As we look at the remainder of 2025 and beyond, the pace and sophistication of cyber attacks targeting the financial sector show no signs of slowing. In fact, based on research from Check Pointโs Q2 Ransomware Report, the financial cybersecurity threat landscape is only intensifying. Gone are the days when the average hacker was a..
According to the Thales Consumer Digital Trust Index 2025, global confidence in digital services is slipping fast. After surveying more than 14,000 consumers across 15 countries, the findings are clear: no sector earned high trust ratings from even half its users. Most industries are seeing trust erode โ or, at best, stagnate. In an era..
Alan reflects on a turbulent year in DevSecOps, highlighting the rise of AI-driven security, the maturing of hybrid work culture, the growing influence of platform engineering, and the incredible strength of the DevSecOps community โ while calling out the talent crunch, tool sprawl and security theater the industry must still overcome.
When it comes to AI, trust used to mean one thing โ accuracy. Does the model predict correctly? Then we started asking harder questions about bias, transparency and whether we could explain the AIโs reasoning. Agentic AI changes the equation entirely. When a system doesnโt just analyze or recommend, but actually takes action, trust shifts from โDo I believe this answer?โ to โAm I still in full control of what this system does?โ
In the agentic era, trust must evolve from ensuring accurate results to building systems that can ensure continuous control and reliability of AI agents. As a result, trust is now the foundational architecture that separates organizations capable of deploying autonomous agents from those perpetually managing the consequences of systems they cannot safely control. My question for enterprise leaders is: Are you building that infrastructure now or will you spend next several years explaining why you didnโt?
Traditional security was built on static trust: verify identity at the gate, then assume good behavior inside the walls. Agentic AI demands we go further. Unlike traditional applications, AI agents adapt autonomously, modify their own behavior and operate at machine speed across enterprise systems; this means yesterdayโs trusted agent could potentially be todayโs compromised threat that immediately reverts to normal behavior to evade detection.
Trust cannot be established and maintained just at the perimeter; our focus must shift to inside the walls as well. Securing these dynamic actors requires treating them less like software and more like a workforce, with continuous identity verification, behavioral monitoring and adaptive governance frameworks.
Successful trust architecture rests on three foundational pillars, each addressing distinct operational requirements while integrating into a cohesive security posture.
Pillar 1: Verifiable identity
Every AI agent requires cryptographic identity verification comparable to employee credentials. Industry leaders recognize this imperative: Microsoft developed Entra Agent ID for agent authentication, while Oktaโs acquisition of Axiom and Palo Alto Networksโ $25 billion CyberArk purchase signal market recognition that agent identity management is critical.
Organizations must register agents in configuration management databases with the same rigor applied to employee vetting and physical infrastructure, establishing clear accountability for every autonomous actor operating within enterprise boundaries.
Pillar 2: Comprehensive visibility and continuous monitoring
Traditional security tools monitor network perimeters and user behavior but lack mechanisms to detect anomalous agent activity. Effective trust infrastructure requires purpose-built observability platforms capable of tracking API call patterns, execution frequencies and behavioral deviations in real time.
Gartner predicts guardian agents, which are AI systems specifically designed to monitor other AI systems, will capture 10% to 15% of the agentic AI market by 2030, underscoring the necessity of layered oversight mechanisms.
Pillar 3: Governance as executable architecture
Effective governance transforms policies from static documents into executable specifications that define autonomy boundaries, such as which actions agents can execute independently, which operations require human approval and which capabilities remain permanently restricted. Organizations with mature responsible AI frameworks achieve 42% efficiency gains, according to McKinsey, demonstrating that governance enables innovation rather than constraining it โ provided the governance operates as an architectural principle rather than a compliance afterthought.
In sum, trust infrastructure isnโt defensive. Itโs the prerequisite for deploying AI agents in high-value workflows where competitive advantage actually resides, separating organizations capable of strategic deployment from those perpetually constrained by risks they cannot adequately manage.
The 2027 divide
Gartner predicts 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by 2027, citing inadequate risk controls as a main factor. By then, there will be a clear divide between organizations that can safely deploy ambitious agentic use cases and those that cannot afford to. The former will have built trust as infrastructure; the latter will be retrofitting security onto systems already deployed and discovering problems through costly incidents.
Trust canโt be borrowed from consultants or bought from vendors. Unlike traditional currencies that flow freely, trust in the age of agentic AI must be earned through verifiable governance, transparent operations and systems designed with security as a core principle, not an afterthought. As the gap between those who have it and those who donโt widens, the architectural decisions you make today will determine which side of the divide youโre on.
