The CrowdStrike 2026 Global Threat Report found that in 2025, AI-enabled adversaries increased attacks by 89 per cent year-over-year.
The speed with which cyberattackers are able to move from initial attack to gaining access to high-value assets of a target has also increased significantly, the data showed — meaning it’s getting more difficult to keep up with responses to attacks that can quickly compromise digital information.
That measure of what’s known as average “breakout time” fell to 29 minutes in 2025, a 65-per cent increase in speed from the prior year, with the fastest breakout taking only 27 seconds.
In comparison, the average breakout time sat at 98 minutes in 2021, demonstrating the swiftness and advancements attackers have made in accessing information.
In 2025, 55 per cent of “interactive intrusions” were in North America, the highest percentage worldwide.
The industries most affected by online attacks were technology (23 per cent), manufacturing (15 per cent), retail (12 per cent) and financial services (11 per cent), among others.
The report highlights that once adversaries gain initial access, their next objective is to “break out” and “move laterally from the initial foothold to high-value assets.”
The speed of this breakout time “determines how fast a defender must respond to reduce the costs and damages associated with an intrusion.”
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Breakout time was found to be steadily decreasing over the past five years — roughly a 70 per cent reduction from 2021 to 2025 — suggesting that “adversaries are getting significantly faster at expanding their foothold after initial access.”
As a result, CrowdStrike reported that “adversaries continue to become faster, stealthier, and more effective as they adapt to navigate larger environments and bypass stronger security controls.”
Ian Lin, director of research and development at Packetlabs, said that the skillset needed to accomplish these online hacks have been lowered because of AI.
“For a long time, people thought hackers were people from movies who had a hoodie on spending lots of time online trying to learn all of this, that’s been cut short by AI,” he said. “The technical bar of being able to execute this is lowered by AI.”
However, there is still a human element in achieving these hacks.
“It’s not the AI systems themselves that are going after targets, it’s hackers who still have hands on keyboards, but using AI to help them.”
Lin said it is not just because of AI that breakout times are reaching new highs.
“If you look at the 29-minute breakout time, it sounds really, really fast but even without AI, we’ve had breakout times that are lower than that,” he said.
“Even without AI, breakout times could reach below that.”
Lin also noted that there is likely “some form of automation powered by AI in order to do that.”
The challenges come as AI use is growing in Canada, and as growing questions emerge over how best to make those systems and capabilities stemming from AI more secure.
“Right now, the world is having a hard time trying to secure AI,” Lin said.
“When organizations eventually do make the decision to embed AI in their core business practices, they don’t yet understand the attack surface of what could happen.”
According to a June 2025 Statistics Canada survey, over 12 per cent of Canadian businesses reported having “used AI to produce goods or deliver services over the 12 months preceding the survey” in the second quarter of 2025.
This was an increase from over six per cent reported in the second quarter of 2024.
It was also found that in that same quarter, 8.3 per cent of businesses in Canada reported that investment in AI was “very important” to their operations, while 20.1 per cent considered it “somewhat important.”
In contrast, many businesses in Canada do not currently consider AI investment to be required for their operations, with 41.2 per cent reporting it to be “not relevant.”
Over one-fifth (21.5 per cent) of businesses in professional, scientific and technical services reported that investment in AI was “very important,” followed by 20.8 per cent of businesses in information and cultural industries and 17 per cent in finance and insurance.
In order for businesses to create a defence against potential cyberattacks, Lin said that there will have to be an active AI component.
“For Canadian businesses, if an AI powered attacker, there has to be something equivalent on the defence side, too, an AI powered defence,” he said. “That’s the only way this is going to shape out in the future. Defence is powered by AI to match the speed that we are seeing.”
Lin also noted that although this data is available, there is still so much to learn.
“We’re early inductors of AI, we’ve been using AI since it came out, and part of the reason why we do this is because we need to understand the risks, limits and power of AI.”
© 2026 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.