Top 10 ways to get breached in 2026

This briefing outlines the top ten ways organizations are likely to be breached in 2026—misconfigurations, social engineering, non-human (machine) identities, supply-chain compromises, AI/LLM attack surface, adversary-in-the-middle, sprawl of secrets and shadow IT, DDoS, DNS manipulation, and zero-day exploits—and recommends mitigations such as policy-as-code, phishing-resistant MFA, identity inventorying and short-lived credentials, SBOM/AIBOMs and signed artifacts, AI sandboxing and permission controls, session binding and monitoring, secret scanning and centralized management, resilience planning, DNS validation, and rapid prioritization of patches and playbooks.