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Security is reaching a breaking point as growing technical complexity becomes a major risk vector. Learn why modern systems amplify threatsโand how to stay ahead.
You may have noticed that large pieces of the Internet were down on Tuesday. It was a problem at Cloudflare, and for once, it wasnโt DNS. This time it was database management, combined with a safety limit that failed unsafe when exceeded.
Cloudflareโs blog post on the matter has the gritty details. It started with an update to how Cloudflareโs ClickHouse distributed database was responding to queries. A query of system columns was previously only returning data from the default database. As a part of related work, that system was changed so that this query now returned all the databases the given user had access to. In retrospect it seems obvious that this could cause problems, but it wasnโt predicted to cause problems. The result was that a database query to look up bot-management features returned the same features multiple times.
That featurelist is used to feed the Cloudflare bot classification system. That system uses some AI smarts, and runs in the core proxy system. There are actually two versions of the core proxy, and they behaved a bit differently when the featurelist exceeded the 200 item limit. When the older version failed, it classified all traffic as a bot. The real trouble was the newer Rust code. That version of the core proxy threw an error in response, leading to 5XX HTTP errors, and the Internet-wide fallout.
Dangling Azure
Thereโs a weird pitfall with cloud storage when a storage name is used and then abandoned. Itโs very much like what happens when a domain name is used and then allowed to expire: Someone else can come along and register it. Microsoft Azure has its own variation on this, in the form of Azure blob storage. And the folks at Eye Securityโs research team found one of these floating blobs in an unexpected place: In Microsoftโs own Update Health Service.
The 1.0 version of this tool was indeed exploitable. A simple payload hosted on one of these claimed blob endpoints could trigger an explorer.exe execution with an arbitrary parameter, meaning trivial code execution. The 1.1 version of the Update Health Service isnโt vulnerable by default, requiring a registry change before reaching out to the vulnerable blob locations. That said, there are thousands of machines looking to these endpoints that would be vulnerable to takeover. After the problem was reported, Microsoft took over the blob names to prevent any future misuse.
BADAUDIO
Thereโs a new malware strain from APT24, going by the name BADAUDIO. Though โnewโ is a bit of a misnomer here, as the first signs of this particular malware were seen back in 2022. What is new is that Google Threat Intelligence reporting on it. The campaign uses multiple techniques, like compromising existing websites to serve the malware in โwatering holeโ attacks, to spam and spearphishing.
Notable here is how obfuscated the BADAUDIO malware loader is, using control flow flattening to resist analysis. First consider how good code uses functions to group code into logical blocks. This technique does the opposite, putting code into blocks randomly. The primary mechanism for execution is DLL sideloading, where a legitimate application is run with a malicious DLL in its search path, again primarily to avoid detection. Itโs an extraordinarily sneaky bit of malware.
Donโt Leave The Defaults
Thereโs an RCE (Remote Code Execution) in the W3 Total Cache WordPress plugin. The vulnerability is an eval() that can be reached by putting code in a page to be cached. So if a WordPress site allows untrusted comments, and has caching enabled, thereโs just one more hurdle to clear. And that is the W3TC_DYNAMIC_SECURITY value, which seems to be intended to stave off exactly this sort of weakness. So hereโs the lesson, donโt leave this sort of security feature default.
Not a Vulnerability
We have a trio of stories that arenโt technically vulnerabilities. The first two are in the mPDF library, that takes HTML code and generates PDFs โ great for packaging documentation. The first item of interest in mPDF is the handling of @import css rules. Interestingly, these statements seem to be evaluated even outside of valid CSS, and are handled by passing the URL off to curl to actually fetch the remote content. Those URLs must end in .css, but thereโs no checking whether that is in a parameter or not. So evil.org/?.css is totally valid. The use of curl is interesting for another reason, that the Gopher protocol allows for essentially unrestricted TCP connections.
The next quirk in mPDF is in how .svg files are handled. Specifically, how an image xlink inside an svg behaves, when it uses the phar:// or php:// prefixes. These are PHP Archive links, or a raw php link, and the mPDF codebase already guards against such shenanigans, matching links starting with either prefix. The problem here is that thereโs path mangling that happens after that guard code. To skip straight to the punchline, :/phar:// and :/php:// will bypass that filter, and potentially run code or leak information.
