Botnets, adversarial attacks and data poisoning top leaders’ AI threat list
PwC survey finds leaders least prepared for AI-directed botnets, adversarial attacks, and data poisoning.
PwC surveyed 3,934 business and technology leaders in 71 countries between May and July 2026 and found attacks on AI systems are the preparedness gap ranked highest by security and technology executives. More than half of leaders asked about AI-enabled attacks placed AI-directed botnets, adversarial manipulation, and training-data poisoning in their top five threats. PwC says frontier models can now find unknown software flaws and exploit them with little human involvement. Among security and finance leaders, 84 percent expect cyber budgets to grow, but only 39 percent have fully formalized continuity plans, and fewer than a quarter would let AI agents contain attacks without human approval.
- Half of security and technology executives rank attacks on AI as a top gap.
- Leading concerns are AI-scaled botnets, adversarial attacks, and data poisoning.
- Eighty-four percent expect larger cyber budgets; only 39 percent have full continuity plans.
- Fewer than a quarter would let AI agents remediate attacks without approval.
- Only about half of companies have implemented organization-wide data classification.
- Organizations
- PwCLloyds Banking Group
From the original article
2 min read at helpnetsecurity.com
Companies are putting more money into AI while naming attacks on AI systems as the threat they are least ready to face. PwC surveyed 3,934 business and technology leaders in 71 countries between May and July 2026. Half of the security and technology executives among them ranked such attacks in their top five preparedness gaps, ahead of every other threat on the list.
By Sinisa Markovic · helpnetsecurity.com
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