The Cyber Insecurity List: Why Hackers Are Logging in, Not Breaking In

Cybercriminals ranging from state actors to industrialized ransomware syndicates are converging on the same strategic truth: the shortest path into a target is often through the digital relationships that help the target function.

The center of gravity in enterprise cybersecurity is no longer the corporate laptop or even the data center. It is the software-as-a-service (SaaS) layer that sits between employees and the systems that matter most. These vulnerabilities, spanning identity systems, cloud middleware, telecom providers, open-source packages, AI vendors and SaaS connectors, are no longer side channels. They are the main terrain.

That shift is especially visible in the most consequential criminal operations from just the first four months of 2026, which have produced a density of cyber incidents that, in an earlier era of the internet, would each have dominated the global business agenda on their own.

Consider the run to date: a reported 10-petabyte breach of a Chinese state supercomputing center; an attack on Stryker that disrupted operations across 79 countries; a claimed 375-terabyte compromise at Lockheed Martin; the exposure of the FBI director’s personal inbox; a supply-chain intrusion that hit the Axios npm package; a Cisco source-code theft; an Oracle legacy-cloud compromise still generating fallout; a breach at Mercor, a crucial AI data vendor to OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta; and a sprawling Salesforce-centered extortion wave linked to the combined capabilities of several hacking groups. And that’s just scratching the surface.

Taken together, these are not just breaches. They are signals. And the signal is clear: the architecture of digital risk has fundamentally changed.

See also: What AI-Driven Attack Chains Mean for CFOs and CISOs

The Collapse of the Perimeter

For much of its operational history, enterprise cybersecurity strategies have been anchored in a relatively stable assumption that organizations could meaningfully define and defend a perimeter. Firewalls, network segmentation and endpoint protection were all designed around this core idea that there was an “inside” worth protecting and an “outside” to keep at bay.

But the modern enterprise is a distributed system composed of SaaS platforms, cloud providers, APIs, contractors and open-source dependencies. Identity, not infrastructure, has become the primary control plane. In such an environment, a single compromised credential or third-party vendor can function as a master key, bypassing traditional defenses entirely.

The PYMNTS Intelligence report “Vendors and Vulnerabilities: The Cyberattack Squeeze on Mid-Market Firms” found that hackers are increasingly going after middle-market firms, which depend on third-party cloud providers, software-as-a-service platforms, managed service and logistics providers, which can leave them vulnerable to attack.

Organizations no longer control the full extent of their own attack surface. They inherit risk from every partner, platform, and dependency they rely on. And that inherited risk is often opaque, difficult to quantify, and nearly impossible to fully mitigate.

The weak point is often not a core platform but an integration, a support workflow, a contractor system or a developer package maintained far upstream.

Consider the nature of modern digital infrastructure. A single SaaS provider may serve thousands of companies. A compromised code repository can be cloned and redistributed instantly. A breached identity system can grant access across multiple environments simultaneously. Data, once exfiltrated, can be replicated infinitely at near-zero cost.

See also: Cybersecurity’s Hottest New Job Is Negotiating With Hackers

The Industrialization of Cyber Adversaries

Compounding these structural shifts is the increasing sophistication and coordination of hackers. Groups like ShinyHunters, Scattered Spider, and LAPSUS$ are not operating as isolated entities. They are part of an evolving ecosystem of cyber adversaries that share tools, techniques and, increasingly, objectives.

The convergence of dissolved perimeters, global blast radii, industrialized adversaries, and continuous exposure is reshaping the cyber landscape in fundamental ways. It is compressing timelines, amplifying impacts and challenging long-held assumptions about what it means to be secure.

If the last hundred days have revealed anything, it is that the pace of change in cybersecurity is accelerating. The next hundred days are unlikely to be any less consequential.

After all, while few of the year’s headline incidents to-date can be cleanly reduced to “AI attacks,” it is equally difficult to overlook the parallel surge in AI-enabled offensive capability. Anthropic’s Claude Mythos Preview, for example, has reportedly demonstrated the ability to autonomously discover and exploit vulnerabilities across major operating systems and web browsers, including decades-old bugs in widely trusted systems.

In other cybersecurity news, PYMNTS wrote earlier about the way Quantum Day — the moment when commercially available quantum computers can crack widely used cryptographic systems — has ceased being a distant hypothetical.

“As a result of the shrinking strategic horizon, what was once a theoretical, deep-tech risk is instead now being operationalized into present-day procurement decisions, product roadmaps and compliance mandates,” that report said.