Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Security teams have spent years improving their ability to detect and respond to cyber threats. More visibility, better tools, and richer telemetry have helped organizations identify suspicious activity across users, devices, applications, and infrastructure. But the nature of the challenge is changing. Modern attacks are rarely defined by a single event.

Every vendor this year says the same thing: AI is transforming cybersecurity. True, and not useful. Here is the useful version. AI is doing two things at once. It is compressing the time between a vulnerability being found and being exploited, which is the part everyone talks about. And it is quietly installing a brand new attack surface inside your clients' businesses, which is the part nobody is selling against yet.

HTTPS protects communications between users and the services they access by encrypting data in transit. That makes it much harder for someone to intercept and read that information. But there is a trade-off: encryption can also prevent security controls from seeing what is inside the traffic they are supposed to protect. Your Firebox may know that a user is connecting to a website or service. Without HTTPS inspection, however, it may have limited visibility into what is actually being exchanged.

Cybersecurity teams have spent years preparing for malware, ransomware, and high-volume attacks. Yet the latest WatchGuard Global Threat Report reveals a more nuanced and potentially more dangerous reality: attackers are becoming quieter, more evasive, and increasingly reliant on stolen credentials, legitimate tools, encrypted communications, and long-known vulnerabilities. For MSPs and IT leaders, the challenge isn't simply understanding these trends.

If you've glanced at a vulnerability tracker lately, the numbers look alarming. The Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams (FIRST) now projects roughly 66,000 CVEs will be published in 2026; up from a February forecast of 59,427 and closing in on 70,000 by some counts. That would follow a record 2025, which finished at roughly 48,000 disclosed CVEs, itself a sharp climb from about 40,000 the year before. It's tempting to read that curve as a sign that software is getting worse. It isn't.

Guest post by Neil Holme, Founder and CEO of Impact Business Technology, a WatchGuard partner. The cloud environments MSPs manage change every week. Clients adopt new SaaS applications, AI tools, and collaboration services, making it difficult to track what is in use, how it is configured, and which access permissions remain active. Exposure grows without a clear warning sign until an incident occurs. The cloud is also the fastest-growing attack surface an MSP manages.

The European Commission has published its first official guidance to help businesses implement the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA)—the EU regulation establishing cybersecurity requirements for products with digital elements. The timeline is critical: reporting obligations for actively exploited vulnerabilities and severe incidents take effect on September 11, 2026, while the core CRA requirements will become mandatory from December 11, 2027.

The NIST’s changes in how the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) operates have fundamentally shifted how organizations interpret the vulnerabilities published in this go-to registry. In the past, the NVD provided vulnerability enrichment data, such as CVSS scores, affected products, CWE classifications, and reference links.