2025 Cybersecurity Threat Report: Proliferating RATs, Evolving Ransomware, and Other Findings | Huntress

**Executive summary:** Huntress' 2025 Cyber Threat Report synthesizes 2024 telemetry from thousands of organizations and millions of endpoints to highlight rising threats: widespread use of RATs (e.g., AsyncRAT, Jupyter), exploitation of legitimate RMM tools for lateral movement and persistence, a shift in ransomware toward data theft and extortion, growing prevalence of infostealers and malicious scripts (PowerShell/VBScript/JS), increased living-off-the-land techniques using Sysinternals/LOLBins, and more sophisticated phishing; the report recommends layered defenses (EDR), tighter RMM access controls, removal of unnecessary software, strict execution policies, and enhanced user training.