Cybersecurity in 2026 is not a clean break from the past: ransomware, phishing, vulnerability exploitation, DDoS, fraud and third-party exposure remain central threats, while AI is being used to enhance attacks and is creating systems attackers may target. The clearest current incident picture is ENISA’s analysis of EU events recorded during 2025—not a global count or a report of all attacks in 2026.
What the latest threat picture actually covers
ENISA’s 2026 Threat Landscape examines incidents observed from 1 January through 31 December 2025. It is useful evidence for understanding the risks facing the EU as 2026 unfolds, but it is not a census of every attack, a global measurement or a forecast that every pattern will persist unchanged. Reporting and classification affect what appears in the analysis.
One distinction matters when reading the figures: the number of recorded events, the share of a particular incident type, and the relative impact of an attack are different measures. ENISA calls ransomware the most short-term impactful incident type; that does not mean it was the most frequent type. DDoS made up a substantial share of recorded cases, but frequency and impact should not be treated as interchangeable.
| Measure | What ENISA reported | How to interpret it |
|---|---|---|
| Organizations targeted | 73% were essential and important entities under the NIS2 definition. | Share of organizations targeted in ENISA’s 2026 analysis, not a rate for all European organizations. |
| Sector targeted most often | Public administration accounted for 32% of recorded cases. Business services and transport each accounted for 8%; manufacturing, 7%; and finance/banking, 6%. | These are shares of ENISA-recorded cases in its EU analysis, not a ranking for every region. |
| Public-administration events | 82% were ideology-driven DDoS attacks. | Applies to the recorded public-administration events, not to all DDoS or all cyber incidents. |
| Unauthorized access | 60% of incidents for which ENISA could identify an intrusion vector leveraged a vulnerability. | ENISA says this identifiable group represented 5% of unauthorized-access incidents; 60% is not the share of all attacks. |
| Cybercrime and financial motivation | 36% of total events were classified as cybercrime. Among financially motivated events, ransomware deployment accounted for 40%, data breaches 31%, and fraud and impersonation 19%. | The first share covers all events; the latter three describe only the financially motivated subset. |
| Published vulnerability identifiers | More than 48,000 new CVE identifiers were published in 2025, 22% more than the previous year. | This counts published identifiers, not vulnerabilities exploited in attacks. |
ENISA also describes geopolitical developments as shaping hacktivist DDoS campaigns against essential entities. Its executive director, Juhan Lepassaar, said the threat landscape shows “how threats become more interconnected and how threat groups spread their impact across the larger map of digital services and infrastructures.” The practical implication is that an incident affecting one supplier or service can matter well beyond the organization first compromised.
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Which familiar attacks still deserve attention?
Ransomware and data theft
Ransomware remains a major high-impact risk in ENISA’s EU picture. Financially motivated incidents also included data breaches, fraud and impersonation. An organization therefore needs to consider more than whether it can restore encrypted files: exposure of stolen information and fraudulent use of compromised identities can create separate harms.
Phishing and other social engineering
ENISA describes social engineering—particularly phishing—as a common enabling tactic. Phishing kits and the growing use of ClickFix are among the methods it notes. The underlying objective is often to persuade a person to disclose credentials, approve access or run something harmful, so a convincing message can be part of a larger intrusion rather than an isolated nuisance.
Exploited software weaknesses
Attackers continue to exploit both known, unpatched (“N-day”) vulnerabilities and previously unknown (“zero-day”) flaws. The figure about vulnerabilities in the table should not be read as an exploitation count; it does, however, sit alongside ENISA’s warning that vulnerability exploitation remains a prevalent intrusion route. Keeping internet-facing and otherwise exposed software updated is a concrete way to reduce avoidable exposure.
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Distributed denial of service and supply-chain exposure
DDoS attacks can disrupt availability, including in politically motivated campaigns. Separately, attackers may target suppliers, service providers or other dependencies to reach multiple organizations or create broader consequences. ENISA warns that supply-chain and third-party incidents can have large-scale or high-impact effects. A company’s practical exposure therefore includes the digital services it relies on, not just equipment and accounts it owns directly.
