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Brandefense Academy Your trusted hub for learning, developing, and mastering the skills that shape tomorrow's digital defense.
Discover NowMAY 22, 2026
The Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) is one of the most widely referenced, most carefully scrutinized, and most consequential publications in the cybersecurity industry. Now in its 19th edition, the 2026 DBIR draws from more than 31,000 real-world security incidents, over 22,000 of them confirmed data breaches, spanning 145 countries. These are the largest figures the report has ever covered in a single edition.
This year, we are proud to announce: Brandefense is among the contributing organizations to the Verizon 2026 Data Breach Investigations Report.
Contributing to the Verizon DBIR is not merely a badge of prestige for a security company. It is independent validation that the threat intelligence produced meets the quality, depth, and global breadth required to inform the most authoritative cybersecurity research in the world.
Each year, the DBIR team works with nearly a hundred data contributors. These include large incident response firms, cyber insurance companies, law enforcement agencies at every level, digital forensics firms, and threat intelligence providers like Brandefense. All datasets are normalized using the VERIS (Vocabulary for Event Recording and Incident Sharing) framework, anonymized, and subjected to rigorous aggregated analysis.
The result is a threat panorama that genuinely transcends the limited perspective any single vendor can offer. That is the source of the DBIR’s authority: thousands of real incidents, across dozens of independent data sources, analyzed through a consistent methodology. This is why CISOs, risk managers, regulators, board members, and cyber insurance actuaries all cite DBIR as a foundational reference.
Contributing to that picture means Brandefense’s threat intelligence has reached the standard required to feed the world’s most trusted cybersecurity research. That is not a claim we make; it is the logical consequence of being selected as a contributor.
The 2026 DBIR introduces several findings that distinguish it from prior editions. Together, they paint a picture of a threat landscape that is moving faster, exploiting more attack surfaces, and leveraging new tools, including AI, to operate at unprecedented scale.
For years, credential abuse was the undisputed #1 initial access vector. The 2026 DBIR changes that picture definitively. Exploitation of vulnerabilities now accounts for 31% of all breaches, a 55% year-over-year increase from the previous year’s 20%. Credential abuse has fallen sharply from 22% (2025 DBIR) to 13%.
| 31% | Vulnerability Exploitation Now the #1 initial access vector: a 55% YoY increase, overtaking credential abuse at 13% |
The remediation picture makes this more alarming. Only 26% of critical CISA KEV vulnerabilities were fully remediated in 2025, down from 38% the prior year. Median remediation time has risen from 32 days to 43 days. Organizations faced 50% more critical KEV vulnerabilities to patch in 2025 compared to 2024. The patching capacity ceiling appears structural, not cyclical.
From a threat intelligence perspective, this is a clarifying signal: real-time intelligence on which CVEs are being actively exploited in the wild, which threat actors hold the corresponding exploit code, and which industries are currently being targeted transforms patch prioritization from a reactive checklist into a strategic capability.
Third-party involvement in breaches increased by 60% year-over-year, rising from roughly 30% to 48% of all breaches. Nearly one in two confirmed breaches now involves a third-party component: a vendor, a software supplier, a cloud provider, or a managed service. Several high-profile campaigns in the dataset saw attackers compromise multiple third-party providers simultaneously.
| 48% | Third-Party Exposure Of all breaches involved a third-party component, a 60% increase from last year |
This finding reinforces something Brandefense has long argued: threat intelligence cannot stop at your own perimeter. The digital footprint of your supply chain (the exposed credentials of your vendors, the compromised infrastructure of your software providers, the dark web chatter about a partner’s impending breach) is part of your attack surface whether you monitor it or not.
| See Your Supply Chain’s Dark Web Exposure Before Attackers Do Brandefense continuously tracks exposed credentials, leaked data, and active threat discussions tied to your vendors and partners, making third-party risk visible before it becomes a breach. [ Book a Demo → brandefense.io ] |
Ransomware grew to 48% of all breaches, up from 44% the prior year. There is a notable counter-trend within this figure: 69% of ransomware victims did not pay, and median ransom payments declined from $150,000 to $139,875. Organizations are increasingly investing in incident response capabilities and backup recovery rather than payment, a behavioral shift that carries important strategic implications.
