My Take

BLACK HAT ROUNDTABLE: Security pros dissect fallout from Hugging Face’s double guardrail failure

By Byron V Acohido

LAS VEGAS – It’s come to this. A cyberattack carried out by a machine.

Worse, a machine that picked its own victim. Whether that counts as agency is where the experts below part company.

Hugging Face disclosed July 16 that intruders had moved through its production infrastructure over more than four days, harvesting internal credentials and reaching a production database. Responders logged more than 17,000 actions. The company attributed the intrusion to an external AI agent and had no idea whose.

Its own investigation then hit a wall. The commercial models the incident response team reached for refused to analyze the attack logs, unable to tell a defender examining an exploit from an attacker running one. The forensics ran instead on GLM-5.2, a Chinese-made open-weight model distributed by Nvidia, hosted on Hugging Face’s own hardware.

MY TAKE: Big Tech is funding the AI race by cutting the skilled employees it needs to win it

By Byron V. Acohido

Big Tech isn’t buying the AI future with profits. It’s buying it with payroll.

The verdict is in. Wall Street hates the tradeoff.

Fortune’s Eva Roytburg laid it out last week in a piece on Big Tech’s AI spending. AI has pushed the biggest companies on earth into spending more than they earn, and the market has stopped extending them the benefit of the doubt. Alphabet, the parent of Google, posted the most profitable quarter in corporate history and got sold off anyway.

Every technology revolution runs the same three phases. A breakthrough arrives. People get fluent, then dependent. The powerful move in and take ownership of what everyone now needs. The printing press took centuries to run that course. The cloud took two decades. AI is doing it in three years. Now the giants are climbing over each other to own AI outright. That is the pattern I’ve spent three years tracking, and it’s the subject of my book, The Butterfly Volcano, out in a signed collector’s edition at Black Hat next month.

Microsoft is my barometer. I covered the company for USA Today during the Steve Ballmer years, and nobody is running this play harder than his successor, Satya Nadella, who took over in 2014.

Comment | Read | July 27th, 2026 | My Take | Top Stories

MY TAKE: AI agents force a rethink of enterprise service lines as vendors move up the tech stack

By Byron V. Acohido

ORLANDO — Companies are pulling AI agents into their daily operations through a dozen side doors.

Related: SaaS and AI agents converge

One of them was in focus at KB4-CON, KnowBe4’s annual customer conference at the Marriott World Center here last week.

The Clearwater, Fla.-based cybersecurity training vendor used the conference to lay out a pivot from a training-focused company to a workforce security platform — built through extending its core services to adjacent IT operations.

The logic holds. It’s a way to help its existing customer base leverage AI to streamline vital employee training and also boost protective filtering of company email.

But that’s just the starting line, CEO Bryan Palma told me. The company is stepping forward to help companies mitigate the cascading risks of a hybrid workforce where humans and AI agents share the same workflows.

“People say the agentic era is comparable to the Industrial Revolution. I think it’s true,” said Palma, who took over as CEO in May 2025. “It’s probably one of the biggest inflection points in humanity. For KnowBe4 that’s a lot of fun. We’ve been anticipating it.”

Comment | Read | May 18th, 2026 | My Take | Top Stories

LW ROUNDTABLE: Microsoft Edge normalizes credential exposure — security pros push back

By Byron V. Acohido

By design.

Two words that have done an awful lot of heavy lifting in the cybersecurity industry over the years. They tend to surface whenever a vendor wants to wave off a serious finding without fixing it.

Related: The unending password problem

Microsoft just deployed them again. This time in response to a Norwegian researcher who showed that Edge holds every saved password in plaintext memory for the entire browser session — even credentials for sites the user never opens. The disclosure landed just days before World Password Day.

A working demonstration

Tom Jøran Sønstebyseter Rønning is no hobbyist. He leads proactive security at Statnett SF, the Norwegian state grid operator. He disclosed the finding April 29 at Palo Alto Networks Norway’s BIG Bite of Tech conference. On May 4 he posted a video walkthrough on X. He also released a proof-of-concept tool, EdgeSavedPasswordsDumper, on GitHub.

