How You Can Be More Proactive with Your Cybersecurity in 2026

Cybersecurity threats are just as pressing as ever. The good news, though, is that it collectively takes less time to detect and contain a breach. It’s also cheaper than it has been, and the global average cost of a breach is down.

With the average cost of a breach still at $4.44 million, however, now is not the time to sit back and rest easy. We’re finally turning the tables on cybercrime, and you too can benefit by investing in these proactive cybersecurity tactics and tools in 2026.

Actively Hunt Threats Down

Threat hunting is one of the more effective ways you can proactively address breaches. While yes, the global average breach lifecycle has dropped 17 days, it still takes an average of 241 days to identify and contain a breach. That’s why being proactive is essential.

Threat hunting leverages tools like managed detection response and security information and event management (together) to establish a baseline of behavior to detect, investigate, and then respond to threats. This proactive approach, when paired with the right systems, can even alleviate your security teams’ workload simply by triaging alerts by order of priority and by offering a 24/7 monitoring solution to ensure your business is protected around the clock.

Audit Your User Access Protocols

Your users will always be one of the biggest weakpoints in your business, which is why it’s important that you regularly audit your users.

To start, check to make sure that all user access for previous employees is deleted. You’ll even want to extend this to customers and remove inactive accounts after a specific period of time. Not only will this help you maintain data governance regulation, but it will also minimize risk from shadow accounts.

You’ll also want to enforce strong, unique passwords and ensure that multi-factor authentication is enabled for everyone. From there, you’ll want to go through and ensure that every role in your business is restricted so it can only access the data it needs. Your accountant, for example, shouldn’t have access to R&D reports unless they concern financials.

Detect Shadow AI Solutions

Shadow AI is the new unknown on the block, pairing up with shadow data and even shadow IT. Where shadow AI differs, however, is that it’s probably your employees who are causing it.

Shadow AI is, essentially, unauthorized AI solution use. An employee who asks a question to ChatGPT is causing shadow AI. In and of itself, it’s not usually a concern, except if that employee submits sensitive or private data to the AI tool itself, at which point your sensitive, important data is ingested into that tool’s training data, or even outright stolen if the tool was made by a criminal.

Training and limiting access to AI tools on your network to only pre-approved ones will help minimize this risk.

Audit Your Security System Regularly

Finally, remember that you need to regularly audit your security system. Part of this will include taking inventory of your digital assets, other parts will include conducting penetration tests. Ongoing auditing, particularly by digital security experts, is essential for understanding where your own weaknesses are so you can patch them before a criminal learns how to exploit them.