Google Cloud's Cybersecurity Forecast 2026: What Small and Midsize Businesses Actually Need to Know

Every year, Google Cloud publishes its Cybersecurity Forecast — a report built not on crystal-ball guessing, but on what Google’s threat intelligence teams, Mandiant incident responders, and security researchers are actually seeing in the field right now. The 2026 edition is out, and it is worth your attention even if you never plan to read a threat report.

We read the full report so you do not have to. Below is a summary of the parts that matter most for small and midsize businesses, followed by what we think you should do about it. If you want the source material, you can download the full report here (PDF).

The big picture: three themes

The report organizes 2026 around three forces:

1. AI is now standard equipment for attackers and defenders alike. Criminal use of AI is moving from the exception to the norm.
2. Cybercrime — especially ransomware and extortion — remains the most disruptive threat globally. Not nation-state spies. Ordinary criminals after money.
3. Nation-state actors (Russia, China, Iran, North Korea) keep operating at scale, mostly targeting governments, critical infrastructure, and strategic industries.

For most businesses, the first two themes are the ones that will actually show up at your door. Here is what they look like in practice.

AI-powered scams are getting personal

The most important prediction in the report has nothing to do with exotic hacking. Google expects the biggest growth area to be AI-enabled social engineering — attacks aimed at people, not systems.

The standout tactic is voice phishing (“vishing”) powered by AI voice cloning. Attackers can now generate hyperrealistic impersonations of real people — your CEO, your bookkeeper, someone claiming to be from your IT provider — and use them in phone calls designed to talk an employee into resetting a password, approving a payment, or handing over access. Groups using these techniques in 2025 were remarkably successful precisely because they skipped technical exploits entirely and went straight for human trust.

AI also makes the rest of the scam better: researching your company, learning who reports to whom, and writing phishing messages that read like they came from a colleague. The report is blunt about why this will increase — these attacks are cheap to run, they work, and the people behind them rarely get caught.

The defense is process, not products. Google’s guidance is to build multiple checks and balances around sensitive actions. In practical terms: no password reset, banking change, or payment approval should ever happen on the strength of a single phone call or message, no matter how convincing the voice on the other end sounds.

Ransomware is not going anywhere

The report calls the combination of ransomware, data theft, and extortion the most financially disruptive category of cybercrime in the world — and expects that to hold through 2026. The first quarter of 2025 set a record for the number of victim organizations posted on criminal leak sites, the highest count since tracking began in 2020.

A few details worth noting:

• Attackers increasingly get in by tricking people into bypassing multi-factor authentication — often with the same vishing tactics described above — rather than by breaking through defenses.
• They target third-party providers and widely used software so a single break-in gives them access to hundreds of victims at once.
• The damage cascades. Incidents in 2025 that hit retail and food supply chains caused hundreds of millions of dollars in losses that spread far beyond the initial victim.

One newer wrinkle: attackers are shifting attention to virtualization infrastructure — the underlying layer many companies run their servers on. It is often poorly monitored compared to laptops and desktops, and a single compromise there can take down hundreds of systems in hours instead of days. If your business runs on virtualized servers (on-premises or hosted), the security of that layer deserves the same attention as everything running on top of it.

The new “shadow IT” problem: shadow AI agents

You may already be familiar with shadow IT — employees signing up for apps and services without anyone in charge of security knowing. The report predicts 2026’s version: shadow AI agents.

AI agents are tools that do not just answer questions but take actions — reading documents, drafting emails, moving data between systems. Employees are going to adopt them for work tasks whether or not anyone approves it, and each unauthorized agent is a quiet, invisible pipeline for company data. That can mean leaked customer information, compliance violations, or worse.

Google’s advice matches our own experience: banning these tools does not work — it just pushes usage onto personal devices where you have zero visibility. The better path is to give your team approved, secured ways to use AI, with sensible guardrails, so the innovation happens where you can see it.

There is a bright side in the report, too. The same AI wave is transforming defense. Security teams are beginning to use AI agents to investigate alerts, summarize incidents, and respond in minutes instead of hours — which raises the bar for everyone, including the providers protecting small businesses.

What about the nation-state stuff?

The report devotes a full section to Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. Most small and midsize businesses are not direct targets of state espionage, but two points are still relevant:

• North Korean IT worker fraud is expanding globally. State-backed operatives pose as legitimate remote employees and contractors to earn salaries, steal data, and in some cases steal cryptocurrency from their employers. If your business hires remote workers, identity verification during hiring is no longer paranoia — it is due diligence.
• Techniques trickle down. Tactics pioneered by well-funded state actors — like targeting network edge devices and trusted third-party vendors — reliably end up in the criminal toolkit a year or two later.

What we recommend you actually do

Reports like this can feel overwhelming, but the practical to-do list for a small or midsize business is refreshingly consistent with security fundamentals — the threats are evolving faster than the defenses need to change:

• Put verification steps around money and access — no payment change, password reset, or account access granted on the strength of a single call, text, or email, even from a familiar voice.
• Use strong, phishing-resistant multi-factor authentication everywhere — and train your team that attackers will try to talk them around it.
• Keep immutable, tested backups that ransomware cannot reach, and actually verify you can restore from them.
• Give your team an approved, monitored way to use AI tools, rather than pretending they are not already using them.
• Know who is watching your infrastructure — including the layers you do not see day to day, like virtualization hosts, edge devices, and third-party vendor connections.

None of this requires an enterprise security budget. It requires consistency — and someone paying attention.

That is the role we play for our clients. As a managed IT provider, we build these safeguards into the environments we manage: hardened device configurations, sensible access controls, monitored backups, and automated monitoring that flags trouble outside business hours. If you are not sure how your business would hold up against the threats in this report, that is exactly the conversation we like having before an incident, not after.

You can download the full Cybersecurity Forecast 2026 report for the complete details, including the nation-state analysis and Google’s predictions for cryptocurrency-related crime.