A Recap of 2025 Breaches and an Outlook for 2026 Security Priorities

2025 didn’t give us a single “big breach story.” It gave us repeated variations of the same theme. From misconfigured cloud assets to overly permissive SaaS integrations, identity compromise, and DNS hijacks, attackers kept exploiting weak points that enterprises already knew existed, but hadn’t fully connected.

Looking back at this year’s security incidents, one thing becomes obvious: cyberattacks are no longer isolated to a single environment. Breaches don’t start and finish in the cloud, or identity, or DNS. They span across all of them. That interconnected reality changes how organizations need to prepare for 2026, especially as breach costs continue rising.

Cloud: Where Attackers Increasingly “Discover” Rather Than “Breach”

2025 reaffirmed that cloud misconfigurations are not just mistakes but entry points. And in many of the most notable incidents this year, attackers didn’t need sophisticated tools. They found what enterprises left exposed.

Take the Oracle cloud exposure: old, forgotten cloud services became the foothold. That’s the new cloud truth—shadow assets and abandoned infrastructure are becoming more dangerous than active systems.

Similarly, the TalentHook incident exposed more than 26 million resumes due to a cloud misconfiguration. Nothing about the breach was cutting-edge; the danger came from something simple, overlooked, and publicly reachable.

This pattern matters, because attackers are choosing the lowest-effort entry point. When the cloud is improperly configured, “breach” is the wrong word. The more accurate description is “unauthorized discovery.” They aren’t forcing their way in; they’re finding doors left open.

SaaS: Where Trust Becomes A New Attack Surface

SaaS used to be considered a safer, turnkey environment. Today, it’s one of the most complex layers to secure—not because of the SaaS platforms themselves, but because of the integrations, permissions, and third-party applications that live inside them.

JP Morgan’s public warnings earlier this year were a rare moment where a major financial institution openly acknowledged the systemic risk of SaaS adoption at scale. That visibility helped bring SaaS into board-level security conversations. SaaS security incidents provided confirmation that once an attacker gains access, SaaS entitlements can magnify the blast radius faster than teams can respond.

Identity: The Single Point of Failure

If there is one theme that defines the modern threat landscape, it is identity compromise. And this year’s investigations showed again and again that once identities are misused, very little stands in the way of lateral movement.

The Microsoft Entra ID vulnerability discovery reinforced how identity weaknesses are rarely contained. A single misconfigured identity or service principal can affect multiple environments. The U.S. Treasury incident showed that identity isn’t only about internal privilege. Third-party access, token delegation, and federated identity chains are now equally critical.

Identity compromise is a breach multiplier. Once credentials, tokens, or entitlements are in the wrong hands, traditional perimeter defenses become irrelevant.

DNS: The Quiet Infrastructure That Defines Disruption

DNS has long been one of cybersecurity’s most underappreciated attack surfaces. But 2025 pushed DNS into the spotlight. CISA’s fast-flux advisory highlighted DNS as part of an attacker’s infrastructure—not just a victim’s.

The Microsoft outage and DDoS-linked service disruption showed how DNS is tied directly to availability—not just security—and why DNS failures quickly become business failures. The MikroTik botnet story connected DNS manipulation with global-scale abuse. DNS incidents don’t just compromise data. They interrupt business. And interruption is rapidly becoming the most expensive part of cybersecurity incidents.

The Real Story of 2025: One Attack, Many Surfaces

It’s easy to label each of these incidents as cloud, SaaS, identity, or DNS breaches. But they aren’t separate categories. They’re phases of the same kill chain. Cloud misconfigurations create access, SaaS entitlements expand access, identity compromise enables persistence, and DNS disruption maximizes damage. Attackers don’t need new vulnerabilities. They only need enterprises to treat each surface in isolation. And that’s the most important lesson from 2025: cyber risk is cumulative.

What This Means for 2026

IBM reported that this year’s global breach cost averaged $4.44 million. More alarmingly, the average cost of a breach in the US surged to $10.22 million! Breaches involving data stored across multiple environments took 276 days on average to identify and contain, and the healthcare industry saw timelines extend to 279 days, reinforcing what 2025 already showed us: the more distributed the attack surface, the more expensive the incident becomes.

Misconfigured cloud assets and sprawling SaaS permissions increase dwell time, while identity misuse and token compromise amplify lateral movement and remediation effort. Even operational disruption—especially in DNS incidents—now represents a meaningful slice of breach cost, because business interruption often exceeds the cost of data exposure itself. The pattern heading into 2026 is clear: costs rise fastest where environments are hybrid, identities are loosely governed, and critical services depend on external control points such as DNS.

Priorities for Security Leaders

For security teams, the most important shift in 2026 is moving away from surface-specific fixes toward controls that reduce dwell time across the entire attack path. Continuous visibility of cloud assets, early detection of misconfiguration, and strong identity lifecycle governance directly influence breach duration and, therefore, financial impact. When attackers land in environments with shadow infrastructure or unmanaged SaaS connections, containment becomes a time problem, and time is what drives cost.

Equally critical is treating DNS and SaaS entitlements as part of core security posture rather than peripheral infrastructure. Enterprise services now depend on domains, tokens and third-party app permissions in ways traditional security tooling rarely inspects. Prevention, automated remediation, and identity-aware policy enforcement must operate as one capability instead of separate projects. The controls themselves are familiar; what’s new is the requirement to make them continuous and connected.

Closing Thoughts

2025 looked chaotic, but the pattern was clear. 2026 won’t be about chasing new threats, but about treating these surfaces as one connected attack path. That’s exactly the problem CheckRed is built to solve: unifying posture across cloud, SaaS, identity, and DNS. When organizations close those gaps, attackers lose their footholds.