribution of traffic by device type in 2025}

Cloudflare automatically mitigates attack traffic targeting customer websites and applications using DDoS mitigation techniques or Web Application Firewall (WAF) Managed Rules, protecting them from a variety of threats posed by malicious actors. We also enable customers to mitigate traffic, even if it isn’t malicious, using techniques like rate-limiting requests or blocking all traffic from a given location. The need to do so may be driven by regulatory or business requirements. We looked at the overall share of traffic to Cloudflare’s network throughout 2025 that was mitigated for any reason, as well as the share that was blocked as a DDoS attack or by WAF Managed Rules.

This year, 6.2% of global traffic was mitigated, down a quarter of a percentage point from 2024. 3.3% of traffic was mitigated as a DDoS attack, or by managed rules, up one-tenth of a percentage point year over year. General mitigations were applied to more than 10% of the traffic coming from over 30 countries/regions, while 14 countries/regions had DDoS/WAF mitigations applied to more than 10% of originated traffic. Both counts were down in comparison to 2024. 

Equatorial Guinea had the largest shares of mitigated traffic with 40% generally mitigated and 29% with DDoS/WAF mitigations applied. These shares grew over the last year, from 26% (general) and 19% (DDoS/WAF). In contrast, Dominica had the smallest shares of mitigated traffic, with just 0.7% of traffic mitigated, with DDoS/WAF mitigations applied to just 0.1%.

The large increase in mitigated traffic seen during July in the graph below is due to a very large DDoS attack campaign that primarily targeted a single Cloudflare customer domain.

^{Mitigated traffic trends in 2025, worldwide}

A bot is a software application programmed to do certain tasks, and Cloudflare uses advanced heuristics to differentiate between bot traffic and human traffic, scoring each request on the likelihood that it originates from a bot or a human user. By monitoring traffic suspected to be from bots, site and application owners can spot and, if necessary, block potentially malicious activity. However, not all bots are malicious — bots can also be helpful, and Cloudflare maintains a directory of verified bots that includes those used for things like search engine indexing, security scanning, and site/application monitoring. Regardless of intent, we analyzed where bot traffic was originating from in 2025, using the IP address of a request to identify the network (autonomous system) and country/region associated with the bot making the request. 

Globally, the top 10 countries/regions accounted for 71% of observed bot traffic. Forty percent originated from the United States, far ahead of Germany’s 6.5% share. The US share was up over five percentage points from 2024, while Germany’s share was down a fraction of a percentage point. The remaining countries in the top 10 all contributed bot traffic shares below 5% in 2025.

^{Global bot traffic distribution by source country/region in 2025}

Looking at bot traffic by network, we found that cloud platforms remained among the leading sources. This is due to a number of factors, including the ease of using automated tools to quickly provision compute resources, their relatively low cost, their broadly distributed geographic footprints, and the platforms’ high-bandwidth Internet connectivity. 

Two autonomous systems associated with Amazon Web Services accounted for a total of 14.4% of observed bot traffic, and two associated with Google Cloud were responsible for a combined 9.7% of bot traffic. They were followed by Microsoft Azure, which originated 5.5% of bot traffic. The shares from all three platforms were up as compared to 2024. These cloud platforms have a strong regional data center presence in many of the countries/regions in the top 10. Elsewhere, around the world, local telecommunications providers frequently accounted for the largest shares of automated bot traffic observed in those countries/regions.

^{Global bot traffic distribution by source network in 2025}

Attackers are constantly shifting their tactics and targets, mixing things up in an attempt to evade detection, or based on the damage they intend to cause. They may try to cause financial harm to businesses by targeting ecommerce sites during a busy shopping period, make a political statement by attacking government-related or civil society sites, or attempt to knock opponents offline by attacking a game server. To identify vertical-targeted attack activity during 2025, we analyzed mitigated traffic for customers that had an associated industry and vertical within their customer record. Mitigated traffic was aggregated weekly by source country/region across 17 target verticals.

Organizations in the "People and Society” vertical were the most targeted across the year, with 4.4% of global mitigated traffic targeting the vertical. Customers classified as “People and Society” include religious institutions, nonprofit organizations, civic & social organizations, and libraries. The vertical started out the year with under 2% of mitigated traffic, but saw the share jump to 10% the week of March 5, and increase to over 17% by the end of the month. Other attack surges targeting these sites occurred in late April (to 19.1%) and early July (to 23.2%). Many of these types of organizations are protected by Cloudflare’s Project Galileo, and this blog post details the attacks and threats they experienced in 2024 and 2025.

