In 2022, I released the 2023 Cybersecurity Anti-Predictions. They were a response to the litany of cybersecurity “thought leaders” who roll out annual predictions, which are extremely predictable.
However, since then, things have changed. Let’s revisit those predictions and make some new ones.
1. The Threat Landscape is Changing
2023: Not really.
2026: AI has entered the chat.
For 2023 I wrote, “everybody will experience the same quality and quantity of attacks that we did in 2022. The technologies, personnel, and practices may change causing us to perceive security differently. However, the actual threats we face will remain mostly the same.”
For the most part, this prediction remains the same. The threat landscape in 2026 will be about the same as 2025, 2024, 2023, and so on. Malware is still a threat. Credential theft remains the primary focus of attackers. And hackers still have the upper hand in every way.
However, when we look at AI systems, there are tremendous changes in the threat landscape. Perhaps the most interesting of these threats are data poisoning attacks. These specifically target AI systems and large language models (LLMs) to produce flawed or misleading output. In 2024, NIST released an advisory about this kind of attack based on a study they conducted titled Adversarial Machine Learning: A Taxonomy and Terminology of Attacks and Mitigations. This study is an interesting read. It is extremely thorough and even identifies some lingering cybersecurity challenges such as the dilemma of open versus closed systems.
The mitigating factor with this kind of treat is that it targets the AI platforms, and not the end users of those platforms. This limits the scope of this threat to a handful of AI platform providers, such as OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, etc. Furthermore, I could not to locate any confirmed instance of a data poisoning attack, however that does not mean it has not happened.
What is a larger issue are employees sending company data into AI platforms with no regard to the sensitivity of that data. This poses a complex challenge for organizations who want to enjoy the benefits of AI but need to protect sensitive data. It also poses a massive challenge for regulated systems under standards such as FedRAMP, CMMC, etc.
Fortunately, the industry is responding to this with ample technologies to manage, monitor, and control AI access as well as model context protocol (MCP) servers. Some examples of AI security providers in this space include Obsidian, Zenity, and Cyberhaven.
2. Executives Will Start Taking Security Seriously
2023: Probably not.
2026: No, and you can turn in your badge with security.
For 2023, I wrote, “Information security is an esoteric threat to executives. They know it exists, but they cannot quantify it with clear consequences. They know it is serious, but they do not know how to dimmish the threat. They know harm is possible, but it is easy to dismiss it as somebody else’s problem.”
Around 2016 or so, I noticed that many executives would tune out the moment cybersecurity was mentioned. I had CEOs once tell me he was sick of security slowing down his company. Here we are a decade later and this attitude has only become more prevalent. A recent example of this attitude happened in early 2025 when the Trump administration wiped out the entire Department of Homeland Security’s Cyber Safety Review board. The message was unambiguous: security is unimportant.
Executive indifference to security is a massive barrier for security startups. Leaders only care about security when it becomes a catastrophe. And all they really want is to find somebody to blame.
3. Companies will Commit to Stronger Security Defenses
2023: No, they will stick with “good enough” security
2026: Good enough is pretty good.
What I wrote for 2023 remains relevant. “It is not that executives do not care at all about security. They care up until the exact point they are on par with everybody else. This is the “good enough” approach to cybersecurity. Companies focus on doing what is an “industry standard” rather than doing what is necessary.”
Fortunately, “good enough” security is getting pretty good. One example of this was AWS’s recent announcement of their security agent product. This is a cool new AI technology that can scan an environment, locate vulnerabilities, and suggest improvements. While no AI agent will ever be as good as a skilled human penetration tester, for most organization, this agent is all they really need.
Another good example of how “good enough” has improved is Azure Sentinel. What used to be a mediocre SIEM and endpoint product, has evolved into a respectable security platform. Azure environments have Sentinel built-in, so Azure customers can access and use it easily.
4. We Will See a Megabreach that Cannot be Ignored
2023: We are already ignoring them.
2026: Megabreaches, what’s that?
I cannot even think of a megabreach from 2025 that had any significant impact. Apparently, Verizon had a massive leak in August, which they denied. Whatever. This is a classic “boy cried wolf” problem.
5. Security Staffing will See Improvements
2023: Not likely.
2026: Define “improvements.”
For 2023 I said, “Cybersecurity does not have a staffing problem; it has a staffing crappy jobs problem. There are ample people out there who want to pontificate about all their grand theories of security. What nobody wants to do is actually run anything.”
The most significant change for 2026 is that AI is changing who companies are hiring. AI can do what a lot of security analysts and engineers once did. It even can write NGINX config scripts, which is something nobody can successfully do. (Yes, that’s a nerdy joke.)
AI can also do a lot of the grunt work industry analysts do, as Richard Stiennon has proved with his IT Harvest platform.
None of this is good news for job seekers. While the cratering US economy accounts for a lot the downsizing, AI is only making it worse. AI will never entirely replace humans, but organizations are testing the limits of that. Teams are being shrunk, and the remaining staff is expected to fill the gaps with AI tools.
This adds up to a bleak outlook for security staffing in 2026.
6. Cloud Eats Security
However, the ultimate prediction for 2026 is that security is everywhere, integrated into everything. In 2021, I identified a growing cybersecurity trend: Cloud Eats Security (also called “platformization”.) Cloud providers, like AWS, Azure, and GCP, and SaaS providers like Salesforce or ServiceNow, were (are) slowly consuming many of the traditional security capabilities (firewall, intrusion detection, vulnerability management, web-application firewalls, etc.)
The impact of this trend is that security is now integrated into the platforms companies use. Companies do not need to purchase individual point-solutions which demand complex and expensive integration efforts. However, even the point solutions are getting on board with this trend, making their products much simpler to roll out and fully integrated into cloud and SaaS offerings.
This was one of the reasons why Google paid $32B for Wiz in 2025. Wiz is a powerful platform that simplifies a lot of cloud security functions. Cloud security providers, like Cloudflare, are also rolling out new capabilities practically everyday. And some of those are free, such as Cloudflare Tunnels which allows anybody to securely host anything on the Internet.
To help monitor all these integrated systems, there are emerging AI-powered security operations products from companies such as AI Strike, Torq, and Dropzone AI.
If all this AI stuff seems unstoppable, and wildly insecure, well, it is. However, there are promising emerging technologies such as Automated Moving Target Defense.
And the final piece of this trend is the rise of automated, integrated managed security providers who can keep an eye on everything. In early 2025, I worked on an MSSP analysis project. I was stunned at how many MSSPs had fully embraced automation, AI, and the cloud in their offerings. Unless your organization is gigantic or a government agency, there is no reason to do security internally. Hire an MSSP. There are a lot of great ones out there that can further simplify security.
Conclusion
For 2026, I predict cybersecurity will continue down the path of more integration, more platformization, and more simplicity. This will not stop attackers, but it does swing the odds of success toward the defenders.
As for the attackers, like the rest of us, they are going to use AI to do their dirty work. And like the rest of us, they are going to generate a lot of pictures of cats playing pickleball. Which means defenders do not need some whiz-bang quantum oscillating over-thruster to stop them. They merely need to make the most of the security tools they already have.
NOTE: The companies mentioned in this blog are for examples only. I received no compensation for mentioning them nor do I endorse them or their technologies.
