By Martin Ekpeke
Kaspersky’s 2025 Security Bulletin highlights challenges the financial sector is likely to face in 2026.
According to the report, in 2025, the financial sector navigated a rapidly evolving cyber landscape, with malware spreading through messaging apps, AI-assisted attacks, supply chain compromises, and NFC-based fraud. These were the tremors that preceded the 2026 earthquake.
The Adaptive Breach: March 2026
The lights were out in the global Security Operations Center (SOC) of Titan Bank, save for the sickly green glow of the monitors. Dr. Elena Reyes, Titan’s Chief Cyber Resilience Officer, was facing her worst nightmare: Agentic AI malware.
It had breached Titan’s national payment network, not through a direct assault, but via a small, third-party lending partner. This classic supply chain attack exploited vulnerabilities in a trusted provider. The malware, a hyper-evolved variant of the AI-enabled threats that had scaled rapidly in 2025, was terrifyingly efficient.
“We contained the initial signature,” a junior analyst reported breathlessly. “But it dynamically altered its behavior mid-execution. It encountered our sandbox, analyzed the environment, and adapted its tactics on the fly. It’s moving like liquid.”
Elena realized the code wasn’t following a fixed script; it was deciding. A single piece of malware was exhibiting a cascade of behaviors—from infiltration to system disruption—in response to the specific defenses it encountered.
The Deepfake Front and WhatsApp’s New Trojan
Meanwhile, the human element of the attack was equally sophisticated, demonstrating the new convergence of organized crime and cybercrime.
The attack was preceded by a wave of hyper-realistic deepfake/AI services for social engineering. Criminals used AI to generate convincing voice and video profiles, using them to conduct highly specific, fake job interviews and offers to Titan employees. These scams, often blending with insider manipulation, tricked mid-level managers into providing data that fueled the Agentic AI’s access. The success of these deepfakes was driving an underground market for tools that could completely bypass Know Your Customer (KYC) verification, creating a perfect storm of synthetic identities and stolen credentials.
Then came the banking trojan breach. It didn’t come through email. Banking Trojans were rewritten for WhatsApp distribution. Criminal groups had rapidly scaled the distribution and abused messaging apps to target corporate and government clients who still relied on Windows-based desktop online banking. A seemingly innocent PDF from a “colleague” on a group chat was all it took to deploy the infection, marking a massive shift from old phishing tactics to a new delivery method for classic fraud.
The Silent Bleeding
While Elena’s team fought the Agentic AI, the global fraud team reported a massive spike in localized theft.
The threat wasn’t a single global attack but a hundred tiny, localized incursions: the appearance of regional info stealers. Leveraging the malware-as-a-service model established by older families like Lumma and Redline, new, specialized groups were targeting specific countries or regions, harvesting credentials in small, manageable batches.
Even end-users were vulnerable in the physical world. Reports flooded in of more attacks on NFC payments. New tools and malware were specifically directed against the contactless technology, enabling both physical fraud in crowded places and remote fraud via fake banking apps.
Adding to the complexity was the persistence of ‘out of box,’ pre-infected devices. Customers were bringing infected smart TVs and “gray” market Android phones into their networks—devices loaded with trojans like Triada that had extensive capabilities, including stealing banking credentials the moment they were connected.
Elena leaned back, exhausted but resolute. The 2026 cyber landscape was defined by adaptation and convergence. The threat was no longer static code or a single phishing email; it was an autonomous, multi-vector crisis blending AI, physical compromise, and human deceit. They were fighting a war where the enemy was learning, deciding, and acting faster than human defenders could patch.