In brief:
- Cybersecurity’s elevation as the No. 1 concern for businesses has been driven by rapid advances in AI, which are making cyberattacks more frequent, sophisticated, and lethal.
- These rapid AI advances are significantly shaping the top cybersecurity trends this year – transforming both threats and defenses.
- While global average breach costs fell for the first time in six years, in the U.S. they surged 9% to $10.22 million – the highest of any country.
- Some of the most in-demand cybersecurity skills today include cloud computing security, advanced AI expertise, and non-technical expertise such as strong problem-solving acumen and communication skills.
Cybersecurity has, in the space of a few years, evolved from a back-office IT task into a boardroom imperative. For four consecutive years, it’s held the top spot on the Allianz Risk Barometer as the No. 1 concern for businesses worldwide. Staying ahead of the latest cybersecurity trends is essential to safeguarding your organization.
Rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have been a driving force in escalating cyber risks – fundamentally reshaping the cybersecurity battlefield. The development of powerful new AI capabilities such as Generative AI (GenAI) and Agentic AI has lowered the barrier to entry for cybercriminals, making it easier and cheaper to launch sophisticated, scalable, and automated attacks.
As a result, attacks against businesses worldwide have ramped up significantly: Businesses today face an average of 1,673 attacks per week, a 44% jump from a year earlier, Check Point’s 2025 Cyber Security Report found.
While this is prompting cybersecurity to be prioritized as an investment area, funding has not kept pace with the scale of the security challenge. Average security budgets grew just 4% year over year (IANS 2025 Security Budget Benchmark Report), even as the complexity of programs – and the cost of talent, tools, and training involved – continues to rise.
In this climate, how can organizations improve their cybersecurity posture?
Understanding the forces reshaping the cybersecurity landscape and learning how to prove the business value of proactive investments are essential first steps.
Read on to learn the top cybersecurity trends for 2026 – and get practical guidance for aligning strategy, resources, and leadership to stay ahead of tomorrow’s threats. For a deeper dive, don’t miss our new report 10 Cybersecurity Trends Redefining the Future of Defense, which explores these emerging trends in detail and offers actionable insights for IT security leaders to future-proof their organizations.
1. Data breach costs touch record high in US
Following five consecutive years of rising breach costs, 2025 marked a reversal. Average breach costs fell to $4.44 million, down from $4.88 million in 2024, IBM’s 2025 Cost of a Data Breach report found. The decline is attributed to the widespread adoption of AI and automation to detect and contain threats faster.
Yet, the United States saw a different story: breach costs surged to $10.22 million, a 9% jump over the previous year and the highest worldwide.
So, why is the U.S. still trending the wrong way?
- Higher regulatory fines
The United States remains a sustained target for attackers. In Q2 2025, North America accounted for 53% of known ransomware attacks alone – the highest of any region, according to Check Point’s latest quarterly security trends report.
This relentless wave of breaches – including major consumer data leaks in recent years at Yahoo, National Public Data, Facebook, and Target – has exposed massive amounts of consumer data, prompting regulators to respond with tougher frameworks and steeper penalties.
U.S. organizations now face the world’s highest post-breach regulatory costs, the IBM report found. Regulatory fines are enforced by multiple state, federal, and industry bodies – meaning a patchwork of agencies can impose sanctions for the same incident. HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) violations alone can cost healthcare organizations over $2 million annually.
- Increased detection and escalation costs
Globally, shorter breach investigations – aided by AI and automation – are pushing down detection and escalation costs, including forensic assessments, audits, crisis management, and executive and board communications.
In the U.S., however, breach detection remains more difficult. Complex and interconnected IT environments, increasingly sophisticated threats in a digital-first economy, persistent cybersecurity talent shortages, and fragmented security practices and regulations all slow identification and response.
As a result, detection is slower and, at times, companies aren’t even aware of a breach until after the attacker discloses it – giving malicious actors ample time to wreak havoc.
When attackers – not internal security teams – reveal a breach, the average global cost soars to $5.08 million, nearly 20% higher than when organizations catch the breach.
IBM 2025 Cost of a Data Breach report
2. Artificial Intelligence introduces a new era of cyber risk
AI tops the list of factors amplifying cyber risk – not only by enabling more sophisticated attacks, but also by expanding the attack surface as organizations rapidly integrate AI into their operations.
