Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

For the financial sector, 2026 isn’t just another year on the calendar—it’s a regulatory crossroads. With the RBI’s April 2026 deadline approaching in India and the increasingly stringent SAMA Cybersecurity Framework updates in the Middle East, “check-the-box” security is officially dead. Regulators have shifted their focus from internal controls to external visibility.

When news broke that the Head of CISA uploaded sensitive data to ChatGPT, the response was predictable: panic, headlines, and renewed questions about AI safety. But this incident reveals more about confusion than actual risk. The real issue? Most organizations don’t understand what they’re actually risking when they use AI tools. Let’s fix that.

As organizations migrate critical applications to the cloud, cloud-based DDoS attacks and defenses have become a growing concern amid the increasing number of cyber threats. Unlike traditional threats, these attacks are increasingly targeted, sophisticated, and capable of disrupting services in ways that can impact entire business operations and business continuity.

The shadow technology problem is getting worse. Over the past few years, organizations have scaled microservices, cloud-native apps, and partner integrations faster than corporate governance models could keep up, resulting in undocumented or shadow APIs. We’re now seeing this pattern all over again with AI systems. And, even worse, AI introduces non-deterministic behavior, autonomous actions, and machine-to-machine decision-making. Put simply, shadow AI is much, much riskier than shadow APIs.

Agent swarms are having a moment.

Now that CMMC is a mandatory part of participating in the defense supply chain, a lot of businesses are starting to grapple with the requirements and what they mean for operations. One of the biggest roadblocks is the use of an MSP, or Managed Services Provider. MSPs are the backbone of many businesses that don’t have the resources to spin up entire architectures on their own. It’s a huge benefit and allows companies to exist when otherwise the investment to get started would be way too high.

Approximately 1,600 Ivanti Endpoint Manager Mobile (EPMM) instances are currently exposed globally, creating a significant attack surface for enterprise mobile infrastructure. Ivanti has disclosed two critical vulnerabilities, CVE-2026-1281 and CVE-2026-1340, that allow unauthenticated remote code execution on affected on-premises deployments. CVE-2026-1281 has been confirmed exploited prior to disclosure and is now listed in CISA’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog.

If you listen to the news, the “Dark Web” sounds like a digital version of a back-alley movie set. But if you’re a threat researcher, it looks a lot more like a marketplace one that is surprisingly organized, highly volatile, and increasingly sophisticated. As we move through 2026, the underground isn’t just one big scary place; it’s a fragmented collection of forums, each with its own “culture” and specialty.

I am excited to announce my latest book, How AI and Quantum Impact Cyber Threats and Defenses: Shaping Your Cyber Defense Strategies.

There are different cybersecurity solutions that security teams can choose from. Some of the popular ones include EDR, NDR, XDR, and MDR. Each security solution offers significant benefits but also has certain limitations. Security teams can add the solution according to their requirements. But these solutions don’t guarantee safety against breaches. This doesn’t mean the tools are ineffective, but it is how security teams decide to use them.