Organizations faced a record number of interconnected threats in 2025, from global political volatility and multi-city protests to emerging technology disruptions and extreme weather events. The sheer volume and variety of incidents forced leaders to rethink how they monitor risk, protect employees, and maintain business continuity in an increasingly unpredictable world.

In this episode, AlertMedia’s Senior Vice President of Global Intelligence, Sara Pratley, unpacks the top threats and key trends from the 2026 Threat Outlook Report and shares practical guidance to help leaders build resilience for the year ahead.

The Employee Safety Podcast is hosted by Peter Steinfeld, SVP of Safety Solutions at AlertMedia.

Get every episode delivered straight to your inbox by subscribing at https://www.alertmedia.com/podcast/.

Hello and welcome to the Employee Safety podcast from AlertMedia, where you'll hear advice from industry leaders on how to protect your people and business. I'm Peter Steinfeld. It's a new year, and that means taking a closer look at the trends in global development shaping organizational risk.

There's no one better to guide us through it than my colleague Sarah Pratley, Senior Vice President of Global Intelligence at AlertMedia.

Great to be here, Peter, especially on this topic. Really looking forward to diving in.

What stood out most to you and your Global intelligence team as you tracked all those global risks out there and a lot of the different emerging threats?

I mean, you said it, it was a busy year. There were definitely a lot of defining moments in a lot of the categories you mentioned. Right.

We started off the year with a car ramming in New Orleans. We had the Southern California wildfires.

We had this incredibly devastating earthquake across Asia, kind of pinnacle mid year with the Portugal and Spain blackouts. And then we dive into the end of the year. We've got so many different targeted shootings, demonstration events.

So the year was chock full across all of the categories. Excited to always say that my team continues to rise to the occasion. They cover and really help support our customers in all of these areas.

Really for us, it's important to continue to evolve with these events, evolve with the way that we're bringing them to our customers with context and analysis with. When I look back at the year, my team, we think about a lot of data.

So just think about that, right? The crazy intense number of events that our customers are having to manage and deal with, hopefully, obviously with that great support from our team.

Yeah. The sheer volume of information that you have to process is just stunning.

Absolutely.

I mean, I feel like we do such a great job with this report every year.

I know how much value it provides to our customers and people across the security, business continuity and really risk, resiliency, employee safety landscape. Everybody can really get something out of it. There's so many risks we could focus on.

And the five things we really focused on this year were, number one, the information battleground. More noise, more information than ever. This is something we all perpetuate. But also other things going on in the world around us. More bots than ever.

Also the advancements in artificial intelligence, that too, perpetuating a lot of the creation of and sharing of fake content. So that was really the first thing that we dive into in the report.

The second thing we're really focused on is global political volatility, particularly with ongoing conflicts. There are several.

Also the uncertainty over those conflicts and any resolutions if they hold, if we get new resolutions, and then also just shifting global alliances. Right. There's a lot to dig into and say about that as well. Number three, demonstrations in civil unrest.

This is something that's really hit the report every year for the past several years, and with good reason.

We continue to see the complexity of this demonstration in activism environment, especially as it pertains to keeping businesses running as smoothly as possible, as well as keeping employees around those safe. The fourth thing we focus on is climate and extreme weather.

We have a great team of meteorologists who really not only dive into forecasting, but trends. So there's some really significant takeaways there. And then lastly, emerging tech disruptions. Right.

How could we round out the list without really focusing on those tech disruptions?

The rapid advancements in AI, as I mentioned before, the expanding tech ecosystem always presenting so many different challenges as well as opportunities as we look at the risk landscape and how we're managing different threats and also responding to those.

One other thing that I'll note, really one common thread between a lot of these different topics is artificial intelligence, especially when it comes to synthetic information. Right. Deepfakes, people using AI to write posts, create fake voice videos, transform data and Things of that nature.

Yeah, let's go ahead and start there. How's all this synthetic information shaping the current threat environment for organizations?

Yeah, really.

Simply stated, it's making things more complicated and confusing, not only to figure out what exactly is happening, but also to respond to those events that are happening. There's some great data in the report I'm just going to Dr. Directly from because I think it's really important to highlight.

I mentioned bots a second ago. Bots actually account for 51% of global web traffic. I know we find a ton of complexity in this with collection.

