The Threat Landscape Debrief: Lessons from 2025 and What They Signal for 2026

Look Closer at the Risks Hiding in Plain Sight

For many organisations, much of the cybersecurity conversation continues to focus on what’s coming next: AI-driven attacks, new classes of malware, quantum disruption, and the assumption that yesterday’s threats are already under control. 

 But when you look closer at how real incidents unfolded over the past year, a more instructive picture emerges; one that’s shaping the threat landscape organisations are facing right now. And in many cases, when you strip it back, it wasn’t the tech that failed – it was human behaviour under pressure. 

The most damaging breaches weren’t driven by novel or futuristic attack paths.  They stemmed from familiar weaknesses that had already been documented, patched, or previously exploited, yet remained present in live environments. . Identity misuse. Patching delays. Social engineering that blended seamlessly into everyday workflows.  Operational gaps that persisted despite reassuring dashboards, compliance metrics, and seemingly mature technology stacks. 

This debrief cuts through the speculation and focuses on the evidence. The behaviours, attack patterns, and overlooked risks that defined recent breaches, and that continue to influence how attackers operate in 2026. 

The threats themselves aren’t new.  The risk lies in how often they’re underestimated, and how unprepared organisations remain when they’re exploited. 

What Actually Happened Last Year 

1. Vulnerabilities Were Exploited Faster Than Organisations Could Respond

Exploitation speed accelerated again in 2025. In multiple high-severity cases, proof-of-concept code and active exploitation appeared within hours of disclosure, not days or weeks; as seen in widely reported incidents affecting VPN and firewall platforms such as Ivanti Connect Secure and Palo Alto PAN-OS, to name a few. 

 In several cases, attackers were acting on newly disclosed vulnerabilities within hours of public advisories being issued.. While zero-days made headlines, a significant proportion of successful intrusions relied on older, well-documented vulnerabilities that organisations believed were already “known” risks. 

Remote services such as VPNs, firewalls, hypervisors, and identity providers remained the most attractive targets due to their direct access to internal environments. 

For many organisations, the issue wasn’t vulnerability complexity, but the operational gap between knowing a patch existed and being able to apply it quickly and safely. 

Why this matters:

“Patch faster” sounds simple, but last year showed that exploitation routinely outpaces traditional patch cycles. Without accurate asset visibility, risk-based prioritisation, and operational capacity, known vulnerabilities continue to provide reliable entry points. 

2. Ransomware Didn’t Decline, it Quietly Changed Shape 

Predictions of ransomware decline did not materialise. Instead, ransomware evolved. 

The ENISA Threat Landscape Report shows ransomware activity increased in frequency and impact during 2025, with a clear shift towards data exfiltration and extortion without encryption. However, many campaigns no longer began with loud, disruptive encryption events. Instead, attackers focused first on data theft, reconnaissance, and credential harvesting. 

Encryption became optional. In several incidents, it was skipped entirely. The threat of data disclosure alone proved sufficient to force negotiations, even when backups were intact. 

Initial access was frequently achieved through a combination of vulnerability exploitation and stolen credentials, rather than malware delivery alone. 

Why this matters:

Backups are no longer a sufficient safety net. Ransomware defence must now cover the full intrusion lifecycle, from initial access through lateral movement to data exfiltration. 

3. Social Engineering Became Context-Aware and Harder to See

The most significant shift in social engineering during 2025 wasn’t volume, but accuracy. 

Attackers increasingly used highly contextual lures that mirrored internal workflows, supplier communications, approval requests, and system alerts. AI-assisted tools enabled rapid variation in language, formatting, and branding, helping phishing attempts bypass static detection controls. 

Many users weren’t responding to obviously suspicious emails. They were reacting to messages that looked and felt like routine operational communication. 

The widespread use of remote access tools, VPNs, and hybrid working models created additional pressure points, particularly around administrative and privileged accounts. 

Why this matters:

Awareness training based on outdated phishing examples no longer reflects reality. When deception looks authentic, risk shifts from knowledge gaps to decision-making under pressure. 