For threat intelligence practitioners, the ransomware economy’s pre-attack phase is where the real intelligence value lies. Monitoring Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) operator infrastructure, initial access broker listings selling credentials into target organizations, dark web leak site activity, and victim industry targeting patterns gives defenders a material early warning window before encryption begins.
The 2026 DBIR provides the most concrete data yet on AI-augmented threats. The median threat actor researched or used AI assistance in 15 different documented attack techniques; some actors leveraged it across 40 to 50 techniques. AI-assisted malware development is predominantly associated with well-established attack techniques; attackers are not using AI to invent novel malware categories, but to scale, accelerate, and optimize what already works.
Shadow AI represents an equally significant threat vector on the defender’s side. 67% of users access AI services through non-corporate accounts on corporate devices. Shadow AI has become the third most common non-malicious insider action in DLP datasets, a fourfold increase from the previous year. Source code (28%), structured data (14%), and documents (13%) are among the most frequently exfiltrated data types to unauthorized AI platforms, representing genuine intellectual property and competitive intelligence exposure.
| 4× | Shadow AI DLP Surge Shadow AI now ranks 3rd in DLP policy violations, a fourfold percentage increase year-over-year |
The human element remains present in 62% of breaches. Social Engineering is the third most common breach pattern at 16%. The 2026 DBIR’s most operationally significant social engineering finding: in phishing simulations, click rates on mobile-centric vectors (voice calls and SMS messages) are 40% higher than those on email. Pretexting has risen to 6% as an initial access vector and is increasingly the entry point for ransomware and extortion campaigns.
The implication is direct: security awareness programs designed primarily around email phishing simulation are increasingly misaligned with attacker behavior. Intelligence on mobile-targeting phishing infrastructure, vishing campaigns, and smishing kits is essential for defenders recalibrating their human risk programs.
| Detect Ransomware and AI-Augmented Threats Before They Reach You Brandefense monitors ransomware operator infrastructure, initial access broker activity, and AI-assisted phishing campaigns to give your security team early warning across the full threat lifecycle. [ Book a Demo → brandefense.io ] |
The DBIR is built on the principle that no single organization has a complete view of the threat landscape. Its value derives directly from the diversity, quality, and authenticity of its contributing data sources. Being selected as a contributor is not an application process; it is a recognition by the DBIR team that an organization’s data is both unique and rigorous enough to add to the global picture without distorting it.
Brandefense’s threat intelligence platform continuously monitors dark web forums and marketplaces, underground credential trading ecosystems, phishing infrastructure, botnet command-and-control networks, threat actor TTPs, and regional cyber threat ecosystems, including deep visibility into Turkish-language dark web communities and Eastern European cybercrime forums that are often underrepresented in global datasets.
Data quality validation. The DBIR methodology requires that contributor data be reliable, consistent, and normalizable to the VERIS framework. Brandefense’s data passing that bar is independent confirmation of the quality and operational rigor of our intelligence production process.
Perspective uniqueness. The DBIR’s analytical power comes from bridging viewpoints that wouldn’t otherwise be combined. Brandefense contributes a perspective grounded in adversary-centric intelligence sourced directly from the dark web: a view of threat actors’ own ecosystems that complements the incident-reporting lens of forensics firms and insurers.
Customer trust signal. When a CISO references the DBIR, as they routinely do, they are trusting that the data behind the report meets the highest standards of the industry. Brandefense being part of that foundation tells our customers that the intelligence powering their security decisions has been validated at the highest level of independent global research.
Mapping the 2026 DBIR findings against Brandefense’s threat intelligence capabilities produces a set of clear, actionable implications:
Reports like the Verizon DBIR represent the collective intelligence of the cybersecurity industry, built from the incidents of thousands of organizations, the analysis of hundreds of researchers, and the data of dozens of contributors worldwide. For Brandefense, being part of that effort carries a meaning that goes beyond brand positioning: it is a commitment to making the broader security ecosystem more informed, more resilient, and more capable of defending against an adversary that never stops evolving.
The 2026 DBIR makes clear that threat actors are faster, more scalable, and more sophisticated than at any prior point in the report’s 19-year history. The organizations best positioned to respond are not those with the most tools; they are those with the clearest picture of how their adversaries think, what they target, and where they will strike next.
Firewalls don’t stop breaches. Understanding the adversary does. Brandefense is the threat intelligence platform that opens a window into the attacker’s world and validates that view against the world’s most authoritative security research.
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