Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

The State of Ransomware 2026: Payments are dropping but encryption is climbing Insights from 2,158 IT and cybersecurity leaders across 17 countries whose organizations were hit by ransomware in the past year. This year's data has a few eyebrow-raising departures from the patterns of past State of Ransomware reports. Exploited vulnerabilities lost their three-year grip on the top root-cause spot. Median ransom demands and payments both dropped, yet the average recovery bill still climbed.

On July 14, 2026, SonicWall disclosed two vulnerabilities in SonicWall SMA1000 appliances. Models 6210, 7210, and 8200v are affected. CVE-2026-15409 is a critical (CVSS score of 10.0) unauthenticated server-side request forgery (SSRF) flaw that allows an attacker to force the appliance to make requests to unintended destinations.

The stack had a good run. Defense systems are the future. Introducing Sophos Fusion, the industry’s most complete AI-Native Cybersecurity Defense System. Something shifted in late 2025 that I don't think our industry has fully reckoned with yet.

Sophos Firewall v22 MR2 is now available AI app control, PQC detection, enhanced Chromebook support, and more. Sophos Firewall v22 bolstered Secure by Design, taking it to a whole new level with major updates to the architecture and new features like the Health Check to help identify high-risk configurations. Sophos Firewall v22 MR1 added several enhancements, including a new set of NDR detections for active threats.

Sophos named a 2026 Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for Email Security Sophos’ first ever recognition as a Customers’ Choice for Email Security. Sophos has been named a 2026 Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice in the 2026 Gartner Peer Insights Voice of the Customer for Email Security. This marks Sophos’ entry into the report, as well as Sophos’ first ever Customers’ Choice distinction for Email Security.

An X-Ops analysis of how AI coding agents trigger endpoint detection rules designed for adversaries AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and others built on skill packs such as GStack) are showing up in customer environments. They write code, install dependencies, automate browser tasks, and troubleshoot failures by trying alternative approaches.

"Exploit mitigation" stalled around 2008. The attacks didn't. AI turns a patched bug into a working exploit in hours. Why endpoint exploit mitigation stalled in 2008, and what a default-on mitigation layer looks like now. The core of my last post was an asymmetry. An attack can unfold in two steps or 20, but the vocabulary it draws from never grows.

Counter Threat Unit (CTU) researchers investigated two interconnected threat groups known as Vect and TeamPCP. The two groups announced a formal operational partnership in late March 2026 to combine TeamPCP’s credential harvesting and data theft capabilities with Vect’s ransomware deployment infrastructure in a widespread campaign involving supply chain attacks and the extortion of multiple organizations.

Sophos X-Ops presents a working taxonomy for attacks using, and targeting, AI Conversations about ‘AI threats’ typically collapse into one of two extremes. On the one hand, hype: unverified claims that don’t hold up to scrutiny and invite significant criticism. On the other, dismissal: it’s just old tradecraft with new branding.