First flagship NordVPN Consumer Cybersecurity Report provides insights into the evolving threat landscape in the first half of 2026
NordVPN, a leading provider of consumer cybersecurity solutions, today published its first-ever threat intelligence report: Consumer Cybersecurity Report: Dismantling the Evolving Threat Landscape. The report draws on NordVPN’s threat intelligence data from January to June 2026, analyzing current trends, metrics, and fraud methodologies.
The data presented is supplemented by real-world case studies that serve to facilitate an understanding of the mechanisms and sophistication of cyberattacks, as cybercriminals are leveraging tools such as generative AI and advanced attack methods to target consumers at an unprecedented scale.
The report finds the most exploited vulnerability in 2026 is trust. Fueled by generative AI and the industrialization of fraud, cybercrime has shifted from mass technical exploits to highly targeted campaigns that weaponize urgency, greed, and trust in familiar brands. Ready-to-use fraud kits and unrestricted AI models have drastically lowered the entry barrier. The threats pose significant risks to everyday individuals, impacting their finances, privacy, and digital security.
“Bad actors are weaponizing our natural instinct to believe what we see and hear. These attacks no longer require advanced skills or significant resources. Anyone with an internet connection can launch them. A single human error is now more likely than ever and likely to be more devastating than ever”, says Marijus Briedis, CTO at NordVPN.
The report also includes practical guidelines for protection to empower consumers against existing and newly emerging risks, highlighting the need to adopt both technological defenses and behavioral resilience for effective protection.
Key figures:
- Scale of the threat: NordVPN analyzes 12 million unique URLs every day. On average, we block 130,000 malicious pages daily before they can reach a user.
- Malware remains the biggest threat by volume. Attacks peaked in January 2026, with over 5 million attempts blocked in that month alone as attackers targeted post-holiday shoppers. Across the first half of the year, the US (4.89M), UK (2M), and Germany (1.32M) were hit hardest. Most of these attacks were infostealers aiming for saved login credentials.
- Phishing: We blocked over 4.4 million phishing attempts in the first half of the year. Notably 99% of attacks impersonate just 300 brands. Microsoft (16.12%), Roblox (12.32%), Google (9.94%), and Netflix (5.99%) lead our list of most-impersonated companies.
- Scams: The .com domain accounts for 43.2% of intercepted scam cases, exploiting its perceived trustworthiness. From launch until June 16, 2026 alone, NordVPN blocked nearly 29,000 scam calls and warned more than 525,000 users about spam calls.
- Dark web: 8.4 million compromised accounts identified in just 90 days via NordVPN’s Dark Web Monitoring tools.
- Over 47% of exchanged data involves physical addresses and full names, underscoring how attackers combine digital and real-world identifiers to develop complete victim profiles.
- Session hijacking: 94 billion cookies exposed online between January 1st and May 26th, 2026. 1.2 billion of those session cookies attackers could use to hijack accounts without passwords, sometimes bypassing MFA.
ABOUT NORDVPN
NordVPN is an all-in-one digital privacy and security app trusted by millions of internet users worldwide. The NordVPN app combines the world’s most advanced VPN, a next-generation antivirus, and other built-in security features, such as Dark Web Monitor™, designed to help users stay safer and more private online. NordVPN helps protect against phishing, scams, malicious websites, trackers, intrusive ads, and malware, while strengthening online privacy.
See also:
Did OpenAI Build a Hacker, Then Lose It for a Week? – MRKT3.0
Did OpenAI Build a Hacker, Then Lose It for a Week? – MRKT3.0
