Security Predictions for 2026: Trust, Identity, and the New Insider Risk

As 2026 begins, insider risk and human‑driven threats are expected to continue shaping the security environment in ways enterprise leaders increasingly feel. What remains less settled is how far those risks will extend once trust assumptions are tested at scale.

Over the past several years, organizations have adapted to people‑centric risk in fragments, often at the cost of slowed hiring decisions, internal friction between teams, and unclear ownership of trust and access at the leadership level. Hiring teams adjusted processes. Security teams added controls. HR absorbed new responsibilities. In 2026, it is likely that these fragmented responses are likely to prove insufficient. Many organizations recognize the risks, but the trust models still in use were designed for a very different operating reality.

Security programs have invested heavily in defending against unauthorized access. Far less attention has been paid to the risk introduced when access is granted legitimately, often under assumptions that no longer hold. As a result, hiring, identity, and insider risk are no longer adjacent concerns. They are converging into a single security problem, a shift increasingly visible in how insider threats are understood and addressed.

At Nisos, much of our work sits at this intersection. Based on observed threat activity, client engagements, and broader industry signals, several trends stand out as particularly relevant for the year ahead.

1. The hiring crisis reaches a breaking point

This erosion of trust is already visible inside many organizations, most clearly in how they approach hiring.

As 2026 unfolds, organizations are confronting what many security teams have quietly suspected for some time. Traditional hiring processes are no longer sufficient for a digital, AI-mediated labor market. Incident reporting, law enforcement actions, and enterprise investigations over the past several years suggest that fraudulent applicants are no longer edge cases, particularly in remote and highly technical roles. As these cases have become more visible, recruitment risk has shifted from a theoretical concern to a practical constraint, especially where physical verification is limited.

What makes this moment different is scale, and the way it compresses risk tolerance, cost exposure, and executive accountability into the same set of decisions. AI is now embedded across the hiring ecosystem. Job seekers use it to optimize resumes. Recruiters rely on it for screening and sourcing. Threat actors, unsurprisingly, use the same tools to fabricate identities, credentials, and work histories at speed. The result is a growing hesitation to hire, paired with an increased risk of onboarding individuals who should never gain access to sensitive systems or information.

It appears increasingly likely that 2026 will mark a turning point, when fragmented ownership of hiring, identity, and access creates governance gaps, regulatory exposure, and heightened scrutiny at the board and executive level. Organizations that continue to rely on static background checks or point-in-time screening may find themselves exposed to both operational disruption and downstream insider risk. The concept of a trusted workforce is shifting from a hiring milestone to an ongoing security discipline, one that blends identity assurance with continuous risk awareness.

2. Employment fraud evolves beyond awareness

As trust weakens at the point of entry, employment fraud becomes more than a recruiting problem.

Over the past year, significant attention has focused on employment fraud operations linked to North Korea. These campaigns have demonstrated how convincingly threat actors can penetrate Western organizations by posing as legitimate remote employees. While increased awareness has led to improved detection in some cases, it has also had an unintended side effect.

By surfacing tactics in detail, public reporting has effectively published a playbook. Recent Nisos investigations into DPRK-linked employment fraud how threat actors can obtain legitimate roles and sustain long-term access inside Western organizations, often operating undetected for extended periods. In 2026, similar approaches are expected to be adopted by a wider range of state-aligned and financially motivated actors. While some historical DPRK-linked efforts have appeared to prioritize revenue generation, the same tactics also enable access, intelligence collection, and long-term presence, making them attractive for a wider range of objectives.

This distinction matters. Financial fraud is often noisy and eventually detectable. Long-term infiltration, by contrast, is designed to blend in. It aligns closely with insider threat activity and is far harder to unwind once embedded within an organization’s workforce.

3. Visual identity verification loses reliability

One consequence of this shift is the growing fragility of visual trust.

One of the more unsettling developments on the horizon involves the erosion of visual identity verification. For years, hiring managers and security teams have relied on live video interviews and document checks as a final safeguard.

AI-generated resumes and headshots are already commonplace. The next phase appears to involve dynamic, real-time manipulation. Live-adjusting video, capable of altering faces, backgrounds, and even physical documents on camera, is no longer theoretical. In practical terms, asking a candidate to hold up an ID during an interview may soon offer little assurance.

Some observers argue that layered authentication tools will fill this gap. Others note that attackers often adapt faster than defensive controls. A more durable response may involve shifting emphasis away from visual confirmation and toward behavioral patterns, contextual risk signals, and post-hire monitoring. Identity, in this sense, becomes something that is continuously evaluated rather than momentarily proven.

4. Employment fraud becomes a globalized operation

Once fraudulent access is repeatable, it inevitably becomes scalable.

As employment fraud campaigns succeed, they encounter the same constraint faced by legitimate businesses: scale. Sustaining dozens or hundreds of fraudulent roles across multiple organizations requires operational coordination. Evidence suggests that by 2026, employment fraud will increasingly resemble a distributed global enterprise.

Threat actors are expected to outsource tasks across regions, leveraging collaborators in countries such as Iran, India, and parts of Africa to execute daily work, meet performance expectations, and reduce detection. This diffusion complicates attribution and challenges assumptions that risk can be tied to a single geography or actor.

For security teams, the implication is clear. Indicators of insider risk may no longer align neatly with known threat profiles. Instead, organizations will need to look for subtle inconsistencies across digital behavior, access patterns, and external exposure signals that exist outside the firewall.

5. Insider threat pressure intensifies as workforce trust erodes

The cumulative effect of these trends is felt most acutely inside the organization.

Perhaps the most consequential outcome is the strain these trends place on internal trust, felt most acutely by leadership teams, managers, HR, and security as assumptions about access are questioned in real time. When organizations struggle to confidently validate who is inside their environment, risk multiplies. In some cases, that risk comes from fraudulent hires. In others, it emerges from legitimate employees facing financial stress, coercion, or disillusionment.

In 2026, a measurable rise in insider threat activity tied to access monetization is increasingly likely. Selling credentials, leaking proprietary data, or facilitating external compromise are all behaviors that thrive in environments where oversight is limited and trust assumptions go unchallenged.

This is where a more holistic approach to insider threat intelligence becomes essential. Programs grounded in outside-the-firewall visibility and investigation-ready context, such as Nisos’ Insider Threat Intelligence Solutions, are better positioned to surface early signals and intervene before access is misused. Rather than focusing exclusively on internal telemetry, leading programs increasingly incorporate external risk indicators, digital footprint analysis, and early warning signals that identify behavioral change before harm occurs.

What these security predictions mean for 2026

None of these predictions suggest that trust disappears completely, nor do they imply that organizations should overcorrect in ways that slow decision-making or undermine culture. What is changing is the cost of getting it wrong, and how quickly those costs surface at the leadership level.

For years, organizations treated trust as a prerequisite to access and then largely moved on. In 2026, that approach is likely to feel increasingly brittle. Workforce decisions now carry security consequences that extend far beyond onboarding, often surfacing months or years later as insider risk, data exposure, or quiet erosion of intellectual property.

Organizations best positioned for the year ahead will not be those that attempt to eliminate trust altogether. They will be those that treat it as provisional, measurable, and continuously informed by intelligence rather than assumption.

For executive leadership, the challenge is no longer simply defending against intrusion. It is recognizing when access itself has become the vulnerability and acting before that access is weaponized.

For organizations where these dynamics are already surfacing, Nisos works with enterprise leaders to help assess workforce risk, identify early warning signals, and bring greater clarity to trust, access, and insider exposure. Let’s discuss how intelligence-led insight can support more resilient workforce and security decisions