A newly released 2026 Digital Risk Report from Cybersecurity Insiders, produced with support from Outtake, finds that organizations are struggling to keep pace with a rapidly evolving digital threat landscape where attackers increasingly target trust, identity, and online reputation rather than traditional infrastructure alone.
The research, based on responses from more than 1,100 cybersecurity, fraud, risk, and trust leaders, reveals that digital risk has become a significant business issue extending far beyond security operations. While organizations have invested heavily in securing endpoints, identities, cloud environments, networks, and email systems, adversaries have shifted their focus to the public internet, where brands, executives, employees, customers, and business workflows remain vulnerable.
According to the report, 84% of organizations experienced a material digital risk incident during the past year. Despite the prevalence of these incidents, only 7% of respondents consider their digital risk programs to be mature or leading.
Digital Risk Expands Beyond Traditional Security Boundaries
Researchers found that modern digital risk campaigns are increasingly coordinated and multifaceted. Organizations reported widespread exposure to lookalike domains, executive and employee impersonation, and cross-channel attack campaigns that combine multiple platforms and techniques.
The consequences extend well beyond cybersecurity teams. Operational labor, customer support burdens, executive involvement, legal response efforts, communications activities, and direct financial losses all contribute to the overall business impact. As a result, digital risk is becoming a board-level concern that requires cross-functional governance rather than isolated security tooling.
The report notes that many organizations still lack centralized ownership for digital risk initiatives, creating accountability gaps that hinder effective response and remediation efforts.
Executive and Employee Identities Become Prime Targets
The findings show that people have emerged as one of the most exposed attack surfaces. More than half of surveyed organizations reported incidents involving executive or employee impersonation during the past year.
Attackers increasingly leverage spoofed communications, social media platforms, and professional networking sites to exploit authority, familiarity, and trust. Prior to launching campaigns, adversaries often collect personal information from public sources, data broker platforms, and credential exposures to build detailed target profiles.
Despite these risks, many organizations have not implemented comprehensive person-of-interest monitoring, threat profiling, or personal information removal programs. Visibility into encrypted and decentralized communication platforms also remains limited for a large portion of respondents.
Workforce Protection Remains Limited
While executive protection programs have gained traction, broader workforce coverage continues to lag.
The study found that most organizations either focus protection efforts exclusively on executives, provide limited coverage for select high-risk roles, or operate without a formal workforce protection strategy altogether. Only a small percentage reported comprehensive protection across their entire employee base.
Researchers warn that attackers frequently target employees with privileged access to financial systems, administrative controls, customer relationships, or critical business processes rather than senior executives alone. As a result, narrow protection strategies may leave key personnel exposed.
AI-Generated Deception Raises the Stakes
Artificial intelligence is reshaping both offensive and defensive operations.
Respondents identified AI-generated attacks designed to mimic legitimate activity as their most significant visibility challenge. Nearly half reported confirmed or suspected synthetic-media impersonation incidents involving deepfake videos, cloned voices, or other AI-generated content impersonating executives or brand representatives.
Traditional indicators used to identify fraudulent content, such as poor grammar, unnatural imagery, or inconsistent messaging, are becoming less reliable as generative AI tools improve. Organizations increasingly view AI-generated deception detection as a strategic investment priority.
The report suggests that defenders must shift detection efforts earlier in the attack lifecycle by identifying campaign infrastructure before fraudulent content reaches intended targets.
AI Agents Introduce a New Security Boundary
Beyond external threats, the report highlights emerging risks associated with AI agents and automated workflows that interact with external data sources.
Many organizations are deploying AI-powered systems to support communications, research, transactions, and decision-making processes. However, visibility and control over these systems remain limited.
Researchers point to indirect prompt injection attacks as a growing concern. In these scenarios, adversaries embed malicious instructions within external content that AI agents consume as part of their normal operations. If successful, manipulated agents may execute unintended actions without human awareness.
Only a small percentage of organizations reported having comprehensive visibility and active controls governing AI agents’ external interactions.
