There's nothing which says that the Great Filter needs to be caused by endogenous factors. Let's say that these are all relatively "easy" to achieve: planets, life, complex life, technological civilisation. Even if they're "easy" now, there will have been a time, billions of years ago, when they weren't. Let's say that all of this has only been achievable since the emergence of the first high-metallicity stars, maybe 5 or 6 billion years ago.

At that time, There will have been a number of "first" civilisations. Imagine that one of those civilisations grew up to be even more paranoid than us. "Nature, red in tooth and claw" shaped their psychology profoundly. For them, to meet any strange species is to utterly fear it. They know, to the core of their being, that if they do not annihilate the stranger, the stranger will annihilate them. Let's call this species "the Fearers".

So when The Fearers become aware of the potential for species elsewhere in the galaxy to exist, they decide that the best defence is a good offence. They throw all of their civilisational resources into developing technology which ensures that no alien species will ever bother them.

Assembler probes are dispatched to a large metal asteroid. They pull it apart, re-assembling it into an autonomous listening post attached to a 10-million-kilometer-long solar-powered mass driver. If the listening post detects signals from any species other than the Fearers, then the mass driver will spend a few years tweaking its orbit, take careful aim, and dispatch a stream of projectiles towards the source of the signal. Each projectile only weighs a few hundred kg, but travels at 99.9% the speed of light, making it a gigaton-class impactor. Not quite a planet-killer, but the mass driver can take several shots per hour, and has trillions of tons worth of ammunition at its disposal. It spends a few years shelling the source of the signals, plus any other planetary body in the target system, just in case the emerging technological civilisation was able to develop interplanetary capabilities before the first impactor arrived.

The Fearers realise that although this first mass driver is sufficient to clear their local neighbourhood of potential adversaries, they are still, in the long term, vulnerable. What if some species on the far side of the galaxy was able to develop interstellar travel, making them potential resilient to such an attack? The Fearers then conceive of a next-generation defense grid: self-reproducing probes which spread out through the galaxy, establishing listening posts and mass drivers every 100 light-years or so. It only takes a few hundred thousand years to saturate the galaxy with the these defence stations. There, they lurk indefinitely, completely radio-silent, waiting to snuff out signals as soon as they arrive.

Unfortunately for the Fearers, their early foray into self-replication causes them to succumb to a Grey Goo catastrophe, shortly after launching the first interstellar defence probes. But the damage was done. The Fearers have now been gone for billions of years, but their defence grid remains active. In that time, hundreds of thousands of technological civilisations have emerged, but within a century of their first long-range radio broadcasts, all of them have been snuffed out by a fusillade of near-lightspeed projectiles. That is too short of a window for any species to develop the class of interstellar capabilities needed to survive such an event.

Maybe this story seems implausible. But these kind of capabilities will probably be within humanity's grasp within a couple hundred years -- and the galaxy has been around for billions of years, during which it only takes a single species being that much of an asshole to construct a Great Filter like this.

It's scenarios like this which really make me hope that the Great Filter is behind us.