We’ve spent the last few years treating AI as a productivity booster. But Google Cloud’s new Cybersecurity Forecast 2026 warns that this era is ending.
Hackers now use software that writes its own malicious code and launches attacks without human help. Manual security teams simply cannot move fast enough to stop this. The report makes it clear that the only way to survive an automated attack is with an automated defense.
This is the biggest technical shift in the report.
According to the forecast, attackers are no longer just using AI to write better emails or speed up coding. They are deploying autonomous malware that runs its own operations and rewrites itself to escape detection.
In the past, malware was static. A hacker wrote it, released it, and eventually, security tools would identify its “signature” and block it. Now, attackers are using generative AI to create malware that changes its own code all the time.
Google calls these just-in-time AI attacks.
It includes malware families like PROMPTFLUX, PROMPTSTEAL, and PROMPTLOCK. For example, the “thinking robot” PROMPTFLUX connects to the Gemini API to rewrite its own VBScript code every hour.
If the malware looks different every 60 minutes, your standard antivirus tools (which look for specific patterns) become useless. You can’t catch a criminal who changes their fingerprints every hour.
While malware gets smarter, attackers are also targeting the people and systems you trust.
The forecast warns that the line between a real user and an attacker is disappearing. With AI impersonations becoming so realistic, it’s getting nearly impossible to tell a real employee from a hacker.
Social engineering has moved way past those obvious spam texts we used to get.
The report highlights a spike in vishing (voice phishing). Attackers are using AI to clone the voices of executives or IT staff. It’s hard to stay skeptical when the person on the phone sounds exactly like your boss asking for a password reset.
For many companies, the biggest risk isn’t a sophisticated hacker; it’s an employee trying to be efficient.
A shadow agent occurs when an employee uses unapproved AI tools with company data. It creates hidden entry points that security teams cannot see or manage, leading to data leaks that go completely unnoticed.
And in prompt injection, attackers are learning how to manipulate corporate AI bots into ignoring safety rules and leaking private data.
Instead of hacking code, attackers use specific commands to trick the model into ignoring its safety protocols, convincing a helpful customer service bot, for example, to share sensitive internal data or execute unauthorized tasks.
The report also flags a quiet but critical risk: virtualization. As operating systems get harder to crack, attackers are getting deeper, shifting focus from operating systems to the underlying virtualization layer.
Since this infrastructure usually supports your entire network, compromising it is a “single point of failure”. One breach here can take down hundreds of systems at once.
You can’t fight a machine that thinks by throwing more people at the problem. You can’t analyze these logs manually anymore; the volume is just too high. You need what Google calls an Agentic SOC.
Basically, you need to move your Security Operations Center from reactive monitoring to using your own AI agents that can investigate threats and stop them instantly.
The agentic SOC will be a connected, multi-agent system that works collaboratively with human analysts. (Source: Google)
By now, you know you need AI defense, but implementing it is a different story.
That is exactly what we do. We help organizations take these high-level Google Cloud capabilities and turn them into a working security setup.
Before you build defenses, you need to know what’s already happening. We do deep security assessments to find gaps in your environment and the AI tools your employees are already using. We identify which third-party apps have access to your data and help you secure those permissions without downtime.
We help you implement and manage Google Security Operations. This platform ingests your data and uses Google’s Gemini to spot the “self-rewriting” malware mentioned in the report. We set up the rules and infrastructure, so your team gets clear answers, not just a flood of alerts.
If you are going to use AI agents for defense, they need governance. We help you implement frameworks (like Google’s SAIF) to give your AI tools identities, permissions, and limits. This ensures the tools you use for defense don’t become a security risk themselves.
The threats coming in 2026 are fast and autonomous. Your defense needs to be the same. You shouldn’t have to build an Agentic SOC from scratch or figure out how to stop prompt injection on your own. That’s our job.
Contact our experts today, and let’s assess if your current security setup is ready for what’s coming.