Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2026. Read them in this 18th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
By Roger Grimes, CISO Advisor at KnowBe4
For cybersecurity teams, 2026 won’t feel like business as usual. It’s the year that long-discussed threats finally show up in the real world. Autonomous AI attacks and early quantum decryption capability have been theoretical talking points for years. In 2026, they become live operational concerns.
The change is stark. We’re moving away from attacks that require humans to guide each step and toward systems that probe, adapt, and exploit at machine speed. At the same time, the cryptography that has protected the internet for decades is starting to show early signs of stress. Innovation is accelerating quickly, and policy and defensive programs are struggling to keep pace.
With that backdrop, here are my five critical predictions for the year ahead.
Prediction #1: AI will drive almost all cyberattacks by the end of 2026
By late 2026, the majority of hacking will be fully automated by AI. Attackers will rapidly adopt agentic AI tools that autonomously execute a cyber attack end-to-end. These models will continuously learn from failed attempts, making attacks faster, more pervasive, and more successful. Security teams without a sufficiently resilient AI defense will simply not be able to keep up.
Prediction #2: Quantum Q-Day occurs in 2026
Q-Day, the day when quantum computers first reach the necessary threshold to break today’s quantum-susceptible cryptography, is likely happening in 2026, and certainly far sooner than the U.S. government’s current prediction that it will happen in 2035 or later. The current prediction date ensures that most companies are not creating projects, spending money, or dedicating resources to prepare for it in time. This will create a Y2K-like panic if it happens next year. Regardless of when Q-Day occurs, hackers who have been harvesting encrypted data for years will be able to view and take advantage of it immediately once quantum decryption becomes commonly viable. The biggest targets will not only be government agencies and suppliers, but also companies that have a lot of critical confidential information, intellectual property, and patents.
Prediction #3: Regulatory slowdown widens cyber attack opportunities in 2026
In 2026, heightened fears of adversarial nation-state AI competitive advances will significantly stymie thoughtful and appropriate regulation of AI in the U.S. Regulators will be forced to take a backseat, with people’s valid concerns about AI abuses not getting appropriate consideration and regulation. A lack of regulation will allow faster AI innovation and adoption, but also likely lead to a faster realization of those feared AI abuses. It’s going to be tough to put the genie back in the bottle when that happens. As national AI regulation loses momentum, policy gaps will force individual states, companies, and regulatory organizations to engage in a wasteful and losing patchwork battle of weakened and often conflicting regulations. Society will get faster AI innovation, but will it be worth the cost?
Prediction #4: AI MCP hacks surge in 2026
In 2026, AI Model Context Protocols hacks will become a common, ever-present threat, with hundreds of individual exploitation announcements. Most of these attacks will be AI bots attacking AI tools and services without any direct human intervention required. After decades of vendors successfully minimizing silent “drive-by” attacks, they will see a sharp increase in new popularity as hackers use exploited AI to take over desktops, run malicious commands, and move through networks more quickly and quietly.
Prediction #5: AI becomes a powerful first line of defense in 2026
AI won’t just fuel attacks; it will also become a critical defense tool. Though it will forevermore be a fight of AI-enabled defenses against malicious AI, the good actors will eventually be successful in making a huge dent in cybercrime. Security teams and end users will increasingly rely on AI to spot threats faster, block more malicious activity in real time, and ultimately respond faster and more consistently to early signs of a cyberattack. These systems will learn from every attempt, improving continuously and helping organizations keep pace with rapidly evolving, AI-driven attacks. It’s the good actor’s AI bots against those of the bad actors, with the best algorithms winning. The good actors will have the better algorithms.
Taken together, these trends mark the start of a new phase in cybersecurity-one defined by the speed and autonomy of the algorithms on each side. Agentic AI will find and exploit weaknesses far faster than humans can respond, shrinking the defender’s reaction window to almost nothing.
Defenders can still win, but only if they modernize quickly: stronger cryptography, wider use of AI-driven detection, and far more automation in response. The gap between the best and worst algorithms will determine outcomes in 2026. The organizations that adapt now will be the ones that stay ahead.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Roger A. Grimes, CISO Advisor for KnowBe4, Inc., is the author of 15 books and over 1500 articles, specializing in host security and preventing hacker and malware attacks. Roger is a frequent speaker at national computer security conferences and his presentations are fast-paced and filled with useful facts and recommendations.
