Why the WEF Cybersecurity Outlook 2026 makes a strong case for UEBA
In the past, cybersecurity was largely about keeping attackers out.
Today, that paradigm no longer holds.
According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2026, published this week during the WEF Annual Meeting in collaboration with Accenture, the most damaging cyber incidents are increasingly driven by legitimate identities, valid credentials and trusted access paths – not by broken perimeters or exotic exploits.
This shift has profound implications for how organizations detect, investigate and contain threats.
Why it matters: what’s changing in the threat landscape
The 2026 Outlook highlights several trends that, taken together, point to a fundamental detection gap.
1. Identity-driven attacks are accelerating
- Cyber-enabled fraud and phishing are now the top cyber concern for CEOs, overtaking ransomware.
- Insider threat and credential misuse are among the fastest-growing risks year over year.
- 73% of respondents report direct or indirect exposure to cyber-enabled fraud in the past 12 months.
These attacks rarely look “malicious” at first glance. They are executed using:
- legitimate user accounts
- standard applications (ERP, CRM, HR, collaboration tools)
- approved APIs and automation
Traditional security controls were not designed to detect these identity-driven attacks.
2. AI is amplifying attackers and defenders
AI is no longer just a defensive capability.
The report shows that:
- 77% of organizations already use AI in cybersecurity, including user behavior analytics.
- At the same time, 87% identify AI-related vulnerabilities as the fastest-growing risk.
- AI agents, automation and non-human identities are multiplying access paths – and potential blind spots.
This dramatically increases the volume, speed and subtlety of suspicious behavior. Detection approaches that rely on static rules or manual correlation alone simply cannot keep up.
3. Resilient organizations invest in analytics, not just controls
One of the most telling findings of the Outlook is the difference between highly resilient and insufficiently resilient organizations.
More resilient organizations:
- prioritize threat intelligence and behavior insights
- focus on early detection and context, not just prevention
- invest in analytics that reduce noise and accelerate investigations
In contrast, less resilient organizations struggle with alert fatigue, fragmented visibility and slow response times – even when they have SIEMs and SOCs in place.
Why traditional detection struggles
Most security stacks are still optimized for:
- known indicators of compromise
- signature-based or threshold-based alerts
- siloed analysis per system or log source
But identity-driven attacks don’t trip those wires.
Common failure modes include:
- Valid credentials behaving abnormally, but not “illegally”
- Custom or business-critical applications that lack monitoring and detection logic of abnormal user behavior such as mass data exfiltration
- Alert overload, where weak signals are buried in noise
- High dwell time, because behavior only looks suspicious in hindsight
The result: organizations detect breaches late – if at all.
Why behavior analytics (UEBA) closes the gap
User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) addresses the challenges highlighted in the WEF report.
Instead of asking “Is this known to be malicious?”, UEBA asks:
- Is this behavior normal for this identity, entity or application?
- Is this sequence of actions consistent with past patterns or peer groups?
- Is risk emerging across systems, not just within one log source?
This enables:
- detection of insider misuse and credential abuse
- visibility across users, applications, APIs and automation
- earlier alerts with higher confidence
- reduced alert fatigue through behavioral aggregation
In short: UEBA aligns detection with how modern attacks actually unfold.
Why Exeon.UEBA specifically
While many vendors label features as “UEBA”, the practical ability to operationalize behavior analytics varies widely.
Exeon.UEBA was designed for the realities highlighted in the 2026 Outlook:
- Holistic coverage
Behavior analytics across users, applications (including SAP and custom apps), infrastructure, APIs and AI agents – not just SaaS logs.
- Real-time stream-based analytics
Detection happens as behavior unfolds, not hours later in batch jobs.
- Noise reduction by design
Log normalization, deduplication and behavioral aggregation reduce SIEM load and analyst fatigue.
- Privacy-first and sovereign
Built-in anonymization, encryption and on-prem or sovereign deployment support GDPR, DORA and NIS2 requirements – particularly relevant for European and Swiss organizations.
This combination allows organizations to translate the strategic insights of the WEF report into practical detection capability.
From insight to action
The Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2026 makes one message clear:
“The future of cybersecurity is not about more alerts – it is about better understanding behavior.”
Organizations that invest in behavior visibility today will be better positioned to detect the threats that matter tomorrow – especially those that arrive through the front door, from within.
