Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

As we step into 2026, Bitsight researchers are closely watching key developments across the cyber risk landscape. Their insights reveal a dynamic tension between rising threats and new opportunities to strengthen defenses. Here's what they predict for the year ahead, and what security teams should be prepared to navigate.

Have you ever watched AMC’s The Walking Dead? Before the walkers, before the chaos, there is a quieter moment that often goes unnoticed. The power is out. Roads are empty. Hospitals are running on borrowed time. The world has not fallen apart yet, but it is no longer working. That is what a day without ICS and OT would look like. Industrial control systems (ICS) and operational technology (OT) are the systems that run the physical world.

The finance sector continues to face sustained and evolving cyber threats driven by the high value of financial data, credentials, and transactional access. Malware remains one of the most common and effective mechanisms used to compromise financial institutions, payment platforms, and end users, enabling fraud, data theft, and operational disruption.

Security Operations Centers (SOCs) are overwhelmed by alerts, often reacting to threats as they appear rather than anticipating them. Bitsight Threat Intelligence (TI) transforms SOC operations by providing external visibility, context, and correlation with real adversary behavior. By mapping incidents to MITRE ATT&CK techniques and monitoring the deep and dark web for emerging risks, Bitsight TI enables SOC and CTI teams to detect, understand, and prevent threats before they cause impact.

A high-severity vulnerability, CVE-2025-14847, affecting MongoDB Server is being actively exploited in the wild with a Bitsight Dynamic Vulnerability Exploit (DVE) score of 9.71. The flaw, commonly referred to as “MongoBleed,” is an unauthenticated memory-read vulnerability caused by improper handling of zlib-compressed network message headers, which may allow attackers to read uninitialized heap memory remotely.

As the global cyber threat landscape evolves, adversaries continue to refine and adapt their tactics. Bitsight threat intelligence indicates that there are several tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) that are most commonly and consistently leveraged by threat actors. These attacks are not isolated; they’re systemic.

On December 3rd Lachlan Davidson disclosed an unauthenticated remote code execution vulnerability in React Server Components (RSC) that exploits how React.js (and Next.js) decodes payloads sent to React Server Function endpoints. On December 4th we started observing fingerprinting attempts for these vulnerabilities and on December 5th we started observing exploitation attempts. React.js is used by 66% of the global digital supply, in the top 0.06% of all technologies.

Like any other global industry, financial services companies face tremendous challenges of scale and complexity when it comes to managing cyber risk across their digital supply chain. The financial services supply chain is composed of more than 1.6M third-party relationships across the industry ecosystem.

When Anthropic dropped the Model Context Protocol (MCP) in late 2024, it felt like the missing puzzle piece for AI tooling: a standard way for Large Language Models (LLMs) to talk to data sources, APIs, and pretty much anything else you can think of. Think of it as a USB-C port for AI, as the protocol’s creators like to say. But like most shiny new standards, the devil’s in the details.

We trust our devices to keep our lives organized, from reminders and appointments to birthdays and holidays. But behind that convenience lies an invisible risk. Every time you subscribe to an external calendar, you may be granting an unknown third party the ability to send events directly to your device for as long as the subscription remains active.