Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Peak season brings challenges to the hospitality industry every year. Thousands of guests, temporary staff, vendors, and business partners interact daily with reservation systems, management platforms, mobile apps, and loyalty programs. That operational complexity makes hotels a particularly attractive target for cybercriminals. Artificial intelligence hasn't created a new problem for hotels, it is simply accelerating an existing one: identity-based attacks.

For years, cybersecurity has faced a persistent talent shortage. Yet the real challenge for many organizations isn't simply finding more people; it's having the specialized capabilities needed to investigate and respond to today's increasingly sophisticated threats.

The workplace has fundamentally changed. Employees work from home, customer locations, airports, coffee shops, hotels, and virtually anywhere with an internet connection. At the same time, the applications they depend on are spread across Microsoft 365, SaaS platforms, private cloud environments, corporate data centers, and on-premises business applications. For managed service providers (MSPs), this represents one of the largest recurring revenue opportunities available today.

MSPs are operating in an increasingly demanding environment. Every client they onboard adds more applications, identities, endpoints, cloud services, data, and third-party dependencies. All of this drives up the daily operational workload that teams have to absorb.

Generative AI has quickly moved from experimentation to everyday business use. Employees use AI tools to create content, write code, analyze data, automate repetitive tasks, and interact with business applications in entirely new ways. At the same time, software vendors are embedding AI capabilities into the products organizations already use every day, often without requiring users to adopt separate tools.

We’re proud to announce that two WatchGuard leaders have been named to CRN’s Top 100 Executives list for 2026, recognizing their leadership, innovation, and commitment to the channel. This year’s honorees are: Each year, CRN’s Top 100 Executives list celebrates leaders who are shaping the future of the IT industry through their vision, business leadership, and commitment to the partner ecosystem.

For years, phishing has worked for one simple reason: it exploits the weakest link, the user. The defensive strategy has followed the same formula: better email filtering, more user awareness, and an extra layer of authentication. It wasn't perfect, but it was a workable balance.

One particularly concerning trend in the recent evolution of phishing is the rise of QR code-based attacks. It doesn't rely on new malware or sophisticated exploits. Instead, it takes advantage of something much simpler: the trust users place in QR codes every day. Over the last few months, QR codes have become one of the most popular tactics for steering users toward malicious sites on mobile devices or in browser environments, where the visibility of many security tools is very limited.

Artificial intelligence is quickly becoming one of the most transformative technologies in cybersecurity. Unfortunately, it's not transforming the industry exclusively for defenders. Attackers are already experimenting with AI to accelerate reconnaissance, analyze software for vulnerabilities, develop fully-functional exploits, and automate nearly all parts of the attack lifecycle.