AI Complexity Leads To Demands For Better Cybersecurity In 2026 AI-driven cyberattacks drive enterprises toward stronger, data-centric cybersecurity measures for 2026 against generative AI and cloud threats.
By Kul Bhushan
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Enterprises across all verticals are looking to beef up their security firewalls in 2026 with attacks becoming more sophisticated, courtesy AI.
Phishing attacks over the past year have grown over 1000%, attributed to the rise of generative AI tools, and the number of AI-driven cyber attacks rose 47 percent globally in 2025, according to a Cybersecurityventures report. Cisco's 2025 Cybersecurity Readiness Index reveals nearly 86% of business leaders overseeing cybersecurity reported at least 1 AI-enabled incident in the last one year or so.
India too has been affected by the surge of attacks. Cybersecurity firm Check Point in its report said that Indian organizations faced an average of 2,011 cyberattacks per week in 2025, significantly higher than global averages.
"The education sector emerged as the most targeted vertical worldwide, with institutions experiencing between 4,248 and 9,817 attacks per week, far exceeding other industries. Telecommunications, healthcare, financial services, and government bodies also faced sustained and elevated attack volumes," according to the Check Point report.
Separately, financial cyber fraud losses reported on the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal went past INR 36,450 crore as of February 2025, largely driven by phishing led UPI fraud, AI assisted social engineering, SIM swap attacks, and deepfake enabled scams, the Check Point report added. Though, the government initiative Financial Fraud Risk Indicator (FRI) helped prevent losses worth INR 660 crore cyber fraud losses in just six months of rollout in May last year.
Separately, Global Ransomware Survey by OpenText reveals India is becoming one of the largest targets for AI-related attacks. More than half of Indian enterprises had suffered ransomware attacks with more than 7 in 10 (71%) reporting a growth in AI-led phishing or deepfake security breach attempts.
Having said that, 2026 also marks the technology landscape's a new defining phase where intelligence is now shifting from centralised cloud systems to edge, machines and systems are learning real-time, and even capable of making decisions. With the volume of data exchanged between systems growing at an exponential rate, experts believe building always-on encryption will be critical to making sure reliability, safety, and resilience at scale.
"Cybersecurity in 2026 will be all about keeping data safe every second. Attacks are getting faster because criminals now use AI, and most businesses are exposed through the many apps they rely on. Instead of trying to stop every attack, companies will focus on protecting data in real time, so even if someone breaks in, what they steal is useless. Ransomware will also get more personal. It will not just lock systems but try to damage reputation and trust. This will force organisations to secure data at every point, from devices to cloud apps," Srinivas Shekar, CEO and co-founder, Pantherun Technologies said in a statement
"We will also see more risks from trusted partners and insiders, which means protection can't stop at the network. Security must follow the data wherever it goes. With stolen passwords and user sessions becoming common, identity alone will not be enough. Data-centric protection will take the lead. And as quantum computing grows, old encryption will not hold. Companies will start preparing for stronger, future-ready methods."
Palo Alto Networks, a global cybersecurity service providers, in its report titled 6 Predictions for the 'AI Economy: 2026's New Rules of Cybersecurity' says 026 will mark the inflection point where the global economy transitions from "AI-assisted" to "AI-native" leading to a new AI Economy.
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The report highlights that leaders taking care of cybersecurity will have to address the following central questions in 2026: how to govern as well as secure a workforce that is multihybrid wherein machines and agents may outnumber human employees. The report also recalls the conventional systems changing fast after pandemic hit, and also opening up the space for cyberattackers to target unsecured front doors in every employee's browser. Moreover, an increase in productivity due to AI integration could also see the rise of cyber threats that can take the form of a rogue AI agent, capable of goal hijacking, tool misuse and privilege escalation.
Kunal Ruvala, Senior Vice President & GM, India at Palo Alto Networks, further explained: "AI-driven deception and data exposure are now frontline risks for Indian enterprises. Deepfakes, contextual data leakage and prompt abuse are creating a new class of insider threat at a scale we have never seen before. At the same time, hybrid work has made the browser the new enterprise workspace, increasing interest in secure enterprise browsing. These shifts are pushing Indian organizations to strengthen identity-first, behavior-based and Zero Trust defenses much earlier in their AI adoption journey."
Apart from AI, enterprises are also now looking to build a framework that is not solely reliant on AWS or Cloudflare, both of which saw major outages worldwide.
"Only 16 months after Crowdstrike brought the digital world to a standstill, and a month after the global AWS outage, this week another key player in the Cybersecurity space, Cloudflare, suffered a global outage causing error messages to plague websites across the globe, including Spotify, ChatGPT, X, and Open AI," Rob Newell, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Asia Pacific & Japan at New Relic, said.
"Outages of this size can have significant impacts on an organisation's bottom line. The 2025 Observability forecast found that high-impact outages can cost Indian organisations between $1M-$3M USD in lost revenue per hour. In the case of the recent global AWS outage, New Relic's engineers were able to flag the issue 27 minutes before AWS informed their customers of the outage, enabling New Relic's customers to identify the impacted services of their stack so they could address issues efficiently, and monitor golden signals within the failover environment to ensure its stability and performance. With global outages becoming more common, observability is no longer an engineering tool––it is business-critical practice."
