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Repair common Windows errors and clear accumulated junk for a smoother, more stable PC - no reinstall needed.Free scan · no reinstallCybersecurity in 2026 is not a clean break from the past: ransomware, phishing, vulnerability exploitation, fraud, DDoS and third-party exposure remain central, while AI can help attackers improve or scale familiar operations and creates systems that can themselves be targeted. The clearest current snapshot is ENISA’s analysis of incidents observed in the EU during calendar year 2025—not a tally of all attacks worldwide or a report covering all of 2026.
What the latest threat picture actually measures
ENISA’s 2026 Threat Landscape analyzes events observed from 1 January through 31 December 2025. It is evidence about reported and shared incidents in the European Union, classified by ENISA; it is not a complete census of attacks, and its sector percentages should not be applied to other regions. The separate 2025 edition analyzed 4,875 incidents from 1 July 2024 through 30 June 2025, a different reporting interval. ENISA, Threat Landscape 2025.
ENISA identifies ransomware as the most impactful incident type in the short term. Public administration was the most targeted EU sector in its recorded events, while geopolitical developments shaped hacktivist DDoS campaigns against essential entities. These findings describe different aspects of risk: impact, incident volume, target sector and motive are not interchangeable measures.
How to read the reported figures
| Measure | What ENISA reported | Scope to keep in view |
|---|---|---|
| Targeted organizations | 73% were essential or important entities under the NIS2 definition. | Share of organizations targeted in ENISA’s 2026 analysis, not all European organizations. |
| Recorded events by sector | Public administration 32%; business services 8%; transport 8%; manufacturing 7%; finance and banking 6%. | Shares of ENISA’s recorded events, not a global sector ranking. |
| Public-administration events | 82% were ideology-driven DDoS attacks. | Applies to recorded public-administration events in ENISA’s EU analysis. |
| Unauthorized access and vulnerabilities | 60% of unauthorized-access incidents with an identifiable intrusion vector leveraged a vulnerability. | ENISA could identify a vector for only 5% of unauthorized-access incidents; 60% is not the share of all attacks. |
| Event classification and financial motive | 36% of total events were classified as cybercrime. Among financially motivated events in 2025, ransomware deployment accounted for 40%, data breaches 31%, and fraud and impersonation 19%. | The first figure concerns all events; the latter three concern only financially motivated events. |
| Published CVE identifiers | More than 48,000 new identifiers in 2025, a 22% increase from the prior year. | A count of published CVEs, not the number exploited in attacks. |
Those figures come from ENISA’s 2026 analysis and its 22 September 2026 report, Exploring the evolution of the cyber threat landscape: How dependencies weaken our digital resilience. They are useful for understanding what appeared in that EU incident picture, but they do not establish a single worldwide attack rate or predict which threats will dominate in every country or organization.
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Familiar attack routes remain the practical priority
Phishing and social engineering
ENISA describes social engineering—particularly phishing—as a common way to enable attacks. Its 2026 reporting mentions phishing kits and increased use of ClickFix. The useful implication is not that every message is AI-generated, but that deceptive prompts, links and instructions remain a routine route to credentials, access or user action.
Vulnerabilities and delayed fixes
Attackers continue to exploit both known, unpatched vulnerabilities (often called N-day vulnerabilities) and newly discovered flaws (0-day vulnerabilities). The CVE total above measures identifiers published, not successful intrusions; an organization should prioritize which exposed systems need attention rather than treating the annual CVE count as a measure of its own compromise risk.
Third parties and shared dependencies
Supply-chain and third-party attacks target the services, software and providers an organization depends on. ENISA warns that such incidents can create broad or high-impact consequences. A compromised supplier or widely used dependency can give an attacker a path beyond the first victim, so asset and access reviews should include external services—not only equipment owned directly by the organization.
DDoS, fraud and ransomware are different problems
Ideology-driven DDoS can disrupt availability, while fraud and impersonation aim to manipulate people or transactions; ransomware can disrupt operations and may involve data theft as well. ENISA’s distinction between ransomware’s short-term impact and DDoS’s substantial share of recorded cases matters: frequency and consequence should both inform preparedness, rather than being collapsed into one ranking.
