So far in 2026, the pattern in cyber incidents has been hard to miss: incidents are more frequent, disruption lasts longer, and the knock-on impact spreads faster. Pressure on public services has been especially clear, while attackers continue to exploit trust, speed and complexity in everyday workflows.
The stories that draw attention in the press are those with consequences: downtime, service delays, supply chain knock-on effects, and teams trying to keep organisations running across a mix of cloud platforms, shared services, and third parties. But that is only part of the picture. There are also cases where strong recovery capability keeps services running through an incident and avoids the kind of disruption that ends up in the headlines.
We have pulled together the themes emerging so far in 2026 to help organisations pressure-test their continuity assumptions.
Resilience expectations are tightening
In the UK, cyber resilience is increasingly being treated as a national operational concern, with the government taking steps to strengthen coordination and raise expectations around preparedness. Alongside that, the Cyber Security and Resilience (Network and Information Systems) Bill continues to move through Parliament, signalling a sharper focus on incident handling, accountability and reporting.
For many organisations, this matters even if you are not directly in scope. If you supply to government, local authorities, regulated services, or critical sectors, you will feel the effects through assurance requirements, procurement expectations, and the growing need to evidence what you can restore, how quickly, and under what constraints.
A continuity plan that exists as a document is not enough. The bar is moving towards demonstrable capability: tested restore processes, known recovery priorities, clear ownership, and decision-making that can hold up under scrutiny.
Disruption is often the objective
One of the most consistent patterns this year has been disruption as a primary outcome. That includes hacktivist activity aimed at taking services offline, creating public inconvenience, and draining response capacity.
In January, the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre warned of state-aligned hacktivist groups targeting organisations in the UK, including local government and critical infrastructure operators, through denial-of-service attacks and broader disruption. What this shows is that attackers do not need to steal data to cause harm. If they can block access to online services, they can create backlogs, missed deadlines and financial impact.
At the extreme end of the scale, February reporting highlighted a record-setting DDoS attack peaking at 31.4 Tbps. Most organisations will never see anything close to that volume, but the lesson still applies. Attackers now have access to botnets, automation and rented infrastructure that can escalate disruption quickly. Your online services, customer portals and remote access platforms are part of your continuity surface area.
For resilience planning, it is worth asking a blunt question: if one or more of your online services became unavailable for a day, what would stop? Then, what would you do manually, and for how long could you do it?
Supply chain disruptions and public service delays
Cyber is often discussed in abstract language, but some of the most informative stories this year have been measurable in production volumes and delayed public services.
Manufacturing is a good example. Jaguar Land Rover publicly reported that the cyber incident-linked disruption contributed to a significant fall in wholesale volumes during the third quarter. Even without getting into technical detail, the impact is obvious: when systems that coordinate production, logistics, and fulfilment are disrupted, the effect spreads quickly through suppliers and customers.
Local government has also shown how cyber disruption translates into real-world friction. Updates from London boroughs affected by a cybersecurity incident have described ongoing service impacts. The secondary effects are the kind that citizens and businesses feel immediately, such as delays related to property searches and administrative processes.
These examples reinforce what continuity teams already know: the most damaging incidents are the ones that interrupt workflow, stall decision-making, and create long backlogs. Recovery goes beyond switching systems back on. It restores the ability to deliver services, process demand and keep critical functions moving while full remediation continues.
Deepfakes and impersonation are now everyday risks
Another theme that has accelerated this year is the erosion of trust in digital interactions. Deepfake-enabled fraud is no longer a niche risk discussed only in research circles. Reporting has described deepfake scams operating at an industrial scale, driven by cheap, accessible tools capable of producing convincing audio and video impersonations.
This has direct consequences for business email compromise, supplier payment fraud, executive impersonation and social engineering during incidents. When attackers can replicate a voice on a call or present a convincing video in a meeting invite, legacy “gut feel” checks become unreliable. Organisations need verification steps that are built into the process, not dependent on individual caution.
From a continuity perspective, this is not only a finance issue. Impersonation is a powerful tool for gaining access during an incident, extracting credentials, or persuading staff to bypass controls “just this once” because services are down and pressure is high.
Insider risk and access brokering are growing
We have also seen more attention this year on insider-driven access, including dark web recruitment and offers to sell credentials or initial access. Whether insiders are malicious, coerced, or simply careless, the result stays the same: an attacker can enter through a route that bypasses many perimeter controls.
