WEF Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2026: Key Insights for Leaders

The World Economic Forum’s Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2026, published in January in collaboration with Accenture, reads less like a report and more like a warning shot. Compiled from 804 qualified respondents across 92 countries — including 316 CISOs, 105 CEOs, and 123 other C-suite executives — the fifth edition of this annual survey paints a picture of a cybersecurity landscape accelerating faster than most organizations can keep pace with.

Key Takeaways

1. AI Is Driving Cybersecurity Change Faster Than Governance Can Keep Up. Ninety-four percent of survey respondents identify AI as the most significant driver of cybersecurity change in 2026, and 87% flagged AI-related vulnerabilities as the fastest-growing cyber risk throughout 2025. Yet roughly one-third of organizations still have no process to assess AI tool security before deployment. The gap between AI adoption speed and AI governance maturity is widening, not closing.
2. Geopolitical Volatility Has Permanently Reshaped Cyber Strategy. Sixty-six percent of organizations have modified their cybersecurity strategy due to geopolitical instability, and 31% of respondents report low confidence in their nation’s ability to respond to major cyber incidents targeting critical infrastructure. Cybersecurity planning now requires geopolitical risk modeling as a permanent input, not an occasional consideration.
3. Cyber-Enabled Fraud Has Reached Epidemic Proportions. Seventy-three percent of respondents say they or someone in their professional network has been personally affected by cyber-enabled fraud in the past 12 months. CEOs now rank fraud as their number one cyber concern, displacing ransomware. Phishing, vishing, and smishing account for 62% of fraud incidents, followed by invoice and payment fraud at 37%.
4. Supply Chain Vulnerabilities Are the Top Challenge for Large Organizations. Sixty-five percent of large companies cite third-party and supply chain vulnerabilities as their greatest obstacle to cyber resilience, up from 54% in 2025. Yet only 27% simulate cyber incidents with supply chain partners, and just 33% comprehensively map their supply chain ecosystems. The visibility gap between risk awareness and risk management remains dangerously wide.
5. The Resilience Gap Between Large and Small Organizations Keeps Widening. Nineteen percent of organizations now report cyber resilience that exceeds requirements, more than double the 9% that made that claim in 2025. But 17% still report insufficient resilience, and 85% of those also lack critical cybersecurity skills. Small organizations are 2.5 times more likely to say their resilience is insufficient compared to large enterprises. Cybersecurity is becoming a structural advantage for organizations that can afford it.

The headline numbers are striking. Ninety-four percent of respondents say AI will be the single most significant driver of change in cybersecurity this year. Eighty-seven percent flagged AI-related vulnerabilities as the fastest-growing cyber risk they observed throughout 2025. And 73% reported that they or someone in their professional network had been personally hit by cyber-enabled fraud over the past 12 months.

These aren’t abstract projections. They’re the lived experience of security professionals and business leaders navigating real-time chaos.

Let’s unpack what the report actually tells us — and where the gaps are that organizations need to close before the next breach makes headlines.

AI Is Rewriting the Rules of Engagement

If there’s a single thread running through the entire report, it’s this: AI has fundamentally changed how attacks are launched, how defenses are built, and how risk is assessed. And the pace of change is outstripping governance at almost every level.

The report frames AI’s impact across three interconnected dimensions. First, AI integration is expanding the attack surface in ways traditional security controls weren’t designed to handle. Second, defenders are deploying AI for detection, incident response, and automation of repetitive analytical tasks. Third — and this is the part that should keep people up at night — threat actors are using AI to scale and sharpen their attacks with unprecedented precision.

The good news? Organizations are starting to take AI security seriously. The percentage of organizations with processes in place to assess AI tool security nearly doubled year over year, jumping from 37% in 2025 to 64% in 2026. Forty percent now conduct periodic reviews of AI tools before deployment, a clear sign of maturing governance practices.

The bad news? Roughly one-third of organizations still have no process whatsoever to validate AI security before deployment. That’s a massive blind spot in a world where attackers are already weaponizing generative AI for phishing, deepfake creation, and reconnaissance at industrial scale.

From a Kiteworks perspective, this gap highlights a critical truth about sensitive content communications: The AI tools organizations adopt to process, analyze, and share confidential data need to be governed with the same rigor as any other infrastructure component. When generative AI handles sensitive content — whether it’s drafting communications, summarizing legal documents, or processing financial data — organizations need to know exactly where that data goes, who can access it, and what guardrails prevent leakage. That’s precisely why a private content network approach, where sensitive data flows are consolidated, tracked, and protected within a single governance framework, becomes essential as AI adoption accelerates.

