Essential Guide: New Six For 2026: The Cyber Threats You Can’t Ignore

As we kick off 2026, cybersecurity is undergoing rapid transformation. In just the past year, we’ve seen a surge in attacks driven by advances in AI, automation, and the subsequent increased sophistication of social engineering techniques. This year promises new challenges and exploits.

Below are several predictions for the top threats in 2026, along with actionable recommendations to help strengthen defenses:

1. Exploits facilitated by agentic AI, shadow AI, and AI-driven social engineering methods. Almost everyone has experienced an AI-related attack this year, as documented in this post from OpenAI, this post describing IDesaster, and this post from Fortune on AI coding tools vulns. While stronger cloud defenses could have helped prevent many of these attacks, monitoring local networks would also have helped to detect shadow AI and address risks in agentic tool usage.

Recommendation: Start by improving hybrid network visibility and monitoring to help detect malicious activity early. One of the more important ways to defend against AI-related attacks is to add network detection and response (NDR) tools that can identify issues early on using a combination of deep packet analysis, network threat detection, and other mechanisms.

2. The rise of deepfakes and synthetic media as part of phishing campaigns. By generating ever more realistic content, these techniques and technologies can compromise various identity and authentication checks. Or, they can be used to manipulate insiders into establishing trust with adversaries and sharing sensitive or privileged data which could ultimately allow attackers to compromise systems or exfiltrate data. CrowdStrike reported that 75% of intrusions involved compromised identities or valid credentials rather than malware.

Recommendation: Implement stronger ZTNA-based policies and deploy digital identity verification along with AI-based content authenticity tools, such as passwordless and biometric authentication.

3. The escalation of ransomware powered by offensive AI orchestration and automation.CrowdStrike, in a survey last fall, said AI is increasingly used to accelerate and automate ransomware attacks, making them more difficult to respond to and neutralize. This orchestration is enabling more realistic phishing lures, helping to more quickly compromise systems, driving faster encryption and exfiltration of data, and sending out threats of public release of data in an accelerated and coordinated manner.

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Source: BleepingComputer