Explore the differences between LDAP and Single Sign-On (SSO) for user authentication. Understand their use cases, benefits, and how they fit into your enterprise security strategy.

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Richmond, VA — December 11, 2025 — Assura is proud to announce that it has been named to the MSSP Alert and CyberRisk Alliance partnership’s prestigious Top 250 MSSPs list for 2025, securing the #94 position among the world’s leading Managed Security Service Providers. “Making The Top 100 is an incredible milestone and testament to the… Continue reading Assura Named to MSSP Alert and Cyber Alliance’s 2025 “Top 250 MSSPs,” Ranking at Number 94

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Ambiguity isn't just a challenge. It's a leadership test - and most fail it.

I want to start with something that feels true but gets ignored way too often.

Most of us in leadership roles have a love hate relationship with ambiguity. We say we embrace it... until it shows up for real. Then we freeze, hedge our words, or pretend we have a plan. Cybersecurity teams deal with ambiguity all the time. Its in threat intel you cant quite trust, in stakeholder demands that swing faster than markets, in patch rollouts that go sideways. But ambiguity isnt a bug to be fixed. Its a condition to be led through.

[Image: A leader facing a foggy maze of digital paths - ambiguity as environment.]

Lets break this down the way I see it, without jazz hands or buzzwords.

Ambiguity isn't uncertainty. Its broader.  

Uncertainty is when you lack enough data to decide. Ambiguity is when even the terms of the problem are in dispute. Its not just what we don't know. Its what we cant define yet. In leadership terms, that feels like being handed a puzzle where some pieces aren't even shaped yet. This is classic VUCA territory - volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity make up the modern landscape leaders sit in every day. 

[Image: The dual nature of ambiguity - logic on one side, uncertainty on the other.]

Here is the blunt truth. Great leaders don't eliminate ambiguity. They engage with it. They treat ambiguity like a partner you've gotta dance with, not a foe to crush.

Ambiguity is a leadership signal  

When a situation is ambiguous, its telling you something. Its saying your models are incomplete, or your language isn't shared, or your team has gaps in context. Stanford researchers and communication experts have been talking about this recently: ambiguity often reflects a gap in the shared mental model across the team. If you're confused, your team probably is too. 

A lot of leadership texts treat ambiguity like an enemy of clarity. But thats backward. Ambiguity is the condition that demands sensemaking. Sensemaking is the real work. Its the pattern of dialogue and iteration that leads to shared understanding amid chaos. That means asking the hard questions out loud, not silently wishing for clarity.

If your team seems paralyzed, unclear, or checked out - it might not be them. It might be you.

Leaders model calm confusion  

Think about that phrase. Calm confusion. Leaders rarely say, "I don't know." Instead they hedge, hide, or overcommit. But leaders who effectively navigate ambiguity do speak up about what they don't know. Not to sound vulnerable in a soft way, but to anchor the discussion in reality. That model gives permission for others to explore unknowns without fear.

I once watched a director hold a 45-minute meeting to "gain alignment" without once stating the problem. Everyone left more confused than when they walked in. That’s not leadership. That's cover.

There is a delicate balance here. You don't turn every ambiguous situation into a therapy session. Instead, you create boundaries around confusion so the team knows where exploration stops and action begins. Good leaders hold this tension.

Move through ambiguity with frameworks, not polish  

Here is a practical bit. One common way to get stuck is treating decisions as if they're singular. But ambiguous situations usually contain clusters of decisions wrapped together. A good framework is to break the big, foggy problem into smaller, more combinable decisions. Clarify what is known, identify the assumptions you are making, and make provisional calls on the rest. Treat them like hypotheses to test, not laws of motion.

In cybersecurity, this looks like mapping your threat intel to scenarios where you know the facts, then isolating the areas of guesswork where your team can experiment or prepare contingencies. Its not clean. But it beats paralysis.

Teams learn differently under ambiguity  

If you have ever noticed that your best team members step up in times of clear crises, but shut down when the goals are vague, you're observing humans responding to ambiguity differently. Some thirst for structure. Others thrive in gray zones. As a leader, you want both. You shape the context so self starters can self start, and then you steward alignment so the whole group isnt pulling in four directions.

