2026: Industry by Industry, Focus Areas to Improve Information Security

Peter Sopczak

By Peter Sopczak

Were finally settling into 2026 and businesses are always looking to see what the year has in store. We have had many twists and turns in the past such as the pandemic, the rise of AI and markets hitting all time highs.  Many other trends in infosec have evolved such as tools continuing to get more sophisticated and efficient. Businesses are always playing defense and some are even evolving their security posture to a level of active defense, allowing them to keep pace with the changing threats.

I will break out some things to consider this year across multiple industries to help ask the right questions to prepare for what’s to come.

Finance: Leading the Way in Maturity and Targeting

In 2026, financial institutions find themselves in a paradoxical position: despite having the most mature cybersecurity budgets in the world, they face compounding risks that traditional defenses can no longer keep pace with. The industry has shifted from defending a static perimeter to securing a hyper-connected web of open banking APIs and embedded finance modules. In this environment, identity and API abuse have surpassed traditional fraud, while the integration of tokenized assets and stablecoins introduces the terrifying prospect of irreversible digital loss scenarios where “undoing” a fraudulent transaction is technically impossible.

Historical precedents demonstrate the high stakes of these evolving 2026 trends:

  • API Abuse and Open Banking Vulnerabilities:The 2021 Experian API flaw allowed anyone to access credit scores with minimal data, highlighting how “identity as a perimeter” can fail. By 2026, as banks open their doors to fintech partners, a single poorly secured API can expose millions of accounts, turning the speed of embedded finance into a liability.
  • Irreversible Loss in Digital Assets:The FTX collapse and numerous DeFi bridge hacks (like the $600M Ronin Network breach) serve as warnings for the stablecoin era. In 2026, as banks integrate tokenized deposits, they face the reality that a private key compromise doesn’t just lead to a data breach it leads to the instantaneous, permanent vanishing of capital that cannot be recovered via traditional “reversal” protocols.
  • Third-Party Concentration Risk: The 2024 CrowdStrike outage and the ION Trading ransomware attack proved that the financial sector relies on a dangerously small number of vendors. When ION, a niche but critical derivatives software provider went dark, it disrupted global clearing for days. In 2026, regulators like the SEC and European Central Bank are no longer just looking at bank security; they are hyper-focused on these “single points of failure” that can trigger systemic collapse.
  • Governance Failures as Material Events:The 2019 Capital One breach, which resulted in an $80 million fine and a massive class-action settlement, proved that even if funds aren’t stolen, the failure of oversight is what triggers regulatory wrath. By 2026, the “Executive Reality Check” is that a breach with “no material loss” can still be a material event if disclosure or governance fails.

Executive Considerations for 2026

To address these compounding risks, financial leadership must move beyond tactical defense to strategic resilience:

  • Implement “Continuous API Discovery” and Governance:Executives must authorize automated tools that map every API endpoint in real-time. In the age of open banking, a “zombie API” (an old, forgotten connection) is the most likely entry point for a catastrophic breach. Governance must mandate that no fintech partner is onboarded without a verified “API security score.”
  • Redefine Controls for Tokenized Assets:To mitigate “irreversible loss,” leadership should invest in Multi-Party Computation (MPC) and “Time-Lock” protocols for large-scale digital asset movements. These controls ensure that no single compromised credential can authorize a permanent transfer, providing a digital “cooling-off period” that mimics the safety of legacy banking.
  • Adopt “Active Resilience” for Concentration Risk:Boards must move beyond annual vendor audits. In 2026, executives should mandate multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud strategies for critical functions to ensure that an outage at one major provider (e.g., AWS or Azure) does not result in total operational paralysis.
  • Link Cyber Governance to Executive Accountability:With regulators now looking at “resilience” as a fiduciary duty, executives must ensure that cyber-risk reporting is integrated into every business line. This includes conducting “Exit Strategy” drills—practicing how the bank would move its operations away from a compromised third-party provider in under 24 hours.
  • Focus on the “Trust Deficit”:Leadership must recognize that customer attrition is the ultimate cost of a breach. Executives should authorize transparent “Trust Portals” that provide customers with real-time visibility into how their data is protected, turning security from a hidden cost into a competitive advantage.

