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Cyber security has always been a fast-moving space and that become even more evident as we approach 2026. We’re not just facing new threats, we’re seeing a complete shift in how risks are created, understood, and resolved. AI is no longer a future conversation. It’s already changing how attackers behave and how defenders must respond. The pace of cybercrime has reached industrial scale. And for many organisations, it’s becoming clear that the real test isn’t how well they spot threats, it’s how quickly and consistently they can act on them.
We’ve spent the past few months speaking with clients and partners to explore where the industry is really heading. We’ve analysed global threat intelligence, gathered front-line insight from technical leaders, and considered how these forces are already reshaping the decisions our clients are making today.
This report brings all of that together. It’s not exhaustive. But it’s a clear, honest look at the six major shifts we believe will define the cybersecurity landscape in 2026 and what we think organisations need to do about them.
1. AI is a Colleague Now, Start Managing It Like One.
Over the last few years, AI has steadily moved from the fringes of cyber defence into the heart of operations.
We’ve entered the age of agentic AI: autonomous, policy-driven systems that can make decisions, execute tasks, and, increasingly, operate across the digital estate without human intervention.
We explored this evolution in detail in our 2025 whitepaper, How is AI Changing Cyber Security?. It has become evident, AI has moved beyond where initial focus was during early adoption: AI for threat detection, basic automation, and augmentation of analyst workflows. What we’re seeing now is something more evolved and far more consequential.
Adversaries Have Made the Leap.
Threat actors are no longer experimenting. They’re actively using AI to:
- Generate phishing messages at scale
- Clone voices and impersonate senior leaders
- Design evasive malware
- Automate reconnaissance and lateral movement
Techniques like prompt injection, where attackers manipulate AI models to follow hidden, malicious instructions, are now a live concern. And they’re only becoming more sophisticated.
“I think the evolution of AI and the harnessing of the good vs bad will be a massive challenge, this will become increasingly prevalent in the malware space as the bad guys embrace the machine learning aspects and incorporate into their code, the cyber labs will have to keep 1 step ahead in detection and response, this is also likely to lead to smarter DLP controls as PII is likely to be leaked as LLMs are harvested.”
– Network Manager
The SOC is Changing Too.
On the defensive side, security teams are starting to hand off more to AI.
- SOC analysts are tasking AI agents to correlate alerts, summarise incidents, and propose next steps.
- Threat hunters are using natural language queries to uncover TTPs and anomalies.
- CISOs are turning to AI to model risk and simulate outcomes in real time.
This emerging model, often referred to as the “Agentic SOC” is less about AI as a tool, and more about AI as a teammate.
But while these capabilities promise speed and scale, they come with a significant risk that’s only just entering the conversation: AI sprawl. In our interview with cyber security professionals, it was raised multiple times as an underestimated industry threat and key concern.
An underestimated threat for 2026 is that “Both users going out and utilising unauthorised AI tools (and leaking data into them) and also users developing their own agents without any centralised control/oversight/guidance and the impact that can have on organisations, both in general and when the user leaves.”
— Technology Director
We Can’t Secure What We Can’t See.
Banning AI tools doesn’t work. It just pushes them off-grid, into personal accounts, shadow agents, and uncontrolled workflows.
What’s needed now is a new kind of visibility, not just into traffic or endpoints, but into AI behaviours, agent decisions, and automated actions across the estate.
In 2026, we believe organisations need to build agent governance frameworks. These should:
- Treat AI agents as first-class identities, with role-based access, credentials, and audit trails
- Monitor AI usage across environments, including personal devices and SaaS integrations
- Embed controls into developer and business workflows, allowing innovation without loss of control
We call this approach agentic identity management, and in our view, it’s not optional. If AI is going to make decisions inside your organisation, you need to know what it’s doing, who it’s acting as, and when it’s stepping outside the lines.
2. From Visibility to Resolution: Closing the Gap That’s Putting Businesses at Risk.
If there’s one conversation we’ve had on repeat this year, it’s this: “We know what’s vulnerable. We just can’t fix it fast enough.”
