According to recent research from the World Economic Forum, the global cost of cybercrime will rise to $23 trillion in 2027, a massive 175% increase from 2022. This amount is roughly equivalent to the GDP of a country like Italy, and the implications are significant on a personal level.
For individuals and families, the escalating costs could mean higher expenses for online security, potential financial losses from cyber fraud, or increased internet service prices as companies pass on the costs of securing their systems. As reliance on digital platforms and exposure to Artificial Intelligence (AI) increase, we become increasingly exposed to cybersecurity threats, ranging from malware attacks to more sophisticated AI-powered attacks, such as deepfakes and AI-driven spear-phishing.
How prepared are you for these cybersecurity challenges? Research reveals that the world is largely unprepared for these growing threats.
The first step towards fighting the enemy is knowing it. Hence, this article unmasks the top cybersecurity threats, including AI and IoT attacks, for all those wanting to learn about emerging threats and the best practices to prevent them.
Let’s begin by clearing the basics around cybersecurity issues, the forms they may take, and their possible impact.
Simply put, cyber security threats are vulnerabilities that cybercriminals or bad actors can exploit to gain unauthorized access to your sensitive information for their unfair purposes.
While cybersecurity is the practice of protection against digital threats, cyber threats are events that are designed to target your computer or any other computerized information system to alter, destroy, or steal your data and exploit or harm your network.
In other words, these are the events that may compromise your integrity, confidentiality, or information and systems availability.
With the growing digital landscape, cybersecurity challenges can be categorized into several categories, such as malware, social engineering, insider threats, and Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs). This article covers all these threats in the later sections.
For better understanding, let’s look at some examples of common cybersecurity threats.
Imagine someone sends you an email, pretending to be an official bank representative, warning you that your account will be frozen if you do not share your sensitive account information.
This is a classic example of phishing, a form of social engineering that attempts to get your sensitive information.
A modern form of phishing can be a voice of someone you know, cloned using AI, asking you for your personal information or requesting you to transfer money to their bank account.
In another example of cybersecurity threats in healthcare, imagine a malicious software encrypts a patient’s data, making it inaccessible unless a ransom is paid.
Something similar actually happened in 2021, a ransomware attack on Universal Health Services resulted in $67 million in lost revenue.
In addition to financial losses, cybersecurity issues lead to financial losses, reputation damage, operational disruption, legal and regulatory consequences, and intellectual property theft.
Hence, let’s take a closer look at the latest cybersecurity threats so that you can take protective measures to safeguard your valuable assets.
The top threats in cybersecurity include AI-powered cyber-attacks (such as deepfakes), social engineering attacks (such as phishing), malware (such as viruses), and the following.
AI, i.e., Artificial Intelligence, is both a bane and a boon for cybersecurity. On the one hand, AI can help you predict threats and vulnerabilities ahead of time, increase the security patching scale, and help you combat cybersecurity challenges with hyper-personalized training materials.
On the other hand, AI can empower cybercriminals to execute smarter and harder-to-detect attacks. Statistics show that over 87% of organizations identify AI-related threats as the fastest-growing cybersecurity challenges (according to the World Economic Forum). Moreover, according to another recent study, over 16% of security breaches involved AI-driven attacks.
The emerging AI-powered cyber security threats are adversarial AI attacks and model poisoning, automated malicious tools and campaigns, and refined phishing and deepfakes.
Model phishing and adversarial AI attacks manipulate AI models by injecting malicious data during their training or making trained models misclassify data, causing failure of AI-driven security tools.
To better understand these terms, think of adversarial AI as similar to misleading someone by giving them incorrect instructions, causing them to make mistakes. Model poisoning is like introducing wrong information into a person’s education, causing them to give erroneous answers because they’ve learned the wrong things.
Automated malicious tools and campaigns involve creating and executing extremely personalized and effective cyber attacks. It includes infecting the system with an autonomous malware (malicious program) that adapts itself to defenses, self-propagating worms, and advanced scanning tools.
Moreover, attackers can use generative AI to create deepfakes and advanced phishing attacks. Deepfakes are realistic but fake audio, video, or images. Attackers can use these deepfakes to impersonate trusted individuals or executives to get the victim’s sensitive information.