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These categories can overlap. ENISA notes that techniques, infrastructure and access methods recur across cybercrime, hacktivist and state-nexus reporting even when the groups have different objectives. Defenses organized around exposed systems and likely attack paths are consequently useful alongside threat-actor labels.
What “AI attacks” means in 2026
The phrase covers two related but different situations. Keeping them separate helps avoid overstating what AI has changed.
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AI-assisted attacks: using AI as a tool
Attackers can use AI to support or scale existing activities, including phishing, fraud, impersonation, translation and information manipulation. ENISA reports the use of synthetic audio and video and AI-generated text in information manipulation, and says malicious groups are increasingly using AI to facilitate or enhance activity. A fake voice or polished message can make deception more persuasive; it does not necessarily change the underlying tactic of tricking someone into giving up access or money.
Attacks on AI systems: targeting a model or its lifecycle
An AI system can itself be a target. NIST’s AI 100-2 E2025, Adversarial Machine Learning: A Taxonomy and Terminology of Attacks and Mitigations, published in March 2025, provides terminology for attacker goals, capabilities and knowledge, the stages of a machine-learning lifecycle, and possible mitigations and risk-management methods. Examples of the kinds of issues covered include manipulating training data (data poisoning) and crafting inputs intended to make a model behave incorrectly (evasion).
NIST’s taxonomy is a framework for describing attack methods, not a survey showing how prevalent real-world attacks on AI systems are. Likewise, ENISA’s observations support discussing increasing malicious use of AI, but do not establish that autonomous AI agents dominate cybercrime or that conventional attacks have been replaced.
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What individuals and organizations can do
CISA’s baseline advice is practical: recognize and report phishing, use strong passwords, enable multifactor authentication (MFA), and update software. A password manager can help create and maintain strong, unique passwords. These steps address common routes into accounts and devices; they do not eliminate every risk.
Choose MFA by protection and compatibility
CISA ranks a physical security key among the strongest listed MFA options and says it offers the best phishing protection among those methods. The hierarchy it presents places keys above number-matching authenticator apps, one-time-code apps, biometrics, and text or email codes. What you can use depends on whether the service and device support it; convenience also matters if a method is to be used consistently.
- For important personal accounts, enable the strongest MFA method the service supports. A FIDO/WebAuthn-compatible physical security key is one option for phishing-resistant MFA; check service and device compatibility before buying or setting one up.
- For organizations, prioritize strong MFA for privileged and remote access, and choose methods that can be required for those accounts where feasible.
- If a key is unavailable or unsupported, use the strongest compatible alternative offered by the service. CISA also lists number-matching authenticator apps, one-time-code apps, biometrics, and text or email codes.
A security key is optional equipment, not a standalone security solution: account protection still depends on enabling it correctly and maintaining sound account and device practices.
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Reduce exposure beyond the login screen
- Apply software updates, especially to internet-facing systems and tools that hold sensitive access.
- Train people to pause over unexpected requests, verify unusual payment or credential requests through a separate trusted channel, and report suspected phishing.
- Know which external providers and services are critical to operations, what access they have, and how the organization would respond if one were compromised or unavailable.
How to read the numbers without overgeneralizing
ENISA’s percentages describe its EU observations and classification methods. They should not be projected onto every country, every organization or all incidents worldwide. In particular, the sector figures concern recorded events, and the vulnerability-vector figure applies only to the small subset of unauthorized-access incidents for which an intrusion vector could be identified.
There is no single global 2026 total established by these sources, nor a reliable worldwide percentage of attacks enabled by AI. The evidence supports the more careful conclusion that malicious AI use is increasing and that AI systems attract security interest; it does not establish that AI attacks are the dominant or inevitable next phase of cybercrime.
For historical context, ENISA’s separate 2025 edition analyzed 4,875 incidents from 1 July 2024 through 30 June 2025. That earlier reporting interval is not the same as the 2026 edition’s calendar-year 2025 window. See ENISA’s 2025 Threat Landscape publication page.
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