The webinar “Powerful Predictions about Cyber Threats & Resilience in 2026” brought together some of the most important forecasts shaping security in the year ahead. If you missed it, the full…
Publish Date: 2026-01-13 03:15:00
Source Domain: www.linkedin.com
Using an unordered list, summarize the following article with between 4 and 8 key points.
Transcript
Transcript
Transcript
Before we announce the top three winners of dance forecasts, let’s remind ourselves that there were many great competitors. And here are the logos of the 26 finalists, the best of many dozen cyber forecast reports for this year. From Akamai to Forrester, from Security Scorecard to 0 Fox, all these firms demonstrated great thought leadership. And so after we’ve announced the top three best reports, we’ll summarize the top teams from all of these leading cybersecurity. Terms. So let’s start with our top three. Who is our top three IV. The top three is watch Guard and watch Guard is a is famous for the network firewalls for small businesses, unified threat management, secure Wi-Fi, multi factor authentication, endpoint protection. So Dan, tell us what do they predict? Yeah, So before we dive into the actual predictions and the list is here, I I say watch guard always does a great job with their, but it’s a lot of energy into this. They have a lot of great videos. And and one of the things we didn’t mention earlier about these reports, it’s not just the predictions. It’s the detail, it’s the research, it’s the links, it’s the references, you know, the reference examples that you can go to the references and you can read about them. But it’s also the formats, it’s interactive, it’s YouTube videos, you know, a wide variety of ways that you can access this material. And Watchguard does a great job. They’re always, they have a very funny approach to things. Some years this year, not so funny, but they were really good. First, they predict crypto ransomware will go extinct. So interesting one there with the tax moving. Towards data theft and extortion rather than just encryption. I just rewatched their video on this topic. They already said 4/5 of the ransomware attacks in 2025 did not encrypt the data. They just go right right to the extortion. That’s pretty bold prediction. OS open source software uses AI for supply chain protection. There’s been a lot of OS attacks, but using AI could help us catch risks earlier. So that’s one of the things they predict. Third, regulatory mandates like CRA will drive secure by design practices, making security part of development from the start. We’ve been talking about that building security is from the beginning for many years. So again, a pretty bold. Addiction there which they’re known for 4th ZTN A0 trust networks will start replacing traditional VPN you see that some other people say VPN will just go away altogether putting identity at the center of access control so identity you know that that theme keeps coming back up and then finally AI literacy will become a core cybersecurity skill essential for all security professionals to understand risk and defense so it’s no longer just an optional help you do your. Have a little bit better, but really utilizing AI will become a core skill for cyber security professionals. I highly agree then I think we are we all need to be good at AI prompting and knowing how to work our way with AI, especially with our time now. So for #2 we have Google Cloud or Mandiant. They are famous for their incident response, threat intelligence, breach investigations, cloud security consulting, security validation. And assessments. So what do they have for us then? Yeah, thanks Coby. And and they really have some great videos too. So I they dive in. There’s a full video from many of their VP’s and senior executives on these different predictions. And then both by region they did they break it down by different topic of starting off their key messages that AI is transforming both attacks and defense adversaries are fully embracing AI. Using techniques like prompt injection to manipulate systems and take control in ways that are much harder to detect. At the same time autonomous AI agents are beginning to act like non human insiders executing complex multi step operations across enterprise systems. So again, AI top of the list. After Defenders, AI is also a powerful force multiplier Mandy and predicts the rise of supercharged security analysts. There’s a new new concept here, Supercharged Security Analysts, where AI helps with correlating alerts, generating case summaries, and mapping attacks to frameworks. This lets human analysts respond faster, with more insights and focus on strategic decisions rather than manual data crunching. One final warning, enterprise virtualization remains under monitored. While teams often focus on endpoints and applications like core virtualized infrastructure, the backbone for most enterprise workloads is still a gap attackers can exploit. So seeing more and more threats around that. So with that Ivy, I think we’re ready for the top report. Trend Micro, the Trend Micro is a company that is famous for their endpoint and server security, cloud workload protection, e-mail security, ransomware defense and threat intelligence research. So that that’s a lot. And then I’m very curious, I’m sure a lot of our audience are used why what they do predict. Things that really sets Trend Micro apart. It wasn’t really even close this year. Other years have gotten close in a Google cloud jumped them I think a couple of years back. The reality is they’re 39 page report. It’s a it’s a very professional PDF. They have references for everything. So they link the things that these aren’t people pulling out ideas out of the year and kind of making stuff up. Not that other vendors are doing that either, but they have more references than anybody else. They have more formats, they have interactive formats You can you can look at this a wide variety of. Of ways and it really sets them apart actually they connect the dots between attack behavior technology shift and real world risk what really makes it valuable is that it combines multiple formats written analysis data-driven insights interactive graphics which helps translate abstract predictions into something security can actually act on so they have action steps and again I encourage you we’re not going to try and summarize all of this in today’s webinar but encourage you to go and. Is it Trend Micro? And they do a great job every year. I know they put 10s of thousands, maybe even more, hundreds of thousands into this report. So it’s a it’s a great report. Throughout this webinar, you’ll notice that many of the themes we discussed, especially AI identity, supply chain, risk, short repeatedly across industry. Trend Micro does an excellent job of capturing those themes early and explaining why they matter in 2026 and what’s different between 2026 and 2025. So how things are changing. So when we reference predictions today, just know that they’re grounded in broad. Industry consensus anchored by one of the strongest reports available going into 2026, so highly encourage you to go to the link. Read the Trend Micro report. That’s really, you know, a lot to digest. I’m sure they’re gonna, you