A high-profile example of an AI cybersecurity threat is where a finance employee at a multinational engineering firm (Arup) in Hong Kong was tricked using deepfakes to transfer $25 million to scammers.
Social engineering cybersecurity issues involve exploiting human psychology, tricking victims into breaking security procedures, and giving attackers access to sensitive data.
According to Mimecast’s The State of Human Risk 2025, almost all data breaches (over 95%) involved human error. Moreover, many businesses consider human errors and social engineering as the biggest cybersecurity issues in 2026.
Various social engineering threats that demand caution in 2026 include phishing variants (such as email phishing, spear phishing, whaling, vishing or voice phishing, smishing, and angler phishing, i.e., an attack that occurs on social media platforms. You can read more about phishing and its various forms in our other dedicated guide.
Social engineering cybersecurity threats in 2026 also involve baiting, pretexting, and business email compromises.
Baiting means enticing victims with the promise of information or goods. It is commonly done through USB drives that purportedly contain important work-related information, such as salary details of employees, which are actually harmful malware created to enter and infect a corporate network.
Pretexting occurs when attackers use pretenses to get information. For example, an attacker may pose as an auditor needing confidential or sensitive information to carry out a supposed security or business audit.
Business email compromise involves using email fraud to trick companies into transferring crucial data or money to cybercriminals.
Also know: How to Activate and Use Windows Security on Windows 11 and 10
While not new, malware attacks continue to be one of the top cybersecurity threats in 2026. Malware statistics show that malware attacks (especially ransomware attacks) are going to increase 40% by the end of 2026, compared to 2024, and 400% compared to 2020.
Malware attacks involve viruses and worms, ransomware, cryptojacking, and fileless malware.
Viruses and worms are among the most common forms of malware. Viruses attach themselves to clean files and then infect other clean files, which may spread uncontrollably, damaging the system and corrupting its data. Worms replicate automatically within the network to exploit vulnerabilities; they can even mimic benign network traffic to evade detection.
Ransomware is a malware that steals your data and holds it hostage until you pay the ransom. Even after paying the ransom, there is no guarantee that cybercriminals will release your data.
Cryptojacking is a lesser-known but among the top cybersecurity challenges in 2026. It is malware that hijacks your computing resources, allowing bad actors to mine cryptocurrency without your permission.
A fileless malware is another threat that operates directly in your computer’s memory (RAM) and uses legitimate system tools, such as the registry and PowerShell, to execute, leaving no files on the hard drive. This makes it particularly dangerous for everyday users because it is much harder to detect and remove compared to traditional malware.
Since it does not leave a clear digital footprint on the hard drive, traditional antivirus software often fails to recognize it. Consequently, users are more vulnerable to potential data breaches and unauthorized access to their personal information.
The world is almost at war in 2026. With growing conflicts between Russia and Ukraine, Russia and the United States, and almost every other country, state-sponsored attacks and insider threats are on the rise.
In fact, according to the World Economic Forum, nearly 59%, i.e., six in ten organizations, think geopolitical tensions have impacted their cybersecurity strategies.
These nation-state cyber activities are targeted at sabotage, espionage, or the global political landscape. Empowered by the state’s power, these attacks are executed with the utmost sophistication to achieve various national military or economic objectives.
Examples include the Russian government-sponsored groups using malware and other cybersecurity threats to target critical infrastructure in Ukraine and the United States.
On the other hand, insider threats are challenges that come from within an organization, usually through employees, business partners, or contractors having access to sensitive data and systems.
An insider attack occurs when an individual within the organization misuses their access to data and systems for personal gain. These threats can also arise from a careless action by an insider, leading to a security breach.
An advanced persistent threat (APT) is also among the top cybersecurity threats to watch out for in 2026. It is a hidden cyberattack in which a group or person gains unauthorized access to a network and goes undetected for an extended period.
While the definition of advanced persistent threat was initially related to nation-state sponsorship, we have seen multiple instances of such attacks in the last few years.
For example, in early 2024, Lazarus Group, i.e., a North Korean state-sponsored APT, exploited CVE-2024-4947, a Google Chrome zero-day vulnerability, tricking cryptocurrency traders into downloading malicious software to steal their sensitive financial data.
