{"id":214946,"date":"2026-02-18T12:38:00","date_gmt":"2026-02-18T17:38:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/02\/18\/3-top-cybersecurity-stock-picks-to-weather-ai-replacement-worries\/"},"modified":"2026-02-18T13:05:08","modified_gmt":"2026-02-18T18:05:08","slug":"3-top-cybersecurity-stock-picks-to-weather-ai-replacement-worries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/02\/18\/3-top-cybersecurity-stock-picks-to-weather-ai-replacement-worries\/","title":{"rendered":"3 Top Cybersecurity Stock Picks to Weather AI Replacement Worries"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.businessinsider.com\/stock-picks-cybersecurity-tech-crowdstrike-palo-alto-networks-zcaler-wedbush-2026-2\">3 Top Cybersecurity Stock Picks to Weather AI Replacement Worries<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.businessinsider.com\/stock-picks-cybersecurity-tech-crowdstrike-palo-alto-networks-zcaler-wedbush-2026-2\">https:\/\/www.businessinsider.com\/stock-picks-cybersecurity-tech-crowdstrike-palo-alto-networks-zcaler-wedbush-2026-2<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Publish Date: <a href=\"publish_date]\">2026-02-18 12:38:00<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Source Domain: <a href=\"www.businessinsider.com\">www.businessinsider.com<\/a><\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s one corner of the tech sector where investors can hide out from AI disruption while still benefiting from the technology&#8217;s adoption, Wedbush says.<\/p>\n<p>Analysts led by Dan Ives, a vocal AI mega bull, flagged cybersecurity as a space that will see rising demand driven by AI, while steering clear of the AI worries that have rattled the market so far in 2026. <\/p>\n<p>Experts have called AI a double-edged sword for the cybersecurity industry, as the evolving technology is strengthening the capabilities of both cyber attackers and defenders.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;AI will be a major tailwind to the cyber security sector over the coming years as protection of use cases, data, and end points expand markedly,&#8221; the analysts wrote.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;As attack frequency, success rates, and blast radius rise with AI deployments, cybersecurity becomes even more mission-critical risk management, reinforcing budget resilience in this new AI driven IT budget world,&#8221; they added.<\/p>\n<p>Cybersecurity is among the fastest growing areas of enterprise IT spending. Gartner expects global AI cybersecurity spending to hit $51 billion in 2026, roughly doubling from the year prior.<\/p>\n<p>Wedbush highlighted three stocks as the best-positioned in the space: Palo Alto Networks, CrowdStrike, and Zscaler.<\/p>\n<h2 id=\"f0d373bb-59ac-4037-9a7f-ced33d847643\" data-toc-id=\"f0d373bb-59ac-4037-9a7f-ced33d847643\">CrowdStrike<\/h2>\n<p><iframe title=\"[ Insert title here ]\" aria-label=\"Line chart\" id=\"datawrapper-chart-Kst5v\" src=\"https:\/\/datawrapper.dwcdn.net\/Kst5v\/1\/\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"0\" style=\"width: 0; min-width: 100% !important; border: none;\" height=\"439\" data-external=\"1\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><strong>Ticker<\/strong>: CRWD<\/p>\n<p><strong>What Wedbush says<\/strong>: &#8220;We believe that CRWD&#8217;s position as the gold standard of cybersecurity remains firmly unchanged in the face of this software sell-off with the company&#8217;s innovative, best-in-class Falcon platform becoming increasingly effective in the modern threat landscape as AI adversaries become an incrementally larger threat for enterprises heading down the AI path.&#8221;<\/p>\n<h2 id=\"7a7dae06-c805-4329-8034-792b055f4836\" data-toc-id=\"7a7dae06-c805-4329-8034-792b055f4836\">Palo Alto Networks<\/h2>\n<p><iframe title=\"[ Insert title here ]\" aria-label=\"Line chart\" id=\"datawrapper-chart-U2ZcF\" src=\"https:\/\/datawrapper.dwcdn.net\/U2ZcF\/1\/\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"0\" style=\"width: 0; min-width: 100% !important; border: none;\" height=\"439\" data-external=\"1\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p id=\"893cd40d-d345-423a-9081-5c25758368e9\"><strong>Ticker<\/strong>: PANW<\/p>\n<p><strong>What Wedbush says<\/strong>: &#8216;&#8221;AI is not displacing PANW&#8217;s value proposition, but has actually made it more relevant, not less, as it is forcing customers to consolidate vendors, improve visibility, and automate response as threats become more adaptive and&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.businessinsider.com\/stock-picks-cybersecurity-tech-crowdstrike-palo-alto-networks-zcaler-wedbush-2026-2\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>3 Top Cybersecurity Stock Picks to Weather AI Replacement Worries https:\/\/www.businessinsider.com\/stock-picks-cybersecurity-tech-crowdstrike-palo-alto-networks-zcaler-wedbush-2026-2 Publish Date: 2026-02-18 12:38:00&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":214947,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/i.insider.com\/6995e8dfa645d118818982f9?width=1200&format=jpeg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[20,57],"class_list":["post-214946","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cybersecurity","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-security"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214946"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=214946"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214946\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":214948,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214946\/revisions\/214948"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/214947"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=214946"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=214946"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=214946"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}