Cyberattacks are moving faster, shrinking the gap between initial compromise and bad consequences, and the advent of AI is accelerating their timelines in a way that human defenders can no longer keep up with. That’s the broad and perhaps unsurprising finding of Palo Alto Networks’ 2026 Global Incident Response Report, which analyzed 750 incidents in 50 countries that were investigated by the company’s Unit 42 global threat intelligence and incident response team. In the fastest attacks analyzed, threat actors moved from initial access to data exfiltration in 72 minutes, down from nearly five hours in 2024. Increasingly, this is explained by AI’s ability to compress timelines for reconnaissa...