Theres a counterintuitive finding in team research: under certain conditions, ambiguity enables better collaborative decision making because the absence of a single voice forces people to share and integrate knowledge more deeply. But this only works when there is a shared understanding of the task and a culture of open exchange. 

Lead ambiguity, don't manage it  

Managing ambiguity sounds like you're trying to tighten it up, reduce it, or push it into a box. Leading ambiguity is different. It's about moving with the uncertainty. Encouraging experiments. Turning unknowns into learning loops. Recognizing iterative decision processes rather than linear ones.

And yes, that approach feels messy. Good. Leadership is messy. The only thing worse than ambiguity is false certainty. I've been in too many rooms where leaders pretended to know the answer, only to cost time, credibility, or talent. You can be confident without being certain. That's leadership.

But there's a flip side no one talks about.

Sometimes leaders use ambiguity as a shield. They stay vague, push decisions down the org, and let someone else take the hit if it goes sideways. I've seen this pattern more than once. Leaders who pass the fog downstream and call it empowerment. Except it's not. It's evasion. And it sets people up to fail.

Real leaders see ambiguity for what it is: a moment to step up and mentor. To frame the unknowns, offer scaffolding, and help others think through it with some air cover. The fog is a chance to teach — not disappear.

But the hard truth? Some leaders can't handle the ambiguity themselves. So they deflect. They repackage their own discomfort as a test of independence, when really they're just dodging responsibility. And sometimes, yeah, it feels intentional. They act like ambiguity builds character... but only because they're too insecure or inexperienced to lead through it.

The result is the same: good people get whiplash. Goals shift. Ownership blurs. Trust erodes. And the fog thickens.

There's research on this, too. It's called role ambiguity — when you're not clear on what's expected, what your job even is, or how success gets measured. People in those situations don't just get frustrated. They burn out. They overcompensate for silence. They stop trusting. And productivity tanks. It's not about needing a five-year plan. It's about needing a shared frame to work from. Leadership sets that tone.

Leading ambiguity means owning the fog, not outsourcing it.

Ambiguity isn't a one-off problem. It's a perpetual condition, especially in cybersecurity and executive realms where signals are weak and stakes are high. The real skill isn't clarity. It's resilience. The real job isn't prediction. It's navigation.

Lead through ambiguity by embracing the fog, not burying it. And definitely not dumping it on someone else.

When the fog rolls in, what kind of leader are you really?

#

Sources / Resources List

• VUCA definition and relevance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VUCA

• Communicating amid change and ambiguity: https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2025/06/ambiguity-leadership-communication-rob-siegel-think-fast-talk-smart/

• Breaking down decisions amid ambiguity: https://www.conversant.com/resources/leading-in-ambiguity-effective-decision-making-for-leaders/

• Ambiguity and team decision quality: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8236615/

• Role ambiguity and stress outcomes: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5767326/

• Ambiguity, leadership behavior, and burnout: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3387/15/11/424

• Leader ambiguity tolerance and follower performance: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/356021331_Leader_Tolerance_of_Ambiguity_Implications_for_Follower_Performance_Outcomes_in_High_and_Low_Ambiguous_Work_Situations

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SecureIQLab has officially established its Asia-Pacific (APAC) office in Kathmandu, Nepal, marking a significant milestone in expanding independent cybersecurity validation and advisory services across the region.  The new APAC office strengthens SecureIQLab’s ability to support regional enterprises, government institutions, and cybersecurity vendors with objective, outcome-based cybersecurity validation aligned with real-world threats and operational requirements.  Why […]

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Over the past week, enterprise security teams observed a combination of covert malware communication attempts and aggressive probing of publicly exposed infrastructure. These incidents, detected across firewall and endpoint security layers, demonstrate how modern cyber attackers operate simultaneously. While quietly activating compromised internal systems, they also relentlessly scan external services for exploitable weaknesses. Although the

The post Real Attacks of the Week: How Spyware Beaconing and Exploit Probing Are Shaping Modern Intrusions appeared first on Seceon Inc.

The post Real Attacks of the Week: How Spyware Beaconing and Exploit Probing Are Shaping Modern Intrusions appeared first on Security Boulevard.

