Rapid7 outlines 2026 cybersecurity predictions

Rapid7 released its top cybersecurity predictions for 2026 following a webinar featuring executives Raj Samani, Sabeen Malik, and Rob Dooley, and presented findings that highlighted geopolitical spillover into the private sector, a rise in insider threats, and the need for contextual awareness for cyber defense.

The company described operational implications such as private organizations in critical supply chains becoming proxy targets and the blending of third parties with nation-state actors for espionage and economic sabotage, and identified metrics for security value including time saved, dwell time reduced, risks remediated, and accelerated workflows.

Rapid7 outlined methods such as integrating exposure management with detection capabilities for faster triage and response, establishing behavior baselines across users and roles to flag anomalous access and downloads, and regularly reviewing privilege models to limit access and reduce blast radius; it also noted new offerings including Incident Command, Vector Command, and expanded Managed Detection and Response (MDR) coverage for Microsoft environments.

The predictions were delivered during the annual Top Cybersecurity Predictions webinar, which Rapid7 held in December and moderated by Philip Ingram; the company also published research on access brokers and the global threat landscape and made a replay of the webinar available.

“Cybersecurity is intelligence. It's the ability to gather signals from the noise and respond appropriately,” said Samani, Rapid7’s chief scientist. “We have some really aggressive actors that are trying to exploit whatever it is they can. Still, humans at the end of the day are going to see more sophisticated attacks using things like AI,” said Malik, Rapid7’s vice president of Global Government Affairs and Public Policy.

Rapid7's executives projected that insider threats would dominate breach root causes by 2026 and that contextualized intelligence would be necessary for effective exposure management and detection across complex environments.