The World Economic Forum’s Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2026 delivers a clear and uncomfortable truth: cyber risk is accelerating faster than our traditional defenses can keep up. AI-driven attacks, geopolitical volatility, supply-chain fragility, and widening cyber inequity reshape the threat landscape at a systemic level.

What stands out most, however, is not just what is changing—but where defenses are consistently failing.

Across AI misuse, ransomware, fraud, supply-chain compromise, and cloud outages, identity remains the dominant attack path. Whether human or non-human, identities have become the new control plane of modern cybersecurity.

In this blog, I break down five Identity Security lessons we can learn from the research.

Lesson 1: AI has turned identity abuse into a force multiplier

According to the report, 94% of organizations identify AI as the most significant driver of cyber risk, and 87% cite AI-related vulnerabilities as the fastest-growing threat. While much attention is placed on AI models themselves, the more systemic risk lies elsewhere.

AI agents, like other identities, don’t break in—they log in.

Attackers are using AI to:

• Scale phishing and impersonation with unprecedented realism

• Automate credential harvesting and privilege escalation

• Exploit over-privileged service accounts, APIs, bots, and AI agents

The report explicitly highlights that the multiplication of identities—especially AI agents and machine identities—has outpaced governance and security controls. These non-human identities (NHIs) now outnumber human users in most environments, yet remain largely invisible, unmanaged, and implicitly trusted.

Security takeaway:
If organizations continue to protect networks and endpoints while trusting identities by default, AI will simply accelerate compromise.

This is why it’s important to apply Zero Trust principles to Identity Security. If authentication and authorization are where your security controls end, you’re likely not implementing a Zero Trust approach.

Instead, security-first approaches like adaptive MFA and risk-based access controls for all identities – whether it’s humans, service accounts, APIs, AI agents, legacy systems, and more – ensure your strategy is based on continuous validation. Rather than, “Do the credentials/access match the identity?” you should be able to answer questions like “Does this access make sense to allow based on the risk signals?”

Lesson 2: Cyber-enabled fraud is an identity problem, not a financial one

The report reveals that 73% of respondents were personally affected by cyber-enabled fraud, making it the top concern for CEOs—surpassing ransomware.

What’s driving this surge?

• AI-powered impersonation

• Credential reuse

• Lateral movement using legitimate access

• Abuse of trusted identities rather than malware

Fraud today succeeds not because systems are unpatched—but because identity verification stops too early.

Once credentials are obtained, most environments still fail to:

• Continuously validate access

• Detect abnormal identity behavior

• Apply step-up authentication dynamically

Security takeaway:
Fraud prevention and identity security are now inseparable. Fraud begins and end with identity abuse, meaning that real-time, context-aware controls are needed to stop fraudulent activity before material damage is done.

From the report, it’s also clear that CEO and CISO priorities are shifting, yet the foundation for where they can come together remains the same: through strong Identity Security.

Lesson 3: Supply-chain attacks inherit trust—and abuse it

The WEF report identifies third-party and supply-chain vulnerabilities as the top cyber resilience challenge for large organizations. Crucially, the most common supply-chain risk is not malware—it is inherited trust.

When vendors, partners, or managed services connect:

• They often authenticate via service accounts

• Credentials are long-lived and rarely rotated

• Access is broad, persistent, and poorly monitored

Attackers don’t need to breach the perimeter if they can log in through a trusted identity.

Security takeaway:
Supply-chain security failures are identity governance failures. Supply-chain breaches succeed by abusing inherited trust, not by exploiting technology gaps. Organizations should treat third-party access as an identity risk by maintaining a clear inventory of vendor identities, enforcing least-privilege and time-bound access, and eliminating standing permissions wherever possible. Strong authentication should be prioritized for high-risk vendor access, and access reviews must align with contract and business lifecycles. Even without new tools, disciplined governance can significantly reduce supply-chain exposure.

Lesson 4: Cyber resilience depends on identity visibility, not just recovery plans

While 64% of organizations claim they meet minimum cyber resilience requirements, only 19% exceed them. Highly resilient organizations share one defining trait: deep visibility and control across identities.

The report’s Cyber Resilience Compass shows that resilient organizations:

• Continuously assess AI and identity risks

• Monitor access across IT, OT, and cloud

• Reduce standing privileges

• Treat identity as a shared ecosystem risk

Yet identity remains fragmented across directories, clouds, SaaS platforms, legacy systems, and machine workloads.

Security takeaway:
You cannot be resilient if you don’t know who or what is accessing your systems—and why. That’s why it’s so important to retain a living, dynamically-evolving graph visualizing which identities exist and their access paths. This acts as a unified source of truth that can expose exploitable gaps that need closing.

Lesson 5: Cyber inequity makes identity the weakest link

The report highlights a widening cyber inequity gap, driven largely by skills shortages—particularly in identity and access management roles, which are among the top three most understaffed security functions globally.

Complex IAM implementations, agent-based controls, and application rewrites are no longer realistic for many organizations.

Security takeaway:
Identity security must become simpler, not more complex. IAM upskilling needs to happen in tandem with identity-first security solution implementation; this is how we close the gap between IAM and cybersecurity teams while reducing operational burden. Cyber inequity makes identity the most fragile control post – especially where skills are resources are limited.

Implementing security solutions designed with identity teams in mind offers many benefits. By standardizing identity policies (e.g., enforcing MFA on all remote and privileged access), organizations reduce dependency on scarce expertise, lower configuration errors, and achieve consistent risk reduction. For example, you can apply one access standard to employees, contractors, and service accounts, cutting operational overhead while measurably shrinking the attack surface.

The strategic shift: From perimeter security to identity-centric Zero Trust

The Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2026 reinforces a fundamental shift: Cybersecurity is no longer about defending a defined perimeter—it’s about securing infrastructure and access in real-time.

AI, cloud, supply chains, and geopolitics have dissolved the perimeter. Identity is what remains.

Organizations that will succeed in 2026 and beyond are those that:

• Treat identity as critical infrastructure

• Secure non-human identities with the same rigor as human users

• Enforce Zero Trust dynamically, everywhere

• Reduce implicit trust across ecosystems

Silverfort was built precisely for this moment—to secure identities wherever they exist, however they authenticate, and whatever they access.

Silverfort’s platform approach to Identity Security recognizes that identities span cloud, on-prem, legacy systems, service accounts, and non-human workloads—yet they are secured through fragmented controls. By acting as a unified enforcement layer across all authentication paths, the platform enables consistent Zero Trust policies without agents or application changes. This allows organizations to reduce identity risk holistically, rather than incrementally securing identities one system at a time.

Final thought

The WEF report concludes that cyber resilience is a shared responsibility and a strategic imperative. Identity Security is where that responsibility becomes actionable.

In the age of AI-driven threats, every breach is an identity breach first.

The question for organizations is no longer if identity should be central to their security strategy—but how quickly they can make it so.

Source: SIlverfort