Europe's Cyber Threat Picture Looks Nothing Like America's. The Numbers Prove It.
Business email scams hit 81% of reported incidents in Germany and the Benelux region. Europe absorbs nearly half of all global denial-of-service attacks. A new wave of ransomware gangs is arriving. The regulatory rulebook is entirely different, too.
Key points
- Business email compromise, where criminals impersonate colleagues or suppliers by email to steal money, was involved in 81% of reported cyber incidents in Germany and the Benelux region so far in 2026, according to Eye Security.
- Europe absorbed 48.4% of all global DDoS attacks (floods of fake traffic designed to knock websites or services offline) in the period studied, five times the North American share of 9.4%, driven largely by Russian-aligned hacker groups, according to Radware.
- Poland's cybersecurity spending grew 59% year-on-year in the second half of 2025, Spain's rose 20%, and Italy's climbed 15%, all outpacing North America's roughly 10% growth in the same window, per IDC figures.
- Ransomware gangs, which lock an organisation's files and demand payment to restore them, are increasingly targeting European companies after years of focusing mainly on North American victims.
- NIS2, the European Union's updated network and information security law, sets compliance deadlines that carry real enforcement consequences, distinct from the U.S. regulatory framework.
The cyber threat map of Europe and North America may look similar at first glance. Look closer and they are almost completely different pictures.
The statistics are striking. Business email compromise (BEC), a fraud where criminals send convincing fake emails pretending to be a boss, a supplier, or a partner in order to redirect payments or steal login details, affected 81% of reported incidents in Germany and the Benelux countries (Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg) so far this year, Eye Security data shows. In the United States over 2025, the same category figured in just 27% of investigated incidents, according to Arctic Wolf.
The gap on DDoS attacks is even wider. A DDoS, or distributed denial-of-service attack, is when criminals flood a website or online service with so much fake traffic that it collapses and real users cannot get through. Europe absorbed 48.4% of all such attacks globally. North America took 9.4%. Much of the European volume traces back to hacktivist groups aligned with Russia, whose operations intensified after the invasion of Ukraine placed critical European infrastructure physically and politically close to the conflict.
Why does Europe's regulatory environment matter separately from America's?
Because the rules genuinely differ, and the deadlines carry teeth. NIS2, the EU's updated law on security standards for essential services such as energy, transport, healthcare, and digital infrastructure, imposes mandatory incident-reporting timelines and financial penalties that companies operating in Europe must meet regardless of what U.S. regulators require. ENISA, the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity, issues guidance and recommendations that sit in a different legal context than advisories from America's CISA (the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency). Treating one as a proxy for the other creates real compliance gaps.
Ransomware adds a further complication. Gangs that have spent years extorting American hospitals, schools, and manufacturers are now turning toward European targets, drawn partly by lower awareness of the threat in some corners of the continent.
For organisations with any European footprint, the practical steps are clear. Map your NIS2 obligations by sector and member state. Train staff on BEC fraud, which remains the most common entry point in the region. And do not assume a security posture built around U.S. regulation covers you on this side of the Atlantic.
Dark Reading has launched a dedicated European coverage section, DR Global Europe, to track these regional differences as they develop.
