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The growing cyber threat: Ransomware, China, and state-sponsored attacks
"Ransomware attacks surged 252% last year—hospitals, schools, and local governments are paying the price," said Brad Smith, Microsoft vice chair and president, during a Global Stage discussion at the 2025 Munich Security Conference.
Smith highlighted the evolving cybersecurity threats in 2025. While defenses have improved, China’s recent Salt Typhoon attack exposed vulnerabilities in US telecom networks, and ransomware has exploded—with over half of payments flowing to Russia and Iran. Smith warns that some of these attacks are state-sponsored or state-tolerated, calling for greater international collaboration to counter them.
Watch the full conversation here: Is the Europe-US rift leaving us all vulnerable?
This conversation is presented by GZERO in partnership with Microsoft from the 2025 Munich Security Conference in Munich, Germany. The Global Stage series convenes global leaders for critical conversations on the geopolitical and technological trends shaping our world.
The world is an inkblot
In 1921, a Swiss psychologist spent months carefully crafting a series of seemingly random blots of ink. When he was done, he arranged them in a set of 10 for publication.
He had discovered that different people saw different things in the inkblots and that this could tell him a lot about their mental state, their concerns, and their worldview.
I thought of Dr. Rorschach and his now-famous inkblots this week as I leafed through a massive new study of what people in a dozen of the world’s most powerful countries – the G7 industrialized democracies, plus Brazil, China, India, and South Africa – are worried about when it comes to their security.
The survey, done by the Munich Security Conference, an annual confab of world leaders happening this week (shameless plug for our coverage of it here), indexes respondents’ levels of concern, from 1-100, about dozens of threats.
They cover everything from terrorism to technology, climate to coronavirus. Mass migration, racism, trade wars, and organized crime are all in there too, as are questions about the threats posed by specific countries: Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, the US, and the EU.
There is obviously no shortage of stimuli for the anxious these days. Major wars rage in Europe and the Middle East. Artificial intelligence warps our experiences of both work and the web more and more each day. Conflict, poverty, and climate extremes have driven the highest numbers of refugees ever from their homes. And of course, the world is slowly cooking itself while its two leading economies – and carbon emitters – warily circle each other on technology, trade, and Taiwan.
All of that, everywhere, all at once, yes.
But when people in different countries look at our little blue and brown inkblot of a world, they see very different threats and risks.
South Africans, for example, are acutely worried about energy and food shortages. Ukraine, unsurprisingly, is concerned about Russia. The climate is Brazil and India’s top concern, while Germans now wring their hands over migration and terrorism.
Those are the finer lines of the study, but what can we see in the broader blot of responses?
First, in aggregate, the things that worry most of the world most right now have to do with two things: climate change and cybersecurity, both of which are significant cross-border issues that cannot be solved by countries working alone.
Second, the roughly two billion people of India and China are surprisingly chill these days. Not a single one of the risks rises above 50 on the index for either country, with the sole exception of “climate change” notching a blasé 54 in India. In all other countries, people are far more on edge, with most risks ranging between the 50s and 70s.
Third, Russia isn’t as scary anymore. The world – but especially Europeans and Americans – is less concerned about Russia than it was in 2022. Nearly two years on from Putin’s invasion, the dreaded “Ukraine fatigue” has set in — there’s a reason Volodymyr Zelensky has been struggling to secure more aid from his two biggest backers – the US and EU.
Fourth, what moves the “Global South” is different from what concerns Europe and the US. Climate and cybersecurity figure at or near the top for both groups, but while “Russia,” “Islamic terrorism,” and “mass migration” are keeping folks up at night on both sides of the Atlantic, these concerns hardly appear at all for China, Brazil, India, and South Africa, where economic upheavals and income inequality are more pressing.
And lastly, the most powerful country on earth is a little out of touch at the moment. While Americans’ primary security concern with cyberattacks echoes broader trends, the remainder of the US top five — “political polarization,” “China,” “Russia,” and “disinformation campaigns” — are not key concerns for most other countries, particularly in the Global South. Climate change – a major issue for the rest of the world – limps in at a lowly 21st spot for the US.
To be clear, there’s nothing surprising or abnormal about different countries seeing the world in vastly different ways. In fact, it would be terrifying if 9 billion people all saw the world identically.
