The report describes a shift from technical exploitation to human exploitation, does this fundamentally change how organisations should think about cybersecurity?
Organisations should think about a combination of technical and human exploitation. For years, cybersecurity strategies were mostly built around protecting infrastructure, patching systems and managing vulnerabilities. While those remain important, the report shows that attackers are increasingly choosing a different path, one that goes through people rather than systems.
Ram Narayanan, Country Manager at Check Point Software Technologies, Middle East
AI has changed the nature of social engineering. Messages are now highly personalised, contextaware and often indistinguishable from legitimate communication. More importantly, attacks are no longer limited to email. They span voice calls, collaboration tools, browsers and even AI applications that employees interact with daily.
Insights from Check Point’ s Cyber Security Report 2026 reveal a fundamental shift in the threat landscape – from technical exploitation to highly sophisticated human targeting. As ransomware evolves, AI accelerates threat activity and attack surfaces expand, Ram Narayanan, Country Manager at Check Point Software Technologies, Middle East, explains that organisations must prioritise continuous exposure management, unified protection frameworks and AI-driven defence to stay resilient in an increasingly complex digital environment.
This means organisations need to rethink their approach. Cybersecurity is no longer just about securing networks or endpoints in isolation; it is about securing the entire user experience. Protection needs to be embedded into the way people work, rather than relying on individuals to identify threats on their own.
In practical terms, this shifts the focus towards securing the workspace itself, ensuring that users are protected consistently across every channel they use. The goal is to reduce reliance on human judgement in high-risk situations and instead build environments where security is applied by default.
As environments become more distributed and attack vectors multiply, how important is consistent end-to-end protection across the board?
Consistency is now essential. The modern enterprise is no longer defined by a single perimeter. It is a mix of remote users, cloud services, personal devices and distributed workloads, all interacting in real time.
Each of these elements introduces potential risk. When security is applied unevenly across them, gaps appear. Attackers are very effective at identifying those gaps and using them to move laterally across environments.
AI has changed the nature of social engineering.
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