Fintech Cybersecurity Trends to Watch in 2026

Rise of Credential-Based Attacks and Advanced Phishing Techniques

Phishing is among the most popular cyber threats. While hacking a system takes time and is more difficult to find and exploit a vulnerability, phishing and credential-based attacks offer the opportunity to "log in" to the system as an authorized user. This method is based on social engineering and impersonation, which has now reached a new level.

With the development of artificial intelligence, fraudsters are increasingly using deepfakes, which are difficult to distinguish from real calls, emails, documents, average user behavior, etc. Utilizing AI-powered methods, hackers obtain credentials, passwords, session and OAuth tokens, API keys, and can bypass security measures on fintech platforms. AI/deepfake concerns were cited by 64% of industry respondents as a top fraud threat in 2025.

Data Loss Prevention Challenges Are Growing

Among the main cybersecurity trends in financial services, data loss prevention is worth noting, which has also been enhanced by the adoption of AI tools.

The risk of data loss arises as digital finance firms do not always control how employees interact with and send data, nor which AI-powered systems have access to sensitive financial data. Furthermore, insider risks are increasing against this backdrop.

The use of AI to simplify processes and workflows in this case creates another problem: shadow AI, in addition to shadow IT (which is a common headache due to the complexity of systems and infrastructures). 

Data loss issues are a consequence of a lack of visibility and integration with multiple cloud applications.  IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report 2025 puts the average financial services breach at USD 5.56 million. It's essential to implement AI usage policies, clear data classification, monitoring, and zero-trust principles.

Ransomware Attacks Shift Toward Data Theft and Double Extortion

While ransomware attacks previously aimed to obtain and decrypt data, cybercriminals have now changed tactics. They no longer attempt to decrypt the obtained data, but rather blackmail companies and partners with the threat of the leak.

Financial services are particularly vulnerable to this tactic. Since regulations for data management in the fintech landscape are extremely strict, the mere fact of a leak can seriously damage a brand's reputation and lead to substantial fines. Hackers prioritize exploiting trusted file-transfer platforms to exfiltrate sensitive data before encryption, maximizing regulatory and reputational fallout for victims.

This shift toward data theft makes segmented infrastructure, immutable backups, and continuous identity monitoring among the top cybersecurity trends for system protection.

Ransomware attacks primarily target less mature financial entities, such as service providers (29%) and insurance organizations (17%), with impacts including financial loss (38%), data exposure (35%), and operational disruption (20%).

Increasing Exploitation of Edge Devices and Pre-Zero-Day Vulnerabilities

Attacks on edge infrastructure are among the most impactful financial cybersecurity trends. VPNs, firewalls, and remote access gateways are of particular interest to cybercriminals as they enable session hijacking, credential harvesting, and privileged lateral movement into core banking systems. Moreover, once compromised, edge devices allow adversaries to blend into trusted network traffic, bypassing traditional perimeter defenses.

The problem with this hacking vector is that vulnerabilities are exploited hours after disclosure, literally, and the exploitation process itself often begins even before the official CVE. Also, third-party vendors are often the weakest link, and if their infrastructure is successfully compromised, threat actors can launch supply chain attacks.

This problem makes attack surface management, continuous external asset discovery, and zero-trust network segmentation especially important to combat cybersecurity risks.

Zero-day exploits against edge/VPN devices jumped to 22% of exploitation incidents in 2025, up from only 3% in 2024.

Surge in State-Sponsored Cyberattacks Targeting Fintech and Crypto

State-sponsored attacks (often DPRK-linked groups) are among the top cyber risks for fintech platforms, especially those interacting with cryptocurrency. Such hacker groups coordinate campaigns leveraging malicious NPM packages, malware, and exploitation of React2Shell (CVE-2025-55182) for credential theft and persistent backdoor access.

Furthermore, geopolitical considerations are playing a role. In other words, tensions between different countries/blocs further increase the risks for crypto exchanges and payment providers, as government-backed hacker groups/intelligence agencies can target them, including SWIFT integrations, digital banking APIs, and crypto wallets.

This requires companies to implement geographic risk-based access policies, conduct regular vendor security audits, and implement threat intelligence to enhance protection and address security challenges.

Cloud Security Risks and AI Governance Gaps Become Critical Concerns

Cloud infrastructure is an integral part of the financial services sector, as it increases deployment and reduces costs. Yet, cloud complexity, insider risk from new hires, and ungoverned AI usage exposing sensitive data are among the challenges. Maintaining visibility across multi-cloud environments while managing sensitive data exposure through emerging AI tools is also challenging.

