Why Cyber Incidents Are The Top Business Risk in 2026
Key Takeaways
- Cyber incidents ranked #1 business concern for five straight years.
- 42% of respondents ranked cyber incidents as the top business risk.
- AI jumped from #10 to #2 in rank of business concerns: Cybercriminals are weaponizing AI to automate attacks and deceive employees.
- People remain the top attack vector: AI makes social engineering harder to detect.
The Allianz Risk Barometer is one of the most closely watched annual risk surveys in the world. The 2026 edition, drawing on responses from 3,338 risk management experts across 97 countries, confirms a pattern that cybersecurity leaders already recognize: cyber threats are getting worse, AI is accelerating them, and people are still the most targeted asset in an organization.
Why Have Cyber Incidents Been the #1 Risk for Five Consecutive Years?
Cyber incidents ranked #1 in the barometer the fifth consecutive year and held a ten-point lead over every other risk on the list, with 42% of global respondents scoring it as their top corporate concern for 2026.
A decade ago, it ranked #8. It has remained the #1 risk because the financial reward for cybercriminals keeps growing, and the tools to execute attacks keep getting cheaper and easier to deploy.
In fact, cyber incidents were the top-ranked business risk across every region in the survey (the Americas, Asia-Pacific, Europe, and Africa & the Middle East) and across every size of organization.
Rishi Baviskar, Global Head of Cyber Risk Consulting at Allianz Commercial, commented in the report:
“Large companies’ investments in cyber security and resilience have been paying off, ensuring they can detect and respond to attacks early. However, cyber risk continues to evolve. Organizations are increasingly reliant on third party providers for critical data and services, while artificial intelligence (AI) is supercharging threats, increasing the attack surface and adding to existing vulnerabilities.”
Risk professionals don’t foresee a pullback in cybersecurity investments. 90% of respondents told Allianz that they expect Moderate to High investment needed to protect their organizations.
What Insurance Claims Data Shows
- Ransomware accounts for 60% of the total value of large cyber claims (>€1M) in H1 2025
- Data theft featured in 40% of large claims, up from 25% in all of 2024
- IT outages and non-malicious incidents, such ashuman error, technical failure, wrongful data handling — made up a record 28% of large claims by value in 2024
- U.S. cybercrime losses reached $16.6B in 2024,a 33% year-over-year increase
Many organizations overlook the third statistic because not every major cyber loss involves a high-tech attack. An employee clicking the wrong link while working with urgency can carry the same financial and operational consequences as a targeted breach.
Where Does Supply Chain Risk Stand Among Cybersecurity Concerns?
Companies that weren’t directly targeted can still find themselves unable to process orders, make payments, or ship goods when a key supplier or customer is hit.
In 2025, a ransomware attack on Jaguar Land Rover affected over 5,000 organizations in its supply chain, with estimated damages of up to £2.1B ($2.8B). It contributed to a 30% drop in British car production that October.
More than three-quarters of companies now rely on cloud services across most or all of their operations. Just three providers control over 60% of global cloud infrastructure. AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud all suffered significant independent outages in 2025.
WHAT THIS MEANS FOR YOUR ORGANIZATION
Your resilience depends partly on vendors you don’t control, which means that your vendor selection process to be part of your risk reduction strategy. What is their cybersecurity strategy? Are they adequately protecting the human attack surface?
How Is AI Actively Making Cyber Threats Worse?
AI’s jump from #10 to #2 for major business risks marked the biggest single-year move for a category in the Allianz Risk Barometer’s 15-year history.
Cybercriminals are using AI to automate and scale their attacks, lower the technical barrier to entry, and craft phishing emails and deepfake impersonations that defeat the “does this feel off?” instinct employees are trained to rely on.
Additionally, generative AI has made creating cheapfakes and deepfakes affordable and convincing enough to threaten brand integrity and financial market behavior.
Spot the Internal Governance Gap
Only one-third of respondents identified robust AI governance as a top priority. But any disruptive technology needs deployment with care: the promise of greater productivity and innovation comes with the risk of new attack surfaces. In most organizations, AI adoption is moving faster than the policies, training, and oversight needed to manage it safely.
This is the gap where cybercriminals find their footholds.
What Are the Downstream Business Consequences to a Cyberattack?