The problem is that so many of these key challenges — climate change, cybersecurity, migration, technology regulation — require common cause and cooperation at a time when the world’s major powers seem to be pulling away from each other.
In other words, it’s great to see different things in a given inkblot, but the inability to get on the same page about solutions is, Dr Rorschach might agree, a more dangerous pathology entirely.
Why privacy is priceless
If someone were to get a few pictures off your phone without your permission, what's the big deal, right? Don't be so blasé, says human rights attorney David Haigh, who was prominently targeted with the powerful Pegasus spyware in 2021.
"If someone breaches your private life, that is a gateway to very, very serious breaches of other human rights, like your right to life and right to all sorts of other things," he said. "That's why I think a lot of governments and public sector don't take things as seriously as they should."
Right now, he says, dictators can buy your privacy, "and with it, your life."
Haigh spoke with Eurasia Group Senior Analyst Ali Wyne as part of “Caught in the Digital Crosshairs,” a panel discussion on cybersecurity produced by GZERO in partnership with Microsoft and the CyberPeace Institute.
Watch the full Global Stage conversation: The devastating impact of cyberattacks and how to protect against them
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How cyberattacks hurt people in war zones
They may not be bombs or tanks, but hacks and cyberattacks can still make life miserable for people caught in the crosshairs of conflicts. By targeting key infrastructure and humanitarian organizations, warring governments can deny crucial services to civilians on the other side of no-man's-land.
And just like with conventional weapons, there can be collateral damage, said Stéphane Duguin, CEO of the Cyber Peace Institute. "We have 53 countries in the world targeted by these attacks across 23 sectors of critical infrastructure or essential services," he said. "At the end of the day, you end up having civilians who cannot benefit from essential services because of what has been escalated into another part of the world."
The perpetrators are often not centrally directed either, and may be located all over the world, complicating enforcement efforts. Hear more about what he said about the problem to Eurasia Group Senior Analyst Ali Wyne in a panel discussion which capped “Caught in the Digital Crosshairs,” a video series on cybersecurity produced by GZERO in partnership with Microsoft and the CyberPeace Institute.
Watch the full panel discussion: The devastating impact of cyberattacks and how to protect against them
Why snooping in your private life is big business
Kaja Ciglic, senior director of digital diplomacy at Microsoft, said, "cybersecurity is the defining challenge of our time" amid a spike in misinformation campaigns thanks to wars in Ukraine and Gaza, growing interest from governments in building cyberweapons, and plain old profit-motivated thieves.
"We are seeing private sector enterprises that, effectively, are selling services, products that allow their customers to break into, whether it's a personal account, whether it's into an organization's account," she said. "The cyber mercenary market that is also emerging is also a very strong concern for Microsoft."
Learn more about what they are doing to solve the problem in Kaja's chat with Eurasia Group Senior Analyst Ali Wyne as part of “Caught in the Digital Crosshairs,” a video series on cybersecurity produced by GZERO in partnership with Microsoft and the CyberPeace Institute.
Watch the full conversation: The devastating impact of cyberattacks and how to protect against them
How rogue states use cyberattacks to undermine stability
Cyberattacks are about a lot more than just money these days. Both unscrupulous governments and extremist groups are increasingly using hacking to advance political aims, says Kaja Ciglic, senior director of digital diplomacy at Microsoft.
When the International Committee for the Red Cross or International Court of Justice experiences cyberattacks, she said, "These are all organizations that are trying to defend peace and stability, they're trying to advocate for all of our human rights." The fact that unscrupulous governments are spending taxpayer money to purchase tools that interrupt their work, she noted, is worth taking a stand against.
Ciglic spoke with Eurasia Group Senior Analyst Ali Wyne in a panel discussion for “Caught in the Digital Crosshairs,” a video series on cybersecurity produced by GZERO in partnership with Microsoft and the CyberPeace Institute.
Watch the full Global Stage conversation: The devastating impact of cyberattacks and how to protect against them
The devastating impact of cyberattacks and how to protect against them
Imagine one day you found out someone had hacked your phone. What would that mean for your life? With the right software, the bad guys might be able to get into your bank account, surveil your messages, or even steal your fingerprints and facial scans.
