Insight

Last year, CSIDES took place on The Grand Pier in Weston-super-Mare for the first time - a day filled with cyber talks, Cyber's Got Talent, exceptional swag, its own theme song and - we are told - an extraordinary raffle.  After the success of the inaugural event last summer, on the 9th October 2026, industry experts will gather in North Somerset once again, courtesy of event sponsors Tines, 4FOX Security, Consultants Like Us, Punk Security,...

Penetration testing has been a cornerstone of cybersecurity for decades. For many organisations, it is part of an annual security programme, providing reassurance for boards, evidence for customers and insurers and a demonstration of compliance with regulatory requirements. It is also one of the most commonly purchased cybersecurity services.  Despite its widespread use, penetration testing is actually one of the least consistently defined services in the industry. Two providers can assess the same environment and produce very different reports. One may identify critical vulnerabilities that...

More than 100 vendors now position themselves as AI SOC platforms, but the category didn’t even exist 18 months ago.   The Cloud Security Alliance found that AI-enhanced SOCs investigated cloud security incidents 45–61% faster than manual teams, explaining the boom in interest.   The vendors truly defining the AI SOC space are the ones with fully agentic underpinnings. This piece profiles those vendors, offers a shared framework for comparing platforms, and explains what makes...

The last time I spoke with Securonix, it was to discuss its acquisition of ThreatQuotient, adding a threat intelligence capability to its existing portfolio of security analytics, threat detection and incident response through its cloud-native Unified Defense SIEM. Several months on from that announcement, new steps have been taken to enable a wider user base, alongside the launch of new capabilities designed to support AI measurement and management. The combination of unified SIEM and managed...

Like many, I love KnowBe4’s The Inside Man series. So when series director Jim Shields and writer Robert McCollum stood on stage at the UK Premiere for Season 7 (held at the glitzy Odeon LUXE in Leicester Square, in an affair that could rival any of the Summer’s blockbusters) and said that they’d always planned to wrap the show up after seven series, I found myself abhorred. Personally, I’m not quite ready to let go...

Security is not a point-in-time exercise. It’s a cycle of testing, fixing, and starting over. Organisations that treat it as anything less quickly fall behind. In the last decade, we've seen how offensive security practices such as penetration testing, combined with follow-up patching and mitigation strategies, have significantly strengthened defences. For instance, Active Directory hardening, EDR solutions, and endpoint security have evolved considerably thanks to insights from attack simulations. Repeated internal testing followed by corrective...

For years, international entrepreneurs have measured business risk through a familiar set of indicators. Cybersecurity, regulatory compliance, access to capital, political stability and supply-chain resilience have typically dominated boardroom discussions. These factors remain critical, but another consideration is steadily moving higher up the agenda. Jurisdiction itself is becoming part of the resilience conversation. The ability to operate internationally has changed dramatically over the past decade. Cloud computing, artificial intelligence and secure digital infrastructure mean many...

The 2026 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) has sparked widespread industry reaction, with security leaders warning that AI-enabled attacks, vulnerability exploitation, and third-party risk are reshaping the threat landscape faster than many organisations can respond. For the first time in the report’s history, vulnerability exploitation overtook stolen credentials as the leading initial access vector, a shift many experts say reflects both AI acceleration and growing operational strain on defenders. Collin Hogue-Spears, senior director of...

The European Union’s AI strategy is entering a new phase. What began as a commitment to “trustworthy AI,” grounded in ethics and human rights, is now evolving into a legally enforceable framework for technically secure AI. EU-specific AI, data and cybersecurity regulations are taking effect, alongside the January 2026 Digital Omnibus initiative. Cybersecurity is no longer a supporting consideration in AI governance, but rather, it is now a statutory obligation. AI systems are embedded across...

AI is transforming both attacks and defense. To avoid being outstripped by AI-powered adversaries, organizations need platforms that prioritize risk in real-time. Exposure management with AI is the next evolution in comprehensive cybersecurity. AI-powered exposure management, as embodied in continuous threat exposure management (CTEM) platforms, help security leaders keep an eye on the entire ecosystem, discovering not just vulnerabilities across assets, but all weaknesses across all areas of the attack surface. The criteria for evaluating...