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.
How Non-Human Users Are Reshaping Business and Cybersecurity
The digital world is changing fast, and now AI agents are appearing as non-human users who act autonomously. They log in to systems, handle transactions, review data, and even negotiate or create things without people having to step in every time. This shift means greater overall demand for software and changes how work is done. However, this should prompt you to consider online trust and security.
Why Human Risk Management is vital in the age of Artificial Intelligence
The rapid evolution of AI has inaugurated a new era of productivity and efficiency across industries. From autonomous workflows thatmore
AI industry at a crossroads
The AI industry appears to be reaching a crossroads that will determine its future in the next two years. The only clear outcome is it will not be what it is now, nor what it is predicted to be.
Most doomsayers and cheerleaders largely agree on a single vision: The technology will destroy hundreds of thousands of jobs. Wealthy investors and captains of industry consider that a good thing and mumble about universal income legislation and Star-Trekkian futures. White-color workers and unions see the future less optimistically. But cooler heads see a precarious future. Those cooler heads include Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s Chat GPT, and X.ai’s Grok. Cyber Protection Magazine talked to all three, and they all came up with four likely scenarios that may be brewing even as this article is read.
A security breach or a major AI system collapse.
Technical plateau causing diminishing returns on scalability.
Strict regulatory legislation that stifles innovation and makes development too expensive to pursue.
A significant economic downturn or massive market correction drying up capital investment.
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The Human Firewall Is Failing: Can Safe AI Reinforce It?
Attackers increasingly rely on AI to influence behavior in real time. Cyber defense systems are now turning to personalized, trustworthy AI platforms to reduce human-driven incidents by 95%
Vibe coding faces rough growing pains
Vibe coding (using LLMs to create computer code) was all the rage when 2025 began. By June, the bloom had fallen off the rose. Companies offering platforms and tools for the practice saw dramatic downturns in users. What happened? Evidence points to the traditional market practice of targeting early tech adopters.
Vibe coding was largely sold as a mean of improving efficiency professional coders and, as is their wont, professionals loved it for eliminating what they considered grunt work. But as the fad gained traction in the coding community, there was little evidence that it made coding any better, Rather, it made it possibly worse.
Illusions of efficiency
New studies showed any improvements in coding efficiency were illusions. While the coders assumed the tools made them as much as 50% more efficient, the reality is it made them, on average 19% slower. There were multiple reasons for the drag on efficiency. For one, professional coders know something about the issues of security, compliance, and quality control. LLCs don’t and neither do people without coding experience.
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CISA is dead. Long live CISA?
The Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) of 2015 expired January 30, 2026. Whether that means anything is debatable.
The 10-year old act facilitates sharing cyber threat information between the government and private sector organizations. Many security experts are unimpressed by how the act performed. Chaim Mazal, Chief AI and Security Officer at Gigamon said wasn’t a two-way street. Most of the sharing was done by private companies. There was little data shared by the government. As a result. Participation in the program cratered in the last two years.
“Allowing the law to lapse gives us the opportunity to reinvigorate the bidirectional transfer of information,” he predicted.
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.
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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.