Geopolitics Has Become Permanently Embedded in Cyber Strategy

The report makes clear that geopolitical volatility isn’t a temporary headwind — it’s a permanent feature of the cybersecurity landscape. Some 64% of organizations now account for geopolitically motivated cyberattacks in their risk mitigation strategies, and 66% have modified their cybersecurity strategy specifically because of geopolitical instability.

What’s particularly telling is the confidence gap. Thirty-one percent of survey respondents reported low confidence in their nation’s ability to respond to major cyber incidents targeting critical infrastructure — up from 26% the year before. And the regional variation is stark: 84% of respondents from the Middle East and North Africa expressed confidence in their country’s cyber preparedness, compared to just 13% in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The largest organizations are responding by investing in threat intelligence and deepening relationships with government agencies. Seventy percent of organizations with more than 100,000 employees have increased their focus on nation-state threat intelligence, compared to just 30% of organizations with fewer than 1,000 employees. This makes sense — global companies have global attack surfaces — but it also means smaller organizations are increasingly exposed and increasingly on their own.

The sovereignty dimension is getting louder, too. The report documents how European municipalities and federal agencies are migrating to sovereign or regionally managed cloud solutions, seeking to reduce dependence on foreign technology providers. This isn’t just regulatory compliance theater. It reflects a genuine recalibration of trust — not just in systems but in the geopolitical reliability of the ecosystems behind them.

For Kiteworks, this trend validates the zero-trust data exchange model that underpins secure content communications. When organizations operate across jurisdictions with different data sovereignty requirements, they need infrastructure that enforces data residency, applies consistent encryption and access controls regardless of geography, and provides a complete audit trail of every file sent, received, or accessed. The geopolitical fragmentation the WEF describes isn’t going to reverse. Organizations need to build for a world where the regulatory and threat landscape looks different in every country they operate in.

Cyber-Enabled Fraud Has Gone Mainstream

One of the report’s most sobering findings is the sheer prevalence of cyber-enabled fraud. Seventy-three percent of respondents said they or someone in their network had been personally affected by fraud in the past year. The most common attack vector? Phishing, vishing, and smishing, reported by 62% of those affected. Invoice and payment fraud followed at 37%, and identity theft at 32%.

This isn’t just a corporate problem. It’s a societal one. Sub-Saharan Africa led fraud exposure at 82% of respondents, followed by North America at 79%.

The CEO-CISO divide on this issue is revealing. CEOs now rank cyber-enabled fraud as their top concern, displacing ransomware from the number-one spot it held in 2025. CISOs, meanwhile, still view ransomware as the primary threat, with supply chain disruption holding steady at number two. This divergence reflects the different lenses through which boardrooms and security operations centers view risk: CEOs are focused on financial loss and brand damage, while CISOs are tracking operational disruption and technical exposure.

The report also flags a disturbing development in the fraud landscape: the emergence of autonomous AI agents capable of executing full attack life cycles. In November 2025, Anthropic disclosed a cyber espionage operation that demonstrated AI being used across every phase of an attack — from reconnaissance to exploitation to data exfiltration. This was the first confirmed case of agentic AI gaining access to high-value targets including major technology companies and government agencies.

From Kiteworks’ vantage point, the fraud explosion underscores why organizations need ironclad control over how sensitive content moves in and out of the enterprise. Invoice fraud, payment fraud, and business email compromise all exploit weaknesses in how organizations share files and communications with external parties. A consolidated platform for managing email, file sharing, managed file transfer, and web forms — with built-in digital rights management, multi-factor authentication, and real-time anomaly detection — closes the gaps that fraudsters are so effectively exploiting.

Cyber Resilience: Getting Better, But Not Fast Enough

The report shows incremental progress on organizational resilience. Nineteen percent of organizations now say their cyber resilience exceeds requirements, more than double the 9% that made that claim in 2025. But 17% still report insufficient resilience levels, and the gap between well-resourced and under-resourced organizations remains stark.

