6 Predictions for the AI Economy: 2026New Rules of Cybersecurity by Palo Alto Networks (Category Security)
Keep reading the reports for 2025 year 2026. This time it's about cyber security in the days of AI and this one. report Palo Alto Networks is one of the pillars of this market.
🎭 The New Age of Deception: The Threat of AI Identity AI is already capable of creating perfect clones of leaders indistinguishable from real people. Identity is now a new security perimeter: security must proactively protect every person, machine, and AI agent to maintain trust. From experience I can say that deepfake-doubles meet in reality, however, I have seen how they write through instant messengers, call on the phone or undergo interviews, but I believe that in the world of deepfakes. 2026 This practice will become even more popular.
🤖 The New Insider Threat: Securing the AI Agent Autonomous AI agents speed up work, but without proper protection can become “traitor insiders” with privileges on all APIs and data – an attacker can intercept such a bot with one malicious proxy. Therefore, in 2026There will be a new class of tools – “AI firewalls” that monitor and block attacks on agents in real time. (injections of prompts, abuse of tools, etc.). I've seen how browsers with built-in agents like Perplexity's Comet can scour internal knowledge bases and where that internal data will go - that's a big question.
🧪 The New Opportunity: Solving the Data Trust Problem Attacks shift to data – hackers stealthily “harass” AI training datasets, embedding backdoors and distorting models. Traditional perimeter does not save: we need a common view of developers and security professionals. In 2026i.e. data visibility tools (DSPM/AI-SPM) and protection at the code execution level (software firewall) It will be necessary to trust AI models.
⚖️ The New Gavel: AI Risk and Executive Accountability In 2026 The question “who will answer if AI causes damage” will cease to be philosophical – AI failures will begin to be asked from management. The first lawsuits are expected to personally hold directors accountable for incidents involving unguided AI. To prevent innovation, CIO will have to become a strategist. (Introduce the position of Chief AI Risk Officer) and build a unified control of AI risks at the company level. It seems that the position of Chief AI Officer has just appeared. (And remember, joker before)And now we're going to have CAIRO.
⏳ The New Countdown: The Quantum Imperative The threat of “gather data now – hack the quantum computer later” becomes a reality and accelerates the largest cryptographic migration in history. In 2026 Regulators will require a plan to move to post-quantum encryption, and a breakthrough in quantum computing will reduce the “deadline” threats to the world. 10 before ~3 years. Already, companies need to identify which encryption algorithms are vulnerable, and become crypto-agile – learn how to quickly change encryption standards to new ones to protect data in the future. By the way, I did. handler This is an initiative of the UK cybersecurity agency.
🌐 The New Connection: The Browser as the Novel Workspace The browser has become an autonomous platform ("new OS") And, as a result, a new battlefield for IS. Traffic generated by AI has increased by 890%, data breach incidents have doubled – sensitive data leaks as if by accident (Employee inserts secret code into ChatGPT), as well as through prompt attacks, when an AI bot is deceived to give someone else's data. You need Zero Trust right in the browser: a special cloud mechanism checks the actions of AI before encrypting traffic – masks sensitive data in prompts, prohibits screenshots and blocks illegal export of files.
I recommend reading the original article because for each item, Wendi Whitmore, Chief Security Intelligence Officer @ Palo Alto Networks, provides links to additional material about what the risk is and what can be done about it.
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