2026 Cybersecurity Assessment: The Gap Between Awareness and Resilience

The 2026 Bitdefender Cybersecurity Assessment, based on a survey of 1,200 IT and security professionals, finds a notable gap between awareness and operational resilience: leaders overestimate visibility into sanctioned and shadow AI use, organizations struggle to reduce attack surface due to policy, resource and business-continuity concerns, attention to AI-related threats may be overshadowing prevalent Living-off-the-Land techniques, and many respondents reported being instructed to keep breaches confidential—highlighting governance, transparency, and operationalization challenges for cybersecurity in 2026.