Disruptions of US water infrastructure have been in the news recently, which made us think of utilities in general. Utilities in general (water, electricity, natural gas) are often targets of military hacking as opposed to criminal hacking, which made us think of how much we emphasize one (criminal) and minimize the other (military). Let's get into that. The model we are used to is cyber crime, almost always in the form of being held for ransom by ransomware. In this scenario your systems are breached, then compromised, then a ransom demand is made. There is nothing subtle or covert about this process. The goal is immediate attention and payment. You don't have to wonder if you are being attacked. You cannot avoid knowing that you are being attacked. The military model is very different. Your adversary wants to know what they can do to you, but unless you are actually at war your adversary may not want you to know that they know. There will be no alarm bells. There will be mini...

Pythia Cyber applies behavioral science to cybersecurity to make cybersecurity more effective. But our take is slightly different from the common definition of "behavioral cybersecurity." How are we different? Let's first review what Google's AI summary tells us about "behavioral cybersecurity" which is a decent summary of the common definition: AI Overview Behavioral cybersecurity focuses on human actions and system patterns to stop threats. It covers two main areas: behavioral analytics for threat detection and behavior-oriented training for human habits. Behavioral Analytics (Systems and Data) Baseline creation: Software learns normal user or device actions. Anomaly detection: Flags strange login times or unusual data transfers. Insider threats: Catches stolen accounts moving through a network. Signature bypass: Finds new or unknown attacks that pass standard firewalls. Behavioral Training (The Human Factor) Habit focus: Replaces one-time compliance rules...

Cybersecurity (C/S) is a branch of Risk Management, not of Computer Science (CS) or Information Technology (IT). At Pythia Cyber we spend way too much time making that point, mostly to executives who think that they can leave C/S to the IT folks. But C/S has a big component of applied technology which has led to a long and complicated history of IT techniques and technologies trickling down from IT to C/S. So it is with AI: first AI was used to boost programmer productivity, then it was AI used to make people's emails easier to read and now it is used everywhere for everything all once. Specifically AI is being used in C/S for a number of functions. We are going to focus on "white hat" uses, in which people are trying to prevent cyber crime, as opposed to "black hat" uses in which people are trying to commit cyber crime. In the white hat world AI is being used to simulate attacks, probe for weaknesses, automate some monitoring tasks and keep abreast of new patch...

Way back when, at the dawn of my career as a software developer, I came across a parody of the Night Before Christmas entitled The Night Before Implementation . Just about all of the poem was hilarious to me at that point, as I was in the midst of exactly the same kind of grief. I especially enjoyed the final lines: The system was finished, the tests were concluded, the users' last changes were even included. And the user exclaimed with a snarl and a taunt, "It's just what I asked for, but not what I want!"   These lines came to mind when I read reporting about how another AI had escaped containment and hacked companies in the real world. (Here is my post on the previous incident.) Because I love the meta flavor of this, I will let Google's AI summarize the actions of Anthropic's AI in my post about people mismanaging AI. Anthropic reported that its AI models (including versions of Claude) accidentally breached the systems of three external organizations d...

Sometimes when we talk to potential clients we run into a strange dynamic: other people ask us why we would work with an already good cybersecurity program. It seems that people expect cybersecurity consultants to work with demonstrably ineffective cybersecurity programs, apparently assuming that we only show up right after some kind of serious incident. While this scenario has a shorter and easier sales cycle it is not our preferred way to work. Ineffective programs are generally ineffective through some combination of weak leadership, lack of talent and lack of rigor in the program. None of these issues is easy to fix, especially by outside consultants. That is why for conventional cybersecurity firms this scenario often leads to easy sales of training programs and other canned solutions but does not often lead to a great cybersecurity program. The truth is that good programs are usually focused on self-improvement. Steady and prolonged improvement is rarely accidental. Working with ...

  As a CISO you need to be a technical leader, and an organizational leader, and a developer of yourself. And, you will fail if you don't build the best cyber-defense team for the always-on threat environment. This series has discussed resilience and adaptive capacity. There are no shortcuts to these in the always-on threat environment.  Building the cyber-defense team for an always-on threat environment requires a CISO who has the discipline to optimize team performance. There are four pillars of building the cyber-defense team you need: [Hiring for Talent × Structure × Engagement × Development] = Adaptive Capacity Two of these pillars, hiring and development, are the "TAU" Brendan introduced us to in March 2026. Pythia Cyber is the only company on the planet that has a cyber-talent assessment for hiring and development. The other two pillars, structure and engagement, are what we at Pythia Cyber consult with you about to unlock and focus your talent. The CISO is the ar...