Comment | Read | May 13th, 2026 | My Take | Top Stories

RSAC 2026: No easy fixes for expanding AI attack surface, but a coordinated response is emerging

By Byron V. Acohido

SAN FRANCISCO — Forty-four thousand cybersecurity practitioners converged on Moscone Center this week with an urgent question: how do you secure a network when everything — the technology, the threats, the tools — is changing faster than anyone can govern it?

Microsoft’s Vasu Jakkal set the scale on day one. She noted that IDC projects 1.3 billion AI agents in operation by 2028 — each one requiring the same governance and protection organizations currently apply to human users. That number puts a concrete frame around both waves: the tools needed to defend AI-native infrastructure, and the tools needed to secure AI systems themselves. Neither problem is theoretical anymore.

The week’s most unexpected signal came not from the vendor floor but from the main stage, where former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern joined new RSAC CEO Jen Easterly for a conversation on leading through crisis.

The message landed differently in this room than it might have elsewhere: the challenge in front of this industry has grown past what any single organization, or any single technology, solves alone. What’s required now is the kind of collective will that Ardern built in the aftermath of Christchurch — clear values, shared purpose, leaders who show up.

MY TAKE: A decade of cyber collaboration, built under Obama, is now hostage to a political grudge

By Byron V. Acohido

SAN FRANCISCO — I was in the room at Stanford in February 2015 when President Obama used the bully pulpit to launch what became a decade of hard-won public-private collaboration in cybersecurity.

It didn’t take much to tear it asunder.

At RSAC 2026 this week, that decade of work is suddenly on the line — because RSAC named Jen Easterly, former CISA director under Biden, as its new CEO. In any other era, a perfectly mainstream hire. Not so with the Trump White House, which pulled federal agencies from the conference within days.

Alan Shimel of Security Boulevard called it a temper tantrum. He’s right.

But all is not lost. My read, having spent three days on this floor talking to the career practitioners who built this collaboration from both sides of the public-private divide, is that they are still at the table, still working, and not inclined to fold their tents over the geopolitical hysterics of the moment.

MY TAKE: As RSAC 2026 opens, AI has bifurcated cybersecurity into two wars—the clock is running

By Byron V. Acohido

SAN FRANCISCO — RSAC 2026 opens here Monday at Moscone Center, with upwards of 40,000 cybersecurity professionals, executives, and policy leaders, myself among them, filing in to take stock of an industry under acute pressure.

Related: RSAC 2026’s full agenda

The dominant undercurrent is already unmistakable: AI hasn’t just arrived in cybersecurity. It has split the field in two.

For the past year, the industry has been simultaneously fighting two wars. One is about using AI to transform defense — rebuilding threat detection, threat response, and security operations from the ground up with AI at the center.

The other war is newer and in some ways more disorienting: figuring out how to secure AI systems themselves — even as attackers are learning to turn those same systems against the companies racing to deploy them.

These two wars demand entirely new weapons and fundamentally different thinking. They are both accelerating — and as the conference opens, it is far from clear that defenders are keeping pace with either.

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The Last Watchdog

My Take

BLACK HAT ROUNDTABLE: Security pros dissect fallout from Hugging Face’s double guardrail failure

By Byron V Acohido

MY TAKE: Big Tech is funding the AI race by cutting the skilled employees it needs to win it

By Byron V. Acohido

MY TAKE: AI agents force a rethink of enterprise service lines as vendors move up the tech stack

By Byron V. Acohido

LW ROUNDTABLE: Microsoft Edge normalizes credential exposure — security pros push back

By Byron V. Acohido

RSAC 2026: No easy fixes for expanding AI attack surface, but a coordinated response is emerging

By Byron V. Acohido

MY TAKE: A decade of cyber collaboration, built under Obama, is now hostage to a political grudge

By Byron V. Acohido

MY TAKE: As RSAC 2026 opens, AI has bifurcated cybersecurity into two wars—the clock is running

By Byron V. Acohido