Tech
The three cyber trends that will define 2026 | Computer Weekly
We are staring down the barrel of 2026. If you think the last 12 months were chaotic, strap in.
The business-as-usual model for security is dead. We are moving into an era where the CISO is either a financial risk broker or irrelevant, where AI doesn’t just write emails but writes exploits, and where your right to privacy is being legislated out of existence.
Here is my take on the three trends that will define the next year.
1. The federated CISO (stop counting bugs)
Let’s be honest: the CISO 2.0 buzzword from 2020 is stale. In mature organisations, the CISO role has already shifted. We aren’t technical guardians anymore; we are risk brokers.
By 2026, if you are still reporting the number of vulnerabilities you patched to your board, you are failing. The successful CISO is embedded in the profit and loss (P&L) function. They speak the language of the CFO, not the language of the firewall. They don’t ask for budget to ‘fix stuff’; they present investment cases based on earnings at risk.
The Office of the CISO
The days of the CISO trying to manage every security decision are over. The scope is too wide. The smart move for 2026 is decentralisation, a Federated Security Model. You set the guardrails (policy and platform), but you let your security champions in engineering, sales, and other business functions to execute the actual work. You stop being the bottleneck and start being the auditor.
And you better have the emotional intelligence to handle the heat. When a ransomware negotiation goes south or your team is burning out from alerting fatigue, you need to be the calmest person in the room.
2. The agentic AI explosion
We have moved way past large language models (LLMs) that just ‘chat’. We are now dealing with autonomous agents that ‘do’. As 2026 arrives, we aren’t writing prompts; we are governing digital workers capable of reasoning and using tools. In timely news, you should read the new OWASP Top 10 for Agentic Applications 2026.
I view this with a mix of professional alarm and strategic hope.
The bad news:
The bad guys are moving faster. We are seeing polymorphic attack agents that don’t just run scripts; they improvise. They scan for targets, write bespoke exploit code on the fly, and – this is the part that keeps me up at night – then manage the extortion. These agents can negotiate ransom payments using sentiment analysis to squeeze the maximum payout from a victim without a human criminal ever touching a keyboard.
The good news:
We can fight fire with fire. We are entering the era of self-healing infrastructure. Defensive agents that detect an anomaly and fix it – blocking IPs, isolating containers, rewriting rules – before a human analyst even opens their laptop.
For the CISO, this is how we solve the data overload. We don’t need more dashboards. We need virtual analyst agents that audit our environment 24/7 and feed a quantitative risk model.
3. The fight for the right to privacy
While we obsess over AI, a much quieter war is being lost. Governments are dismantling the presumption of privacy.
I am watching this “slow boiling of the frog” with deep concern. It’s not just about encryption anymore; it’s about the right to exist digitally without showing your papers.
The border dragnet
Have you travelled recently? The presumption of privacy at the border is gone. It is becoming normal to surrender years of emails and social media history just to enter a country. We are handing over our digital souls to border agents as the price of entry.
The “16+” trap
Look at what happened in Australia just a few days ago. The new legislation restricts social media to those over 16. It sounds noble, but the logic is flawed. To exclude a minor, you have to verify everyone. You cannot filter out the 15-year-old without carding the 50-year-old.
The naive solution – uploading passport scans to random websites – is a privacy disaster waiting to happen.
The only way out – the device lifeline
There is only one technical way to comply with these laws without building a surveillance state: Privacy-preserving age verification.
We need a model where your device – which already knows who you are – generates a cryptographic token (a zero-knowledge proof) that simply tells the website the user is over 16. The website gets a ‘Yes’, but never your name. The OS vendor sees a token request, but not which site you are visiting.
But let’s be clear about the trade-off. We are effectively asking Apple and Google to become the custodians of our civil liberties, protecting us from state overreach.
It is a strange world where I trust Apple more than I trust the government, but here we are.
Tech
Onnit’s Instant Melatonin Spray Is the Easiest Part of My Nightly Routine
I’ve always approached taking melatonin supplements with skepticism. They seem to help every once in a while, but your brain is already making melatonin. Beyond that, I am not a fan of the sickly-sweet tablets, gummies, and other forms of melatonin I’ve come across. No one wants a bad taste in their mouth when they’re supposed to be drifting off to sleep.
This is where Onnit’s Instant Melatonin Spray comes in. Fellow WIRED reviewer Molly Higgins first gave it a go, and reported back favorably. This spray comes in two flavors, lavender and mint, and is sweetened with stevia. While I wouldn’t consider it a gourmet taste, I appreciate that it leans more into herbal components known for sleep and relaxation.
Keep in mind that melatonin is meant to be a sleep aid, not a cure-all. That being said, one serving of this spray has 3 milligrams of melatonin, which takes about six pumps to dispense. While 3 milligrams may not seem like a lot to really kickstart your circadian rhythm, it’s actually the ideal dosage to get your brain’s wind-down process kicked off. Some people can do more (but don’t go over 10 milligrams!), some less, but based on what experts have relayed to me, this is the preferable amount.
A couple of reminders for any supplement: consult your doctor if and when you want to incorporate anything, melatonin included, into your nighttime regimen. Your healthcare provider can help confirm that you’re not on any medications where adding a sleep aid or supplement wouldn’t feel as effective. Onnit’s Instant Melatonin Spray is International Genetically Modified Organism Evaluation and Notification certified (IGEN) to verify that it uses truly non-GMO ingredients.
