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The World Economic Forum’s Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2026 identifies three leading cybersecurity trends: AI reshaping the cyber arms race, geopolitics influencing cyber risk, and cyber-enabled fraud threatening organizations and individuals. The report also points to supply-chain weaknesses and unequal access to cyber expertise as important resilience problems. These are survey-based findings and expectations, not a global count of attacks or a universal ranking of the likelihood that any one organization will be hit.
How to read the WEF’s 2026 findings
The World Economic Forum published its Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2026 on 12 January 2026, in collaboration with Accenture. Its launch release says the survey drew on 804 business leaders in 92 countries, including 105 CEOs and 316 CISOs. The percentages below describe respondents’ experiences, perceptions or expectations; they do not measure the share of all people or organizations worldwide that experienced an attack.
The report’s executive summary names three key trends, rather than ranking every threat from most to least dangerous. Its trends chapter also examines supply-chain risk, cyber inequity and emerging technology areas.
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AI is the report’s most prominent source of change in cybersecurity. According to the WEF’s 2026 report, 94% of respondents expected AI to be the most significant driver of change in cybersecurity in the year ahead. Separately, 87% identified AI-related vulnerabilities as the fastest-growing cyber risk over 2025. These are survey responses, not measured attack rates.
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Security of AI tools is drawing more attention
The share of respondents whose organizations assessed the security of AI tools rose from 37% in 2025 to 64% in 2026, according to the WEF. The increase suggests more organizations are scrutinizing the tools they deploy, but it does not establish that all AI systems are being assessed or that assessment practices are equally thorough.
Data exposure and attacker capability are key concerns
In the report’s trends chapter, 34% of respondents named generative-AI-associated data leaks as a leading AI concern for 2026, while 29% pointed to advancing adversarial capabilities. The figures describe concerns, not the proportion of organizations that suffered leaks. The balance differed in 2025: adversarial capabilities led at 47%, while generative-AI data leaks stood at 22%.
AI can help defenders, but governance matters
The WEF describes AI as useful to human teams for detection, defense and response, as well as a potential source of harm when poorly implemented or misused. Its recommendations include governance, security-by-design, monitoring and keeping human judgment central. In practical terms, organizations need to consider what information AI tools can access, how their outputs are checked, and how security issues are detected and handled.
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Geopolitics remained the leading factor influencing cyber risk mitigation strategies in the WEF’s 2026 findings. The report says 64% of organizations accounted for geopolitically motivated attacks, such as critical-infrastructure disruption or espionage, in their mitigation strategies. Among the largest organizations, 91% changed cybersecurity strategy because of geopolitical volatility.
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These findings connect cyber planning to events beyond an organization’s own network. Disruption of critical infrastructure and espionage can affect business continuity, public services and the wider environment in which organizations operate.
Respondents expressed concern about national response capacity
According to the WEF report, 31% of respondents had low confidence in their country’s ability to respond to major cyber incidents, up from 26% the previous year. The executive summary also reports regional variation in confidence about protecting critical infrastructure: 84% in the Middle East and North Africa and 13% in Latin America and the Caribbean. These are survey findings, not measures of every resident’s view or an objective rating of national capability.
3. Cyber-enabled fraud is affecting people and organizations
Cyber-enabled fraud is the WEF’s third headline trend. The report says 73% of respondents reported that they, or someone in their network, had been personally affected by cyber-enabled fraud during 2025. In a separate finding, 77% said cyber-enabled fraud and phishing had increased overall. Neither percentage means that the same share of the world’s population was victimized.
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The most common attack types respondents reported were phishing—including voice and text-message variants—payment fraud and identity theft. These threats can exploit trust and routine transactions, making awareness and verification important alongside technical defenses.
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CEOs and CISOs emphasize different risks
The WEF reports that CEOs rank cyber-enabled fraud as their top concern, while CISOs remain focused on ransomware and supply-chain resilience. This difference in emphasis does not mean ransomware has gone away: the report describes it as a persistent threat and a leading concern for CISOs.
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Supplier weaknesses can spread across connected systems
Third-party and supply-chain vulnerabilities were identified as the greatest cyber-resilience challenge by 65% of large companies in the WEF’s 2026 survey, compared with 54% in 2025. The report highlights inherited risk from third-party software, hardware and services, along with limited visibility into suppliers. A breach at one supplier can cascade through connected systems, so organizations need to understand dependencies as well as secure their own networks.
Cyber inequity leaves some organizations with fewer defenses
The report describes unequal access to cybersecurity resources and expertise as a resilience problem, particularly for smaller organizations and less-resourced regions. Its launch release says smaller organizations were twice as likely as large firms to report insufficient resilience. It also identifies workforce skill constraints in Latin America and the Caribbean and sub-Saharan Africa. These findings point to differences in capacity, not an inherent difference in the threats those organizations face.
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Emerging vectors to watch toward 2030
The trends chapter discusses autonomous systems and robotics, digital currencies, and space and seabed infrastructure as areas that could affect cybersecurity toward 2030. They are emerging-vector discussions, not a claim that these are the most significant current threats. In the report’s 2026 survey, 26% of respondents said autonomous systems and robotics would affect cybersecurity, while 9% said space technologies would have the greatest impact.
What the findings mean for organizations
The report’s findings suggest several practical areas to examine. They are broad priorities drawn from its trends, not a substitute for assessing an organization’s specific systems, obligations or threat environment.
Quick Recap
- Assess AI use: identify which tools handle sensitive data, evaluate their security, and set governance and monitoring practices.
- Plan for geopolitical disruption: consider how espionage, critical-infrastructure disruption or regional instability could affect operations and incident response.
- Strengthen fraud defenses: make it easier to verify unusual payment, identity and account requests, and train people to recognize phishing across voice, text and email.
- Map supplier dependencies: understand which third-party services and components are essential, what assurances are available, and how operations would continue if a supplier were compromised.
- Build response capacity: account for gaps in skills and resources when planning resilience, including for smaller organizations and teams with limited specialist support.
Sources
- World Economic Forum, Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2026
- World Economic Forum, launch release, 12 January 2026
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