All news with #forecast tag

🔒 US organizations should begin operationalizing post-quantum cryptography now to protect long-lived secrets and meet an emerging 2030 readiness horizon. With NIST finalizing initial PQC standards in 2024 and agencies like NSA and CISA aligning guidance, a pragmatic hybrid strategy—pairing existing classical algorithms (ECDHE/TLS) with post-quantum primitives such as ML-KEM—reduces long-term confidentiality risk while preserving interoperability. Start with a comprehensive crypto inventory tied to data value, pilot internal mTLS, VPN and code-signing migrations in a lab, improve crypto agility, add telemetry for rollout metrics, and add PQC requirements into procurement to buy time and avoid last-minute disruption.

🔐 By 2026, the central competition in identity-related work will be the ability to prove that the person behind a high-impact action is a real, accountable human. Generative AI and deepfakes create synthetic identities that can pass routine checks, contaminate risk models and hijack estate workflows. Defenses must focus on provenance, cross-channel consistency and continuous, risk-based verification tied to audit-grade trails.

🛡️ Gartner warns custom-built AI applications will increasingly strain security teams unless defenders are engaged early. It predicts that by 2028 at least half of enterprise incident response work will handle fallout from AI app security issues. Analysts urge teams to "shift left" to embed controls during development, and expect AI security platforms to be widely adopted within two years to enforce guardrails and mitigate prompt injection, data misuse and related threats.

🔐 RSA 2026 will spotlight how AI agents, CTEM, cyber resilience, identity, and AI security are reshaping CISO agendas. Expect demonstrations of AI-SOC capabilities, expanded CTEM platforms, and renewed emphasis on identity as the perimeter, alongside warnings about hallucinations, data quality, and vendor overreach. Arrive prepared with prioritized requirements, cleaned data, and a plan to upskill teams for effective human–agent teaming.

🔔 FIRST forecasts a median of approximately 59,427 new CVEs in 2026, with a 90% confidence interval from 30,012 to 117,673. Using a new statistical model built from historical records and publication trends in the NVD and MITRE, the non-profit warns 2026 could be the first year to exceed 50,000 published vulnerabilities. FIRST urges organisations to assess capacity, prioritise ruthlessly, and plan contingency scenarios to allocate resources strategically.

🔍 A new forecast from FIRST projects a median of roughly 59,000 CVEs in 2026 and warns that under extreme scenarios the count could approach 118,000, up from about 48,000 in 2025. Experts stress this growth reflects improved discovery and disclosure — more CNAs, bug bounties, and scrutiny of long-neglected code — rather than a sudden rise in attacker capability. Historically, only a small fraction of published CVEs are weaponized: recent data shows fewer than 3,000 had public proof-of-concept exploits and only about 700 showed evidence of exploitation in the wild. The primary challenge for CISOs is separating signal from noise through prioritization, automation, and capacity planning rather than trying to patch every disclosed flaw.

🔒 Gartner identifies six priority cybersecurity trends for 2026 that demand immediate attention from security and risk leaders. Key risks include uncontrolled agentic AI proliferation, global regulatory volatility, and the urgent need to plan for post-quantum cryptography. Gartner advises stronger governance to detect and control both approved and shadow AI agents, evolve identity and access management for machine actors, modernize SOCs with human-in-the-loop processes, and shift awareness programs toward task-focused, AI-specific behavioral training.

🔐 As AI accelerates adoption and threat automation, CISOs foresee 2026 as a turning point for governance, resilience, and identity-centric defense. Leaders expect boards to elevate AI and quantum risk, vendors to deliver secure-by-design products, and SOCs to consolidate telemetry and automate responses. Small and mid-size firms will face intensified targeting, making tailored security services essential.

🤖 The editorial teams of Computerwoche, CIO and CSO reflect on a turbulent 2025 shaped by the rapid rise of AI, economic uncertainty and geopolitical friction. They call out major flops such as widespread AI‑justified layoffs (Surfshark estimates 200,000+ jobs lost) and the growing use of AI by cybercriminals, while noting positive trends: pragmatic CIOs focusing on data quality, innovative change management like Mobilezone, and sizable sovereignty investments such as Schwarz IT.

