Fortinet has released its 2026 Cyberthreat Predictions Report, outlining a year in which cybercrime moves decisively into an industrialized phase. FortiGuard Labs notes that while innovation will continue, the defining theme of 2026 will be throughput—how quickly attackers and defenders can turn intelligence into action.
The report suggests that AI, automation, and a sophisticated cybercrime supply chain will allow intrusions to happen faster than ever. Attackers will focus less on creating new tools and more on scaling proven ones, using AI to run reconnaissance, accelerate breaches, parse stolen data, and even generate ransom negotiations. Autonomous agents on the dark web will begin managing entire portions of an attack with minimal human involvement. As a result, the capacity of threat actors will expand dramatically, shrinking the time between intrusion and impact from days to minutes.
FortiGuard Labs predicts that specialized AI agents will begin to assist cybercriminals across critical phases of attacks—from credential theft and lateral movement to rapid data monetization. Once attackers gain access to stolen databases, AI tools will immediately sort, prioritize and evaluate victims, generating tailored extortion messages at scale. The underground economy will become more structured, offering industry- or geography-specific access packages, automated escrow, customer-style service, and enriched data bundles. In essence, cybercrime will begin functioning like a fully organized industry.
On the defensive front, organizations will be forced to match attacker speed with what Fortinet describes as machine-speed defense. Security operations will shift toward continuous intelligence, validation, and containment, compressing detection and response timelines from hours to minutes. Frameworks such as continuous threat exposure management and MITRE ATT&CK will need to be embedded deeply into security workflows. Identity—whether human, machine, AI agent, or automated process—will become the fundamental control surface. Managing these non-human identities will be essential to preventing privilege escalation and large-scale data exposure.
The report also highlights the need for coordinated global responses. Initiatives like INTERPOL’s Operation Serengeti 2.0, supported by Fortinet and other private-sector partners, demonstrate the power of shared intelligence to disrupt criminal networks. Meanwhile, new efforts such as the Fortinet–Crime Stoppers International Cybercrime Bounty Program aim to build community-driven deterrence. Fortinet further anticipates greater investment in education and prevention programs to steer young or at-risk individuals away from being recruited into cybercrime ecosystems.
Looking ahead, FortiGuard Labs expects cybercrime to function at a scale comparable to legitimate global industries by 2027, driven by automated, agentic AI models and increasingly sophisticated supply-chain attacks targeting AI and embedded systems. Defenders, too, will need to evolve, embracing predictive intelligence and automation to anticipate attacker behaviour rather than merely react to it.
“Cybercrime is no longer opportunistic—it is an industrialized system operating at machine speed,” said Rashish Pandey, Vice President – Marketing & Communications, APAC, Fortinet. “The time between compromise and consequence continues to collapse, and cybersecurity is now a race of systems, not individuals.”
For Vivek Srivastava, Country Manager, India & SAARC, Fortinet, the shift is equally profound. “Static configurations and periodic assessments can’t keep pace with attackers who automate reconnaissance and extortion in minutes. Organizations need a unified, adaptive security posture that integrates threat intelligence, exposure management, and incident response into a continuous, AI-enabled workflow.”
As velocity and scale redefine the cyber landscape, Fortinet concludes that the organizations most likely to withstand the coming wave are those that integrate intelligence, automation, and human expertise into a tightly coordinated, responsive system.
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