Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

In 2024, ransomware was publicly disclosed in more than 5,600 attacks worldwide, with over 2,600 victims in the United States alone. The same reporting says the FBI's 2024 IC3 report logged 3,156 ransomware complaints, an 11.7% increase from the prior year, which is a useful reminder that this isn't a niche malware problem. It's a persistent operational risk that keeps showing up across sectors and environments (Fortinet's ransomware statistics summary).

A breach doesn't become expensive only when systems go down. It becomes expensive when an organization spends months discovering what happened, who needs to decide, what evidence was lost, and which business services can't wait. According to IBM's 2024 Cost of a Data Breach Report, the global average cost of a data breach reached $4.88 million in 2024, while the average time to identify a breach was 194 days.

This week bore witness to some interesting events and milestones as Anthropic announced the availability of Claude Fable 5, a descendant of their Mythos Preview model, and Microsoft published their largest Patch Tuesday in history with over 200 vulnerabilities. The two are not unrelated.

Many organizations invest heavily in backup solutions but still face a critical gap: the absence of a well-defined backup retention policy. Without a structured retention policy, backups may either be stored longer than necessary, driving up costs, or deleted prematurely, increasing compliance risks and limiting recovery options. In critical scenarios like ransomware attacks or system failures, organizations may find that their backups are incomplete, outdated, or unusable.

API security is the practice of protecting the interfaces that connect your applications, models, and data from unauthorized access, abuse, and data theft. In AI applications, APIs carry prompts, model responses, customer PII, and agent instructions, which makes them the single most exposed layer of your AI stack. Securing them requires authentication, rate limiting, encryption, and a layer most teams miss: protection of the sensitive data in every API call.

The CMMC ecosystem is poised to be very strict in a very short amount of time, which means a lot of organizations are quickly finding that they need to do a lot of work in short order. A significant area of concern is where MSPs fall into the spectrum of security. Managed Service Providers are a key part of how modern digital businesses operate, but they’re also distinct and separate from the businesses themselves.

Risk-based vulnerability management (RBVM) is a cybersecurity methodology that prioritizes vulnerabilities based on actual business risk rather than technical severity scores in isolation. RBVM combines vulnerability severity, exploitation likelihood, threat intelligence, and asset criticality to focus remediation on the exposures most likely to be weaponized against your specific environment.