Cybersecurity 2026 Predictions: Third-party Risk & AI-driven Obsolescence

It’s no secret that attacks on third-parties are increasing and AI is enabling new attack methods at higher frequencies than ever before. What’s not as apparent is how AI-driven attacks are making defenses against third-party threats untenable, or how organizations can protect themselves against new types of attacks on increasingly vast third-party networks in 2026 and beyond.

Global Cyber Crime Will Skyrocket as Attacker Innovation Accelerates

Defenders have always found themselves in reactionary positions, adjusting defense strategies based on the latest attacks. This has been an iterative approach, as the pace of innovation in cyberattack methods and strategies has been constant and fairly linear. However, AI-driven adversaries are transforming every phase of attack methods from the reconnaissance phase through all components of an attack like phishing, deepfakes, etc. and we’re shifting towards an exponential rate of innovation that defenders will not be able to match in 2026. In fact, at the current rate of growth the Global Cyber Tax (Global cybercrime losses added to the amount of global cybersecurity spending,) will also rise to $4.33 trillion (3.2% of global GDP) by 2030. If this rate of growth accelerates, we could see these levels of losses shift forward to ’27 or ’28, with a sharp growth acceleration of losses in ’26.

The current security programs of both large enterprises and government organizations cannot match the agility of sophisticated cybercriminals that increasingly leverage AI to automate the entire attack framework. Through automated reconnaissance capabilities, adversaries can rapidly assess a target’s increasingly connected digital systems and networks – creating a near infinite attack surface to exploit. Cybercriminals can now target numerous potential weaknesses of a customers’ connected ecosystem including IoT, Third Parties, SaaS, Cloud, Identity, and AI applications to identify where an organization is most vulnerable. These third-party integrations are difficult to secure due to their level of independence. The best organizations have been able to do is require a certain level of security posture of third parties, but posture does not translate to secure. The ‘front door’ will become the least likely option for an attacker as optional routes to compromise are increasingly easy to find and exploit.

We already see this taking place as the number of breaches leveraging third parties has doubled in the past year. Organizations will begin to leverage targeted risk intelligence that identifies where threats intersect with the organization’s extended ecosystem, where their defenses are essentially only as good as their weakest link. In this scenario, threat detection and response need to extend beyond a company’s control zone and crossover to their extended ecosystem of third parties. Third Party Posture management/measurement is essentially all defenders could deploy thus far as threat detection and response for an extended ecosystem of perhaps thousands of third parties has not been available at scale.

Ironically, many of the AI-enabled security tools that customers will deploy only serve to accelerate the obsolescence rate of those same approaches.

Cyber defenders will increasingly leverage AI to automate intelligence-led security programs. For example, threat intelligence will enable AI driven threat-hunting capabilities to proactively hunt for known threats in their environment, build and deploy detection rules, and automate alert triage to shift to partially autonomous security operations centers (SOCs). These autonomous SOCs, with a human in the loop, can identify threats at line speed and counter those threats before they can be executed by attackers. However, by accelerating their ability to detect and defeat known threats, companies are accelerating the obsolescence rate of their intelligence-led security program.

As defenders successfully learn to leverage intelligence of prior attack tools and tradecraft to automate many of their security practices, this will force adversaries to increasingly shift their focus to leveraging AI to spin up new and novel attack strategies that have never been seen before. In essence, as defenders automate their defensive measures against known threats, adversaries will increasingly shift away from leveraging prior methods, and all victims become Patient Zero.