The Cybersecurity Horrors Keeping CISOs Up at Night

It’s Halloween—and while most people are worried about ghosts and goblins, CISOs are facing far scarier things that can’t be solved by calling Ghost Busters.

The monsters haunting enterprise security in 2026 are very real: failing MFA, undead passwords, ancient VPNs, rogue AI, and a creeping sense that zero trust might be too complex to conquer. But here’s the good news—these aren’t unstoppable horrors. They’re just the remnants of outdated tech and old thinking.

 

The MFA Zombie: Still Walking, Barely Working

Once the hero of identity security, multi-factor authentication (MFA) is stumbling forward like the living dead. In our CISO Perspectives 2026 report, 96% of CISOs say MFA can’t keep up with evolving threats, and 98% worry it no longer provides sufficient protection for employees.

The problem? Attackers have adapted. MFA fatigue attacks, one-time passcode (OTP) interception, and adversary-in-the-middle phishing kits now make short work of traditional MFA. CISOs know they need stronger, phishing-resistant methods—like certificate-based, passwordless authentication—to keep the zombie threat at bay.

 

The Ghost of Passwords Past

Passwords should have been buried long ago, but they keep coming back to haunt security teams. Despite years of investment, 92% of CISOs say their organizations are now implementing or planning to implement passwordless authentication, up from 70% just a year ago.

It’s not hard to see why: passwords remain one of the easiest ways for attackers to get inside. They’re reused, shared, stolen, and exploited. Passwordless authentication—especially certificate-based methods that eliminate shared secrets—finally breaks that curse for good.

 

The VPN Mummy: Wrapped in Risk

If there’s a relic that belongs in a museum, it’s the VPN. Once considered a vital shield, it now slows users down and exposes organizations to unnecessary risk.

According to the report, two-thirds of CISOs expect to phase out VPNs by 2026, and 93% plan to retire them completely by 2027. VPNs were never designed for zero trust; they create flat, overexposed access that violates least-privilegeprinciples.

Their replacement? Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA)—a modern, software-defined approach that brokers secure, per-app connections instead of tunneling users into the full network.

 

The AI Poltergeist: Unseen, Unmanaged, Unsettling

Artificial intelligence has entered the enterprise with unstoppable momentum—and CISOs can feel it rattling the walls.

The rise of AI adds more challenges that haunt CISOs. AI introduces new machine identities, unpredictable behaviors, and synthetic access patterns that don’t fit traditional policy models. Without controls in place, AI becomes a spectral force inside the network—doing things no one can fully explain or trace.

The solution? Expand zero trust principles to include every identity—human or not. NAC, ZTNA, and passwordless authentication all play a role in continuously verifying and containing AI-driven activity.

 

The Complexity Curse: The Real Monster

Finally, the most pervasive horror of all: the fear that zero trust is too complex to implement. 77% of CISOs say achieving zero trust will require major overhauls to their current stack.

But that doesn’t have to be true. The rise of cloud-native NAC and ZTNA platforms is shattering that myth. Modern zero trust doesn’t require a cast of consultants or a pile of hardware—it’s as simple as policy-based enforcement delivered from the cloud.

 

Exorcising the Fear

The scariest thing for CISOs this Halloween isn’t what’s hiding in the dark—it’s what’s still lurking in their infrastructure. The zombies, ghosts, and mummies of legacy security tools won’t stop on their own.

The antidote is already here: cloud-native access control, built for the speed and scale of today’s enterprises. NAC for the network. ZTNA for remote access. Passwordless authentication for identity. Together, they exorcise the old fears and bring zero trust to life—without the horror.