Top Security Threats in 2026 & How to Prevent Them

As we approach 2026, the security landscape facing ultra-high-net-worth families, estate managers, lifestyle asset managers, and corporate operators is more complex than ever. Threats that were once distinct have begun to converge – blending digital and physical tactics in ways that exploit every weak link. Sophisticated cyberattacks, AI-driven scams, rogue drones, domestic extremism, social engineering cons, and supply chain infiltrations are all on the rise.

This article examines the top security threats anticipated in 2026 and explains why a converged protection approach – integrating cyber, physical, personnel, and intelligence measures – is the most effective defense against these emerging dangers.

Cybersecurity threats continue to escalate in scale and sophistication. Attackers are leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to supercharge their cyberattacks – from generating highly realistic phishing emails and deepfake voice calls to deploying malware that adapts in real-time. By 2026, AI-driven cyberattacks are expected to become more targeted and harder to detect, as generative AI enables criminals to automate attacks that previously required human effort. Ransomware also continues to evolve: instead of “only” encrypting data, gangs now engage in double and triple extortion – stealing sensitive files and threatening leaks or attacks on partners to extort additional payments. Even nation-state hackers are ramping up their campaigns, aiming malware at critical infrastructure such as energy grids and transportation networks to cause real-world disruption. In short, cyber threats in 2026 will be more intelligent, adaptive, and disruptive than anything seen before, often with direct consequences for physical operations.

The same AI tools transforming cybercrime are also enabling new kinds of physical-world threats. For example, deepfake technology can clone voices or video, allowing criminals to impersonate trusted people and trigger harmful actions in real life. In fact, North America saw a staggering 1,740% increase in deepfake fraud in 2023 – a harbinger of things to come. There have been cases of AI-generated voice scams where an employee receives a call that sounds exactly like their CEO instructing a funds transfer, when in reality it’s an AI mimicking the CEO’s voice.

Such deepfake social engineering can bypass traditional verification and lead to significant losses. AI can also be used to breach physical security in novel ways; for instance, researchers have demonstrated that the sound of a key turning in a lock can be analyzed by AI to recreate the key, effectively allowing for remote lock picking. Would-be intruders could exploit AI-driven tools to defeat biometric access systems, generate realistic fake IDs, or even coordinate autonomous drones/robots for nefarious purposes. These AI-driven physical incursions blur the line between cyber and physical, rendering traditional security measures vulnerable to circumvention.

The sky is becoming a new frontline for security. Small unmanned drones are inexpensive, readily available, and capable of serious mischief – from spying on private estates to shutting down critical infrastructure. Airports have already learned this the hard way. Back in 2018, a rogue drone caused London’s Gatwick Airport to close for ~36 hours, canceling 1,000 flights and stranding 110,000 passengers. Today, such incidents are no longer rare.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration has logged over 2,000 drone incursions near airports since 2021, with drones implicated in a large share of near mid-air collision reports. Security officials are sounding the alarm: drones can be used for illicit surveillance, smuggling contraband, or even as weapons (improvised explosive carriers or jammers). Recent U.S. homeland security assessments warn that coordinated drone attacks on an airport, seaport, or public event are a credible and growing threat.

The threat isn’t limited to airports either – an ultra-wealthy family’s estate could be surveilled by a drone flying overhead, or a critical facility’s perimeter could be breached by a swarm of drones overwhelming the guards. The technology is outpacing defenses, and traditional perimeter fences or CCTV cameras alone won’t spot a threat buzzing in from above.

A rogue drone can bypass traditional defenses, as seen in the 2018 Gatwick Airport incident, which disrupted 1,000 flights. In 2025 and beyond, drones pose serious risks to both private estates and critical infrastructure.

In many regions, the primary terror threats are now domestic rather than foreign. Recent threat assessments in the U.S. note that domestic violent extremists are actively encouraging attacks on critical infrastructure to advance their causes. We’ve seen plots to sabotage power grids, communication networks, and other infrastructure by homegrown groups with extreme ideologies.

For example, in 2022-2023, multiple incidents involved individuals shooting or tampering with electrical substations, causing power outages. Corporate and public infrastructure operators fear that a disgruntled insider or an extremist “lone wolf” could target facilities to trigger chaos. Even high-profile private targets (e.g., an executive’s estate or a corporate campus) could become scenes of politically or ideologically motivated attacks. Compounding this, global events in 2026 – such as the FIFA World Cup – are potential flashpoints that could incite domestic actors to attempt disruptive actions on home soil.

