Artificial intelligence is driving down the cost of cybercrime, enabling attackers to launch more campaigns at greater speed even without improving success rates. Flashpoint's 2026 Global Threat Intelligence Report: Midyear Edition documented a 45% rise in ransomware victims during the first six months of 2026 as the average black-market price for initial network access plunged 69%, dropping from $1,427 to $439. The findings suggest AI isn't necessarily making individual attacks more effective but is instead slashing the time, skill, and expense needed to execute them, allowing criminals to target more organizations simultaneously.
Flashpoint tracked more than 22 million illicit discussions related to AI, 7.4 million hosts infected with infostealing malware, and 21,667 vulnerability disclosures over the six-month span. The research identified 6,256 confirmed ransomware victims in the first half of 2026, up 45% compared to the same period in 2025. Those 7.4 million compromised hosts yielded roughly 1.7 billion stolen credentials and identity artifacts. Of the 21,667 vulnerabilities disclosed, 4,015 already had publicly available or working exploit code—nearly one in five. Flashpoint analysts told Channel Insider that threat actors have shifted from testing malicious or jailbroken large language models to incorporating them into daily operations, often moving these tools onto privately hosted infrastructure rather than public underground services to evade detection.
The report finds that AI-powered tools are being deployed to generate phishing content, create malware components and evasion scripts, analyze vulnerabilities, automate target profiling, and support initial access efforts. According to Flashpoint analysts, "the clearest effect we're seeing today is scale and speed," as AI reduces the time, expertise, and money required for activities that previously demanded considerably more manual effort. Attackers leverage automated tools to continuously identify targets, tailor messages to specific environments, and test stolen credentials across large numbers of VPNs, SaaS applications, and cloud endpoints. The analysts emphasized that "attackers increasingly don't need to break through the perimeter when they can acquire legitimate credentials or session data and simply log in."
The declining cost of launching attacks creates new pressure on managed service providers and managed security service providers, who now face customers targeted by a higher volume of lower-cost campaigns. Flashpoint analysts explained that while AI can help security teams process large volumes of intelligence, prioritize alerts, and automate well-defined response actions, "automating analysis of incomplete or poorly prioritized intelligence can simply allow teams to reach the wrong conclusion faster." The analysts noted that as both vulnerability discovery and exploitation become more automated, organizations will have even less time to rely on traditional manual triage and severity-based patching. With nearly one in five disclosed vulnerabilities already accompanied by exploit code, the window for manual patch prioritization is narrowing rapidly.
The report positions MSPs and MSSPs as the operational bridge between threat intelligence and customer action, with opportunities to help clients identify which vulnerabilities are actively being exploited rather than treating every high-severity disclosure as equally urgent. Flashpoint analysts said the common thread across these trends is the need to move upstream—identifying exploitable vulnerabilities, exposed credentials, and other signs of risk early enough for customers to act before attackers turn them into a broader compromise. "The organizations best prepared for 2027 will be those that can turn intelligence into action quickly without sacrificing the human judgment needed to determine what matters most," the analysts concluded. For channel partners, the real edge won't come from automation alone but from knowing which threats warrant immediate attention and which can wait—a judgment call that still requires human expertise layered atop the technology doing the heavy lifting.