know, look back and review. The top ten that we’ve just discussed are done. So now that we’ve celebrated a top ports, let’s move on to the top themes. So then these are the most powerful and the most popular predictions from all the dozens that you’ve reviewed. OK, so Kobe will be showing us the graphic that summarizes the top 10 / 2 Kobe. Yes, I V So what we have here is the top 10 predictions for dance articles will make this slide along with all the other slides, of course, available on our LinkedIn page immediately after this webinar. And let’s jump straight into the number one forecast from all those reports you’ve heard, the number one prediction from all the dozens of reports you analyzed. Should it be surprised to anyone since most of the reports mentioned it? So of course, that is the rise of agentic AI. Then take it away. Yeah, that’s what I mentioned also. You know, you guys did a great job, really, really encouraged by all the great work that Cyber Rescue Alliance has done. Putting this together, we actually looked at a total of over 125 to 150 different reports are included in these roll up trends. It’s these top 26 reports, but it’s also really hundreds of vendors are predicting these same things. And that’s why I think it’s so important that we really take these seriously and understand what is what is being said here, autonomous AI agents. Execute multi step operations, interact with real systems, turning compromised agents into powerful independent attack vectors. So this is a shift from AI assisting attackers to AI acting on their behalf. Autonomous agents will execute those operations, interact with systems, and they shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. So everyone should be preparing now for when that prediction comes true. Some people would argue this is already happening, but more and more autonomy, I think, you know, going further with this. Theme talking about frontline agents, as we saw in several of those top 10 reports that, you know, supercharged frontline agents, there’s even discussion around, I’m not going to get into that today. Is that going to take away jobs from entry level cybersecurity professionals? But most organizations say that in reality, there’s still literally hundreds of thousands, if not millions of vacancies worldwide for cybersecurity professionals and security professionals overall, so that there’s still a huge need for technology. Expertise, so it’s not taking away the human, it’s it, it’s augmenting and helping. But in many cases, these are autonomous actions that are being taken by these AI agents. So with that, please bring us up #2 Ivy. Thanks, Dan. Another AI powered prediction is at #2 so it’s deep fake services and hyper personalized AI. And it will revolutionize business e-mail compromise and extortion scams. Making deception nearly impossible to detect. So, Dan, can you tell us more about this? Yeah. So, I mean, you know, we talk about deep fakes. It’s voice, it’s video. It’s. And many of you out there, I’m sure have seen examples of this are, are all over the the world pretending to be your boss, actually looking like your boss, telling you to do things. Pretending to be your bank or pretending to be some organization seeing more emails where it it’s traditional fishing, but it could also be Facebook Marketplace. It could be. You know where where you’re buying your things online, all kinds of extortion scams that are looking more and more and say, well, damn, we’ve been seeing this fishing’s been, you know, for the last decade, 2 decades, but it’s highly, highly sophisticated. It’s much better than it ever was to the point where many people would say it’s very hard to tell a fake from the real thing. And as that plays that I do a lot with governments, you know, fake ID, fake drivers licenses, fake benefits. We talked. Earlier about fraud, you know, the, the, the, the growing amount of ability to take not just one piece of identity, but multiple different pieces of information, grab that off the web, put it together and then commit fraud to the tune of millions and billions of dollars. I mean, so this is a huge, huge trend and and utilizing all that data off the Internet, what are personas are looking at Ivy and Kobe and Dan and saying what do we know about them? How can we pretend to be them to the bank or to the government? Agency or to someone out there to commit fraud and that is growing and it’s becoming very, very, very powerful. I definitely agree with you on on that, Dan. It’s really getting hard now to detect which is true or not. I mean, I do believe that there’s a huge gap on towards, you know, really. Finding out what to believe in and what is not true, right. I’m sure you you you’ve had so many encounter on that one, but do you want to add more or shall we get into the the third one, the post quantum quantum. You know, we’ve been hearing about this for a while. I just emphasized what I said earlier. A number of organizations are saying this showed up in literally dozens and dozens of reports across the 125 top reports that it’s. It it now needs to be on your agenda for 2026. It can’t be like, ohh, yeah, we’ll get to that in a year or two. Or, you know, it’s always kind of, you know, one of those ones that, you know, kind of like cleaning your basement in my house. You know, we’ll get to that in a year. We’ll get to that next year. We’ll get to that next Christmas. No, you need to take care of this right now. Post quantum is a hot topic. It’s growing harvest now, decrypt later strategies, sophisticated adversaries. It’s showing up as a top trend in most reports. So. You’ve gotta again, dive into the detail in these reports, but you’ve got to have a project around quantum computing and security in your organization for 26. It needs to be in there. Great, thank you for that then. So if the first set showed us how AI accelerates attacks, this next, this next group shows what happens when automation access and scale collide. So for prediction #4 we have ransomware becomes fully automated. As Dan has mentioned a while ago, ransomware shift from manual campaigns to AI driven operations where they require minimal human intervention and systems can exploit and extort on their own. Prioritizing data test and leverage over simple encryption prediction #5 is AI insider threats where the new insider isn’t always human. It could be the autonomous AI agent with privileged access that can become vulnerable if they’re not monitored or constrained. So that do you have number six? Yeah. Conversions of APT systems, advanced persistent threat and cyber crime. They should state actors and criminal gangs will share infrastructure and payload. Blurring attribution, accelerating the scale of global cyber operations. This is a really interesting one when you start talking about, there’s a number of reports that actually dive in a little bit more detail around, you know, will there be offensive security done by companies or is that just going to be nation states? How do you respond? Different predictions around that, But that all kind of fits into this thing of AI is letting people know about the vulnerabilities quicker and they’re utilizing that to actually exploit. And commit cybercrime faster than ever before.
