As 2025 comes to a close, it’s time to look ahead to 2026. We asked Bugcrowd executives and thought leaders, as well as elite hackers, to share their thoughts on what you can expect in 2026. From AI innovation to evolved attacks, check out their predictions below!

Dave Gerry, CEO at Bugcrowd
  1. Attack sophistication and scale will continue to accelerate—In 2026, the pace and sophistication of cyberattacks will reach levels that will be increasingly difficult to anticipate. Organizations will be less focused on identifying whether attacks come from criminal groups or nation-state actors and more focused on how to respond effectively when an incident occurs.
  2. Critical infrastructure will remain a prime target—Attacks against critical infrastructure will remain a top concern. Hardware security, including IoT devices, pipelines, and water systems, will continue to be key risk areas, requiring organizations to prioritize protective measures across the evolving attack surface.
  3. Security controls must adapt to the diversity of attacks—The variety of attacks will keep expanding, and security teams will need to implement flexible, effective controls that balance access and protection. Ensuring that employees understand how to identify threats and escalate concerns will be critical to maintaining resilience in this complex landscape.
  4. AI confidence might mislead—In 2026, AI-generated outputs will continue to present information confidently, even when incorrect. As organizations rely on AI for efficiency, reports on threats or incidents may be confidently wrong, creating noise that security teams must cut through to identify real risks.
  5. Human oversight will remain critical—The rise of AI-driven hallucinations, deepfakes, and lifelike synthetic media will make it harder for nontechnical users to discern reality from AI-generated content. Organizations will need to foster a culture of human validation and critical thinking, ensuring that teams understand AI’s capabilities and limitations.
  6. Trust and verification will evolve—With AI changing how information is created and shared, individuals and organizations will need new methods of verifying content. In 2026, security teams and broader stakeholders will face a culture and mindset shift, focusing on determining what to trust, what to validate, and how to respond responsibly to AI-driven outputs.

Dr. David Brumley, Chief AI and Science Officer at Bugcrowd
  1. AI will amplify attacker skill levels—In 2026, AI will continue to accelerate the capabilities of both novice and experienced attackers. Tasks that once required deep expertise might be performed with AI augmentation, effectively raising the baseline skill level of adversaries. Organizations will need to reassess what they consider a “high-level” threat and adjust defenses accordingly.
  2. Trust will become the core question—As AI takes on more responsibility in identifying and reporting threats, the real challenge will not just be technical accuracy. It will be whether organizations feel confident letting AI operate with limited oversight. Even if AI models become highly accurate, they can still generate false positives or confidently incorrect outputs. This will raise a bigger, business-driven question: how much autonomy are we willing to give AI inside our networks? In 2026, leaders will shift from asking “What can the technology do?” to “When can we trust it enough to act without human review?” The burden will be on security teams to build guardrails, validation processes, and accountability models that ensure AI-generated alerts and decisions are reliable before granting AI greater independence.
  3. Human expertise will remain essential—Despite AI’s growing role in offensive and defensive operations, humans will remain critical in interpreting results, cutting through noise, and making sound security decisions. In 2026, the importance of human oversight in cybersecurity will be more apparent than ever.

Trey Ford, Chief Strategy and Trust Officer
  1. Continuous adversarial testing will replace point-in-time pen testing—Annual penetration tests provide a once-a-year snapshot of your program, but they don’t help CISOs confidently report on program effectiveness over time. Initiatives like FEDRAMP 20x point toward the reality that in 2026, CISOs will see an industry shift; there will be greater investment in continuous assurance testing to quantify security outcomes, identify gaps, and move beyond subjective assessments. 
  2. Researcher rewards will indicate overall cybersecurity resilience—For organizations investing in bug bounty programs, resilience can be measured by researcher economics. In 2026, leaders will be able to predict security maturity and resilience by looking at program measures like how competitive researcher reward payouts are, what program participation looks like, and how many researchers hunt on programs long term. 
  3. We will move toward a global, unified definition of sovereignty—Traditionally, organizations comply with their regional jurisdiction for security authority and requirements (e.g., GDPR). In 2026, we will see a consolidation of sovereignty requirements, definitions, and criteria to meet these requirements. As the market continues to settle, clarity will improve
  4. AI will bring a critical-thinking renaissance—Overly eager to help, GenAI unsurprisingly generates hallucinations and misleading responses. As deepfakes, AI-generated media, and trending fake social media content continue to flood the internet, the need for critical thinking and deductive reasoning has never been greater. In 2026, users will thoughtfully question the content coming from their AI tools and social media trends, relying on classical thought patterns to navigate the content presented.

