Cybersecurity for the Technology sector | Hunt & Hackett

The technology sector is one of the fastest growing and most influential industries in the world. It continues to expand rapidly, driven by the demand for AI, computing power, electronics, and a wide array of digital services, including Cloud providers, SaaS, PaaS, IaaS platforms and collaboration tools. The sector includes a diverse range of organizations, each contributing to the digital backbone of modern society. Despite their differences, these companies share a common vulnerability: exposure to cyberattacks.

In recent years, Hunt & Hackett has seen a clear increase in activity by Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) groups targeting the technology sector. The combination of cutting-edge innovation and access to sensitive data makes these companies attractive to adversaries focused on espionage, financial gain, or intellectual property theft. And beyond that, tech companies often serve as intermediaries to a large set of underlying organisations or individuals. This makes them attractive targets for supply chain attacks—as seen in cases like the Snowflake (2024), Microsoft Exchange (2021), and SolarWinds (2020) attacks. As these incidents demonstrate, successful attacks on technology firms can have far-reaching and serious consequences.

How can you address this growing threat?

There is this legendary quote from Sun Tzu on how to overcome your adversaries: 'know thy enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles, you will never be defeated'. To know your enemy starts with gaining an understanding of yourself, your threat landscape, your adversaries’ intentions, their modus operandi, and specific attacking methods. On this page, the cyber threats to the technology sector are explored. Understanding the full picture of the challenges our clients may encounter helps us in doing what we do best: ensuring security for your business from specific cyber threats targeting your organization.

	Technology	Technology + related	All known
APTs	439	476	801
TTPs	2,907	3,378	4,112
Attack tools	2,585	2,905	3,666

Our proprietary threat diagnostics system shows a significant increase in malicious activity targeting the technology sector. As digital innovation accelerates, so do the risks. The sector continues to attract financially motivated cyber criminals and nation-state actors alike. They are drawn by its access to sensitive data, intellectual property, its strategic role across industries, and by its role as a conduit to other organisations through interconnected supply chains. This, combined with the frequent adoption of new technologies, reliance on third-party providers, and widespread use of cloud services, has significantly expanded the attack surface. High-profile breaches in recent years demonstrate how vulnerabilities can be exploited at scale and how quickly attacks can spiral across interconnected systems. As organizations struggle to keep pace, staying in control becomes more challenging.

However, understanding who is targeting your business provides a crucial advantage. Each threat actor has different goals, tactics, and preferred entry points. Knowing your adversaries allows for smarter defenses, better prioritization, and a stronger security posture overall. The following overview outlines the actors most active in the technology sector today.

In their fight against cyber attacks, our customers typically go through several stages of maturity. By ramping up their prevention, detection and incident readiness over time – and optimizing this for their actual threat landscape – they reach a point where they have developed solid resilience against targeted attacks, with only highly controlled and accepted risks remaining.

There is no simple 'fix' to become resilient against the sophisticated cyber threats of today. Without serious resources or processes for systematic security activities, protection against modern cyber threats like ransomware is just a wish. Hunt & Hackett has developed a unique threat- and sector-driven approach to cybersecurity, enabling you to work from your current situation to a highly improved and controlled situation, optimized for your specific threat landscape and context as an organisation.

Schietschijven1

STAGE 1: Unknown risk
Pre-monitoring
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Preventitive controls

Limited resilience

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STAGE 2: Reduced risk
Post-monitoring
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Preventitive CIS controls (IG1)

Detection & response controls

Resilience against non-targeted attacks

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STAGE 3: Controlled risk
Implemented roadmap
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Alignment between preventitive, detection & response CIS controls (IG2)

Resilience against non-targeted and semi-targeted attacks

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STAGE 4: Highly controlled risk
Targeted attack resilience
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Full redundancy between preventitve, detection & response CIS controls (IG3)

Resilience against against advanced targeted attacks