State of the Human Attack Surface: 2026 Threat Intelligence Report

AI has given attackers a capability set that enterprises were never built to defend against. Campaigns that once required hours of manual reconnaissance now launch in minutes, personalized, convincing, and deployed at scale. Attack vectors no longer operate in isolation. Threat actors chain email, SMS, voice, and video into coordinated kill chains designed to outlast any single-channel defense. This threat intelligence report examines how AI social engineering exploits the seams between enterprise defenses across eight critical attack vectors.

What you’ll learn:

• 1Eight active attack vectors covered in depth: AI-powered phishing, QR code phishing (quishing), smishing, deepfake impersonation, vishing, help desk deception, collaboration platform compromise, and BEC
• 2The anatomy of a modern three-phase social engineering kill chain: initial access, identity exploitation, and payload execution, and how each phase targets a different layer of enterprise trust
• 3Why coordinated multi-channel kill chains defeat the seams between disconnected technical controls, and why the orchestration problem is the hardest one to solve
• 4Six practical recommendations for security leaders looking to close the human-layer gap against AI-enabled threats today