Julian Brownlow Davies, SVP, Offensive Security and Strategy
  1. Predictive security will become the default operating model, not just a talking point—As breach timelines shrink, security teams will move their focus to earlier in the attack chain to predict which paths through the environment are the most exploitable, closing them before they’re used. 
  2. Prioritization will become the security KPI that matters—In 2026, CISOs will replace “How fast did you fix it?” with “Did you fix the right thing?” We’ll see teams prioritize exploitability over CVSS scores, as well as exposure chaining to view risk as steps in an attack path. 
  3. “Human-in-the-loop” AI will become mandatory, not optional—While we’re already seeing AI agents carry out parts of incident triage, log correlation, and even response-drafting actions, AI can still be misled or even hijacked. By mid-2026, “AI as an accelerated, supervised staff member” will be the successful model in both offensive and defensive security rather than “AI as an autonomous operation.”
  4. Shadow AI will become the new shadow IT—Employees are creating unauthorized AI agents, copilots, and automations with privileged access, meaning threat hunting must adapt. By 2026, threat hunting and exposure management will explicitly include an expanded scope focused on identifying both human adversaries and the overeager AI agents inadvertently leaking intellectual property on organizations’ behalf. 
  5. Red teaming will expand across whole organizations—Modern red teaming has evolved beyond simply “Can we break in?” In 2026, buyers will stop treating red teaming as a stunt and start approaching it as an exposure management function across the whole organization, including board and executive engineering, third-party/vendor compromise paths, business process fraud, and privileged identity abuse in SaaS consoles. 
  6. High-end bug bounty vulnerability research will become more valuable—For years, there’s been a perception that AI will find all of the bugs in web applications and APIs. In reality, 2026 will bring an understanding that AI can increasingly detect common vulnerabilities like trivial misconfigurations, but the “crown jewel compromise paths” that require in-depth understanding of a business’s operations will continue to rely on humans. The talent that can deliver such findings is in short supply, so bounty rewards will increase. 

Casey Ellis, Bugcrowd Founder and Advisor
  1. China’s 100-year anniversary of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) looms large—There has been much talk around the date of August 1st, 2027, which is the hundredth anniversary of the PLA—and a date to which President Xi has attached a mandate around modernizing Chinese military capability, including in cyberspace. Whether we’ll see any specific actions by the CCP on or before this date is outside the scope of this article, but it is very safe to say that the buildup is making nations that view China as a competitor nervous, as well as creating tension in the general geopolitical environment. 2026 will bring us into the 12-month range of this date, and we can reasonably expect—whether by deliberate strategic action or as a byproduct of the general tension—an increase in cyber skirmishes. This will include strategic nation-targeted misinformation and disinformation, prepositioning activity, reconnaissance, and general ruckus on the internet. We’ve already seen this in the form of Salt Typhoon, Volt Typhoon, and Flax Typhoon, and we’ve seen the U.S. response in the form of both rhetoric and legislation around building out offensive cyber capability and moving toward a “defend forward” active security cyber thesis.
  2. Shift left might actually start working…—If we’re being honest about it, the earlier iterations of shift left were pretty limited in their effectiveness, mostly because they basically foisted the burden of the security team onto an already overburdened development team. With the advent of GenAI, as well as a fresh wind in the sails of innovators in the space, 2026 may end up being the year that security succeeds in making security easy and insecurity hard for the engineering team.
  3. …while we continue to forget that the internet is still basically a pile of turtles—If the last point was good news, the bad news is it only applies to modern code—CI/CD-native and cloud-native companies and products. In the meantime, the vast majority of systems that constitute the internet’s attack surface aren’t going to be able to benefit from solutions like these and will continue to be targetable through aged vulnerabilities and trivial exploits, as well as n-day exploits against unpatched systems.
  4. The tale of two internets—The contrast between the “two internets” highlighted above is a well-established issue of internet physics. However, I think 2026 will see the global attack surface reveal itself as having two separate natures: the newer, more dynamic, and maintainable attack surface (which is currently threatened by the reckless use of vibecoding and heavily focused on by innovators working to leverage AI to shift left and prevent vulnerabilities and risks at the source) and the older, more static underlying attack surface that powers the rest of the internet and has been steadily accumulating technical debt (i.e., any company founded before 2008 or so, as well as the vast majority of the internet’s underlying technical infrastructure). Nation-states and state-adjacent actors will target the old stuff, and the IABs and cybercriminals will focus on the newer stuff.
  5. AI-enabled attacks (but more vibecrime-y than Skynet-y)—AI has put the ability to develop software in the hands of just about anyone. Given that malware is basically just spicy software, the combination of this democratized engineering capability and growing financial and economic pressure will trigger a new wave of folks participating in “garden-variety” malware creation—vibecoding together crimeware tools like malicious browser extensions.
  6. AI-induced job scarcity will trigger a rise in freelancing, crowdsourcing—We’ve actually seen this movie before and worked with university researchers in the aftermath of COVID-19 to study the effects of external shock on crowdsourcing ecosystems. While AI is not causing the same degree of disruption to knowledge workers and the perceived value of knowledge work compared to COVID-19, there are some similarities—and I think it’s reasonable to expect a fresh influx of folks wanting to turn security research and bug hunting into their full-time gig. The challenge, of course, is that as AI and automation reduce the cost of discovery for certain classes of vulnerabilities (and as AI gets more effective over time), the available liquidity for bug hunters is likely to shift.
  7. …and crime too—There are a bunch of different factors here, with two big ones to call out: necessity and the blurring of ethical lines. The first is overall job scarcity and increasing economic pressure, which at this point is a global phenomenon. When it becomes an issue of survival and the opportunity presents itself, people will choose crime to survive. The other more nuanced dynamic is the way that increasing global geopolitical tensions are blurring the definition of what a “bad guy” actually is. In the case of hiring someone for overt cybercriminal activity, this distinction is probably clear to the person applying for the job. However, their ethical threshold might be compromised relative to where they may have landed in the past. A good parallel “gray” example of this second phenomenon is the IT Army of Ukraine operating against Russia in support of Ukraine. In many jurisdictions, the actions of those participating are definitely gray, if not illegal, but people choose to engage nonetheless because of their belief in the underlying cause.

