2026 Phishing Threat Predictions: 5 Key Takeaways

Cofense’s 2026 Phishing Threat Predictions outlines five key trends: SOCs must pair AI efficiency with human judgment; attacker-side AI will compress time from phish to compromise to under an hour; detection must pivot to context and cross-channel signals over static IOCs; oversharing will drive highly personalized phishing at scale; and attackers will increasingly abuse legitimate remote access tools, necessitating strict allowlists, MFA, domain monitoring, user reporting, and layered, intelligence-enriched defenses.