Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

It was time to write another book. That’s what I thought when I heard that Corelight wanted to update its 2021 book on network detection and response (NDR). Tamara Crawford, who owned the project, scheduled a meeting with me and asked if I might be interested in helping, depending on who might write the text.

IBM’s 2025 Cost of a Data Breach Report found that 97% of organizations that experienced an artificial intelligence (AI)-related security incident lacked proper access controls on AI systems. The same report highlighted that 63% of organizations lacked governance policies to manage AI or prevent shadow AI. Despite those statistics, AI is now deeply embedded in workflows across critical business functions. Employees are using public AI tools to work faster.

SCA tools are good at identifying vulnerabilities in your dependencies. They’re not built for the harder part of vulnerability risk management: telling you whether those vulnerabilities are actually reachable in your application, or which assets are running an affected component the moment a zero-day drops. Seemplicity’s SCA Analyst solves both problems inside a single centralized vulnerability management platform.

Static application security testing (SAST) tools are intentionally conservative. Traditional scanners identify code that appears exploitable and flag the snippet for review, even when protections elsewhere in the application prevent exploitation. Although that approach helps teams catch vulnerabilities, it also creates false positives that consume developer time, slow remediation efforts, and make future alerts easier to dismiss.

AI’s latest wave is reshaping cybersecurity in a fundamental way. Capabilities that once were limited to a handful of frontier models are now widely accessible, cheaper, and embedded across more environments. As access expands, risk is growing fast and scaling even faster.

For years, development and security practitioners have treated dynamic application security testing as a critical final safety check before code goes live. However, the external attack surface is expanding faster than mid-sized security teams can realistically manage. In this high-velocity environment, legacy DAST tools are increasingly failing to keep pace.

Right now, a bot is running a single command against a website and reading the first few lines that come back. Maybe yours. It is not personal. The bot is working down a list of a few hundred thousand WordPress sites, and any given site is on it because WordPress runs more than 40% of the web and the same small set of mistakes shows up on most of them. You can read exactly what that bot reads. It takes about ten minutes, the tools are already on your machine, and none of it is hacking.

In June 2026, ServiceNow disclosed that a customer-facing API endpoint had been shipped with authentication switched off, letting anyone query internal tables on hosted customer instances without a password. It wasn’t an isolated case. In 2025, a deprecated Stripe payment endpoint, still connected to live systems, let attackers validate stolen card numbers for months before anyone noticed.

Independent journalists, analysts, and working CISOs are all reaching the same conclusion about questionnaire-based, point-in-time risk assessment: it’s no longer enough. Risk and vulnerabilities keep growing, compliance obligations keep stacking up, and AI adds an entirely new surface to account for. CISOs need something better: a continuous approach with visibility across their business, that actually reduces risk rather than just documenting it.

In Part I of this series — “Behind the Fake Tax Notice” — the Foresiet Threat Intelligence Team mapped a multi-country, tax- and invoice-themed phishing network built around hxxps://adresesvip/. That infrastructure, hosted on Alibaba Cloud in Hong Kong, was used to target taxpayers across India, Germany, Malaysia and Japan. The first report documented the lure, the sender and the hosting, but left one question open: what does the campaign actually deliver?