5 Cybersecurity Priorities Every Leader Must Own
When we look at cybersecurity in 2026, the biggest shift isn’t that we suddenly have new threats. It’s that everything has become faster, more automated, and more targeted. Attackers have shortened the distance between “idea” and “impact.” They’re using AI, abusing identity, exploiting your SaaS stack, and going directly after executives and boards with ruthless precision. In that world, buying another tool isn’t a strategy.
Here are the five cybersecurity priorities I believe every organization must focus on in 2026, not as buzzwords, but as concrete areas of execution.
Priority 1: Use AI to Defend Against AI-Driven Attacks
AI is changing the speed of cyberattacks, and you cannot ask humans alone to keep pace with machine-speed threats.. Attackers use AI to automate phishing, impersonate executives with deepfakes, and move faster than humans can react. In 2026, organizations must also use AI as a defense, to detect, decide, and respond in real time.
We’re already seeing:
- Highly convincing, AI-generated phishing that bypasses traditional “bad grammar” tells
- Deepfake audio and video used to impersonate executives and approve fraudulent transactions
- Automated reconnaissance and exploitation, where scripts probe your environment continuously
What this priority really means:
- Instrument your environment for real-time telemetry.
AI is only as good as the signals it sees. That means high-quality logs, endpoint visibility, identity events, and cloud telemetry. - Deploy AI where humans struggle: scale and correlation.
Use AI to:- Treat AI as a product, not a gadget.
- Define clear use cases (e.g., phishing detection, anomaly detection, identity risk scoring)
- Set success metrics (false positive rates, detection time, analyst time saved)
- Govern the models, understand data sources, drift, and failure modes
- Prepare for AI-enabled deception.
- Update your fraud, payment, and approval processes to account for deepfake risks
- Train executives and critical staff to distrust urgency and verify out-of-band
- Treat AI as a product, not a gadget.
Priority 2: Treat Identity as the Primary Battleground
Identity has become the primary battleground. Most attackers are no longer “hacking in”, they’re logging in with stolen credentials, fake identities, and abused service accounts. Zero Trust becomes operational reality, with continuous identity validation instead of one-time access.
We’ve been saying “identity is the new perimeter” for years. In 2026, that’s no longer a slogan, it’s the daily reality of most breaches.
What this priority really means:
- Assume every credential can be compromised.
- Enforce strong MFA everywhere it makes sense, particularly for admin and high-risk roles
- Move toward passwordless where possible
- Operationalize Zero Trust, don’t just talk about it.
- Apply least privilege and just-in-time access, especially for administrative roles
- Continuously evaluate context: device posture, location, behavior, and risk scores
- Treat every new access request as untrusted until proven otherwise
- Shine a light on non-human identities.
- Inventory and govern service accounts, API keys, and machine identities
- Rotate secrets automatically and scope them tightly
- Monitor how and where these credentials are used
- Align identity with business processes.
- Automate onboarding/moving/offboarding processes so access matches actual roles
- Regularly review high-risk access with business owners, not just IT
Priority 3: Shift to Continuous Exposure Management
Annual assessments no longer keep up with the pace of change. In 2026, organizations need to continuously measure what can be exploited right now, across cloud, SaaS, endpoints, and third parties. Security becomes a living, always-on discipline.
Traditional vulnerability management and yearly pen tests can’t reflect a world where:
- New cloud resources spin up and down daily
- SaaS apps are adopted without central approval
- Third-party connections create hidden paths into your data
Continuous exposure management is about always knowing the answer to the question, “What are the most important ways we can be hurt today, and what are we doing about them?”
What this priority really means:
- Build a living asset inventory.
- Track cloud resources, SaaS apps, endpoints, identities, and key data stores
- Accept that the inventory will never be “done,” it must be continuously refreshed
- Focus on exposures, not just vulnerabilities.
