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threat intel
When trust becomes the payload: Inside the threats, etc quarterly report
Elastic Security's quarterly threat report covering April through September 2026 finds that attackers increasingly abuse legitimate, trusted software such as remote monitoring and management tools, artificial intelligence (AI) coding assistants, and Microsoft applications to gain persistent access rather than deploying traditional malware. The report identifies three attack patterns: zero-malware intrusions using signed legitimate products, AI agent-driven attacks compressing thousands of actions into days, and exploitation of identity and consent flows to compromise cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS) tenants in as little as eight minutes. Defensive strategies relying on signature-based detection fail against signed software abuse, requiring instead behavioral analytics, cross-domain visibility, and automation to detect unauthorized system-level activity.
Why it matters: Security teams and incident responders must shift detection and hunting from signature-based methods to behavioral monitoring of trusted applications, because attackers now routinely hide inside pre-approved tools and legitimate user workflows with attack chains completing in seconds to minutes.
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