🚗 Bruce Schneier frames a public-policy dilemma: a neurosurgeon writing in the New York Times calls driverless cars a “public health breakthrough,” citing more than 39,000 US traffic fatalities and thousands of daily crash victims, while the authors of Driving Intelligence: The Green Book argue that ongoing autonomous-vehicle (AV) trials have produced deaths and should be halted and forensically reviewed. Schneier cites a 2016 paper, Driving to safety, which shows that proving AV safety by miles-driven alone would require hundreds of millions to billions of miles, making direct statistical comparison impractical. The paper argues regulators and developers must adopt alternative evidence methods and adaptive regulation because uncertainty about AV safety will persist.

🛡️In 2026 Palo Alto Networks forecasts a shift to the Year of the Defender as enterprises counter AI-driven threats with AI-enabled defenses. The report outlines six predictions — identity deepfakes, autonomous agents as insider threats, data poisoning, executive legal exposure, accelerated quantum urgency, and the browser as an AI workspace. It urges autonomy with control, unified DSPM/AI‑SPM platforms, and crypto agility to secure the AI economy.

🔒 Enterprises face expanding, complex attack surfaces driven by IoT growth, API ecosystems, remote work, shadow IT and multi-cloud sprawl. The author predicts 2026 will bring centralized cloud control—led by SASE—a shift to proactive, continuous ASM, stricter zero trust enforcement and widespread deployment of intelligent, agentic AI for autonomous detection and remediation. The analysis also emphasizes greater attention to third‑party and supply-chain risk.

🚨 Google Cloud Security's Cybersecurity Forecast 2026 warns of a rise in cyber-physical attacks across EMEA targeting energy grids, transport and digital infrastructure. The report highlights increased state-sponsored espionage from Russia and China and anticipates these operations may form hybrid warfare combined with information operations to erode public trust. It also flags supply-chain compromises of managed service providers and software dependencies, and notes that cybercrime — including ransomware aimed at ERP systems — will remain a major disruptive threat to ICS/OT. Analysts further expect adversaries to increasingly leverage AI and multimodal deepfakes.

🔍 Forrester warns that 2026 will demand precision, resilience and strategic foresight from CIOs and CISOs as volatility persists and the AI hype phase gives way to a results-driven era. Leaders will face rising pressure to deliver measurable, secure outcomes from AI initiatives while managing vendor promises, postponements and tighter financial scrutiny. Neocloud growth, talent bottlenecks and accelerating quantum risk will further complicate planning and force cross-functional governance.

📉 Juniper Research predicts an 11% decline in consumer SMS fraud losses in 2026, dropping from $80bn in 2025 to $71bn. The firm credits reduced messaging volumes and stronger operator security—especially enhanced firewall capabilities—for making it harder for fraudsters to conceal malicious traffic. Nevertheless, large-scale smishing campaigns, PhaaS platforms and the transition to RCS keep risks elevated and require ongoing defensive improvements.

🔐 Fortinet’s CISO Collective outlines priorities and risks CISOs will face in 2026. The briefing warns that AI will accelerate innovation while expanding attack surfaces, increasing LLM breaches, adversarial model attacks, and deepfake-enabled BEC. It highlights geopolitical and space-related threats such as GPS jamming and satellite interception, persistent regulatory pressure including NIS2 and DORA, and a chronic cybersecurity skills gap. Recommendations emphasize governed AI, identity hardening, quantum readiness, and resilience-driven leadership.

🔒 The Cybersecurity Forecast 2026 synthesizes frontline telemetry and expert analysis from Google Cloud security teams to outline the most significant threats and defensive shifts for the coming year. The report emphasizes how adversaries will broadly adopt AI to scale attacks, with specific risks including prompt injection and AI-enabled social engineering. It also highlights persistent cybercrime trends—ransomware, extortion, and on-chain resiliency—and evolving nation‑state campaigns. Organizations are urged to adapt IAM, secure AI agents, and harden virtualization controls to stay ahead.

🔒 Cybersecurity leaders report the mission to defend organizations is unchanged, but threats, technology and operating pressures are evolving rapidly. Five trends — shrinking or stagnating budgets, AI-enabled attacks, the rise of agentic AI, accelerating business speed, and heightened vendor M&A — are forcing changes in strategy. CISOs are simplifying tech stacks, increasing automation and outsourcing, and deploying AI for detection and response while wrestling with new authentication/authorization gaps. Vendor viability and consolidation now factor into resilience planning.