The threat landscape has shifted dramatically since 2022. Cryptojacking has faded while AI-powered scams, supply chain attacks, and identity-based threats have taken center stage. Attackers no longer need to break in. They log in with stolen credentials, deepfake their way through video calls, or pressure your team into approving an MFA prompt. Here are the cybersecurity threats your business needs to watch in 2026, and what to do about them.
AI-Powered Phishing and Deepfake Fraud
Phishing isn’t new. What’s new is how good it has gotten. Generative AI has made it trivial to produce flawless, personalized phishing emails at scale, and the same technology now powers voice clones and deepfake video calls that fool even careful employees.
IBM’s 2025 Cost of a Data Breach Report found that 1 in 6 breaches now involves attackers using AI, most commonly for phishing (37%) and deepfake impersonation (35%). By 2026, AI-driven deepfakes account for 40% of business email compromise attacks, up from less than 5% in 2023.
How AI phishing works
Attackers harvest publicly available information from LinkedIn, company websites, and social media to craft emails that reference real projects, real colleagues, and the executive’s actual writing style. The generic “urgent invoice” scam has been replaced by messages that feel completely legitimate. The improvement in specificity is what drives the higher success rates seen in 2025 and 2026.
Deepfake CEO fraud and voice cloning
Voice cloning needs only three seconds of audio to produce an 85% voice match. Video deepfakes need slightly more, but executive Zoom recordings, conference talks, and earnings calls give attackers plenty of source material. The Arup engineering firm lost $25 million in early 2024 when a finance employee in Hong Kong authorized 15 transfers after joining a video call where every other “executive” on screen was an AI-generated deepfake. Deepfake fraud losses in the U.S. tripled to $1.1 billion in 2025, and CEO fraud now targets roughly 400 companies per day.
MFA Fatigue Attacks
Multi-factor authentication was supposed to stop credential theft, and for the most part it does. But attackers have found a workaround that doesn’t need to break MFA at all. They just exhaust your employees.
In an MFA fatigue attack (also called prompt bombing or push bombing), an attacker who already has stolen credentials repeatedly triggers MFA push notifications to the victim’s phone, sometimes dozens or hundreds in a row. The goal is to wear the user down until they approve one out of frustration, confusion, or muscle memory. Microsoft observed more than 382,000 MFA fatigue attempts in a single 12-month period, and 1% of users approved the first unexpected prompt they received.
The fix is phishing-resistant MFA (passkeys or FIDO2 keys instead of push notifications), number-matching prompts, and adaptive authentication that flags requests from unfamiliar devices or locations.
Ransomware-as-a-Service and Double Extortion
Ransomware has gone industrial. According to Verizon’s 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report, ransomware was a factor in 44% of all breaches, up from 32% the year before. The picture for small businesses is even worse: 88% of SMB breaches involved ransomware compared with just 39% for large organizations.
How RaaS lowers the bar for attackers
Ransomware-as-a-Service is now an underground industry estimated at $2.5 billion. Affiliate criminals subscribe to ransomware platforms the same way legitimate businesses use SaaS, with access to malware kits, infrastructure, and even customer support for paying victims. This has dramatically expanded the pool of people who can launch ransomware attacks, and it’s why even small businesses without obvious “value” are getting hit.
Double and triple extortion
The old playbook was simple: encrypt your data and demand payment for the decryption key. Today, attackers steal a copy first and threaten to publish it if you don’t pay (double extortion). Some add a third layer with DDoS attacks or by directly contacting your customers to pressure you (triple extortion). This is why traditional backups alone no longer save you. If your data is already in an attacker’s hands, the threat shifts from “you can’t recover” to “your customers will see this on the dark web.”
Supply Chain and Third-Party Attacks
Even if your own security is tight, your vendors’ security is now part of your attack surface. Verizon’s 2025 DBIR found that third-party involvement in breaches doubled to 30% year over year, making supply chain compromise the second most prevalent attack vector after phishing.
The third-party trust problem
Modern businesses share data, credentials, and system access with cloud vendors, IT providers, payment processors, marketing platforms, and a dozen other partners. Every one of them is a potential entry point. IBM found that supply chain compromises cost an average of $4.91 million per breach and take 267 days to detect and contain, the longest of any attack vector.
Cascading downstream impact
A single compromised vendor can affect hundreds of downstream customers. Black Kite’s 2025 Third-Party Breach Report identified 136 major incidents that affected 719 named companies, plus an estimated 26,000 additional downstream victims who were never publicly named. The average third-party breach now reaches 5.28 downstream victims, the highest level on record.
Need expert help defending your business from AI-powered scams and ransomware? Schedule a free consultation with MDL Technology.
Insider Threats
Your employees can be your most valuable asset and your most dangerous cybersecurity risk at the same time. According to Verizon’s 2025 DBIR, 30% of all data breaches now involve internal actors, and IBM reports that malicious insider attacks cost an average of $4.92 million per incident, the highest of any initial attack vector.
Negligent vs. malicious insiders
Most insider incidents aren’t malicious. Roughly 55% are caused by negligence: clicking a phishing link, misdelivering an email, storing files in a personal cloud account, or pasting sensitive data into a public AI chatbot. The remaining incidents fall between malicious insiders (intentional data theft or sabotage) and compromised insiders, where an attacker uses stolen credentials to act as an employee.
The compromised insider
This last category is the most dangerous and hardest to detect. When an attacker logs in with valid credentials, they look identical to a legitimate user. The average credential-theft insider incident now costs $779,797, and compromised credentials take 186 days to identify on average. This is why thorough offboarding, least-privilege access, and dark web credential monitoring matter more than ever.
IoT and Smart Device Exploits
Smart appliances, printers, cameras, conference room systems, and other connected devices remain a popular backdoor for attackers. They typically ship with weak default credentials, rarely receive security updates, and often sit on the same network as your business data.
The risk has grown alongside the device count. Connected devices in homes and offices roughly doubled between 2021 and 2025, and the number keeps climbing. Every device that connects to your business Wi-Fi is a potential entry point, and a single compromised IoT device can let an attacker pivot into your main network.
The basics: change default passwords on every connected device, segment IoT traffic onto a separate network from your business systems, and review what’s actually connected at least once a year.
How to Protect Your Business
The threats above all benefit from the same handful of defenses:
- Phishing-resistant MFA (passkeys, FIDO2 keys) instead of SMS or push-based MFA
- Employee training that covers deepfake voice and video, MFA fatigue patterns, and AI-generated phishing
- Verification procedures for any financial transaction requested by phone, email, or video call (a callback to a known number works well)
- Dark web monitoring to catch stolen credentials before attackers can use them
- Vendor risk reviews for any third party with access to your data or systems
- Network segmentation that isolates IoT, guest, and business traffic
- 24/7 monitoring and response so threats are caught in minutes, not months
Cyberattacks are evolving faster than most internal IT teams can keep up with. When this becomes too much to handle alone, MDL has your back.
Your company’s security is our top priority. Don’t wait for an incident to force the conversation. Get protected with MDL Technology today.
