For years, cybersecurity has focused on a familiar objective: protecting data. While that remains critical, the conversation is evolving. Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming how organizations operate, communicate and serve customers, while also enabling cybercriminals to create increasingly convincing scams, impersonations and fraud schemes. As a result, consumers are left wondering if they can trust that a message, voice, image or request is real.
That growing uncertainty is a key theme in our newly released 2027 Data Breach Industry Forecast: Consumers at Risk.
After more than 24 years helping organizations prepare for and respond to data breaches, we’ve observed an important shift. The conversation is expanding beyond breach prevention and response to broader questions about identity, authenticity and confidence in digital interactions.
A trend we envision will heighten in 2027 is the growing distrust among consumers to the point of paralysis on when to act. Security alerts, fraud warnings and breach notifications are designed to help people protect themselves, but recipients may no longer be able to confidently distinguish real communications from fake ones. This will cause a gap in consumer protection and leave people potentially more vulnerable than ever before.
We also examine how years of exposed personal information, combined with increasingly powerful AI tools, could enable cybercriminals to build highly detailed digital representations of individuals. At the same time, consumers may respond by becoming more protective of their identities, adopting new privacy behaviors and finding creative ways to make personal information less valuable to criminals.
Together, these shifts could reshape how organizations engage with customers, how consumers manage their digital identities and how trust is established online.
From identity verification and authentication technologies to other methods of establishing legitimacy, we believe organizations will greatly increase investing in tools and services next year that help build confidence in an increasingly complex digital environment.
Your Trusted Partner
The purpose of our annual forecast is to encourage organizations to think ahead, prepare for emerging challenges and consider how today’s trends could influence tomorrow’s risks.
At Experian, we remain committed to helping organizations navigate those challenges, whether through verification tools, breach preparedness, response or identity protection. Because in the years ahead, maintaining trust may become just as important as protecting data.
To read the full predictions report, click here.