Top 5 ways hackers breach companies in 2026, according to Verizon

Five prevalent methods hackers use to breach companies in 2026, according to Verizon's 2026 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR), which analyzed over 31,000 security incidents and 22,000 confirmed breaches across 145 countries.

System Intrusion leads as the most common breach pattern, accounting for 61% of confirmed breaches. Other significant patterns include social engineering and web application attacks.

A less obvious threat is ordinary employee mistakes, which can expose sensitive data without a hacker breaking into a system. Insider abuse of legitimate access is the smallest breach pattern, typically involving an employee sharing company data with a personal account.

In most cases (54%), hackers behind these breaches are average end users. Developers contribute 22%, while system admins and managers each account for 8%, and executives make up around 3%.

Convenience, not malice, is the leading motive in 60% of these breaches. Financial motives follow at 33%, with espionage and grudge accounting for around 4% each. Convenience-related examples include employees emailing company data to personal accounts just to work from home.

Personal data (60%) is most commonly compromised, followed by other data types (35%), secrets (27%), and internal data (25%). Mistakes like misdelivery, misconfiguration, and mismanagement nearly always result in exposed data.

Web application attacks remain widespread, driven by stolen credentials and unpatched vulnerabilities. Use of stolen credentials (56%) and exploitation of vulnerabilities (53%) are the top techniques, followed by password dumping (21%), brute force (19%), backdoors or C2 functionality (17%).

These attacks are financially motivated (74%), with espionage accounting for 23% and ideology-driven attacks making up the remaining 3%. Stolen credentials top the list of stolen data (52%), followed by internal data (48%), other data types (33%), and secrets (15%).