Now the big question: Why are neither of those vulnerabilities? Even when one is a bypass for a CVE fix from 2019? Because mPDF is only to be used with sanitized input, and does not do that sanitization as part of its processing. And that does check out. Itโs probably the majority of tools and libraries that will do something malicious if fed malicious input.
Thereโs one more โvulnerableโ library, esbuild, that has an XSS (Cross Site Scripting) potential. It comes down to the use of escapeForHTML(), and the fact that function doesnโt sanitize quotation marks. Feed that malicious text, and the unescaped quotation mark allows for plenty of havoc. So why isnโt this one a vulnerability? Because the text strings getting parsed are folder names. And if you can upload an arbitrary folder to the server where esbuild runs, you already have plenty of other ways to run code.
Bits and Bytes
Thereโs another Fortinet bug being exploited in the wild, though this one was patched with FortiWeb 8.0.2. This one gets the WatchTowr treatment. Itโs a path traversal that bypasses any real authentication. There are a couple of validation checks that are straightforward to meet, and then the cgi_process() API can be manipulated as any user without authentication. Ouch.
The Lite XL text editor seems pretty nifty, running on Windows, Linux, and macOS, and supporting lua plugins for extensibility. That Lua code support was quite a problem, as opening a project would automatically run the .lua configuration files, allowing direct use of os.execute(). Open a malicious project, run malicious code.
And finally, sometimes itโs the easy approach that works the best. [Eaton] discovered A Cracker Barrel administrative panel built in React JS, and all it took to bypass authentication was to set isAuthenticated = true in the local browser. [Eaton] started a disclosure process, and noticed the bug had already been fixed, apparently discovered independently.
Dogfooding is usually a good thing: Thatโs when a company uses their own code internally. Itโs not so great when itโs a cloud company, and that code has problems. Oracle had this exact problem, running the Oracle Identity Governance Suite. It had a few authentication bypasses, like the presence of ?WSDL or ;.wadl at the end of a URL. Ah, Java is magical.
Cyber adversaries arenโt standing still, and our defenses canโt either. In an environment where government networks face relentless, increasingly sophisticated attacks, itโs evident that perimeter-based security models belong in the past. A zero trust framework redefines the approach: Every user, device, and connection is treated as unverified until proven otherwise, or โtrust but verify.โ By assuming breach, zero trust delivers what todayโs government missions demand: speed, resilience and the ability to contain damage before it spreads.
To truly operationalize zero trust, agencies must look beyond theory and embrace emerging technologies. Many federal organizations are already turning to artificial intelligence and digital twins to get there. A digital twin โ a software-based replica of a real-world network โ creates an invaluable proving ground. Rather than waiting for an adversary to strike live systems, agencies can safely simulate cyberattacks, test and refine policies, and validate updates before deployment. In my view, this marks a fundamental shift: Digital twins arenโt just a tool, they represent the future of proactive cyber defense, where learning, adaptation and resilience happen before a crisis, not after.
This approach doesnโt just strengthen agency defenses; it also streamlines operations. Instead of maintaining expensive, outdated physical labs, agencies can rely on digital twins to keep pace with evolving cyber threats. Most recently, a large government agency demonstrated the power of this approach by overcoming years of technical debt, rapidly reconfiguring critical systems, and building a testing environment that delivered greater speed, precision and efficiency that advanced their mission and operational goals.
Strategies for anticipating compromise while ensuring operational resilience
Digital twins offer significant potential for enhancing cybersecurity, yet their widespread adoption remains nascent due to several challenges, including budget constraints and agency inertia. Agencies can reference established frameworks such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology SP 800-207 and the Cybersecurity Infrastructure and Security Agency Zero Trust Maturity Model, to guide their zero trust journeys. However, with various legacy systems, cloud services and devices, agencies require zero trust capabilities for their specific needs. The core challenge for government then becomes how to proactively implement effective zero trust strategies that anticipate compromises while ensuring continued operations.
To address these challenges and effectively implement zero trust, here are key actions for agency leaders to consider that include people, process and tools:
People
Embrace change management
Zero trust implementation is as much about people and process as it is about technology. To foster cross-team buy-in, agencies must clearly articulate the โwhyโ behind zero trust. Instead of just a technical mandate, zero trust should be framed as a strategy to improve security and efficiency. This involves creating a shared understanding of the frameworkโs benefits and how it impacts each team member.
