Cyber defence is entering a race measured in minutes, not days. As we move into 2026, threat actors are faster and quieter than ever before. Breakout times have dropped below an hour, identity abuse has overtaken malware as the primary intrusion path, and AI is accelerating phishing, fraud, and reconnaissance at industrial scale. What once required specialist skills can now be bought, automated, and deployed by almost anyone.
This article breaks down the threat dynamics shaping the year ahead, from identity-centric intrusions and AI-driven social engineering to ransomware ecosystems and supply chain abuse. More importantly, it outlines what this means for defenders: why assume-breach is no longer optional, why detection speed now defines impact, and how organisations must adapt their incident response and resilience strategies to survive the next phase of cyber risk.
Our takeaways:
- Speed defines impact. Breakout times are under 60 minutes; early detection becomes critical.
- Identity is the primary battleground. Credential abuse now outpaces malware as the main intrusion method.
- AI amplifies attacks. Phishing, social engineering, and reconnaissance are automated and scaled.
- Assume-breach becomes the norm. Operate under the assumption that threat actors are in.
- Proactive strategies win. This means identity hardening, least-privilege access, threat hunting, and telemetry correlation.
- Expert guidance makes the difference. We recommend that AI-assisted detection be amplified by human expertise.
Our verdict: 2026 will reward the teams that can detect early, respond decisively, and act on expert insight.
The 2026 global threat horizon is defined by speed and scale
The global cyber threat picture entering 2026 is defined by speed, stealth-oriented tactics, and increasing commoditisation that allows even non-expert threat actors execute sophisticated campaigns at scale. Three statistics capture the scale and urgency defenders must plan for: average breakout time fell to 48 minutes, vishing grew 442% between the first and the second half of 2024, and China-nexus activity surged 150% year-over-year, with certain industries seeing 200–300% spikes. These are the metrics that define the defender’s window to detect, contain, and remediate.
Further, global threat actors no longer rely primarily on malware. Instead, they partner, buy, and automate to move fast and blend in. CrowdStrike observes that 79% of today’s detections are malware-free, a dramatic shift from 40% in 2019. Hands-on-keyboard, identity-centric intrusions now dominate.
Three structural trends underlie these numbers. It is these trends that should frame any incident response strategy today.
Identity and access have become the primary battleground
Identity attacks remain dominant, with 97% of identity‑based attacks involving passwords. Valid account abuse accounts for a large share of cloud incidents and access brokers. Microsoft’s Digital Defense Report 2025 highlights that “instead of brute‑forcing their way past firewalls, threat actors are now increasingly exploiting legitimate credentials, tokens, and trusted relationships to access systems and data.”
GenAI is the new force multiplier
LLMs are already improving the success rates of large-scale phishing campaigns, producing deepfakes and accelerating exploit development and reconnaissance.
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Social engineering scaling at low cost
2026 is expected to bring even more sophisticated and scalable social campaigns. Vishing and help-desk fraud enable fast footholds that evade EDR and exploit human workflows, a perfect complement to genAI-assisted lures.
Inside Europe’s threats: between global pressures and regional dynamics
Europe’s cyber threat environment remains complex. According to the ENISA Threat Landscape 2025 report, the EU recorded nearly 4,900 curated incidents between July 2024 and June 2025, highlighting a maturing threat ecosystem marked by rapid vulnerability exploitation and diversified adversary tactics.
Public administration remains the most targeted sector, accounting for 38% of incidents, followed by transport, particularly maritime and logistics, pinpointing Europe’s critical infrastructure exposure. Essential entities under NIS2 represented 53.7% of the total number of recorded incidents.
AI continues to be both a tool and a target in cyber operations, with threat actors using commercial and jailbroken LLMs to automate phishing, social engineering, malware development, and reconnaissance. The emergence of “allegedly standalone malicious AI systems” and AI-based lures, along with attacks on AI supply chains, that is, the data, models, and third-party components AI systems depend on, highlights a rapidly expanding and exploitable attack surface.
Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) contributing to the professionalisation of extortion
Ransomware continues to dominate the European cybercrime scene. The proliferation of Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS), builder leaks, and access broker marketplaces has lowered entry barriers, creating a professionalised ecosystem capable of aggressive extortion.
Insider threat developments also continue with the commercialisation of insider access. Groups such as ShinyHunters and Lapsus$ are actively recruiting employees to sell credentials or provide direct system access. This blurs the boundary between external intrusion and insider threat, giving ransomware operators a faster and more reliable entry vector than phishing or vulnerability exploitation.
In the EU transport sector alone, ransomware accounted for 83.9% of all incidents. Further, ransomware was behind 36% of recorded incidents in the finance sector.
Business email compromise (BEC) is still a leading threat to enterprise credentials in Europe
Business Email Compromise (BEC) and phishing remain central intrusion vectors, with phishing responsible for 60% of attacks and increasingly industrialised through phishing-as-a-service platforms, according to ENISA. Whereas roughly 73% of phishing cases are classified as “unknown,” 27% result in successful intrusions. By early 2025, AI-supported campaigns accounted for over 80% of social engineering attacks, using jailbroken models, synthetic media, and model poisoning to boost effectiveness.
Supply chain attacks: exploiting trust for persistent access
ENISA’s distribution of threats during the reporting period shows that supply chain risks constitute 10.6% of all threats, highlighting the significance of indirect pathways through trusted partners.
Further, supply chain attacks are used by state-aligned Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) targeting telecommunications, logistics, and manufacturing networks. These campaigns exploit third-party dependencies and software supply chains to gain persistent access.
Hacktivism: low-cost, high-visibility disruption
Hacktivism continues to be highly visible across Europe and remains the most active threat against Member States, responsible for 79% of recorded incidents. These are primarily low-level DDoS attacks and defacements. While the immediate operational impact of these campaigns is low, they highlight the rapid scalability of low-cost, ideology-driven attacks.
Notably, public administration, transport, and banking remain strategic targets for hacktivist campaigns, a trend illustrating the convergence of financial, ideological, and geopolitical motivations in Europe’s cyber threat ecosystem.
Overall, Europe’s cyber ecosystem reflects a mix of persistent low-level threats, high-value ransomware intrusions, and state-aligned espionage, demanding proactive, multi-layered defences across public and private sectors.
Eye Security’s 2026 playbook: assume breach, act fast
These global trends call for an urgent pivot where organisations should operate from a true assume-breach mindset: assume that firewalls and VPN concentrators will expose a critical vulnerability and will be exploited; assume that social engineering will trick an employee into opening a malicious attachment, approving a fake MFA prompt, or sharing remote access details; assume that a software update or third-party tool in your supply chain could be backdoored; and assume that reused or leaked credentials will let an attacker simply log in.
In this reality, the priority shifts to identity hardening, least-privilege access, and rapid detection tied to behaviour-based baselines, supported by playbooks that start from the premise that the attacker already has a foothold and may break out within an hour or less.
Further, organisations are urged to look into proactive threat hunting and telemetry correlation to reduce mean time to detect and neutralise and bake those lessons into resilience metrics measured quarterly. Attackers are faster, stealthier, and more coordinated than ever. Equally so, incident response must accelerate while becoming more identity-focused and data-driven. It is the organisations that combine rapid AI-assisted detection and expert guidance that are best positioned to stay ahead in 2026.
