As Q1 2026 begins, CISOs are grappling with a threat environment evolving too quickly for legacy approaches, shaped by intelligence-led risk, live adversary behaviour and growing geopolitical instability that are forcing a rethink of how cyberexposure is assessed and explained. We asked six cybersecurity leaders to share how CISOs should be shaping their security playbooks for Q1 2026.
In Q1 2026, CISOs face a security landscape that is shifting faster than traditional playbooks can keep up. Intelligence‑driven risk, real‑world threat behaviour and geopolitical volatility now demand a complete reset in how organisations understand, prioritise and communicate cyberexposure.
As AI‑enabled attackers adapt in real time and initial access becomes inevitable, leaders must pivot from prediction to containment, resilience and Business Continuity. At the same time, long‑standing weaknesses, from poor access controls to inconsistent patching, continue to drive the majority of breaches, underscoring the need for disciplined fundamentals alongside next‑generation defences.
With alert fatigue rising, CISOs must unite people, processes and technology to respond decisively under pressure.
We spoke to six cybersecurity leaders about what a CISO’s playbook for Q1 of 2026 should look like and the message is clear: 2026 is the year to simplify, strengthen and build systems engineered to endure.
Andy Grayland, CISO at Silobreaker:
For Q1 2026, CISOs should reset their playbook around intelligence-driven risk. This starts with re-baselining cyber-risk against current business strategy, geographic exposure and adversary behaviour in order to understand who is targeting the organisation and why, rather than relying on generic likelihood scores.
Threat activity must also be translated into clear business impact. Leadership teams now need insights into how active campaigns affect revenue and operations, but also organisational reputation. Security teams should focus on real-world threat actors’ intent and capabilities, prioritising controls where exposure is demonstrable and resources are most needed.
Additionally, third-party risk management benefits from threat-led assurance, identifying suppliers that provide intelligence on active campaigns or high-risk regions. Executive reporting should shift from internal security activities to ‘what’s happening to organisations like ours’, establishing concise, actionable situational awareness for boards.
Incident readiness should also reflect current attack patterns, including ransomware, extortion and supply-chain intrusions, ensuring playbooks mirror how adversaries operate today. In order to do this, organisations should reassess data exposure, monitoring how similar entities’ information is targeted, or weaponised for extortion or competitive advantage. Cloud and SaaS risk reviews should now prioritise configurations and platforms actively exploited by threat actors, aligning detection capabilities with known techniques.
Finally, CISOs should track geopolitical developments, sanctions and conflict-driven cyberactivity to understand how external events translate into cyber-risk. In Q1 2026, effective cyberleadership is defined by awareness and proactive preparation, transforming security from reactive compliance into business protection.
Benny Lakunishok, CEO and Co-founder of Zero Networks:
As CISOs look to Q1 of 2026, the playbook needs to reflect a new reality: We can no longer predict how attacks will arrive, only how much damage they can do once they are inside. AI has broken old assumptions. Attackers now adapt in real time, chain techniques automatically and exploit whatever access path happens to work first. Planning around static threat scenarios is no longer enough.
The priority for Q1 should be treating threat containment as a core, standing budget line. Not a project and not a reaction to a specific threat. Prevention still matters, but it is no longer the constraint. The organisations that perform best assume initial access will occur and focus investment on limiting blast radius, maintaining uptime and keeping critical operations running even during active attacks.
In practice, this means shifting budget toward controls that reduce lateral movement, eliminate always on access and automate enforcement across identity and network layers. It also requires a change in how success is measured. Instead of asking whether an attack was blocked, executives are asking how quickly it was contained and what business impact was avoided.
Q1 of 2026 is about operationalising resilience. CISOs should align spending to Business Continuity outcomes, embed containment into daily operations and be ready to clearly explain how these investments protect revenue, safety and trust in an AI driven threat landscape.
Patricia Egger, Head of Security at Proton:
As CISOs navigate Q1 of 2026, the playbook should prioritise discipline over novelty. While emerging risks such as AI-driven attacks, deepfake-enabled social engineering and longer-term quantum threats warrant attention, they should not distract from a more enduring reality: most breaches still result from long-standing, preventable weaknesses. Poor access controls and credential management, weak authentication, inconsistent patching, misconfigured systems and insufficient security awareness remain the primary drivers of incidents. Addressing these issues may be less eye-catching than preparing for future threats, but it is still a prerequisite and an effective way to reduce risk.
