The 7 biggest issues CISOs and security teams face today

What happened

Advances in artificial intelligence and the rapid growth of AI use in business are also impacting the security agenda, introducing novel attacks, broadening the attack surface to include AI infrastructure, and presenting governance and security control challenges and complications — especially as agentic (AI that carries out multi-step tasks rather than answering one question) systems come online. As a result, 68% of security leaders report that their roles have become more stressful over the past five years, according to the 2026 State of Cybersecurity survey from ISACA , with 71% of CISOs citing the increasingly complex threat landscape as their main stressor, up from 63% in 2025.

“And there are always trade-offs to be made,” McMillan adds. Year after year CISOs see the volume, velocity, and sophistication of attacks increase.

They also see their attack surfaces expand and increase in complexity. Moreover, the introduction of Mythos-class AI models has 50% of CISOs considering exiting the profession entirely, according to a recent survey from Absolute.