Essays

AUTHOR Q&A: New techno-thriller ‘The Virus’ simulates an AI malware outbreak gone global

By Byron V. Acohido

Eddy Willems has been a steady, pragmatic voice in cybersecurity for decades — known for breaking down complex threats in ways real people can understand.

Related: AI fueling disinformaton

With The Virus, he tries something new: a fast-paced techno-thriller that fuses autobiography with speculative fiction. The result reads part memoir, part cautionary tale, part simulation of how a global cyber outbreak might unfold.

The story toggles between threat briefings and the fictional rise of “Doomware,” a novel virus that spirals from localized disruption into full-blown global crisis. Willems casts himself as a lightly fictionalized version of his real-life role, offering insight through scenes that draw on years of direct frontline experience.

In today’s threat landscape — shaped by AI acceleration, ransomware-as-a-service, and politicized disinformation — The Virus feels eerily plausible. Its fictional twists are anchored in real-world behaviors and known vulnerabilities. Because Willems never strays too far from facts, the book functions as both gripping story and subtle cybersecurity literacy. It doesn’t preach, but it lands with urgency.

GUEST ESSAY: How to defend against decision mimicry — a practical AI-era checklist for leaders

By Nikolay Valov

AI is getting better at mimicking how leaders think — not just how they sound.

Related: Can AI mimic my personality?

The latest wave of deepfake attacks isn’t about dramatic voice-cloning or bold social engineering. Instead, the bigger risk may come from systems that quietly learn how your organization makes decisions — and then replicate that logic to steer outcomes in the wrong direction.

These attacks don’t require stolen passwords. They exploit routine patterns: approvals that cluster at day’s end, familiar pairs of names on high-risk items, predictable shortcuts when urgency spikes. Nothing about that behavior is confidential — it’s just how work gets done.

Modern AI is skilled at recognizing these cues. When adversaries introduce misleading signals into trusted systems, the result isn’t a red-flag breach. It’s a well-formed, data-cited, high-confidence recommendation that happens to benefit the

Comment | Read | November 13th, 2025 | Essays | Top Stories

GUEST ESSAY: Observability is no longer passive — it’s now a real-time driver of security action

By Dean Lewis and Anna Kapuscinska

Modern enterprises generate a steady stream of telemetry from infrastructure and applications.

This data spans infrastructure layers, workloads, and communication patterns across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

Traditionally, performance-focused engineering teams have relied on one set of observability tools, while security teams have used another. The result is a divide in tooling and perspective, where performance optimization and threat detection are treated as separate disciplines.

Kernel-level programmability is beginning to bridge that gap. A technology called eBPF now makes it possible to capture security-relevant signals directly from inside the operating system, in real time. With this, observability becomes more than a tool for performance tuning; it becomes a frontline source of security intelligence.

GUEST ESSAY: Why cyber defenses need a framework — and a clearer map of boundaries

By Jed Salazar

In the early years of enterprise computing, isolation had a clear home in the networking domain.

Network isolation meant a strong perimeter that kept internal traffic separate from the external world. Firewalls, VLANs, and DMZs were the primary tools. The edge was guarded, and anything inside the walls was assumed safe.

Related: The state of cloud security

That model broke down as applications shifted from monoliths on dedicated servers to microservices spread across hybrid clouds. Multitenancy became the default, and AI workloads began sharing GPUs. Attackers stopped focusing only on the front door and instead moved laterally through weak internal boundaries and under-protected runtime environments.

GUEST ESSAY: Why IoT security must start at the module—a blueprint for scaling IoT security

By Enrico Milanese

A few years ago, a casino was breached via a smart fish tank thermometer.

Related: NIST’s IoT security standard

It’s a now-famous example of how a single overlooked IoT device can become an entry point for attackers — and a cautionary tale that still applies today.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is expanding at an extraordinary pace. Researchers project over 32.1 billion IoT devices worldwide by 2030 — more than double the 15.9 billion recorded in 2023. From connected vehicles to smart agriculture, businesses are scaling their deployments fast. But security, far too often, is an afterthought.

This gap has real consequences. One in three data breaches now involves an IoT device. That’s because attackers know these endpoints are often poorly secured, rarely monitored, and easy to exploit.

Comment | Read | July 16th, 2025 | Essays | Top Stories

GUEST ESSAY: The AI illusion: Don’t be fooled, innovation without guardrails is just risk–at scale

By Naómi L Oosthuizen

Artificial intelligence is changing everything – from how we search for answers to how we decide who gets hired, flagged, diagnosed, or denied.

Related: Does AI take your data?

It offers speed and precision at unprecedented scale. But without intention, progress often leaves behind a trail of invisible harm. We are moving fast. Too fast. And in our excitement, we’ve stopped asking the most important question of all: at what cost?

AI’s influence is already everywhere, even when we don’t see it. It hides behind dashboards, recommendation engines, productivity scores, and predictive analytics. It tells us what’s trending, what’s risky, and what to do next. But just because it’s quiet doesn’t mean it’s safe. These tools are shaping human lives in deeply personal ways, and too often, they’re doing it invisibly and without accountability.

GUEST ESSAY: Cybercrime for hire: small businesses are the new bullseye of the Dark Web

By Doni Brass

Small businesses make up 90% of all companies worldwide and account for half of global GDP. Yet despite their importance, many lack the cybersecurity expertise and resources to fend off a rising tide of digital threats.

Rich in sensitive data and often connected to larger supply chains, small businesses have become prime targets for attackers. And thanks to an explosion of inexpensive “cybercrime-as-a-service” offerings on the dark web, launching an attack is easier — and cheaper — than ever.

Cybercrime industrialized

The dark web has become a marketplace where bad actors can buy tools and access with the ease of shopping for software. Many of these services exploit unpatched software flaws — some disclosed years ago — that remain active in business environments.

Recent Guardz research shows that more than 15% of the tools advertised on dark web forums target vulnerabilities like EternalBlue,

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