Quantify and communicate value
Measuring the ROI of zero trust is complex, as preventing incidents yields invisible benefits. How will you define success: reduced risk, faster compliance, operational consistency? Agencies should set milestones for measuring security posture improvements and regulatory progress while recognizing the limitations of conventional ROI calculations.
Process
Adopt zero trust as a damage-limitation strategy
Rather than asking, โHow do we stop every breach?โ agencies should take steps to shift from prevention-only thinking to dynamic containment and defense, such as:
Developing an incident response plan that outlines roles, responsibilities and communication protocols for cyberattack stages.
Conducting regular tabletop exercises and simulations to test the planโs effectiveness and find improvement areas.
Automating security workflows to accelerate response times and reduce human error.
Be thorough with zero trust planning
According to public sector best practices, projects with 90% planning and 10% execution are far more likely to succeed. Agency technology and information leaders should take an active role in driving zero trust transformation, ensuring comprehensive planning, stakeholder engagement, and organizational buy-in are prioritized from the outset.
Tools
Leverage digital twins
Agencies are turning to emerging technology, including AI and digital twins, to keep pace with threat actors. Government IT and SecOps teams can deploy digital twins to simulate attacks, validate controls and reduce costly physical testing environments. Digital twins should also be considered a safe space for agencies to experiment, identify vulnerabilities, and optimize policies before deployment โ an invaluable asset for agencies navigating mixed legacy and cloud ecosystems. Moreover, model-based systems engineering and agile approaches, paired with digital twins, can empower agencies to โrehearseโ security incidents and fine-tune architectures.
Tackle tool sprawl using informed consolidation
The sheer volume of disparate vendors and tools can undermine even the best zero trust architecture. Utilizing digital twins to map and simulate your IT environment allows for thoughtful consolidation without sacrificing security or compliance. Lastly, agencies should identify where they are duplicating capabilities and envision a streamlined, mission-focused toolset.
Accelerating zero trust at scale
To address the pace and complexity of future threats, government agencies must act boldly by embracing zero trust not only as a framework but also as a fundamental mindset for continual adaptation and resilience.
By harnessing the power of technologies like AI and digital twins, modernizing planning and response strategies, and committing to cross-team collaboration, agencies can outmaneuver adversaries and protect their most critical missions.
The path forward is clear: Operational resilience is achieved by investing today in future-ready strategies that anticipate compromise, ensure continuity and empower every stakeholder to play a proactive role in defense.
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John Fair is vice president of Air Force sales and account management at Akima.
Bitcoin development nonprofit Btrust has named Nigerian Bitcoin Core contributor Abubakar Nur Khalil as its new chief executive officer, the organization announced today.ย
Khalil had previously served as interim CEO while sitting on the board as a non-voting member. Khalil will step down from his board position and report directly to the organizationโs directors in the full-time role.ย
His three-year term is renewable once.
Founded to support open-source Bitcoin development in the Global South, Btrust has expanded its footprint across Africa, Latin America, and India over the past year. The non-profit received initial funding from Jay-Z and Jack Dorsey.
During his interim leadership, the group increased partnerships with organizations including Bitshala, Vinteum and 2140, and reported record grant distribution.ย
Since mid-2024, Btrust says it has issued more than $1.7 million in funding, with over half going directly to developers.
Khalil co-founded Btrust Builders, an initiative focused on growing the open-source developer pipeline in emerging markets. He is recognized as a prominent advocate for Bitcoin development in Africa.
โIโm honored to have led Btrust as interim CEO over the past year,โ Khalil said in a statement, adding that he aims to strengthen the organizationโs systems and scale its impact in 2026 and beyond. โEnsuring that Bitcoin continues to be a money that works for everyone worldwide.โ
Board member Obi Nwosu said Khalil is well-positioned to guide Btrust through its next phase as it builds out long-term programs and developer support infrastructure.ย
The organization said continuity will be a major focus as it transitions from early-stage growth to broader execution.
Btrustโs board launched the CEO search in July, citing the need for dedicated leadership as its programming expands globally. The organization said the appointment marks โa meaningful next chapterโ in its mission to strengthen decentralized Bitcoin development.
Abubakar Nur Khalil will also be speaking at Bitcoin MENA, happening December 8โ9, 2025, at the ADNEC Center in Abu Dhabi.
"BITCOIN IS MONEY."
We're thrilled to announce Btrust CEO, Abubakar Nur Khalil, to speak at Bitcoin MENA! pic.twitter.com/1ozbQyNBoK
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