Researchers with Google Threat Intelligence Group have detected five China-nexus threat groups exploiting the maximum-security React2Shell security flaw to drop a number of malicious payloads, from backdoors to downloaders to tunnelers.

The post Google Finds Five China-Nexus Groups Exploiting React2Shell Flaw appeared first on Security Boulevard.

After our research on Cursor, in the context of developer-ecosystem security, we turn our attention to the Jupyter ecosystem. We expose security risks we identified in the notebook’s export functionality, in the default Windows environment, to help organizations better protect their assets and networks. Executive Summary We identified a new way external Jupyter notebooks could […]

The post Code Execution in Jupyter Notebook Exports appeared first on Blog.

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The surge in AI-driven traffic is transforming how websites manage their content. With AI bots and agents visiting sites at unprecedented rates (often scraping without permission, payment, or attribution) content owners face a critical challenge: how to protect their intellectual property while capitalizing on legitimate AI use cases. Today, we’re excited to announce Imperva’s integration […]

The post Imperva Partners with TollBit to Power AI Traffic Monetization for Content Owners appeared first on Blog.

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Session 6B: Confidential Computing 1

Authors, Creators & Presenters: Maryam Rostamipoor (Stony Brook University), Seyedhamed Ghavamnia (University of Connecticut), Michalis Polychronakis (Stony Brook University)

PAPER
LeakLess: Selective Data Protection against Memory Leakage Attacks for Serverless Platforms

As the use of language-level sandboxing for running untrusted code grows, the risks associated with memory disclosure vulnerabilities and transient execution attacks become increasingly significant. Besides the execution of untrusted JavaScript or WebAssembly code in web browsers, serverless environments have also started relying on language-level isolation to improve scalability by running multiple functions from different customers within a single process. Web browsers have adopted process-level sandboxing to mitigate memory leakage attacks, but this solution is not applicable in serverless environments, as running each function as a separate process would negate the performance benefits of language-level isolation. In this paper we present LeakLess, a selective data protection approach for serverless computing platforms. LeakLess alleviates the limitations of previous selective data protection techniques by combining in-memory encryption with a separate I/O module to enable the safe transmission of the protected data between serverless functions and external hosts. We implemented LeakLess on top of the Spin serverless platform, and evaluated it with real-world serverless applications. Our results demonstrate that LeakLess offers robust protection while incurring a minor throughput decrease under stress-testing conditions of up to 2.8% when the I/O module runs on a different host than the Spin runtime, and up to 8.5% when it runs on the same host.

ABOUT NDSS
The Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) fosters information exchange among researchers and practitioners of network and distributed system security. The target audience includes those interested in practical aspects of network and distributed system security, with a focus on actual system design and implementation. A major goal is to encourage and enable the Internet community to apply, deploy, and advance the state of available security technologies.

Our thanks to the Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium for publishing their Creators, Authors and Presenter’s superb NDSS Symposium 2025 Conference content on the Organizations' YouTube Channel.

Permalink

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Frankfurt, Dec. 16, 2025, CyberNewswire — Link11, a European provider of web infrastructure security solutions, has released new insights outlining five key cybersecurity developments expected to influence how organizations across Europe prepare for and respond to threats in 2026.… (more…)

The post News Alert: Link11’s Top 5 cybersecurity trends set to shape European defense strategies in 2026 first appeared on The Last Watchdog.

The post News Alert: Link11’s Top 5 cybersecurity trends set to shape European defense strategies in 2026 appeared first on Security Boulevard.

Zero Trust has become the strategic anchor for modern cybersecurity. Every board is asking for it, every vendor claims to support it, and every CISO is under pressure to make...

The post The Future of Network Security Policy Management in a Zero Trust World appeared first on Security Boulevard.

The post Inside Our AI SOC: How Swimlane Cut MTTR in Half appeared first on AI Security Automation.

The post Inside Our AI SOC: How Swimlane Cut MTTR in Half appeared first on Security Boulevard.

