Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2026. Read them in this 18th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
By Pete Luban, Field CISO at AttackIQ
Cybersecurity is entering a period of reckoning. The pace at which organizations have expanded their technology environments has outstripped the assumptions many security strategies were built on, creating growing tension between convenience, trust, and resilience. Businesses are more interconnected than ever, yet that connectivity has quietly expanded the attack surface far beyond what most teams can realistically see or control.
By 2026, those tensions will no longer sit in the background. Adversaries are exploiting shared dependencies, operational blind spots, and architectural shortcuts with increasing precision. The following predictions highlight where those fault lines will become most visible, and why security leaders will need to rethink how they measure risk, resilience, and readiness in a deeply interconnected threat landscape.
Supply chains will become the #1 access point for adversaries.
When the SolarWinds attack hit in 2020, few realized it would mark the start of a new era in cyber risk. Five years later, the ripple effects are everywhere. Attackers have learned a simple truth: why break into 1,000 companies when you can hit one trusted provider and reach them all?
In 2026, that playbook will reach its peak. Adversaries are turning their focus to the glue that holds modern business together, from software dependencies to service providers and integration platforms that connect entire ecosystems. One compromise in that chain can expose thousands of organizations overnight.
This will be the year companies either gain true visibility into their supply chains or keep learning the hard way what blind trust costs. Annual questionnaires won’t cut it anymore. The lesson will be simple: you can’t secure what you can’t see.
Cybercrime will go corporate.
Adversarial groups will operate more like legitimate enterprises than underground networks in 2026.
We’re already seeing Scattered Spider, RomCom, and the Lazarus Group establish corporate-level structures, complete with R&D cycles that treat each breach as a learning opportunity. They’re iterating, refining, and returning with better tactics. Add AI-powered reconnaissance and attack automation, and you’ve got adversaries who can adapt faster than most defenders can patch.
The scary part isn’t just their sophistication, it’s their efficiency. The organizations that keep up won’t necessarily be the ones spending the most, but the ones treating threat intelligence as a business function. The winners will learn from every incident, operationalize those lessons quickly, and out-innovate attackers at their own game.
In 2026, cybercrime becomes industrialized, and survival depends on learning faster than the enemy.
The industry’s obsession with “converged” platforms will finally break.
2026 is the year security leaders stop pretending one platform can do it all.
The AWS and Microsoft outages in late October 2025 exposed what many CISOs had quietly feared for years: when your single provider goes down, your entire operation flatlines.
We’ve hit the limit of convenience. Translation layers between tools that were never meant to talk to each other are creating more problems than they solve. The new reality is that best-of-breed architectures are back, not because they’re trendy but because they’re resilient.
In 2026, the market will correct itself. Vendors still chasing total platform domination will feel the impact when renewal conversations begin.
From assumptions to evidence
Across these predictions, one theme is clear: cybersecurity is becoming less about promises and more about proof. Assumed trust, over consolidated platforms, and static defenses are giving way to approaches grounded in visibility, validation, and adaptability. Organizations that continue to optimize for convenience alone will find themselves increasingly exposed as attackers move faster and operate with greater discipline.
In 2026, the advantage will belong to teams that learn quickly, test continuously, and design for failure rather than perfection. Security leaders who embrace this shift will be better positioned to withstand disruption and reduce surprise. Those who don’t may discover that the greatest risk was not a new threat, but outdated assumptions about how security actually works.
##
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Pete Luban is the Field CISO at AttackIQ, the leading vendor of Adversarial Exposure Validation (AEV) solutions and founding research partner of the MITRE Center for Threat-Informed Defense (CTID).
