2026 will bring new cybersecurity challenges – there is no dancing around this fact, evidenced by the lessons that emerged in 2025. The previous year saw a major evolution in cyber attack capabilities and trends, from AI granting even amateur hackers the ability to scale virtually endlessly to critical threats against software supply chains and integrated ERP infrastructure. However, the good news remains that if you prepare for these threats and have the resources available to mitigate your cyber risk, you can protect your valuable business systems and data effectively.
Here are the top network security challenges to watch out for in 2026:
AI-related Cyber Attacks
Artificial intelligence is threatening to disrupt the modern cybersecurity landscape, giving attackers powerful new tools to bypass traditional defenses. AI is also helping to improve existing techniques of many hackers by providing unprecedented automation, and even optimization of existing resources and methodologies.
Social Engineering with AI
Artificial intelligence has fundamentally changed how attackers conduct social engineering campaigns. BEC (business email compromise) attacks have grown in both volume and sophistication as attackers leverage AI to better personalize the content of electronic messages, as well as their approaches to create a more effective delivery system. New artificial intelligence tools enable cybercriminals to more effectively scrape data from social media and other sources, and use the information gathered to generate hundreds to thousands of customized phishing messages targeting individual employees.
Deepfake-as-a-Service
AI-generated “deepfakes” begin proliferating increasingly throughout the 2020’s, though the first recorded attack occurred in 2019 when the CEO of a UK energy firm was tricked by a convincing audio clip of his parent company’s owner requesting over $240,000 be wired to him. The technology has continued to mature since then, leading to the emergence of even Deepfake-as-a-Service (DFaaS) toolkits, lowering technical barriers and allowing even unsophisticated criminals to launch convincing attacks.
LLM Data Compromise
Large Language Models (LLMs), the category that AI tools like ChatGPT or Claude occupy, have also emerged as a potential cyber defense weak point as well as an attack vector. LLMs collect and process a significant wealth of data, with significant security implications on multiple levels – from the platforms themselves potentially leaking information to attackers being able to leverage them to automate infiltration and breaching of a given network.
Ransomware in 2026
Ransomware is perhaps the fastest growing cyber threat in 2026 if judged by real world impact, a designation that it retains from previous years unfortunately. Despite increased efforts by law enforcement around the world, agencies like the FBI and CISA still found multiple campaigns and attacks emerging throughout 2025. The Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) ecosystem now supports multiple layers of specialized operators, with some groups developing malware, others managing payment infrastructure and still others conducting the actual attacks against target victims.
Cybercriminal Networks Growing
Groups like the colloquially named “Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters” collective have demonstrated how cybercriminal organizations coordinate operations and share resources, even in the face of increased scrutiny by law enforcement. Thought to be part of the greater “The Com” network, this informal supergroup has remained active for years despite several investigations and interdiction actions by federal agencies and security researchers. It would appear that when one group is being traced, they simply shift effort and resources into another to continue their activities, reflecting how the RaaS ecosystem has been able to decentralize to the point where new actors can pick up where others left off seamlessly.
Data Theft and Direct Extortion
Some ransomware groups are shifting tactics and now directly stealing data instead of encrypting it, allowing them to extort businesses for returning the files instead of providing the promise of a decryption key once payment is made. This shift reflects both improved backup practices by victims and the recognition that stolen data provides multiple monetization paths. Criminals can demand payment for not releasing information publicly, sell the data to competitors or use it for follow-on attacks against the organization’s customers and partners.
Nation-State Ransomware
Nation-state actors continue sponsoring and conducting ransomware operations as part of broader cyber warfare strategies. Russia maintains extensive relationships with criminal groups, providing protection from prosecution in exchange for intelligence sharing and selective targeting. China, Russia, North Korea and Iran all maintain offensive cyber capabilities that sometimes blur the lines between state-sponsored operations and criminal activities. While nation-state operations typically pursue espionage or disruption rather than direct financial gain, the technical infrastructure and tactics often overlap with purely criminal ransomware campaigns.
Third-party Compromises and Breaches
Supply chain and third-party attacks present unique challenges because they exploit the relationships businesses necessarily maintain with partners, vendors and service providers, as well as between different applications and servers that require two-way connectivity to exchange data successfully. Once attackers compromise a vendor’s systems, they can leverage that access to target dozens or hundreds of downstream organizations through legitimate business connections.
Vendor Access as Attack Vector
Businesses often grant vendors varying levels of system access to provide services or exchange data, and each connection represents a potential entry point for hackers if that third party experiences a network breach. This can include note-taking applications, EDI connectors, fileshare storage servers, cloud-connected APIs and much more – while your cyber defense may be solidified against external infiltration, these types of attacks can bypass those controls via your vendor’s credentials and native connections to your systems.
Healthcare’s Third-Party Risk
Healthcare organizations rely extensively on third-party vendors for billing services, electronic health records (EHR) management, medical device connectivity and more. This creates numerous potential entry points for attackers targeting the sensitive personal and medical information that many organizations in this industry maintain. The distributed nature of modern healthcare — with independent physicians, hospitals, insurance companies and specialized service providers all exchanging patient data — also means that a single vendor compromise can cascade across multiple provider networks simultaneously.
Software Supply Chain Attacks
A single application might depend on dozens of third-party integrations, with each dependency potentially including its own set of dependencies in a cascading chain. This transitive dependency model creates risk because developers inherit vulnerabilities from every library they use, often without visibility into the security practices of the original developers. A developer using a popular web framework might unknowingly incorporate a compromised dependency several layers deep in their dependency tree, shipping malicious code to production without realizing the framework itself pulled in the tainted library.
Threats to ERP Systems
Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems centralize financial data, customer information and business operations, making them particularly valuable targets for hackers looking to secure the most valuable data they can, quickly. Successful ERP breaches can provide attackers with access to much of your most sensitive data in one place — from employee salaries and customer personal records to intellectual property and compliance documentation.
Legacy Systems Approaching End-of-Life
Businesses running older ERP deployments face mounting risk as vendors discontinue security updates. The transition from on-premise to cloud environments often creates temporary security gaps. Legacy systems designed for isolated networks suddenly connect to the Internet during migration, exposing vulnerabilities that previously posed limited risk behind firewalls.
Cloud ERP Misconfigurations
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) ERP, those built in the cloud natively, have a different approach to data connectivity and security than traditional on-premise systems, which can create gaps for businesses that are not used to the new model. In a worst-case scenario, however, this can become critical if an error appears on the publisher side, such as what happened with NetSuite SuiteCommerce in 2024. To be clear, you are still able to protect your data on your side, but this is dependent on maintaining your internal controls – misconfiguration can become a major cybersecurity challenge when using SaaS if you overlook this area.
SAP and Oracle Hacking Campaigns
Users of various SAP and Oracle systems were the target of multiple campaigns by hackers throughout 2025, which exploited vulnerabilities in various applications and software suites from both companies to breach their clients’ data storage. Different ransomware gangs and other cybercriminal groups thought to be based in Russia and China took advantage of the bugs in SAP NetWeaver, S/4 HANA and the SQL Anywhere Monitor module as well as Oracle E-Business Suite to hack into hundreds of victims via their unsecured software connections.
Preparing for 2026’s Cyber Threats
The evolving cyber threat landscape means that cybersecurity cannot be treated as a one-time implementation, but a continuous process that requires the right expertise applied to securing potential gaps. SWK Technologies is an award-winning managed service provider that has partnered with market-leading security experts to provide SMBs with access to enterprise-grade security resources – get in touch with our team to today to learn more.
Contact SWK here and discover how we can help your business secure your defenses against the emerging cyber threats in 2026.