Cybercriminals are entering 2026 with new capabilities powered by artificial intelligence, automation, and increasingly sophisticated deception techniques.
“Because the digital ecosystem nowadays is largely monocultural, everyone becomes a target. Online, there is no such thing as being uninteresting. Any small piece of data, even something as simple as DNS records, can be sold, aggregated, and monetized. Simply existing online makes you a target,” says Adrianus Warmenhoven, cybersecurity expert at NordVPN.
From quantum risks to “evil” ChatGPT, here are 5 emerging cyberthreats set to mark a new digital era come 2026, according to NordVPN.
- Risk of internet monoculture. The growing monoculture of the internet presents a significant risk. The widespread use of the same cloud providers, CDNs and productivity suites means that a failure in one service can affect millions of users, reducing the internet's resilience. This monoculture makes hacking more profitable because even a small gain per person, when scaled across millions of users on a single platform, results in large earnings for criminals.
- Increasing misinformation through new channels. Over the course of 2025, sensible security measures and online privacy habits were often ridiculed by other users. This trend is expected to increase in 2026, with serious repercussions for individual online safety and privacy. Criminal organizations, which are sometimes better organized than legitimate businesses, have dedicated marketing and advertising units aimed at promoting poor security habits to keep users vulnerable. Capable of spending significant funds, these organizations are increasingly likely to buy or create influencers to promote insecure habits or products with weaker security standards.
- AI-driven vulnerabilities and accelerated cyberattacks. AI tools, such as ChatGPT, often store chat histories in the browser's local storage, making sensitive conversations vulnerable to info-stealers. Despite warnings, many users continue to share sensitive topics with AI. While attackers will increasingly target such information, AI companies also use user data to train their models. Cybercriminals are already experimenting with autonomous AI systems that can probe networks, identify weaknesses, and exploit vulnerabilities with minimal human oversight. These systems can learn, iterate, and adapt, making attacks faster and harder to predict.
- Erosion of trust. Trust is expected to become one of the biggest security challenges in 2026. As more services become fully cloud-based, authentication processes will be increasingly targeted. This includes deepfakes, voice cloning, realistic synthetic personas, automated phishing chats, and hyper-personalized attacks that blur the line between authentic and artificial. Criminals will create entirely fake synthetic identities, combining real user data with fabricated information to access cloud accounts, open bank accounts, apply for credit, and commit crimes for years before detection. AI-enabled scams and fraud will increase productivity for criminals and make fraudulent websites and services increasingly difficult to detect. Ultimately, trust in digital devices and services may erode completely.
- Viability of quantum security threats. Quantum computing is approaching a threshold where current encryption standards may no longer be secure. Although large-scale quantum attacks are still years away, cybercriminals are already conducting “harvest now, decrypt later” operations, stealing encrypted data today with the expectation that quantum breakthroughs will allow them to decrypt it in the future.
“As the borders between the physical and digital worlds blur, cybersecurity is no longer just a technical issue but a societal one. It’s like teaching a child to eat a sandwich but not how to brush their teeth. Digital education has focused on literacy (how to use devices) whereas the focus must shift to digital hygiene, cultivating good security habits. In 2026, this will become more important than ever,” adds Warmenhoven.
