ReliaQuest Blog - Threat Hunting, Security Operations, and More

On August 22, 2026, ReliaQuest was the target of a social engineering attack. While unsuccessful beyond temporarily exposing one identity, the attempt was an important reminder of the persistent tactics of threat actor groups and what all organizations can do to guard against them. We are sharing the full details of this attempt for transparency and so others can learn from t...

Editor’s note: This report was authored by John Dilgen and Connor Short.

This is external threat intelligence from the ReliaQuest Threat Research team. The findings describe threats, vulnerabilities, and attacker activity affecting third parties and the broader threat landscape—not ReliaQuest's own environment. Nothing in this report should be in...

AI has widened the attack surface from both directions, leaving defenders with two problems to solve at once: agentic attacks coming at them, and the increasing AI usage within their own organizations.

On the first front, AI handed attackers three structural advantages at once: speed, scale, and the removal of the skills barrier. Full attack cycles that took weeks of tr...

At the Mandalay Bay Convention Center, you could measure how fast the market is moving by counting the signs that read "Agentic AI" over the booth. The label was everywhere. What it actually meant changed booth to booth—and that is the problem you carry home.

The stakes behind the noise are real. The fastest data exfiltration ReliaQuest tracked in 2025 took 6 minutes, a...

Technology and infrastructure health is the foundation of the SOC. Investigations, threat hunts, and detection engineering all assume the same thing: the tools underneath are up, generating telemetry, and functioning as intended. When that assumption breaks, the rest of the SOC breaks with it.

The failures are rarel...