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Every year, TechCrunch looks back at the biggest cybersecurity incidents of the past 12 months — from massive data breaches to hacks that caused weeks of disruption — to see what we can learn. This year, data breaches were like nothing we’ve seen before.
Here’s our look at the biggest security trends of 2025, starting with:
The US government remains one of the biggest targets of the Internet. This year began with a deadly Chinese cyberattack on the US Treasury, followed by several violations of federal laws, including the agency responsible for protecting US nuclear weaponsdue to a SharePoint security issue.
All the while, Russian pirates were stealing printed documents from the US Courts’ filing systemsending alarm bells in all courts.
But nothing came close as the DOGE dived into the government departments and banks that they were the largest attack on US government data in its history.
The Department of Public Works, or DOGE, led by Elon Musk and his private staff, violated federal law and he defied conventional security measures. They they ransacked federal databases of citizen datadespite the warnings of a threat to national security and conflicts over Musk’s foreign business interests. Legal experts say DOGE employees are “suitable” under US fraud laws, though a court would have to agree.
As a result of Musk, a huge public disagreement with President Trump saw the billionaire leave DOGE, leaving employees afraid of where to go. may face federal charges without his protection.
At the end of September, senior management at the giants of American companies started receiving threatening emails from the libertarian and criminal group called Clop. The emails included their personal information – and a ransom demand of several million dollars to keep them from publication.
A few months earlier, Clop’s team quietly exploited an unprecedented vulnerability in Oracle’s E-Business software, a suite of products used to host a company’s business information, such as financial and human resources, customer data, and customer databases. The vulnerability allowed Clop to steal employee data, including that of executives, from many organizations which depends on the Oracle software.
Oracle didn’t know until it was caught in October what it was browsing to eliminate the threat. It was too late, however: Hackers had already stolen the data from universities, hospitals and health systems, media organizationsetc.
This was Clop’s latest campaign of mass extortion. The group exploited flaws in file transfer businesses, such as Go Everywhere, MOVEitand Cleo Softwarewhich the tech giants use to share large amounts of information online.
Salesforce customers had a rough year after two separate data breaches at the tech company hit the bottom that allowed billions of dollars of customer business data stored in the Salesforce cloud to be stolen.
Hackers target at least two companies, Salesloft and Awarenessall of which allow their customers to handle and analyze the data they store in Salesforce.
By breaching these companies directly, the hackers gained access to all the data through their customer connections to Salesforce. Some of the biggest tech giants had their data stolen in the breach, including Bugcrowd, Cloudflare, Google, Proofpoint, Docusign, GitLab, LinkedIn, SonicWall, and Verizon.
A hacking group known as Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters, made up of members from various hacking groups, including ShinyHunters, published data leakage sites advertising stolen records in exchange for the ransom paid by the victims. New victims are still coming in.
Hackers damaged the UK business sector earlier this year, stealing a lot of information Marks & Spencer and no less 6.5 million customers from the Co-op. Back-to-back hacks caused outages and disrupted retail networks, and some store shelves were empty as systems used to support retailers were removed. Best Harrods location it was stolen again later.
But a major cyberattack targeting Jaguar Land Rover, one of the country’s biggest employers, has left the UK economy reeling. A September hacking and data breaches saw a JLR car production for several months how the company worked to reorganize its operations.
The crash affected JLR’s UK dealerships, some of which went out of business altogether. The UK government ended guaranteeing repayment of £1.5 billion ensuring that Jaguar Land Rover employees and dealers are paid during the closure.
UK security experts said Hacking was the most economically damaging form of cyberattack hit in the United Kingdom in history, showing that disruption can be more important to moneylenders than what is stolen.
South Korea has suffered the worst monthly outages this year, with the data of millions of its citizens compromised due to lax security and dysfunctional systems in the country’s major telecommunications and telecommunications networks.
The largest mobile phone company in the country, SK Telecom, hacked and 23 million customer records it was revealed; a series of cyber attacks were reported by its tyrannical neighbor North Korea; and a large data center fire removed the many years of Korean government that had not been kept behind.
But the icing on the cake of the data breach was the months-long theft of nearly 33 million customers from Coupang, the country’s retail giant that some call the Amazon of Asia. The The data theft began in Junebut it was not recognized until November, and eventually led to the head of the company resignation.
