Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Adversaries are using AI to launch cyber attacks in record time, forcing security teams to measure responses in minutes instead of months. Phishing campaigns built with large language models (LLMs) achieve click-through rates 4.5 times higher than traditional methods,1 and the average time between initial compromise and lateral movement has fallen to just 29 minutes.2 This is a 65% increase from the prior year.2 State and local governments and higher education institutions are at an inflection point.

Consolidating every security finding into one place solves visibility, but it doesn’t reduce risk on its own. Aggregation without context just makes the backlog feel bigger. Real remediation depends on answering four questions about each exposure: what needs fixing, why it matters, where the fix happens, and who owns it.

‍Last updated: August 20, 2026‍ A supplier breach or a tough question from a regulator can force a rushed third-party risk management (TPRM) evaluation. You need an answer before the next steering meeting. This list compares the 12 best third-party risk management tools in 2026, based on the capabilities that separate them in daily use, so you can shortlist faster. Whether you're an analyst running early research or a CISO approving the budget, you're working from the same criteria.

Most organizations experience a strange DNS problem at some point: The same domain name means something different depending on who's asking for it. For example, a single internal app, workspace.company.com, might need to serve a locked-down instance to finance, a live staging build to engineering, and a stable production build to support — all under one domain and from the same DNS server.

Top tips is a weekly column where we highlight what's trending in the tech world and share practical ways to navigate these shifts. This week, we're looking at spear-phishing: how cybercriminals weaponize social engineering, why your natural instinct can act as a security blind spot, and practical steps to verify suspicious requests before you take action. I would like to make a confession: I’m a well-versed tech expert, but I almost fell for a phishing scam.

A common misconception is that technology is to blame. That might not be true.