The data on what separates highly resilient organizations from the rest is particularly instructive:

• AI security reviews: Highly resilient organizations are more than three times as likely to periodically review AI tool security (71% vs. 20%).
• Procurement integration: They’re far more likely to involve security in procurement decisions (76% vs. 53%).
• Supplier assessment: They assess supplier security maturity at much higher rates (74% vs. 48%).
• Incident simulation: They simulate cyber incidents with ecosystem partners more frequently (44% vs. 16%).
• Board engagement: 99% of highly resilient organizations report board-level engagement in cybersecurity, compared to just 87% of insufficiently resilient ones.

The skills dimension compounds the problem. Among organizations with insufficient resilience, 85% also report lacking critical cybersecurity skills and people. The most acute shortages are in threat intelligence analysts, DevSecOps engineers, and identity and access management specialists. Regionally, Latin America and the Caribbean (65%) and sub-Saharan Africa (63%) face the most severe talent gaps.

What makes these numbers particularly concerning is the supply chain dimension. The report documents that 65% of large companies now identify third-party and supply chain vulnerabilities as their greatest challenge to resilience — up from 54% in 2025. Yet only 27% of organizations simulate cyber incidents with their supply chain partners, and just 33% comprehensively map their supply chain ecosystems.

This is where Kiteworks sees the most urgent disconnect. Every time an organization shares sensitive content with a third party — a supplier, a legal firm, a financial advisor, a government agency — it extends its attack surface into that partner’s environment. Without visibility into who is accessing what content, from where, and under what conditions, organizations are flying blind on what the WEF calls “inheritance risk”: the inability to assure the integrity of third-party software, hardware, and services. A private content network provides that visibility by creating a single pane of glass for all sensitive content exchanges, regardless of channel, and applying consistent security policies across the entire ecosystem.

The Economic Stakes Have Never Been Higher

The report brings the economic dimension of cybersecurity into sharp focus. U.K. government research cited in the report estimates that the average significant cyberattack costs businesses roughly $250,000, and the national economic impact reaches an estimated $19.4 billion annually. The World Bank adds that reducing major cyber incidents could boost GDP per capita by 1.5% in developing economies.

The Jaguar Land Rover case study is the most concrete illustration. A cyberattack in August 2025 shut down production across the automaker’s global operations for five weeks, affecting more than 5,000 suppliers. Direct costs reached $260 million, revenues dropped nearly 25%, and the wider U.K. economy absorbed an estimated $2.5 billion in losses. The U.K. government ultimately provided a $2 billion loan guarantee to stabilize the supply chain.

These numbers demolish the outdated notion that cybersecurity is an IT cost center. It’s an economic imperative — one that directly impacts national competitiveness, supply chain stability, and corporate valuation.

Looking Ahead: Threats on the Horizon

The report closes by identifying several threat vectors that are emerging quietly but will likely define cybersecurity by 2030:

• Autonomous systems and robotics: Creating new cyber-physical risk profiles where machine-executed decisions can alter safety within seconds.
• Digital currencies: Maturing into critical infrastructure whose security underpins economic stability.
• Quantum technologies: Evolving from theoretical concerns into selective but material threats to cryptography, with NIST post-quantum standards already published and migration deadlines tightening.
• Space and undersea assets: Only 15% of organizations consider space-based assets in their cybersecurity risk mitigation, and just 18% account for the vulnerability of undersea cables.
• Climate change: Amplifying cyber risk by disrupting the physical infrastructure that digital systems depend on.

The window for proactive preparation on all of these fronts is closing. And based on the WEF’s data, too many organizations haven’t even started.

The Bottom Line

The Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2026 tells a story of an ecosystem under enormous pressure. AI is supercharging both offense and defense. Geopolitics has permanently reshaped the threat landscape. Fraud has reached epidemic proportions. Supply chains remain dangerously opaque. And the gap between cyber-resilient organizations and everyone else continues to widen.

The report’s most important finding might also be its simplest: The organizations that thrive aren’t the ones that avoid getting hit. They’re the ones that have built the governance, visibility, and collaborative infrastructure to absorb shocks and recover quickly.

For Kiteworks, this reinforces the conviction that protecting sensitive content isn’t just about preventing breaches — it’s about building the operational resilience that allows organizations to keep functioning when breaches inevitably occur. That means consolidating sensitive content communications into a governed platform with complete visibility, applying zero-trust principles to every exchange, and maintaining the audit trails that regulators, boards, and partners increasingly demand.

The cybersecurity landscape described in this report isn’t going to get simpler. The organizations that recognize that reality — and build accordingly — will be the ones still standing when the next crisis hits.