Look into our cybersecurity crystal ball for the remainder of 2026, and also you most likely will not be shocked to see a well-known acronym seem: AI.
What’s new this yr is that — three years after ChatGPT first burst into public consciousness — CISOs are actually getting all the way down to the nitty-gritty of AI threats and alternatives like by no means earlier than. Excessive-level considerations about AI provide chain threat have given solution to granular discussions of audit-ready AI exercise logs, software-bill-of-materials (SBOM)-style mannequin attestation and Mannequin Context Protocol (MCP) server safety. Moreover, largely theoretical musings on AI brokers’ potential to remodel the safety operations heart (SOC) have now turn out to be sensible conversations about breaking defensive duties into agentic workloads.
You will discover all of this and extra within the following assortment of 2026 cybersecurity predictions, as shared with SearchSecurity by your fellow trade leaders.
1. AI-enabled social engineering campaigns will escalate
Assume that is your boss on Zoom? Assume once more. Many consultants predict 2026 would be the yr that typical enterprise customers study — some the arduous manner — that they will not belief their very own eyes and ears.
“We’re poised to see a brand new section of cyber-risk in 2026,” warned Andy Ulrich, CISO at Vonage, a part of Ericsson. That is as a result of attackers are utilizing generative AI and deepfakes to launch more and more convincing phishing assaults at scale, no matter native language and social engineering expertise.
Enterprises, Ulrich added, should double down on coaching customers to method each digital interplay — even with trusted colleagues — with wholesome skepticism. At Vonage, for instance, he has already begun together with AI-enabled social engineering situations in safety consciousness coaching to reveal what such assaults appear like in apply.
“It is turn out to be more and more vital for workers throughout departments to grasp what’s doable so they’re higher ready for the elevated stage of sophistication that AI will convey to the desk,” he stated.
2. Safety defenders will embrace agentic AI — or fall behind
The very best safety packages in 2026 will not essentially have the largest budgets, predicted Sergio Oliveira, director of improvement at DesignRush, a B2B design and advertising company listing platform. Relatively, they would be the ones utilizing agentic AI to its full potential, reasonably than merely treating it as a “shiny new toy.”
This yr, AI-enabled risk intelligence will turn out to be the linchpin of contemporary safety structure, Oliviera added. “Agentic AI will act as your analyst in actual time, ingesting and correlating alerts throughout identification, functions, cloud and endpoints sooner than any present human groups can do.”
To understand the expertise’s potential within the SOC, stated GitLab CISO Josh Lemos, defenders should scale up their agentic AI instrument chain in the identical manner adversaries break down assault phases into separate agentic workloads.
“AI brokers that leverage inside system assets — techniques that present deep visibility into supply code, infrastructure code, software program composition and dependencies — can break down defensive duties to establish and remediate vulnerabilities previous to adversarial exploitation,” Lemos stated.
AI may show particularly helpful for SMBs with restricted IT and safety workers, added Jason Ruger, CISO at PC maker Lenovo, particularly by augmenting their incident response capabilities. “That is one thing I am optimistic about,” he stated.
3. Boards and auditors will maintain CISOs accountable for AI safety
With nice energy comes nice accountability — and in 2026, AI is nothing if not highly effective. Some consultants imagine that government stakeholders will more and more maintain CISOs accountable for AI governance and safety.
“Anticipate boards to demand audit-ready logs for each AI motion, plus SBOM-style attestation for fashions and knowledge lineage,” stated Andrei Blaj, co-founder of medical imaging infrastructure supplier Medicai. “CISOs get ‘secure harbor’ provided that these controls are stay.”
To deal with such considerations, Blaj stated Medicai plans to deploy a digital personal cloud for AI, implement no-AI fallbacks and set up policy-as-code that allows directors to deactivate an AI agent with a single click on. “That is proof you’ll be able to present a regulator at 2 a.m.,” Blaj added.
Safety leaders must be ready to supply AI audit trails, mannequin threat assessments and incident response readiness plans, stated DesignRush’s Oliveira. “Regulators will count on CISOs to reveal not simply an funding in expertise however the institution of efficient governance processes,” he stated. “‘I did not know’ will not be a official protection.”
4. AI regulation will turn out to be a significant problem for distributors
Lenovo’s Ruger stated he expects organizations like his that supply AI providers will wrestle to cope with tightening rules, particularly on the privateness entrance.
