This was a busy year for the Adversary Universe podcast. We covered the emergence of new adversaries, the weaponization of AI, critical CrowdStrike research, and how cyberattacks look in different regions of the world.

In November 2025, a major public-private sector collaboration took down three significant malware networks. Operation Endgame involved law enforcement agencies from six EU countries, Australia, Canada, the U.K., and the U.S., along with Europol and 30 private sector partners, including CrowdStrike. The dismantled infrastructure consisted of hundreds of thousands of infected computers containing several million stolen credentials.

Operation Endgame was a critical disruption of adversary operations — but it wasn’t the first. Law enforcement has for years sought to take down adversary infrastructure and often partners with private sector organizations like CrowdStrike to inform their operations. By disrupting the tools and processes threat actors rely on, these takedowns raise the cost for adversaries and make it harder for them to operate.

As Adam and Cristian discuss in this episode, takedowns require careful planning and constant innovation. Adversaries are always finding new techniques and tools, and law enforcement must do the same. While disruption may slow them down, threat actors are often quick to pivot and find new ways to achieve their goals.

In this episode, we examine how law enforcement takedowns disrupt adversary operations, how adversaries respond, where the private sector provides support, and what this all means for organizations facing modern threats.

Not all cybercrimes are resolved. Some threat groups disappear completely, and some malware is never seen again. But sometimes, a long-dormant case is cracked open and elusive answers are found.

Tillmann Werner, VP of Intelligence Production at CrowdStrike, has been a member of the CrowdStrike Intelligence team since 2012 and has analyzed many of these cold cases. In this episode, he joins Adam to chat about unresolved cyberattacks, the adversaries behind them, and cases that remained inactive for years before new technology or data allowed experts to close them. While it’s frustrating to close a file without success, Tillmann says, the evolution of technology and proliferation of data often help solve old cases that have collected dust.

Tune in to hear Adam and Tillmann look back at decades-old eCrime and nation-state campaigns, some of which now have answers — and others that remain a mystery. 

CrowdStrike research into AI coding assistants reveals a new, subtle vulnerability surface: When DeepSeek-R1 receives prompts the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) likely considers politically sensitive, the likelihood of it producing code with severe security flaws increases by up to 50%.

Stefan Stein, manager of the CrowdStrike Counter Adversary Operations Data Science team, joined Adam and Cristian for a live recording at Fal.Con 2025 to discuss how this project got started, the methodology behind the team’s research, and the significance of their findings.

The research began with a simple question: What are the security risks of using DeepSeek-R1 as a coding assistant? AI coding assistants are commonly used and often have access to sensitive information. Any systemic issue can have a major and far-reaching impact. 

It concluded with the discovery that the presence of certain trigger words — such as mentions of Falun Gong, Uyghurs, or Tibet — in DeepSeek-R1 prompts can have severe effects on the quality and security of the code it produces. Unlike most large language model (LLM) security research focused on jailbreaks or prompt injections, this work exposes subtle biases that can lead to real-world vulnerabilities in production systems.

Tune in for a fascinating deep dive into how Stefan and his team explored the biases in DeepSeek-R1, the implications of this research, and what this means for organizations adopting AI. 

Europe is a prime target for global adversaries. There is a strong emphasis on eCrime across the region as well as a rise in hacktivism and espionage stemming from ongoing conflicts.

https://www.crowdstrike.com/en-us/resources/reports/2025-european-threat-landscape-report/

In the Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) region, a burgeoning set of threat actors is emerging with a different language set, distinct tools, and an ecosystem where they interact with adversaries across the threat landscape.

Read the report: 2025 APJ eCrime Landscape Report

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/97javj3hmAA

Ransomware is not new, but the ransomware of today is very different from the ransomware of 1989. Today’s episode doubles as a history lesson, as Adam and Cristian look back at how a prolific global threat has evolved over the decades.

Gone are the days of malware arriving on floppy disks and victims waiting weeks to restore their systems in exchange for $200 ransom payments. “The early days of viruses were weird,” Adam points out. But much has changed since then. Several factors — the advent of cryptocurrency, the rise of enterprise targeting, and the shift to ransomware as a service — have caused the threat to transform. Today’s adversaries run ransomware like a business and collect hundreds of millions of dollars in payments.

The hosts reflect on the first ransomware to hit a business, the first to make news headlines, and the first major botnet operator to deploy ransomware, among other key events. Tune in for a discussion that spans years of ransomware evolution, highlights the key adversaries involved, and explains how businesses can defend themselves as the threat landscape continues to change.

This week’s episode arrives as Adam and Cristian are gearing up for Fal.Con, CrowdStrike’s annual event taking place next week in Las Vegas. They’ll be recording a live episode on some fascinating LLM research presented at the show, so stay tuned for that in a couple of weeks.

This year at Black Hat, the topic of AI was everywhere — from hallway chats to the expo floor. Adam and Cristian took a break from the action for a rare in-person conversation about how adversaries are weaponizing AI, how defenders are using agentic AI, and what we should all be thinking about as AI evolves as an offensive and defensive tool.

In the first half of 2025 alone, cloud intrusions were up 136% compared to all of 2024. China was a big driver — CrowdStrike saw a 40% year-over-year surge in intrusions from suspected cloud-conscious China-nexus threat actors. In the government sector, interactive intrusions increased 71%, and targeted intrusion activity jumped 185%.

The CrowdStrike OverWatch threat hunting team has a firsthand look at how adversaries are changing their techniques. In the CrowdStrike 2025 Threat Hunting Report, published today, the team shares observations, trends, and shifts seen in its threat hunting and adversary engagements over the past 12 months.

In this episode, Adam and Cristian dive deep into the report’s key findings and put them into context. They explore why the use of malware is going down (and why it won’t go away), unpack the rise in government intrusions, and explain the role of generative AI (GenAI) in today’s threat landscape. They examine the rise of prolific adversaries such as SCATTERED SPIDER and FAMOUS CHOLLIMA and discuss the techniques organizations can use to stop them.

Below are more key stats from this year’s report:

Download the report to learn more.

Links:

📃 Threat Hunting Report: https://www.crowdstrike.com/resources/reports/threat-hunting-report/

🎧 Our site: https://www.crowdstrike.com/en-us/resources/adversary-universe-podcast/