Forrester S 2026 Cybersecurity Predictions Cybrsecmedia Com

Bonisiwe Shabane

-Dec 22, 2025, 2:55 PM

forrester s 2026 cybersecurity predictions cybrsecmedia com

According to a newly released report from Forrester Research, CISOs will likely be forced to step out of a few of their comfort zones in 2026. This analysis, the 2026 Predictions Report for Cybersecurity, reflects the convergence of three forces rapidly reshaping the CISO's role: geopolitical instability, the proliferation of agentic AI, and accelerating regulatory mandates. And, as Forrester predicts, 2026 will bring CISOs and security professionals potential AI breaches, tight infrastructure regulation, a new European Union vulnerability database, quantum security growth, and merger and acquisition shifts. "2025 was a tumultuous year for cybersecurity professionals. A change in political leadership in the US introduced instability within federal cybersecurity agencies and had a worldwide ripple effect; the focus on AI technology shifted from generative AI (genAI) to agent and agentic... "In 2026, continued political instability coupled with technological advancements being used by cybercriminals will force security, risk, and privacy leaders to not just adapt their defensive technologies to respond but also to prepare their...

Agentic AI Will Cause High-Profile Public Breaches: The most immediate threat CISOs face is the maturation of agentic AI workflows without adequate security controls. Forrester predicts that agentic AI deployments will lead to public breaches and result in employee scapegoating by 2026. The critical insight: these breaches stem from cascading failures, not individual mistakes. Security, risk, and privacy leaders routinely juggle adapting to evolving technology with regulatory compliance and global infrastructure challenges. In 2026, agentic AI will be the cause of a public breach; governments will tightly regulate or control critical communication infrastructure; the European Union will establish its own known exploited vulnerability database; quantum security... This report explores Forrester’s five predictions for cybersecurity, risk, and privacy in 2026.

Nov 28, 2025 | ! Homepage Slider, ! Recent Member News, Analytics and AI, Artificial Intelligence, Cloud Services, Cyber Risk Management Solution, Cyber Security and Compliance Services, Forrester, Insights, International, Market Research, Member News, Publication, Risk Management, Trends | 0 | By Paddy Harrington, Senior Analyst, Forrester Forrester clients can read our full Predictions 2026: Cybersecurity And Risk report to get more detail about each of these predictions, plus two more bonus predictions. Set up a Forrester guidance session to discuss these predictions or plan out your 2026 security strategy.

If you aren’t a Forrester client, download our complimentary Predictions guide, which covers our top technology and security predictions for 2026. And get additional complimentary resources, including upcoming webinars, on the Predictions 2026 hub. Forrester (Nasdaq: FORR) is one of the most influential research and advisory firms in the world. We empower leaders in technology, customer experience, digital, marketing, sales, and product functions to be bold at work and accelerate growth through customer obsession. Our unique research and continuous guidance model helps executives and their teams achieve their initiatives and outcomes faster and with confidence. To learn more, visit Forrester.com.

2025 was a tumultuous year for cybersecurity professionals. A change in political leadership in the US introduced instability within federal cybersecurity agencies and had a worldwide ripple effect; the focus on AI technology shifted from generative AI (genAI) to agent and agentic... In 2026, continued political instability coupled with technological advancements being used by cybercriminals will force security, risk, and privacy leaders to not just adapt their defensive technologies to respond but to also prepare their... To help business and security leaders understand where to focus their attention in the year ahead, here are three of Forrester’s 2026 cybersecurity and risk predictions: Forrester clients can read our full Predictions 2026: Cybersecurity And Risk report to get more detail about each of these predictions, plus two more bonus predictions. Set up a Forrester guidance session to discuss these predictions or plan out your 2026 security strategy.

If you aren’t a Forrester client, download our complimentary Predictions guide, which covers our top technology and security predictions for 2026. And get additional complimentary resources, including upcoming webinars, on the Predictions 2026 hub. Stay tuned for updates from the Forrester blogs. CAMBRIDGE, Mass., October 28, 2025 — According to Forrester’s (Nasdaq: FORR) 2026 technology and security predictions, AI will face a reckoning next year — the gap between inflated vendor promises and the value delivered... With fewer than one-third of decision-makers able to tie the value of AI to their organization’s financial growth, CEOs will lean more on their CFOs to approve AI investments based on their ROI in... As financial rigor slows production deployments and wipes out proofs of concept, enterprises will defer a quarter of their planned AI spend into 2027.

