Fragmentation Defined 2025's Threat Landscape. Here's What It Means for 2026

Recorded Future’s Insikt Group 2026 State of Security report assesses a 2025 threat landscape fractured by geopolitical instability, highlighting covert state-sponsored pre-positioning against identity, cloud, and edge systems; the convergence of hacktivism and influence operations; and a resilient, modular cybercrime economy with proliferating ransomware variants. It underscores verification failures at scale from AI-enabled fraud, and forecasts 2026 risks including shorter, disruption-focused ransomware cycles, synthetic identity abuse, prompt-based attacks on AI systems, connectivity coercion targeting undersea cables and satellites, rising quantum-readiness investments, and growing exposure from networked robots and space infrastructure.