Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

For years, businesses have treated public key infrastructure (PKI) as background plumbing, quietly securing access across enterprise systems and devices, and rarely drawing executive attention unless something failed. New research from the Ponemon Institute suggests that those assumptions no longer hold.

KuppingerCole has recognized CyberArk identity threat detection and response (ITDR) as a leader across all categories: overall, product, innovation, and market in its 2025 KuppingerCole Leadership Compass for Identity Threat Detection & Response.

If privilege has changed, compliance can’t stay static. As organizations accelerate digital transformation, the compliance landscape is shifting beneath their feet—especially when it comes to how privileged access is controlled and proven. Regulatory requirements are multiplying, audit cycles are tightening, and the definition of privileged access has quietly expanded beyond people to workloads, automation, and AI-driven systems.

For the past two years, AI agents have dominated boardroom conversations, product roadmaps, and investor decks. Companies made bold promises, tested early prototypes, and poured resources into innovation, with analysts projecting an economic impact of $2.6 trillion to $4.4 trillion. As 2026 begins, the experimentation phase ends and the production era starts as organizations roll out AI agents at scale across their enterprises.

Criminal infrastructure often fails for the same reasons it succeeds: it is rushed, reused, and poorly secured. In the case of StealC, the thin line between attacker and victim turned out to be highly exploitable. StealC is an infostealer malware that has been circulating since early 2023, sold under a Malware-as-a-Service (MaaS) model and marketed to threat actors seeking to steal cookies, passwords, and other sensitive data from infected computers.

AI systems are moving fast, sometimes faster than the guardrails meant to contain them. In this episode of Security Matters, host David Puner digs into the hidden risks inside modern AI models with Pamela K. Isom, exploring the governance gaps that allow agents to make decisions, recommendations, and even commitments far beyond their intended authority. Isom, former director of AI and technology at the U.S.

In conversations about AI, there’s a tendency to treat the future like a horizon we’re walking toward, always somewhere ahead, always a question of when. But if we look closely, the forces reshaping work, identity, and security beneath the surface are far more consequential than most people realize. More importantly, that reshaping is already happening.

In 2025, we saw attackers get bolder and smarter, using AI to amplify old tricks and invent new ones. The reality is, innovation cuts both ways. If you have tools, AI is going to make them even more dangerous. Last year proved that every leap forward in technology brings new risks right alongside the rewards. At CyberArk Labs, our mission is to uncover hidden vulnerabilities and provide actionable insights that help organizations fortify their defenses.

In my house, we consume a lot of AI research. We also watch a lot—probably too much—TV. Late in 2025, those worlds collided when the AI giant Anthropic was featured on “60 Minutes.” My husband tried to scroll past it, but I snatched the controller away, unable to resist a headline calling out the first widely acknowledged case of an “agentic AI cyberattack.” The framing itself was irresistible, a milestone moment in the rapid acceleration of AI.

How are defenders supposed to keep up when attackers move at the speed of AI? In this episode of Security Matters, host David Puner welcomes Rick McElroy, founder and CEO of Nexasure, for a candid conversation about cybersecurity’s breaking point. Together, they unpack the realities of defending organizations in an era of identity sprawl, machine risk, agentic AI, and relentless automation.