Forrester’s Predictions reports offer forward-looking insights into trends and signals that empower leaders and their teams to think beyond the conventional and ignite bold ideas in the year ahead. Forrester’s technology and security predictions cover topics including: artificial intelligence; automation and robotics; tech leadership; cloud computing; tech infrastructure and operations; enterprise software; software development; cybersecurity and risk; and smart manufacturing and mobility. Key highlights from Forrester’s 2026 technology and security predictions include: “In 2026, the AI hype period ends as the pressure to deliver real, measurable results from secure AI initiatives intensifies,” said Sharyn Leaver, chief research officer at Forrester. “As the era of volatility continues, tech and security leaders will be called upon to recalibrate investments under tighter financial scrutiny and governance while navigating increasingly complex geopolitical and economic risks. Forrester’s predictions are designed to help leaders make confident decisions by understanding the forward-looking trends that will shape their industry, function, and role in the year ahead.”

About Forrester Forrester (Nasdaq: FORR) is one of the most influential research and advisory firms in the world. We empower leaders in technology, customer experience, digital, marketing, sales, and product functions to be bold at work and accelerate growth through customer obsession. Our unique research and continuous guidance model helps executives and their teams achieve their initiatives and outcomes faster and with confidence. To learn more, visit Forrester.com. As artificial intelligence becomes deeply embedded in enterprise operations and cybercriminal arsenals alike, the Cybersecurity Predictions 2026 landscape reveals an unprecedented convergence of autonomous threats, identity-centric attacks, and accelerated digital transformation risks. Industry experts across leading security firms, government agencies, and research institutions have identified over 100 critical predictions that define the year ahead, a year where AI evolves from a defensive tool to both the...

The stakes have never been higher. With ransomware victims projected to increase by 40% compared to 2024, third-party breaches doubling to 30% of all incidents, and AI-driven attacks expected to dominate 50% of the threat landscape, organizations face a fundamental... This comprehensive analysis synthesizes expert forecasts to provide security leaders, practitioners, and decision-makers with actionable intelligence for navigating the most transformative cybersecurity year in modern history. The most significant Cybersecurity Predictions 2026 trend centers on the industrialization of artificial intelligence in cyberattacks. Threat actors are deploying agentic AI—self-directed systems that autonomously plan, execute, and adapt campaigns without human intervention. It's prediction time.

And every year, hundreds of security experts send their predictions to journalists. This year was no different. Here, we picked the best of those that came in over the transom. We stayed away from some of the more common predictions: quantum computing, AI-driven phishing and autonomous attacks, deepfakes rising, and so on. Everyone has those listed and we’ve all read them a dozen times. We picked these not because they are necessarily the most pressing, but because we found them unique, urgent, or somewhere in between.

And we believe they will have significant impacts on security professionals in the year ahead. The AI regulatory hammer drops. One of the most significant regulatory shifts will be moving some AI regulations from nice-to-have to must-have. Diana Kelley, CISO at Noma Security shares how the EU AI Act is entering its enforcement phase, requiring companies to classify AI systems by risk tiers and maintain auditable records of which model made... And in Asia, Japan's AI Promotion Act and South Korea's AI Framework Act both establish transparency and risk-based controls for AI. At the same time, Singapore's AI Verify framework provides a standardized, open-source framework for testing and demonstrating responsible AI.

In the US, California enacted the "Transparency in Frontier Artificial Intelligence Act," establishing first-in-nation rules for high-power AI models, public disclosure of safety processes, and incident-reporting obligations. "While we don't yet have a sweeping federal AI regulation akin to the EU AI Act, the landscape is changing quickly. Together, these signal a shift toward traceable, accountable AI," Kelley says. Attackers will accelerate their investments in cookie theft and MFA circumvention. The near-universal use of multi-factor authentication (MFA) means attackers will increasingly target ways to circumvent it. "This means threat actors will need to act swiftly from the time of theft, utilizing the stolen cookie before it expires to insert backdoors that then grant them persistent access.

Online marketplaces will expand to enable this with rapid trading and exploitation," predicts Ian Pratt, HP global head of personal systems security. "Defenses against cookie and token theft are not mature and are inconvenient for users," he continues. Pratt adds that attacks involving such theft are becoming increasingly commonplace. This is particularly serious for privileged users such as sysadmins, who frequently use web browsers to access high-value administrative websites, such as EntraID, Intune, or AWS web portals, where cookie theft creates an easy...

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If You Aren’t A Forrester Client, Download Our Complimentary Predictions

If you aren’t a Forrester client, download our complimentary Predictions guide, which covers our top technology and security predictions for 2026. And get additional complimentary resources, including upcoming webinars, on the Predictions 2026 hub. Forrester (Nasdaq: FORR) is one of the most influential research and advisory firms in the world. We empower leaders in technology, customer experience...