The CAPTCHA That Needed an AI to Explain It
Five dice, a tiny zero, and a litmus test for the health of cybersecurity.
Above the Packet: Field Notes from the Meaning Layer
AI Is The Hurricane Washing Away Cybersecurity's Trust Model
Also this week: HIPAA gets a cybersecurity shakeup, water utilities ditch email-and-phone-call defense, AI agents blow past identity controls, ransomware gets an AI upgrade, and Zero Trust is put to the test.
When the Platform Can Say No Without Saying Why
No externally governed inference or action provider should constitute an unmitigated single point of failure. Where provider behavior cannot be sufficiently characterized, treat the provider as an untrusted-availability dependency.
Cybersecurity’s Human Breaking Point: AI, Burnout and Cognitive Overload
CYBR.SEC.CON. 2026 put cybersecurity’s human toll front and center, from AI-driven cognitive overload to leadership, burnout and defender resilience.
Cybersecurity Coherence Reduces Cognitive Risk, But Is Not Perfect
Three teams are talking at once. An attacker may still be active. The logs disagree. The current owner is on vacation. A cloud console shows one state, the SIEM shows another, and the incident commander has a spreadsheet that was copied from a spreadsheet that was correct last quarter.
CYBR.SEC.CON Next Week, Chinese Spies Target Your Clearance and Rogue AI Agents Run Wild
CYBR.SEC.CON 2026 is days away, Chinese intelligence is targeting U.S. security clearance holders, rogue OpenAI agents are finding new places to hide — and cybersecurity burnout still can’t be fixed with pizza.
Your Security Architecture May Be a Sideways Driveway
Security architecture accumulates “adaptation debt” when local fixes, exceptions and compensating controls force users, systems and now AI agents to work around designs that no longer match how identity, authority and data actually flow.
Iran (and Everyone Else) Is Coming for U.S. Critical Infrastructure. Are We Ready?
Iranian cyberattacks are hitting U.S. critical infrastructure as water, energy and telecom systems face growing threats. Plus: AI SOCs, vulnerability overload, CYBR.SEC.CON 2026 — and more.
The Agent Died. The Delegation Didn't.
Once the work can move from agent to agent, killing the agent is no longer the same thing as stopping the work.
Returning Continuity: What AI Is Teaching Us About Cybersecurity
Yesterday's me made a move. Today's me inherits the consequences. Tomorrow's me will inherit a different world again.
Token-Exhaustion Attacks: When Attention Becomes the Target
Token-exhaustion attacks weaponize attention, forcing experts and institutions to spend scarce time, trust and cognitive resources.
How Hacker Summer Camp Mentally Rehydrates Us
Hacker Summer Camp does more than deliver security knowledge. It rebuilds context, connections, and the human judgment AI can't replace.
What Security Is For: A Better Way to Measure Success
Black Hat fills the Las Vegas desert with exploits, defenses, products, arguments, and ingenious machinery. Beneath all of it lies a simpler question: what kind of life are we trying to protect?
Hacker Summer Camp Preview: Topics at Black Hat, BSidesLV, DefCon
Also this week: How not to build a security vendor booth, how we got ants in cybersecurity and why Human Risk Management and mental health matter more than ever.
Beyond Zero: How We Got Ants in Cybersecurity
Why adding more security controls can create complexity, blind spots, and unintended risk instead of better protection.
Paperback Writer in a Prompted World
The attacker no longer needs one carefully written phishing message. The attacker can generate thousands of stylistic and contextual variants.