In a climate where companies largely gain attention only when something negative happens, it’s time to celebrate and recognize the companies who are best in class when it comes to cybersecurity. That’s why we applaud Forbes’ decision to produce the industry’s first list of America’s Most Cybersecure Companies. These companies illuminate how cybersecurity is being taken seriously as a core business issue.

‍As a CIO at a mid-sized company, I faced a new challenge when vendors asked for more specifics about our information security and the protocols we have in place to safeguard our sensitive data. Naturally, those questions were directed toward the IT team (and were phrased in ISO 27001 terminology), which was initially challenging because we had limited knowledge of that particular standard.

The constant evolution of technology has led to increasingly sophisticated and frequent cybersecurity threats. As a result, the need for skilled professionals who can effectively handle these threats has never been more pressing. Sadly, there is a shortage of such experts to meet the growing demand. The (ISC)² Cybersecurity Workforce Study revealed that the global cybersecurity workforce gap is 3.4 million people.

While some of the obvious misuse of ChatGPT in the world of cyber security was not unexpected – asking the artificial intelligence to write harder-to-detect malware and easier-to-convince phishing emails – a new threat has emerged that can leverage the very nature of the large language model. Ultimately, ChatGPT is a learning machine, and bases its answers on information it sources from the Internet.