- Misconfigurations, overly permissive access, internet exposed services, and risky third-party connections often matter more than a single CVE
- Prioritize issues that create real attack paths to critical assets
- Context matters when prioritizing vulnerabilities. CVSS measures theoretical severity without accounting for your actual exposure, asset criticality, exploit activity, mitigations, or operational risk, it often prioritizes the wrong vulnerabilities to patch first
- Continuously validate controls.
- Regularly test whether your controls actually block realistic attack scenarios
- Use breach and attack simulation, red teaming, or targeted exercises to test real-world exposure
- Make it operational, not a project.
- Embed exposure review into weekly or monthly operational rhythms
- Provide the business with short, prioritized lists: “Top 10 exposures we must resolve this quarter,” not a 5,000-line spreadsheet
Priority 4: Prepare for Ransomware as Precision Business Extortion
Ransomware has evolved beyond “encrypt and hope they pay.” Attackers now steal data, pressure executives, and threaten customers and partners. In 2026, resilience wins. Tested backups, practiced response plans, and leaders ready to make decisions under pressure.
The modern extortion playbook often includes:
- Data theft and threats to leak sensitive information
- Direct outreach to your customers, partners, or regulators to maximize pressure
- Public shaming campaigns and carefully timed disclosures
In other words, this is no longer just a technical crisis. It’s a business, legal, and reputational crisis.
What this priority really means:
- Invest in resilience, not just prevention.
- Maintain offline or immutable backups for critical systems and data
- Regularly test restoration times and integrity
- Treat ransomware like a business continuity scenario.
- Align ransomware playbooks with your broader business continuity and disaster recovery plans
- Identify which business services you must restore first and what “minimum viable operations” look like
- Rehearse decisions before the crisis.
- Run tabletop and technical exercises that involve executives, legal, communications, and operations
- Clarify who decides on ransom negotiations, law enforcement engagement, and public disclosure
- Pre-draft holding statements and customer communication templates
- Know your data and impact.
- Map where sensitive data lives and who is affected if it’s stolen
- Be prepared to quickly answer: “What was taken? Who is at risk? What are our obligations?”
Priority 5: Embrace Real Executive and Board Accountability
Cybersecurity is now recognized as business risk. Regulators are raising expectations. Boards want measurable outcomes, not a list of tools. CISOs must clearly explain risk, impact, and recovery in business terms. The core question becomes: Can you demonstrate control, resilience, and readiness?
Cyber has moved from the server room to the boardroom. That’s good, but it also means scrutiny, expectations, and accountability are higher than ever.
What this priority really means:
- Translate technical risk into business impact.
- Frame discussions in terms of revenue, operations, customer trust, and regulatory exposure
- Instead of “RDP is exposed,” say “An attacker can gain admin access to the system that processes X% of our revenue.”
- Define and track meaningful metrics.
- Time to detect and respond (MTTD/MTTR) for critical incidents
- Coverage metrics (e.g., % of crown-jewel assets with MFA, EDR, backup, tested recovery)
- Trend lines: are we getting better or worse over time?
- Integrate cyber into enterprise risk management.
- Align cyber risks with Enterprise Risk Management frameworks and risk registers
- Use scenarios: “What if we lost this system for a week?”, to make risk tangible
- Be transparent about gaps and plans.
- Boards don’t expect zero risk; they expect informed risk management
- Clearly communicate what your top risks are, what you’re doing about them, and what remains unfunded or unmitigated
- Build a culture of shared ownership.
- Make it clear that cybersecurity is not “the security team’s problem”
- Engage business leaders as owners of risk in their domains
Bringing It All Together
If we zoom out, these five priorities form a coherent picture of cybersecurity in 2026:
1. Speed: Use AI to defend at machine pace.
2. Identity Control: Treat identity as the core attack surface.
3. Continuous Visibility: Know your exposures in real time, not just once a year.
4. Resilience: Plan for precision extortion and practice your response.
5. Accountability: Elevate cyber to be a true business risk conversation at the executive and board level.
Cybersecurity isn’t about perfection, it’s about being ready, resilient, and in control, even when things don’t go as planned. And in 2026, that’s what matters most.
