Harbinger of the Cyber Age

  Long before I ever heard of Dungeons and Dragons, my first role-playing game experience was the futuristic world of Cyberpunk, where hackers, called ‘Netrunners,’ battled each other in cyberspace in pursuit of wealth and power. Back then, the idea of an AI jacking into corporate systems, rewriting its own code on the fly, and outmaneuvering security agents was both thrilling and purely fictional. But today, those neon-soaked fantasies are starting to look more like forecasts. The difference? The AIs aren’t avatars in the grid. They’re real, and they’re rewriting the rules of cybersecurity in the background while most of us are still playing catch-up In today’s cybersecurity landscape, the line between science fiction and operational reality is disappearing fast. Earlier this month, Wired reported that the AI tool XBOW is now topping HackerOne’s vulnerability leaderboard. Simultaneously, so-called "blackhat LLMs" like WormGPT and FraudGPT have been quietly circulating in Di...

A little less than two thousand years ago, Roman citizens were forced to watch as their mighty capital and empire came crashing to the ground at the hands of an unstoppable Visigoth army. Perhaps the worst part of the destruction, at least for Roman leaders, was facing the uncomfortable truth that these soldiers destroying their city were doing so with the very weapons, armor, and training that Rome had provided, under the pretense that those tools would be used to protect the empire. In cybersecurity, we face the same uncomfortable situation almost daily. The powerful tools we create to defend, outwit, and protect against cybercriminals often become the very tools those cybercriminals use against us. A recent report from Proofpoint highlights this growing danger: a threat group tracked as UNK_SneakyStrike has been leveraging an open-source penetration testing tool—TeamFiltration—for account takeover (ATO) campaigns across Microsoft Entra ID environments. What’s Happening TeamFiltratio...