Some 87% of security professionals surveyed in SoSafe’s 2025 Cybercrime Trends report say their organization experienced an AI-driven cyberattack in the last year – and more than 90% expect a significant surge in coming years.
Worse, AI attacks are triggering a bigger hit on company bottom lines:
Generative AI, in particular, has been a gamechanger for cybercriminals through its ability to mimic human language and synthesize realistic content at scale. Cybercriminals are leveraging GenAI Large Language Models (LLMs) to convincingly replicate the communication styles of senior leaders at organizations – for example, tricking employees with phishing scams and deepfake impersonation attacks.
GenAI is also being used to develop credible social engineering attacks in a wide range of languages, helping threat actors target a greater number of people in more countries at a lower cost.
Nearly 47% of organizations rank adversarial GenAI – enabling adaptive malware, hyper-realistic deception, AI model manipulation, and large-scale attack automation – as their top security concern, a 2025 World Economic Forum (WEF) cybersecurity survey found. These advancements are tipping the scales in favor of cybercriminals – unless defenders match them with equally advanced, AI-powered countermeasures.
While an overwhelming majority (96%) of professionals recognize the importance of detecting AI-based attacks, only 26% rate their ability to do so as “high.”
SoSafe 2025 Cybercrime Trends
This highlights a critical vulnerability: organizations are struggling to gain the budget and skills required to deploy the advanced AI agents and tools needed to defend against AI-powered attacks and data thefts.
Meanwhile, business leaders have eagerly embraced AI integration for the enterprise, chasing quick returns and cost savings. But this rapid adoption opens the door to new vulnerabilities.
Many AI business solutions – whether third-party or custom-built – lack robust security safeguards, making them prime targets for cybercriminals. Attackers can exploit these weaknesses to extract sensitive company data and information, map network vulnerabilities, and bypass detection systems.
Compounding the problem is the menace of shadow AI – employees using unauthorized AI tools for work. MIT’s State of AI in Business 2025 report found that while only 40% of companies say they pay for official GenAI subscriptions, employees at more than 90% of firms regularly use personal AI tools such as ChatGPT or Claude on the job.
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These unmonitored tools are proving costly: High levels of shadow AI at an organization can add as much as $670,000 to a breach price tag, exposing more personal and sensitive data in the process, IBM found.
Unsurprisingly, shadow AI has emerged as one of the top three costliest breach factors, topped only by supply chain incidents and overly complex security system environments.
3. Third-party risk becomes the weakest – and costliest – link
Today, every business depends on a highly complex and interconnected ecosystem made up of supply chain vendors, technology providers, outsourcers, etc., to conduct its day-to-day operations. As Jeffrey Wheatman, Senior VP of Cyber Risk Strategy said at a recent Auxis cybersecurity webinar, “No organization is an island unto itself.”
In fact, SoSafe’s survey revealed 93% of companies now rely on third-party services to deliver their main value proposition. This increased – and often unavoidable – dependence brings significant cybersecurity implications, dramatically widening your attack surface to not only include your direct vendors – but their entire supply chain as well.
Similarly, the rapid adoption of cloud technologies – which offer scalability, cost efficiency, and perceived security benefits – also introduce new vulnerabilities. This is especially true when companies have limited control over configurations on Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platforms.
A single attack on a major cloud provider – like recent attacks targeting AWS and Snowflake – could ripple across thousands of dependent businesses, halting operations overnight and leading to extensive short and long-term losses.
The percentage of security breaches involving a third party doubled in the last year, jumping from 15% to 30%.
Verizon 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report
Even worse, at an average of 267 days, attacks on the supply chain also take the longest to detect and contain, IBM’s data showed. This is because these attacks exploit the trust between vendors and customers, and automated system-to-system communications.
Put simply, in today’s hyper-connected world, your business is only as secure as your weakest third-party link.
4. From startups to giants, no business is immune
A decade ago, large enterprises and industries like retail and healthcare were the prime targets for cyberattacks – driven by their high ransom potential, valuable consumer data, and the notoriety associated with grabbing headlines. That is no longer the case today.
In fact, as bigger corporations up their security game, threat actors have realized it is easier to penetrate smaller businesses with weaker defenses – and hitting several at once can add up to big payoffs.
One in three small and mid-size businesses (SMBs) experienced an attack in the preceding year, with attack costs running as high as $7 million.
