New research from the World Economic Forum takes us inside the minds of more than 100 CEOs and CISOs across industries and regions to understand what’s actually keeping them up at night as we head into 2026. These insights are from a cohort of leading executives who are accountable for protecting some of the world’s most complex organizations. Their views reflect the realities of operating global businesses at scale, including managing third-party ecosystems, navigating evolving regulations, and staying ahead of increasingly sophisticated threats while still enabling growth and innovation. Here are the key takeaways and our take on what this means for your organization.
1. Think TPRM is old news? Think again
Third-party and supply chain risk continues to be the single greatest challenge to becoming cyber resilient, even for highly resilient organizations. Even the most prepared, well-funded, and mature organizations still see third-party risk as their top concern. This isn’t a “we’ll get to it later” issue, it’s a reminder that your security posture is only as strong as the weakest link in your ecosystem.
What this means for your organization: TPRM isn’t going away. If anything, it’s becoming harder to manage as ecosystems grow more complex. This means you need stronger visibility into who you work with, faster ways to assess their risk, and continuous monitoring rather than point‑in‑time checks. Leveraging a high‑accuracy risk rating solution with real‑time alerts ensures you catch material changes the moment they happen, before they escalate into incidents. This shift strengthens your overall resilience and keeps your ecosystem from becoming your biggest vulnerability.
2. Breaking silos is no longer optional
The number one approach CEOs from highly prepared organizations use to address supply chain cyber risk? Partnership. Specifically, involving the security function earlier in the procurement process and actively assessing the security maturity of suppliers. This means security, procurement, legal, and risk teams working together, not in parallel, and not after the fact. Cyber resilience doesn’t come from one team doing more work. It comes from fewer silos and better coordination.
What this means for your organization: Embedding security earlier in the procurement process and improving alignment across security, procurement, legal, and risk teams is essential. Break down silos with clear communication channels, regular cross‑functional touchpoints, and integrated tools that streamline shared workflows. This transforms cybersecurity into a shared responsibility, not a downstream checkpoint.
3. Cyber inequality is widening
One of the most striking findings is the global gap in cyber skills. CEOs in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean face the greatest shortages. Outside of Europe and North America, more than half of CEOs admit they lack the skills needed to achieve their current cybersecurity goals. The numbers are especially high in sub-Saharan Africa (70%) and Latin America and the Caribbean (69%). This isn’t just a talent issue, it’s a resilience issue. Organizations can’t defend against modern threats without the people and expertise to do so.
What this means for your organization: Bridging the cyber skills gap starts with upskilling your teams through continuous training and cyber crisis exercising. This is the practice of running through real-life fire drills that test decision‑making, validate playbooks, and build confidence across technical and executive teams. This ensures your people are prepared to respond effectively when, not if, a real incident occurs.
4. AI is both a tool and a weapon
Like any powerful tool, AI can be a force multipler - or a risk. CEOs identify data leaks (30%) and the advancement of adversarial capabilities (28%) as the most significant security concerns related to generative AI. These risks clearly stand above the rest, pointing to two core fears: exposure of proprietary data and increasingly sophisticated attackers. What’s especially telling is the gap between organizations. Highly resilient organizations rank AI-related vulnerabilities as their top concern. Less resilient organizations don’t even have AI in their top three priorities. That disconnect matters. It suggests that awareness and preparedness around AI risk is becoming a differentiator.
What this means for your organization: Addressing AI‑driven threats requires AI‑native, cloud‑based solutions built to detect and respond at machine speed. Prioritize technologies that use AI at the core (not as an add‑on) to identify anomalies, prevent data leakage, and keep pace with rapidly evolving attacker capabilities. This shift helps ensure your defenses scale as fast as the threats targeting them.
5. Different priorities for CISOs and CEOs
Ransomware remains the top cyber risk concern for CISOs. That hasn’t changed. But CEOs are increasingly focused elsewhere. For 2026, cyber-enabled fraud and phishing now rank as their number one concern. That shift reflects the growing business impact of these attacks, not just operational disruption, but direct financial and reputational damage.
What this means for your organization: As CEOs prioritize fraud and phishing while CISOs remain focused on ransomware, you need tools that address both operational threats and business‑impact threats in one integrated approach. Leveraging AI‑native, cloud‑based security and fraud‑intelligence solutions helps close that gap by detecting attacks earlier, reducing financial exposure, and strengthening resilience across the entire enterprise. This alignment ensures your defenses match the evolving priorities of both technical and business leaders.
Taken together, these insights paint a clear picture of 2026: cyber risk is broader, more interconnected, and more business‑critical than ever before. Third‑party exposure, talent gaps, AI‑driven threats, and executive misalignment aren’t isolated challenges - they’re systemic pressures that directly shape an organization’s resilience. And resilience, increasingly, is what separates organizations that can move forward with confidence from those that are forced to react, recover, and rebuild.
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