Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2026 (World Economic Forum Financial Services)

Summary

• 87% of respondents identified AI-related vulnerabilities as the fastest-growing cyber risk over the course of 2025.p.5
• Some 64% of organizations are accounting for geopolitically motivated cyberattacks in their cyber risk mitigation strategies.p.5
• 91% of the largest organizations have changed their cybersecurity strategies due to geopolitical volatility.p.6
• 31% of respondents report low confidence in their nation's ability to respond to major cyber incidents, up from 26% last year.p.6
• 73% of respondents reported that they or someone in their network had been personally affected by cyber-enabled fraud over the course of 2025.p.8
• AI is anticipated to be the most significant driver of change in cybersecurity in the year ahead, according to 94% of survey respondents.p.18
• The share of organizations assessing the security of their AI tools has nearly doubled, from 37% in 2025 to 64% in 2026.p.20

Key insights

1. Some 23% of public-sector organizations reported having insufficient cyber-resilience capabilities.p.7
2. CEOs identify data leaks (30%) and the advancement of adversarial capabilities (28%) as the most significant security concerns related to generative AI.p.12
3. 52% of CEOs of highly resilient organizations prioritize threat intelligence on nation-state actors, compared to 13% of CEOs of insufficiently resilient organizations.p.13
4. 78% of CEOs of highly resilient organizations identify supply chain and third-party dependencies as the most significant challenge to strengthening resilience.p.14
5. Sub-Saharan Africa (70%) and Latin America and the Caribbean (69%) face the greatest cyber skills gaps among CEOs.p.16
6. 77% of organizations have adopted AI for cybersecurity, primarily for phishing detection (52%), intrusion and anomaly response (46%) and user-behaviour analytics (40%).p.22
7. Insufficient knowledge and skills (54%) is the top barrier to deploying AI for cybersecurity.p.22
8. The share of organizations changing their cybersecurity strategy due to geopolitics has declined from 93% in 2023 to 66% in 2026.p.24
9. Sub-Saharan Africa leads on cyber-enabled fraud exposure, with 82% of respondents reporting exposure to digital scams.p.31