2026 M-Trends: Public Sector Must Pivot to Machine-Speed Defense

The public sector is no longer defending a traditional perimeter but a web of interconnected trust relationships, and adversaries now operate at machine speed.

Mandiant‘s 2026 M-Trends report, based on over 500,000 hours of incident investigations, reveals a 22-second hand-off as the median time between an initial access broker establishing a foothold and handing off to a ransomware operator.

This extreme compression of the attack cycle makes human-speed triage obsolete, forcing a strategic pivot toward machine-speed defense. The report also identifies several emerging