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LevelBlue chart from its Q3 2026 TTP Briefing showing that intrusions combining encryption with exfiltration fell to 50% of cases while exfiltration or extortion without encryption rose to 33%.
Graphic: LevelBlue, Q3 2026 TTP Briefing (fair use).

Detection

LevelBlue Says Data Exfiltration Showed Up in 83% of Q3 Intrusions While Encryption Fell to 67%, and Attackers Bypassed MFA in 79% of the Business Email Compromise Cases Where It Was On

The quarterly briefing, drawn from LevelBlue's own incident response work, says attackers are keeping stolen data and skipping the ransomware payload, so detection built around encryption events will miss a growing share of intrusions. Phishing still led initial access at 42%, down from 65%, as internet-facing routes rose, and the firm says to watch outbound transfers, archive creation, new cloud destinations, and device-enrollment activity.

Ava Okello, DetectionLondon5 min read

LONDON - Attackers are increasingly skipping the ransomware payload and keeping the stolen data instead, LevelBlue said in its Q3 2026 Threat Trends Briefing, a quarterly read drawn from the company's own incident response engagements worldwide. Data exfiltration showed up in 83% of intrusion cases last quarter, while encryption appeared in 67%. In the second quarter, both sat at 77%.

The briefing's theme, in LevelBlue's phrasing, is that trusted access fuels data theft: "Attackers didn't need to break in so much as log in." Session tokens lifted by phishing kits, OAuth apps users consented to, VPN appliances that accepted forged authentication, and remote management tools that look like routine IT all gave intruders a foothold that looked legitimate from inside.

Detection built around encryption will miss the shift

For a SOC, the headline number has a direct consequence. "Detection built around encryption events will miss a growing share of intrusions," LevelBlue wrote, telling teams to watch instead for large outbound transfers, unusual archive creation, and new cloud storage destinations. The tools its responders kept seeing are the ordinary ones of data movement: rclone, MegaSync, WinSCP, 7-Zip, and WinRAR.

Exfiltration-only extortion, where attackers steal data and threaten to publish it without ever deploying ransomware, was the fastest-growing category in the quarter. Attacks that pair encryption with exfiltration are still the most common single bucket, but their share has fallen each quarter. For the first time in LevelBlue's data, files being exfiltrated overtook files being viewed or accessed as the most common outcome once data was at risk.

LevelBlue chart of most common threat types in Q3 2026: business email compromise at 32%, non-ransomware network intrusions at 22%, and ransomware at 20%.
Graphic: LevelBlue, Q3 2026 TTP Briefing (fair use).Business email compromise stayed the most common incident type.

Business email compromise remained the most common incident type at 32%, with non-ransomware network intrusions second at 22% and ransomware third at 20%. LevelBlue attributes the strength of the intrusion category to attackers focusing on exfiltration and extortion rather than encryption.

How they are getting in

Phishing was still the top initial-access route at 42%, though that is down sharply from 65% in the second quarter. External remote services such as RDP and VPN, and exploited vulnerabilities, tied for second at 14% each, so the two internet-facing routes together now account for more than a quarter of initial access.

LevelBlue chart of initial intrusion vectors across three quarters, with phishing and social engineering highest but declining, and external remote services and exploited vulnerabilities rising.
Graphic: LevelBlue, Q3 2026 TTP Briefing (fair use).Internet-facing routes rose as phishing's share fell.

LevelBlue also published the CVEs its responders saw exploited in real incidents, a list it argues is a sharper patching guide than any severity score. It names, among others, CVE-2026-0257 in PAN-OS GlobalProtect, CVE-2026-72898 in Metabase, four SonicWall SonicOS flaws, and CVE-2022-26923 in Active Directory Domain Services. The Metabase flaw, an unauthenticated SQL injection with a CVSS score of 10, let responders watch a single self-contained path from initial access to extortion, with attackers creating new admin accounts and reaching third-party systems connected to the platform.

MFA no longer closes the door

Multi-factor authentication is close to universal among the organizations LevelBlue responds to, and it no longer stops business email compromise. In the quarter, attackers bypassed MFA in 79% of BEC incidents where it was enabled.

LevelBlue chart showing MFA implementation near universal across three quarters while MFA bypass in business email compromise incidents reached 79%.
Graphic: LevelBlue, Q3 2026 TTP Briefing (fair use).Bypass rates stayed high even as MFA deployment held steady.

The methods are less about defeating the prompt than going around it. LevelBlue describes attackers using vishing to talk victims into enrolling an attacker-controlled device, so the access looks approved, and relying more on machine identities and token abuse that never trigger a user prompt at all. Its guidance is to pair MFA with continuous session-token monitoring, short token lifetimes, and conditional-access policies that flag anomalous token use, and to watch enrollment activity closely.

The quarter also brought a shift in who got hit. Technology and software surged to the most-targeted sector at 14%, up from 5% a quarter earlier, which LevelBlue ties to attackers using AI to hunt exposed API keys that are often long-lived, over-permissioned, and able to bypass MFA. Dwell time kept falling, with 56% of incidents resolved within 10 days, a mix the company reads as both faster detection and faster attackers. The defensive through-line is consistent: identity cannot be a standalone project, and monitoring for data leaving the environment matters as much as stopping the payload that no longer always comes.

Sources:


Ava Okello covers detection engineering, EDR telemetry, and SOC hunting for SOCtember from London.

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