The bottom line: domestic terror and extremist attacks are a real risk to both families and businesses, often combining physical force with digital propaganda or coordination. These threats demand a vigilant, intelligence-driven approach that many private security setups aren’t prepared for.

Old-fashioned con artistry has gotten a high-tech upgrade. Social engineering – tricking people into giving up access or information – remains one of the most effective attack methods, and it’s growing more insidious. Phishing emails and phone scams are now finely tailored using data from social media and breaches. Attackers can impersonate colleagues, vendors, or even family members with frightening accuracy.

The incorporation of AI means phishing messages are grammatically perfect and contextually convincing, making them harder to spot. As mentioned, deepfake audio and video add another layer: imagine receiving a video call that looks exactly like your spouse, but it’s a forgery designed to trick you into revealing security passcodes.

We’ve already seen high-value heists where thieves used an AI voice deepfake of a CEO to authorize a fraudulent bank transfer. And in 2024, multiple tech companies (even cybersecurity firms) reported that impostors cloned their CEOs’ voices to phone employees, attempting to capture login credentials. Such incidents highlight that human trust is being weaponized on a large scale.

For ultra-wealthy families, social engineering may target house staff or assistants – for example, a scammer convinces a house manager to disable alarms by pretending to be a technician on the phone. For corporations, employees or third-party support staff are prime targets (as seen in the 2023 Las Vegas casino hacks, which started with attackers socially engineering an IT helpdesk). In an era where criminals can literally fake identities, training people to recognize the tricks – and backing them up with verification protocols – is absolutely critical.

A final major threat category for 2026 is the supply chain attack, which occurs when attackers infiltrate a trusted third-party provider to reach their ultimate target. This could be a cyber supply chain (e.g., tampering with software updates or hardware components) or a physical supply chain (compromising a vendor that services security systems, etc.). Recent years have seen an explosion in such attacks: between 2019 and 2022, software supply chain attacks surged by 742%.

Criminals realized that instead of attacking one well-protected organization head-on, it’s easier to slip malicious code into a software library used by thousands, or hack a security vendor that has VPN access to all its clients. Notable examples include the SolarWinds incident in 2020, where hackers planted backdoors in IT monitoring software, thereby breaching numerous Fortune 500 companies and government agencies.

More recently, identity management provider Okta suffered a breach via its subcontractor in 2023, exposing many clients to downstream risk. These attacks are especially dangerous because they undermine the very tools and vendors we trust. For a family office or estate, a supply-chain attack might mean the brand-name smart home system you installed could come pre-loaded with spyware, or the private jet’s navigation software could be compromised at the source.

For a critical infrastructure operator, it could mean a trusted equipment supplier’s firmware is tainted with malware. Supply chain breaches essentially turn your strengths into weaknesses – and they can evade conventional security monitoring since the threat arrives through approved, legitimate channels.

With threats multiplying in all directions, one thing is clear: legacy, siloed security approaches are no longer enough. Traditionally, organizations and high-net-worth individuals have managed security in fragments – one team (or vendor) handles physical security (guards, gates, cameras), another handles cybersecurity (networks and data), and perhaps another looks after personal/executive protection or intelligence. These silos often fail to communicate effectively, leaving dangerous gaps. Modern attackers exploit those gaps. As cybersecurity expert Scott Borg put it, “As long as organizations treat their physical and cyber domains as separate, there is little hope of securing either one.” In practice, this means if your IT security and building security aren’t coordinated, a threat that straddles the two can slip through unchecked.

Real incidents bear this out. A well-known example is a bank robbery in which a criminal posed as an IT technician to gain access to a secure facility, bypassing world-class physical and digital controls by exploiting human trust. He simply walked in with a hi-vis vest and installed a device on the network, later using it remotely to steal millions.

The bank’s cybersecurity systems didn’t detect a “physical” intruder, and the physical security guards didn’t question the “IT guy” – a classic silo failure. Likewise, during the 2023 MGM Resorts cyberattack, hackers started by socially engineering an IT helpdesk (a human vulnerability), which led to ransomware crippling casino operations – shutting down everything from digital room keys to slot machines for 10 days. If physical security and IT had shared early warning signs (e.g., unusual account access and on-site anomalies), the response might have been faster.

Siloed security also struggles with situational awareness. One team might not see the whole picture of an unfolding multi-faceted attack. For instance, a corporate security department could be investigating an unauthorized building entry at the same time the IT team is investigating a network breach – without realizing that these events are part of a single, coordinated attack.

