Group-IB High-Tech Crime Trends Report 2026: Supply Chain Attacks Emerge as Top Global Cyber Threat

WHY THIS MATTERS:
Supply chain attacks have evolved from occasional high-profile breaches into a dominant cyber threat model. Group-IB’s 2026 report highlights a decisive shift: attackers are no longer targeting single organisations, but instead compromising trusted vendors, SaaS providers, open-source components and managed service providers to gain inherited access across entire ecosystems. In fast-digitising regions like the Middle East and Africa — where fintech, cloud adoption and digital government platforms are expanding rapidly — this creates systemic risk rather than isolated incidents.

The data underscores the scale of the threat. In 2025, over 80% of phishing activity observed in MEA targeted high-trust sectors such as internet services, financial institutions and logistics. More than 200 cases of corporate access linked to MEA organisations were advertised by Initial Access Brokers, while ransomware activity in the GCC alone surpassed 100 reported incidents. The convergence of phishing, identity compromise, access brokerage and ransomware reflects an increasingly industrialised cybercrime supply chain.

Group-IB, a leading creator of cybersecurity technologies to investigate, prevent, and fight digital crime, launched today its High-Tech Crime Trends Report 2026, revealing that supply chain attacks have become the dominant force reshaping the global cyber threat landscape.

For organizations across the Middle East & Africa (MEA), where cloud adoption, digital government platforms and fintech ecosystems continue to expand rapidly, the shift toward supply chain compromise represents a growing systemic risk rather than isolated security incidents.

Mapping the web of deceit in supply chain attacks

This year’s High-Tech Crime Trends report reveals that cybercrime has shifted decisively away from isolated intrusions toward ecosystem-wide compromise, where attackers exploit trusted vendors, open-source software, SaaS platforms, browser extensions, and managed service providers to gain inherited access to hundreds of downstream organizations. 

In MEA, phishing activity observed by Group-IB in 2025 shows attackers disproportionately targeting high impact sectors, particularly internet services (52.49%), financial institutions (28.50%) and the logistics sector (11.20%). Although phishing often starts with individual users, compromise within these organizations can trigger cascading effects across customers, partners, and connected ecosystems. 

Drawing on worldwide telemetry alongside on-the-ground investigations, the report combines Group-IB’s adversary-centric and global analysis with real-world regional case studies to illustrate how supply chain compromises unfold across industries and geographies. These cases span open-source package poisoning, malicious browser extensions, OAuth token abuse, cascading SaaS breaches, and ransomware operations fueled by upstream access brokers—demonstrating how a single localized intrusion can rapidly escalate into large-scale, cross-border impact. 

Powered by Group-IB’s proprietary predictive intelligence, the report finds that modern supply chain attacks no longer operate as standalone incidents. Instead, phishing, identity compromise, malicious extensions, data breaches, ransomware, and extortion increasingly function as interconnected stages of a single attack chain—each reinforcing the next.

Key MEA insights from the High-Tech Crime Trends Report 2026:

• Phishing-driven identity compromise: In 2025, phishing activity across the Middle East and Africa increasingly targeted high-trust sectors such as internet services, financial institutions, and logistics providers, accounting for more than 80% of observed phishing activity. This enabled attackers to gain legitimate access and scale attacks across interconnected digital ecosystems.
• Access brokerage as a key factor in downstream attacks: The report found over 200 cases of publicly advertised corporate access linked to MEA organizations being offered by Initial Access Brokers (IABs) in 2025. This shows a strong demand for compromised access in the region. It also highlights how stolen credentials and footholds are increasingly being sold to support ransomware, espionage, and large-scale follow-up attacks.
• An industrialized ransomware supply chain: In 2025, ransomware activity across the Middle East and Africa was most heavily concentrated in the GCC, which accounted for over 100 reported incidents. Other affected countries included South Africa, Egypt, Morocco, and Turkey. The most targeted sectors were real estate (39 incidents), financial services (25), manufacturing (23), followed by government and healthcare (21 each). Ransomware operators now operate as tightly coordinated ecosystems, focusing on upstream access points to maximize operational and financial damage.
• Supply chain attacks expand the impact beyond the initial victims: The report identified five organizations in the GCC affected by supply chain attacks, mainly within IT services and industrial sectors. As these organizations provide services to broad partner and customer networks, a single compromise can disrupt operations, data security, and trust across multiple dependent entities simultaneously. As a result, such incidents can lead to significant losses not only for the directly affected organization, but across the wider ecosystem that depends on its services, data, and infrastructure. In addition, the report notes that some supply chain attacks—particularly those involving open-source ecosystems—may remain partially hidden, making the true scope of impact difficult to quantify and likely larger than what is immediately visible.

“Cybercrime is no longer defined by single breaches. It is defined by cascading failures of trust,” said Dmitry Volkov, Chief Executive Officer of Group-IB. “Attackers are industrializing supply chain compromise because it delivers scale, speed, and stealth. A single upstream breach can now ripple across entire industries. Defenders must stop thinking in terms of isolated systems and start securing trust itself, across every relationship, identity, and dependency.” 

Through detailed case studies and threat actor profiling, the High-Tech Crime Trends Report 2026 highlights how 2025 marked a pivotal escalation in supply chain threats—from the weaponization of open-source ecosystems and the rise of malicious browser extensions to AI-driven phishing, OAuth abuse, and the emergence of an industrialized ransomware supply chain. The report documents sustained activity by supply-chain-focused actors such as Lazarus, Scattered Spider, HAFNIUM, DragonForce, 888, and campaigns linked to Shai-Hulud, underscoring how both criminal groups and state-aligned operators are exploiting the same trusted platforms and integration layers to achieve asymmetric impact at scale. 

The High-Tech Crime Trends Report 2026 is powered by unique intelligence from Group-IB’s Digital Crime Resistance Centers (DCRCs) in 11 countries around the world, and adversary-centric telemetry, combined with real-world cybercriminal investigations, and round-the-clock global monitoring of underground ecosystems. It provides actionable insight for enterprises, governments, and law enforcement seeking to anticipate emerging risks and disrupt attack chains before damage occurs.

FF NEWS TAKE:
The defining feature of modern cybercrime is leverage. A single upstream breach can now cascade across industries, borders and critical infrastructure. That fundamentally changes the defensive playbook.

Organisations can no longer treat cybersecurity as perimeter defence. Securing identities, third-party integrations, APIs and software dependencies must become core strategy. In a world of interconnected platforms, resilience depends on protecting trust — not just networks.