How emerging tech is rewriting cyberwarfare

Date:
Mon, 15 Jun 2026 09:15:59 +0000

Description:
AI, quantum and autonomous systems are accelerating cyber conflict - and its arriving faster than most expect.

FULL STORY ======================================================================Copy link Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Pinterest Flipboard Threads Email Share this article 0 Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.

A quote attributed to the renowned military strategist Sun Tzu. It describes the ultimate strategy: win before the battle even begins. In many ways, its exactly what cyberwarfare represents today. Only now, emerging technologies are bringing that principle into the spotlight. AI is accelerating cyber operations. Quantum computing threatens to challenge the very foundations of encrypted trust. Meanwhile, automation, cloud and interconnected systems have expanded the blast radius of compromise as well as the reach of digital conflict. Latest Videos From Watch full video here: Nadir Izrael Social Links Navigation

Co-Founder and Group Vice President of Armis from ServiceNow. Individually, each of these technologies represents a powerful shift. But together, they have the potential to rewrite the rules of cyberwarfare. The convergence of these technologies amplifies capability on both sides. But attackers only
need to be right once.

What once looked like isolated disruption is now becoming something far more strategic: the ability to undermine an enemy long before the battle begins. So, the real question organizations must now ask is: what happens when the technologies driving innovation begin rewriting the rules of cyberwarfare?
You may like AI-driven cyber warfare reshapes global defense readiness Mythos enters the chat Four key areas in cybersecurity that need fresh thinking and actionable steps in 2026 When technologies amplify each other AI is already a staple within cyber operations; lowering the barrier to entry, allowing adversaries to automate reconnaissance, generate exploits and scale campaigns at an unprecedented pace. Its getting harder to keep up and the data speaks for itself.

New research shows how 65% of global IT decision-makers say the current pace of AI innovation is already outrunning cybersecurity policies and
regulations, while nearly eight in ten (79%) are concerned that nation-states will use AI to develop more sophisticated and targeted cyberattacks. Are you
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But what makes this shift particularly dangerous is how quickly the human element is disappearing from the attack chain. Cyber operations are being driven by autonomous systems capable of scanning networks , identifying vulnerabilities and weaponizing exploits in seconds. Weve entered into the
era of the agentic swarm autonomous, goal-seeking AI agents that discover vulnerabilities and weaponize exploits in seconds.

However, the advent of quantum computing introduces an even deeper structural risk. Its a technology thats not even commercially available, yet a quarter
of IT leaders already fear quantum computing could become the greatest existential cyber risk if weaponized.

Geopolitical competition is only heightening this fear. For example, China claims its already testing experimental quantum-based cyber weapons designed specifically for warfare, while Russia is developing quantum navigation systems to counter electronic warfare. What to read next Forget the AI Armageddonquantum computing is the real threat to digital security Claude Mythos turns years of security research into 20-hour AI exploits AI security is broken at runtime: Most enterprises dont realize it yet

These advancements are compressing years of capability development into a
much shorter window. And yet, many defensive responses remain foundational at best. Measures such as multi-factor authentication and password policies are still widely relied upon, but theyre no longer sufficient on their own in the face of autonomous, agentic threats.

This is further hampered by growing operational gaps and an ever-expanding attack surface. If you look at AI alone, theres evidence that 71% of
employees are already using unvetted AI tools, where proprietary corporate code is being fed directly into public models, giving bad actors a digital
map to an organizations backdoor.

And yet, the biggest challenge lies in that convergence. When these technologies begin amplifying one another, cyber conflict evolves into something far more complex to understand and control.

It creates new pathways for exposure across interconnected systems, software and infrastructure. In fact, 65% of IT decision-makers believe this convergence will drive an unprecedented escalation in cyber conflict capabilities, expanding the ways organizations can be exposed.

So, how do you prepare for a future threat thats already converging? Cyber exposure management for the next era Put simply, you cannot stop an
autonomous agent with just a manual ticket or a human analyst; we must move
to machine-on-machine weaponry. The most effective shift organizations can
now make is moving away from reactive security strategies toward a deeper, continuous understanding of cyber exposure.

In an environment where emerging technologies and interconnected systems create countless new pathways for compromise, resilience depends on knowing how risk forms across the entire digital ecosystem, not just responding once its exploited. This requires a different lens when viewing cybersecurity.

Rather than treating vulnerabilities, alerts or incidents as isolated technical problems, organizations must understand how assets, software, identities and infrastructure connect across IT, cloud, OT and increasingly complex supply chains. The real risk rarely sits in a single vulnerability;
it emerges from the relationships between systems, and the pathways attackers can exploit between them.

Exposure-centric security focuses on making those relationships visible. By continuously mapping assets, dependencies and access paths across the environment, security teams gain the context needed to identify where risk is truly concentrated and which exposures could have the greatest operational impact.

This becomes even more important as emerging technologies accelerate the pace of digital change. AI is already expanding the scale and complexity organizations must defend.

Quantum computing threatens to push this even further. Attackers are already adapting to this trajectory, using AI tools to probe systems and identify weaknesses at machine speed while some nation-state actors adopt harvest now, decrypt later tactics; collecting encrypted data today in anticipation that future quantum breakthroughs will render it readable.

Therefore, to keep pace, defenders must apply automation and AI in the same way: analyzing vast volumes of assets, behavioral and vulnerability data in real time to surface the exposures that matter most. When done effectively, this shifts security teams away from chasing thousands of alerts and toward anticipating how adversaries might move through interconnected systems.

In this model, preparedness is no longer defined by how quickly organizations respond to attacks, but by how clearly they understand their digital environment before those attacks occur. Preparing for the next era of cyber conflict Emerging technologies are accelerating cyber conflict in ways few defensive models were built to contain and in ways were still yet to fully understand. But waiting for these capabilities to mature before acting is a wildly dangerous assumption, particularly when bad actors are already experimenting with them in the wild.

The challenge now facing organizations is speed. The window between vulnerability discovery, exploitation and real-world impact is shrinking rapidly as technologies converge and automation removes the human bottleneck from cyber operations.

In this environment, resilience now means continuously understanding digital ecosystems, while anticipating how exposure forms and adapting as quickly as the technologies that are reshaping the threat landscape. Now is the time to act.

Because in an era where cyberwarfare moves at machine speed, the ultimate strategic advantage remains the one Sun Tzu described centuries ago: winning the battle before it ever begins. We've featured the best encryption
software. This article was produced as part of TechRadar Pro Perspectives , our channel to feature the best and brightest minds in the technology
industry today.

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