Hackers

Hackers will scale their skills using customized AI agents—I expect a rise in hackers using AI agents customized with their own techniques, greatly increasing the volume of interactions and findings. Many researchers who had ideas but couldn’t build scalable tools will finally be able to automate and massively scan for the specific vulnerabilities they specialize in. At the same time, access to advanced AI will push some offensive experts into defense, offering solutions based on real attacker knowledge. Overall, 2026 will mark a shift toward fast, autonomous, agent-driven security on both sides. – bsysop
There will be mass adoption of AI-driven pen testing and security analysis solutions—In 2026, we will see the consolidation and mass adoption of cybersecurity tools powered by LLMs. These tools already exist, but they remain expensive, experimental, or burdensome because they require significant manual integration. Next year, plug-and-play solutions will emerge, accessible and designed for real teams. They’ll cover everything from automated application analysis to recon, low-complexity exploitation, and code-review assistance.

Lower token costs will enable organizations of all sizes to adopt AI as a continuous security assistant rather than an experiment. This will not replace the role of the hacker or security consultant; on the contrary, it will amplify their work, increase their speed, and allow them to focus on complex findings while delegating repetitive or high-volume tasks to agents.

2026 will be the year when AI stops being an “add-on” and becomes an essential layer within the processes of prevention, detection, and vulnerability discovery for companies, pentesters, and bug bounty hunters alike. – bronxi
AI will begin to live up to the hype—In 2026, hacking is going to speed up thanks to AI. We’re already seeing people use LLMs to dig through data faster, spot patterns, and take on the boring parts of research. That trend will grow, with more hackers using AI to cut down the time it takes to figure out where to look and what’s worth poking at. The big shift won’t be brand-new tricks but how quickly someone can go from an idea to action with AI doing the heavy lifting behind the scenes. – Nahamsec
Vulnerabilities repeat themselves—If the OWASP Top 10 has taught us anything (which it definitely has), it’s that history and vulnerabilities repeat themselves. Unsurprisingly, broken access control takes the top spot because at the heart of website design is the human who creates, tweaks, and updates, even if it’s ChatGPT or a prebuilt framework. Where there is a homepage, there will always be a window or a sliding door named input validation, alongside access controls that can be bypassed by human creativity. I predict that AI and automation will be the words on everyone’s lips, but what will be in pen test reports will be the old adage: don’t trust the user, whether that be the developer or the hacker. If you do, the hacker will no doubt “screw around and find out” (your sensitive data). – Brig

 

 

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