Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Shadow IT refers to any technology—including hardware, software, cloud services, SaaS applications, or AI tools—used within an organization without the explicit approval of the IT or security department. Shadow IT is rarely malicious. It is usually the result of employees searching for a means of making their workflows more efficient. When sanctioned corporate tools are perceived as too slow, rigid, or complex, users often "self-serve" by adopting unvetted alternatives to meet their deadlines.

The classic tradeoff in cybersecurity has always been simple: more visibility at the cost of speed. But today, that tradeoff is breaking down. As attackers leverage AI to find and exploit vulnerabilities at unprecedented scale, the sheer volume of alerts is burying security teams. The result? An expanding exposure gap. It is taking longer than ever to triage and remediate threats, creating a dangerous window between when a tool pings and when a human in the SOC can actually take action.

There’s no way to stop the clock in cybersecurity for InfoSec teams, but you can find ways to manufacture a better way to spend their time. Tiering does just that, prioritizing your team’s most finite resource. But to start, you need better data, and most importantly, better logic to redefine how you work.

Most organizations need both a cyber-focused TPRM platform and a compliance-focused TPRM platform, but it can be difficult to see where one tool ends and the other begins. If you're currently evaluating TPRM platforms, this guide clarifies the differences between the two.

Cybersecurity doesn’t really have quiet days. Usually, it’s just long stretches of constant noise before realizing you’ve been blindsided. That blindside is a flat list of unprioritized vendors. Without a way to filter what matters when a team needs to mitigate the fallout of a crisis, a vendor inventory like this becomes a compliance-only activity that offers a false sense of security.

The thing about blanket approaches is that they rarely work or scale. The same holds true for third-party cyber risk management. Treating every provider, stakeholder, or partner with the same intensity is neither productive nor cost-effective. While defaulting to treating every vendor at the same risk level is common, it is not a resilient security strategy.

Humans have always sought to streamline productivity through the most convenient solutions available, prioritizing speed to stay ahead and gain an edge over the competition. From the assembly line to the cloud, the goal remains the same: do more with less friction. Today, that convenience is synonymous with AI. While these tools have revolutionized how we work, the reality remains that rapid innovation always comes with a hidden cost.

Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers facilitate the integration of third-party services with AI applications, but these benefits come with significant risks. If a trusted MCP server is hijacked or spoofed by an attacker, it becomes a dangerous vector for prompt injection and other malicious activities. One way attackers infiltrate software supply chains is through brand impersonation, also known as typosquatting—creating malicious resources that closely resemble trusted ones.

What permissions are developers granting to Claude Code, and could those permissions pose a risk if the coding agent were exposed to malicious inputs? To answer this question, we turned to GitHub, the website where developers go to share their private configuration files. From Github we collected a dataset of 18,470.claude/settings.local.json files, each containing the permissions that a user granted to Claude Code for a software project.

Organizations face a complex cybersecurity conundrum. Attack surfaces are expanding faster than SOC teams can scan. All of which is leading to a never-ending cycle of swivel-chair security, context-free lists, increased alert fatigue, and slow remediation. The strategic pivot needed to combat this is Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM). A structured and essential alternative that moves teams away from reactive scanning to proactive, ongoing validation and prioritization.