In 2026, the mandate for the C-suite is clear: Cybersecurity is not a project with a finish line; it is a permanent state of readiness. In a world of compounding risk, the only “safe” institution is the one that assumes it is already breached and has the governance in place to survive it.

Hospitality: Availability Is Everything—And It’s Fragile

hospitality organizations are no longer targeted solely for data theft but because of their high operational leverage—the immense pressure to maintain 24/7 service during peak seasons. As these businesses become more digitally interconnected, a single system failure can paralyze a property. For guests, this translates into immediate “revenue continuity” issues where a digital outage isn’t just an IT glitch; it is a complete shutdown of the guest experience.

Historical breaches underscore how these vulnerabilities manifest:

  • Operational Paralysis: The 2023 MGM Resortsbreach serves as a cautionary tale of “high leverage” attacks. By compromising a single employee via social engineering, attackers crippled systems for 10 days, costing the company $100 million in revenue. Guests were left stranded as slot machines went dark, digital room keys failed, and check-ins reverted to pen and paper.
  • Targeted Timing and Interconnectivity: Attackers increasingly time incidents around peak demand. In 2024, Omni Hotels & Resortssuffered a major outage just before the busy spring travel season, disabling reservation systems and payment processing across multiple locations. These incidents highlight that if a property cannot operate for 24–48 hours without core systems, it faces catastrophic revenue loss.
  • Third-Party Vendor Entry Points: Small vulnerabilities in the supply chain often lead to the largest impacts. Caesars Entertainmentfell victim in 2023 after attackers breached an outsourced IT support vendor. This single entry point allowed hackers to exfiltrate a six-terabyte loyalty database containing personal data for 65 million members, eventually forcing a $15 million ransom payment.
  • Long-Term Negative Impact: The damage lingers far beyond system restoration. Marriott’s multi-year exposure of the Starwood reservation system—which affected 500 million guest records—resulted in a $24 millionpenalty and lasting brand erosion. By 2026, institutions face even steeper “class-action exposure,” as seen in the $45 million settlement MGM reached in 2025 to resolve claims from its recurring breaches.

Executive Considerations for 2026

To address these gaps, hospitality leaders must integrate cybersecurity into core business operations and guest services:

  • Implement “Resilience by Design” for Core Systems: Executives must mandate that property management systems (PMS), point-of-sale (POS), and reservation platforms have built-in “offline” or manual failover modes. This ensures that a ransomware attack does not result in the total paralysis seen during the MGM Resortsbreach, allowing key services like check-ins and basic payments to continue operating.
  • Prioritize “Event-Based” Risk Planning: Given that attackers time incidents around peak seasons, leadership must implement a tiered security model that scales defenses during major events (e.g., holidays, conventions). This includes mandating 24/7 dark web monitoring for compromised credentials belonging to staff during these high-leverage periods.
  • Mandate Strict Third-Party Vendor Accountability: Following the Caesars Entertainmentand Marriott/Starwood incidents, C-suite executives must require continuous, real-time security posture monitoring of all third-party vendors. Contracts should include financial penalties and mandatory cyber insurance coverage for vendors who introduce risk, shifting the burden of supply chain security beyond a simple annual audit.
  • Invest in “Brand Resilience” Through Transparency: Executives should authorize a “preparedness and transparency” communications plan. In the event of a breach, having a pre-approved, rapid response strategy helps manage the “long-term reputational harm” by quickly restoring customer confidence and mitigating class-action exposure.
  • Adopt Board-Level Cyber Governance: Cybersecurity must become a standing board agenda item. Executives are facing increased “executive liability tied to governance,” requiring them to move beyond delegating risk to the CISO and actively participating in approving disaster recovery simulations and operational readiness reports.

For executives in 2026, the reality is clear: cybersecurity is no longer a back-office function but a pillar of sustainable operations. Without robust protections for property management systems and third-party integrations, the next peak-season attack could mean a total loss of both revenue and guest trust.

SMBs: Security Awareness is Key for Efficiency

the couple of years have opened the eyes of many small businesses.  These companies are not targeted individually; they are targeted systemically as part of an industrialized attack model. With the proliferation of “Ransomware-as-a-Service” (RaaS), attackers can deploy sophisticated malware with minimal technical skill, turning SMBs into frequent victims or unwitting entry points into larger corporate supply chains. For many owners, a major cyber incident is no longer a recovery event—it is an “exit event” that threatens the very existence of the business.