It’s a pattern we see across industries. Businesses have made significant investments in detection tools, from vulnerability scanners and endpoint detection to threat intelligence platforms. But while these tools have made it easier to see risk, they haven’t made it easier to close it.
The result? A growing backlog of unresolved issues. Vulnerabilities that sit open for weeks, sometimes months. And in a threat landscape where attackers are leveraging AI to exploit exposures faster than ever, this delay isn’t just inconvenient, it’s dangerous.
“Most of the industry is still underestimating the operational crisis created by remediation bottlenecks. We’ve spent a decade perfecting detection, yet the real risk now sits in the widening gap between what organisations can find and what they can actually fix. As AI-driven threat actors accelerate exploit development, this gap becomes a systemic liability. The overlooked challenge isn’t better visibility; it’s building the muscle to resolve exposures at scale without drowning security and IT teams in manual work.”
— Moty Cohen, Director of EMEA at Vicarius
What We Expect for 2026?
In 2026, we expect more organisations to recognise that discovery alone is no longer a win. The real measure of cyber security maturity will be how fast risk can be resolved and how efficiently teams can act under pressure.
This means going beyond patching. It means transforming the entire remediation pipeline:
- Who owns the risk?
- Who takes action?
- How is it prioritised and tracked?
- Can the business maintain momentum while resolution is underway?
And critically: how much of that process can be automated?
According to IBM’s 2025 Cost of a Data Breach report, organisations that used extensive automation saw breach lifecycles that were 80 days shorter on average. In 2026, we’ll see a growing focus on mean time to resolve as a key security metric. Automation won’t be a nice-to-have, it will be critical infrastructure. The future of security isn’t just about seeing threats. It’s about fixing them, fast.
3. Security as a Business Enabler, Not Just Another Cost.
The past few years have made one thing very clear: cyber security is not just a technical function. It’s a core part of how a business protects its reputation, delivers its services, and builds trust with customers.
“I think the fundamental shift is to look at cybersecurity as part of the value chain that protects the organisations investment in their customer experience, their market reputation and their revenue streams.”
— Head of Infrastructure
In sectors like finance, law, retail, healthcare and travel, that connection is more than symbolic. It’s measurable. Downtime costs money. Loss of trust costs customers. Security controls aren’t just compliance checkboxes, they’re continuity enablers.
Lessons From 2025 Cyber Attacks.
In 2025 alone, several high-profile UK attacks underscored just how significant the financial impact of a cyber incident can be:
- Marks & Spencer experienced a cyber-attack that disrupted online ordering and store services, leading to an estimated £300 million hit to annual profits. It was one of the most severe operational impacts ever seen in UK retail.
- Co-op Group faced major store disruptions after an April 2025 cyber-incident affecting over 2,300 convenience locations. The attack cost at least £206 million in revenue.
- Jaguar Land Rover was forced to halt production across UK factories due to a ransomware attack, with supply chain disruption affecting over 5,000 companies. Analysts estimated a staggering £1.9 billion economic cost to the UK.
These aren’t isolated incidents. They’re business-wide wake-up calls. In every case, cyber security wasn’t just about preventing data loss. It was about protecting revenue, safeguarding operations, and maintaining customer trust when it mattered most.
That’s why, in 2026, we expect a continued shift in mindset at the executive level. More boards and leadership teams are starting to view cyber security not as a cost centre, but as a core business function. It is one that enables continuity, resilience, and growth. The key question is no longer “What’s the cost of investing in security?” but rather “What’s the cost of not?”
And with that shift comes new expectations. Boards increasingly want security teams to speak their language, not in acronyms and alerts, but in terms of outcomes:
- What’s the financial or reputational impact of a vulnerability?
- How does our security posture stack up against competitors?
- Can we prove to customers, partners and regulators that we’re resilient?
