Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

CISA Emergency Directive 25‑03 mandates that federal civilian executive branch (FCEB) agencies immediately identify and mitigate vulnerabilities in Cisco ASA and Firepower devices. The vulnerabilities, which affect SSL VPN components, can be exploited by attackers to gain unauthorized access and pivot across networks. CISA’s actions are based on observed exploit activity in the wild and the critical role these devices play in public sector infrastructure.

Across the financial sector, compliance teams face rising expectations from regulators and customers alike. Agencies such as the SEC, OCC, FDIC, CFPB, and the European Banking Authority now demand proof of continuous compliance—not point-in-time reports. Yet most financial institutions still depend on spreadsheets, manual command-line checks, and tribal knowledge to validate security controls.

In a typical enterprise environment, NTP server configurations may differ not just between vendors, but even across OS variants within the same vendor. Ensuring that these configurations are correct and standardized is critical for time synchronization, which underpins security, logging, and automation.

“AI is just automation by a different name.” It’s a bold claim—but one that Brandon Heller, CTO and co-founder of Forward Networks, and Howard Holton, CEO of GigaOm, unpack in a way that will make you think. In their recent conversation on Discovering Disruptions in Tech, they make the case that artificial intelligence, especially generative AI, is not delivering brand-new capabilities.

Cisco devices don’t warn you before rebooting with unsaved changes. A missed write memory means the running config is lost—and the device reloads with an outdated startup config. That’s how critical updates disappear, outages happen, and incidents get escalated. Manually checking for this drift across hundreds or thousands of devices is tedious and error-prone.

The Forward Networks platform creates a complete digital twin of your network—but the power of that data multiplies when it’s accessible via API. Whether you’re pushing insights into dashboards, validating changes before rollout, or automating ticket generation, the API puts your network state into your workflows.

Agentic AI—the emerging class of autonomous systems that can plan, decide, and act with limited human oversight—has become one of the most talked-about technologies of 2025. The promise is enormous: faster operations, automated decision-making, and the ability to handle complexity at scale.