Microsoft SMB Cybersecurity Report 2024
Ransomware, the dominant attack method for targeting businesses, disproportionally affects smaller organizations, Verizon found. Ransomware accounted for 88% of breaches at SMBs, compared to 39% for larger organizations.
Yet, many SMBs remain unaware of their heightened risk. The Microsoft study revealed concerning mindsets at small and mid-size organizations that increase their cyber risk:
Yet, the biggest barrier to stronger cybersecurity at SMBs isn’t lack of awareness, it’s a lack of resources. Just 7% of small and mid-size organizations say their cybersecurity budget is “definitely sufficient,” according to CrowdStrike’s 2025 State of SMB Cybersecurity survey.
The global shortage of cybersecurity professionals adds to the problem. While well-funded sectors and bigger corporations can compete for top cybersecurity talent, smaller and under-resourced organizations often can’t – leaving critical gaps in expertise and defense.
This imbalance triggers real-world consequences. Without robust recovery plans, backups, or cyber insurance, smaller businesses suffer the most in the event of a cyberattack.
Three-fourths of small businesses say a major cyberattack would “likely” or “definitely” put them out of business, CrowdStrike reported, compared to less than one-third of mid- and large-sized SMBs.
5. A growing cybersecurity skills gap puts businesses – and budgets – at risk
While the cybersecurity skills gap has persisted for about a decade, the shortfall has never been this severe. The latest ISC2 Cybersecurity Workforce Study reports a staggering 4.8 million unfilled roles globally, even as the global cybersecurity workforce swelled to a record high of 5.5 million.
In the U.S. alone, Cybersecurity Ventures reports more than 750,000 cybersecurity job vacancies – pushing salaries higher as companies compete for a limited pool of talent.
Over the years, this skills gap has snowballed into a multi-faceted crisis – no longer just a headcount deficit, but a critical mismatch of skills and resources. Economic headwinds continue to tighten IT security budgets, leaving several organizations unable to hire – or competitively pay – the talent they urgently need to protect their infrastructure.
The strain is especially visible in 2025, the IANS report found, with security leaders and their teams reporting they are stretched thin amid hiring freezes and limited budgets. Equally concerning is the widening skills gap – the lack of up-to-date capabilities and specialized knowledge – which is proving just as damaging as staffing shortages.
Organizations with a high level of skills shortages incur $5.22 million in average breach costs – a staggering $1.57 million more than organizations with a low-level or no skills shortage.
IBM 2025 Cost of a Data Breach report
What are the most in-demand cybersecurity skills?
While companies are hiring for cybersecurity roles across the board, specialist cybersecurity skills are the most in demand as organizations confront sophisticated AI-powered attacks, rapid cloud service adoption, stricter regulatory compliance requirements, and the need to secure increasingly complex technology environments while managing risk.
The most in-demand skills include:
- Cloud computing security ranks as the #1 sought-after technical skill, the ISC2 survey found. Hiring managers are seeking candidates experienced in:
- Cloud platform and infrastructure security
- Cloud data security
- Cloud architecture and design
- Rapid AI adoption is generating new specialized roles that demand advanced AI expertise. Hiring managers are looking for a new generation of cybersecurity professionals with skills spanning:
- AI and machine learning (ML) models and model auditing
- Data science
- Natural language processing (NLP)
- Generative AI applications for cybersecurity
- Identity and access management (IAM)
Get the “10 Cybersecurity Trends Redefining the Future of Defense in 2026” whitepaper
Learn the other critical trends shaping the cybersecurity landscape in 2026 – and dig deeper into the ones above. You’ll also discover what organizations can do now to translate today’s emerging trends into smarter strategy, stronger governance, and reduced risk.
Download our 2026 Cybersecurity Trends report to learn:
- How AI is rewriting the threat landscape – and the AI tools you need to fight back
- A complete list of the most in-demand cybersecurity skills organizations can’t afford to lack
- Top hidden factors eroding business resilience (alert fatigue, weak AI governance, and more)
- How AI adoption is outpacing AI governance – and what you can do about it
- How the ROI challenge is redefining cybersecurity strategy
- Why cybersecurity is now the #1 outsourced business function – and nearshoring is leading the shift
Want to strengthen your cybersecurity stance with expert-driven protection? Schedule a consultation with our cybersecurity experts today! You can also visit our resource center for more cybersecurity tips, strategies, and success stories.
Frequently Asked Questions
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