I imagine most people are finding the same complexity as well. Also, AI driven attacks, they're surging. That's not hard to imagine. 16.7% up year over year.

Another stat here, reaching 36,000 credential scans per second. So just imagine that that's per second. Just an amazing and really disturbing number as we think about that as well.

So just a lot to really wrap our heads around as we think about not only the number of events, but also that cost to businesses and how we can try and mitigate those risks going forward. As we focus here, all of these obviously also creating what we would call the crisis of trust.

So not being able to trust the information that you're seeing also delaying your ability to trust the information that you should be trusting. So again, that crisis of trust is wound throughout a lot of this as well.

Yeah, it seems like when someone receives information now, they're not really willing to act on it right away because they're like, ugh, fool me once, you know, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. So they just resist and they investigate further and then that slows down their ability to react. And that's just not good.

Absolutely. We're having to go to greater lengths to make sure the information is true and real things that we should be doing.

But that's delaying our ability to understand that truth and then respond to it for the business.

So a lot of pivoting that businesses are having to do in this specific area. And it's really a global phenomenon here. We think about the United States, obviously a big driver.

The reintroduction of temporary internal border controls across multiple UE countries. It means it's harder for people to obviously transit across borderlines, but also the transfer of goods. Right.

So that's something to take into account and consideration as well. And then the last thing I would note here is just the increase in gray zone attacks targeting critical infrastructure.

Remember all of the undersea cables that have been cut and obviously the vulnerability there as well. As we move forward into the future. And when we think about political instability as well, it impacts everything.

It impacts our offices that we have in these locations, it impacts, it impacts our people that we have in these locations and regions, it impacts the travelers that we have going through these regions and it impacts our vendors that are in these areas as well as our supply chains, again, the transit of goods. So it really is very full fledged there. It's impacting basically everything that we're working to protect and keep up and running as a business.

We've also seen a lot of, as you mentioned before, widespread demonstrations and protests over the past few years. It's not just in the past year.

It seems to have really spun up since COVID So what trends are your team tracking when it comes to all this unrest and mobilization that you're seeing out there?

Yeah, so our strategic intelligence team has a very specific focus here. They track activism globally.

They're tracking the different groups, the different campaigns, and they're really helping our customers to understand these things ahead of time, as is much needed in the space. Tens of thousands of events that we're seeing across the globe every year.

When we think about the trends, I would say trend number one, the numbers are going up. We're seeing more and more activism, more demonstrations, more protests happening in the world around us and for so many different reasons.

The second trend, which I think was really highlighted across 20, 25 and a few different examples is the multi location events. Right. We have groups that are not only hosting a demonstration or a few demonstrations, they're calling for demonstrations across multiple cities.

And it's not just a few, it's dozens. It's hundreds. It's sometimes more than hundreds of cities that they're organizing these campaigns and. Right. That creates a lot of complexity.

We saw this with the no Kings demonstrations, which haven't happened once but twice and time and time again with millions of attendees in multiple cities. Again, not just in the US but globally. We've seen this with pro Palestinian demonstrations across the last several years.

We've seen this with farmers protests. We're seeing it with Gen Z groups across Asia, across Latin America.

And.

And I think it's important to highlight because it's something we should all be considering from a business continuity perspective, especially keeping our employees safe who might be in these areas.

Do you find in the data that you're investigating that the organizers are getting savvier about what they do to make it harder to figure it out ahead of time, or is it just the volume up so tremendously it makes it difficult to track?

I think it's more the latter. I think it's, you know, the volume, the intensity of that volume. I think most organizing groups are very much looking for attendance. Right.

So they're pretty out there on different platforms promoting these events and trying to game that activism and activity to really promote how people are feeling around these different topics.

Extreme weather and climate related disruptions continue to dominate a lot of the headlines out there. How are those risks evolving for businesses this year?

Yeah, as one would imagine, as we continue to see headlines, the number of severe weather events, the number of natural disasters is continuing to be on the rise. Obviously the intensity of those events as well. I talk to our meteorologists all the time.

They're really great at forecasting and doing impact assessments.

But one of the other things that we really rely on them for is helping us to understand the trends so we can bring that to this community, to our customers as well, so that people can really be planning in the right ways. I would say as we look across this landscape, there's several different things that they would highlight.

Heat obviously Has a lot of implications when we think about our workforce, whether it's outdoor employees, when we think about remote employees in different environments.

