Most organizations have mature processes for managing human identities. Onboarding, offboarding, access reviews, least privilege — these are established practices, even if execution is inconsistent. The problem is that human identities are no longer the majority of what’s accessing your systems. Service accounts, API keys, OAuth tokens, automation scripts, and now AI agents — non-human…
Graduation season is here, and if you’re about to finish a cybersecurity degree, a bootcamp, or a certification program and step into your first job search, congratulations — and also, fair warning: the gap between what academic programs prepare you for and what the job actually looks like is real, and nobody warns you about…
Every year on March 31st, the security community celebrates World Backup Day. Vendors tweet reminders. IT teams run awareness campaigns. Someone in marketing makes a clever graphic about the 3-2-1 rule. And every year, organizations that had backups still lose everything to ransomware. That’s because we’ve been celebrating the wrong thing. We’ve been celebrating the…
February is often “Bonus Season.” If you were lucky enough to see a performance bonus hit your account this month, the temptation is immediate: a new watch, a 4K monitor, or perhaps throwing it into a volatile crypto coin. But if you treat your career like a business—let’s call it “You Inc.”—you know that the…
It is tax season, which means it is also “Tax Scam Season.” While we all know to avoid phishing emails claiming to be the IRS (pro tip: the IRS never emails you), there is a more sophisticated threat: Stolen Identity Refund Fraud. This occurs when an attacker uses your Social Security Number (SSN)—likely stolen in…
An interview is a two-way street. While the company is evaluating your technical skills to see if you can protect their network, you must evaluate their culture to see if you can protect your sanity. Security burnout is real. It is rarely caused by “too much work”; it is almost always caused by poor management,…
We often use the terms “Security” and “Privacy” interchangeably, but they are two very different disciplines. In February, as we reflect on Data Privacy Day, it is critical to understand the distinction—because getting it wrong can lead to massive fines. Here is the simplest way to visualize the difference: You can have perfect security (a…
You can be the greatest penetration tester in the world, but if you can’t explain why a vulnerability matters to a Chief Financial Officer (CFO), you may hit a career ceiling. The most high-value skill in 2026 isn’t Python or Reverse Engineering. It’s Translation. The Translation Gap: How to Practice: Next time you find a…
It is performance review season. For many security professionals, this is a painful exercise. Why? Because in cybersecurity, success is often invisible. If you write your self-review based solely on “what went wrong” or “what I fixed,” you are underselling your value. You need to shift the narrative from “Operational Activity” to “Business Enablement.” Here…
Let’s start with a scenario that every GRC analyst has lived through. The Real-World Disconnect Imagine you are onboarding a new SaaS provider, “Vendor X.” You send them your standard SIG Core questionnaire (all 300 rows of Excel). Three weeks later, they reply. You mark them as “Compliant” and approve the contract. Two months later,…