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Human error dominates cyber insurance losses in early 2026

Social engineering drove 85.3% of incurred cyber insurance losses in H1 2026, while AI-specific attack vectors accounted for none in Resilience’s portfolio for the period.

Reported · Written up by our desk · Health Insurance

Cyber insurer Resilience said social engineering, not AI agents, is driving most cyber insurance losses so far in 2026. In its Cyber Mid Year Risk Report, the company found that 85.3% of incurred losses in the first half of 2026 stemmed from a person believing a fraudulent voice, message, or request, up from 17.7% in the first half of 2024.

Resilience reported that none of its losses in H1 2026 could be attributed to AI-specific attack vectors such as prompt injection, model exploitation, or agentic AI misuse. The report’s trend line also shows social engineering rising over time, reaching 75.2% in H2 2025.

The report covers claims data from Resilience’s portfolio of mid-size to large enterprises, with average annual revenue of $2.04 billion, from January 2024 through June 2026. Resilience said two developments this half, including an autonomously operating ransomware operation documented by Sysdig Threat Research and an OpenAI model that breached a Hugging Face environment, are warning signs, but not current drivers of its H1 2026 claims.

Beyond social engineering, Resilience said known vulnerabilities were the largest technical cause of cyber insurance claims at 7.0% of incurred losses in H1 2026, down from 25% in H2 2024, while governance-related losses tied to privileged access, authentication, and payment control gaps accounted for 5.4%. The insurer added that fixes for both categories exist, but what is missing is faster and broader adoption, citing Mandiant’s “M-Trends 2026” work on mean time to

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