Sygnia: 73% of CISOs unprepared for AI agent attacks

Sygnia's 2026 CISO survey puts a hard number on what security teams have been quietly admitting: 73% of organizations are not fully prepared to respond to a major incident, and only one-in-three feel equipped to investigate an attack involving an AI agent specifically. The readiness gap runs deeper than staffing or budget. Traditional incident response playbooks were built around known failure modes: a compromised server, stolen credentials, a lateral-moving human attacker. AI agents operate differently. They can autonomously exfiltrate data, modify files across systems, and escalate privileges through tool chains without triggering the signatures IR teams are trained to recognize. Essentially: (Sygnia) is documenting a structural mismatch between how security teams were trained and the threat surface that agentic AI deployments are creating in production environments right now. - 73% of surveyed CISOs say they are not fully prepared to respond to a major incident of any kind. - Only 1-in-3 organizations feel capable of investigating an AI agent-specific attack. - Agentic deployments are accelerating into production faster than IR playbooks are being updated to account for them. The core problem isn't that AI agents are new; it's that the investigation tooling, forensic frameworks, and institutional knowledge needed to audit their actions at runtime largely don't exist yet at scale.