Q1 2026 should therefore focus on reinforcing the fundamentals. This includes tightening access controls, enforcing least-privilege and need-to-know principles, strengthening authentication and ensuring patching and configuration management are consistent and well governed. These technical measures must be matched by investment in people through refreshed security awareness training and – importantly – clear roles and accountability, so all employees understand their role in protecting organisational assets.
At a strategic level, CISOs should embed security into everyday decision-making rather than treating it as a reactive function, recognising that strong policies, clear controls and sound risk management are what deliver resilience over time. While the threat landscape will continue to evolve, the most effective defence remains vigilance, consistency and follow-through.
Rex Booth, CISO at SailPoint:
The speed of crime continually accelerates and Q1 will be no exception, driven by knowledge sharing and collaboration among criminals and the continued democratisation of Ransomware-as-a-Service. Criminals only need time, a laptop and an Internet connection to wreak untold havoc.
Security teams are feeling the heat: facing alert fatigue and even burnout as attacks increase in scale, sophistication and frequency. In light of this, automation has emerged as a central pillar for Q1’s cybersecurity playbook. AI-enabled security tools aren’t a ‘silver bullet’, but they can take some of the pressure off overburdened teams by cutting through the sea of alerts to find what really matters. Next-gen tools can detect anomalies and remediate threats that the human eye might otherwise miss.
But tech is only one piece of the puzzle. Even the best tools are rendered ineffective without wider buy-in across the business. The most effective cybersecurity playbooks will aim to bring together people, processes and technology to respond quickly, adapt continuously and stay resilient in the face of shared, evolving threats. Delivering on this promise requires CISOs to become great strategists, not just technologists. Traditionally, security has been viewed as the department of ‘no’, but it’s not just there to block things. When every stakeholder understands that security is a collaborative function, not an obstacle, every employee will recognise the unique role they have to play in protecting the wider business.
Kim Larsen, CISO at Keepit:
We can see that in 2026, preparing for the unpredictable is more important than ever. Hybrid threats that test our infrastructure and showcase our hidden dependencies on hyperscalers underscore the need for rigorous planning and testing of company systems – especially with AI-driven attacks becoming more adaptive.
As attackers aim to instill uncertainty, CISOs should respond by increasing transparency within their organisations. This can start by working with your organisation, mapping out and prioritising all of your critical systems, which will also help you to identify shadow IT looming inside your organisation. This is key for understanding what you need to protect and how to do so if disaster strikes.
Creating a prioritised Business Continuity plan and testing your Disaster Recovery capabilities regularly are non-negotiables. These will be the first steps in making sure your organisation can access crucial systems during a blackout from your cloud provider or recover if hit by a cyberattack.
Transparency also means including the whole organisation in this process. Clarity and understanding on all levels from the board to your HR department will not only ensure correct prioritisation, but also increase accountability across teams.
Luca Rognoni, CSO at YEO Messaging:
As CISOs look ahead to 2026, the playbook needs to reflect the hard lessons of the past year – and fast. 2025 proved that threats are evolving faster than traditional defensive assumptions, with AI-powered identity spoofing, destructive ransomware and noisy tool stacks exposing real weaknesses. Q1, 2026 is where CISOs must reset, simplify and build architectures that behave predictably under pressure.
Identity must now be treated as the primary control surface. Attackers are no longer breaking in; they are logging in. This means verification must be continuous, adaptive and contextual, combining continuous facial verification with per-message identity validation. Only by removing identity ambiguity, can the defensive baseline change.
Equally, resilience overtakes security as the board-level priority. Leaders need provable survivability and resilience in their revised playbooks: clarity on blast radius, trusted recovery pathways and a defensible understanding of data lineage. The upcoming Cyber Security and Resilience Bill becomes law in Q1, which will only accelerate expectations on deeper resilience.
Finally, CISOs should enter the year with a disciplined approach to data. Over-collection is now a liability. The new standard is to collect only what can be justified, secured and defended in a regulatory context.
The threats will not slow down in 2026, but our models can become smarter, more contextual and far more durable. Q1 is the moment for CISOs to stop reacting and instead build systems engineered to endure.
