Fortinet’s 2026 Cyberthreat Predictions: Cybercrime enters the age of industrialization

Fortinet has released its 2026 Cyberthreat Predictions Report, outlining a year in which cybercrime moves decisively into an industrialized phase. FortiGuard Labs notes that while innovation will continue, the defining theme of 2026 will be throughput—how quickly attackers and defenders can turn intelligence into action.

The report suggests that AI, automation, and a sophisticated cybercrime supply chain will allow intrusions to happen faster than ever. Attackers will focus less on creating new tools and more on scaling proven ones, using AI to run reconnaissance, accelerate breaches, parse stolen data, and even generate ransom negotiations. Autonomous agents on the dark web will begin managing entire portions of an attack with minimal human involvement. As a result, the capacity of threat actors will expand dramatically, shrinking the time between intrusion and impact from days to minutes.

FortiGuard Labs predicts that specialized AI agents will begin to assist cybercriminals across critical phases ...