What’s rising in 2026
- AI-driven social engineering and deepfakes. Expect convincing voice/video lures, contextual spear-phish, and help-desk fraud aimed at MFA resets and SSO portals.
- Identity as the primary attack surface. Token theft, session hijacking, legacy auth, and over-privileged service accounts will remain the easiest path to data.
- SaaS sprawl and shadow AI. Unvetted apps and gen-AI tools will move data outside approved boundaries, complicating retention, DLP, and discovery.
- Ransomware + data extortion 2.0. Attackers target backups and identity providers first, then pressure with regulatory and customer notifications.
- Regulatory pressure with real teeth. SEC cyber disclosures, expanding state privacy laws, healthcare enforcement, and customer audits will demand provable controls.
- Third-party concentration risk. A handful of cloud, MSP, and identity vendors represent outsized blast radius; supplier incidents will be your incidents.
- Email and collaboration threats shift left. QR phishing, OAuth consent abuse, and malicious add-ins will outpace traditional filters.
- Operational technology and connected devices. “Office IT” and clinical/field devices are converging; patching and segmentation matter more.
- Cyber insurance gets tougher. Underwriters will ask for evidence of MFA, EDR, backups, and incident runbooks—not just policies.
- Crypto-agility and key hygiene. Post-quantum planning will appear in RFPs; 2026 is about inventory, rotation discipline, and crypto-agile roadmaps.
How to prepare—practical moves that pay off
- Make MFA phish-resistant and default to passkeys. Enforce FIDO2/hardware keys for admins and high-risk users. Kill legacy/basic auth everywhere.
- Lock down Conditional Access and least privilege. Baselines for device health, location, and risk; just-in-time elevation for admins; quarterly access reviews with owner sign-off.
- Harden service accounts and automations. Remove standing privileges, rotate secrets, prefer managed identities, and monitor OAuth grants.
- Discover and govern SaaS/AI use. Turn on SaaS discovery, review risky OAuth apps, enforce DLP for uploads/chats, and publish approved AI tools with usage guardrails.
- Backups that actually restore. Immutable copies, offline separation, routine restore drills, and documented RTO/RPO by system. Prove it with logs and screenshots.
- EDR/XDR with human eyes. Consolidate tooling, wire to a 24×7 MDR, and script first-hour actions. Tabletop your top three scenarios quarterly.
- Email domain defense. Enforce SPF/DKIM/DMARC (reject), brand indicators, and user-reporting that routes straight into triage playbooks.
- Continuous control monitoring (CCM). Automate evidence for encryption, retention, access reviews, backups, and incident response. Build an “evidence pack” you can export in minutes.
- Third-party risk at speed. Maintain a living vendor inventory, require MFA/EDR/backup attestations, and pre-authorize incident communication paths.
- Runbooks mapped to regulations. Tie each step to HIPAA/SOC 2/SEC criteria so every action creates proof (tickets, logs, approvals). Practice, tune, repeat.
Signals you’re on track
- Admins use hardware-backed MFA, not SMS.
- Conditional Access blocks unhealthy devices by default.
- Quarterly access reviews close out with owner sign-off and artifacts.
- Restore tests complete within target RTOs and are documented.
- Your evidence pack exports in under 10 minutes for audits, insurers, or customers.
- Tabletop exercises surface issues you fix within a sprint.
From reactive to ready
One of our clients made this shift by standardizing identity controls, retiring legacy auth, moving to passkeys for admins, discovering shadow SaaS, and turning their incident playbooks into click-ready runbooks mapped to SOC 2 and HIPAA. The payoff: faster triage, calmer audits, and real negotiating power with customers and insurers.
If you want help pressure-testing your 2026 readiness—identity first, evidence automated, recovery proven, we can help. We’ll bring Fractional CISO leadership, Cybersecurity Program Management, and Compliance as a Service to make your program resilient and provable.