Business interruption ranks as the #3 risk globally, and the consequences of a cyber incident extend well beyond operational downtime. Changes in legislation and regulation sit at #4, with the EU’s updated Product Liability Directive now extending to cybersecurity, AI, and software across the supply chain.
| Consequence | What It Looks Like in Practice |
| Business interruption | Production halts, delayed orders, supply chain paralysis |
| Regulatory exposure | Compliance violation-related litigation and fines that outlast the incident by years |
| Reputational damage | Customer trust erosion, brand damage from public breaches or AI-generated disinformation |
Data breaches rarely stop at one of these. Organizations that plan for only the immediate operational impact consistently underestimate how much a cyber incident can cost.
Why Are Employees Still the Core Vulnerability?
Cybercriminals are adept at exploiting vulnerabilities in cybersecurity, including the human layer through social engineering.
Your people are not, and should not, be treated as a peripheral risk. According to Verizon, 60% of data breaches involved a human factor, which means that your people might be the primary entry point.
Smaller and mid-sized organizations face this challenge with fewer resources. They tend to depend more on third-party digital infrastructure, have less dedicated security awareness capacity, and have less ability to absorb the impact of a successful breach.
With AI enabling cybercriminals to target them at scale more efficiently than ever, the search for the path of least resistance is already automated.
WHAT THIS MEANS FOR YOUR ORGANIZATION
Every vendor relationship extends your attack surface. Third-party security assessments, clear contractual standards, and ongoing visibility into your supply chain’s posture are now baseline requirements, not nice-to-haves.
What Should Organizations Do to Protect the Human Layer?
Building an integrated human risk management strategy means connecting your technical controls to the human behaviors that either reinforce or undermine them. The organizations reducing risk most effectively treat security awareness training as a business continuity measure.
How to Strengthen Your Security Culture
- Train continuously, not annually. Cybersecurity awareness training has to happen monthly, and phishing tests carried out either monthly or every other week. Frequent, short, story-driven training builds lasting behavior change in a way that a once-a-year session cannot.
- Prepare employees for AI-enhanced attacks. Your team needs to know about the risks posed by deepfake video and phone calls, hyper-personalized phishing, and emotional manipulation. The tactics behind social engineering attacks may not have existed when they last received training if you move at an annual pace.
- Close the governance gap before an incident forces you to. Define incident response ownership, accountability structures, and AI usage policies now. Allowing the most disruptive technology in a generation to run wild in your system without guardrails is a significant business risk.
- Address each employee’s individual vulnerabilities. Not everyone is susceptible to the same attacks. Some employees are more likely to respond to attacks that exploit a sense of urgency, others to obedience or curiosity. Personalized security coaching that maps to each person’s emotional susceptibility profile is significantly more effective than one-size-fits-all training.
- Brief leadership in business terms. Frame risk as revenue disruption, regulatory liability, and reputational damage. Leadership that understands the severe impact of cybersecurity incidents makes better investment decisions.
Around 90% of respondents anticipate moderate-to-high investment in cyber loss prevention in 2026. Investment matters, but it only bends the risk curve when it creates genuine cultural change.
The 2026 barometer makes one thing clear: Attacks are getting more targeted, AI is removing the friction that once made them easier to detect, and the downstream consequences—operational, financial, regulatory, and reputational—are compounding.
Organizations that treat cybersecurity awareness training and human risk management as a strategic priority now, rather than a reactive measure after an incident, will be far better positioned as the landscape continues to shift. The human layer has always been where breaches begin. Let’s make it where they get stopped, too.
Frequently Asked Questions
A: Track behavior change instead of completion rates. Increasing phishing report rates, faster time-to-report, and declining repeat-clickers are the metrics that matter.
A: Insurance transfers financial risk after an incident. Resilience reduces the likelihood of an incident and limits the damage if it does happen.
A: Frame it as revenue disruption, regulatory liability, and reputational damage instead of technical vulnerabilities. Give this more credibility with case studies of data breaches, both big and small, from other organizations.
A: Use standardized questionnaires aligned to ISO 27001 or SOC 2 and contractually require breach notification within a defined window.
A: Define which AI tools employees can use, how data is handled within them, and who reviews outputs before they influence decisions.
A: Modern platforms deliver short, engaging training experiences, phishing simulations, and role-based content that keep employees involved throughout the year and help strengthen an organization’s overall security posture.
About NINJIO
NINJIO’s human risk management platform reduces cybersecurity risk through personalized security coaching, engaging awareness training, and adaptive testing. Our multi-pronged approach to risk mitigation focuses on the latest attack vectors to build employee knowledge and the behavioral science behind social engineering to sharpen users’ intuition. Our simulated phishing and coaching tools build a proprietary Emotional Susceptibility Profile for each user to identify their specific social engineering vulnerabilities and change behavior.
