2026 Global Cybersecurity Outlook

January 21, 2026

Artificial intelligence (AI), geopolitical fragmentation and a surge in cyber-enabled fraud are “redefining the global cyber risk landscape at unprecedented speed,” according to the World Economic Forum’s “Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2026.” The World Economic Forum’s 56th Annual Meeting is taking place January 19-23 in Davos, Switzerland, with international leaders from business, government, international organizations, civil society and academia in attendance. Underscoring the importance of cyber resilience, which is a major focus of the new report, recent research into the state of enterprise cyber resilience from Absolute Security – which provides products and services in the fields of cyber resilience, endpoint security, and zero trust security – found that almost a fifth of organizations experienced operational disruptions that lasted as long as two weeks — with the majority facing downtime that lasted nearly five days — when hit with a cyberattack.

The World Economic Forum’s new report was released a week in advance of their 2026 meeting in Davos and is the fifth edition of the report. It is based on a survey of 804 global business leaders in 92 countries, including 105 CEOs, 316 chief information security officers (CISOs) and 123 other C-suite executives, including chief technology officers and chief risk officers.

This latest report, developed in collaboration with Accenture – a multinational professional services company providing information technology and management consulting services across 120 countries globally – warns that cyber-enabled fraud has become a pervasive threat. This “underscores the growing societal and economic impact of fraud as it spreads across regions and sectors,” a press release accompanying the report’s release explains. The report also underscores how AI is “supercharging” both offensive and defensive capabilities. Finally, the report emphasizes that “geopolitical fragmentation further compounds these risks, reshaping cybersecurity strategies and widening preparedness gaps across regions.”

This steady evolution from “pandemic-driven digitalization to today’s increasingly complex cybersecurity landscape” points to a cyber landscape undergoing profound structural shifts, the report stresses, “where cyber resilience can no longer be approached as a technical function alone but as a strategic requirement that underpins economic stability, national resilience and public trust.”

Indeed, Jeremy Jurgens, Managing Director of the World Economic Forum, says that cyber-enabled fraud has emerged as one of the most disruptive forces in the digital economy, “undermining trust, distorting markets and directly affecting people’s lives.” He argues that the challenge for global leaders is no longer just understanding the threat but acting collectively to stay ahead of it. “Building meaningful cyber resilience will require coordinated action across governments, businesses and technology providers to protect trust and stability in an increasingly AI-driven world,” he underscores.

The report warns that there is a “stark” gap between highly resilient organizations and those falling behind, “with skills shortages and resource constraints amplifying systemic risk.” At the same time, global supply chains have become “more interconnected and opaque,” the press release warns, which is “turning third-party dependencies into systemic vulnerabilities.” Furthermore, this is all coming together when inequalities in cyber capabilities are widening, “leaving smaller organizations and emerging economies disproportionately exposed.”

The “weaponization of AI,” as the press release characterizes it, along with “persistent geopolitical friction and systemic supply chain risks” are making it imperative for C-suite leaders to “pivot from traditional cyber protection to cyber defense powered by advanced and agentic AI” in order to be resilient against AI-driven threat actors.

For 2026, the report identifies several key factors that will likely shape the evolving cyber landscape, including:

AI is accelerating cybersecurity risks at unprecedented speed. AI-related vulnerabilities rose faster than any other category in 2025, with 87 percent of respondents reporting an increase. Looking ahead to 2026, data leaks linked to generative AI and advancing adversarial capabilities are among the leading concerns, at 34 percent and 29 percent, respectively. Meanwhile, with 94 percent of leaders expecting AI to be the most consequential force shaping cybersecurity in 2026, organizations are responding, with the share assessing AI security nearly doubling, from 37 percent to 64 percent.
Geopolitics is redefining the global cybersecurity threat landscape. Sixty-four percent of organizations now factor geopolitically motivated attacks into their risk strategies and 91percent of the largest enterprises are adjusting their cybersecurity posture accordingly. Overall, 91 percent of respondents expressed low confidence in their country’s ability to manage major cyber incidents, with confidence levels varying widely, from 84 percent in the Middle East and North Africa to 13 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Cyber-enabled fraud has become a pervasive global threat. A “striking” 73 percent of respondents were or knew someone directly affected in 2025, and CEOs now rank fraud and phishing ahead of ransomware as their top concerns.
Supply chains remain a major systemic vulnerability. Among large companies, 65 percent cite third-party and supply chain risks as their greatest cyber resilience barrier, up from 54 percent last year. Concentration risk is also intensifying, with incidents at major cloud and internet service providers “demonstrating how infrastructure-level failures can trigger widespread downstream impacts across interconnected digital ecosystems,” the report stresses.
Cyber inequity is widening across regions and sectors. Smaller organizations are twice as likely to report insufficient resilience compared to large firms. Regionally, the shortage of cybersecurity talent is most pronounced in Latin America and the Caribbean, with 65 percent of organizations reporting insufficient skills to achieve their security objectives, while 63 percent of organizations in sub-Saharan Africa face similar constraints.

According to the World Economic Forum, its Global Cybersecurity Outlook has become “an authoritative reference, empowering leaders with the insights they need to navigate cyber challenges, as well as an important instrument with which to redefine business strategy, enterprise investments and government initiatives and seize the opportunities of today’s cybersecurity landscape.” The report calls on leaders across sectors to move beyond isolated efforts and “commit to raising the collective baseline by sharing intelligence, aligning standards and investing in the capabilities needed to ensure all organizations can benefit from a more secure and resilient digital environment.”

When asked to summarize the report’s strategic implications for 2026, Microsoft Copilot identified the following:

Invest in AI driven defense while strengthening oversight and risk controls.
Prioritize identity security, as attackers increasingly “log in” rather than “break in.”
Build resilience, not just protection — assume breaches and prepare rapid recovery.
Close capability gaps through training, partnerships, and shared resources.
Embed cybersecurity into innovation, ensuring new technologies are secure by design.

Turning to the recent research from Absolute Security into the state of enterprise cyber resilience – which means having the ability to ensure critical cyber defenses are operating effectively and to quickly restore business operations following a disruptive cyber incident or major software failure — it is a global study of 750 Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) in the US and UK, and is represented as the industry’s first research to provide insights into the state of cyber resilience, the challenges enterprises face, and steps security and risk executives can take to overcome them. The findings are now published in the first installment of Absolute Security’s newly launched eBook series, “The Resilient CISO: The State of Enterprise Resilience.”

According to the research results, during the past 12 months, 55 percent of CISOs agreed their organization had experienced a cyberattack, ransomware infection, compromise, or data breach that rendered mobile, remote, or hybrid endpoint devices inoperable. When asked about recovery time, a majority (57 percent) reported their organizations took more than 4.5 days (on average) for full remediation and recovery, with 19 percent saying recovery efforts stretched as long as two weeks. The survey further revealed that 98 percent of organizations are spending between $1 million and $5 million to recover from cyber incidents, with the average cost to recover per incident now $2.5 million. “Not a single respondent in the survey said they were able to recover from a cyber incident within a day when hit by an attack or incident in the past 12 months,” the research stresses.

In summary, as the World Economic Forums’ report underscores, “strengthening collective cyber resilience has become both an economic and a societal imperative.” And the new research from Absolute Security emphasizes how damaging a cyberattack, ransomware infection, compromise, or data breach can be, both financially as well as operationally. Combined, the two reports provide a clear warning to those responsible for the retirement security of millions of educators that prioritizing cyber resilience over traditional prevention, detection, and response may be more important than ever.

What does your CISO think?