Comcast Report Finds AI Impact Across All Stages of Cyber Threats
The analysis covered 79.3 billion events, with phishing and drive-by compromise accounting for the most recorded techniques.
- By Danielle Naidu
- Oct 06, 2026
Artificial intelligence is affecting cyber threats at every stage, including how quickly attackers gain access and how they use identities to move within networks, Comcast Business found in its fourth annual Cybersecurity Threat Report.
Comcast said AI coding tools allow attackers to develop new exploits before patches are available, narrowing the window between exposure and impact. Phishing accounted for 25.4 billion events, followed by 21.9 billion drive-by compromise events.
The report identified several forms of activity within the 79.3 billion-event total, including 47.9 billion initial access events, 5.2 billion resource development events and 288.9 million active scans for vulnerable devices. The full data set, which also included the phishing, drive-by compromise, browser-access and distributed denial-of-service activity detailed in the report, averaged roughly 2,514 events per second.
The report counted 5.8 million attempts to covertly access employee browsers through malicious extensions, browser synchronization and session theft. It also recorded 57,000 distributed denial-of-service events driven by botnets.
Comcast said attackers are compromising routers, cameras, streaming devices and point-of-sale terminals in employees' homes and businesses, adding them to residential proxy networks and renting out the traffic to buyers seeking to disguise their activity. The report also identified stolen credentials, hijacked sessions, AI agents and application programming interfaces as sources of identity-related risk.
The findings cover aggregated and anonymized customer data collected from March 1, 2025, through Feb. 28, 2026, and mapped to the MITRE ATT&CK framework. Comcast said the report uses expanded telemetry and an updated methodology, so its totals are not comparable with figures from previous editions.
About the Author
Danielle Naidu is assistant editor for Security Today, Campus Security Today, Occupational Health & Safety and Environmental Protection Online.