News brief: AI threats to shape 2026 cybersecurity

2023 was the year of AI hype. 2024 was the year of AI experimentation. 2025 was the year of AI hype correction. So, what will 2026 bring? Will the bubble burst -- or maybe deflate a little? Will AI ROI be realized?

In the cybersecurity realm, one of the big questions is how adversaries will use AI in their attacks. It's well known that AI enables threat actors to craft more realistic phishing attacks at a greater scale than ever, create deepfakes that impersonate legitimate employees and generate polymorphic malware that evades detection. Additionally, AI systems have vulnerabilities that bad actors exploit, for example, using prompt injection attacks.

Here's what some experts predict for offensive AI in 2026:

• "An agentic AI deployment will cause a public breach and lead to employee dismissals." Paddy Harrington, analyst at Forrester.
• "Offensive autonomous and agentic AI will emerge as a mainstream threat, with ...