What will be the most common threats that businesses have to contend with in the new year? It’s a common question amongst IT security professionals and senior business executives alike. In years past, these New Year’s “top threats” blogs tended to feature the same usual ransomware and phishing suspects. While these types of attacks need to remain on your radar for sure, the landscape is shifting, and there is a clear move toward new attack methodologies that every digital organization needs to understand. At IntegraONE, we have outlined three cyberthreats you cannot afford to ignore in the coming year.
Identity‑Centric & Credential‑Based Breaches
Businesses today not only compete fiercely for talent; they must also safeguard the identities of their employees. That is because identity has become the new battleground in cybersecurity. According to the 2025 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, the use of stolen credentials remains one of the leading initial access vectors, accounting for roughly 22% of breaches. Attackers are increasingly favoring credential abuse over traditional exploit-based intrusion, since logging in with valid credentials often bypasses security controls entirely.
In fact, attackers aren’t just limiting their focus on living, breathing users. They are increasingly targeting non-human identities like service accounts, API keys and AI agents as these identities often have broad, persistent privileges, operate at high scale and undergo less monitoring. The fact is that attackers don’t care what type of identity they compromise if it gives them access to the enterprise systems and cloud accounts they need to carry out their attacks. Expect an even greater emphasis on least privilege strategies and phishing-resistant MFA to counter this trend.
Agentic AI Attacks
You are no doubt aware of the cyberthreats that LLMs have created over the past two years. These LLMs allow just about anyone to create malicious scripts or conduct research on targets. Common risks include prompt injection attacks and data leakage. Fortunately, most LLM-based threats remain reactive since they require human input to act. The real game-changer, however, could be agentic AI. While large-scale, fully autonomous agent-driven attacks are not yet widely observed in enterprise environments, proof-of-concept tooling and early experimentation suggest this capability is rapidly approaching operational maturity.
Much like the relentless cyborg in The Terminator, these agents can iteratively adapt and persist, trying new approaches when they hit a roadblock instead of simply failing and stopping. The traditional kill chain of recon → exploit → lateral movement → exfiltration, which historically unfolded over weeks or months, could be significantly compressed as autonomous agents operate continuously and without human fatigue. As it operates, it can learn from partial successes and failures, refining its tactics and quietly hammering at defenses until an opening appears.
While security vendors are developing AI agents to bolster defenses, these tools aren't immune to the same risks that affect LLMs. This creates a dual-use challenge, where the same capabilities that enhance security operations can also be exploited offensively if improperly secured or governed. Expect agentic AI–driven attacks to become a major focus of both offensive and defensive cybersecurity conversations in the coming year.
Deceptive Cyberattacks
In Sun Tzu’s Art of War, the military strategist and general outlines how all warfare is based on deception. That assertion could not be truer when it comes to deep fakes and synthetic identities. In what seems to be an oxymoron, AI is adding a personal touch to cyberattacks, and it is making it difficult to discern what is actually real. In what some are referring as a perfect storm, deceptive warfare is shaping 2026 to be a breakout year for large-scale impersonation attacks.
Not only can AI write in the native‑sounding language of its target, but it can also scrape public data to craft highly personalized messages that quickly build trust with a target. Thanks to AI-enabled deception technology, an attacker can sound or even look like your CEO, CFO or immediate boss while giving you instructions to complete a financial transaction or share sensitive information. At the same time, synthetic identities are making it harder for organizations to distinguish legitimate customers from fraudsters. For instance, a fraudster might take the real Social Security number of a small child and pair it with a fake name, date of birth, and address to create a new individual who can pass many basic verification checks. This threatening technology will force organizations to implement deep fake detection tools and require out-of-band verification for certain requests.
Stay Safe in 2026
If you are concerned about these and other cyber threats impacting the resiliency of your business, contact IntegraONE. Our team of cybersecurity specialists will review your business and risk profile to recommend practical ways to strengthen your defenses against both legacy and emerging threats.
