M-Trends 2026 Report on Fire Drills
Mandiant’s M-Trends 2026 report contains a message that should resonate with every security leader: your incident response plan is only as good as your last test of it.
The report’s recommendations are practical: update incident response and recovery playbooks for the modern extortion pipeline, and run tabletop exercises that help teams detect opportunistic infections early, reduce response times, and disrupt the hand-off from initial access partners to secondary groups.
According to the report, organizations should regularly test and update their response playbooks through tabletop exercises. Specifically, they should conduct tabletops designed to stress-test modern extortion pipelines, not just the familiar ransomware scenario every other company tends to default to.
The Problem With Most Tabletops
A tabletop where everyone reads from a script and nods along is security theater. Real adversaries adapt. Real pressure reveals whether your team has reflexes or just plans.
That's what Reflex Security was built to solve: “Tabletop exercises should test your teams’ crisis reflexes, not just plan knowledge.” Reflex uses adaptive AI adversaries that respond dynamically to your team’s actual decisions. The scenario evolves organically, just like a real attack would.
Why “The Reflex Way” Changes the Outcome
M-Trends 2026 found that global median dwell time climbed back up to 14 days. The report says that increase was driven largely by long-term espionage activity and DPRK IT worker operations. The same report also highlights how quickly initial access can be handed off to follow-on threat actors, with a median time-to-hand-off of just 22 seconds in 2025. The threat landscape is reactive and fast-moving. Your preparedness program needs to be too. Running a static, checkbox tabletop once a year won’t build the muscle memory your team needs when it’s 2 a.m. and a crisis is unfolding. Effective preparedness means:
- Scenarios built from your real attack surface
- Adversaries that respond to your team’s decisions
- Quantifiable performance data
- After-action reports that drive measurable change
The M-Trends 2026 findings confirm what the best security teams already know: the gap between having a plan and being able to execute under pressure is enormous. Tabletops done the Reflex way — adaptive, adversarial, and grounded in your real environment — are how you close it.
Build your first customized tabletop scenario in minutes with Reflex Security.
Sources: Mandiant M-Trends 2026 | reflexsecurity.io
