Cyber Security Report 2026

Check Point Research’s Cyber Security Report 2026 synthesizes findings from 2025 showing AI is embedded across the attack lifecycle, accelerating reconnaissance, social engineering, and malware development while introducing new governance risks. The report also highlights fragmented, data-only ransomware extortion, exploitation of unmonitored edge and perimeter devices, geopolitically aligned cyber activity, and measurable vulnerabilities in Model Context Protocols and ungoverned AI usage. #ModelContextProtocols #UnmonitoredDevices

Keypoints

AI has become a force multiplier across the attack lifecycle, increasing speed, scale, and the effectiveness of familiar techniques like social engineering and reconnaissance.
Risk from AI systems is measurable: risky prompts rose 97% in 2025, 40% of analyzed Model Context Protocols (MCPs) were vulnerable, and prompt injection/workflow abuse amplified impact.
Ransomware operations shifted toward smaller, decentralized operators with more data-only extortion, personalized victim profiling, and shorter, automated negotiation timelines.
Unmonitored edge and perimeter devices (routers, gateways, VPN appliances) emerged as high-value initial access points used for persistence and lateral movement.
Cyber operations increasingly aligned with geopolitical conflicts, coordinating espionage, disruption, and influence activities and leveraging compromised IoT and surveillance systems.
Common attacker patterns in 2025 included faster execution cycles, broader targeting with fewer resources, reduced reliance on custom tooling, and expanded attack paths across cloud, edge, SaaS, and on-prem environments.

MITRE Techniques

[None ] No MITRE ATT&CK technique identifiers or names were explicitly mentioned in the article. (‘The report does not reference MITRE ATT&CK technique names or IDs.’)

Indicators of Compromise

[None ] The article does not publish specific IOCs such as IP addresses, file hashes, domains, or filenames for observed activity – ‘No IPs, file hashes, domains, or filenames were listed in the report.’