Report by Verizon
2026 Data Breach Investigations Report
Key Findings
31% of breaches now start with software vulnerabilities.
48% of all breaches now involve ransomware.
Only 23% of third-party organizations fully remediated missing or improperly secured multifactor authentication (MFA) on their cloud accounts, with 50% of all findings being resolved within a month.
67% percent of users are using non-corporate accounts on their corporate devices to access AI services
The median threat actor researched or used AI assistance in 15 different documented techniques, with some Actors leveraging as many as 40 or 50.
40% higher click rates make mobile devices the new favorite target.
Only 26% of critical vulnerabilities were fully remediated by organizations in 2025, a drop from the previous year’s 38%.
The median time for full resolution of critical vulnerabilities went up to 43 days, almost two weeks more than the previous year’s 32 days.
Breaches with third-party involvement have increased by 60%.
Shadow AI is now the third most common non-malicious insider action detected in Verizon's data loss prevention (DLP) dataset in 2025
Human element was present in 62% of breaches
Less than 2.5% of the AI-assisted malware observations involved less- common techniques with one or fewer known malware examples.
69% of ransomware victims didn’t pay.