Cyber threats in 2026: What business leaders need to know

TL;DR

The Essentials in 60 Seconds CrowdStrike’s 2026 Global Threat Report offers a detailed look at how cyber threats evolved in 2025.

AI-powered attacks grew significantly, attackers are moving faster than ever, and most intrusions now rely on stolen credentials rather than traditional malware.

Understanding these trends is the first step toward building a resilient business.

The second step? Having the right support in place.

Staying informed is your best defence

Each year, CrowdStrike — one of the world’s leading cybersecurity intelligence firms — publishes its Global Threat Report. For business leaders, it is one of the most valuable free resources available: a clear-eyed, data-driven picture of how the global threat landscape is shifting.

The 2026 edition, titled Year of the Evasive Adversary, identifies some significant trends that are worth understanding — not to cause alarm, but because informed leaders make better decisions. At Symsafe, helping you make sense of reports like this one is precisely what we are here for.

Who is being targeted?

A common assumption among smaller businesses is that cyber criminals focus their attention on large corporations. The data suggests otherwise.

The technology, manufacturing, retail, financial services, and healthcare sectors all ranked among the most frequently targeted industries in 2025. Criminals target any organisation that holds valuable data, processes payments, or relies on operational systems to function — and that description fits most businesses, regardless of size.

Understanding your exposure is not about fear. It is about making smart, proportionate decisions about where to invest in protection.

AI is changing the threat landscape

Artificial intelligence has become a genuinely useful business tool — and unfortunately, it has also become useful to the people trying to compromise your business.

In 2025, attacks by AI-enabled adversaries increased by 89% year-over-year. Hackers are using AI to craft more convincing phishing emails, automate reconnaissance, and scale attacks more efficiently. One important nuance from the report:

AI is primarily enhancing existing attack methods rather than creating entirely new ones.

The fundamentals of good cyber hygiene therefore remain just as relevant and effective as they have always been.

For business leaders, the key takeaway is that security awareness training for your team needs to keep pace with increasingly convincing social engineering attempts.

Speed matters: Understanding breakout time

The report introduces a concept worth understanding: “breakout time” — the window between an attacker gaining initial access and moving deeper into your systems.

In 2025, the average breakout time fell to 29 minutes, down from 48 minutes in 2024. This trend underscores why detection and response capabilities matter just as much as prevention. It is not enough to have a firewall. Your security posture needs to include the ability to identify unusual activity quickly and act on it.

This is one of the core reasons managed security services — where trained professionals monitor your environment around the clock — deliver such meaningful value for businesses that cannot maintain that capability in-house.

Most attacks do not look like attacks

Perhaps the most important insight in the report for business leaders to grasp:

82% of intrusions in 2025 involved no malware whatsoever.

Modern attackers increasingly prefer to steal legitimate login credentials and simply log in — appearing, to most monitoring tools, like an ordinary user. They then move quietly through cloud platforms, SaaS applications, and internal systems gathering data or preparing for a ransomware deployment.

This is why identity protection — robust multi-factor authentication, access controls, and anomaly detection — has become a foundational element of any sound security strategy, rather than an optional extra.

Your third-party relationships matter

One of the report’s more significant findings involves supply chain attacks — where criminals compromise a trusted software vendor or service provider to gain access to multiple downstream businesses simultaneously.

Your business almost certainly relies on third-party software, cloud services, and technology partners. Each of those relationships carries some level of risk. This does not mean avoiding third-party tools — it means ensuring your security strategy accounts for those relationships and that your providers are held to appropriate security standards.

A useful question for your next leadership conversation: Do we have visibility into the security practices of all the vendors who access our systems?

Practical steps forward

The report’s recommendations translate directly into actionable priorities for SMB leaders. These align closely with the services Symsafe provides:

Strengthen identity and access controls. Phishing-resistant multi-factor authentication and least-privilege access policies are foundational and highly effective.

Patch promptly. In 2025, attackers exploited newly disclosed vulnerabilities within days of public announcement. A consistent patching schedule meaningfully reduces your exposure.

Invest in your people. Well-trained employees remain one of your strongest defences against social engineering. Regular, realistic training pays dividends.

Ensure full environment visibility. Cloud applications, unmanaged devices, and third-party integrations all represent potential blind spots. Knowing what is in your environment is the prerequisite for protecting it.

Knowledge is the starting point

The cyber threat landscape is genuinely complex and constantly evolving — but it is not unmanageable. Reports like CrowdStrike’s Global Threat Report exist to help organisations understand what they are facing, so they can respond sensibly and proportionately.

Symsafe works with businesses every day to translate this kind of intelligence into practical, right-sized security strategies. If you would like to understand where your business currently stands, we would be glad to have that conversation.