During conversations with many of my CSO colleagues over the recent years, I have tried to put myself in their shoes. What would be keeping me up at night in 2026 as a Fortune 500 CSO, as each member of the C-Suite clamors for me mitigate their risk and enhance their status within the company? The board wants resilience. The CEO wants growth. The CFO wants cost discipline.
Meanwhile, the world wants to light itself on fire.
Here are the 8 things that would be stealing your sleep.
1. The Rage Economy Is Now a Physical Security Problem
It used to be called “workplace tension.” Now it’s a grievance culture led by a social influencer with Wi-Fi and a following.
Combine economic stress, political polarization, layoffs, and return-to-office mandates, then mix in social media amplification, and you have a volatile human cocktail. The distance between online outrage and offline action is shrinking.
You’re not just protecting facilities anymore. You’re monitoring behavioral drift—inside and outside the building.
2. Insider Risk Wearing a Name Badge
The most dangerous person in your building is someone who works for your company and knows the floor plan. With financial anxiety, ideological radicalization, and AI-driven job displacement acting as accelerants, the addition of remote access privileges and privileged credentials makes insider risk a hybrid physical-cyber threat.
It’s not espionage that worries you. It’s the disgruntled systems engineer who decides the company owes him something and somebody needs to pay.
3. Executive Threats Going Mainstream
We’ve seen this play out in tragic reality over the past 16 months, as hostility toward corporate leadership is no longer fringe. It’s cultural.
From targeted harassment campaigns to doxxing to physical stalking, the line between reputational attack and kinetic risk is thin. When corporate decisions intersect with political narratives, executives become symbolic targets.
Your protection program can’t just be reactive. It must be intelligence-driven and anticipatory.
4. Economic Instability as a Security Multiplier
Inflationary pressure, labor friction, and regional recessions: none of this looks like “security issues” on paper. But they drive theft, fraud, workplace conflict, and insider compromise.
When people feel squeezed, controls get tested, threat vectors shift. You’re watching shrink, fraud metrics, workplace complaints, and anomalous access patterns the way others watch quarterly earnings.
5. Converged Systems, Converged Consequences
Access control systems integrate with identity management, your video cameras in the cloud, and HR, piggybacking on the visitor management platform. Convergence can be an efficient and conveniently terrifying security proposition.
A misconfigured identity policy can now unlock both data and doors. A ransomware event can disable physical access. A cloud outage can leave your SOC in the dark.
Integration has brought visibility and concentrated risk.
6. AI Everywhere, Governance Nowhere
AI-enabled analytics, predictive video, automated threat scoring and vendors promise insight at machine speed. But models hallucinate. Data drifts. Bias creeps. False positives create friction. False negatives create headlines.
You’re not afraid of AI. You’re afraid of deploying it faster than your governance, validation and audit frameworks can mature.
Because “the algorithm did it” is not a defensible incident report.
7. Workplace Incivility as a Pre-Incident Indicator
The spike in harassment complaints, aggressive confrontations, and “minor” policy violations isn’t just an HR issue. (See our cover story this month by Howard Carder)
It’s telemetry.
Behavioral drift precedes physical events. Escalating incivility often signals deeper instability that has a personal, financial, or ideological twist. If your threat assessment team isn’t mining HR, compliance, and access data together, you’re missing the early-warning system.
In 2026, behavioral intelligence becomes as critical as badge logs.
8. Board-Level Expectations with Operational-Level Resources
And perhaps the most prevalent and frustrating nightmare is the quiet anxiety that expectations are rising faster than budgets.
The board wants zero incidents. The CEO wants frictionless operations. Employees want psychological safety. Regulators want documented diligence.
You get incremental funding and a mandate to “do more with smarter technology.”
The translation is potentially terrifying: architect an enterprise-wide, converged, behaviorally informed security strategy—without slowing the business.
The Real Sleepless Question
The common thread isn’t just threat. It’s velocity.
Social narratives move faster. Economic shocks ripple faster. Technology deploys faster. Outrage amplifies faster. Systems integrate faster. Your job is to ensure that risk identification, cross-functional governance, and response capability move faster still.
Because in 2026, the organizations that suffer most won’t be the ones with the biggest threats. They’ll be the ones who mistook volatility for background noise.
And as CSO, you know the difference—usually around 2:37 a.m.
About the Author
Steve Lasky
Editorial Director, Editor-in-Chief/Security Technology Executive
Steve Lasky is Editorial Director of the Endeavor Business Media Security Group, which includes SecurityInfoWatch.com, as well as Security Business, Security Technology Executive, and Locksmith Ledger magazines. He is also the host of the SecurityDNA podcast series. Reach him at [email protected].