But when we think about heat, it's also important to think about infrastructure and the impact that heat is having on the infrastructure around us and will continue to have on the aging infrastructure that, that we all depend on very much for life and for business that we're conducting in different areas. The other thing that we talk a lot about right now, and we actually talked quite a bit about in the last few years, is flooding. Right.

Tying back to heat. We have a lot of water in the atmosphere. The more that that water collects, the more intense we're seeing these flooding events.

This has really been something that's impacted countries, regions across the globe. We think about Pakistan, we think about Nigeria, we think about South Africa.

Hundreds of people dead across significant flooding events in these areas. And then the last thing, again it attaches back to heat is wildfire activity.

The other thing that I think is important to mention when we think about severe weather and natural disasters is just a lot of what we've seen with commun and alerting infrastructure and a lot of criticism, rightfully so, on different tools and capabilities either being used or not being used in different areas.

We experienced this during the Texas floods in July of last year, but we've also seen this not many months before that in Valencia, Spain, a 13 plus hour gap in their alerting system. In Estonia, they actually had tested their emergency platform and 25% of it failed.

Absolutely. And it seems like there's just obviously way more people on the planet than there ever have been.

And a lot of those people are living in these disaster prone areas and they're being affected by things that 100 years ago there were no people there. Does that change how your team covers things, maybe from a general analyst to a meteorologist?

Yeah, I mean, we follow the data for sure. The New York Times has had some great imaging and data that they've published in recent years that really proves that exact point.

People are moving to more disaster prone areas. When we look at just the United States, a lot of people are moving to Florida, a lot of people are moving to Texas. Right.

Two states that if you're on those coastal regions, you're going to experience more from the hurricane in tropic seasons, we're seeing people move more towards wildfire prone areas as well.

So when we think about it as a team, we're not only looking at the trends in these events, but also the trend in population because that drives a lot of our alerting as well. The impact to people and personnel that are in these areas.

Well, emerging technology is another area where risk and opportunity often collide. What are some of the significant developments your team is watching in that area?

I think one of the things I'd like to cap here is emerging technology can be such an amazing thing. Right. My team benefits from this all day long.

All the different tools and techniques to collect information, to get valuable information to our customers more quickly.

But as we think about the risk landscape, obviously emerging technologies present a lot of challenges for the businesses that we support across these different spaces. I think there's a few common themes here, right? Artificial intelligence and the impact on infrastructure. Right.

We like to talk about AI, but when we think about AI, we also need to think about the infrastructure impacts. There are so many more data centers that are being brought online right now.

As AI continues to evolve and the value is continued to be seen by all these organizations, we're going to see more data centers brought online. And what does that mean? There's more energy consumption and more of a push on the energy supply in these areas.

We're already seeing those impacts in certain areas in certain states. The other thing we need to think about here too is water. These facilities need water to cool the facilities and keep things up and running smoothly.

So there's definitely impacts from an infrastructure perspective that I think are important to think about as they interlink with technology. Cyber is a huge one. Ransomware in particular, as we think about cyber ransomware and extortion attacks are up 45% year over year.

And that's just disclosed events. So think about the things that are going unreported or underreported at this point. Those numbers really continuing to drive conversations.

87% of IT leaders are actually concerned that this will impact their orient organization. They're in good company. It will impact organizations and at a tremendous level. It's something we need to be preparing for.

And then another big one, quantum computing. Again, I think this goes a little bit, maybe under noticed by organizations, but a data point here that I think is important.

It's concerning that only 5% of organizations have a plan in place related to this, despite more than half of professionals believing that current encryption methods will fail at some point. So a word to the wise there as we think about that data and maybe being better than that data in the future months.

And just to put a kind of fine point on this as well, I think a lot of these things that we're talking about also really reinforce the fact that there is this convergence of physical and digital threats. And that's something that we will continue to see play out in the months and years to come.

Well, as if all those major themes are not enough to contend with, what are some of the under the radar risks that leaders should be paying attention to this year?

Yeah, as I mentioned earlier, obviously we only have so much space to work with. So we really focused on five things that we thought that business leaders really need to be the most focused on. There is so much more.

There are hundreds, if not more things that we all need to be focused on in the threat landscape.

