Organizations have never had greater awareness of cyber risk. Yet turning that awareness into operational resilience has never been more challenging. The 2026 Bitdefender Cybersecurity Assessment confirms this is the case, as this year’s findings reveal a series of surprising contradictions.
Here are a few examples, based on the independent survey of 1,200 IT and cybersecurity professionals across six countries.
- IT & security leaders believe they have sufficient visibility into employee AI usage, while many frontline practitioners disagree.
- Security teams understand the importance of reducing the attack surface, yet they often lack the skills, resources, or strategy to do so.
- AI dominates cybersecurity conversations, but in some cases, it is drawing attention away from more prevalent attack techniques already causing significant damage.
- Although organizations say they recognize the importance of transparency after a breach, many professionals still report pressure to remain silent, even if a breach is reportable.
Together, these findings point to an industry wrestling with a new reality: the gap between awareness and resilience.
AI Has Become Both the Biggest Priority and the Biggest Blind Spot
Artificial intelligence has rapidly become part of everyday business operations, whether security teams planned for it or not. Yet visibility into that usage remains surprisingly inconsistent.
While 51.8% of respondents believe they have full visibility into sanctioned and unsanctioned AI use, 47.4% admit they have only partial or no visibility into Shadow AI tools or personal AI accounts being used for work.
The disconnect becomes even more striking when comparing leadership with practitioners. Nearly 58% of managers believe they have complete visibility, while only 45.9% of practitioners agree.
The implication: many organizations may be making strategic decisions based on an incomplete picture of their AI exposure.
Majority Agree Attack Surface Reduction Matters—Few Can Achieve It
Reducing unnecessary exposure has become one of cybersecurity’s most widely accepted priorities. Actually doing it is another matter.
Respondents identified maintaining hardening policies and exceptions (38%), fear of disrupting business operations (35.4%), and limited resources (34.6%) as the biggest obstacles to reducing the attack surface. Another 33.8% cited uncertainty about which legitimate tools individual users actually require, with that figure climbing to 48.8% among U.S. organizations.
The challenge isn’t convincing anyone of the value of shrinking the attack surface; instead, it’s about finding a way to do it dynamically, without disrupting productivity or creating additional operational burden.
AI Is Dominating Attention, Prevalent Threats Ignored
In this year’s assessment, security professionals rank AI-related threats as their top three cybersecurity concerns. This includes: Self-mutating malware (55.9%), public LLM data leakage (53.5%), and AI-driven evasion techniques (52.5%), which were all ranked as high or extreme risks by respondents.
Yet today’s threat intelligence paints a more nuanced picture.
Rather than inventing entirely new attack techniques, adversaries are largely using AI to improve existing techniques, like making phishing campaigns more convincing, automating reconnaissance, and accelerating attack execution.
Meanwhile, one of today’s most prevalent attack methods continues to receive comparatively little attention.
Bitdefender Labs recently found that 84% of high-severity attacks leveraged Living off the Land (LOTL) techniques by abusing legitimate tools already present inside the environment. Yet only one in five survey respondents ranked LOTL attacks among their top three concerns.
This suggests that while AI deserves attention, organizations cannot afford to lose sight of the threats already succeeding today.
Transparency Remains One of Cybersecurity’s Hardest Challenges
Perhaps this year’s most surprising finding isn’t about attackers at all.
It’s about organizational culture.
More than half (55.2%) of respondents who experienced a breach during the previous twelve months say they were instructed to keep the incident confidential despite believing authorities should have been notified.
The figure rises to 68.6% in the United States.
These findings raise important questions about governance, compliance, and trust. Responding effectively to a cyber incident is no longer measured solely by technical recovery. Increasingly, resilience includes transparency, accountability, and confidence in decision-making when incidents occur.
Awareness Is No Longer Enough
Taken individually, each finding is interesting. Taken together, they reveal something much larger.
Organizations understand today’s cyber risks better than ever before. They know AI introduces new exposure. They recognize the importance of attack surface reduction. They appreciate the need for transparency and resilience.
What remains difficult is operationalizing that understanding while balancing productivity, complexity, compliance, and limited resources.
That is the real challenge of defining cybersecurity in 2026.
See How Your Organization Compares
To explore the complete results, compare regional trends, and benchmark your organization against 1,200 cybersecurity professionals worldwide:
Because the organizations best prepared for tomorrow’s threats won’t simply understand the risks—they’ll be the ones that know how to turn that understanding into resilience.
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