Focus Topics
Cybersecurity Magazine is the place to go to for insights on cybersecurity, both from the research community and the industry.
However, sometimes we focus on specific topics and run several articles pertaining to those focus topics. You will find an overview of all focus topics we’ve published in the past here.
Flock’s big problem isn’t the tech
In Jefferson, GA, a police chief in a neighboring town ran roughly 600 searches on a woman and her daughter’smore
Analysis: Trump’s EO revives lethargic PQC sector
The Trump regime’s latest executive order (EO) last week is a shot in the arm to the moribund Post-Quantum Cryptographymore
Collaboration fueling configuration drift
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.”
We read Czarny’s book so you wouldn’t have to
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.
That email from your bank looked real. That was the point
Brian Silverstein, May 29th 2026 Modern phishing has evolved rapidly with AI. It doesn’t come from strangers or an unknownmore
Data removal services face uphill battle in healthcare
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.
Internet of Things
Security concerns reach beyond CISOs
The English riots this past week provide a Dickensian “best of times…worst of times.” context to politics in the United Kingdom and possibly the United States later this year. The UK has had a significant political shift in leadership that brought relief to the majority of that countries citizens (the best) but also encouraged the minority opinion to lash out with provocation from domestic actors and foreign states (the worst). This highlight the fact that digital security concerns reaches far beyond the confines of corporate CISO offices.
The rioters are extreme anti-immigration nationalists whipped up by false information regarding the stabbing of several young children and adults at a dance recital in Southport, a town just north of Wales. The disinformation came from several sources but is primarily coming through a Russian-linked website posing as a legitimate American news organization. The claim was meanwhile amplified up by far-right figures Tommy Robinson and Andrew Tate. Robinson was arrested under anti-terrorism laws but is out on bail has been vacationing in Europe. He is still spreading disinformation. Tate is currently under “judicial supervision” for rape and human trafficking charges. X owner Elon Musk has also participated personally in sewing the discord.
Foreign interference grows
Meanwhile, open source intelligence monitored by companies like Zero Fox and Fletch have identified efforts by North Korea and Russia to interfere in elections of Western countries including Germany and the United States. Zero Fox said, “The Telegram-based bot service IntelFetch had been aggregating compromised credentials linked to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and their websites. This data, primarily sourced from botnet logs and third-party breaches, includes sensitive information such as login credentials for party members and delegates. This breach poses a significant risk of unauthorized access and potential disruptions to the convention.”
Zero Fox said the DNC had been alerted several weeks ago and that the weaknesses fixed. The DNC Convention is set to begin August 19 and Zero Fox was planning on announcing their findings that day to boost their profile.
Addressing Financial Organizations’ Digital Demands while Avoiding Cyber Threats
Keeping up with requirements has caused financial organizations to rapidly overhaul their IT infrastructure. Because of this rapid digitalization, organizations are consuming many different security solutions creating a bespoke environment that inadvertently exposes them to cyber threats.
The Crucial Role of Regulatory Frameworks in Ensuring Robust Cyber Security
In order to understand the ever-changing regulatory landscape, we spoke to eight cybersecurity experts about the latest developments and how businesses should navigate their way through.
Mining data is daunting but crucial
The cybersecurity industry seems addicted to research but isn’t all that good at it. Mining the massive amount of data produced is daunting but crucial to everyone.
Surveys and studies are an important part of marketing form the cybersecurity industry. Cyber Protection magazine receives a lot of them. We read them all. In the two months before the RSA Conference, more than one a day came into our inbox. However, they are not a great source of independent data and insight.
Ignoring the cherry-picked data highlighting a particular company’s product or service, there are a few nuggets that, taken together, produce some interesting insights. Out of 60+ reports, we took a pass on any that were repetitive, were suspect methodologically, or effectively plagiarized from another source. We chose to look at seven with a solid methodology, representation of industry-wide concerns, and originality. The reports came from Dynatrace, Black Kite, SlashNext, Metomic, Originality AI, Logicgate, and Sophos. We found three common themes: The impact of AI on security, government regulation compliance, and understanding of security concerns on the C-suites and board levels.
Understanding security issues.
Almost every study has a common complaint. CISOs say application security is a blind spot at the CEO and board levels. They say increasing the visibility of their CEO and board into application security risk is urgently needed to enable more informed decisions to strengthen defenses.
However, Dynatrace’s study said CISOs fail to provide the C-suite and board members with clear insight into their organization’s application security risk posture. “This leaves executives blind to the potential effect of vulnerabilities and makes it difficult to make informed decisions to protect the organization from operational, financial, and reputational damage.”
Recent news shows the study may have a point. Marriott Hotels admitted that a 2018 breach was the result of inadequate encryption of customer data. In 2018 the company claimed their data was protected by 128-bit AES encryption when customer identity was only protected by an outdated hashing protocol. One can imagine the discussion between the CEO and the IT department:
CEO: is our data encrypted?
IT manager: Yeah, sort of.
CEO: OK, good enough
If the CEO doesn’t understand the difference between a hash and AES encryption, that’s a problem.
And there many be evidence that ignorance is widespread. Apricorn reported that the number of encrypted devices in surveyed companies had dropped from 80 percent to 20 percent between 2022 and 2023. Some of that could be attributed to work-from-home (WFH) growth in companies. It is also likely that companies over-reported what was encrypted simply because they did not understand what “encryption” meant. Once they learned the meaning, adjustments were made.
That lack of a foundational security technology could be a reason for the devastating growth in ransomware in the past two years.
CTEM – useful or just another acronym?
CTEM is a term that was coined by Gartner (who else?) and is used to encapsulate an approach that seeks to assess and manage the exposure of the business on a continuous basis.
