Mandiant dropped its M-Trends 2026 report today. The headline finding: attackers are accelerating. They are moving away from phishing, skipping straight to exploits, and increasingly targeting backup and virtualization infrastructure to deny recovery.
One detail stands out. AI is being used to speed up reconnaissance. Faster recon means a shorter window between when an attacker first probes your network and when they act on what they found.
The obvious question: if the recon window is shrinking, what does your defense look like when reconnaissance takes hours instead of weeks?
A network that looks the same every time it gets scanned will eventually get mapped, no matter how fast your team responds. A network that keeps changing — where what an attacker recorded at 2am no longer exists at 3am — turns that speed advantage into wasted effort.
Faster reconnaissance only helps attackers against static targets.