Microsoft 2026 Digital Defense Report: AI Has Tipped Near-Term Advantage to Attackers

Microsoft's 2026 Digital Defense Report, drawing on 165 trillion daily security signals, concludes AI has already shifted the near-term advantage to attackers: median time from vulnerability discovery to weaponization has fallen below 24 hours, phishing was the entry vector for 23% of investigated intrusions (up from 7%), and the report documents the first autonomous 32-step attack chains run by Anthropic's Mythos and OpenAI's GPT-5.5 against emulated enterprises.