Skip to content 2025 was the year the “resilience” narrative crumbled. It wasn’t just about data theft; it was about systemic breakage. From healthcare to critical infrastructure, systems didn’t just get breached—they got turned off.
As we look toward 2026, the era of “voluntary compliance” is over. We are entering the age of mandatory enforcement and automated warfare.
The attacks of 2025 revealed a fatal flaw in modern architecture: interdependency.
The “Everything” Outage: Attackers stopped targeting data and started targeting uptime. Ransomware evolved from “pay us to get your files back” to “pay us or we keep your hospital/factory/grid offline indefinitely.”
The AI Force Multiplier: Threat actors weaponized AI to scale attacks faster than human defenders could patch. The “time to exploit” (the gap between a vulnerability being found and being attacked) dropped to near zero.
Third-Party Dominoes: Major breaches didn’t happen at the core; they happened at the edge—through vendors, API connections, and software supply chains (like the massive breaches cited in healthcare and operational technology).
If 2025 was the year of chaos, 2026 will be the year of the crackdown. The “honor system” for cybersecurity is dead.
The Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) is no longer a “nice to have” for government contractors.
The Shift: Federal enforcement is ramping up. If you cannot prove compliance, you lose the contract. This will force a massive “put up or shut up” moment for the entire defense industrial base.
The Consequence: Non-compliance will essentially mean “out of business” for vendors relying on federal dollars.
The NIST Cybersecurity Framework is shifting from a “guideline” to a de facto national baseline.
The Shift: Expect insurance companies, boards, and regulators to treat NIST alignment as the minimum standard for duty of care. Negligence lawsuits will hinge on whether you followed it.
The only way to fight AI-driven attacks is with AI-driven defense.
The Shift: 2026 will see the rise of Agentic AI in security—autonomous agents that hunt threats and patch holes without human intervention.
The Risk: This creates a machine-speed arms race where the “human in the loop” becomes a bottleneck rather than a safeguard.
2025 proved that "good enough" security is a myth. The systems broke because they were fragile. Surviving 2026 requires two things: radical resilience (systems that can take a punch without collapsing) and absolute compliance (treating security standards as existential requirements, not paperwork).
Article: 2025 Cybersecurity Recap: The Year Systems Broke And Why 2026 Will Be Harder
Publisher: Forbes
Author: Emil Sayegh (Cybersecurity Contributor)
Context: A retrospective on the escalation of cyber-physical attacks and the shift toward mandatory federal compliance (CMMC/NIST) in 2026.
