Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

It has been a week since we announced Forward Predict at our Innovation Day broadcast, and I'm still taking it in. Since the inception of networking, the industry has been working without a safety net, making changes in the production network without knowing their impact beforehand. The result has been outages and security breaches. This wasn’t a lack of diligence, it was because there was no way to know, with certainty, what a change would do to the production network before it was pushed.

Over the last decade, while working with Fortune 500 enterprises and some of the most secure government networks on the planet, I’ve consistently heard the same question: “Can your software tell me what will happen if I push this change?”

CVE-2025-53521 was first disclosed by F5 in October 2025 as part of their quarterly security advisory cycle. At that point, it was classified as a denial-of-service vulnerability with a CVSS v4 score of 8.7. Many security teams logged it and moved on, reasonably treating it as a lower-priority item in an already full patch queue.

CISA issued Emergency Directive 26-03 in response to active exploitation of vulnerabilities in Cisco SD-WAN management systems, specifically Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Manager and SD-WAN Controller platforms. The vulnerabilities include an authentication bypass flaw (CVE-2026-20127) that allows unauthenticated remote attackers to gain administrative privileges and manipulate network configuration, and a path traversal vulnerability (CVE-2022-20775) that enables local privilege escalation to root.

Walking the halls of Moscone Center last week, the energy was high, but the conversation had a notably different edge than last year. In 2025, everyone was asking, "What can AI do?" This year, "How can we trust it?" As the theme "The Power of Community" echoed across the keynotes, one thing became clear: a community is only as strong as its foundation. For network and cybersecurity professionals to truly operate as one, we must move beyond fragmented data to a single, trusted source of truth.

Network engineers have long understood redundancy. Redundant power, redundant links, redundant clusters. The reasoning is simple: any single component that can fail, will. But AI introduces a category of failure that most infrastructure teams have not yet built defenses against. Unlike hardware, AI models can become unavailable for reasons entirely outside your organization's control.

Every organization has invested in endpoint detection, identity, and cloud security, yet breaches continue to occur. You’ve secured the individual points but lack the context of how those points connect; you haven't secured the paths attackers navigate. Security teams are running more tools than ever: EDR on every endpoint, MFA for every identity, CSPM on every cloud tenant, and SIEMs ingesting terabytes of logs.

Cisco Live EMEA 2026 Amsterdam has officially wrapped up, and the path forward is clear: we have entered the Agentic AI Era. The event was centered around an industry shift towards a unified platform where AI agents don't just respond; they act. At Forward Networks, we aren’t just watching this shift happen; we are providing the foundation required to make it a reality.