Cybersecurity Trends & Predictions to Expect in 2026

As 2026 unfolds, one reality is becoming clear: reactive cybersecurity, propped up by cyber insurance payouts, will not keep pace. AI-era attacks will continue to accelerate, regardless of an organisation’s size.

The year will not be defined by a new category of threats but will centre around the scale and automation behind threats already in play. This is the year cybersecurity will become an indispensable element of business continuity. Organisations that don’t adopt preventive measures will discover the widening gap between what attackers are capable of and the ineffectiveness of reactive security programs. 

Here’s a breakdown of the predictions and trends that can help organisations understand what the threat landscape will look like, so they can make wise investments to defend their cyber infrastructure.

AI-fueled attacks will accelerate

In 2026, AI-fueled attacks will transition decisively from being the exception to the norm. Threat actors are expected to fully leverage AI to enhance the speed, scope, and effectiveness of attacks, including social engineering, information operations, and malware development. They will also adopt agentic AI systems to streamline and scale attacks by automating steps across the attack lifecycle.

The biggest threat to organisations is acceleration. Organisations that do not prioritise and accelerate their proactive security programs to counter the speed of AI-fueled attacks are at heightened risk. The who, what, how, and why of an attack don’t matter when AI-fueled attacks start and end before a ticket is created. Proactive defense makes speed obsolete.

Cyber resilience will become a top priority

Cyber resilience will bubble up as a critical business objective. Global-scale outages, such as those experienced by Cloudflare, Amazon, Microsoft, and CrowdStrike, have highlighted just how damaging downtime is to both the bottom line and brand reputation. As a result, the focus will expand beyond avoiding an outage and ticking off compliance checkboxes to ensure operations can be restored before it goes viral on social media.

Boards will want to understand how quickly systems can be secured proactively and how quickly they can be recovered in the event of an attack; how well networks are segmented; and how prepared teams are to respond to a real attack. Cybersecurity will become a core element of operational resilience and organisational credibility, as AI adoption accelerates and expands the attack surface.

Unified platforms will strike down tool sprawl 

Organisations have lost patience with using numerous tools that cater to different aspects of security. Under pressure to cut tool sprawl and duplicated spend, CISOs will consolidate identity risk, posture, runtime, and network context - a shift only unified exposure management platforms can deliver. For instance, Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) will disappear as a standalone category in 2026.

Unified preventive security platforms like exposure management will also be supported by Gen AI because organisations must operate in the reality where skilled security professionals are scarce. In 2026, we will see more organisations move to simplify their stacks to get greater visibility, improved response speed, and prevent attacks before they can happen.

Non-Human Identities will become the number 1 cloud breach vector

Non-Human Identities (NHIs), now outnumbering humans by 80:1, will decisively become the number one cloud breach vector. The core problem is no longer misconfigurations or missing patches. There will be billions of unseen, over-permissioned machine identities that attackers (or autonomous agentic AI) will leverage for silent, undetectable lateral movement. CISOs will be forced to pivot massive spending toward permissions governance and large-scale cleanup, as machine-identity sprawl has rendered cloud environments truly unmanageable.

Organisations that thrive in 2026 won’t be the ones with the most tools or biggest security teams. They’ll be the ones that make a decisive shift to preventive security, supported by unified platforms. Platforms like exposure management consolidate identity, posture, runtime, and context into a single source of truth, offering visibility to close exposure gaps before they are exploited. The automation to move at the speed of AI, despite limited resources, will define resilient security practices in 2026. It is time to stop patching a broken and reactive strategy and start building one that prevents attacks from happening in the first place. Organisations must make 2026 the year they consolidate their stacks, prioritise exposure management and establish deterrence against the advantage of speed attackers think they have.

-By Rajnish Gupta, MD & Country Manager, Tenable India

(Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views or editorial position of Dataquest or CyberMedia.)