How The European Cyber Threat Landscape Looks in 2026

Cyber threats never exist in a vacuum. They evolve alongside geopolitics, regulation, economic priorities, and technological maturity. That means the European cyber threat landscape rarely looks exactly the same as in other regions.

There are good reasons to examine the cyber threat landscape solely from a European vantage point. European companies share regulatory pressures, operate within tightly interconnected supply chains, and sit in the middle of an increasingly tense geopolitical environment that includes state-backed cyber activity from Russia, China, and other actors.

Understanding how these broader dynamics shape cyber threats across the region helps businesses answer a critical question: What types of attacks are most likely to target European organisations right now – and why?

Prominent Cyber Threats in Europe

To understand how the cyber threat landscape looks for European companies in 2026, it helps to start with the broadest view of the region’s threat patterns. ENISA data, overviewing the threat landscape in 2025, paints a clear picture: attacks targeting system availability are by far the most common type of cyber incident in the EU.

According to ENISA’s latest threat-landscape reporting, DDoS attacks accounted for 76.7% of recorded cases. But that figure needs context: the category is driven overwhelmingly by hacktivist activity, with most of those attacks linked to ideology-driven campaigns rather than classic financially motivated cybercrime.

That matters because a region can appear to be dominated by “availability” incidents in the raw numbers, while the more operationally damaging threats still sit elsewhere. ENISA’s data shows that phishing and other social-engineering techniques remain the main entry point for attackers, accounting for about 60% of observed cases, while vulnerability exploitation accounts for 21.3%.

Intrusions also continue to have serious downstream consequences. ENISA found that 68.6% of recorded intrusions resulted in data breaches being advertised on cybercriminal forums, underlining how closely modern intrusion activity is tied to monetisable data theft. Ransomware remains a major pillar of Europe’s threat landscape and a big part of the cause of these downstream consequences. While the tactic is familiar, its scale and professionalisation continue to grow.

Europe has become a particularly attractive target for ransomware operators, partly due to the region’s concentration of industrial firms and strict data-protection laws that increase pressure on victims when data is stolen.

Looking at country-level trends adds another layer of insight. Research from Cyble’s 2025 European threat landscape analysis found that Germany is the most frequently targeted country for ransomware attacks in the region. Germany’s industrial economy, dense supply chains, and large number of mid-sized manufacturers (the “Mittelstand”) create a vast attack surface that cybercriminal groups increasingly try to exploit.

From manufacturing plants to logistics networks and public infrastructure, the ability to disrupt systems (and then leverage that disruption for extortion) is one of the defining features of the European threat landscape.

Key Threat Groups Targeting European Businesses

Statistics on ransomware and intrusions only tell part of the story. Behind many of the incidents affecting European organisations in recent years are a relatively small number of well-established cybercrime groups. Several ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operations in particular have become persistent threats to European businesses, infrastructure operators, and public institutions.

Qilin

This group relies on double-extortion tactics, first stealing sensitive data and then encrypting systems to pressure victims into paying. Its malware has been written in languages such as Go and Rust, allowing it to target multiple environments including Windows and virtualised infrastructure.

Initial access often comes through phishing, compromised credentials, or exposed remote-access services, after which attackers escalate privileges and move laterally before deploying the ransomware payload. European organisations have frequently appeared among Qilin’s victims, particularly in healthcare, manufacturing, and financial services.

Akira

Akira emerged in 2023 and has since targeted hundreds of companies worldwide. Like Qilin, Akira operates under a double-extortion model, stealing data before encrypting systems to maximise leverage over victims. The group’s attacks typically begin through compromised VPN credentials, exposed remote desktop services, or vulnerabilities in internet-facing infrastructure.

Once inside a network, Akira actors tend to rely heavily on “living-off-the-land” techniques – using legitimate built-in system tools for malicious purposes – and use administrative tools to move laterally and avoid detection. These tactics make the group particularly difficult to detect during the early stages of an intrusion. Akira has targeted organisations across a wide range of industries, including manufacturing, healthcare, education, finance, and IT services. In Europe, these industries are heavily interconnected through supply chains.

SafePay

SafePay is a relatively new ransomware group, but it expanded rapidly after first appearing in September 2024. The group appears to rely heavily on valid credentials, likely sourced from dark-web marketplaces, and then uses those credentials to access victims through VPN gateways and often RDP.

Once inside a network, SafePay actors reportedly disable protections such as Windows Defender using LOLBins, then move quickly from compromise to encryption. SafePay has shown particular concentration in the US, UK, and Germany. In fact, 24% of all reported ransomware victims in Germany in Q1 2025 were linked to SafePay.

Z-Pentest Alliance

The Z-Pentest Alliance is quite different from typical financially motivated ransomware groups. It is a group that blends hacktivist, psychological, and disruptive tactics, with a particular emphasis on critical infrastructure. Sectors such as energy, water and wastewater, industrial systems, oil, and broader critical infrastructure are prime targets. The group has targeted companies in France, Italy, Romania, Germany, and Poland.

The group seeks access to Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA), Industrial Control Systems (ICS), and Operational Technology (OT) environments, including systems connected to water pumping, gas flaring, and oil collection. The “alliance” uses social engineering, leverages dark-web leak data to prepare targeted operations, and may exploit zero-day vulnerabilities to access critical systems.

Preparing for the Threats Shaping Europe in 2026

Europe’s cyber threat landscape in 2026 reflects a convergence of forces that includes hacktivists trying to disrupt operations, organised ransomware groups, geopolitically motivated actors, and a vast attack surface created by digital supply chains and interconnected infrastructure.

Various threat groups show how different motivations – financial, ideological, and strategic – are increasingly colliding in the same operational space. Also, despite the evolving threat actors and increasingly sophisticated ransomware ecosystems, attackers are still exploiting many of the same foundational weaknesses that have plagued organisations for years (social engineering, compromised credentials, etc.).

For European organisations, staying ahead of these threats calls for a clear understanding of how attackers operate and where your vulnerabilities may lie.

If you’d like support navigating this landscape, DIESEC’s cybersecurity team can help.
Contact us today.