Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2026. Read them in this 18th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
By Ihab Shraim, CTO, CSC Global
As the new year approaches and cyber threat actors become more strategic, IT and security teams must prepare for increasingly targeted attacks that leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and other tools to evade detection.
To get ahead of these evolving risks – and adopt the right tools/practices to properly secure their organizations – security teams must familiarize themselves with how emerging threats are being deployed. The following predictions outline key trends that have the potential to re-define cybersecurity practices in 2026, changing the way security professionals detect and respond to increasingly persistent attacks.
1. AI Becomes a Persistent Adversary – Not Just a Tool
There are several types of AI attacks that bad actors are increasingly leveraging, including:
- Prompt injection
- Shadow AI & unapproved tools
- AI model theft & Intellectual Property (IP) leakage
- Data poison and malware injection
- Insecure AI-related APIs
- Impersonations and deepfakes
Bad actors will deploy long-lived AI agents that sit dormant inside working environments to learn the internal processes, people and security controls. This insider knowledge will allow the bad actors to launch targeted attacks, which will look like normal behavior, thus not triggering security alerts.
2. Identity Denial of Service (ID-DoS)
Bad actors will target Identity Access Management (IAM) systems by flooding them with authentication requests – locking out executives and leaders during critical events – which forces organizations to insecure emergency bypass.
3. “Data Integrity” Attacks Overtake “Data Theft”
Instead of aiming to steal data, bad actors are going to focus on altering internal data, such as AI model training data. Such actions will poison data engineering pipelines and lead to several outcomes that could be disastrous for the organization.
4. Third Party Supply Chain API Attacks
Organizations rely on APIs to exchange data with various trusted vendors, partners and customers. However, these APIs are a major target for bad actors, as breaching a third-party API means gaining access to all organizations that are exchanging data. Following the notable supply chain and third party attacks we’ve seen in 2025, we anticipate bad actors will continue to prioritize and advance their tactics here.
5. Corporate Espionage via Insider-Threat-as-a-Service (ITaS)
This is a modern form of corporate espionage where adversaries do not break into the organization, they buy from ex-hires who are unemployed and obtain sensitive data that will aid them in their potential breach. Alternatively, they buy access from someone who departed the organization, where the access is still active. This type of attack is very difficult to detect.
6. AI Powered Phishing and Brand Will Reach Record Levels
Phishing and brand attacks remain ubiquitous and will be on the rise in 2026, as bad actors are utilizing AI as a tool to launch very sophisticated and targeted attacks. Bad actors will increase their usage of communication platforms such as email, social media (LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, etc.), messaging apps (WhatsApp, iPhone & Google Messages, Signal, etc.) YouTube, search engines and more.
Moreover, bad actors are going to increasingly employ creative technologies such as voice cloning and deepfakes in their well-crafted surgical attacks.
7. Blended Attacks Will Become the Future Norm
With the rise in usage of AI and machine learning (ML), bad actors can launch several well-crafted attacks at the same time, which will paralyze organizations. For example, several attacks can be used as a decoy while data is being exfiltrated. Defending organizations will have to mature very fast to attend to such worrisome scenarios.
8. Organizational Security Tools will Become a Measurable Risk to Report on
Bad actors know that most organizations have too many security tools with poor integration, SOC personnel are experiencing “Alert Fatigue,” network segmentation is not meeting the corporate growth and acquisitions, and configuration management databases (CMDBs), which fuel the data source for many tools, have incomplete data. As such, we anticipate increased risk associated with security tools in 2026.
9. Cyber Extortion Without Malware
Attackers have found more ways to extort organizations without launching malware and will continue to advance these methods next year. Examples include exposing AI model bias, revealing weak security controls that take a long time to fix and disclosing proprietary resistive data.
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