Each year, a team of experts analyzes data on the latest cyber threats and real-world breaches, compiling their findings in the Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR). The 2026 DBIR is the largest in the report’s 19-year history, covering more than 31,000 incidents — including over 22,000 confirmed data breaches across organizations in 145 countries. It’s required reading for cybersecurity professionals like your friends at NWG, who read the report in its entirety every year to stay current on the evolving threat landscape. Here are our top takeaways, written for C-Suite executives, IT professionals and non-IT professionals alike.

Takeaways for the C-Suite

Third-party risk is your fastest-growing attack surface. Breaches involving a third party jumped 60% year over year, now accounting for 48% of all breaches. The root cause behind most of these incidents wasn’t sophisticated: absent or misconfigured MFA on cloud accounts and excessive access permissions. But this doesn’t seem to be a case of attackers seizing a narrow window of opportunity. This year’s report includes new data on remediation over time, collected directly from inside third-party cloud environments. This data shows that only 23% of third-party organizations fully remediated MFA gaps on their cloud accounts. Creating the perfect storm, multiple high-profile 2025 campaigns compromised more than one vendor simultaneously, using one provider’s access to pivot into another. The key takeaway: Your risk register must include your vendors, what access they hold and how well they’ve implemented the basics.

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Ransomware is growing more disruptive, even as fewer organizations are paying. Ransomware appeared in 48% of all breaches in the 2026 DBIR, another year-over-year increase. The encouraging news: 69% of victims chose not to pay, and the median ransom paid has continued declining to $139,875. Threat actors have adapted by shifting focus toward maximum operational disruption — prolonged outages, encrypted systems and halted supply chains designed to break the will of organizations that might otherwise hold firm. Ransomware resilience is a business continuity question as much as a technical one, and C-suite leaders need to be present in tabletop exercises, not just the IT team.

Takeaways for IT Professionals

Vulnerability exploitation is now the #1 initial access vector — and the patching gap is widening. For the first time, exploitation of vulnerabilities has overtaken credential theft as the most common way attackers get in, reaching 31% of breaches — up from 20% in last year’s report. The patching picture is moving in the wrong direction: Only 26% of vulnerabilities on the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog were fully remediated in this year’s dataset, down from 38% the prior year, and the median time to full remediation climbed from 32 days to 43. Organizations are now facing roughly 50% more KEV vulnerabilities to patch than the year before. Prioritization matters — the 2026 DBIR shows that vulnerabilities with recent exploitation activity are far more likely to resurface than dormant ones, making recency a more effective tiebreaker than severity score alone.

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Given that patching cycles don’t always allow for fast reaction time, IT teams need to sharpen their focus on what happens after initial access. Can you detect lateral movement quickly? Can you identify compromised assets before the damage escalates? Can you distinguish attacker behavior from normal user activity when no malware is involved? Regular full-scope penetration testing and purple team exercises — where your team chases down alerts alongside your testers in real time — remain some of the most effective ways to stress-test those capabilities before a real incident. The 2026 DBIR also reports a 240% year-over-year surge in attackers using legitimate remote monitoring and management (RMM) software to operate inside victim networks, blending in with trusted IT tools to evade detection. If your detection strategy is built around catching “malicious tools,” it will miss this.

Takeaways for Anyone Who Works On, Around or Near a Computer

Social engineering is expanding beyond email, and it’s getting more effective. The human element was present in 62% of breaches in this year’s report. Phishing simulation data shows that mobile-centric attacks — voice calls, text messages and callback-style lures — succeed at rates 40% higher than traditional email phishing. Pretexting, where an attacker builds a convincing scenario and interacts with the victim directly by phone or chat, is increasingly being used as an entry point for ransomware attacks. If your awareness training is built around email phishing simulations alone, it is not keeping pace with how these attacks actually work.

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Shadow AI is a data security problem hiding in plain sight. This year’s report showed that 45% of employees are now regular AI users on corporate devices — up from just 15% the year before — and 67% are doing so through non-corporate accounts. Unauthorized AI use became the third most common non-malicious insider action detected in data loss prevention datasets. The most commonly uploaded data type was source code; in 3.2% of cases, research and technical documentation was submitted to external AI systems. Employees are not acting maliciously, but the data is leaving regardless of intent. Organizations without a clear AI-usage policy and sanctioned tooling are operating with an uncontrolled data channel.

In Summary

The 2026 Verizon DBIR’s overarching message is “refinement, not revolution.” Vulnerability exploitation is now the dominant path in, patching capacity is falling short, ransomware is growing more disruptive, third-party exposure is compounding and AI is raising the baseline for every attacker. Rather than adopting an entirely new defensive framework, this requires organizations to execute the fundamentals more rigorously. Cyber resilience is not a destination. An intrusion doesn’t have to become a breach, and a breach doesn’t have to become a catastrophe. Making resilience a priority protects your operations, data and long-term continuity.

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If the findings in this year’s 2026 Data Breach Investigations Report have you thinking about your organization’s security posture — whether that means penetration testing, vulnerability management, tabletop exercises or how to strategically strengthen resilience — NWG can help. Contact us today to discuss your needs and explore how we can help you build a more resilient and secure future.

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Published By: Daniel Parker, VP of Ethical Hacking, NetWorks Group

Publish Date: June 4, 2026

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