Overview
- Verizon’s 2026 Data Breach Investigations Report, released Tuesday, finds about 31% of breaches began with attackers exploiting a software vulnerability, surpassing stolen passwords for the first time in 19 years.
- The report says threat actors now use AI to spot and weaponize known flaws faster, cutting the time from discovery to exploitation from months to hours.
- Verizon notes that generative AI is helping in targeting, initial access, and tool building, with its main impact today in automating and scaling known techniques rather than unlocking new ones.
- Employee use of unapproved AI tools jumped from 15% to 45% over the year, making shadow AI the third most common non‑malicious source of data leaks.
- Breaches involving vendors or service providers rose 60% to 48% of cases, and the dataset covers more than 31,000 incidents from October 2024 through November 2025, which predates deployments of Anthropic’s Claude Mythos.