Three years ago, the practical question for an MSP building a cybersecurity practice was which "vCISO platform" to buy. The term was good shorthand for the work at the time: assessments, advisory, reporting, maybe a compliance module bolted on the side. The work has since outgrown the descriptor.
A Security Growth Platform is the more precise name for what MSPs and MSSPs need from the software
Shadow AI used to mean employees pasting things they shouldn't into ChatGPT. It now means something bigger: employees building full applications with AI, wiring them into production systems, and publishing them on the open internet. Without Security or IT in the loop.
The artifact moved from a prompt to a product. The risk surface moved with it.
In The Shadow Builders report (get it here), a
State of AI Usage Report 2026 (full report here) by LayerX Security reveals the extent of the enterprise AI visibility gap and why most organizations still don't understand where their AI exposure is actually coming from. The research shows that enterprise AI risk is not distributed evenly across users or platforms. Instead, it is heavily concentrated among a small group of AI power users and a
Most organizations still picture cyber defense as a fortress problem: build stronger walls, add more guards, buy another detection engine. But modern incidents rarely crash through the front gate. They drift in disguised as routine activity, hide inside legitimate processes, and quietly accumulate risk long before anyone labels them an "incident."
That changes the role of the SOC entirely.
The
When an employee installs an AI writing assistant, connects a coding copilot to their IDE, or starts summarizing meetings with a new browser tool, they are doing exactly what a productive employee should do: finding faster ways to work.
Across most organizations today, employees are running three to five AI tools on any given day. Most were never reviewed by IT. A significant portion connects
Every single day, hackers are finding new ways to crash websites and steal data.
But right now, something has changed. Hackers are no longer working alone. They are now using powerful Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools to make their attacks faster, stronger, and much harder to stop.
According to recent updates from The Hacker News, bad actors are using AI to find weak spots in systems and
Multi-factor authentication (MFA) was supposed to close a critical gap in identity security. It meant that, even if an attacker possessed the account credentials, they couldn't log in without the second factor. While that logic was sound, attackers have now figured out that they don't need to steal the second factor: they just need the user to hand it over.
If your workforce authenticates with
Ask a cybersecurity pro about Network Detection and Response (NDR) and you might still hear "Noisy," "Too much data." But ask the teams running NDR that includes agentic AI capabilities and you'll hear they're actually using it to catch threats earlier, triage faster, and chase fewer false positives. The old complaint lingers in part because reputations are sticky, and because NDR has evolved
1 Introduction
This article provides a technical analysis of how many Windows kernel mode drivers can be interacted with from user mode without the hardware they were developed for. This work was motivated by driver-oriented vulnerability research and the need to evaluate the exploitability of individual findings, which frequently affect code whose reachability is hardware-gated. The
TL;DR: Stop chasing thousands of "toast" alerts. Join experts from Wiz to learn how hackers connect tiny flaws to build a "Lethal Chain" to your dataβand how to break it. Register for the Strategic Briefing Here.
Most security tools work like a smoke alarm that goes off every time you burn a piece of toast. You get so many alerts that you eventually start to ignore them.
The real danger? While
Security teams have never had better visibility into their environments and never been worse at confirming what they fix stays fixed.
Mandiant's M-Trends 2026 report puts the mean time to exploit at an estimated negative seven days. The Verizon 2025 DBIR puts median time to remediate edge device vulnerabilities at 32 days. These numbers have understandably driven the industry toward a clear
Why do the Riskiest SOC Alerts Go Unanswered?
Security operations teams are drowning in alerts. But the real problem isn't always alert volume; it's the blind spots. The most dangerous alerts are the ones no one is investigating.
A recent report from The Hacker News examined why certain high-risk alert categories - WAF, DLP, OT/IoT, dark web intelligence, and supply chain signals- consistently
Agentic AI is already running in production environments across many organizations today. It is executing tasks, consuming data, and taking actions β most likely without meaningful involvement from the security team. The industry conversation has largely framed this as a question of policy: allow it, restrict it, or monitor it? However, that framing misses the point.Β
The more urgent
Defending a network at 2 am looks a lot like this: an analyst copy-pasting a hash from a PDF into a SIEM query. A red team script is being rewritten by hand so the blue team can use it. A patch waiting on a change-approval window that's longer than the exploitation window itself.
Nobody in that chain is incompetent. Every human is doing their job correctly. The problem is the system, its
The dark secret of enterprise security operations is that defenders have quietly institutionalized the practice of not looking. This is not just anecdotal, but rather backed by a recent report investigating more than 25 million security alerts, including informational and low-severity, across live enterprise environments.Β
The dataset behind these findings includes 10 million monitored
The hardest part of cybersecurity isn't the technology, itβs the people.
Every major breach youβve read about lately usually starts the same way: one employee, one clever email, and one "Patient Zero" infection.
In 2026, hackers are using AI to make these "first clicks" nearly impossible to spot. If a single laptop gets compromised on your watch, do you have a plan to stop it from taking down
Having an incident response retainer, or even a pre-approved external incident response firm, is not the same as being ready for an incident. A retainer means someone will answer the phone. Operational readiness determines whether that team can do meaningful work the moment they do.Β
That distinction matters far more than many organizations realize. In the first hours of a security incident
For nearly 20 years, we at The Hacker News have mostly told scary stories about cyberspace β big hacks, broken systems, and new threats.
But behind every headline, thereβs a quieter, better story.
Itβs the story of leaders making tough calls under pressure, teams building smarter defenses, and security products that keep hunting threats 24/7 β even when itβs hard.
Most of the time, this work is
Every AI tool, workflow automation, and productivity app your employees connected to Google or Microsoft this year left something behind: a persistent OAuth token with no expiration date, no automatic cleanup, and in most organizations, no one watching it. Your perimeter controls don't see it. Your MFA doesn't stop it. And when an attacker gets hold of one, they don't need a password.
OAuth
While the software industry has made genuine strides over the past few decades to deliver products securely, the furious pace of AI adoption is putting that progress at risk. Businesses are moving fast to self-host LLM infrastructure, drawn by the promise of AI as a force multiplier and the pressure to deliver more value faster. But speed is coming at the expense of security.
In the wake of the