“Within the subsequent yr or two, we are going to see, like with the EU AI Act, rules that say an organization that gives AI providers wants to watch what’s being requested of the LLM and what the LLM is outputting,” Ruger stated.
He added that, as a personal firm, Lenovo’s place is to depart the choice to its prospects. If a buyer desires full privateness, Lenovo won’t ever know what they ask the LLM or what the mannequin outputs. Ruger famous, nonetheless, that regulators do not essentially appear focused on permitting prospects the selection to choose out of getting suppliers monitor their use of LLMs.
5. MCP server threats would require new safety instruments and practices
MCP servers join AI fashions to third-party knowledge, instruments and providers, underpinning many vital enterprise AI use circumstances. However the explosion in MCP server recognition additionally brings a bunch of recent safety dangers, cautioned Dave Stapleton, chief belief officer at ProcessUnity, a third-party threat administration service supplier.
“There are millions of MCP servers now on the market — many barely used or monitored — and it is clear the ecosystem is transferring sooner than the safety practices round it,” Stapleton stated. Dangers embody weak entry controls, misconfigured permissions and software program provide chain points, in addition to novel AI threats corresponding to command injection, instrument poisoning and context spoofing.
“We have to begin treating MCP like a vital integration layer with actual guardrails, visibility and accountability baked in,” he stated. “As MCP adoption continues to develop, we are able to count on a rise in purpose-built safety instruments to assist enterprises establish and handle related dangers.”
Stapleton stated he notably hopes to see the emergence of instruments and providers that supply the next:
- MCP server code scanning.
- Expanded runtime monitoring of MCP server actions and connections.
- Integration of MCP servers with SIEM techniques and different safety knowledge aggregation instruments.
- MCP server gateways or proxies.
- MCP server threat assessments.
- The appliance of zero-trust ideas to MCP server expertise.
6. Safety capabilities will drive AI shopping for selections
Issues about AI threats and vulnerabilities will more and more affect B2B buying selections in 2026, predicted Docusign CISO Michael Adams, including that inbuilt safety and compliance capabilities will turn out to be the last word AI tooling differentiators.
“We’ll see a shift towards platforms that may scale innovation safely, pairing AI-driven effectivity with the identical rigor historically reserved for vital infrastructure,” Adams added. “Essentially the most profitable corporations will probably be those who deal with belief as a design precept, making certain each AI functionality meets enterprise-grade safety and compliance requirements.”
7. CISOs will tackle extra IT duties
Emilio Escobar, CISO at observability and safety platform vendor Datadog, predicted that cybersecurity leaders will more and more tackle conventional CIO features, enabling them to personal IT reasonably than simply report into IT.
“I see extra CISOs now being answerable for IT or having some form of operational infrastructure accountability,” stated Escobar, who beforehand held safety positions at Hulu and PlayStation. At Datadog, for instance, safety owns each IT and — as of a couple of yr and a half in the past — website reliability engineering.
“It simply made sense to turn out to be extra of a resiliency operate reasonably than reliability and safety being seen as two separate parts of threat,” Escobar stated.
8. Passwords will turn out to be much less frequent
Passwords stay a stubbornly mounted factor of contemporary work life. In lots of workplaces, they’re as unloved as they’re unavoidable. Whereas rumblings of going passwordless have been taking place for years, it’d lastly be the expertise’s time to shine.
Distant entry vendor TeamViewer has already taken the plunge, and the corporate’s CISO, Jan Bee, predicted that the advantages of passwordless will encourage extra corporations to make the change.
“We enforced many new measures in our identities,” Bee stated, noting that implementing passkeys to bind a person’s identification to a selected gadget has not solely helped cut back digital friction, however has additionally added a stage of comfort that in the first place appeared virtually too good to be true. “You do not have to recollect any password — there isn’t any password,” he stated.
To ease customers’ considerations about passwordless and passkey safety, Bee beneficial explaining that biometric knowledge is saved domestically on a tool, lowering the chance of identification theft in a breach. He additionally burdened the significance of addressing vulnerabilities corresponding to session theft as a secondary layer of protection.
Alissa Irei is senior website editor of Informa TechTarget’s SearchSecurity.
Phil Sweeney is an trade editor and author targeted on cybersecurity subjects.
