The quiet shift no one planned for

For years, cyber defence has been treated as a technical arms race. More tools. More automation. Faster detection. Yet despite sustained investment, cyber incidents continue to grow in frequency, cost, and operational impact.

The uncomfortable truth emerging from Check Point’s Cyber Security Report 2026 is this: cyber defence is not failing because technology is weak - it is failing because trust is misplaced.

Many of today’s most damaging incidents do not begin with malware or zero-day exploits. They begin with a legitimate login, a convincing voice, a familiar collaboration platform, or a moment where human judgement is exploited inside systems designed to assume trust.

Attackers no longer break in - they blend in

Modern attackers increasingly avoid technical confrontation altogether. Rather than forcing entry, they operate within the environments organisations rely on every day:

• Valid credentials
• Trusted devices
• Approved cloud services
• Familiar communication channels

Check Point’s research shows social engineering expanding well beyond traditional phishing emails into collaboration platforms, voice impersonation, and real-time interaction. Importantly, this is no longer marginal activity. Some social-engineering techniques increased by several hundred per cent year-on-year, appearing in nearly half of documented campaigns in 2025 - a scale that would have been impractical without automation and AI assistance. AI has not changed attacker intent. It has changed the economics.

Consider a common scenario now seen across large organisations

An employee receives a message on a collaboration platform from what appears to be a senior colleague. The profile photo is correct. The tone is familiar. The request is urgent but reasonable - access to a shared document, confirmation of a workflow, approval to bypass a minor delay.

No malware is deployed. No firewall is breached. Multi-factor authentication is never challenged.

The interaction takes place entirely inside trusted systems, using legitimate credentials and approved tools. By the time the request is questioned (if it is questioned at all) access has already been granted, activity looks routine, and the trail blends into normal operations.

From a technical perspective, nothing “failed”. From a trust perspective, everything did.

Identity has become the primary attack surface

Identity emerges repeatedly throughout the report as the decisive point of failure - not because identity systems are broken, but because they are trusted by default.

Once attackers obtain valid credentials or privileged access:

• Activity appears legitimate
• Lateral movement blends into normal operations
• Alerts trigger late, if at all

This is not an authentication problem. It is a visibility and context problem.

Security environments optimised to detect noisy, external threats are poorly equipped to recognise slow, deliberate abuse of trust from within.

Why speed is no longer enough

Many security strategies still prioritise faster detection and response. But the attacks described in the report are not designed to be fast - they are designed to be quiet.

Common characteristics include:

• Long dwell times
• Low-and-slow reconnaissance
• Use of legitimate tools and infrastructure

By the time an incident becomes visible, attackers may already understand the environment better than defenders - including how to delay recovery and maximise disruption.

In this model, speed alone is not a meaningful advantage.

What leaders need to confront

Cyber defence is losing its human advantage not because people are careless, but because systems increasingly assume trust in environments where trust is easily abused.

Addressing this shift requires more than awareness training or incremental tooling. It requires rethinking how trust, identity, and visibility are designed into the environment - across networks, endpoints, cloud services, and operations.

The organisations best positioned to adapt are those treating cyber security not as a collection of controls, but as an architectural discipline: one that assumes compromise, constrains trust, and makes abnormal behaviour visible before impact becomes inevitable.

Where is trust quietly assumed in your environment?

Most cyber incidents don’t start with malware - they start with trusted access that goes unexamined. NEC works with organisations to map identity, privilege, and visibility across hybrid environments, identifying where assumptions of trust create real risk.

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