AI-powered attacks, identity exploitation, and why endpoint protection alone is no longer enough
The threat actors targeting your customers in 2026 are faster, more automated, and more effective than they were two years ago. Understanding what changed – and where attacks now start – is the foundation of an effective security conversation with any customer.
AI-powered attacks:
speed is the new asymmetry
The AI-driven threat ecosystem has fundamentally reshaped attack economics. The median timeline from new CVE disclosure to active exploitation is now measured in hours – a compression that will push exploitation under 24 hours throughout 2026. This is not a future concern; it is the operational environment we inhabit today. CVEs are now competing directly with compromised identities as the most common initial attack vector. The era when defenders had days to patch vulnerabilities has simply ended.
Attackers are leveraging generative AI to craft hyper-personalized phishing campaigns at scale, abandoning generic mass-mailing tactics in favor of surgically targeted social engineering. Simultaneously, AI dramatically compresses attack timelines from initial access through lateral movement, collapsing what once took days of reconnaissance into hours of fully automated exploitation. Credential stuffing and identity abuse now require no human operator. Fully automated systems scan for vulnerable accounts and pivot through networks with minimal friction or detection.
AI-generated malware variants defeat signature-based detection faster than ever, rendering traditional endpoint protection increasingly obsolete. The uncomfortable truth is clear: defenders must adopt AI capabilities too, or watch the defensive gap widen irreversibly. Organizations without machine learning-powered threat detection are already losing the speed war.
Identity: the fastest-growing
initial access vector
Identity-based attacks are rapidly growing as the most common entry point into customer networks. Compromised Entra ID and Azure AD credentials grant attackers cloud-wide access instantly, bypassing perimeter controls entirely. Business Email Compromise via M365 accounts ranks as the top attack vector because these accounts sit at the intersection of corporate communications and sensitive data access.
The machine identity problem demands urgent attention. Attackers increasingly abuse overprivileged and poorly monitored machine identities – service accounts, API keys, and OAuth tokens – to maintain persistence while bypassing MFA and user-centric security controls. These non-human identities rarely receive the same audit rigor as user accounts, yet they hold the keys to entire systems and represent a persistent blind spot in most security programs. Traditional EDR is fundamentally blind to identity-layer attacks, which is why XDR combined with Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) capabilities have become essential investments for any MSP serving enterprise customers.
Cloud and collaboration surface
expansion
Every M365 tenant represents a distinct attack surface. Email, Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive are not merely communication platforms – they become persistent access vectors when misconfigured or compromised. Cloud misconfigurations in Azure and AWS remain persistent, ever-growing exposures that many organizations struggle to identify and remediate at scale.
SaaS sprawl creates shadow IT that MSPs frequently cannot see or control. Employees adopt best-of-breed tools independently, data migrates to unknown cloud locations, and security policies become theoretical rather than enforced. Hybrid work has fundamentally dissolved the traditional network-centric security perimeter, forcing a reorientation of visibility requirements toward identity, cloud, and collaboration layers rather than the network edge. IoT and OT devices in customer environments remain largely unmanaged and unprotected, creating vulnerable footholds that attackers exploit to establish persistent presence in supposedly secure networks.
Regulation as a forcing function
Compliance frameworks are driving security investment with increasing urgency. NIS2 (October 2024) is mandatory for EU essential and important entities, specifically including MSPs in its scope. DORA (January 2025) requires digital resilience frameworks for the financial sector with mandatory ICT risk management structures. GDPR enforcement is intensifying simultaneously with tightening breach notification timelines. ISO 27001 is increasingly demanded by enterprise supply chains as a baseline for vendor engagement. MSPs that cannot demonstrate compliance readiness will simply lose regulated customers entirely.
Speed: the new attacker advantage
The mean time from initial access to data exfiltration is now measured in hours, not days. Ransomware operators employ “double extortion” tactics – encrypt data while simultaneously threatening publication, forcing organizations to treat this threat with absolute seriousness. Alert-heavy security tools slow down defenders precisely when speed matters most, drowning analysts in noise while real threats advance undetected. Twenty-four-hour monitoring is no longer a premium service offering – it is the minimum viable response capability for any organization handling sensitive data.
What this means for MSP delivery
Endpoint protection alone is demonstrably insufficient for defending 2026’s threat landscape. Security coverage must extend comprehensively to identity and cloud layers to address actual attack vectors. Alert fatigue kills analyst productivity and obscures genuine threats in the noise. Customers increasingly expect proactive risk reduction and threat neutralization before breaches occur.
Attack path visibility has become the operational standard for enterprise-grade customers. Detection alone is necessary but insufficient; customers need to understand which combinations of vulnerabilities and permission misconfigurations enable attackers to reach critical assets.
MSPs must prevent attacks before they start and execute this at scale automatically. This means delivering continuous, automated security posture optimization without requiring human intervention for each decision. More critically, MSPs themselves are now high-value attack targets. A single MSP breach exposes dozens of customer environments simultaneously. This is not aspirational – your own security posture is a due diligence requirement for prospects and a liability exposure in supply-chain incidents.
WithSecure response to the threat landscape
For MSPs, the threat landscape described above creates two parallel obligations: protecting customers effectively and delivering that protection efficiently at scale. WithSecure addresses both. Elements XDR covers endpoints, identities (Entra ID), cloud (Azure + AWS), and M365 collaboration from a single platform – purpose-built for the attack vectors dominating 2025–26.
Elements XM and XDR together enable proactive security by continuously turning threat intelligence into action. Elements XM provides real-time visibility into exposures such as vulnerable software, misconfigurations, and emerging attack paths, while Elements XDR supplies live sensor data and response capabilities from endpoints. By fusing XM insights with XDR detections and response actions, security posture can be adjusted immediately – before exploitation occurs. This closed loop shifts defense left, enabling preemptive mitigation of risks even when patches or known exploits do not yet exist. Luminen GenAI assistant is included across all tiers, reducing analyst workload by surfacing and contextualizing threats automatically.
WithSecure is one of only two vendors globally to participate in all 7 MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise Evaluation rounds – with the lowest detection-to-alert ratio among European vendors in 2025 evaluations1.
Key questions for your business
• How many of your customers have Microsoft Entra ID – and do you have visibility into identity threats in those tenants today?
• If a customer’s M365 account was compromised at 2am, how long before you would know?
• Can you currently show customers their attack surface – the paths a real attacker would use to reach their critical assets?
• Which of your customers are subject to NIS2 or DORA, and are you prepared to support their compliance obligations?
Want to know more? Read next about the case for an end-to-end security platform or download The 2026 MSP Cybersecurity Buyer’s Guide.
1 MITRE. ATT&CK Evaluations: Enterprise (Round 7). https://evals.mitre.org/enterprise/er7