By the time they piece it together, it’s too late. According to industry research, 72% of organizations that converged their security departments reported a stronger overall security posture, precisely because convergence closes those information gaps that attackers love to exploit. In short, fragmentation blind spots. And in 2026’s threat environment, blind spots are unacceptable.

To counter converging threats, forward-thinking enterprises and families are adopting converged security, a holistic approach that unifies all aspects of security into a single strategy. Converged security means integrating digital, physical, personnel, and intelligence protections so that nothing falls through the cracks. Instead of separate siloed efforts, there is one coordinated effort to safeguard people, assets, and information. In formal terms, “Converged Security is a new way of viewing all risks, combining risks from the Physical, IT/Cyber, and Personnel disciplines” under one governance model. It provides a centralized, 360° view of threats and their interrelationships, rather than a piecemeal approach.

In a converged security model, previously isolated domains work hand-in-hand. For example, your cybersecurity team shares threat intelligence with your physical security team in real time – if there’s chatter about a kidnapping plot targeting executives, IT can monitor for related cyber intrusions while the physical team increases protection for those individuals. Personnel security (the human factor) is also folded in: this includes background checks, insider threat monitoring, and continuous training so that staff become an active line of defense rather than a weak link. And tying it all together is protective intelligence/risk intelligence – experts analyzing external threats (from terrorism alerts to cyber threat feeds) and internal data to anticipate problems before they strike.

Converged security isn’t just a theory; it’s proving effective in practice. By consolidating security functions, organizations can respond more quickly and effectively to complex incidents. They gain what some call a “single pane of glass” – a unified command center view where cyber alarms, camera feeds, access logs, and intelligence reports all feed into one dashboard. This unified view means that if an incident spans multiple domains, it’s caught and correlated early. One tangible benefit is evident in threat intelligence sharing: a converged team will produce more context-rich intelligence that encompasses both cyber and physical indicators. This leads to more informed and faster decision-making in a crisis. It’s also preventive – as one security leader noted, convergence helps you “predict threats and address them before they escalate,” because you’re monitoring every vector simultaneously.

To illustrate, consider a VIP family’s home security in a converged model: The IT system detects an unusual network login attempt (perhaps an intruder attempting to disable the alarms). Immediately, an alert is sent to a joint security center – they not only investigate the cyber aspect (tracing the login) but also dispatch physical security personnel to check the home’s perimeter. Simultaneously, intelligence analysts review whether this fits any patterns (perhaps they see that high-net-worth families in the area were targeted by a similar MO recently). Within minutes, all teams coordinate and act – preventing a breach that could have succeeded if each team worked in isolation. This level of integration and agility is what makes converged protection so powerful against the blended threats of 2026.

A robust converged security program will typically cover several core pillars in an integrated way:

Protection of networks, systems, and data against hacking, malware, and breaches. In a converged approach, digital security measures (firewalls, monitoring, incident response) are informed by and connected to physical and intel inputs. For example, if a cyber threat actor is discussed on the dark web as also stalking physical locations, the cyber team alerts physical security.

Protection of people and property through access control, surveillance, guards, alarms, and secure facility design. In a converged model, physical security isn’t just guards at gates – it’s augmented by technology and intel. Cameras can be analyzed by AI for anomalies, and badge access systems can be linked with IT logs to flag if a user enters a building and logs into the server room at an unusual time.

 

This involves vetting and training the people within the organization or household. Background checks for staff, strict controls on access, and ongoing security awareness training all fall under this category. People are often the weakest link, so converged security places heavy emphasis on education and insider threat detection. For instance, an integrated system might monitor employees for both digital red flags (such as downloading sensitive files) and physical red flags (like accessing the office at 3 AM), catching a rogue insider early.

 

The “radar” of the operation, scanning the horizon for threats. This includes gathering intelligence on emerging cyber threats, crime trends in relevant areas, and geopolitical events, and analyzing how they might impact a specific individual or organization. Converged security teams utilize this intelligence to stay proactive – if there’s news of a new drone-based burglary tactic, they can immediately adjust both IT (e.g., detecting drone Wi-Fi) and physical defenses (e.g., deploying counter-drone measures) accordingly.

By merging these pillars, converged security creates a force multiplier. It eliminates the “grey areas” between separate defenses – those grey areas are exactly where attackers love to slip through, as seen at opticsecuritygroup.com. As one security study put it, when departments remain siloed, it leaves “exposures” (gaps) that adversaries exploit and “overlaps” where effort is wasted. Convergence fixes both: no gaps, no redundancy – just a coordinated shield that covers all fronts.