At Secon, we’re helping our clients translate technical controls into business intelligence, so security can drive smarter, more strategic decisions.
4. Real-Time Assurance: The New Standard for Trust.
An insightful contribution to our predictions came from Quod Orbis:
“Attacks don’t wait for audits, quarterly reviews, or scheduled assessments. Organisations that have suffered breaches consistently show a common weakness, they don’t have a real-time view of their ecosystem. They don’t fully know which systems, devices, or third-party connections are live, which controls are functioning as intended, or where vulnerabilities are emerging. Without that visibility, they’re forced to make decisions in the dark, leaving both operations and customer trust exposed.
Security can no longer be a series of episodic activities. Boards, executives, and customers expect proof, not promises, that risk is being managed effectively. Organisations need to move to continuous monitoring and assurance, where they can see what’s happening across their entire environment at any given moment. This real-time insight allows them to spot issues before they escalate, understand the impact immediately, and act with confidence.”
– Gary Penolver, CTO at Quod Orbis
This gets to the heart of a huge issue in security operations: too many organisations are making decisions in the dark.
They’re relying on point-in-time assessments to manage real-time risk. They’re preparing quarterly reports based on yesterday’s data. And when an incident happens, they discover too late that a control wasn’t working, a third-party system was exposed, or a misconfiguration had been sitting unnoticed for months.
The future of cybersecurity is real-time, evidence-based assurance. That means:
- Continuous monitoring of controls
- Live visibility of assets, connections and vulnerabilities
- Proof, not just promises, that risk is being managed effectively
This is not just a compliance issue. It’s a trust issue. Customers, regulators and boards want to know that their data is safe, now, not last month. We’re helping our clients build that capability.
5. The Rise of Industrialised Cybercrime
If attackers once operated like gangs, in 2026 they operate more like tech companies. They’re organised, automated, and incredibly efficient.
What’s changing:
- Attacks are faster — AI is shortening time-to-exploit and expanding target scope
- Targets are shifting — from endpoints to hypervisors, virtualisation layers, and third-party supply chains
- Monetisation is smarter — adversaries are moving on-chain, using decentralised networks to distribute malware and cash out tokens
To keep up, defenders need to think like attackers:
- Automate detection and response
- Focus on resilience at the infrastructure level
- Build muscle memory through simulation and testing
This is not about more tools. It’s about sharper execution and smarter decisions under pressure.
6. A People, Talent and the Security Culture Reset.
Cybersecurity isn’t just changing how businesses work, it’s also changing who gets to work in cybersecurity.
As AI replaces some traditional analyst tasks, we risk losing something critical: pathways into the profession.
“Companies need to create pathways where new talent can be nurtured. In the current economic climate and with the emerging AI consuming entry level roles then businesses need to create succession plans to develop new talent.”
— Head of Infrastructure
At the same time, cultural attitudes need to change. Many organisations still treat human error as failure, punishing users for falling for phishing or missing a step. That approach creates fear, not security.
“I would like to see businesses, led by MSSPs, pivot their views on how we approach the human factors, particularly from “catch them out” to “supportive behaviour change”. The 3 strikes and your out mentality does not work and will destroy company cultures, and we know…. there is a better way.”
— Craig Marshall Brown, Head of Channel, Red Flags
We believe people are still the most important part of the cybersecurity equation. So in 2026, we’re helping our clients:
- Rebuild career paths into security especially for those displaced by automation
- Design awareness programmes that empower, not blame
- Foster a culture where learning is continuous and shared
Because security isn’t something we impose. It’s something we build, together.
Looking Ahead.
2026 will be a defining year. The pace is accelerating. The stakes are rising. And the tools we used even two years ago aren’t enough for the challenges ahead.
But with clarity, collaboration, and a commitment to real outcomes, not just noise, we believe organisations can face what’s coming with confidence.
At Secon, we’re not just watching these trends. We’re preparing our clients to lead through them. Because in an always-on world, the security that matters is the kind that’s always ready.