Cyberwarfare threats have reached a global pressure-cooker moment, according to new research from Armis.

The cyber firm based its study on more than 1,900 global IT decision-makers as well as propriety data from Armis Lab.

As emerging technologies accelerate cyber operations and geopolitical tensions worsen, attackers are increasingly targeting the infrastructure, information, and systems that underpin global stability.

“Geopolitical tensions, AI acceleration, and unresolved security gaps are colliding, bringing the state of cyberwarfare to a boiling point,” said Nadir Izrael, CTO and Co-Founder of Armis.

“Cyberwarfare is now a constant condition; attackers are operating at machine speed, while too many organisations are still trying to defend themselves with assumptions and structures built for a very different threat landscape. Organisational leaders must heed the call and immediately enhance their proactive cybersecurity operations before it’s too late.”

Nearly eight in ten IT decision-makers (79%) globally are concerned about nation-state actors using AI to develop more sophisticated and targeted cyberattacks, up from 73% last year, while two-thirds (67%) believe the misuse of emerging technologies will increase the likelihood of collateral damage to civilian infrastructure during cyber conflict.

Despite mounting pressure, there’s a false sense of confidence among organisations that remains surprisingly high. Nearly eight in ten (79%) IT decision-makers say their organization is prepared to handle a cyberwarfare attack, while 76% believe they are ready to mitigate AI-driven threats. This confidence is increasingly disconnected from reality.

More than half (54%) of organisations report they’ve already been impacted by an AI-generated or AI-led attack in the past 12 months, and half (50%) admit they have still been unable to adequately secure their environment post-attack.

At the same time, two-thirds (66%) also agree that organisations continue to underestimate the resources required to defend against AI-powered threats, revealing a widening gap between perceived preparedness and actual resilience.

“False confidence absent contextual intelligence is a force multiplier for the adversary,” said Michael Freeman, Head of Threat Intelligence at Armis.

“In the era of AI-accelerated threats, nation-state actors exploit the gap between a defender’s perceived security and their actual exposure. Effective cyber exposure management doesn’t just provide a ‘view’; it provides the ground truth required to eliminate blind spots and preemptively harden the attack surface before the first exploit is even launched.”

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About seven in ten (69%) of IT decision-makers agree that a global reliance on AI will intensity the geopolitical stakes of cybersecurity.

A similar amount (68%) also agree that the weaponisation of AI will make cyber conflict a more persistent feature of global geopolitics.

Nearly two thirds (64%) say emerging technologies are making it harder to distinguish between espionage, cyber-crime, and acts of war.

About three quarters (74%) believe that cyberwarfare attacks will increase targeting institutions representing free press and independent thinking.

Ransomware payments are exceeding firm’s annual cybersecurity budgets, according to 52% of those surveyed, with the average global ransomware payout in 2025 amounting to £7,710,000.