Gambling/Games, the most-targeted vertical last year, saw its share of mitigated attacks drop by more than half year-over-year, to just 2.6%. While one might expect to see attacks targeting gambling sites peak around major sporting events like the Super Bowl and March Madness, such a trend was not evident, as attack share peaked at 6.5% the week of March 5 — a month after the Super Bowl, and a couple of weeks before the start of March Madness.

^{Global mitigated traffic share by vertical in 2025, summary view}

Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the Internet’s core routing protocol, enabling traffic to flow between source and destination by communicating routes between networks. However, because it relies on trust between connected networks, incorrect information shared between peers (intentionally or not) can send traffic to the wrong place — potentially to systems under control of an attacker. To address this, Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) was developed as a cryptographic method of signing records that associate a BGP route announcement with the correct originating autonomous system (AS) number to ensure that the information being shared originally came from a network that is allowed to do so. Cloudflare has been a vocal advocate for routing security, including as a founding participant in the MANRS CDN and Cloud Programme and by providing a public tool that enables users to test whether their Internet provider has implemented BGP safely. 

We analyzed data available on Cloudflare Radar’s Routing page to determine the share of RPKI valid routes and how that share changed throughout 2025, as well as determining the share of IP address space covered by valid routes. The latter metric is noteworthy because a route announcement covering a large amount of IP address space (millions of IPv4 addresses) has a greater potential impact than an announcement covering a small block of IP address space (hundreds of IPv4 addresses).

We started 2025 with 50% valid IPv4 routes, growing to 53.9% by December 2. The share of valid IPv6 routes increased to 60.1%, up 4.7 percentage points. Looking at the global share of IP address space covered by valid routes, IPv4 increased to 48.5%, a three percentage point increase. The share of IPv6 address space covered by valid routes fell slightly to 61.6%. Although the year-over-year changes for these metrics are slowing, we have made significant progress over the last five years. Since the start of 2020, the share of RPKI valid IPv4 routes and IPv4 address space have both grown by approximately 3x.

^{Shares of global RPKI valid routing entries by IP version in 2025}

^{Shares of globally announced IP address space covered by RPKI valid routes in 2025}

Barbados saw the biggest growth in the share of valid IPv4 routes, growing from 2.2% to 20.8%. Looking at valid IPv6 routes, Mali saw the most significant share growth in 2025, from 10.0% to 58.3%. 

Barbados also experienced the biggest increase in the share of IPv4 space covered by valid routes, jumping from just 2.0% to 18.6%. For IPv6 address space, both Tajikistan and Dominica went from having effectively no space covered by valid routes at the start of the year, to 5.5% and 3.5% respectively. 

In our quarterly DDoS Report series (Q1, Q2, Q3), we have highlighted the increasing frequency and size of hyper-volumetric network layer attacks targeting Cloudflare customers and Cloudflare’s infrastructure. We define a “hyper-volumetric network layer attack” as one that operates at Layer 3/4 and that peaks at more than one terabit per second (1 Tbps) or more than one billion packets per second (1 Bpps). These reports provide a quarterly perspective, but we also wanted to show a view of activity across the year to understand when attackers are most active, and how attack sizes have grown over time. 

Looking at hyper-volumetric attack activity in 2025 from a Tbps perspective, July saw the largest number of such attacks, at over 500, while February saw the fewest, at just over 150. Attack intensity remained generally below 5 Tbps, although a 10 Tbps attack blocked at the end of August was a harbinger of things to come. This attack was the first of a campaign of >10 Tbps attacks that took place during the first week of September, ahead of a series of >20 Tbps attacks during the last week of the month. In early October, multiple increasingly larger hyper-volumetric attacks were observed, with the largest for the month peaking at 29.7 Tbps. However, that record was soon eclipsed, as an early November attack reached 31.4 Tbps.

From a Bpps perspective, hyper-volumetric attack activity was much lower, with November experiencing the most (over 140), while just three were seen in February and June. Attack intensity across the year generally remained below 4 Bpps through late August, though a succession of increasingly larger attacks were seen over the next several months, peaking in October. Although the intensity of most of the 110+ attacks blocked in October was below 5 Bpps, a 14 Bpps attack seen during the month was the largest hyper-volumetric attack by packets per second blocked during the year, besting five other successive record-setting attacks that occurred in September.

