2026 Cybersecurity Trends

Zero trust comes to the forefront of supply chain risk mitigation, as phishing attacks and other socially engineered schemes become increasingly stealthy in their abilities to evade filtering and detection. Service-level agreements with third-party vendors will be required to include strategies and timelines for testing and training regarding cyber risks, with a specific focus on strategies built into cyber resiliency and disaster recovery playbooks. 

Ever-evolving infostealers make digital security impossible to ensure for end users, cementing hardware-based tokens and passkeys as the only ways to truly secure methods of accessing accounts. Investments in dark web threat intel will become critical, especially for card issuers, as the detection of compromised credentials and accounts on the dark web before they are leaked will remain the best way to stop fraud from becoming widespread. 

As a preventive strategy, banks will need to focus more attention on dark web threat intel for attacker attribution, to help define parameters around personally identifiable information that could be linked to a synthetic identity. And widespread use of quantum computing will soon make existing data encryption standards obsolete, requiring banks to adopt agile and malleable security postures around how they view and manage data security.