Cybersecurity Predictions 2026: Expert Insights on the Trends Shaping the Year Ahead

In July 2025, city officials in St. Paul, Minnesota took a step few ever expect to take. They shut down city systems.

A ransomware attack forced the city’s IT team to take networks offline. Digital services stopped working, including police laptops, library computers, and online payments.  

City leaders declared a state of emergency and brought in outside help to limit the damage.

The attack did more than disrupt IT. It affected daily city operations and quickly became a public safety issue.

This incident captures a broader shift in cybersecurity. Modern cyberattacks are no longer isolated technical events. They spread fast, cross organizational boundaries, and create real-world consequences for businesses, governments, and communities.

That reality defines the cybersecurity outlook for 2026. The coming year will be shaped by how well organizations prepare to contain attacks, limit disruption, and stay operational when systems fail.

To understand what lies ahead, we asked Illumio cybersecurity experts to share their predictions for 2026, including how resilience, Zero Trust, AI, and accountability will shape security strategy.

Cyber resilience will be the baseline, not the goal

For years, resilience was treated as a secondary concern to prevention. In 2026, experts see it becoming cybersecurity’s starting point.

Organizations now accept that breaches will happen. What matters is how well teams respond and how small incidents remain.  

Trevor Dearing, director of critical infrastructure at Illumio, believes this shift will redefine how security teams — and their boards — measure success.

“Resilience has long been treated as a nice-to-have within cybersecurity rather than a fundamental business outcome,” he said. “That will change next year. Resilience will become an expectation for business.”

This also means more organizations will invest in post-incident learning, explained Raghu Nandakumara, VP of industry strategy at Illumio.  

After-action reviews will become standard. Dedicated teams will study what happened, test defenses, and improve systems before the next attack.

Resilience will become inseparable from business planning.

“Boards will assess cyber risk in financial and operational terms,” he said, “shifting the question from ‘Are we secure?’ to ‘What happens when we’re not?’”

Going forward, resilience will change from avoiding failure to proving the business can continue operating under pressure.

Supply chains become the front line of cyber risk

Supply chains have become one of the most attractive targets for attackers.

In 2025, several high-profile supply chain incidents affected organizations such as auto giant Jaguar Land Rover, UK retailers Harrods and Marks & Spencer (M&S), and Japanese beer manufacturer Asahi.

Cyber experts expect this pattern to intensify in 2026.

By compromising a single trusted provider, attackers can disrupt dozens of organizations at once. Trevor Dearing warns that many businesses still rely too much on trust without enough verification.

“Attackers don’t need to go through the front door when a supplier has the keys,” Dearing said.

Michael Adjei, director of systems engineering at Illumio, expects attackers to shift their focus away from software vendors and toward service providers.

“When companies outsource core services, they create single points of failure that attackers can exploit,” Adjei said. “Attackers recognize this and will adjust their tactics accordingly for maximum gain.”

In 2026, this will force organizations to rethink how they manage third-party access.

Shared visibility, clear accountability, and continuous verification will replace assumption-based trust.

AI will expand the attack surface faster than security can adapt

AI will continue to change cybersecurity in 2026, but it will also introduce new risks.

As agentic AI becomes more common, automated systems will connect to applications, APIs, and other agents at a much larger scale. Many security teams will struggle to keep up with this growth.

“The rapid adoption of agentic AI will lead to many more automated connections between agents, systems, and applications,” Adjei said. “As these connections grow, API sprawl will increase, security teams will struggle to keep up, and blind spots will spread across digital environments.”

Attackers will take advantage of AI systems that act on behalf of people. When agents use credentials and tokens to access systems, it becomes harder to tell who or what is really behind an action.

“Agents will act on behalf of people, using usernames, passwords, and tokens to log in to systems automatically,” Adjei said.

On the defensive side, AI will also reshape how security teams work. Nandakumara expects security operations centers (SOCs) to rely more on AI assistance to reduce noise and improve focus.

“AI copilots will be embedded throughout detection and response workflows to spot anomalies, fill data gaps, and recommend next actions,” Nandakumara said.

In 2026, the challenge will be using AI to improve speed and clarity without introducing new risks that teams cannot see or control.

Zero Trust will become invisible infrastructure

In 2026, Zero Trust becomes standard practice.

John Kindervag, creator of Zero Trust and chief evangelist at Illumio, believes the approach will fade into the background as it becomes built in by default.

“In 2026, Zero Trust won’t be a strategy. It will be the standard,” Kindervag said.

Least-privilege access, segmentation by design, and continuous verification will be part of modern architectures. These controls will no longer be optional or open for debate.

Nandakumara agrees that Zero Trust is reaching maturity.

“What was once seen as aspirational is now essential for operational resilience,” Nandakumara said.

As Zero Trust becomes expected, organizations will focus less on labels and more on outcomes such as breach containment, cyber resilience, and operational continuity.

Accountability will shift to the boardroom

In 2026, ownership of cyber risk will change.

Kindervag expects accountability to move beyond the security team.

“For too long, CISOs have taken the fall for breaches they could not prevent because they lacked authority, resources, or budget,” Kindervag said.

As cyber incidents create real business impact, CEOs and boards will face greater scrutiny. Executive pay and performance metrics will increasingly reflect cybersecurity outcomes.

This shift will lead to clearer decisions about funding, priorities, and accepted risk. Cybersecurity will no longer be something leaders can delegate without consequence.

Regulation lags while industry moves first

Compliance regulations will continue to shape cybersecurity in 2026, but they will not solve the problem on their own.

Dearing expects more organizations to recognize that compliance does not equal safety.

“There’s a mistaken belief that having more laws or guidelines in place will automatically make organizations safer,” he said.

As regulations struggle to keep up with fast-moving threats, industries will work together more closely. Organizations will share threat intelligence, support one another during incidents, and raise the bar for resilience.

This collaboration will matter most in sectors like energy, utilities, transportation, and retail, where tight margins and aging systems increase cyber risk.

What these predictions mean for 2026

These predictions point to cybersecurity in 2026 being defined by realism.

Organizations that succeed will accept breach reality, invest in resilience and containment, and treat cyber risk as a core business issue. The goal is not to stop every attack but to limit damage, recover quickly, and keep critical services running.

Security leaders who prepare for that future now will be better equipped to face whatever comes next.

Prepare for 2026 with a security strategy built for disruption. Explore how Illumio helps organizations contain breaches, strengthen Zero Trust, and stay resilient when attacks occur.