Microsoft's 2026 Digital Defense Report: AI Is Speeding Up Familiar Attacks

Microsoft has released its 2026 Digital Defense Report, which draws on what its security and threat intelligence teams are seeing. The company describes an increasingly interconnected environment, where threat activity can span infrastructure, identities, applications, cloud services and software supply chains. Activity that looks incomplete in one place can become clearer when separate signals are viewed together.

The report finds that threat actors are building AI into reconnaissance, social engineering, malware and exploit development, and activity after a compromise. For now, much of this use is focused on specific parts of existing attack workflows, although more advanced uses are still developing. AI can give attackers more speed and scale, and help them tailor campaigns more efficiently. In social engineering, it can make campaigns more targeted. In technical work, automation can compress parts of the attack process. Importantly, the underlying methods often remain familiar, and people, identities, exposed systems and trusted access continue to feature prominently.

The report also highlights how AI is becoming more connected to the systems businesses already use. AI agents can interact with company data, applications, APIs and tools, with different levels of access and autonomy depending on how they are built and deployed. Those connections let agents do useful work, but they are also something security teams need to understand. This summary covers only the opening of the report's findings, not the full document.