4. Identity Became the Primary Attack Surface

One of the clearest lessons last year was the central role of identity-based attacks. 

Credential misuse, password spraying, session hijacking, token theft, and MFA fatigue were recurring factors across breaches in multiple sectors.  Identity-driven threats have increased sharply since 2023, accounting for 59% of all confirmed incidents by early 2025. This represents a 156% rise in identity-based attacks over a two-year period. 

 In many environments, lateral movement remained surprisingly easy due to limited segmentation and weak access governance. 

Why this matters:

Identity has overtaken endpoints as the most reliable entry point. Least privilege (limiting users and systems to only the access they genuinely need) alongside strong access governance and phishing-resistant MFA, is now a foundational security control rather than an optional enhancement. 

5. Major Disruption Came from Familiar Failures

Many of the most disruptive incidents in 2025 traced back to familiar operational failures, including exposed management interfaces, misconfigured cloud assets, end-of-life systems, weak separation between critical and non-critical environments, and single points of failure within third-party services. 

These weren’t advanced attacks. They were preventable failures that persisted behind assumptions of maturity and control. 

Why this matters:

Advanced tooling can’t compensate for weak operational foundations. The difference between a contained incident and a headline event often comes down to basics that were assumed to be “done.” 

Top Exploited Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs)  

Across global reporting, several patterns emerged: 

1. Exploitation clustered heavily around public-facing systems

VPN appliances, firewall devices, email gateways, and cloud identity providers continued to be top targets. 

2. Widely known vulnerabilities were still among the most exploited

Older CVEs with available patches remained prevalent due to long remediation timelines, legacy systems, or incomplete patch rollouts. 

3. Attackers exploited chaining opportunities

Rather than relying on a single flaw, threat actors frequently combined: 

• A known remote code execution vulnerability 

• A privilege escalation flaw 

• A misconfiguration or unsecured credential 

This chaining approach enabled rapid lateral movement after initial access. 

4. Weaponisation times accelerated dramatically

Several critical vulnerabilities saw active exploitation the same day vendor advisories were published. 

What this tells us:

The threat is not only about new vulnerabilities, but also visibility, prioritisation, and velocity. Attackers focus on the easiest route in, not the most sophisticated one. 

Ransomware Tactics, Techniques and Procedures 

• Ransomware activity rebounded in 2025: one analysis estimates a ~34 % increase in confirmed ransomware incidents compared to 2024.  

• However, contrary to older models that focused on pure file-encryption, many attackers now favour double-extortion: exfiltrate data first, then encrypt or threaten to leak it.  

• The economics of ransomware are changing. According to a global survey, the average ransom payment in 2025 remained high (≈ US$1.0 M), but only a minority of organisations paid.  
• Ransomware actors increasingly combine vulnerability exploitation (e.g. unpatched VPNs/firewalls) with credential theft or phishing/social engineering to gain initial access.  

Why this matters:

The shift toward exfiltration-first, encryption-as-a-side tactic means that defenders cannot rely solely on file backups. Detection and prevention must now cover the entire intrusion lifecycle from access through to exfiltration and keep pace with exploit-driven attacks. 

Social Engineering Evolutions: What Surprised (and Succeeded) 

• Social engineering remained a core driver of ransomware and breach campaigns in 2025. In particular, phishing as an initial access point jumped significantly.  

• The rise of AI-powered phishing: attackers now frequently use automated or AI-assisted tools to craft convincing, highly tailored phishing emails that bypass traditional detection. 

• As a result, many phishing emails now use “polymorphic” features varying sender names, metadata, subjects, logos to defeat signature-based filters and avoid pattern detection.  
• The shift to hybrid work, remote environments, and widespread use of remote-access software (VPNs, RDP, remote-desktop tools) further increased the effectiveness of credential theft and social-engineering tactics.  

Why this matters:

Security awareness alone is no longer enough. As attackers use AI to scale and tailor social engineering, organisations need to invest in layered defences (technical controls and human training and anomaly detection) especially around email and identity access. 

