Industry experts at Integrity360 outline the evolving threat landscape and strategic shifts organisations must embrace in the year ahead
As 2025 drew to a close, cybersecurity professionals were confronting a sobering reality: traditional defence strategies were no longer sufficient. Seasoned experts at Integrity360 reveal the challenges awaiting organisations in 2026, revealing a fundamental shift in how businesses must approach digital security.
The cyber sector will ultimately face a critical evolution, moving beyond cybersecurity to embrace cyber resilience. Richard Ford, Chief Technology Officer at Integrity360, frames this transition as essential for modern organisations facing an increasingly hostile digital environment.
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Brian Martin, Director of Product Management at Integrity360, explained the concept using the National Institute of Standards and Technology definition: the ability to anticipate, withstand, recover from, and adapt to adverse conditions, stresses, attacks, or compromises on systems.
"Cyber resilience acknowledges there's an inevitability about breaches happening," Briansaid. "It emphasises the ability to recover and continue operating after an attack, minimising the downtime and damage."
This shift isn't merely theoretical. Recent regulatory developments, including the Digital Operational Resilience Act and the Cyber Resilience Act, are embedding these principles into legal requirements. Organisations must now consider metrics like maximum tolerable downtime, recovery time objectives, and recovery point objectives as core components of their security posture.
The UK's National Cyber Security Centre reinforced this message in its recent annual report, which focused heavily on resilience and hardening. The report featured an open letter from a retail executive describing their company's experience repelling an attack, success that stemmed directly from advance preparation, including maintaining paper-based backup procedures for critical operations.
There are growing concerns throughout the sector about the increasingly powerful impact that Artificial Intelligence will have on cybersecurity in 2026.
Martin Potgieter, Regional Chief Technology Officer for South Africa and the African region at Integrity360, emphasised the technology's real-world impact on threat actor capabilities. Social engineering campaigns have reached unprecedented sophistication, with poorly crafted phishing attempts becoming artifacts of the past.
"You actually don't come across a bad social engineering campaign nowadays," Potgieterobserved. "The campaigns are very convincing. There's AI doing voice now, and we all know about the video stuff."
Ahmed, a technical product manager at Integrity360specialising in cloud and network security, drew parallels between AI adoption and early cloud computing. Both technologies present unavoidable challenges: organisations cannot simply opt out, as AI is already embedded in countless tools and services.
The threats are multifaceted. Attackers are weaponizing AI through tools like "Bad GPT," which help develop malicious payloads that evade traditional detection. Simultaneously, AI systems themselves face novel attacks, including prompt injection and data poisoning.
Yet rushing into AI adoption without proper safeguards mirrors the security failures of early cloud implementations. Experts at Integrity360 stress the vital importance of establishing clear AI usage policies as a foundational step, followed by implementing visibility and governance tools that can monitor shadow AI usage and provide inline guidance to users.
In a fast evolving world, Geopoliticshas also emergedas a major concern, reflecting how international tensions are increasingly manifesting in the digital realm and reshaping the threat landscape.
Nation-state threat actors from Russia, Iran, China, and North Korea continue refining their methods, with particular focus on trusted software and hardware ecosystems. The compromise of supply chains has become a hallmark of sophisticated state-backed operations, with vulnerabilities discovered by nation-state actors often trickling down into the broader cybercriminal ecosystem.
Trade tensions between major economic powers are driving intensified espionage and intellectual property theft. The weaponization of supply chains, particularly in critical sectors like semiconductorscreates new vulnerabilities for organisations caught in the geopolitical crosshairs.
Hacktivist groups aligned with ideological or nationalist causes add another dimension to the threat landscape. These groups increasingly target private enterprises based on symbolic associations, meaning companies can find themselves under attack simply due to their supply chain relationships or office locations.
Potgieternoted that the African region, once perceived as somewhat insulated from geopolitical cyber conflict, now finds itself "in the thick of things" as various nations compete for influence and access to the continent's resources.
This in turn will continue to fuel the debate about data sovereignty and infrastructure dependencies, particularly given the fact that much of the world's technology and security infrastructure remains concentrated in specific regions, creating strategic vulnerabilities as international relationships shift.
2026 is also expected to see national critical infrastructure coming under increasingly sustained and sophisticated new levels of attack.
Industrial organisations and operational technology environments face mounting pressure, with research showing a 60 percent increase in threat actors targeting the industrial sector and approximately 80 percent growth in ransomware attacks against these organisations during 2025.
Brianidentified several factors making OT (Operational Technology) particularly attractive to threat actors. Cyber investment in these environments typically lags behind traditional IT infrastructure, while the stakes remain extraordinarily high. Just a few hours of downtime in an industrial setting can cost more than a typical ransomware payment, creating strong incentives for victims to simply pay up.
Common vulnerabilities include lack of network segmentation, obsolete and unpatched components, insufficient visibility and monitoring, and embedded assets unprotected against malware.
Critically, over 70 percent of breaches in operational technology environments originate in connected IT systems. This statistic underscores the importance of proper segmentation following established frameworks. Effective segmentation alone could eliminate approximately three-quarters of operational technology breach risk.
Attackers increasingly bypass traditional endpoint defences entirely by targeting cloud identities directly. Sophisticated phishing campaigns steal credentials and execute attacks without ever touching protected endpoints.
"We spend all this time on protecting the endpoint and getting visibility on the endpoint," Potgieterexplained. "We've had cloud for many years now, and we're still seeing attacks against cloud."
This reality demands expanded visibility across the entire technology landscape, not just endpoints, but also cloud environments, applications, identity systems, networks, and data repositories. Each area requires specialised detection capabilities tuned to its unique characteristics.
To be fully prepared in 2026, organisations will need to move beyond threat detection toward proactive security measures, identifying weak points and exposures before they manifest as active breaches.Integrity360 has laid out the following recommendations:-
Elevate cyber resilience to board-level responsibility, ensuring executive leadership takes ownership of risk. Organisations should define and regularly test metrics including maximum tolerable downtime and recovery objectives.
Establish clear AI usage policies before implementing technical controls, balancing productivity benefits against security risks. Deploy visibility tools that can detect shadow AI usage and provide governance oversight.
Develop intelligence-led defences that account for geopolitical developments and nation-state threat actor tactics. Organisations should understand where their data resides and which regulations apply to their operations.
Implement robust network segmentation, particularly between IT and operational technology environments, following established frameworks and standards.
Expand detection and response capabilities beyond endpoints to encompass cloud environments, identity systems, and the full technology estate.
Perhaps most importantlyorganisations must abandon the notion that perfect prevention is achievable. In recent yearsthe question has notbeen if a breach will occur, but when, but now that questions has become how impactful a breach will be, whether the organisation can withstand, recover from, and adapt to that inevitable event. Survival depends not on avoiding every attack, but on being thoroughly prepared when attacks succeed. In 2026, that preparation must extend well beyond traditional cybersecurity measures to embrace genuine resilience across people, processes, and technology.
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