Published January 30 2026
2025 brought many new technological and cybersecurity trends, from the increasing growth and usage of AI to the continuing prevalence of remote work. It has also seen many cybersecurity incidents, from ransomware being used to cause substantial disruption to several aspects of the state of Nevada’s motor vehicle records system to the potential exposure of the personal data of hundreds of thousands of Montanans in breaches at insurance and medical providers.
Understanding the key trends from the year and knowing how you should act on them to ensure your cybersecurity in 2026 can be challenging. To help, we’ve compiled a list of five key cybersecurity trends in 2025, including easy to understand explanations of the technical changes and steps you can take to be prepared and stay secure in the future.
Now, let’s get into the list, arranged in no particular order.
- Institutional vulnerabilities increasingly drive risks, not new attack types. Many cyberattacks this year highlighted the fact that the vulnerabilities within an institution are what leave it open to cyberattacks, not hackers using new techniques or types of attacks. Fundamental security errors, like poor passwords, lack of segmentation between different networks within an organization, an excessive number of shared credentials across different accounts, and poor maintenance of backups, helped enable many large attacks or made their impact more severe.
These attacks succeeded not because the hackers found novel methods but because the company being attacked was poorly secured. This suggests that the organizations, both large and small, should focus on ensuring that their security fundamentals, like passwords and access management, are strong to prevent and mitigate cyberattacks. - AI enters the cyber crime arsenal. AI has rapidly become an invaluable tool for cyber criminals, helping them plan attacks more quickly, execute attacks with greater success, and steal more information during an attack. AI tools can be used to constantly scan for vulnerabilities and surveil potential targets, as well as assisting in the organization of resources and planning for a cyberattack.
Once the attack begins, AI offers several new and improved tools for attacks. It dramatically boosts the potential of phishing, allowing threat actors to create far more realistic messages and fake websites to entice targets into clicking dangerous links or entering information into falsified websites. AI also can easily create highly realistic deepfakes of voices or videos, adding a new tool to convince targets to respond.
During an attack, AI agents can morph and reconfigure themselves, making them far harder to detect and more effective at slipping past security system and exploiting vulnerabilities. Once they have breached an organization, AI agents can also harvest far larger amounts of data much faster than previous tools, making breaches more severe and threatening. Understanding and being prepared for AI-enhanced cyberattacks will be a critical skill for remaining secure into the future. - Cyber attacks leave the computer behind. Often, we think of cyberattacks as a purely digital threat coming from distant actors and hacking groups. However, 2025 highlighted that many cyberattacks are now incorporating physical components and on the ground agents to achieve success.
While fully remote hacking can still occur, many attacks now involve personnel on the ground who help scout out information about targets or work to insert contaminated USB drives or other items into a target’s system.
This trend correlates with the rising importance of insider threats, people within an organization who are cooperating with cyber threats to expose its information and enable attacks.
The shift towards cyberattacks using physical tools and insiders means that organizations must be more vigilant about ensuring that they are verifying the identities of the people entering their offices and monitoring their own employees to ensure that they are not posing security risks. Complementing these security measures with strong digital security should help ensure that organizations stay safe from all types of attacks. - Security shifts from networks towards identity. The structure of how security is managed for organizations is shifting, driven by the increasing volume of remote and hybrid work and the distribution of employees into a variety of locations.
While focusing security efforts on networks was effective when employees were reliably working on devices inside an office, this approach has declined as more of those employees are working outside the office, on a variety of networks, and often on devices that are partially used for personal activity.
To address this shift, security efforts have moved towards verifying the identity of a person accessing a resource instead of on secure the perimeters of a network. This is reflected in the increasingly ubiquitous usage of identity verification tools like multi-factor authentication to log into systems. Additionally, many organizations are using tools to monitor unusual behavior from users as a way to detect potentially compromised users who are operating outside of the company network. - Cybersecurity professionals are overwhelmed and burned out. The constant escalation in the complexity of cyberattacks, the relatively limited resources allocated to cybersecurity and the shortage of qualified professionals is making many of the people in the industry overwhelmed and frequently burned out by the stress and heavy workloads of their positions.
The shortage of cybersecurity professionals is particularly important, as many open positions are not filled due to a lack of qualified candidates, putting a heavier burden on existing staff and leading them to consider also exiting the industry due to stress.
Although shifts in work practices, particularly in reducing crunch time and overwork, can help alleviate these issues, the primary solution comes in expanding the number of people in the industry. This will require the development of the workforce pipeline, from exposing youth to the possibility of a career in cybersecurity to providing the education necessary for adults to change careers and enter the field. Developing the workforce is the clearest path to ensuring that the necessary professionals are in place to keep our future secure.
To keep ahead of these security threats and trends, CyberMontana offers resources to Montana companies, governments and organizations, from low-cost security awareness training for non-specialists to grant funding to help bolster cybersecurity for local governments.
CyberMontana also provides a range of educational options in cybersecurity, including programs for youth and resources for adults looking to build their skills or change careers into cybersecurity.
If you have questions about any of our programs, contact info@cybermontana.org. Take advantage of our tools to build your future and stay secure in 2026!