AI accelerates digital fraud and drives global market to more than US$ 200 billion

Cybersecurity is constantly changing, driven by technological advancement and the evolution of digital threats.Projections from Future Market Insights indicate that the global fraud detection market is expected to grow from US$ 43.4 billion in 2025 to US$ 217.8 billion in 2035, reflecting the increased sophistication of attacks and the way organizations will face an even more challenging scenario. Hackers will take advantage of new artificial intelligence features and strands to exploit vulnerabilities in record time and digital identities will be priority targets.

According to Thiago Tanaka, Director of Cybersecurity at TIVIT, digital security has come to be seen as a continuous process of adaptation. However, when analyzing the maturity of companies, market movements and the behavior of attackers, one thing is clear: 2026 will not be just another year of evolution, but rather a year of acceleration and review of approaches, warns the executive. “O that previously advanced incrementally now gains much greater proportion, scale and impact.”

The World Economic Forum (WEF) already places cyberattacks, year after year, among the main global threats, consistently ranking in the Top 10 of risks that can destabilize entire economies.Criminal attacks are a systemic risk with the power to disrupt supply chains, compromise essential services and trigger reputational and financial crises.

It is in this scenario that TIVIT highlights five main trends in cybersecurity for 2026, with Artificial Intelligence at the heart of business:

Types of attacks that should dominate the scenario: Next year, traditional attacks gain traction thanks to AI and automation, amplifying behavioral fraud that can accurately mimic human voices, communication styles, and decisions. At the same time, SaaS integrations and invisible automations become silent entry doors, while ransomware evolves into a continuous occupation, with attackers remaining in systems and extorting victims in prolonged cycles.

Defensive and offensive AI: AI becomes indispensable for detecting suspicious behavior, analyzing identities in real time and automatically responding to incidents, but it also creates risks such as excessive reliance on automation, data poisoning and proliferation of tools without governance. Defense now requires both machine speed and rigor in the supervision and transparency of models.

The real challenge of multicloud environments: With multiple providers, SaaS applications, temporary devices and automated agents, identity control fragments and exposes gaps that make 2026 especially challenging.Non-human identities, such as bots, ephemeral containers and AI agents, become the biggest blind spot, interacting and consuming data without proper monitoring.

Culture and humans on the front lines: Security comes to depend less on devices and more on human behavior, with stress, fatigue, inappropriate use of AI and emotional manipulation amplifying internal risks. Professionals need to combine technical vision and architectural understanding with sensitivity about people and business, communicating risks in the board language and navigating complex hybrid environments.

Bold bet with AI: Autonomous AI agents must gain ground in SOCs (Cybersecurity Operations Center), acting with partial autonomy to correct simple vulnerabilities, block suspicious sessions and adjust policies before human intervention.It is an inevitable response to the volume of signals and the shortage of specialists, representing the next leap between traditional automation and intelligent defense.

“A cybersecurity ceases to be just an operation for systems protection, becomes a survival strategy for companies in 2026”, says Tanaka.“The paradigm has changed and the goal is no longer to “predict everything”, but to respond, learn and adapt faster than the adversary.Today, it represents the protection of trust, continuity and quality of decision, strategic pillars of any modern organization”, he concludes.