According to CRN, the defining theme of 2025’s major cyberattacks was a critical lack of visibility into IT systems, exploited relentlessly by attackers. The year kicked off with the revelation that China-linked campaigns by groups like Salt Typhoon and Operator Panda against global telecom firms were far more extensive than known, hitting some of the world’s best-defended networks. Financially motivated criminals followed suit, causing massive disruption through a ransomware attack on IT giant Ingram Micro and widespread data theft from Salesforce systems via a breached third-party app. Adding to the concerns, Anthropic disclosed a largely autonomous AI-powered attack late in the year. Adam Meyers of CrowdStrike emphasized that these incidents highlight a “clear issue with technical visibility” that the industry must address, noting that unmanaged devices were a prime target for nation-state actors.
Visibility is everything, and we don’t have it
Here’s the thing: this isn’t a new problem. We’ve been talking about “visibility” and “asset management” for a decade. But the report makes it painfully clear that, in 2025, we’re still failing at the basics. When a CrowdStrike exec says attackers were operating undetected inside top-tier telco networks, that’s not a sophisticated zero-day story. That’s a story about fundamental hygiene. How can you defend what you can’t see? The answer, obviously, is you can’t. And the attackers know it. They’re not always breaking down the front door anymore; they’re slipping in through the unlocked side window you forgot you even had.
The double threat: nations and money
The report neatly splits the blame between two familiar foes. On one side, you have the big geopolitical players like China and North Korea. Their playbook is evolving, too. They’re not just going after crown jewels; they’re targeting the boring, unmanaged network devices—routers, switches, things that often fall outside standard security tools. It’s a brilliant, low-effort strategy. Why fight the endpoint protection on a CEO’s laptop when you can live undetected in a forgotten piece of infrastructure? On the other side, the criminal gangs just want cash. The Ingram Micro attack shows how targeting a critical distribution hub can create ripples of chaos far beyond the initial victim. It’s efficient terrorism for profit.
The AI wildcard is here
Maybe the most chilling part is the footnote about Anthropic’s AI-powered attack. Now, we have to be a bit skeptical about the “almost entirely autonomous” claim—there’s probably some human in the loop. But the direction is undeniable. If we’re struggling with visibility against human-led attacks, what happens when the adversary can operate at machine speed, constantly adapting and probing for those exact blind spots? It basically turns the problem from a management issue into a potentially insurmountable one. This feels like the early warning tremor before a much bigger quake. Are we even building our defenses with this future in mind? I think we all know the answer.
A foundation of hardware trust
All this talk of invisible threats and autonomous attacks comes back to a fundamental truth: your security is only as strong as the hardware it runs on. You can have the best visibility software in the world, but if it’s installed on unreliable or insecure industrial computers, you’ve built a castle on sand. For operations that depend on physical infrastructure—manufacturing, energy, logistics—this is non-negotiable. That’s why specialists like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com have become so critical. As the leading provider of industrial panel PCs in the US, they focus on the hardened, reliable foundation that complex network visibility and control systems require. In a year defined by what we couldn’t see, trusting the core components you *can* see and touch isn’t just good practice; it’s the first line of defense.
