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Cybersecurity in 2026 is no longer about what’s coming next, but about managing what’s already here. AI-driven attacks, stricter global regulations, supply chain exposure – here's how to stay ahead when compromise is no longer hypothetical.

It’s 8 a.m. Your company’s email system goes down.

Minutes later, a poisoned update floods your development pipeline, silently embedding malware into every product your team touches.

AI-generated phishing emails land in employees’ inboxes, flawlessly mimicking the voices of their managers.

Customer data, vendor credentials, and financial records are exposed before anyone even realizes an attack has begun.

This is no longer science fiction.

Many of the trends we predicted in 2025 - large breaches, ransomware waves, rising supply-chain compromises, and AI-enabled cyber attacks have fully materialized. 

What was once the future of cybercrime is now simply the present. Here’s what that means as we step into 2026.

In 2026, cybersecurity regulations are moving toward greater global convergence and stricter enforcement. 

Key developments include the EU’s NIS2 Directive for critical entities and the EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), which mandates security for products with digital elements and reporting obligations starting September 11, 2026. 

Artificial intelligence has become both the sword and the shield.

Threat actors now rely on AI to scale phishing operations, localize social engineering campaigns at speed, evade detection by generating polymorphic malware, and automate reconnaissance across massive attack surfaces. 

Anthropic’s article on the first AI-orchestrated campaign says that this marks a pivotal shift in cybersecurity, highlighting the emergence of AI agents – systems that can be run autonomously for long periods of time and that complete complex tasks largely independent of human intervention.

Deepfakes, voice cloning, and identity fraud also became mainstream tools for deception, with deepfakes in particular growing increasingly difficult to detect.

The result is what many organizations now recognize as a crisis of authenticity - verifying identity, intent, and digital trust has never been harder.

At the same time, a new risk category has emerged: attacks targeting AI systems themselves. Data and model poisoning, prompt injection, model extraction, and compromised AI pipelines are becoming real concerns. 

Protecting AI systems is now inseparable from protecting core infrastructure.

On the defensive side, organizations are increasingly deploying AI-powered security operations platforms and agentic SOC tooling to process behavioral alerts, correlate signals, and accelerate incident response. 

AI now plays a central role in threat detection, analysis, and automated containment, helping defenders simply keep up with the scale of modern attack activity.

We’re not done with AI quite yet.

AI-assisted development has transformed how software is built. Natural-language prompts replace detailed requirements. Entire features are generated instantly. Deployment cycles have collapsed from weeks into hours.

The productivity gains are enormous, but so is the risk. Wiz showed that almost 20% of vibe coded apps include serious vulnerabilities.

In 2026, the challenge is clear: organizations must preserve development speed without abandoning safety. 

Automated code security analysis, dependency scanning, AI-generated testing, and policy-based delivery guardrails are becoming mandatory to keep pace with modern development practices.

Of all cyber threats in 2025, phishing remained the dominant force.

High-profile attacks, such as the Scattered Spider compromise of Marks & Spencer and the Co-Op incident, highlighted the enormous financial impact of credential-focused campaigns, with losses estimated at £300M and £270-440M, respectively. 

What changed in 2025?

Phishing became more sophisticated and precise:

In 2026, defending against phishing means putting identity security at the center of operational defense:

Identity has become the new firewall, the first line of defense in a landscape where trust is constantly under attack.

Cue Shai-Hulud 2.0 as a prominent recent example.

Shai-Hulud 2.0 demonstrated how upstream compromise of developer tooling can silently infect thousands of downstream projects, without attackers targeting the end organizations at all. 

By poisoning packages that developers trusted and pulled directly into production, the attack bypassed perimeter defenses entirely.

We can almost predict the headlines for 2026.

Security maturity is now measured not only by how well you protect your own assets, but by how deeply you understand and manage your entire vendor ecosystem, including your shadow IT. 

Dependencies are no longer just code libraries - they are hosted platforms, analytics services, support tools, collaboration APIs, and managed cloud infrastructure.

In 2026, supply-chain security is operational security:

These steps now define baseline resilience.

The mindset around cybersecurity has changed.

While prevention remains critical, leadership teams now actively assume that compromise is possible, even likely, and design accordingly.

The breaches in recent years showed that many attacks operate without malware, relying instead on stolen credentials, social engineering, abused APIs, or compromised vendors. These techniques bypass traditional perimeter defenses and signature-based detection tools entirely.

In response, organizations should be prioritizing:

The focus is shifting from “How do we prevent every attack?” to “How quickly can we detect, contain, and recover?”

With ransomware-as-a-service still looming large and threat actors broadening their scope, robust resilience and incident response capabilities are becoming the new benchmark of cybersecurity maturity. 

In this new environment, cybersecurity requires more than just point solutions or compliance checklists.

Organizations need a holistic security partner - one that understands modern application ecosystems, AI exposure, supply-chain complexity, and operational resilience.

That’s why Infinum’s emerging cybersecurity offering covers a wide-range of cybersecurity services. Here’s how we can help:

As we step into 2026, organizations need cybersecurity that is practical, adaptive, and deeply integrated with how modern products are built and operated.

If you need help to design, deploy, and operate secure digital products that can stand strong not only today, but through whatever innovations tomorrow brings – contact our experienced team.