The AI-fication of cyberthreats: Trend Micro Security predictions for 2026
The report outlines how AI is becoming embedded in malicious operations, moving beyond assistance with phishing and intrusion toward large-scale, coordinated activities.
It identifies key areas of concern including advanced persistent threats (APTs), ransomware, cloud environments, supply chains, vulnerabilities, identity and authentication, and AI-enabled attacks.
The report’s overview highlights cloud misconfigurations, exposed APIs, overprivileged credentials, insecure containers, and hybrid and multicloud environments as important attack surfaces, while ransomware is expected to become increasingly automated and focused on intelligent exploitation of stolen data.
The predictions also cover increasingly sophisticated social engineering, including AI-assisted voice and chat scams, attacks targeting authenticated sessions and tokens, risks created by AI agents operating with delegated permissions, and the exploitation of software supply chains and trusted enterprise technologies.
The report expects AI to accelerate the discovery and exploitation of zero-day vulnerabilities while introducing new risks in AI-enabled environments, including prompt injection attacks, model backdoors, and vulnerabilities in inference infrastructure.
For defenders and decision-makers, the report emphasizes moving from reactive security toward anticipatory resilience, with greater emphasis on visibility, continuous validation, behavioral monitoring, automated response, layered defenses, and Cyber Risk and Exposure Management (CREM).
It also highlights the need to secure AI models, agents, automation workflows, cloud infrastructure, and supply-chain access points from the design stage while maintaining established resilience measures such as tested recovery processes and robust access controls.
Access the full report.
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