I would say some of the things that are a little bit more under the radar would be it's specific to the Dark Web, the Dark Web Marketplace and just how much activity is happening there that can really be threatening to businesses. It nearly doubled the number of Marketplace listings in Q2 of last year.

So that should obviously I think be a driver and a pointer for a lot of conversations for businesses who may see their data information in goods kind of displayed in that place, as well as people obviously trying to hire folks, bad actors in that space as well. The use of semi closed platforms, that's the space between open and dark web systems like Telegram, platforms like Discord. Right.

These are spaces that we're seeing criminal and extremist Groups using more and more over time, that can be to organize criminal activities. It can be for that demonstration activity.

We saw a lot of targeted attacks. We see a lot of unfortunate data when we think about the targeting of CEOs as well as the targeting of their families.

A lot of the industry space and a lot of conversations are happening around drones. And again, for all the right reasons.

We're seeing a lot of advancements in technology here, and I'm happy to see that people are taking notice of from that business continuity and physical security perspective.

A lot of these risks you talk about seem to be very interconnected. So what advice would you give to leaders trying to make decisions amid all the uncertainty?

Yeah, we did a great job in the report, really identifying seven strategic areas that people can really draw from in their planning and maybe even just kind of rethinking of continuity and security. Right.

Some things may feel like, oh, yeah, I've got that in place, or I've thought about that before, But I think it's a really good opportunity to kind of go through a checklist and think about, like, where is my team with this? How much planning have we done? Are we thinking about this? Should we be thinking about this?

So when we think about those seven key strategies, the first one was standing up verification ladders. Right. There's a lot of different information in the world that we live in.

How do we marry our confidence and intelligence with our alignment with emergency communications so that we understand the information that's coming to us, our level of confidence in that, and are able to get information and contextualize information to our audiences, whether it's those are stakeholders, whether those are employees, as quickly as possible? The second thing we talk about is really broadening your data collection footprint. We all love open source intelligence.

It's definitely a ripe area for us to garner a ton of information about what's happening? Potential threats against our business and the world around us. But I would say we need to kind of deepen that approach as well. Right.

There is fringe social media platforms that we should all be taking note of. There's the dark web that we should all be taking note of. There's alternative channels. Right.

There's so much more there that I think that we as security and business continuity professionals really need to be paying attention to when we think about the collection and the world around us. The third thing is just mapping multi city replication threats.

I think this is really important as we draw back to demonstration activity and we think about those multi location events.

It's just really helpful to think about the planning that we have in place around those as it pertains to employees, as it pertains to travelers, as it pertains to supply chain as well. Hardening identity and finance workflows is the fourth strategy.

So thinking about this specifically around credentials, around access financials, around sensitive information, really training is obviously going to be key in this area and I think that's a good focal point for any and all teams. Is that training. Number five, creating a border friction playbook. I talked about this earlier specific to Europe. Right.

Number six, really stress testing crisis communications with misinformation. I think this is such a valuable opportunity for tabletops for scenario exercises.

Thinking about misinformation is really that thing that can really attack your organization in different ways, shapes and forms. And then lastly building resilience into critical dependencies.

Utilities, cloud providers, data centers are all both feeling the burden of our climate as well as very good targets for bad actors. Considering what you will do if you have to live without one or many things. Just as a main part of that business continuity planning as well.

Yeah, I mean there's so much we can say and there's so much we can do. I think reports like this can really be a guiding light for our planning and preparedness. I would say awareness is our armor. Right.

If we have the awareness, if we have the information we can really drive those conversations about how we will actually prepare, about how we will actually be impacted, about how we'll act in the event of one of these unfortunate incidents impacting our business.

So I would say just that awareness being our armor, knowledge being our power, is really that Northern Star for I think all of us in this space at this point, and that's gonna help us be the most prepared that we can be.

Awareness is our armor. I love it. I don't know how your team puts together all this stuff, but it's truly amazing. Thank you so much for being on the show.

Amazing to be here. Hopefully this is valuable to all of our listeners and to all the people that we support. I just think there's so much meat in this report.

Highly recommend people digging into it indeed.

Wherever you get your podcasts, stay safe out there.

Thank you for listening to the Employee Safety Podcast from Alert Media, the industry's most intuitive emerging communication and threat intelligence solution. To learn more about how to protect your people and business during critical events, visit alertmedia.com until next time.