5 Cybersecurity Predictions for 2026

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

50% : Infrastructure and identity controls such as access monitoring, configuration drift, and patch compliance are increasingly automated, while process and judgment controls like segregation of duties reviews remain periodic.
50% : Auditors must now ask who approves the bot posting accruals or how segregation of duties applies when service accounts execute transactions.
41% : The EU AI Act's full release in August will require organizations to classify systems by risk, complete conformity assessments, and maintain documentation that reshapes how AI is deployed.
39% : Gartner predicts that by 2026, 30% of enterprises will abandon vulnerable verifications like facial recognition as deepfakes render them unreliable, and new laws (such as the EU's AI Act) will require clear labeling of AI-generated media. 2026 marks a pivotal shift -- from general awareness of disinformation and deepfake threats to decisive enterprise action.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.