Expert Analysis – Help Net Security

AI has brought us to a familiar inflection point in the story of privacy, cybersecurity, and online safety. We have an opportunity to apply decades of cybersecurity experience before the next generation of technology creates consequences we cannot easily reverse. I learned the importance of that responsibility through a three-year-old child I’ll call Adia. Her name is a protective pseudonym. Adia appeared in an image of child sexual exploitation uploaded to the internet. Investigators needed … More → The post Be a good AI ancestor: Cybersecurity already gave us the playbook appeared first on Help Net Security.

September 2026 Patch Tuesday set an all-time record with 973 CVEs addressed across the Microsoft portfolio. We’re only four months into the Patch Apocalypse and everyone seems to be numb with respect to the insane number of CVEs reported. Despite this massive number, only two, CVE-2026-85880 and CVE-2026-81963, were reported Known Exploited and none were Publicly Disclosed. So for most of us, it’s still business as usual, patch systems at highest risk, but be prepared … More → The post October 2026 Patch Tuesday forecast: Time for an Office cleanup appeared first on Help Net Security.

AI is transforming warfare and international conflict. Autonomous weapon systems pose a genuine threat to civilians. The war in Ukraine has become a proving ground for weapons that can navigate, identify targets, resist electronic countermeasures, and pursue and engage targets autonomously without the need for human control. That evolution should concern technology professionals, regulators, policymakers, and citizens everywhere. Recent reporting by The New York Times documented a particularly disturbing development. In July 2026, a Russian … More → The post The world must establish red lines for autonomous AI weapons appeared first on Help Net Security.

In the Gartner report Validate the Promises of AI SOC Agents With These Key Questions, analysts Craig Lawson and Andrew Davies posit that “By 2028, 70% of large SOCs will pilot AI agents to augment Tier 1 and Tier 2 operations, but only 15% will achieve measurable improvements without structured evaluation.” Just last year, Gartner placed AI SOC Agents at the Innovation Trigger stage with single-digit adoption. As of earlier this year, Gartner’s Hype Cycle … More → The post Gartner: 70% of SOCs will pilot AI agents. Only 15% will see results appeared first on Help Net Security.

Breach and attack simulation (BAS) has always had a supply chain. Somebody has to read the threat report, pull out the techniques, and turn them into something that will actually run against your controls. That somebody has always been a human red team. Up until a few months ago, turning a major new threat into working simulation content within 24 hours counted as very fast. Frontier AI models broke the symmetry. In the post-Mythos era, … More → The post What breach and attack simulation needs to become in the AI era appeared first on Help Net Security.

UPDATE: September 2026 Patch Tuesday is now live The Patch Apocalypse is continuing unabated. We are seeing record numbers of patches being released and reported CVEs continue to grow as well. August 2026 Patch Tuesday was the second biggest in history with 398 resolved CVEs: 42 rated Critical, 355 rated Important, and 1 rated Moderate. But despite the high number, again only one vulnerability was confirmed actively exploited in the wild, and two more were … More → The post September 2026 Patch Tuesday forecast: All we need is more time appeared first on Help Net Security.

The advice is to consume shared threat intelligence. Join the ISAC. Wire the community feeds into your pipeline. This looks like a fine advice and I agree to it. What nobody mentions you is the operating manual, because the access was never the hard part. A threat feed is someone else’s database. Someone else’s processes built it, someone else’s judgement calls shaped it, and someone else’s bad Tuesday is sitting it right now, waiting for … More → The post Your threat feed is someone else’s database: What ingesting malware intel at scale takes appeared first on Help Net Security.

The NIS2 Directive places direct obligations on organizations across supply chain risk management, incident reporting, and board-level accountability. October brings a new wave of legally binding deadlines across the EU, as member states move from transposition into enforcement. In Austria, the national implementation law enters into force once adopted; in Poland, mandatory self-registration closes on a fixed date set by the national authority. Broader NIS2 non-compliance exposes essential entities to fines up to €10 million … More → The post NIS2 compliance: Fixing IAM and access control before the 2026 audit appeared first on Help Net Security.

The security industry is currently transitioning to an era where both offense and defense are AI-led, and every SOC operates at machine speed. However, what most CISOs have not yet reckoned with is that the AI defenders they are about to deploy will inherit a data foundation that two years of ingestion cost pressure has quietly hollowed out. The result is a security industry heading into an AI era with less visibility than it had … More → The post A hollowed out data layer is making CISOs fly blind into AI attacks appeared first on Help Net Security.

First, a bit of good news: Enterprise defenses are recovering. However, it’s a narrow recovery, with a twist. Today, organizations are better at stopping loud attacks but have barely moved the needle at all against the quiet ones. This data, and a lot more, comes straight from the newly published Blue Report 2026, the fourth annual comprehensive study from Picus Labs. Based on more than 338 million attack simulations run in real production environments in … More → The post 338 million attack simulations reveal the state of enterprise defense appeared first on Help Net Security.