2026 will be a defining year for cybersecurity. AI-driven attacks are accelerating, security programs are maturing fast, and organizations are realizing that reactive approaches are no longer enough.

Across every prediction from HackerOne security leaders, one theme stands out: the need for continuous validation powered by both AI and human ingenuity. From agentic security and CTEM adoption to supply-chain risk and sector-specific threats, leaders agree that security in 2026 will reward organizations that test early, test often, and treat autonomy with caution.

1. The AI Arms Race Reaches a Tipping Point

Dane Sherrets, Staff Innovations Architect

The hackbots and AI “arms race” in cybersecurity will reach a tipping point in 2026, driving deeper collaboration between security researchers and organizations to counter increasingly autonomous cyber threats.

In the year ahead, the cybersecurity landscape will enter a new phase of escalation as AI systems become more autonomous and intertwined across both attack and defensive strategies. The DARPA-funded AIxCC competition has shown how powerful AI can be at identifying and patching vulnerabilities, and I believe we will see dramatic improvements in this realm.

Organizations have started taking a more mature approach to the security posture of their own AI deployments. Over the past year, organizations have increased testing of their AI assets by 270%*, signaling a shift in how AI is implemented and secured. This surge in AI deployments is reshaping the threat landscape, as the number of AI-related vulnerabilities jumped 200% and prompt-injection reports soared 540% in 2025.

"Cybercriminals are already deploying deepfake-driven social engineering and automated vulnerability discovery to breach defenses faster than human response cycles."

—Dane Sherrets, Staff Innovations Architect

To stay ahead, organizations will double down on offensive security strategies that fuse security researcher collaboration with continuous testing.

In 2026, security will hinge on balancing autonomy with accountability, where adaptability, collaboration, and human discernment become core pillars for staying ahead in the ever-evolving AI arms race.

2. CTEM Becomes Essential for Confident AI Adoption

Nidhi Aggarwal, Chief Product Officer

In 2026, security teams will stop treating vulnerabilities as isolated issues and start managing them as a continuous system. Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) will redefine cybersecurity by shifting organizations from reacting to alerts to constantly validating their entire attack surface with real adversarial pressure.

As AI accelerates both development and risk, annual tests and static controls won’t keep pace. AI-assisted coding is now generating insecure patterns at scale, making basic security hygiene issues more common across modern codebases. At the same time, the AI systems driving this acceleration introduce new attack surfaces that must be secured continuously. Organizations that fail to test both the code AI produces and the AI systems behind it will undermine security for AI and create high-speed pathways to avoidable weaknesses.

On HackerOne, AI-related testing grew 270% last year, valid AI vulnerabilities rose 210%, and prompt injection attacks surged 540%, while 97% of AI-related incidents still stemmed from basic access control flaws*. The gap between rapid innovation and foundational security is widening. CTEM helps close the gap by reducing the reliance on reactive fixes and instead creating a continuous loop of discovery, prioritization, and remediation.

In 2026, the breakthrough will be pairing human creativity with AI-driven scale. Nearly 70% of researchers already use AI, and more than half are expanding into AI/ML security. This fusion will power self-testing systems that expose their weaknesses before attackers do.

"2026 will be the year security teams stop trying to outpace attackers and instead out-learn them—continuously, systematically, and with AI as a force multiplier."

—Nidhi Aggarwal, Chief Product Officer

3. Security Leaders Prioritize Continuous Validation Amid Economic Pressure

Kara Sprague, CEO

As economic headwinds persist, security leaders are no longer asking what to cut—they’re asking what delivers measurable risk reduction.

"In this environment, security can’t afford to be static, theoretical, or siloed. It must be continuous, validated, and tied to business impact."

—Kara Sprague, CEO

If your budget were halved, which controls would you keep? The answer increasingly points to what delivers real-time insight into what’s exploitable—not just what’s theoretically vulnerable.

In 2026, the shift toward operationalized exposure management will accelerate. Inspired by frameworks like Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM), security leaders will prioritize ongoing visibility, adversarial validation, and faster remediation.

4. Agentic Security Changes How Defenders Operate

Kara Sprague, CEO

In 2026, resilience won’t come from adding more tools. It will come from having verified vulnerabilities, reproducible exploit paths, and clear severity insights, and acting on them quickly. Two forces are pushing this shift.

First, AI is reshaping the threat landscape. Attackers are using AI to accelerate their workflow: automating discovery, chaining exploits, and evading defenses faster than before. At the same time, enterprise adoption of AI systems is exploding, which dramatically expands the attack surface and exposes organizations to new classes of vulnerabilities such as prompt injection and model manipulation.