Historical precedents illustrate how devastating these systemic risks have become:

  • Systemic Targeting via Supply Chain: The 2021 Kaseyaincident highlighted how attackers leverage managed service providers (MSPs) to hit hundreds of SMBs simultaneously. By 2026, many small businesses find themselves losing major enterprise clients not because they failed a delivery metric, but because a large company’s security requirements (like CMMC) have deemed the SMB a “high-risk vendor.”
  • Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) Proliferation: The ease of use of RaaS platforms has drastically increased the frequency of attacks. A 2023 report from the Cyber Readiness Institute noted a substantial increase in SMBs reporting attacks. By 2026, these attacks often lead to “business failure following extended downtime,” as many SMBs cannot afford to be offline for the weeks required to recover systems from scratch.
  • The Cyber Insurance Crisis: Following a breach, many SMBs struggle to regain coverage. The 2022 CNA Financialransomware attack underscored how insurers are becoming victims themselves, leading to stricter requirements and higher premiums across the board. In 2026, an SMB’s inability to secure insurance post-incident is a major barrier to future financing and operations.
  • Business Failure as the Result: A 2023 survey by ConnectWise found that over 60% of SMBs reported closing their doors within six months of a significant breach. This reality confirms the “Executive Reality Check”: the cost of prevention pales in comparison to the cost of complete business failure.

Executive Considerations for 2026

To address these existential gaps, SMB leadership must prioritize security not as an IT cost, but as an operational necessity:

  • Mandate “Cyber-Literacy” at the Ownership Level: Owners and C-suite leaders must move beyond delegating security entirely to a small IT team. Executives should participate in annual, mandatory cybersecurity training to understand terms like “MFA” and “Zero Trust,” ensuring they can make informed decisions about resource allocation and operational resilience.
  • Prioritize “Operational Continuity” Over Data Recovery: In 2026, the focus must be on minimizing downtime. This means investing in “air-gapped” or immutable backups that can restore critical systems in hours rather than days or weeks, ensuring the business can continue operating and meet payroll obligations.
  • Leverage Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs): SMBs rarely have the in-house expertise to fight nation-state-level threats. Leadership should shift from internal IT management to leveraging MSSPs that provide enterprise-grade detection, response, and compliance services at a predictable monthly cost.
  • Implement “Zero-Trust” as the Default Architecture: Owners must mandate multi-factor authentication (MFA) for everysystem, without exception. This simple step can prevent the majority of RaaS attacks that rely on stolen passwords and is a non-negotiable requirement for obtaining cyber insurance in 2026.
  • Review and Validate Supply Chain Requirements: Executives must proactively review the security requirements of their largest customers. Instead of waiting for an audit, leadership should use these enterprise requirements as a roadmap to improve their own posture, turning compliance into a competitive advantage and a way to secure “key customers.”

In 2026, the executive reality for SMBs is clear: You are the target. Security is no longer a “nice to have” IT feature—it is the life raft that keeps the business afloat when the systemic storm hits.

What Businesses Have Actually Improved (And Deserve Credit For)

The 2026 security landscape is not all regression. Organizations have made meaningful progress in key areas:

  1. Executive Awareness

Boards and executives now understand that cybersecurity is a business risk, not an IT problem. This shift matters.

  1. Incident Response Maturity

Organizations are better prepared to detect, contain, and communicate incidents even if prevention still fails.

  1. Cloud Security Baselines

Default security controls, MFA adoption, and logging are far better than they were five years ago.

  1. Regulatory Alignment

Industries subject to regulation (finance, healthcare, government) have improved governance, documentation, and accountability.

  1. Vendor Risk Visibility

While still imperfect, third-party risk is now acknowledged and measured, rather than ignored.

The 2026 Bottom Line

The most dangerous organizations in 2026 are not the least secure, but are the ones confident in outdated assumptions.

Security success now depends on:

  • Understanding your industry’s specific failure modes
  • Knowing where trust, availability, and identity intersect
  • Accepting that resilience is the goal, not perfection

The companies that endure will not be the ones that avoid every incident. They will be the ones that planned for impact before it became public.