Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

The alerts come in at 3 AM. You've been awake for a full day and into the night, and there are critical questions you have to answer: Is this our problem, or someone else’s? A routing change that went sideways or lateral movement? A misconfigured ACL or an intrusion in progress? The questions get answered as quickly as possible by disconnected dashboards and human-error-prone manual processes. Before anyone else is awake to check the work.

AI agents can now propose network changes at machine speed, yet your team still has no staging environment to prove those changes before the 2 AM change window.

On September 9, Cisco confirmed what earlier warning signs had already hinted at: a security flaw in its Secure Firewall Management Center (Secure FMC) software, the tool that configures and controls Cisco firewalls across a network, is being actively exploited. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-20079, received a maximum severity score of 10.0 on the CVSS scale, the industry-standard scale used to rate how serious a vulnerability is.

On June 22, 2026, President Trump signed Executive Order 14412, accelerating the federal government’s transition to post-quantum cryptography. The order brings key migration deadlines forward from 2035 to 2030-2031 for high-value and high-impact systems. The Department of War followed with its own Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) Strategy, which sets additional deadlines and warns that a cryptographically relevant quantum computer is an existential threat to military missions.

On July 13, 2026, NSA, CISA, the FBI, and co-sealing partners from twelve other countries published AA26-194A, a joint Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA) warning that Center 16 of Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) continues to exploit vulnerable and poorly configured network devices across the defense industrial base, communications, energy, financial services, government facilities, and healthcare sectors. The advisory does not reference new exploits.

On June 2, 2026, President Trump signed Executive Order 14409, "Promoting Advanced Artificial Intelligence Innovation and Security." The framing is innovation first. But for federal network and security teams, the practical reality is a short, specific timeline to harden government systems, with AI now active on both sides of the cybersecurity equation. The deadlines are not aspirational.

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.