TrendAI report reveals threat landscape for financial sector
Recent research by TrendAI shows a huge increase in AI-driven cyber threats targeting the financial sector. According to the report Modern Bank Heists in 2026, 89% of financial institutions observed a rise in these sophisticated attacks over the past year, with 41% of organisations already having suffered at least one breach.
The nature of these breaches has now evolved from mere data theft to active disruption of incident response. Criminals are using so-called counter-incident-response tactics, actively obstructing security staff during live interventions. They can erase system logs, disable endpoint detection tools, or deploy so-called wipers to permanently destroy data on infected systems.
Approximately 67% of companies reported having faced these disruptive interference tactics.
The report pointed to a shift towards ultra-fast automation through the use of AI agents capable of managing multiple attack stages simultaneously.
Attackers are also using steganography – hiding malicious code in image pixels – to bypass traditional security filters. This is often combined with invisible prompt injection, where hidden instructions are embedded in Web content to manipulate AI models.
Moreover, the accessibility of advanced remote access trojans (RATs) means that ordinary criminal groups now have tools that were previously only available to state-sponsored actors.
Other crucial statistics from the research indicate that 55% of companies saw a spike in API-targeted attacks, and that almost half (46%) were targeted because of their proprietary investment strategies or market data.
Despite these escalating risks, 54% of financial institutions report that their cyber security budgets have stagnated.
Tom Kellermann, VP AI security and threat research at TrendAI, stressed that, since trust is the cornerstone of banking, the speed of AI-driven attacks poses a systemic risk.
He argued that chief information security officers (CISOs) should be given more autonomy by boards of directors to enable continuous, intelligence-led defence rather than sporadic reactions.
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