Cybersecurity in 2026 Will Be Defined by Quiet Failures and Loud Extortion - LevelBlue

By the time a ransomware demand flashes onto a screen, the damage has usually already been done. In 2026, that gap between intrusion and impact is expected to widen, not shrink, as attackers refine how they break in, move laterally, and siphon data long before defenders realize anything is wrong.

Ransomware is no longer a chaotic smash-and-grab operation. It has matured into an efficient criminal economy with specialization, tooling, and repeatable playbooks. According to Ziv Mador, VP of Security Research at LevelBlue SpiderLabs, that economy is only getting stronger.

“Ransomware attacks will continue and intensify as they have become one of the best money machines for cybercriminals,” Mador says. “These gangs will expand the techniques they use for network infiltration, lateral movement, and data exfiltration. We shall see this ecosystem of ransomware groups and their affiliates continue to thrive, with new players occasionally emerging.”

That expansion is not just about new malware strains or flashier extortion tactics. It is about precision. Attackers are becoming more selective about how they gain initial access, increasingly targeting the parts of infrastructure that organizations expose to the internet by necessity.

Public-facing systems have always been risky. In 2026, they are expected to become the primary battleground.

“With cybercriminals continuing to compromise different organizations for ransomware attacks and other motives, we shall see their efforts continue to target publicly facing devices,” Mador says. “That includes servers such as Firewalls, VPN, Web servers, and cloud instances, as well as IOT devices. Any publicly accessible interface may be used for the initial infiltration. With the help of AI, we may see more focus by cybercriminals and nation-state agencies on these devices.”

This shift reflects a broader reality of modern IT. Organizations can lock down endpoints and train employees, but they cannot hide firewalls, remote access gateways, APIs, or cloud control planes. These systems sit at the edge of the network, often patched unevenly and configured under pressure. AI-assisted scanning and exploitation lowers the cost of finding weak points at scale, allowing attackers to move faster than traditional vulnerability management cycles.

While ransomware grabs headlines, another class of risk is quietly building beneath the surface. The internet itself runs on a small number of core protocols that rarely attract attention until something breaks. In 2025, DNS failures and misconfigurations repeatedly disrupted services at scale. That pattern is expected to continue, but with a twist.

Ed Williams, Vice President at SpiderLabs Consulting EMEA for LevelBlue, says the next wave of risk may come from even deeper layers of internet plumbing.

“The old adage ‘it’s always DNS’ reared its ugly head in 2025,” Williams says. “We can assume that cloud migration will continue at pace, which will put extra strain and scrutiny on core Internet technologies like DNS and SMTP. By 2026, the spotlight could shift to BGP and PKI, the hidden systems that route nearly all internet traffic and secure every encrypted connection, where one small mistake could cause an even bigger outage.”

These systems are rarely attacked directly. Instead, they fail through misconfiguration, expired certificates, routing leaks, or trust chain errors. As more organizations push critical workloads into the cloud, those failures can cascade globally in minutes. The result is not stolen data but something equally damaging: widespread downtime, broken trust, and invisible fragility.

Taken together, the predictions point to a cybersecurity landscape defined less by novelty and more by pressure. Ransomware operators will keep professionalizing. Attackers will continue to exploit what must remain exposed. And the foundational systems of the internet will be pushed closer to their limits.

In 2026, the biggest security incidents may not come from exotic zero-day exploits. They will come from familiar technologies under unfamiliar strain, failing quietly until the consequences become impossible to ignore.