Tech companies no longer hold only product roadmaps, source code, customer data, and credentials, according to new research from CrowdStrike.
The technology sector is being targeted because it has become the place where everyone else’s future is built. A bank can be attacked for money, a defense contractor for secrets, and a government agency for intelligence. A technology company can offer all three, plus something more strategic: a path into the systems other organizations rely on. It sits upstream of the economy, shaping the tools, platforms, infrastructure, and dependencies that others build upon.
CrowdStrike’s 2026 Technology Threat Landscape Report found tech companies increasingly hold the infrastructure of modern power: AI models, cloud environments, developer pipelines, identity systems, APIs, software supply chains, collaboration tools, and managed services that governments and corporations depend on every day.
CrowdStrike found that China-nexus adversaries accounted for more than 58% of state-sponsored targeted intrusions against the sector. For a state trying to close gaps in AI, chips, cloud infrastructure, and advanced software, cyber espionage can shorten the learning curve. The target may be one company, but the prize is often the map behind the company: its architecture, workflows, engineering choices, customer dependencies, and strategic mistakes already paid for through years of research and investment.
Cyber espionage becomes a means of compressing time. Their criminal activity fits into a larger strategic logic: access to intellectual property, AI capabilities, technical know-how, and infrastructure that could help narrow the gap with the United States. MURKY PANDA conducted password-spraying attacks against more than 340 organizations, with technology among the most affected. WARP PANDA repeatedly targeted North American tech organizations, exploiting vulnerabilities and maintaining persistent access. SUNRISE PANDA focused on technology entities in East and Southeast Asia, including mail infrastructure that could expose sensitive government communications.
If a state is trying to close a gap in AI, chips, cloud infrastructure, software engineering, or advanced platforms, stealing intellectual property is not only about copying a product. It can reveal research direction, engineering trade-offs, model architecture, training methods, customer deployments, source code, and the mistakes competitors have already made.
The prize is the learning curve itself: what worked, what failed, which architectures were abandoned, how infrastructure was optimized, and where the next technical bottlenecks are likely to appear.
Even more, tech companies increasingly serve as gateways into thousands of customer environments. A successful compromise of a software vendor, cloud provider, development platform, or managed service provider can provide access far beyond the original target.
And all of these can irreversibly modify the worldwide geography of power. The battlefield is in the cloud layer, the AI stack, the software supply chain, and the developer systems, where the next decade of economic advantage is being built.