Adopting a converged protection model is becoming not just a best practice, but a necessity for anyone facing advanced threats (which, by 2026, is everyone). Large enterprises and critical infrastructure operators are already moving in this direction – consolidating security platforms and teams. Security trend analyses show a clear shift toward unified security platforms that integrate multiple functions, reducing blind spots and complexity. In the private sector, ultra-high-net-worth families are also seeking “one partner for all aspects of security – physical, cyber, medical, transport”, rather than juggling separate providers for each niche. Such integration ensures nothing is overlooked and that security measures complement rather than conflict with each other.

It’s worth noting that converged security doesn’t necessarily mean doing everything in-house or from scratch. It’s often about smart orchestration – ensuring your various security measures and vendors are coordinated under a unified strategy. This could be achieved by establishing a central Chief Security Officer (CSO) role that oversees all domains, or by engaging a specialized firm that provides converged security services.

For instance, HKDS is a leader in this space, known for a proprietary Converged-Security Model that merges clients’ physical, cyber, intelligence, and operational data to pinpoint exactly where fragmented defenses leave them vulnerable. By using such frameworks, one can effectively “stitch together” all the different layers of protection into one seamless fabric. The end result is presidential-level security – a standard of protection so comprehensive that it’s akin to what world leaders have, yet it operates unobtrusively in the background of your daily life.

Are Your Current Security Measures Keeping Up? It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by these modern threats, but there are proactive steps you can take to mitigate them. One practical step is to assess your current defenses. To help with that, we’re offering a free Converged Security Checklist that you can use to evaluate your estate or organization’s security readiness. This simple checklist (developed by HKDS’s experts) walks you through the essential elements of integrated protection – covering cyber hygiene, physical safeguards, emergency plans, and more – so you can identify any gaps in your current approach. It’s a great starting point to see how close (or far) you are from a truly converged security posture. (Interested readers can get this checklist at no cost, as a resource to start fortifying their defenses.)

In 2026, security convergence isn’t just a buzzword, but a survival strategy. The threats are simply too advanced and too intertwined for legacy approaches to handle. By embracing converged protection, you position yourself to predict, withstand, and respond to whatever comes next – whether it’s a hacker probing your network, a drone hovering over your property, or an insider plotting trouble. Converged security means no more weak links: every facet from your IT systems to your front gate is monitored and reinforced as one cohesive shield.

For ultra-high-net-worth families and estate managers, this approach offers peace of mind that your loved ones and lifestyle assets are protected by “unified command.” For corporate and infrastructure operators, it aligns security with business continuity – ensuring that a cyberattack cannot disrupt your physical operations or vice versa. Converged security also offers strategic benefits, including better alignment of security with your overall goals, improved communication among teams, and more efficient resource utilization. Instead of doubling up or leaving holes, you direct effort where it’s needed most.

Transitioning to a converged model can start with an honest assessment of your current state. Where are the seams in your protection? Perhaps your cyber team lacks insight into what the physical security team knows (and vice versa). Or perhaps your family’s smart home tech is managed by one vendor and your guarding is by another, with no synchronization. Identifying these seams is the first step to stitching them up.

If you’re unsure where to begin, consider scheduling a Private Security Assessment Call with a converged security expert. This is a complimentary, no-obligation consultation – typically around 15–20 minutes – where a seasoned security strategist examines your current security posture across all domains (digital, physical, personal). They’ll help pinpoint the most critical gaps and suggest how to unify your defenses for maximum protection.

Many principals and security leaders are surprised by the “hidden seams” such an assessment uncovers – the very vulnerabilities that a fragmented approach might miss. By investing a few minutes in a professional review, you could prevent a six- or seven-figure incident down the line. HKDS offers a Private Security Assessment Call as a complimentary service to help ultra-wealthy families and organizations gain a clear understanding of their risk landscape. You’ll even receive a personalized interoperability scorecard and some immediate recommendations as takeaways, so you have a roadmap toward converged protection.

Ultimately, the message for 2026 is clear: evolve or risk being exposed. The top threats we’ve discussed will only intensify, but a converged security strategy gives you the upper hand. It’s about being proactive instead of reactive – breaking down silos, integrating intelligence, and staying one step ahead of adversaries who are all too happy to exploit disunity. By fortifying your world with converged protection, you ensure that no matter what threats emerge – be it a cunning AI scammer, a stealthy drone, or a well-orchestrated attack – you have one unified shield ready to meet it. In a time of converging threats, converged security is the only answer that truly protects what matters most.