M-Trends 2026: Data, Insights, and Strategies From the Frontlines

M-Trends 2026 is an annual threat landscape report detailing how adversaries shifted in 2025: increased dwell times and extreme persistence by espionage groups, accelerated zero-day exploitation often pre-patch, a collapse of the initial-access “hand-off” window enabling rapid high-impact operations, a surge in voice phishing (vishing) and SaaS identity compromise, and ransomware evolution toward deliberate recovery-denial by targeting backups, identity services, and virtualization. The report highlights observed malware families and APT clusters, emphasizes large-scale risks to virtualization and edge devices, documents adversary use of AI to augment attacks, and provides strategic recommendations for detection, isolation of control planes, continuous identity verification, behavioral detection, and extended telemetry retention.