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“AI attacks” can mean two different things
AI-assisted attacks use AI as an attacker’s tool
AI can support or enhance existing malicious activity, including phishing, fraud, impersonation, translation and information manipulation. ENISA reports synthetic audio and video and AI-generated text being used in information manipulation, and says malicious cyber groups are increasingly using AI to facilitate or enhance operations. This means AI may make a familiar scam more convincing or easier to scale; it does not mean that the underlying attack path has become new.
Attacks on AI systems target the technology itself
An attacker can instead target a model, its data or another stage in the AI system lifecycle. NIST’s AI 100-2 E2025, Adversarial Machine Learning: A Taxonomy and Terminology of Attacks and Mitigations, published in March 2025, organizes adversarial machine-learning methods by attacker goals, lifecycle stages, capabilities and knowledge, and discusses mitigation and risk management. Examples include data poisoning and evasion. The taxonomy provides terminology and a way to think about defenses; it is not a survey showing how prevalent these attacks are in real-world incidents.
The two meanings are related but not interchangeable. Using AI to write a deceptive message is different from manipulating an AI model or its data. Official sources support discussing both, but do not establish that autonomous AI agents dominate cybercrime, or that AI has displaced conventional attack methods.
What individuals and small organizations can do
CISA’s baseline guidance is practical: recognize and report phishing, use strong passwords, enable multifactor authentication (MFA), and keep software updated. A password manager can help create and maintain strong, unique passwords across accounts. For organizations, apply the strongest feasible MFA to important accounts, especially privileged and remote access, and include provider and dependency access in reviews of who can reach critical systems.
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Choose MFA by phishing resistance and account support
| CISA-listed method | Relative phishing protection in CISA’s presented hierarchy | Practical consideration |
|---|---|---|
| Physical security key | Highest among the listed choices; CISA says it offers the best protection against phishing among those methods. | Check that the service and device support the key. A FIDO/WebAuthn-compatible key is one option, not a stand-alone account security solution. |
| Number-matching authenticator app | Below a physical security key in the hierarchy. | Use where supported if a key is unavailable or impractical. |
| One-time-code authenticator app | Below number matching in the hierarchy. | Support varies by service; this is not as phishing-resistant as a security key. |
| Biometrics | Below one-time-code apps in the hierarchy. | Availability and the way authentication is implemented depend on the service and device. |
| Text or email codes | Lowest among the methods listed in the hierarchy. | Use if that is the available option, but prefer a stronger supported method where possible. |
There is no universally usable method: service support, device compatibility and usability affect the choice. For organizational accounts, also consider whether MFA can be required for privileged or remote access. Buying a key alone does not protect an account if it is not configured and used with a compatible service.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What the evidence does—and does not—say about 2026
The evidence described here is an EU view of observed 2025 incidents, published in ENISA’s 2026 edition. It supports a picture of intertwined attack paths: similar techniques, infrastructure and access methods recur across cybercrime, hacktivism and state-nexus reporting even when the actors’ objectives differ. Defenses therefore benefit from focusing on exposed systems, identity, dependencies and recovery as well as threat-actor labels.
ENISA Executive Director Juhan Lepassaar described the importance of those connections: “The ENISA threat landscape is more than a list of cybersecurity threats affecting the EU and how they are distributed around sectors and entities. The analysis highlights how threats become more interconnected and how threat groups spread their impact across the larger map of digital services and infrastructures. Being aware of such underlying dynamics is key if we want to implement the right solutions and maintain a high level of resilience across our digital economy.”
There is no established global 2026 total or reliable worldwide percentage of attacks enabled by AI in the cited sources. Nor do they establish autonomous AI attacks as the dominant or inevitable next stage. The defensible 2026 posture is to strengthen protection against established attack routes while treating AI both as a possible attacker capability and as technology that needs its own security controls.
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