One thing the past month's burst of unanticipated/unintended AI intrusions by models from OpenAI and Anthropic shows is that we're in the always-on security environment. Cybersecurity has always been about being prepared for multiple unscheduled events, attacks, systems misuse, etc. But these were predictable attacks through predictable channels by predictable entities. Predictability gives you multiple benefits as a practitioner. First, you had a baseline knowledge of the threat surface and attack channels. Second, you could create bespoke processes or follow best-in-class processes such as the NIST CSF and be assured that you had a degree of security -- and you could explain that to your leadership. Third, your development path through the right 'elite' university and certifications and AI basics all made sense; maybe it was performative theater in a way but it was the right approach. None of that is true in the always-on security environment. In brief your attack sur...

  Sing, o goddess, of the litany of the hacked from July 2026. Sure, we're keeping with the Homer theme, and yes we appreciate that the Anthropic product that 'launched a thousand ships' (+/-) was named Mythos.  Let's check the litany for this month. Our point is not shame, but shared awareness to pool resources where possible and create a sense of community. Thus, the litany now includes: Department of Education and police national legal database (both UK)...Fairlife Milk (a unit of Coca-Cola)...AssuranceAmerica...Greenfield Communications...Accenture Consulting...Homeland Security Information Network (HSIN)... In mitigation: one week later there is already a 'post-mortem' of the OpenAI/HuggingFace incident c/o Jen Easterly : https://cloudsecurityalliance.org/artifacts/hugging-face-ciso-post-mortem. We'll come back to that another time. But in aggravation (yep that again) Anthropic announced that one of its products also acted autonomously, though allegedly...

I recently did not take enough time to do something as securely as I should have. I was annoyed with myself when I realized that, not least because I realize that this is a pattern with me and one that I need to break. When the stakes are lower and time is shorter I sometimes rush to get a task off of my list, an email out of my inbox or a colleague off of my back. And the more I think about it the more I think that rushing is insecure. It is tempted to copy that file, email that file or hand off that file just to be done with it. It is probably fine. But I know, deep down, that consistency and care are vital to security. I know that it almost never makes sense to compromise just this once. (This is also a theme of a recent post of Ted's.) I offer this an answer to the question "what does Pythia Cyber mean by the 'behavioral element of cybersecurity?'" This is an example of human behavior being a critical part of cybersecurity. Cybersecurity is more than a protoc...

Our friend Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is back at it. He might not forgive Argentina, um, not winning the 2026 FIFA Men's WC Final, but he is here for us. His latest Substack post poses an interesting question:  Is AI Reducing Human Creativity to the Intellectual Equivalent of Elevator Music? In short his answer is Yes. (Along the way, Tomas discusses the history of Muzak, which apparently was founded in the 1930s in the service of capitalism: Music, executives discovered, could influence mood, reduce perceived waiting times, increase productivity, and even encourage people to spend more money. Art became environmental engineering. Leveraging the communication technologies of the time, from leased telephone lines to centrally distributed recordings and later inexpensive synthesizers and digital production, Muzak industrialized pleasantness. The objective was never to compose the next Gershwin concerto. It was to create a soundtrack that nobody would notice precisely because it never d...

This past weekend, like about 27% of the population of the US, I went here to a showing of the movie The Odyssey .  I don't do movie reviews because I know my limits. But in case you're undecided I can say it was worth it because the story is...epic. (The horse scenes -- get it, Trojan Horse? I could have written off tickets as a business expense! -- were intense.) At nearly the same time this review came out over at The Growth Equation . And as it is within my scope, I'll comment on it. Entitled "What The Odyssey Can Teach Us About Navigating Life," the good people at The Growth Equation saw parallels between the multi-decade travails of Odysseus and everyday challenges -- and how to achieve greatness. Let's review relative to life in cybersecurity. Right up front it's important to note that Odysseus is not a "nice guy." He's described immediately as andra polytropon, a man of many turns (or as Professor Wilson's translation has it, ...

Our HR Guru JP Elliott is back at it. In his latest post he asks a good question: Proven, Better, or Just New to You? It's easy because it's fun to go for the bright shiny object: stuff that's cool, cutting-edge, new. AI-based SOCs are a good example of this, but in the behavioral science realm basically AI-anything is our bright shiny object (until quantum computing comes along). Why? Because new is fun, and you do not have to deal with stuff that is what you do -- a.k.a., proven. There are probably good reasons why it's proven and why you implemented it. Usually these reasons boil down to (a) you know what's going to happen, (b) it's industry-standard, (c) Legal signed off on it, and (d) more or less it's fool-proof (of course until better fools come along). But in a changing environment, people want better . Buying site search engines do this all the time, labelling options as "good," "better," "best." Well, it works for tale...