2026 Forecast: 5 New Trends, 3 Old Risks, & 1 Big Surprise

December 10, 2025 at 11:00 AM EST

The 2026 threat landscape is already taking shape, but most security teams are still fighting last year's battles. The delta between attacker innovation and enterprise defense is widening, and legacy thinking is the adversary's greatest ally.

Join CTO Gunter Ollmann, one of the industry's leading offensive security experts, for a no-holds-barred forecast. We are moving past the obvious to dissect the 5 new trends that will actually reshape the attack surface, the 3 persistent risks that are still costing businesses millions, and the 1 game-changing surprise poised to disrupt a decade of security planning.


In this session, you will learn how to:
  • What attackers are already exploiting in the new, misunderstood AI-driven attack surface.
  • Which "unpatchable" legacy risks are breaking under the strain of new, automated offensive tactics.
  • The single biggest (and most overlooked) strategic shift that will redefine security talent and team structure in 2026.
  • How to augment your team's expertise to find the complex vulnerabilities that AI misses and deliver measurable risk reduction.

SPEAKER
Gunter Ollmann, leadership headshot
Gunter Ollmann
CTO, Cobalt