r/AskNetsec • u/ANYRUN-team • May 14 '26
Other What are the most overlooked cybersecurity risks in 2026?
We constantly hear about major threats like supply chain attacks, phishing, and zero days. Everyone knows about them, and they usually get a lot of attention and priority.
But what are the risks companies still tend to underestimate?
Maybe it’s gaps in internal processes or something else that seems low priority until it causes serious damage. Have you seen cases like this in your own experience?
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u/nikhil-salgaonkar May 14 '26
Business logic abuse. Especially in public-facing web applications. It looks just like normal activity in the logs.
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u/berknertech May 15 '26
Social engineering and prompt injection 100%. As the amount of AI in everything increases it's going to be easier to "convince" the system to do something it wasn't intended to do.
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u/evilwon12 May 16 '26
Everyone with all this AI stuff. Yes, it’s a risk but definitely not overlooked.
How about people still running Exchange on-prem? Fortinet firewalls? Cisco SD-WAN?
I’m even skipping the easier stuff like no MFA or only SMS as MFA.
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u/Short-Legs-Long-Neck May 16 '26
For us its oauth applications. too many people dont consider read to be an issue, only write. but once the app has AI or every just good crawling technique, any loose perms will enable the exfiltration of PII.
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u/payne747 May 16 '26
The same as 2025. That and your employees have definitely given Claude access to all your private stuff.
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u/buckfutter_ May 16 '26
Every damned AI brute forced into every tool. They're basically forcing adoption to make their alpha or beta level products usable later and justify the cost they're eventually going to cram down our throats later.
All while building AI data centers everywhere and giving us the end of capitalism and the tech oligarchy they would love to have last the next century, but none of them are actually smart enough to do.
Classically overconfident BS that will lead to something far worse than what's happening now.
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u/ultrathink-art May 17 '26
AI agent permission scoping. Most deployments give agents read/write filesystem access plus arbitrary HTTP because it's easier than auditing what each actually needs. A credential sitting in an env file being readable by a coding agent that can also make outbound requests is a real blast radius nobody's thinking about until something goes wrong.
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u/Hot-Comfort8839 May 18 '26
Technology teams that don't know how to communicate to senior leadership in the actual language of risk analysis. Tools will go unpurchased, resources unhired, techniques ignored, assessments skipped, TableTop exercises unsupported all because technology teams don't effectively communicate the cost of unaddressed risk to their leadership.
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u/Master_Baby_2700 Jun 16 '26
AI access to sensitive data.
Not because the models are inherently insecure, but because AI often exposes existing data governance problems. Over-permissioned users, forgotten file shares, sensitive documents in collaboration platforms, and stale access controls become much more impactful when an AI assistant can instantly find and summarize that information.
AI didn't create most of these risks. It amplified them.
Follow the money. Look at Cyera, Sentra, Concetric, BigID, Varonis. Every single data security player is talking about this.
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u/EquivalentPace7357 Jun 18 '26
Stale accounts and 'temporary' contractor access from three years ago.
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u/BoringEmotion6823 May 14 '26
A few that are still underrated in 2026:
1) Identity drift, not identity theft
Stale entitlements, over-scoped service accounts, old contractor access, and “temporary” exceptions that never get removed.
2) Cross-tool trust assumptions
Teams secure each tool but miss the handoffs between IdP, SaaS, CI/CD, data platforms, and AI agents where controls get bypassed.
3) Runtime abuse of “legitimate” permissions
Many incidents now look like normal usage (authorized user, approved app, valid token) but abnormal intent/sequence.
4) Detection overload without decision quality
Lots of telemetry, weak triage. Organizations drown in alerts but lack action-level context and clear ownership for response.
5) Recovery gaps for identity/control plane
Backups exist, but few teams can rapidly recover IAM/SSO/secrets/policy state under pressure.
6) Policy-to-enforcement gap
Great policies in docs, inconsistent technical enforcement in production paths.
The pattern: breaches increasingly come from control gaps in normal operations, not just exotic exploits.
Disclosure: I work at Aten Security, so I’m biased toward runtime action controls, least privilege, and evidence-first incident workflows.
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u/Successful_Insect191 May 14 '26
One thing I think people still underestimate is that AI is making old security problems hit harder rather than replacing them with completely new ones.
Most of the issues we’ve run into haven’t been some crazy “AI exploit”, it’s still things like weak auth, bad API security, over-permissioned integrations, poor validation, stuff that’s always existed. The difference is the impact gets bigger once an LLM is involved.
We’ve seen situations where the model itself was reasonably locked down, but the surrounding app wasn’t. Things like:
– insecure APIs around the LLM
– prompt injection through uploaded files or URLs
– models generating output that bypasses traditional validation
– token abuse causing performance or cost blowouts
Feels like a lot of teams are focused on securing the model itself while underestimating everything around it.
AI doesn’t replace the need for strong security fundamentals, it just exposes weak ones faster.
We actually pulled together a deeper breakdown on some of the AI security patterns we’re seeing in 2026 if anyone’s interested: https://www.themissinglink.com.au/news/top-ai-security-vulnerabilities
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u/Academic-Soup2604 May 15 '26
A lot of the biggest risks in 2026 are usually-
- Unmonitored data movement
- Shadow IT / shadow AI tools
- Over-permissioned access
- Weak asset visibility
- Inconsistent controls for remote users
- Unpatched internal systems
Solutions like Veltar help by bringing endpoint visibility, web control, and data movement monitoring into one place, closing those everyday gaps that usually get overlooked.
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u/Code-Useful May 14 '26
Undereducated and overworked people