The second quarter of 2026 was defined by attacks on trust. Across April, May and June, the most consequential incidents did not involve attackers battering at hardened perimeters. They involved attackers walking in through the software supply chain, the identity plane, and third-party providers that their victims had every reason to trust.

Running underneath almost every story was artificial intelligence, which moved decisively from an emerging concern to an operational reality on both sides of the fight. Anthropic disclosed that a frontier model could autonomously discover and exploit previously unknown vulnerabilities, the FBI dismantled an AI-assisted phishing service blamed for 1.9 billion US dollars in losses, and by June the US government was forcing AI companies to restrict access to their most capable models. Regulators, from Australia's APRA and ASD to the Five Eyes agencies collectively, spent the quarter telling boards that this is a present business risk, not a future one.

For the complete analysis, including the quarter in numbers, the Australian incident roundup, the regulatory timeline, priority advisories and vulnerabilities, and detailed Fortian commentary, read the full report.

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Five themes that ran through the quarter

• AI became the weapon, the shield and the thing being regulated, all at once. Frontier models demonstrated offensive capability, criminals industrialised AI-assisted fraud, and governments began treating access to the most capable models as a national security matter.
• The software supply chain trust model cracked open. Signed, provenance-verified npm packages shipped malware, and attackers repeatedly reached their targets by compromising the pipelines and third parties that produce and deliver trusted software.
• Identity was the dominant breach vector. The ShinyHunters collective and the broader network known as The Com dominated the headlines, exploiting stolen credentials, OAuth abuse, social engineering and a platform zero-day to compromise hundreds of organisations.
• Nation-state activity shifted toward pre-positioning and disruption. Iran targeted exposed industrial control systems, China moved to covert networks built on compromised edge devices, and CISA formally moved US critical infrastructure policy onto a wartime footing.
• Australian regulators accelerated hard. The quarter brought an APRA letter on AI risk, the retirement of the Essential Eight, an update to the Information Security Manual, a new Cyber Incident Review Board and the 89.3 million dollar Horizon 2 phase of the national strategy.

The Fortian view

The connective tissue this quarter is trust. Supply chain compromise, identity abuse and third-party breaches are all attacks on relationships an organisation has chosen to rely on. Defending the perimeter is no longer the point when the adversary arrives as a trusted dependency, a valid credential or an authorised supplier. The practical work for the rest of 2026 is inventorying those trust relationships, monitoring them as if they were production infrastructure, and shrinking the blast radius when one of them fails.