Bitdefender Report: Singapore AI Leaders Overestimate Visibility as Cyber Gaps Widen

Bitdefender's 2026 Cybersecurity Assessment Report, based on a survey of 1,200 IT and cybersecurity professionals across six countries including Singapore, reveals a troubling gap between what security leaders believe they know about AI usage in their organisations and what frontline teams actually see. The report, released this week, identifies four critical knowing-versus-doing gaps that are leaving organisations exposed even as awareness of AI-related threats reaches an all-time high.

The most striking finding for Singapore is the AI visibility leadership gap. While 57.8% of managers said they have full visibility into all AI usage across their organisations, only 45.9% of practitioners agreed, an 11-point disconnect between leadership perception and ground truth. Overall, 47.4% of all respondents admitted to having only partial or no visibility into shadow AI, where employees use unsanctioned AI tools through personal accounts. The report also found that 84% of high-severity attacks now use Living Off the Land techniques, yet only one in five cybersecurity professionals rank LOTL as a top-three threat, suggesting AI anxiety is distorting risk perception.

Perhaps most concerning is the breach transparency finding: 55.2% of respondents across all countries said they had been told to keep a security breach confidential even when they believed it should be reported. This internal suppression of incident data creates serious legal and compliance risks, particularly under Singapore's Cybersecurity Act and the upcoming amendments that expand the regulator's oversight powers. The report also highlighted that attack surface reduction efforts are stalled by high maintenance overhead (38%), fear of operational disruption (35.4%), and resource constraints (34.6%).

For Singapore organisations, the report underscores a structural problem that goes beyond technology procurement. As AI adoption accelerates across the city-state's financial services, government, and logistics sectors, the gap between boardroom confidence in AI governance and the reality of unmanaged shadow AI usage is widening. The Bitdefender findings align with other recent SG-focused reports showing that understaffed security teams are struggling to keep pace with AI-driven threats while also managing the operational complexity of their existing tools.

Why it matters for Singapore: The Bitdefender survey puts Singapore alongside the US, UK, Germany, France, and Italy in a uniquely detailed benchmark of cybersecurity maturity, making it directly comparable to major Western economies. The finding that over half of cybersecurity professionals have been told to suppress breach reporting should alarm Singapore regulators and board directors alike, especially with the upcoming Cybersecurity Act amendments that impose stricter incident reporting obligations. For Singapore organisations racing to deploy AI, the message is clear: visibility must come before acceleration.