Why the latest cyber threat trends make NetClean more valuable than ever

One insight stood out: the same attackers who once focused solely on national security are now targeting everyday business data. With espionage and financial motives now overlapping, the old lines between different types of threats no longer hold. For security-conscious organizations, this evolution highlights just how critical our work at NetClean has become.

The 2025 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) reveals a new reality in cybersecurity: the same attackers targeting national secrets are also after your business data. With espionage and financial motives now overlapping, traditional threat categories no longer apply. For organizations focused on security, this shift highlights the growing value of NetClean's solutions.

What’s changing: The blending of espionage and crime

This year, the DBIR found that 28% of breaches involving state-sponsored actors were financially motivated. These attackers are no longer just collecting intelligence. They’re demanding ransoms, selling stolen data, and targeting the same systems used by ordinary businesses. In short, the same threats that once felt distant are now directly relevant to your organization.

The methods are also converging. Whether the goal is espionage or extortion, the tactics are the same: stolen credentials, compromised cloud platforms, misuse of trusted access—and increasingly, the recruitment of insiders through coercion or exploitation of personal vulnerabilities. Attackers understand that individuals with access can become unwilling participants when pressured or blackmailed, and in many cases, these insiders are used to grant unauthorized access, plant malware, or weaken cloud-based defenses from the inside. Insider recruitment has become a strategic pathway for attackers to bypass technical controls entirely, making it a critical part of their playbook.

What this means for you

1. NetClean helps you identify at-risk individuals The greatest risk isn’t just in the systems attackers exploit—it’s in the vulnerabilities they find in the individuals they target. Employees who engage with harmful or illegal material, such as CSAM, are compromised and may pose serious compliance issues. More critically, they may also become targets for coercion, blackmail, or recruitment as insiders—deliberately exploited to serve as internal access points or enablers for attackers. This puts your organization at risk in deeply personal and dangerous ways.

NetClean identifies these individuals early, allowing organizations to take swift, discreet, and appropriate action to mitigate risk. With an approach built for precision and zero false positives without invading privacy, NetClean acts as an early warning system—a red flag for compromised individuals or assets—ensuring threats are intercepted before reputational, legal, and operational harm can escalate. These individuals may be cultivated over time, gradually recruited to serve as internal enablers—granting unauthorized access, leaking data, or weakening defenses from within. Such insider activity poses a serious and escalating threat to any organization.

2. NetClean adds a human layer to insider risk programs Traditional insider threat programs focus on behaviors like data exfiltration or access anomalies. But what happens when the risk lies in psychological pressure or personal exposure? NetClean enhances your security posture by helping identify individuals who may be compromised—intentionally or through manipulation—and who could become conduits for greater threats.

This is about protecting people and systems together—and ensuring that no form of internal risk flies under the radar.

3. NetClean supports cybersecurity frameworks and compliance standards Organizations are increasingly aligning with leading cybersecurity frameworks such as NIST to strengthen defenses and meet compliance expectations. These standards focus on identifying, detecting, and responding to threats—including those that emerge from within.

NetClean contributes to this by providing early signals of risk tied to compromised individuals, enabling you to meet expectations for proactive threat detection, insider threat mitigation, and responsible incident response.

By embedding NetClean into your cybersecurity stack, you enhance your ability to fulfill security controls and demonstrate maturity in handling internal risk.

A smarter way to stay ahead

The 2025 DBIR confirms it: cyber threats are evolving. Insider risk is emerging as one of the most critical and overlooked threat vectors—often invisible until it’s too late. Attackers are increasingly exploiting individuals inside organizations to achieve their goals, bypassing technical barriers by targeting human ones. At a time when organizations are reassessing their insider risk strategies and regulatory expectations are rising, NetClean arrives not as just another tool—but as a timely, necessary safeguard. Our approach fits right into the needs of this moment: precise, early detection of compromised individuals and discreet intervention before harm escalates.

This isn’t about just adding another cybersecurity tool to an already crowded stack; it’s about filling a critical gap that most solutions overlook. Think of NetClean as covering one of the holes in the Swiss cheese that makes up an organization's layered defense—a unique safeguard that strengthens your overall posture where human risk too often goes undetected. it’s about responding to a reality that’s already here. These are the challenges I think about every day, and they reaffirm why the work we do at NetClean is so important. We're not just building technology—we're filling a gap that's been left open for too long. We help organizations see what others can’t—because insider risk often hides in plain sight.