Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

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.

Aligning with a NIST framework is a strategic initiative for any organization serious about cybersecurity. It provides a clear roadmap to defending against sophisticated supply chain attacks, meeting evolving regulatory demands, and managing growing cyber risk exposure from third-party vendors. This guide explains the core NIST frameworks and provides a practical, 5-step implementation plan for building a resilient and defensible security program with a NIST standard.

Looking back at 2025, two mega-trends from the past have continued: First, data breaches remained a constant and continued to trend upward; and second, there was once again a headline disaster no one anticipated. The first point needs no elaboration; data breaches are like air pollution—an accepted nuisance that only occasionally becomes so severe that we wonder why we live like this. For the second point, I gesture toward the major incidents of recent years. MoveIt. Crowdstrike. Snowflake.

If 2025 has taught us anything, it’s that risk is no longer confined to the edges of your network. The traditional security perimeter has dissolved, with risk creeping into the very tools we use to run our businesses. Organizations faced off against catastrophic configuration errors, the weaponization of third-party trust connections, Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) failures, and attackers who clearly love the holidays.