With so many people spending so much time and money and attention on AI, let's consider what happens if all the hype is justified and AI suddenly can do almost any job. Uh, I mean, can be used to boost almost anyone's productivity. Applying AI to the workplace the choice is enhancement versus replacement. By "enhancement" I mean that employers will ride the productivity gains to provide better service at a better price. By "replacement" I mean that employers will ride the productivity curve to fire people and increase profits by delivering worse service at the same price for higher profit. Which option is best? Which is most likely? What happened the last time this option arose? The answer is "it depends." As is so often the case, the follow-up question is "what is the right question?" I was working in "business process engineering" through the 1980s and 1990s when "computerize" was a verb. It meant "to apply a co...

The litany of the hacked is our listing for each known/reported hack in the previous month. The point of the litany is not shame but awareness-raising that, well, these sorts of things happen. Apparently, hackers went for the lay-up while the NY Knicks wrapped up a WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP to attack MSG. Thanks -- not -- a lot, MSG. And so, the litany of the hacked, which for June 2026 now includes: Madison Square Garden Sports Corp...Station Casinos… Israel Holocaust Support Center…Dashlane…Meta’s AI support bot…Anthropic's Claude platform...MyPillow…Fortinet...California Water Service...NAIC...Sacramento Fire Department...University of Nottingham...Texas Department of Fish and Wildlife...Alamo Heights ISD...Prince George's County (MD)... Other than the MSG hack, the one that catches our attention is the attack on Anthropic. In this attack, Anthropic accused a Chinese commerce company that shall not be named in setting up a flood -- almost 25000 -- of fake accounts to steal informat...

AI & Cybersecurity What role should AI play in cybersecurity? Driven by the quick and effective adoption of AI by cyber criminals cybersecurity professionals are under pressure to react somehow, as Ted has already discussed in this post . In that post Ted points out that the business side of the house and the Cybersecurity group (C/S) have very different wants and needs from AI, and that C/S will allow the business side to dictate strategy at their peril. This post is about how C/S can frame that discussion so as to be productive rather than combative. You can't do whatever they are doing because AI means different things to C/S than it does to them. The Business Side Let us consider how AI looks to the business side of the house so that we can define some of those differences and better communicate those differences. Utopian View AI will usher in a new era of workplace productivity and satisfaction because it will handle all the white collar drudgery that plagues our workdays....

And eventually -- it stops. They move on. You are victorious, but frazzled. Now is the time to take stock, rebuild relationships, and prepare for the next engagement. Time for the final NIST CSF pillar, Recover. Let's let Brendan discuss it : Recover is the step you take to undo the damage or restore the service. Recover is a bit more deliberate and thoughtful than Respond. You have time pressure, almost always, but there is rather less of it. The cybersecurity crisis is over, but if you need to keep your systems down for the recovery, then the operations crisis has just begun: how long can the downtime continue, in the name of preventing future problems and gathering evidence? The answer depends on your situation. Your ability to arrive at that answer often depends on how well thought-out your IRP is. Recover should always end with a review that considers how to be better in the future. This is a crucial step to making you safer than you were before. It is very common to just want...

It's time to break the glass -- don't just stand there, do something! This is no time to find out whether your cybersecurity governance is adequate, or whether you have identified all the right assets, or whether your protection protocols are in place. Your systems have detected a problem and it's time for action. Let's let Brendan discuss it : Both the Respond pillar the Recover pillar are unlike the other three, they are triggered by an incident and different from the other steps because the other steps are part of normal operations. Respond and Recover also always happen in tandem, which is why we group them together as part of the Incident Response Plan (IRP). The IRP formalizes incident handling, so that everyone knows what their role is in advance. The IRP covers both the Respond step (halting the problem and trying to restore normal operations) and the Recover step (undoing as much of the damage as possible, preventing a recurrence). The IRP gives us a Respond ch...

  Detecting cyber-intrusions or threats to information systems falls naturally in the NIST CSF sequence after you've identified what assets you're going to defend and you've developed a process to defend those assets. Let's let Brendan discuss detection : The Detect pillar is where daily Cybersecurity operations come into play. Someone has to do the monitoring, and not simply watch the events go by, but confirm that the activity being monitored is either expected or appropriate. Most importantly, the Detect step is about separating the worrisome from the normal, and then taking appropriate action to either confirm that there is an issue or to discover that there is a good explanation. If there is a problem, then we have “an incident” so we go to the Respond pillar (and Incident Response Plan (IRP)). As part of Detect, you gather evidence. Sometimes the evidence shows you that all is well. Sometimes the evidence shows you that something odd is happening. Sometimes the ev...