^{Peak DDoS attack sizes in 2025}

Recent statistics suggest that email remains the top communication channel for external business contact, despite the growing enterprise use of collaboration/messaging apps. Given its broad enterprise usage, attackers still find it to be an attractive entry point into corporate networks. Generative AI tools make it easier to craft highly targeted malicious emails that convincingly impersonate trusted brands or legitimate senders (like corporate executives) but contain deceptive links, dangerous attachments, or other types of threats. Cloudflare Email Security protects customers from email-based attacks, including those carried out through targeted malicious email messages. 

In 2025, an average of 5.6% of emails analyzed by Cloudflare were found to be malicious. The share of messages processed by Cloudflare Email Security that were found to be malicious generally ranged between 4% and 6% throughout most of the year. Our data shows a jump in malicious email share starting in October, likely due to an improved classification system implemented by Cloudflare Email Security.  

^{Global malicious email share trends in 2025}

Deceptive links were the top malicious email threat category in 2025, found in 52% of messages, up from 43% in 2024. Since the display text for a hyperlink in HTML can be arbitrarily set, attackers can make a URL appear as if it links to a benign site when, in fact, it is actually linking to a malicious resource that can be used to steal login credentials or download malware. The share of processed emails containing deceptive links was as high as 70% in late April, and again in mid-November.

Identity deception occurs when an attacker sends an email claiming to be someone else. They may do this using domains that look similar, are spoofed, or use display name tricks to appear to be coming from a trusted domain. Brand impersonation is a form of identity deception where an attacker sends a phishing message that impersonates a recognizable company or brand. Brand impersonation may also use display name spoofing or domain impersonation. Identity deception (38%) and brand impersonation (32%) were growing threats in 2025, up from 35% and 23% respectively in 2024. Both saw an increase in mid-November.

^{Email threat category trends in 2025, worldwide}

In addition to providing traffic, geographic distribution, and digital certificate insights for Top Level Domains (TLDs) like .com or .us, Cloudflare Radar also provides insights into the “most abused” TLDs – those with domains that we have found are originating the largest shares of malicious and spam email among messages analyzed by Cloudflare Email Security. The analysis is based on the sending domain’s TLD, found in the From: header of an email message. For example, if a message came from sender@example.com, then example.com is the sending domain, and .com is the associated TLD. For the Year in Review analysis, we only included TLDs from which we saw an average minimum of 30 messages per hour.

Based on messages analyzed throughout 2025, we found that .christmas and .lol were the most abused TLDs, with 99.8% and 99.6% of messages from these TLDs respectively characterized as either spam or malicious. Sorting the list of TLDs by malicious email share, .cfd and .sbs both had more than 90% of analyzed emails categorized as malicious. The .best TLD was the worst in terms of spam email share, with 69% of email messages characterized as spam.

^{TLDs originating the largest total shares of malicious and spam email in 2025}

Although the Internet and the Web continue to evolve and change over time, it appears that some of the key metrics have become fairly stable. However, we expect that others, such as those metrics tracking AI trends, will shift over the coming years as that space evolves at a rapid pace. 

We encourage you to visit the Cloudflare Radar 2025 Year In Review microsite and explore the trends for your country/region, and consider how they impact your organization as you plan for 2026. You can also get near real-time insight into many of these metrics and trends on Cloudflare Radar. And as noted above, for insights into the top Internet services across multiple industry categories and countries/regions, we encourage you to read the companion Year in Review blog post.

If you have any questions, you can contact the Cloudflare Radar team at radar@cloudflare.com or on social media at @CloudflareRadar (X), https://noc.social/@cloudflareradar (Mastodon), and radar.cloudflare.com (Bluesky).

As the saying goes, it takes a village to make our annual Year in Review happen, from aggregating and analyzing the data, to creating the microsite, to developing associated content. I’d like to acknowledge those team members that contributed to this year’s effort, with thanks going out to: Jorge Pacheco, Sabina Zejnilovic, Carlos Azevedo, Mingwei Zhang, Sofia Cardita (data analysis); André Páscoa, Nuno Pereira (frontend development); João Tomé (Most Popular Internet Services); David Fidalgo, Janet Villarreal, and the internationalization team (translations); Jackie Dutton, Kari Linder, Guille Lasarte (Communications); Laurel Wamsley (blog editing); and Paula Tavares (Engineering Management), as well as other colleagues across Cloudflare for their support and assistance.