AI has broken old assumptions.
Benny Lakunishok, CEO and Co-founder of Zero Networks
Incident readiness should also reflect current attack patterns, including ransomware, extortion and supply-chain intrusions, ensuring playbooks mirror how adversaries operate today. In order to do this, organisations should reassess data exposure, monitoring how similar entities’ information is targeted, or weaponised for extortion or competitive advantage. Cloud and SaaS risk reviews should now prioritise configurations and platforms actively exploited by threat actors, aligning detection capabilities with known techniques.
Finally, CISOs should track geopolitical developments, sanctions and conflict-driven cyberactivity to understand how external events translate into cyber-risk. In Q1 2026, effective cyberleadership is defined by awareness and proactive preparation, transforming security from reactive compliance into business protection.
Benny Lakunishok, CEO and Co-founder of Zero Networks:
As CISOs look to Q1 of 2026, the playbook needs to reflect a new reality: We can no longer predict how attacks will arrive, only how much damage they can do once they are inside. AI has broken old assumptions. Attackers now adapt in real time, chain techniques automatically and exploit whatever access path happens to work first. Planning around static threat scenarios is no longer enough.
The priority for Q1 should be treating threat containment as a core, standing budget line. Not a project and not a reaction to a specific threat. Prevention still matters, but it is no longer the constraint. The organisations that perform best assume initial access will occur and focus investment on limiting blast radius, maintaining uptime and keeping critical operations running even during active attacks.
In practice, this means shifting budget toward controls that reduce lateral movement, eliminate always on access and automate enforcement across identity and network layers. It also requires a change in how success is measured. Instead of asking whether an attack was blocked, executives are asking how quickly it was contained and what business impact was avoided.
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