Session 6A: LLM Privacy and Usable Privacy

Authors, Creators & Presenters: Yuhao Wu (Washington University in St. Louis), Franziska Roesner (University of Washington), Tadayoshi Kohno (University of Washington), Ning Zhang (Washington University in St. Louis), Umar Iqbal (Washington University in St. Louis)

PAPER
IsolateGPT: An Execution Isolation Architecture for LLM-Based Agentic Systems

Large language models (LLMs) extended as systems, such as ChatGPT, have begun supporting third-party applications. These LLM apps leverage the de facto natural language-based automated execution paradigm of LLMs: that is, apps and their interactions are defined in natural language, provided access to user data, and allowed to freely interact with each other and the system. These LLM app ecosystems resemble the settings of earlier computing platforms, where there was insufficient isolation between apps and the system. Because third-party apps may not be trustworthy, and exacerbated by the imprecision of natural language interfaces, the current designs pose security and privacy risks for users. In this paper, we evaluate whether these issues can be addressed through execution isolation and what that isolation might look like in the context of LLM-based systems, where there are arbitrary natural language-based interactions between system components, between LLM and apps, and between apps. To that end, we propose IsolateGPT, a design architecture that demonstrates the feasibility of execution isolation and provides a blueprint for implementing isolation, in LLM-based systems. We evaluate IsolateGPT against a number of attacks and demonstrate that it protects against many security, privacy, and safety issues that exist in non-isolated LLM-based systems, without any loss of functionality. The performance overhead incurred by IsolateGPT to improve security is under 30% for three-quarters of tested queries.

ABOUT NDSS
The Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) fosters information exchange among researchers and practitioners of network and distributed system security. The target audience includes those interested in practical aspects of network and distributed system security, with a focus on actual system design and implementation. A major goal is to encourage and enable the Internet community to apply, deploy, and advance the state of available security technologies.

Our thanks to the Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium for publishing their Creators, Authors and Presenter’s superb NDSS Symposium 2025 Conference content on the Organizations' YouTube Channel.

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Veza has added a platform to its portfolio that is specifically designed to secure and govern artificial intelligence (AI) agents that might soon be strewn across the enterprise. Currently in the process of being acquired by ServiceNow, the platform is based on an Access Graph the company previously developed to provide cybersecurity teams with a..

The post Veza Extends Reach to Secure and Govern AI Agents appeared first on Security Boulevard.

Whether you’re generating data from scratch or transforming sensitive production data, performant test data generators are critical tools for achieving compliance in development workflows.

The post How test data generators support compliance and data privacy appeared first on Security Boulevard.

Identity systems hold modern life together, yet we barely notice them until they fail. Every time someone starts a new job, crosses a border, or walks into a secure building, an official must answer one deceptively simple question: Is this person really who they claim to be? That single moment—matching a living, breathing human to..

The post Can a Transparent Piece of Plastic Win the Invisible War on Your Identity? appeared first on Security Boulevard.

Over the past week, enterprise security teams observed a combination of covert malware communication attempts and aggressive probing of publicly exposed infrastructure. These incidents, detected across firewall and endpoint security layers, demonstrate how modern cyber attackers operate simultaneously. While quietly activating compromised internal systems, they also relentlessly scan external services for exploitable weaknesses. Although the

The post Real Attacks of the Week: How Spyware Beaconing and Exploit Probing Are Shaping Modern Intrusions appeared first on Seceon Inc.

The post Real Attacks of the Week: How Spyware Beaconing and Exploit Probing Are Shaping Modern Intrusions appeared first on Security Boulevard.

Breaking Free from Security Silos in the Modern Enterprise Today’s organizations face an unprecedented challenge: securing increasingly complex IT environments that span on-premises data centers, multiple cloud platforms, and hybrid architectures. Traditional security approaches that rely on disparate point solutions are failing to keep pace with sophisticated threats, leaving critical gaps in visibility and response

The post Unified Security for On-Prem, Cloud, and Hybrid Infrastructure: The Seceon Advantage appeared first on Seceon Inc.

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Articles related to cyber risk quantification, cyber risk management, and cyber resilience.

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Labeling adversary activity with ATT&CK techniques is a tried-and-true method for classifying behavior. But it rarely tells defenders how those behaviors are executed in real environments.

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