This affects recovery planning by changing how you should think about containment. If you assume the attacker may have legitimate credentials, you need a recovery approach that can operate even when identity systems and admin accounts are under suspicion. That pushes organisations towards stronger separation between production systems and recovery systems, tighter protection of backup repositories, and clearer processes for restoring services in a controlled way.
It also strengthens the case for immutable backups and protected copies that are not reachable from compromised credentials.
AI tools are creating new paths for data exposure
AI adoption has become intertwined with everyday productivity, and 2026 has already produced reminders that new features can create unexpected data handling outcomes.
Microsoft confirmed an Office-related bug that resulted in confidential emails being summarised by Copilot in ways customers did not intend, even where policies should have prevented that. Elsewhere, the European Parliament reportedly blocked AI features on official devices due to concerns about sensitive data being processed in the cloud. In the US, reporting described sensitive government material being uploaded to a public AI tool, prompting internal concern and scrutiny.
Taken together, these are not arguments against AI tools. There are warnings about governance gaps. Even well-intentioned users can introduce risk when the boundaries of approved use are unclear, when tools evolve rapidly, or when controls do not behave as expected.
For continuity, the key takeaway is that critical data must remain recoverable even if access controls, labels or platform features behave unpredictably. That includes email, SharePoint, OneDrive and Teams data that organisations increasingly treat as the “system of record”.
What cyber incidents in 2026 mean in practice
Across all of these stories, one common factor stands out. Organisations are rarely short of security tools. The failures tend to happen in recovery, when teams discover that backups cannot be restored cleanly, that recovery priorities are unclear, or that the process depends on people and permissions that are unavailable during the incident.
This is where CiContinuity focuses.
Microsoft 365 protection that sits outside the tenant
Many organisations assume Microsoft 365 is “covered”, then discover during an incident that retention settings, deleted data, corrupted content or tenant-level compromise create gaps. A dedicated Microsoft 365 backup gives you an independent recovery path for email, files and collaboration data, with the ability to restore quickly without relying on the same environment that may be under attack.
Immutable and air-gapped options that attackers cannot alter
Attackers target backups because backups remove leverage. Immutability and separation help ensure you still have a clean, trusted copy when everything else is under suspicion. The priority is protecting the restore point, not simply generating backups.
Disaster recovery built around your real recovery priorities
Not every system needs the same recovery speed. Recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives should be grounded in operational reality: what must come back first to keep services running, what can wait, and what dependencies can block recovery if ignored. DR that is aligned with these priorities reduces confusion and restores momentum faster.
Testing that proves recovery, not just backup success
A successful backup job is a status light. Recovery is the outcome that matters. Regular restore testing, documented runbooks, and clear ownership turn continuity into something usable under pressure.
Six priorities worth acting on now
Rather than a long checklist, here are six focus areas that consistently improve resilience without creating busywork.
Clarify what “critical” means. Make sure your recovery priorities reflect how the organisation actually operates, including dependencies on identity systems, network services and key applications.
Separate recovery from production. If admin credentials are compromised or if the tenant is affected, you need a recovery path that does not depend on the same control plane.
Protect Microsoft 365 as a core system. Treat email and collaboration data as business critical, with an independent backup and defined restore capability.
Assume disruption will happen. Plan for periods where online services are unavailable and ensure teams know what manual fallbacks exist and how long they can operate.
Formalise verification for high-risk actions. Payment changes, supplier onboarding, and urgent access requests should have verification steps that do not rely on a single channel.
Prove recovery with tests. Run restore tests that mirror realistic incident conditions, then feed what you learn back into the process and architecture.
If you want a recovery plan you can rely on, talk to CiContinuity
So far, 2026 has reinforced a basic fact: incidents are increasingly measured in operational disruption, delayed services and reputational exposure. The organisations that cope best are those that can restore systems and data quickly, with confidence in what they are restoring and a plan the team can execute without improvisation.
CiContinuity supports organisations with UK-delivered backup services, Microsoft 365 backup, disaster recovery, and consultancy that turns continuity planning into working capability.
If you would like us to review your current backup and recovery posture, validate whether your restore process is genuinely reliable, or put an independent M365 recovery path in place, contact us, and we will help you map the next steps.