Trend Micro Predicts 2026 As The Year Cybercrime Becomes Fully Industrialized
Trend Micro, Tuesday, November 25th, 2025
Trend Micro released its annual Security Predictions Report for 2026, warning that the coming year will mark the true industrialization of cybercrime. Artificial intelligence (AI) and automation are now enabling threat actors to run entire campaigns autonomously, from reconnaissance to extortion, creating unprecedented speed, scale, and complexity for enterprise defenders.
Ryan Flores, Lead of Forward-Looking Threat Research at Trend: "2026 will be remembered as the year cybercrime stopped being a service industry and became a fully automated one. We are entering an era where AI agents will discover, exploit, and monetize weaknesses without human input. The challenge for defenders is no longer simply detecting attacks, it's keeping pace with the machine-driven tempo of threats."