Kevin Greene
Chief Cybersecurity Technologist – Public Sector, at BeyondTrust
Cyber Security Awareness Month is a reminder that threats move faster than the tools we have to contain them. AI compressed the gap between vulnerability disclosure and exploitation. Months became days, and in some instances hours. And the same flaw sitting in a water treatment plant is sitting in a school district server and a county office.
Technical debt is not an IT problem. It is access. It is the leverage threat actors use to get inside our infrastructure and critical systems. Unsupported devices are the easiest way in. End-of-support doesn't mean broken. It means no more security patches to close attack vectors. Automated scanning finds a forgotten router or camera long before anyone thinks to replace it.
Volt Typhoon is a great example. The FBI dismantled a botnet built from end-of-life routers that Chinese state actors used to preposition inside U.S. water, energy, and transportation networks. Preparation has to go beyond patching. Recovery isn't restoring files. It's sustaining operations. Whether the water keeps running. Whether the school opens Monday. Whether the county makes payroll.
Resiliency is decided before the attack, not after - by how the systems were built, not by how fast anyone responds. And the harder question is who holds the keys, the leverage in our systems. Work and home now share the same networks and the same passwords. AI agents are acting on our behalf in ways most people have never examined.
It is important to retire what is no longer supported. Build for continuity. Know what has access to what is awareness. When we patch, it protects our devices, but knowing who holds the keys protects the mission capabilities.
Chris Radkowski
Security and Risk Expert at Pathlock
Cyber Security Awareness Month is an important reminder that security can no longer focus only on preventing employees from clicking malicious links. With AI adoption accelerating, awareness of how AI agents are used is becoming essential. AI has enormous potential to improve productivity through automation, and whenever a technology helps people work faster and more easily, they will find ways to use it. The challenge for organisations is not to prevent AI adoption, but to ensure it takes place within established security and governance frameworks rather than outside them.
Yet many organisations lack visibility into their AI environments. According to the 2026 Pathlock AI Governance Gap Report, more than half of organisations (51 per cent) are not confident they know about all the AI agents operating within their systems, while 31 per cent are unsure whether AI-related incidents have occurred at all. With visibility this limited, the true scale of AI-driven irregularities is likely greater than formal reporting suggests.
Organisations should educate employees about the safe and responsible use of AI, but awareness alone is not enough. Clear policies must be supported by the right governance and security technology. Organisations need continuous visibility into which human and non-human identities have access, what actions they perform, and whether those actions are appropriate within their business context.
Jason Soroko
Senior Fellow at Sectigo
Quantum readiness isn't a switch you flip overnight. It's a continuous, uneven migration across every system an organisation owns. The first step is understanding where cryptography exists across the environment, but inventory alone isn't enough. Organisations also need context to understand which cryptographic assets support critical systems, where the greatest risks lie, and what should be prioritised first. With that visibility and understanding, they can take a risk-based approach to planning and build the crypto agility needed to adapt as cryptographic standards evolve. Quantum readiness isn't about fixing everything at once. It's about making informed decisions and steadily reducing risk over time.
Nick Heddy
President and Chief Commerce Officer at Pax8
Cyber Security is entering a new era. For the last two decades, security has largely been about protecting networks, devices, and identities. In the years ahead, it will increasingly be about protecting autonomous systems, AI agents, and the growing web of digital interactions they create on our behalf. As organisations embrace AI to drive productivity and innovation, attackers will use the same technologies to scale threats faster than ever before. The result is an arms race where speed, automation, and intelligence become the defining advantages.
The future of cyber security is not simply more tools or more alerts. It is a shift from reactive defence to proactive resilience. Businesses will need systems that can continuously monitor, learn, predict, and respond in real time. Human expertise will remain essential, but the most effective organisations will pair human judgment with machine-scale intelligence. Security will become less about detecting breaches after they occur and more about preventing them before they impact operations.
For small and midsize businesses, this evolution presents both a challenge and an opportunity. Historically, advanced cybersecurity capabilities were often reserved for large enterprises with dedicated security teams. Today, AI and managed services are democratizing access to sophisticated protection, allowing organisations of every size to benefit from enterprise-grade security outcomes. The goal is not to eliminate risk, because that is impossible. The goal is to create resilient businesses that can adapt, recover, and continue serving customers in an increasingly digital world.
As we look toward the next generation of technology, one thing is clear: cybersecurity is no longer a technology issue alone. It is a business imperative, a trust imperative, and ultimately a human imperative. The organisations that thrive in the future will be those that view security not as a barrier to innovation, but as the foundation that makes innovation possible.
Ram Varadarajan
CEO at Acalvio
Cyber Security Awareness Month tends to focus on the moment of compromise – the phishing email, the weak password, the unpatched system. But less attention is given to what happens after an attacker is already inside, which is where the real damage is done.
Reconnaissance is a search for confidence. A configuration file may point to a database, a directory query turns up a server that looks worth examining, and gradually an attacker pieces together a route toward systems that matter. From even a limited foothold, an attacker can assemble a working map of the environment: which systems appear connected, where credentials might work, and which path seems worth testing next. AI is changing the pace of that work. It can help an attacker interpret query results, select another system to probe, and continue with less human direction, shortening the time between each discovery and the next action. Anthropic's 2026 analysis of accounts banned for malicious cyber activity documented exactly this, including a campaign in which an AI agent conducted reconnaissance and internal discovery on its own, choosing what to probe next.
A directory query or connection attempt may give the SOC little reason to escalate on its own, even when its result tells the intruder where to look next. Deception gives defenders a way to influence that next decision by shaping what the intruder encounters: a credential artifact placed where an attacker searching an endpoint would plausibly find it, appearing to lead to a server that fits the organization's naming conventions, when both are false. An attempt to use that credential produces an alert tied to the account, endpoint, and action, giving the security team a specific lead to investigate before the attacker moves further. An attacker may find a way to gain access, but deception makes sure they can't trust what they find once they're in.
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