Most attacks against organizations don’t begin with technical exploitation, but with the exposed personal data of employees. In 2026, the most consequential threats will be those that combine this data with AI-driven automation to scale social engineering and credential theft.
Below we highlight a few key threats on the horizon for 2026 and the need for organizations to shift from reactive measures to upstream prevention.
Prediction 1: Social engineering will remain the #1 attack vector
In 2026, attackers will increasingly automate reconnaissance, targeting, message creation, and follow-up using AI-driven workflows.
Publicly exposed names, roles, email addresses, phone numbers, and organizational context provide the raw material attackers and their AI tools need to scale social engineering and reach their targets.
So long as this data is readily available on the open web, social engineering attacks will only increase in volume and sophistication.
Prediction 2: Attackers will increasingly bypass traditional social engineering detection measures
Attackers will keep designing campaigns so that malicious content is invisible during initial inspection and only revealed after user interaction.
As a result, traditional content-based detection models will continue to lose effectiveness, shifting the burden of detection more to end users.
In this environment, preventing attacks earlier becomes imperative. When attackers cannot easily identify the right individuals to target and lack accurate contact and role information, these evasive phishing delivery techniques can’t hit their mark.
Prediction 3: Social-engineering–delivered infostealers will remain a dominant initial access method
Infostealers will remain one of the most consequential threats in 2026, serving as first-stage enablers of broader compromise.
Critically, these infections are almost always delivered via social engineering (phishing messages, fake software updates, deceptive documents, or paste-and-run prompts). Those social engineering lures depend on exposed personal data to reach the right people with believable pretexts.
As long as attackers can easily obtain employee contact details and organizational context, infostealers will continue feeding downstream account takeovers, ransomware, and extortion campaigns. Limiting exposed PII reduces both the likelihood of initial infection and the scale at which these campaigns can operate.
Prediction 4: More organizations will adopt proactive personal data removal as a foundational prevention layer
As attacks become faster, more automated, and more scalable, reactive defenses alone will fail to keep up.
More organizations will recognize that exposed employee and executive personal data is a major security liability, enabling targeting, impersonation, and credential theft at scale.
Companies that reduce that exposure will dramatically reduce the volume of targeted attacks they must defend against.
Preparing for 2026
In 2026, preventing attacks requires denying attackers the data they need to succeed. As AI-driven automation accelerates and scales social engineering and credential theft, minimizing exposed personal data will be one of the clearest and most affordable ways organizations can reduce their attack surface and their overall risk.