Bugcrowd, a leading provider of crowdsourced cybersecurity insight, recently unveiled their Inside the Mind of a Hacker research report for 2026, based on insights from more than 2,000 security researchers worldwide. These are hackers that contribute to Bugcrowd's Security Knowledge Platform.
The report’s findings show a decisive shift toward human-augmented intelligence, with hackers integrating AI into their workflows at significantly higher rates than in previous years. In parallel, a growing move toward collaborative hacking shows that team-based efforts increasingly outperform working in isolation.
According to Bugcrowd, these shifts reflect a broader evolution in the hacker psyche, balancing professionalization with foundational values. While financial incentives remain a primary motivator, most researchers still take deep pride in their ethical contributions, continuing to view hacking as a creative art form.
Additionally, the research highlights a community that is professionalizing rapidly, balancing increased economic and geopolitical pressures with a steadfast commitment to ethical disclosure. Understanding these dual shifts, in both the tools hackers use and the motivations that drive them, is essential for any modern security strategy.
The following findings represent the most notable trends from this year's study:
82 percent of hackers now use AI in their workflows, up from 64 percent in 2023, with AI primarily used for automating tasks, accelerating learning and analyzing data.
72 percent of hackers believe team collaboration yields better results, with 61 percent finding more critical vulnerabilities when working in teams.
75 percent report hacking is becoming more about money than curiosity, while 56 percent say geopolitics now outweighs pure curiosity as a driving factor.
- Despite economic pressures, 85 percent believe reporting critical vulnerabilities is more important than making money, and 98 percent remain proud of their work.
- 65 percent have chosen not to disclose vulnerabilities due to lack of clear reporting pathways, highlighting critical gaps in organizational security processes.
Some of the industry's leading stakeholders also offered their thought on the report's findings.
Dave Gerry, CEO at Bugcrowd
"Across every industry, from criminal gangs to nation-state actors, attackers are leveraging AI to accelerate their pace and frequency of attacks, increasingly causing defenders to be outmatched like never before. Whether through internal security teams or outsourcing part of their security operations to managed services firms, security teams must quickly ramp up their usage of AI in response to the increased threat environment.
"For managed services firms looking to differentiate from the pack, AI has provided an immense opportunity, not just for internal productivity and efficiency gains, but more importantly for providing improved defense for their clients. Their ability to keep pace with attackers will dictate their ability to continue to win in this AI-first attack landscape."
Randolph Barr, CISO at Cequence Security
"We’re seeing AI rapidly evolve from simple automation to deeply personalized, context-aware assistance—and it’s heading toward an Agentic AI future where tasks are orchestrated across domains with minimal human input.
"Before we even get to AI-specific risks, we have to get the fundamentals right. In the haste to bring AI to market quickly, engineering and product teams often cut corners to meet aggressive launch timelines. When that happens, basic security controls get skipped, and those shortcuts make their way into production.
"So, while organizations are absolutely starting to think about model protections, prompt injection, data leakage, and anomaly detection, those efforts mean little if you haven’t locked down identity, access, and configuration at a foundational level. Security needs to be part of the development lifecycle from day one, not simply an add-on at the time of launch."
Ram Varadarajan, CEO at Acalvio
"In 2026, security teams can no longer rely on humans doing everything by hand. The model has to change to allow humans to direct AI-driven workflows, just as hackers do. It's fated to be a bot-on-bot duel forevermore.
"Teams should start small. Pick a few high-impact workflows where AI provides scale and speed, and humans supply judgment and oversight. Assume a machine-speed AI-augmented attacker or autonomous AI attack, and defend with machine-speed AI that leverages the adversarial AI's own vulnerabilities.
"For MSPs and MSSPs, AI-powered hacking has reshaped and expanded their roles for good. Their value now shifts from basic monitoring to a future of operating and managing AI security agents that can detect and respond in real time: bot-on-bot duels at scale."
Mark McClain, CEO at SailPoint
"Hackers today don’t need to break your system to get in. They can simply walk through the front door with legitimate credentials. Today's reality demands a new approach to security where access can be granted, monitored, and managed dynamically based on policy and context.
"Modern identity tools need to be able to discern between regular user activity and abnormal activity, and grant— or deny— access accordingly. Every access decision is driven by who or what the identity is, the context of the data they touch, and the security signals surrounding them. By unifying identity, security, and data contexts, businesses can make real-time decisions to mitigate risk without disrupting operations."
Diana Kelley, CISO at Noma Security
"AI risks have rapidly moved from a watch list item to a front-line security concern, especially when it comes to data security and misuse. To manage this emerging threat landscape, security teams need a mature, continuous security approach, which includes blue team programs, starting with a full inventory of all AI systems, including agentic components as a baseline for governance and risk management.
"For practitioners, securing AI in 2026 and beyond is not just about protecting models. It requires addressing stack sprawl and moving toward a platform-driven approach that delivers defense in depth through unified, AI-aware identity, configuration, and data visibility. Organizations that simplify their cloud and AI security stack and enable effective automation will be far better positioned to safely scale AI as threats continue to evolve.
"I think the next wave of risk will stem from the broad adoption of agentic AI, systems that leverage the 'reasoning' capabilities of LLMs to drive autonomous workflows. As these agents begin interfacing with enterprise data, APIs, and other agents, long-standing controls like IAM, PAM, and data segmentation will struggle to keep pace as trust boundaries blur.
"To prepare, organizations should implement agentic risk management, starting with established policies and standard operating procedures and supported by technical controls like cryptographic identity attestation and continuous policy enforcement for AI agents. This will allow enterprises to monitor and constrain agent autonomy to gain the benefits of agentic AI without putting the organization at unnecessary risk."
Kamal Shah, CEO at Prophet Security
"AI adoption tracks what we see in security workflows every day. More and more teams are using AI to move faster through noise, automate repetitive and tedious work, and spend more time on the parts that require human judgment. We also see AI helping with code comprehension, patch diffing, fuzzing scaffolding, and cleaner reproduction steps and impact write-ups.
"Defenders are adopting the same pattern to keep pace with faster loops, reduce noise, and move from signal to action with disciplined decision-making.
"Some hackers have built AI agents to capture and annotate screenshots and network requests automatically, providing the necessary evidence that enterprises need to validate their findings. For organizations, this means receiving standardized, professional reports that are easier to reproduce and fix, effectively reducing the expensive back-and-forth typical of manual triage.
"By observing how ethical hackers are using AI to automate repetitive tasks, SOC teams can study these automated methodologies to understand the tempo and velocity of modern attacks.
"The pattern across these findings is tempo and specialization, AI speeds up the work, teams chain skills, and incentives push toward scale. Security teams should shorten time to answer with outcomes that clearly state scope, impact, affected assets, and next actions, backed by evidence the business can trust.
"Treat coordinated disclosure as core infrastructure with a clear VDP or bug bounty program, simple reporting, defined SLAs, safe harbor language, and consistent communication, then keep tight feedback loops with researchers because responsiveness improves report quality and reduces time to fix."
