BRICKSTORM

The cyber risk landscape for 2026 is heavily influenced by regional conflicts, with PRC actors pre-positioning in critical infrastructure edge devices for strategic leverage. Russian actors are escalating hybrid warfare and OT/ICS disruption across Europe, while Iranian groups have decentralized to conduct wiper attacks and target cloud infrastructure. Concurrently, eCrime actors are exploiting these geopolitical tensions to deploy ransomware and infostealers, increasingly targeting hypervisors and industrial operations.

VerdantBamboo, a Chinese threat actor, compromised edge appliances including Egnyte Storage Sync, pfSense firewalls, and Synology NAS devices to deploy custom malware (BRICKSTORM, PLENET, AGENTPSD). The attackers exploited a compromised MSP and local privilege escalation misconfigurations to maintain long-term persistence, using the compromised devices to proxy traffic and bypass Microsoft 365 Conditional Access policies.

2026-05-137 minMandiantcritical

Threat actors are increasingly targeting VMware vSphere environments, specifically the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) and ESXi hypervisors, to establish deep persistence and bypass traditional EDR solutions. This defender's guide outlines a comprehensive strategy to secure the virtualization control plane against advanced malware like BRICKSTORM, emphasizing infrastructure hardening, Zero Trust network segmentation, and enhanced OS-level forensic visibility using auditd and AIDE.

2026-05-135 minMandianthigh

Mandiant's M-Trends 2026 report highlights a severe divergence in adversary tactics. Cybercriminals are optimizing for speed, with initial access hand-offs collapsing to 22 seconds, and focusing on recovery denial by targeting hypervisors and backup infrastructure. Conversely, espionage groups are prioritizing extreme persistence by exploiting zero-days and deploying in-memory malware on unmonitored edge devices, while voice phishing has emerged as a primary vector for bypassing MFA and compromising SaaS environments.

2026-05-135 minMandiantcritical

Google Threat Intelligence Group's 2025 review highlights 90 exploited zero-day vulnerabilities, with a significant shift toward enterprise infrastructure and edge devices. Commercial surveillance vendors outpaced state-sponsored actors in zero-day usage, while financially motivated groups and PRC-nexus espionage operators continued to heavily leverage zero-days for initial access, persistence, and data theft.