The key characteristics of advanced persistent threats include that they are highly targeted, involve long-term engagement, use advanced malware and detection evasion techniques, and move laterally through the network to penetrate various parts of the organization’s digital infrastructure.
An SQL injection attack involves data manipulation to access information that otherwise may not be available to the cybercriminal. In this attack, cybercriminals manipulate SQL queries, i.e., the string of code requests sent to a server or service, to get sensitive information.
In fact, Akamai’s report reveals that SQL injection represented roughly 65.1% of all web application attacks in 2024-2025, with the number expected to increase in 2026.
URL interpretation, also known as URL poisoning, is an attack where cybercriminals attack and fabricate URL addresses to access the target’s personal and professional data.
The bad actor knows the order in which the URL information of a web page needs to be entered. They then interpret this syntax to understand how to access the areas that they otherwise cannot enter.
The modern-day URL interpretation attacks use cloud-based apps, legitimate URL rewriting tools, and multi-stage redirects to evade security systems.
For example, attackers used a legitimate rewriting service to bypass a second URL rewriting service, facilitating an open-standard authorization protocol compromise within a Microsoft 365 (M365) environment. Through the manipulation of rewritten URLs from reputable email security systems, the attackers were able to gain unauthorized access.
DNS, i.e., Domain Name System, spoofing occurs when a bad actor modifies DNS records to send traffic to a spoofed or fake website. The victim may enter sensitive information on the fraudulent website. The hacker may later use or sell this information.
The hacker can also create a low-quality website with inflammatory or derogatory content to bring the competitor company into a bad light. In these attacks, the cybercriminal exploits the user’s belief that they are visiting a legitimate website, allowing them to commit crimes in the name of a legitimate and innocent company.
The Brazilian bank attack is one of the top DNS spoofing examples. The attackers took complete control of a Brazilian bank’s digital infrastructure for as long as five hours, locking the bank out of its own systems, rerouting traffic from all the bank’s domains to fake websites, fooling customers into thinking their connections were secure, and capturing their email credentials, passwords, and authentication codes.
A brute-force attack, getting its name from “brutish,” occurs when the attacker tries to guess the login credentials of someone who has access to the target system.
Since it is cumbersome and time-consuming to guess the login credentials, hackers use bots to do the needful. They feed bots with a list of credentials that may allow them to access the secure area. The bot then tries each of these keys until one of them works and unlocks the system for the hacker.
While brute force attacks may sound like a thing of the past, they still work because hackers can exploit weak and reused passwords, the power of modern hardware to guess password combinations rapidly, and multi-factor authentication fatigue.
Also know: Tailgating in Cyber Security
Session hijacking also has a spot on the list of the top cybersecurity threats. It involves an attacker taking over a session between the server and a client. The attacker’s computer substitutes the Internet Protocol (IP) address of the client’s computer so that the server continues the session without flagging it as suspicious.
2026 is the session hijacking 2.0 era, when attacks move from password brute-force to stealing active session tokens, allowing attackers to impersonate users without being triggered by multi-factor authentication and login alerts. Session tokens are unique identifiers assigned to each user’s session when they log into a system. Stealing these tokens is problematic because it allows attackers to bypass authentication measures and gain access to secure systems without detection.
In fact, statistics show that nearly 87% of successful cyberattacks in 2024 involved session hijacking after a valid multi-factor authentication login, and the number is set to grow in 2026.
An IoT or Internet of Things attack is a cyberattack that targets an IoT network or device. These devices can be many, ranging from industrial equipment to household appliances, with every device connected online. Once the device or network is compromised, the cybercriminal can control the device, steal data, or become a part of a group of infected devices to make a botnet to launch other cyberattacks.
One notable example of IoT attacks is when, in September 2024, security researchers found a botnet made of over 200,000 small office/home office (SOHO) and IoT devices, probably operated by Flax Typhoon, a Chinese nation-state threat actor. This botnet has been active since at least May 2020, and by June 2024, it had compromised over 260,000 devices.
The above was our take on the top cybersecurity threats and issues in 2026. While these challenges are scary, a few effective tips from cybersecurity experts can help you overcome them.
The best cybersecurity experts suggest the tips below to avoid cybersecurity issues in 2026.
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