The six biggest security challenges coming in 2026

Cybersecurity challenges have continued to plague businesses over the course of 2025. Perhaps the most significant issues over the year include the Scattered Spider attacks on sectors such as retail and aviation, as well as the growing severity and widespread exploitation of software flaws.

In 2026, cyber-attacks will ramp up further, as ransomware operations evolve to become more sophisticated, regulation mandates resilience, and AI has an increasing impact on business operations.

Here are six major challenges businesses will face in 2026, with expert advice on what to do to prepare.

Resilience will be increasingly mandated

In 2025, cyber-attacks were on the national agenda. When the fallout from the Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) breach was so severe it impacted GDP, it became clear resilience would need to become a number one priority.

Multiple regulations now mandate that the area is baked into business operations, including the UK Cyber Resilience Bill, which is likely to come into place in 2026.

The JLR incident has shown the business community that a single incident can “wipe millions off share price” and severely damage their reputation, says Chris Dimitriadis, chief global strategy officer at ISACA.

What businesses should do to prepare:

For many organizations, cybersecurity and resilience is a compliance exercise. But it must evolve into “a core intentional cybersecurity capability”, says Dimitriadis. “In 2026, organizations will need to build the capacity to anticipate regulatory changes, understand their strategic implications, and embed them into long-term planning.”

Ransomware will remain a persistent threat

Despite being a threat for almost a decade, ransomware remains the go-to route for cyber attackers. Its continual evolution into ransomware as a service (RaaS) will “further simplify and accelerate” adversaries’ ability to attack organizations in 2026, according to Peter Jones, cybersecurity specialist at Conscia UK.

Attackers are evolving, with partnerships between ransomware gangs and initial access brokers, says Callum Mitchell, SOC technical lead at e2e-assure. This offers adversaries technical capability and communication agility to remain “a persistent threat that is difficult to track and prevent”, he warns.

What businesses should do to prepare:

Robust incident response and backups are a key part of limiting the damage, as well as keeping up with threat intelligence impacting your industry.

Meanwhile, experts advise increasing credential and identity security with multi-factor authentication (MFA) enforced across all login portals.

Phishing attacks will increasingly use AI including deepfake voice and video

Attackers are leveraging AI to create convincing email templates and fake websites “almost indistinguishable” from real ones – and without the common warning signs employees are trained to identify, says Mitchell.

AI is also being used in vishing attacks, with deepfakes making it easier to clone the voice of high-ranking company executives to trick victims.

In 2026, there will be more attacks utilizing realistic voice cloning and high-quality video deepfakes, says Joshua Walsh, information security practitioner and part of the cyber, data and information law specialist team at rradar. “An employee might receive a video call that looks and sounds like their CFO asking for a payment or confidential information,” he says. “Without a verification step, they may not spot that anything is off.”

What businesses should do to prepare:

While email protection currently provides organizations with ”a strong baseline” for prevention against common spam and phishing tactics, it should not be relied upon for complete coverage, says Mitchell.

Attackers frequently manage to bypass detection by using trusted services such as OneDrive to redirect to phishing links, he says. With this in mind, organizations should use a mix of email protection with security monitoring to gain visibility, in combination with staff training to minimize the risks.

For payments or requests that handle sensitive data, always verify using a known internal number or channel separate from the one that received the request, says Walsh. “Agree on simple verbal codes for high-risk actions.”

Supply chain security will be under the spotlight

Many organizations now rely heavily on hosted tools and managed services, but a breach of these can cascade through the supply chain.

Threat actors treat these relationships as a shortcut, says Walsh. “Compromising one supplier can give them a route into a long list of customers.”

The area will be under the spotlight in 2026 as regulation mandates that firms manage third party risk. New frameworks such as the EU Network and Information Systems 2 (NIS2) directive and the SEC cyber disclosure rules make boards “directly accountable for third-party risk management”, says Tracy Hannan-Jones, information security consulting director at UBDS Digital.

What businesses should do to prepare:

It’s important to perform due diligence on all your suppliers, ensuring security is baked into contracts.

Carry out supplier security checks and “request actual evidence”, rather than reassurances, says Walsh. “Keep a record of every integration, token and third-party connection; remove access that’s no longer needed; and plan for what you would do if a key supplier went offline or was breached.”

Firms will struggle to control agentic AI

Agentic AI has been making waves in 2025 and this is set to continue in 2026.

There is a current shift towards agentic AI that can take real-world actions, such as adjusting configurations, interacting with APIs, booking services and initiating financial tasks. This can increase efficiency, but it can also lead to unsafe decisions made at speed, says rradar’s Walsh.

An agent told to "optimize performance" might disable logging or bypass authentication because it views security controls as delays, he suggests.

Prompt injection is a hidden issue to look out for, he adds. “If a threat actor slips hidden instructions into data that the agent consumes, they can make it run actions on internal systems without anyone realising.”

What businesses should do to prepare:

Visibility is key, alongside controls to ensure you are managing the area.

Treat AI agents like a new starter, Walsh advises. “Keep access tight and give them low-risk tasks until you understand their behaviour. Test extensively in non-production environments before letting them near live systems.”

The vulnerability backlog will increase

Attackers are exploiting vulnerabilities in software at rapid speed and there’s no reason to believe this will slow down in 2026. The time between a vulnerability being made public and threat actors attempting to use it has “shortened significantly”, Walsh points out.

In a growing number of cases, probing starts on the same day as disclosure. “Automated scanners and exploitation tooling mean threat actors can react quickly, which leaves IT teams carrying growing backlogs of unpatched issues, especially on systems that need maintenance windows or have complex dependencies,” Walsh warns.

What businesses should do to prepare:

Avoid chasing every CVE and focus on the vulnerabilities being actively exploited, as well as those on internet-facing or business-critical systems, says Walsh. “Utilize automated patching where possible. In most cases, the risk of an update causing a minor fault is far lower than leaving a known exploited vulnerability open.”