Cybersecurity in 2026: Responsible AI Defense

Artificial intelligence (AI) has reset the tempo of cybersecurity in 2026. Attackers can now automate reconnaissance, social engineering, and lateral movement, compressing the time between initial access and business impact. The result is a challenge for boards and executive teams: response windows are shrinking, and decisions about resilience can no longer sit siloed in the security operations center (SOC).

What Has Changed: Velocity & Intent

The defining shift is speed. Cyberattacks that once unfolded over a week can now move across identity, cloud, and endpoint layers in a matter of hours, if not minutes. Automation stitches together the attack lifecycle, turning phishing into token theft, then privilege escalation, then extortion or disruption. For many organizations, the adversary’s goal is not just data theft, it’s operational leverage. That pressure shows up as downtime, reputational damage, and distraction of critical teams.

For a C‑suite audience, the takeaway is straightforward. Security is no longer a series of technical point decisions. It’s an operating discipline, measured in minutes, that should be designed into identity systems, cloud and data governance, and recovery processes.

The speed at which things are happening has gone from days to minutes. Organizations need AI on defense because attackers already have it on offense.

Using AI to Fight AI, Responsibly

AI is already central to effective defense. Deployed well, it can help teams detect anomalies faster, triage alerts with context, and automate containment at scale. Deployed poorly, it can introduce new risks and erode trust. A responsible approach balances speed with governance, supporting:

Governance first. Establish clear policies for AI use in cyber operations. Define data ownership and quality standards, and set review cycles so models and rules evolve with your risk profile.
Human in the loop. Automate where precision is high and consequences are contained. Keep human judgment in escalation, containment decisions affecting critical systems, and any action with legal or regulatory implications.
Transparency and auditability. Favor models and workflows that produce explainable outcomes with audit trails so that internal audit and legal teams can review.
Data minimization. Limit sensitive data in training or inference pipelines, and separate credentials from analytics feeds.
Outcome metrics. Track meaningful indicators such as mean time to detect, mean time to contain, false‑positive rates, and recovery time against key services.

The principle is to apply AI where it lifts the floor of daily operations without creating unseen liabilities.

Identity as a Practical Perimeter

If attackers increasingly “log in” rather than “break in,” identity should be an early control point. For leadership teams, three moves tend to pay off:

Phishing‑resistant multifactor authentication (MFA). Strengthen authentication for all users, especially administrators and high-risk roles, through enabling MFA that will add to the defense-in-depth strategy and help protect identities.
Privileged access protection. Reduce standing privileges and review privileged pathways at a regular cadence, e.g., quarterly, especially those spanning cloud consoles and directory services.
Identity threat detection and response (ITDR). Monitor for behavioral anomalies such as impossible travel, sudden privilege escalation, or token misuse, and coordinate containment across identity, endpoint, and cloud.

These steps do not require your organization to be perfect, but they can help reduce the blast radius significantly and buy time when minutes matter.

Modern Detection & Response, Without Tool Sprawl

Executives often face a patchwork of overlapping tools and rising costs. A pragmatic path is to unify around a modern security operations platform that delivers extended detection and response (XDR) that integrates endpoint detection and response (EDR) with security information and event management (SIEM) to provide a solution that delivers unified environment visibility and response. In practice, look for:

Behavioral analytics. Spot lateral movement and privilege abuse without relying on signatures.
Automated triage. Correlate alerts into a single incident storyline, lowering noise for analysts.
Rapid isolation. Quarantine compromised hosts quickly and revoke suspicious sessions at the identity layer.
Cloud visibility. Map assets, monitor configuration hygiene, and watch for anomalous activity across cloud workloads.

If resourcing is limited, a managed security service provider (MSSP) can operate these capabilities around the clock while your internal team focuses on risk and governance. The Cybersecurity Managed Services team at Forvis Mazars has certified partnerships with modern security operations platforms and agentic AI providers, including Elastic, Qualys, Quantro Security, and SentinelOne.

Recovery Matters: Backups That Actually Work

Ransomware crews now seek to corrupt or encrypt backups before launching their final payload. Therefore, it is imperative to connect incident response to recovery and test them together. To do so, three fundamentals to focus on are as follows:

Layered copies. Maintain off‑site and immutable copies so backups sit outside the blast radius of an attack.
Separate identities. Manage backup credentials and administrative access separately from production domains.
Tabletop plus drills. Run exercises that cover communications, legal, and insurance notification, then perform timed restore drills against your most critical services.

Backups are only as good as your last clean restore test. Treat clean restoration as a priority rather than an assumption.

Elevating Governance

In a recent webinar, “The Resurgence of Manufacturing: Year in Review & What’s Next,” it was shared that AI can generate business value beyond defense. Facilities automation, predictive maintenance, computer vision quality control, and improved forecasting are already reducing costs and waste. These use cases raise the bar for data governance. Define owners, policies, and validation rules upfront, then audit regularly so analytics and security telemetry can maintain trustworthiness. The same governance foundations support AI‑assisted cyber controls later.

Coverage is useful only if limits and terms match operational risk.

That principle applies equally to cyber insurance. As terms and pricing evolve, documented controls such as phishing‑resistant MFA, modern detection, and immutable backups can help improve policy and renewal terms and rates and help build confidence with external stakeholders.

Cybersecurity in 2026: Actions to Take

Run an AI‑aware assessment and penetration test. Deploy proactive cybersecurity methods, like adversary emulation, that reflect current speed and multivector techniques across identity, endpoint, browser, and cloud applications.
Harden identity. Enforce phishing‑resistant MFA for all users, especially administrators and high‑risk roles, apply conditional access, and review privileged pathways regularly.
Modernize detection and response. Evaluate EDR, XDR, and SIEM that can automate triage and isolate compromised assets rapidly. If your security team is resource-constrained, consider an MSSP with proven capabilities.
Make backups recoverable. Adopt layered copies with an immutable or air‑gapped option, manage credentials separately, and conduct restore drills that meet recovery time objective and recovery point objective targets.
Tabletop incident response and recovery together. Exercise a ransomware scenario end to end, then close any gaps based on the findings.
Refresh cyber insurance. Align limits to realistic business interruption costs and document controls to support underwriting and terms.
Strengthen data governance. Assign data owners, codify policies, and schedule hygiene reviews so analytics and security signals remain reliable.

How Forvis Mazars Can Assist With Cybersecurity

Cyberthreats in 2026 are not necessarily novel. What’s new is the speed and automation that AI brings to both sides of cybersecurity. Organizations that treat cyber risk as an enterprise priority, pair value‑creating AI with strong governance, and adopt AI‑enabled defenses that compress detection and response can fare better as attack velocity rises.

Let’s connect. If you would like a road map for AI‑ready cyber resilience, our IT Risk & Compliance Services include AI‑aware assessments, ransomware readiness testing, and cyber insurance control reviews. Contact professionals at Forvis Mazars today to help align with your business objectives and risk tolerance.