Google Cloud:  Five Strategic Threat Shifts for Cybersecurity in 2026

Incidents that occurred during 2025 have laid the groundwork for the challenges 2026 will bring. If your security posture still assumes a human at the keyboard, an alert in a queue, or a network with a clear perimeter, then you’re already outflanked.

Google Cloud’s newly released Cybersecurity Forecast 2026 is grounded in hard data and frontline observations from some of the world's most experienced security researchers.

The forecast confirms what many have suspected: AI is no longer a supporting actor in cyberattacks; it’s actually becoming the lead. Threat actors are shifting from occasional AI use to full integration across the attack lifecycle. Expect faster, broader, and more convincing phishing, reconnaissance, and exploit execution, powered by generative AI models.

Approximately 4 in 5 organizations maintain that they cannot keep up with the pace of AI-motivated malicious activity (CrowdStrike, 2025).

Prompt injection attacks involve subtly manipulating AI input prompts to bypass safety controls or leak sensitive data. As enterprise AI tools proliferate, attackers will increasingly target the models themselves, turning trust into a vulnerability. Equally concerning is the rise of AI-powered social engineering, such as voice-cloning scams impersonating executives. The line between human and synthetic identity is blurring, and organizations are largely unprepared.

While attackers weaponize AI, defenders are building their own countermeasures, led by the emerging concept of the Agentic SOC (Security Operations Center). Instead of manually triaging alerts, analysts will oversee AI agents trained to prioritize threats, generate incident summaries, and correlate signals across systems.

This model doesn’t just improve speed; it redefines the analyst's role. Human teams will shift toward oversight, validation, and strategic decision-making. But this evolution introduces a new challenge: treating AI agents as first-class digital actors. That means issuing them identities, assigning access rights, and applying audit trails, just as we do for human staff.

Organizations that don’t modernize their identity and access management (IAM) frameworks to accommodate AI will find themselves wide open to abuse, privilege escalation, or even rogue AI behavior.

As endpoint and OS-level protections improve, attackers are simply digging deeper. Virtual machines, hypervisors, and cloud-native infrastructure are becoming prime targets. Because these layers lie beneath the purview of many traditional security tools, compromises here can have a massive, rapid impact.

A single compromise of a hypervisor or cloud control plane could grant lateral access across thousands of workloads. The forecast calls this out as a critical blind spot, especially for enterprises running hybrid or multi-cloud environments. Instead of attacking individual endpoints, attackers aim for infrastructure-wide disruption. In a particularly concerning development, the ransomware group Akira has added virtual machine disk files on platforms like Nutanix AHV to its target list (TechRadar, 2025).

Cybercriminals are moving entire operations in the crypto sphere on-chain. Google’s forecast highlights the on-chain cybercrime economy as a major 2026 trend: decentralized extortion schemes, blockchain-hosted command-and-control servers, and payments that resist takedown.

As of mid-2025, more than US$2.17 billion had already been stolen from cryptocurrency services, a number that may cross US$4 billion by year’s end if the trend continues (Chainalysis, 2025). This tactic improves adversary resilience and reduces the impact of law enforcement interventions. Platforms like Tornado Cash and mixers remain under scrutiny, but attackers are rapidly iterating on new decentralized tools.

Nation-state operations are maturing and becoming harder to detect. The days of noisy, headline-grabbing attacks are fading. In their place: long-term, stealthy campaigns focused on espionage, IP theft, and infrastructure compromise.

Throughout 2025, Mandiant and Google’s Threat Intelligence Group tracked Chinese-linked campaigns exploiting zero-day flaws in edge devices and using stealthy malware strains like LightSpy to persist in networks for months, all without triggering any alerts (Cybersecurity Dive, 2025).

These campaigns often sit dormant in networks for months or years, waiting for geopolitical triggers. Organizations in energy, defense, telecom, and finance must treat these actors as ongoing, persistent risks rather than isolated events.

Bottom Line

The defining threats of 2026 are not futuristic; they are already in motion. What’s changing is scale, coordination, and the infrastructure being targeted.