On the point: State-sponsored attackers are systematically weaving AI throughout their entire attack chains and leveraging legitimate cloud services for obfuscation, circumventing traditional security controls.
The APT threat report from security provider TrendAI for the first half of 2026 shows that state-sponsored attackers are increasingly integrating artificial intelligence into all phases of their attack chains and abusing trusted cloud and online services to conceal their activities.
The APT threat report from TrendAI (Enterprise Cybersecurity division of Trend Micro) for the first half of 2026 documents a qualitative shift in the attack practices of state-sponsored actors: they do not deploy AI in isolation, but instead integrate it systematically across the entire attack chain — from reconnaissance through exploitation to the post-compromise phase.
In parallel, these groups are increasingly abusing legitimate, trusted infrastructures (cloud services, established online platforms) as transport mechanisms and obfuscation tools. This significantly complicates detection, as such traffic is typically classified as unsuspicious and disappears in log analysis.
For CISOs, this means recalibrating defensive approaches: signature-based or isolated anomaly detection will be insufficient against AI-optimized attacks. The focus must shift to behavioral analysis, network segmentation, and strict policies for cloud integration, even when these appear trustworthy from the outside.
Source: itwelt.at · Published 30 July 2026
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