The AI Trust Gap Continues to Widen
The report identifies what it describes as an “AI Trust Gap,” driven by the inability of most organizations to automatically detect and contain manipulated AI agents before harmful actions occur.
While some organizations have implemented manual review processes or limited detection capabilities, very few have established automated containment mechanisms capable of stopping compromised agents in real time.
Because AI agents can operate at machine speed, delays associated with human review can allow malicious actions to occur before intervention is possible. Researchers argue that organizations must treat AI governance with the same operational rigor applied to identity and access management programs.
Detection and Response Challenges Persist
Many organizations remain heavily dependent on external parties to discover digital risk incidents.
Customers, partners, and members of the public frequently serve as the first source of notification for brand impersonation activity. Continuous monitoring, automated alerting, and structured triage capabilities remain uncommon across much of the market.
The report also highlights shortcomings in campaign attribution and adversary tracking. Many organizations focus on removing individual malicious artifacts, such as fake accounts or fraudulent domains, without investigating the broader infrastructure and operators behind the activity.
Coverage Gaps Leave Critical Channels Exposed
Comprehensive visibility across the full attack lifecycle remains rare.
Only a small percentage of organizations report end-to-end coverage spanning reconnaissance, infrastructure preparation, trust exploitation, credential theft, fraud execution, and monetization stages.
Encrypted messaging platforms, mobile ecosystems, app stores, and other difficult-to-monitor environments were identified as some of the slowest channels to remediate. At the same time, many organizations lack formal takedown service-level agreements or real-time integration between external threat intelligence and internal fraud data.
These gaps allow threat actors to sustain campaigns longer and adapt faster than defenders can respond.
Fragmented Ownership Slows Response Efforts
The study found that digital risk ownership is frequently distributed across multiple departments, including security operations, threat intelligence, fraud teams, communications, legal, and executive protection functions.
In many organizations, no single team maintains end-to-end responsibility for digital risk management. This fragmentation often results in inconsistent coordination, delayed response efforts, and incomplete visibility into broader adversary campaigns.
Researchers argue that effective programs require centralized ownership and authority spanning channels, artifacts, and organizational functions.
Investment Is Increasing, but Architecture Remains Disconnected
While most organizations plan to increase digital risk spending over the next year, many continue to rely on disconnected tools, manual processes, and fragmented workflows.
Purpose-built digital risk protection platforms remain the exception rather than the norm. Many organizations instead assemble capabilities from multiple internal tools, managed services, and point solutions.
The report warns that simply increasing spending without improving operational integration may perpetuate the very fragmentation organizations are attempting to eliminate.
Toward an Agentic Response Model
The report concludes that digital risk programs must evolve from reactive operations toward agentic response models capable of operating at AI-era speed.
Researchers advocate for tightly integrated workflows that connect detection, investigation, attribution, remediation, verification, and continuous learning into a single operational loop. Under this model, AI agents would automate repetitive response functions while human teams maintain oversight, governance, escalation authority, and strategic decision-making responsibilities.
As AI accelerates both attack and defense capabilities, the report suggests that organizations that successfully implement agentic digital risk operations over the next 12 to 24 months will be better positioned to protect digital trust, limit business disruption, and respond effectively to increasingly sophisticated online threats.
Cybersecurity Insiders produces independent research based on surveys of cybersecurity leaders and practitioners worldwide. Our reports reveal where security strategies break down in practice — helping organizations benchmark their maturity, identify capability gaps, and prioritize the actions needed to close them.
_______
About
Outtake is on a mission to take out internet threats and restore digital trust. As the AI-native digital risk protection platform, Outtake delivers unified detection, investigation, and response across the full threat surface — protecting brands, executives, products, and locations from impersonation, AI-generated deception, and AI agent security risks. In an era where coordinated, industrial-scale attacks move faster than human response, Outtake gives organizations the agentic capability to stay ahead of threats, not just react to them.
Join our LinkedIn group Information Security Community!