Where Predictions Missed, and Why 

Many prior forecasts assumed that ransomware would continue to be dominated by high-impact encryption attacks, and that patching cycles would keep pace. That view underestimated: 

1. The explosion in vulnerability volume and rapid weaponisation: 2025 saw far more CVE disclosures than many predictions anticipated, and attackers exploited many within hours. 

1. The shift to double-extortion/data leak business models: Encryption alone is losing its value when targets have good backups; data theft and extortion give more leverage. 

1. The power of social engineering + AI: forecasts that focused solely on technical vulnerabilities overlooked how effective AI-assisted phishing and credential-based attacks would become. 

This means defenders and risk models that relied mainly on patch cycles, backup resilience, or encryption-based mitigation need re-evaluation. The real threat, especially for many organisations, is now broader: it spans identity, initial access, data exfiltration, and social engineering. 

What the Threat Landscape Signals for 2026

 When you look closely at how recent attacks unfolded, a pattern starts to form. Attackers didn’t rely on futuristic techniques or complex zero-days. In most cases, they chose the simplest and most reliable route into an organisation. 

Often, that route involved people. 

Across identity misuse, delayed patching, ransomware intrusion paths, and social engineering campaigns, the common thread wasn’t just technology. It was behaviour. Decisions made under pressure. Access that had grown over time. Controls that looked strong on paper but weren’t tested in practice. 

Identity continues to sit at the centre of this. Credentials are shared, reused, approved too quickly, or exposed through phishing. Even well-configured environments become vulnerable when everyday behaviours create unintended openings. 

Exploitation speed is also forcing a shift in mindset. Traditional patch cycles and policy-based controls can struggle to keep pace when attackers act within hours. That gap between knowing and doing is where risk lives. 

Ransomware has followed the same trajectory. Data exposure and extortion now sit alongside encryption as core tactics. Preventing impact means understanding not just where systems are vulnerable, but where people and processes may introduce risk. 

Awareness programmes need to evolve too. Modern phishing doesn’t look obviously suspicious. It looks routine. It mirrors suppliers, colleagues, system notifications and internal requests. Recognising that kind of deception requires more than basic training. It requires judgement. 

What 2025 made clear is that operational strength depends on more than tools. It depends on visibility into real behaviour, real exposure, and real readiness. 

In 2026, organisations that understand their human risk as clearly as their technical risk will be in a far stronger position to prevent disruption and respond with confidence. 

Working with MetaCompliance 

At MetaCompliance, we help organisations look closer at the risks that often sit just beneath the surface. The incidents shaping today’s threat landscape rarely happen because employees do not know the rules. They happen because organisations rely on assumptions about behaviour, coverage, and readiness that no longer reflect how attacks actually unfold. 

Our approach is built around turning those assumptions into evidence. Through our Human Risk Management platform, security leaders gain visibility into where risk truly exists, based on real behaviour, engagement patterns, and exposure to modern threats rather than completion rates or static metrics. 

Instead of one-size-fits-all awareness programmes, organisations can deliver targeted, personalised interventions aligned to each user’s risk profile. This ensures training focuses attention where it matters most, rather than spreading effort evenly across low-risk and high-risk users alike. 

Our scenario-based training reflects how deception really looks today, from contextual phishing and supplier impersonation to identity-driven intrusion attempts. These short, focused learning moments are designed to sharpen judgement under realistic conditions, helping employees recognise risk when it is subtle, familiar, and easy to miss. 

Phishing simulations evolve continuously within the platform, mirroring the tactics, language, and context attackers use in real campaigns. This moves organisations beyond simple pass or fail testing and towards sustained behaviour change that reduces exposure over time. 

Policy and compliance management is fully integrated, giving organisations a clearer view of how governance, behaviour, and risk intersect. Reporting highlights emerging trends and hidden weaknesses, enabling leaders to prioritise action based on evidence rather than reassurance. 

As the gap between security confidence and breach reality continues to widen, MetaCompliance helps organisations close it by focusing on the human decisions and everyday controls that attackers exploit most often. It’s time to look closer at where risk really lives.