Cyber security threats in 2026: how can businesses stay protected?

Most security conversations in 2026 are no longer about whether a business uses AI. They are about how much of the working day now runs through AI assistants and agents, and who is accountable when one of them does something it should not. That shift is where the real risk sits this year.

Here is where we see UK businesses genuinely exposed right now, and what to do about each one.

Identity is the front door, and it is being picked

The dominant intrusion pattern is not malware on a laptop. It is a valid sign-in. Attackers buy or phish credentials, defeat weaker multi-factor prompts with fatigue and adversary-in-the-middle kits, then move quietly through cloud services using permissions that were never reviewed.

• Move to phishing-resistant sign-in (passkeys or certificate-based) for admins first, then everyone.
• Review standing privilege. Anything permanent should be time-bound and approved instead.
• Watch for token theft and impossible-travel signals, not just failed passwords.

Agentic automation creates a new class of insider

Copilot Studio agents, Power Automate flows and connected assistants act with real permissions against real systems. Built well, they remove hours of manual handling. Built casually, they become an untracked account with broad access and no leaver process.

Treat every agent like a member of staff: it gets a defined job, the minimum access needed, an owner, and a log you can read afterwards. Our AI agents and automation services are built around exactly that discipline.

Prompt injection and data oversharing

An assistant that can read your files can also be steered by content inside those files, or by a hostile email or web page it is asked to summarise. The bigger everyday problem is quieter: Copilot surfaces whatever a user already has permission to open, which exposes years of loose sharing in SharePoint and Teams.

• Run a permissions clean-up before a wide Copilot rollout, not after.
• Apply sensitivity labels so confidential material is handled properly by AI tools.
• Restrict which agents can act on untrusted external content.

How the threat picture has shifted since 2024

When we wrote cyber security threats in 2024, the concerns were ransomware sophistication, early AI-assisted attacks, supply chain weakness, 5G exposure and deepfakes. Those have not gone away, but three things have genuinely moved on.

• Deepfakes stopped being theoretical. Voice and video impersonation is now a routine part of payment fraud, which makes call-back verification a finance control rather than an IT one.
• Extortion often skips the encryption. Plenty of incidents are now pure data theft and blackmail, so a clean backup restores your systems but does not resolve the incident.
• AI moved inside the business. In 2024 AI was mostly something attackers used. In 2026 it is also something you run, which means governing your own assistants and agents is part of your security posture.

Data foundations decide how well you can respond

Investigations stall when nobody can answer basic questions quickly: what data was in that site, who touched it, which systems depend on it. Bringing telemetry and business data together in Microsoft Fabric turns those questions into a query rather than a fortnight of guesswork, and the same groundwork makes AI safer to adopt. If you are not sure where you stand, a data readiness assessment is the sensible first step.

Regulation is doing some of the arguing for you

Cyber Essentials remains the practical baseline for UK organisations, and it is increasingly a condition of winning work rather than a nice badge. If you trade with or supply into the EU, NIS2 pushes obligations down the supply chain, so expect security questionnaires from customers who never sent them before. Both make the same point: documented controls, tested recovery, and named accountability.

What to prioritise this quarter

• Phishing-resistant multi-factor for privileged accounts.
• An inventory of every AI assistant, agent and automation, with an owner against each.
• A sharing and labelling clean-up ahead of any Copilot expansion.
• A restore test you have actually run, plus a plan for data theft without encryption.
• Finance verification steps that assume voice and video can be faked.

None of this needs to happen at once. It needs an order, an owner and a review date.

If you would like a view on where your organisation is exposed and what to fix first, contact us for an initial chat, or read more about our Managed Intelligence approach.