Cyberattacks are growing in frequency and sophistication. Data from the 2024 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report shows that breaches exploiting application vulnerabilities have increased by 180% in the last year alone. Applications remain a primary target, yet development teams are under constant pressure to innovate and deliver faster. Using disconnected or inadequate application security tools creates security gaps, slows down development pipelines, and ultimately increases business risk.

Ultimately, my prediction for cybersecurity in 2026 is that we will continue to see more of the same, just a lot faster. Threat actors will keep using the methods that work because there is no incentive to change what already delivers results.

Following our successful MITRE ATT&CK Evaluation results earlier this month, WatchGuard has now achieved an AAA rating in the SE Labs Endpoint Protection Suite (EPS) evaluation, the highest possible score in this independent test. SE Labs evaluates prevention and response in real-world scenarios, validating the ability to stop attacks while allowing legitimate business activity to continue uninterrupted.

Energy. Water. Finance. Healthcare. Transportation. Each of these sectors underpins the daily functioning of modern society—and each is now a potential attack vector for cyber attacks.

Imagine this. Your phone rings on January 2nd, and it’s your DevSecOps and AppSec groups. A major security vulnerability is exposing your business, and your teams are trying desperately to find and fix it to protect your data. You probably have scars as far back as Log4j, as well as threats from more recent incidents like npm attacks, Glassworm and others ringing in your ears. With CVEs expected to rise by tens of thousands a year, you can envision that the situation will only worsen.

You’ve used wildcard certificates for years. It made your life easier. Once a year you’d renew your wildcard certificate, and copy it around to all the servers. It was way too complicated and expensive to get a unique certificate for every system. But now certificate lifetimes are shrinking to 47 days by 2029 and it’s not going to work anymore. You need to automate your certificates. Soon.