FlagThis

Abstract

M-Trends 2026 provides a comprehensive view of the modern threat landscape, grounded in over 500,000 hours of frontline incident investigations conducted in 2025. Key emerging trends include the adoption of AI by adversaries for hyper-personalized social engineering and malware evasion, a significant increase in the speed of hand-offs between initial access partners and secondary groups, and a systematic shift by ransomware actors toward denying recovery by targeting backups, identity services, and virtualization layers.