Cyberattack surfaces in the enterprise have been expanding in both extent and complexity for several years and this sprawl is showing no signs of slowing down.
The trend can be attributed to several factors, including:
The rise of IoT, which has added significantly more devices to networks
The increasing use of APIs and interconnected microservices
The shift to remote work, which requires incorporating devices and connections from the home
The seemingly uncontrollable inflation of shadow IT
The move to decentralized infrastructure management and cloud services, which has made the entire IT ecosystem more complicated and opaque
According to the CSA, 82% of enterprises now use hybrid environments. Close to two-thirds work with two or more cloud providers, further complicating the attack surface.
Mainstream adoption of AI has only made things worse. AI assistants and agents add opportunities for cybercriminals, who also use their own AI tools to scale up the volume of attacks. More than half of the organizations surveyed by the CSA use AI and about a third of them have already suffered an AI-related breach.
This rapid development of attack surfaces and seemingly endless rise in cyber incidents – with 73% of businesses experiencing a cyber incident and 55% in the past year, according to a Clutch survey – demands an entirely new approach to attack surface management (ASM). It’s no longer enough just to make small adjustments.
In 2026, I predict a shift in ASM to emphasize:
Centralized cloud management, with secure access service edge (SASE) solutions dominating the field
Proactive risk management takes over from reactive measures
Zero trust is becoming a non-negotiable table stake
Intelligent, agentic AI tools are becoming crucial for attack surface protection
Sharp focus on third-party and supply chain risk
1. Cloud management will be centralized
No one would claim that cloud assets have gone completely unmanaged up until now, but that management has been disparate and diffused. As more and more sensitive data and operations move to the cloud, the stakes are rising. Cloud protection has never been more crucial.
What’s more, the rise in remote and hybrid work, with employees bringing their own devices (BYOD) and logging onto cloud systems through unsecured or poorly secured networks, requires stronger cloud defenses. This calls for the adoption of approaches like SD-WAN networking, firewall-as-a-service, secure web gateways, cloud access security brokers for visibility and control over cloud data and powerful data loss protection plans, alongside traditional protections like identity and access management, zero trust and enterprise policy enforcement.
With so many moving parts, we predict a steep rise in the adoption of solutions that incorporate these multifaceted defenses. Today’s advanced SASE technologies seamlessly unify all the above methods to reduce complexity and improve agility by centralizing it all into one view, which will drive SASE to dominance in 2026.
2. Proactive will be the name of the game
As we enter 2026, cyberthreats have become too numerous, too serious and too rapid for reactive measures to have any hope of success. There’s simply no way to close every loophole and harden the entire attack surface. New vulnerabilities are constantly evolving, especially given the ever-elongating supply chains. Only proactive measures will do.
The proactive ASM measures that we predict for 2026 include:
Continuous, adaptive, automated asset inventory. Organizations will deploy solutions that ceaselessly scan the ecosystem for new assets and map their extent and weaknesses, both internal and external facing.
Executives who understand the situation. There will be a preference for leaders who understand the need to monitor and assess all parts of the attack surface, including AI tools.
Integrated, real-time threat intelligence. Real-time threat intel will be incorporated into all attack surface management workflows, ensuring that decision-making stays one step ahead of malicious actors instead of one step behind.
Automatically and instantly ranking threats. Vulnerability management approaches will prioritize risks according to their exploitability, criticality and impact on business operations, so that the most serious ones are addressed first and don’t go overlooked.
3. Zero trust will take on a new meaning
Phishing doesn’t stop evolving. 2025 has already brought us more clever phishing, vishing (video-phishing), QR-phishing and many other types of social engineering attacks. Human error continues to be the biggest cyber risk and methodologies to trigger it are becoming ever more ingenious. With QR-phishing attacks, for example, 63% of cases involve an employee with access to sensitive data initiating the input vector.
Massive improvements in AI-powered deepfake content mean that even audio and video calls can’t be trusted anymore. For example, employees at one company were duped by a call purportedly from the CEO authorizing a large payment. They recognized his voice, but it was all AI-generated. A 2025 study at Cardiff University found that deepfake speech can fool voice recognition systems with 95% to 97% accuracy and humans can only differentiate between fake and real speech for known voices 17.5% of the time.
There’s no way to block these types of attacks; the only real defense is consistent and repeated employee training. We expect to see adoptions spike for phishing simulations that are designed to drive real behavior change and be delivered in the line of work. Context becomes a vital clue to authenticity.
At the same time, enterprises will also set up and strictly enforce access controls, zero trust for all people and devices and multifactor authentication by default. Internal code words and two-person verification for payments over a certain amount will become the norm.
4. AI will become a crucial player
For a long time, debate has been raging about the wisdom (or otherwise) of integrating AI into cybersecurity solutions. However, events have made it clear that while AI is part of the problem for ASM, it’s also a crucial part of the solution. By 2026, AI for attack surface management will be a given.
This goes beyond using AI to automate scans and trigger alerts about suspicious emails or potential phishing scans. It will include intelligent and agentic AI that spots threats and remediates them autonomously and far faster than humans could.
For example, multiple specialist AI agents could work collaboratively to identify a threat, analyze the level of risk it poses and fix relevant vulnerabilities in real time.
In another scenario, numerous AI agents might monitor user behavior, share threat intelligence and dynamically recognize and respond to emerging threats, addressing unknown unknowns to keep one step ahead of malicious actors.
5. Risk management will look beyond business borders
Third-party and supply chain risks aren’t new concerns, but in 2026, they’ll be center stage. Today’s companies rely on a long digital supply tail of apps, shortcodes, APIs and software that deliver vital digital services. These supply chains can be opaque, comprising unseen nth parties that power chatbots, delivery trackers, payment gateways, database retrieval and more.
It only takes one compromised dependency or overlooked vulnerability to give attackers access to the supply chain and allow them to move laterally to the target organization. It’s especially concerning because many digital partners are smaller businesses that lack the resources to use data masking techniques to defend themselves and their users’ data.
That’s why 2026 will see a rise in wider attack surface mapping that looks beyond the business itself to cover the entire supply chain. Risk assessment solutions that include third, fourth and nth-party risk will overtake their rivals and organizations will give preference to dynamic third-party evaluation solutions that are constantly updated to reflect the changing threat landscape.
2026 will be a critical year for ASM
As attack surfaces grow and attacks themselves become faster and smarter, attack surface management will have to outsmart and out-think the attackers. 2026 will be the year that ASM breaks out of its rigid shell to become agile, proactive, intelligent and far-seeing, fueled by new technologies.
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