That's what happened to human rights attorney David Haigh, who became the first-known British victim of the powerful Pegasus spyware in 2021 while trying to help women of Emirati and Jordanian royalty escape alleged abuse. He learned that his phone was under surveillance – so his communications and the information stored on the device were compromised.
Two years on, he still lives in fear for the privacy of his loved ones and clients. "The police have done nothing,” he says. “There's no support from the government. There's no real information.”
Emerging technologies threaten to make the already-bleak cybersecurity environment all the more treacherous, opening new avenues of attack that could cost countries, companies, and individuals dearly without proactive measures.
Eurasia Group Senior Analyst Ali Wyne moderated a discussion on cybersecurity as part of “Caught in the Digital Crosshairs,” a video series on cybersecurity produced by GZERO in partnership with Microsoft and the CyberPeace Institute. The discussion focused on the blurring lines between attacks on governments and the private sector.
Wyne spoke with Kaja Ciglic, senior director of digital diplomacy at Microsoft, who referred to cybersecurity as “the defining challenge of our times.” The wars in Ukraine and Gaza have coincided with spikes in both cyberattacks and misinformation campaigns, which Ciglic called “harrowing examples of what can happen and how people can use technology to manipulate others into actions.”
Even in peacetime, states are investing in capabilities that can target critical infrastructure, schools, and hospitals, preparing for a new dimension of conflict. And in the private sector, hackers are exploiting lagging private-sector preparedness to grow and evolve.
Hacking is big business, with companies specializing in helping clients break into accounts. While these are usually about making financial gains, says Stéphane Duguin, CEO of the Cyber Peace Institute, his organization has seen a marked shift over the past two years. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the institute has tracked a marked increase in attacks on humanitarian organizations, even those that have little to do with the conflict.
“At the end of the day, you end up having civilians who cannot benefit from essential services because of what has been escalated into another part of the world,” he said.
The attacks impact organizations more profoundly than one might think. Bonnie Leff, senior vice president of corporate security at MasterCard, said that when one suffers a cyber attack, “the impact to an NGO can really almost shut it down.” It leaves organizations unable to pay staff or run programs and can damage their reputation with donors, leaving them worse off in the long term.
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Attacked by ransomware: The hospital network brought to a standstill by cybercriminals
In October 2022, the second-largest nonprofit healthcare system in the US, CommonSpirit Health, was hit with a crippling ransomware attack. Kelsay Irby works as an ER nurse at a CommonSpirit hospital in Washington. She arrived at work after the malware had spread through the hospital network to chaos: systems were down, computers were running slowly or not at all, labs weren’t returning results, and nurses were charting vitals on pen and paper. Even basic things like knowing what medications patients were on or why they came into the emergency room were a challenge, putting lives at risk. The hospital’s nurses and doctors scrambled to manage this crisis for over two weeks until CommonSpirit Health was able to restore access to the IT network
“It was just kind of this perfect storm of very sick patients, not enough help, everybody was super frustrated,” Irby says, “My biggest fear during the whole cyberattack was that a patient was going to suffer because we couldn’t access the technology.”
GZERO spoke with Irby about her experience during the ransomware attack, as well as cybersecurity expert Mora Durante Astrada from Zurich Insurance Group for the final episode of “Caught in the Digital Crosshairs: The Human Impact of Cyberattacks,” a new video series on cybersecurity produced by GZERO in partnership with Microsoft and the CyberPeace Institute. Astrada volunteers for the Institute and its CyberPeace Builders Program, which provides free cybersecurity assistance, threat detection, and analysis to NGOs and other critical sectors while advocating for safety and security in cyberspace.
- Podcast: Cyber Mercenaries and the digital “wild west" ›
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- Podcast: How cyber diplomacy is protecting the world from online threats - GZERO Media ›
- Podcast: Foreign Influence, Cyberspace, and Geopolitics - GZERO Media ›
- Podcast: Cyber mercenaries and the global surveillance-for-hire market - GZERO Media ›
- The devastating impact of cyberattacks and how to protect against them - GZERO Media ›
- How cyberattacks hurt people in war zones - GZERO Media ›
- How rogue states use cyberattacks to undermine stability - GZERO Media ›
- Why privacy is priceless - GZERO Media ›
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