What IT Leadership Should Be Concerned About in 2026
Threat automation paired with larger networks are evolving the complexity of cybersecurity.
For the past several years, the IT leadership’s security conversation centered on a familiar set of problems: ransomware, phishing, credential theft, cloud misconfiguration, and the slow grind of patching and migration off of legacy systems. Those problems haven’t gone away.
But in 2026, the mass deployment of AI on both sides of the attack, has created a threat environment that moves faster, operates at larger scale, and hides in places most organizations have never thought to look.
Here’s what IT Leadership needs to be watching.
1. Your AI Systems Are Now Part of Your Attack Surface
Most organizations are racing to deploy AI— copilots, agents, LLM-powered workflows, third-party tools embedded across every department. But efforts to secure it are lagging.
Gartner forecasts that 40% of enterprise applications will feature task-specific AI agents by 2026. Meanwhile, a Palo Alto Networks report states that only 6% of organizations have an advanced AI security strategy in place. That gap in planning leaves the door wide open for bad actors.
The specific threats to watch:
Shadow AI. As AI adoption surged from 2023 to 2025, teams quietly deployed private or third-party LLMs without official oversight. By 2026, these “shadow models” represent a significant and largely invisible attack surface. They’re introducing unmonitored data flows, unknown training data retention, and inconsistent access controls. Many organizations will discover sensitive information is already circulating through unapproved AI systems.
AI agent compromise. Autonomous agents are now deployed across industries to manage workflows and interact with real systems. The problem: an agent that is “always-on” with privileged access to critical APIs and data is also an insider threat waiting to happen. A single well-crafted prompt injection or tool-misuse vulnerability allows an attacker to co-opt your most trusted digital “employee.” Suddenly, they have an autonomous operator working inside your environment.
Data poisoning. Adversaries can corrupt AI models by manipulating training data at its source to create hidden backdoors and untrustworthy models. The traditional perimeter is irrelevant when the attack is embedded in the very data powering your enterprise intelligence.
AI-generated code vulnerabilities. AI-assisted coding, AKA vibe coding, is becoming standard practice for engineering teams. But AI-generated code can be highly insecure, introducing attack paths into production systems that no human reviewed and no security team anticipated.
What to do: Review all your AI-connected systems, model endpoints, and agent configurations. These are now as critical to your security posture as your network perimeter.
2. Ransomware is Now an Extortion Engine
Approximately 80% of ransomware incidents now involve data exfiltration, and that number is approaching universality. Attackers learned that stealing data and threatening to publish it is faster, cheaper, and more profitable than running an encryption campaign.
Backups don’t protect against extortion.
And what’s more alarming? Agentic AI now handles critical portions of the ransomware attack chain. Attacks can be executed by self-iterating systems that learn from failure and operate in parallel across hundreds of targets simultaneously. Attackers no longer need a skilled operator (or sometimes a human at all), meaning exponentially scaled efforts.
What to do: The only way to stop exfiltration-based ransomware is to identify your exposed data and misconfigured systems before attackers do.
3. Supply Chain and Third-Party Trust Is Broken
Over the past five years, major supply chain and third-party breaches increased sharply. IBM’s X-Force Threat Intelligence Index says incidents have nearly quadrupled. Attackers walk in through supplier backdoors using valid credentials.
Modern software is built on sprawling webs of dependencies, cloud services, and APIs. That interconnectivity creates vulnerabilities that most organizations never fully map. But the compromise of a trusted third party can enable indirect access to customer environments in ways that organizations had not fully prepared for.
In 2026, attackers are developing tooling that doesn’t just target a single SaaS application. It follows the trust chain downstream, using agentic AI to analyze findings from each phase of intrusion and automatically advance to the next.
What to do: Know every third-party connection, API integration, and software dependency in your environment. Map these relationships and evaluate whether each one is properly secured.
4. Identity Has Become the Primary Attack Vector
Machine identities now outnumber human employees by 82 to 1 in the modern enterprise. Service accounts, API tokens, OAuth credentials, agent access keys — each represents an attack opportunity that most security teams aren’t adequately monitoring. Meanwhile, AI-assisted phishing and infostealer malware are dramatically increasing the volume and sophistication of credential harvesting operations.
The deepfake dimension adds another layer: generative AI is achieving a state of real-time replication that makes synthetic impersonation indistinguishable from reality. A single forged identity can now trigger a cascade of automated actions across an organization’s systems.
IBM X-Force data confirms that credential-based attacks remain the dominant breach vector. Organizations that experience fewer such incidents are those that consistently enforce phishing-resistant MFA and apply strong identity management practices — conditional access, least-privilege, and continuous monitoring of authentication behavior.
What to do: Review identity and access management controls, including exposed credentials, over-permissioned accounts, stale API tokens, and service accounts with excessive access. These are often the actual entry points.
5. IoT and Device Proliferation Is Expanding the Attack Surface Rapidly
The device landscape has exploded. Smart building systems, employee devices, guest networks, point-of-sale terminals — each is a potential entry point. Most are unmanaged, unmonitored, and running outdated firmware.
The attack surface grows as IoT, edge, and device proliferation continue. All it takes is a single compromised thermostat or badge reader, properly leveraged, to create cascading network access.
AI is already being embedded into IT asset management to detect and isolate rogue or untracked devices before they become attack vectors. But you can’t use AI to protect devices you don’t know exist.
What to do: A device and asset inventory, coupled with active scanning, reveals the true scope of your exposure.
6. Quantum Risk Is No Longer “Future Planning”
“Harvest now, decrypt later” is already happening. Threat actors — particularly state-backed groups — are collecting encrypted data today with the expectation that quantum computers will eventually decrypt it. Long-retention data is already at risk: financial records, intellectual property, legal files, and anything with a long shelf life.
With NIST’s post-quantum cryptography standards published in 2024, regulated sectors will face accelerating pressure to migrate. But replacing cryptographic libraries and updating protocols across legacy systems is a long, complex effort. Organizations that haven’t begun inventorying their cryptographic dependencies are already behind.
What to do: Understand where your most sensitive, long-lived data sits and what encryption protects it. Crypto-agility planning starts with knowing what you currently have deployed.
The Common Thread: You Can’t Protect What You Haven’t Mapped
Across every one of the threats IT Leadership should be concerned about in 2026, the foundational problem is the same: unknown exposure.
If you don’t know your current exposure, your organization and its people are at risk. A comprehensive cybersecurity risk assessment and gap analysis tells you where you actually stand — evaluating your network infrastructure configuration, server and endpoint security posture, identity and access management controls, patch management processes, backup and disaster recovery readiness, and alignment with frameworks like NIST and CIS.
Request a Cybersecurity Risk Assessment →
The threat environment in 2026 doesn’t reward hope. It rewards preparation. And for over 27 years, preparation is exactly what Promenet has helped its clients achieve.
Sources: Palo Alto Networks 2026 Cybersecurity Predictions, IBM X-Force Threat Intelligence Index 2026, Trend Micro Security Predictions for 2026, Experian 2026 Data Breach Industry Forecast, SentinelOne 2026 Threat Research, Cybersecurity Magazine, GovTech.