Second, agentic security is starting to change the game. Defenders now have AI agents that can automatically probe systems, reproduce exploit chains, score impact, and even trigger fixes.

"Combined with human creativity, this creates a feedback loop that adapts as fast as attackers do. And in that world, crowdsourced security becomes even more essential."

—Kara Sprague, CEO

When human ingenuity pairs with AI-validated findings, organizations get fewer false positives, clearer prioritization, and a faster path from “something looks suspicious” to “we know what’s exploitable and how to fix it.

[Hai CTA]

5. Supply-Chain Attacks Will Continue to Expand Across Entire Industries

Bertijn Eldering, Associate Sales Engineer

Next year, manufacturers won’t have time to blink. If 2025 was the wake-up call, 2026 will be the year cyber criminals grow bolder, more coordinated and more fearless in the targets they choose.

"No longer are they content with attacking single businesses, they now have entire industries in their scopes, exploiting common vulnerabilities or supply chains to jump from business to business in rapid succession attacks."

—Bertijn Eldering, Associate Sales Engineer

2026 will be more of the same unless we see businesses taking an offensive security approach, with a recent report finding that 13% of organizations experienced AI-related or software supply-chain incidents* and 97% of those lacked proper access controls.

This same absence of basic identity protection and segmentation is what enabled perhaps the most significant attack on the industry in 2025: the Jaguar LandRover breach. Not only was this attack a severe blow to JLR, it also had a detrimental impact on the entire UK economy, with the Bank of England highlighting how this attack contributed to the lack of economic growth. Unless there is a significant shift in security priorities, the next year will see more of the same.

As we look to 2026, businesses need to get back to basics. That means using phishing-resistant MFA on ERP, SaaS and supplier portals, keeping IT, ERP and OT networks strictly separated, applying least-privilege and just-in-time access for admin accounts, and continuously testing vendor integrations and APIs through third parties.

Above all, resilience needs rehearsal. Incident response should be muscle memory and not a binder on a shelf. Table-top exercises with plant managers and supplier leads, supported by pre-tested OT backup images, can make the difference between a few hours of disruption and a multi-week shutdown.

It is only through continuous validation of these controls through red teaming or crowdsourced security that organizations can bolster their defenses and mitigate vulnerabilities before they become an issue.

6. Retailers Will Confront Another High-Risk Year

Bertijn Eldering, Associate Sales Engineer

Last year saw retailers hit hard over the holiday season, a deliberate strategy designed to maximize disruption and financial impact while defenses are thinly stretched.

The industry has been constantly in the spotlight these last 12 months, with many industry giants making headlines as they found themselves falling victim to attacks. The problem many face is that retail websites and mobile apps often mirror each other in both design and backend infrastructure, even right down to shared APIs and business logic.

“A single vulnerability, whether in a discount code workflow or a third-party plugin, can be exploited across platforms.”

—Bertijn Eldering, Associate Sales Engineer

The result is a broad attack surface with common weak points, which are something threat actors are quick to exploit. A recent report has revealed that the average cost of one of these attacks is $3.54 million*. 2026 must be the year retailers fight back against this tide, protecting themselves, their peers and their customers.

Just as attackers will continue to grow more organized and opportunistic in the new year, businesses must also look to enhance their cybersecurity capabilities or risk falling victim to another round of vicious attacks. 2026 must be the year retailers double down on security practices, making use of all available resources to bolster their cyber defenses.

One of these key resources is the security researcher. Over the last year alone, these researchers have saved businesses a combined $144 million in mitigated vulnerability costs. By employing strategic testing of defenses, businesses are able to locate and secure potential vulnerabilities. This approach will be key if they hope to stay ahead of attackers in the new year.

Modernize your approach in 2026: CTEM finds what is exploitable, not just what’s discoverable.

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*Hacker-Powered Security Report 2025: The Rise of the Bionic Hacker

Survey methodology: HackerOne and UserEvidence surveyed 99 HackerOne customer representatives between June and August 2025. Respondents represented organizations across industries and maturity levels, including 6% from Fortune 500 companies, 43% from large enterprises, and 31% in executive or senior management roles. In parallel, HackerOne conducted a researcher survey of 1,825 active HackerOne researchers, fielded between July and August 2025. Findings were supplemented with HackerOne platform data from July 1, 2024 to June 30, 2025, covering all active customer programs. Payload analysis: HackerOne also analyzed over 45,000 payload signatures from 23,579 redacted vulnerability reports submitted during the same period.