Black Hat USA kicked off over the weekend and company announcements followed the marketing focus on agentic AI products and services. However, there was more hash than corned beef in these announcements. Most were repackaged current product offerings.
A handful of announcements targeted at Black Hat focused on AI-generated or agentic threats. Most of the announcements repeated announcements prior to the RSA conference,for "agentic AI security" marketing. These include Tenable, Bedrock Data, Cycode, LimaCharlie, Flint AI, GTB Technologies, Strike48, Alice, Menlo Security and Adaptive Security.
Among more interesting legitimate announcements were Backslash Security, and Lineaje.
houlder surfing is probably the easiest security vulnerability to overcome, except to the companies selling solutions for it. In fact, there has been a lively debate CSO Online over whether those who buy a solution might not be intelligent enough to use digital tools.
When AI burst upon the scene a few years ago, it became a boon to the cybersecurity industry. The AI sector pushed a narrative that AI was not just a tool, but a way to replace human workers. Cyber threats exploded and there was greater demand for tools and services. The security industry glommed onto that narrative with AI-driven services. That had the expected result of destroying any goodwill available to AI technology.
However, recent revelations about the effectiveness of AI replacements are making proponents change their tune. What changed? Let’s start with human fertility.
Not all scams take money from you. One of the biggest security scams is the belief that once you have joined a Meta platform, it is impossible to leave. The news the Meta is working with a government contractor to make facial recognition tech for ICE agents has accelerated interest in how to escape Meta Hell. The question is, how?
Migration from Meta platforms is no longer a niche trend. Through 2025 and 2026 there is a sustained structural shift in the social media. Just consider the explosive growth of Bluesky, which closed 2025 with over 41.4 million registered users, a 60% year-over-year increase, with daily active users climbing past 4.5 million. That represents real growth from status into mainstream viability.
Collaboration tools have fueled configuration drift facilitating phishing attacks since they became widespread during the COVID pandemic. The core of the problem is, as usual, human failure, or more accurately, human procrastination.
Configuration drift happens when vendors and customers join corporate networks with supposedly temporary credentials. When those credentials are not revoked quickly after the collaboration, system settings gradually, almost imperceptibly, diverge from a secure baseline state.
Collaboration tools, beginning with email in the 1970s, were largely clunky, on premises and limited to technically sophisticated organizations. Through the 20 years following the turn of the century they became more sophisticated and allowed inclusion of users outside the networks, like vendors, consultants, and customers. Approximately 400 to 600 million people in professional contexts today use Microsoft Teams, Slack, Google Workspace, Zoom, and dozens of others collaboration tools. Gartner said 90% of Fortune 500 companies standardize on Teams. Moreover, every team that uses collaboration tools configures every collaboration tool differently with no central enforcement.
“Configuration drift is one of the most under-recognized risks in modern cybersecurity,” said Garrett Hamilton, CEO and founder of Reach Security. “Security tools are constantly changing due to updates, new features, and operational adjustments. Over time, those changes create drift that quietly weakens defenses. Organizations need a continuous way to validate that the controls they depend on are still working as intended.”
Cybersecurity Upside Down is a self-published book about the benefits of content disarm and reconstruction (CDR) security services and tools. Written by Benny Czarny, the CEO of OPSWAT, a respected provider of CDR, it is an attractive coffee table book to place in office reception rooms. It provides a good argument for adoption of CDR in large enterprises and government networks.
It is also about 150 pages too long, repeats the same argument several times, and has copious sections written by AI. There are also a lot of graphics (about 50 pages worth) that are also AI generated and not always illustrating the text. All of that tends to obfuscate the good argument Czarny makes.
The data broker market is worth half a trillion dollars and growing at a rate of 7.3 percent annually through 2033. That means they don’t care that you want your privacy. They are making too much money selling your personal information to care. That lack of concern doesn’t just affect an individual’s privacy. It threatens their security and that of nation states. The personal data removal and online privacy niche is fixing the problem. That industry, however is worth a 10th of the data broker market so it doesn’t have the political clout of data brokers. And nowhere is it bigger than the healthcare industry, according to Rob Shavell, CEO of Deleteme.
A public relations firm in the United Kingdom said the quiet part out loud about cybersecurity marketing: that much of it is fiction if not outright fraudulent.
Whiteoaks International surveyed 152 senior marketing, PR and communications professionals in the country, working in cybersecurity. The results found 30% said they helped produce content that was excessive, misleading, or unsubstantiated. More than half (51%) said they had seen this type of messaging in the sector.
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