This creates several risks, the most notable of which are:

• Misconfigurations in the cloud, which most often lead to hacking (e.g., an open S3 bucket)

• Excessive permissions in IAM

• Secret exposure in CI/CD pipelines

• Implementation of AI-driven solutions/tools that have access to data (while the company has poor/lack of AI governance and clear policies)

Furthermore, some challenges arise that require addressing, namely:

• Control over the use of external LLMs

• Scans/audits to prevent model poisoning

• Explainability for AI-driven decisions

• AI transparency and regulatory pressure

Therefore, the creation of AI governance frameworks and private AI deployments for sensitive workloads is essential to minimize risks from AI automation and remain resilient.

Convergence of Fraud Prevention, AML, and Cybersecurity

The nature of modern attacks and AI adoption reshape cybersecurity trends in 2026. One of the most notable is the convergence of anti-fraud, anti-money laundering, and cybersecurity efforts.

This blurring of the boundaries between previously distinct fields is a result of the fact that today, a security incident can simultaneously involve account takeover, money laundering, and cyberattack. This means that if SOC and fraud teams operate in isolation, the effectiveness of protection and incident response is reduced. Furthermore, AI creates adaptive threats, which means that traditional rule-based systems are already missing various fraudulent practices.

The convergence of efforts in the financial technology sector is now largely focused on behavioral analytics leveraging advanced AI security tools, real-time fraud detection & monitoring, as well as shared telemetry between fraud and security teams, and the implementation of identity intelligence. This approach expands coverage and visibility, which is especially crucial in the context of threats that constantly evolve.

AI-Powered Cyber Threats in Fintech

AI threats are among the key latest trends in cybersecurity that require attention. Using artificial intelligence, hackers can conduct scans, tests, and attacks faster, cheaper, and, most importantly, with an emphasis on personalization. This significantly complicates defenses, making various practices and policies less effective, further requiring companies and institutions to invest in cybersecurity to combat adaptive threats.

Another problem is the lowering barrier to entry into cybercrime. Already, most attacks are carried out using AI in one way or another. Simply put, the number of attacks and the number of hackers are growing precisely because of the low entry requirements and automation. In 2026, AI will enhance attack vectors and methods, enabling:

• Scaling and personalizing phishing attacks

• Using AI-generated content for deepfake identity fraud

• Automating infrastructure scanning for vulnerabilities

• Creating synthetic identities that are difficult to distinguish from real ones

• Running Fraud-as-a-service ecosystems

• Testing stolen credentials at a massive scale using AI bots

How AI Is Strengthening Fintech Cybersecurity

While the primary battle was once between security teams and white-label hackers against cybercriminal groups and malicious actors, it's now a battle of AI vs AI. 

As traditional security methods become less effective, the introduction of AI tools for analytics, monitoring, and response has become a major innovation in recent years.

Currently, building security in the fintech sector includes the active implementation of AI solutions for:

• Real-time monitoring and detection of anomalies/unusual behavior

• Automating fraud scoring and risk management

• Behavioral intelligence and analytics

• Threat hunting automation

At the same time, AI vs AI is impossible without human intervention. Human oversight and validation remains critical, and AI is an additional tool in the hands of experts. This hybrid approach reduces detection time from days to minutes, which is especially valuable within financial infrastructures.

Notable Cyber Attacks

• Marks & Spencer (M&S) retail outage. This hack was the result of successful social engineering conducted by Scattered Spider, which resulted in online shopping being disabled and retail disruption for several weeks. As a result, M&S lost approximately £300 million.

• Kettering Health healthcare disruption. This incident occurred in 2025. The cause was interlock ransomware, which disrupted internal systems, phone lines, and EHRs across 14 medical centers, leading to forced procedure cancellations and ambulance diversions.

• SAP NetWeaver zero-day (CVE-2025-31324) enterprise software exploitation. This hack was made possible by the disclosure of a critical RCE vulnerability, allowing hackers to perform web-shell uploads and active exploits across hundreds of instances.

• Bank Sepah massive data theft. This incident was carried out by the “Codebreakers” collective in 2025. The hackers' actions resulted in the exposure of one million customer records and involved extortion attempts of $42 million, making it one of 2025's largest financial sector compromises.

Top Cybersecurity Practices for Fintech

Final Thoughts

The threat landscape and the latest trends in cybersecurity are constantly transforming, especially in sectors that are of greatest interest to hackers, such as finance, wealth management, and fintech. This requires increased flexibility and attention from security teams and software developers to promptly fix vulnerabilities and respond to incidents.

While previously the main headache was often inattention, leading to critical vulnerabilities in an organization's security posture, the situation is now complicated by the widespread adoption of AI tools by hackers to scale, test, and personalize their attacks. 

At the same time, security teams are actively using AI solutions to build protection. The evolving nature of threats and attacks requires faster detection and automated response, which is largely achieved by implementing SIEM and SOAR solutions, as well as prioritizing security through a DevSecOps approach to close potential entry points before they are noticed.

Contact Jappwear to learn how you can integrate security and protect your infrastructure from known vulnerabilities and AI-powered attacks.