Top 5 Threats in Cybersecurity
“It’s better to know the apex predators in the jungle than to walk blindly through it.”
This perfectly fits in with our Threat Detection 101 as well. Since the dark side of the Force is constantly equipping itself with sophisticated tools, let’s talk about the top 5 threats every threat hunter should be aware of in 2025:
-
QakBot (Qbot) – A banking trojan turned initial access botnet. Loves enabling ransomware attacks.
-
Impacket – A powerful post-exploitation toolkit frequently abused by attackers to move laterally and execute remote code in enterprise environments.
-
Mimikatz – The go-to tool for credential dumping, still widely used for obtaining plaintext passwords and NTLM hashes.
-
Cobalt Strike – A legitimate red-teaming tool turned attacker favorite, used for command-and-control (C2) operations in advanced intrusions.
-
BloodHound – A powerful Active Directory attack path discovery tool that helps adversaries map out privilege escalation routes.
Among these 5, Cobalt Strike is my top pick as the absolute nightmare for SOC analysts. It’s stealthy, modular, and can blend into normal network activity, making detection extremely difficult.
What This Means for Threat Hunters?
With these threats becoming more sophisticated, proactive threat hunting is crucial. Go for behavioural analytics, anomaly detection, and intelligence-driven hunting strategies, and you just might stay ahead of hackers.
What other threats do you see dominating 2025? Drop your thoughts in the mail. And yes…