The Cybersecurity Excellence Awards today published early nomination insights from the 2026 program, highlighting a shift in vendor emphasis from broad AI positioning toward governance frameworks, identity architecture, and measurable accountability. Produced by Cybersecurity Insiders, the analysis draws on more than 200 submissions received ahead of RSA Conference 2026.

The OWASP Smart Contract Security Project has released the OWASP Smart Contract Top 10 2026, a risk prioritization framework developed from structured analysis of real world exploit data observed across blockchain ecosystems in 2025. Crypto protocols continued to experience significant smart contract failures in 2025, with exploit patterns increasingly pointing to structural weaknesses rather than isolated bugs.

As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more deeply embedded in security operations, a divide has emerged in how its role is defined. Some argue the security operations centre (SOC) should be fully autonomous, with AI replacing human analysts. Others believe that augmentation is the right path, using AI to support and extend existing teams. Augmentation probably reflects how SOCs operate in practice. It helps analysts triage alerts, investigate incidents faster, and it brings better context into their work, while still ensuring humans are accountable for decisions.