2026: The Rise of AI-Powered Cybercrime

In the coming year, adversaries will level up with AI and we will witness the next wave of digital threats, redefining business risk and trust as we know it. As organizations in Mexico accelerate their digital transformation, leaders need to stop making the same mistake of ignoring the fact that innovation and attack sophistication move hand-in-hand. Put simply, if your 2026 plan includes technology as a key element, your success will heavily depend on a modernized cybersecurity strategy.

We are entering the new era of human-free cybercrime, where intelligent systems, not humans, orchestrate attacks from beginning to end. To help you prepare, here are five trends that could define the cyber landscape in 2026 and what you can do now to stay ahead.

1. Step Aside Human: Here Comes the Autonomous Cyberattacks

Attackers are beginning to deploy autonomous AI agents capable of carrying out the full cyberattack life cycle: scanning for vulnerabilities, crafting malicious code, adapting their strategy in real time, even profiling victims, all without human intervention.

In November 2025, Anthropic, one of the largest developers of AI systems, claimed to have stopped an espionage campaign that infiltrated financial firms and government entities around the world. What stood out was that threat actors were able to execute a large-scale cyberattack with minimal human involvement. According to Anthropic, 90% of the operations involved in the attack were performed autonomously by the AI tool Claude, which was tricked by hackers.

As this story continues to develop, a key takeaway is the reality behind offensive AI, compressing attack timelines from weeks to minutes. What once required skilled adversaries now becomes a fully automated, scalable, AI-driven operation. For organizations, this means facing continuous, evolving attacks that may overwhelm traditional defenses, such as manual incident response processes.

Radware’s 2025 cybersecurity survey, focusing on the adoption of AI, shows that 90% of organizations across the world have concrete plans to deploy AI within the next 12 months. To prepare your business, make sure you are able to discuss the following questions, in your next board meeting:

• What’s the financial exposure behind deployed AI technologies?
• Will emerging threats like “offensive AI-agents” outpace your current security controls?
• Does your technology budget include the cybersecurity and compliance redesign required to face new AI requirements?

Do not assume that yesterday’s defensive models can handle today’s attackers that learn, mutate, and act autonomously.

2. Machine Deception: Manipulating Automated Systems Instead of People

In a modern workspace, employees are expected to undergo mandatory security awareness training. Hopefully, by now most employees can effectively recognize and respond to common cyberthreats, such as phishing.

While malicious actors will continue to craft new phishing tactics, they are also increasingly targeting machines instead of humans. According to cybersecurity firm CyberArk, machine identities outnumber human identities 80 to 1, driven primarily by cloud and AI. Nearly half of them have sensitive or privileged access to critical assets that are under-secured. Virtual assistants, identity verification bots, and onboarding workflows are prime candidates for manipulation.

Criminals will leverage synthetic identities, deepfakes, and automated scripts, to submit fraudulent requests, hijack logic flows, or impersonate a verified executive in voice or video. Imagine a digital onboarding platform approving a high-risk loan because a synthetic voice perfectly mimics your CFO. That scenario is no longer from a Sci-Fi movie, it’s happening today.

Executives looking to maintain effective oversight and operational consistency should enforce a revised multilayer authentication process and foster an AI governance program where human ownership is defined behind every automated workflow.

3. The Unseen Threat: Mitigating API Risks in the Supply Chain

Innovation, efficiency, and revenue in the digital economy largely depend on corporate "APIfication." This strategic process leverages API adoption to modernize operations, driving new business models, enhancing efficiency, and increasing competitive edge.

The fintech ecosystem is a great example. Companies like Aplazo are democratizing financial access and opportunities for every Mexican through API integrations between payment and e-commerce systems. Similar technological architecture can be found in most modern companies. While innovation is generally a hot topic during strategic planning, cyber risk is not, and leaders need to be aware that APIs introduce significant security liabilities by expanding exposure to data breaches, unauthorized access, and operational disruptions, all of which may compromise business strategy.

In 2025, we witnessed large-scale supply chain attacks where attackers exploited blind spots in service providers and interconnected systems. Oracle, Salesforce, and NPM were used as the entry point for hackers to thousands of organizations around the world. In the coming months, you should not only expect but also prepare for these types of attacks.

As your technology stack and API usage grows, make sure you have a third-party risk management plan and an API governance program in place. Demand rigorous security validation from all third parties, prioritize partners that can prove cyber-resilience, and make sure your IT staff can monitor API behavior across digital ecosystems.

If you don’t know where to start, Radware can help.

4. AI-Powered Ransomware: A New Extortion Era

Ransomware is evolving beyond encryption. In 2026, the next generation of digital extortion will use AI to corrupt data, poison AI models, or fabricate synthetic evidence to pressure victims.

Instead of simply encrypting your data, adversaries may take advantage of your corporate LLMs to alter sales forecasting models, manipulate supply-chain processes, or disrupt automated manufacturing operations.

Cybercrime upgrade to AI has changed the rules of the game. It enables criminals to develop highly personalized extortion: deepfake messages from executives used to trick employees, automated negotiation chatbots, and hyper-targeted psychological pressure tactics. This is an unprecedented challenge, with advanced and adaptive cyberthreats designed to customize attacks for each victim.

Ransomware gangs are not only leveraging AI adoption, but are also exploiting their close collaboration to enhance the profitability of their operations. We are witnessing the rise of coordinated criminal alliances, such as Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters, that strategically merge tactics from diverse cybercrime groups to amplify their impact.

Defense will require more than data backups. Companies must implement integrity checks for AI models, audit training pipelines, and conduct crisis simulations that include AI-driven extortion scenarios.

5. AI Misconfigurations and Weaponization of AI Agents: The New Cloud-Era Mistake

If the last decade taught us anything, it’s that misconfigurations are inevitable when organizations adopt new technologies too fast. During the cloud boom, organizations accidentally exposed databases, buckets, and applications due to misconfigured settings. The same pattern is now emerging with AI. But the stakes are higher.

In 2026, many organizations will unintentionally expose AI-model endpoints, AI-agent permissions, API keys, overly permissive agent-to-agent communications or unsecured Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers. Such vulnerabilities may allow attackers to hijack AI systems and repurpose them as weapons:

• A misconfigured AI assistant could be tricked into leaking sensitive data from the cloud storage of a high executive.
• An autonomous financial agent could be tricked into approving a credit it should have flagged as non-compliant.
• An internal chatbot could be tricked into deleting or modifying records.

Technical risk is rapidly evolving into operational and governance crises. Organizations must treat AI systems like any other privileged service: enforce least-privilege access, audit agent behavior, validate all outbound requests, and continuously test agent-to-agent interactions.

These cases demonstrate that human-free cybercrime, AI weaponization, and intelligent extortion are no longer predictions, they’re active realities.

From Negligent to Responsible Innovation

The cyber risk horizon for 2026 is not about probability, it’s about velocity. The most valuable asset of any modern organization is not only its data, but the trust of customers, partners, and regulators.

Leaders in Mexico must move beyond reactive cybersecurity and embrace strategic, intelligence-driven resilience. In the age of human-free cybercrime, the strongest defense is a prepared offense. Companies must anticipate, adapt, and secure every layer of their digital ecosystem, especially APIs, AI models, agents, and automated workflows.

Let this be your call to action: Evaluate your AI exposure, test your API security, and prepare for a world where cybercrime is smart, autonomous, and relentless.