Mandiant M-Trends 2026 — Annual Threat Intelligence Report

M-Trends 2026 (published 2026-03-23, first covered 2026-05-07) reinforces three cross-cutting trends visible in this week's incidents: voice phishing surged to the second most prevalent initial-access vector at 11% (overtaking email phishing at 6%) driven by IT help-desk impersonation and SaaS OAuth token theft — directly evidenced this week in the ADT vishing → Okta SSO → Salesforce pivot and in MuddyWater's Teams external-access helpdesk pretext (§ 7); ransomware initial access via prior compromise doubled to 30% — implicit in the access-broker / ransomware-affiliate model behind Akira, Embargo, and Qilin's targeting of European victims; and edge-device persistence on VPNs, routers, and network appliances without EDR coverage remains the dominant initial-access technique for state-sponsored espionage — directly mirrored in CL-STA-1132's PAN-OS exploitation and in Ivanti EPMM's named EU victims. The reframe IOCTA does not give but M-Trends does: median dwell time globally has increased to 14 days (up from 11 in 2024) and espionage-focused intrusions average 122-day median dwell — i.e. when the Ivanti EPMM and PAN-OS post-compromise hunting horizons land on retrospective log review back to March/April, that horizon is consistent with Mandiant's observed espionage dwell envelope. (Google Cloud / Mandiant M-Trends 2026, 2026-03-23; daily 2026-05-07).