Apart from that, there may be some trial and error on the ideal amount for you, and how much time it takes to kick in. Some may feel the melatonin sooner than others. For my colleague Molly, it took about an hour. Melatonin can’t do all the heavy lifting, so make sure you’re ready to go to bed when you take it, and that your sleep space is set up for sleep success, down to your mattress, sheets, and pillows.
Tech
I Tested Bosch’s New Vacuum Against Shark and Dyson. It Didn’t Beat Them
There’s a lever on the back for this compression mechanism that you manually press down and a separate button to open the dustbin at the bottom. You can use the compression lever when it’s both closed and open. It did help compress the hair and dust while I was vacuuming, helping me see if I had really filled the bin, though at a certain point it doesn’t compress much more. It was helpful to push debris out if needed too, versus the times I’ve had to stick my hand in both the Dyson and Shark to get the stuck hair and dust out. Dyson has this same feature on the Piston Animal V16, which is due out this year, so I’ll be curious to see which mechanism is better engineered.
Bendable Winner: Shark
Photograph: Nena Farrell
If you’re looking for a vacuum that can bend to reach under furniture, I prefer the Shark to the Bosch. Both have a similar mechanism and feel, but the Bosch tended to push debris around when I was using it with an active bend, while the Shark managed to vacuum up debris I couldn’t get with the Bosch without lifting it and placing it on top of that particular debris (in this case, rogue cat kibble).
Accessory Winner: Dyson
Dyson pulls ahead because the Dyson Gen5 Detect comes with three attachments and two heads. You’ll get a Motorbar head, a Fluffy Optic head, a hair tool, a combination tool, and a dusting and crevice tool that’s actually built into the stick tube. I love that it’s built into the vacuum so that it’s one less separate attachment to carry around, and it makes me more likely to use it.
But Bosch does well in this area, too. You’ll get an upholstery nozzle, a furniture brush, and a crevice nozzle. It’s one more attachment than you’ll get with Shark, and Bosch also includes a wall mount that you can wire the charging cord into for storage and charging, and you can mount two attachments on it. But I will say, I like that Shark includes a simple tote bag to store the attachments in. The rest of my attachments are in plastic bags for each vacuum, and keeping track of attachments is the most annoying part of a cordless vacuum.
Build Winner: Tie
Photograph: Nena Farrell
All three of these vacuums have a good build quality, but each one feels like it focuses on something different. Bosch feels the lightest of the three and stands up the easiest on its own, but all three do need something to lean against to stay upright. The Dyson is the worst at this; it also needs a ledge or table wedged under the canister, or it’ll roll forward and tip over. The Bosch has a sleek black look and a colorful LED screen that will show you a picture of carpet or hardwood depending on what mode it’s vacuuming in. The vacuum head itself feels like the lightest plastic of the bunch, though.
Tech
Right-Wing Gun Enthusiasts and Extremists Are Working Overtime to Justify Alex Pretti’s Killing
Brandon Herrera, a prominent gun influencer with over 4 million followers on YouTube, said in a video posted this week that while it was unfortunate that Pretti died, ultimately the fault was his own.
“Pretti didn’t deserve to die, but it also wasn’t just a baseless execution,” Herrera said, adding without evidence that Pretti’s purpose was to disrupt ICE operations. “If you’re interfering with arrests and things like that, that’s a crime. If you get in the fucking officer’s way, that will probably be escalated to physical force, whether it’s arresting you or just getting you the fuck out of the way, which then can lead to a tussle, which, if you’re armed, can lead to a fatal shooting.” He described the situation as “lawful but awful.”
Herrera was joined in the video by former police officer and fellow gun influencer Cody Garrett, known online as Donut Operator.
Both men took the opportunity to deride immigrants, with Herrera saying “every news outlet is going to jump onto this because it’s current thing and they’re going to ignore the 12 drunk drivers who killed you know, American citizens yesterday that were all illegals or H-1Bs or whatever.”
Herrera also referenced his “friend” Kyle Rittenhouse, who has become central to much of the debate about the shooting.
On August 25, 2020, Rittenhouse, who was 17 at the time, traveled from his home in Illinois to a protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, brandishing an AR-15-style rifle, claiming he was there to protect local businesses. He killed two people and shot another in the arm that night.
Critics of ICE’s actions in Minneapolis quickly highlighted what they saw as the hypocrisy of the right’s defense of Rittenhouse and attacks on Pretti.
“Kyle Rittenhouse was a conservative hero for walking into a protest actually brandishing a weapon, but this guy who had a legal permit to carry and already had had his gun removed is to some people an instigator, when he was actually going to help a woman,” Jessica Tarlov, a Democratic strategist, said on Fox News this week.
Rittenhouse also waded into the debate, writing on X: “The correct way to approach law enforcement when armed,” above a picture of himself with his hands up in front of police after he killed two people. He added in another post that “ICE messed up.”
The claim that Pretti was to blame was repeated in private Facebook groups run by armed militias, according to data shared with WIRED by the Tech Transparency Project, as well as on extremist Telegram channels.
“I’m sorry for him and his family,” one member of a Facebook group called American Patriots wrote. “My question though, why did he go to these riots armed with a gun and extra magazines if he wasn’t planning on using them?”
Some extremist groups, such as the far-right Boogaloo movement, have been highly critical of the administration’s comments on being armed at a protest.
“To the ‘dont bring a gun to a protest’ crowd, fuck you,” one member of a private Boogaloo group wrote on Facebook this week. “To the fucking turn coats thinking disarming is the answer and dont think it would happen to you as well, fuck you. To the federal government who I’ve watched murder citizens just for saying no to them, fuck you. Shall not be infringed.”
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