CYBERSECURITY

Francis Scialabba

Winter is coming…and by “winter,” we mean AI-enabled cyberattacks and other highly advanced agentic threats.

Industry professionals have been issuing warnings to the broader cybersecurity community about the impending future of fully agentic attacks.

A new threat pyramid. CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz took the stage during a Sept. 1 keynote at Fal.Con Las Vegas to reflect on the state of the cybersecurity industry after the infamous Hugging Face–OpenAI incident, which he called a “watershed moment in security.”

“The new apex predator is the agent,” Kurtz said. “What I mean by that is this is really the rise of the agent state. We hear about ‘nation state’; it’s now the agent state.”

What’s unique about the agent state, he said, is that agents aren’t at an organization’s perimeter, but rather on their “payroll.”

“Your companies, your people, organizations brought them all in. The old model was ‘keep everybody out.’ Now it’s ‘let them all in.’ So, that’s where we are,” Kurtz said. “We can’t see them. We can’t keep up with them. And no one has built AI for the defender. AI is the new battleground.”

Attacks are happening at the speed of “inference.”—BM

      

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IT STRATEGY

Christine Cunningham

Today’s generation of software-building, stack-maintaining IT pros regularly leverage their extensive expertise and problem-solving abilities.

You don’t acquire that kind of knowledge overnight. Christine Cunningham, chief curriculum and learning officer at Boston’s Museum of Science, wants to start building young engineers’ analytical acumen as early as preschool—and with materials as high-tech as puppets and pom-poms.

Cunningham leads the creation of instructional resources for a program called Youth Engineering Solutions (YES). Established in 2024, the initiative provides educator support and science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education for students in middle-school grades and below.

Preschoolers following the YES lessons are tasked with helping a puppet raccoon celebrate a birthday in style: given a jewelry box on a popsicle stick, the youngsters see which combination of paper clips, pom-poms, sponge pieces, and craft foam make for maximum sound effects.

The game offers students a chance to experience the core steps of an engineering task: explore, create, and improve.

“Designing with a function in mind is something that’s not always present in preschool, but kids love doing it, and they’re very, very capable,” Cunningham told us.

What has AI done to “durable” STEM skills?—BH

      

WORD OF THE WEEK

GitOps: This framework rests on three “pillars”: infrastructure-as-code (IaC), pull and merge requests to update infrastructure and keep configurations up-to-date, and continuous integration and continuous delivery and deployment (CI/CD). Learn more.

IT STRATEGY

Getty Images

August marks the end of summer—and it was a quiet month overall for the C-suite, which nonetheless had its share of comings and goings.

Antoine McCord, DHS CIO, leaves agency

After a year-and-a-half stint in charge of cybersecurity at DHS, CIO Antoine McCord has left the agency.

A hire at the beginning of the second Trump administration, McCord’s professional background includes time in the Marine Corps and over two years working for military tech contractor Anduril.

He joined DHS in March 2025 as CIO, but took on added responsibilities—what one official described to FedScoop as a “triple-hatted” role—as head of DHS’s Office of Biometric Identity Management (OBIM) and the agency’s acting CISO.

Kyle Schutt, a former staffer with Elon Musk’s DOGE effort, replaced McCord as interim CIO and head of OBIM on August 31.

Also: Delaware has a new CIO.—EH

      

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patch notes

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top IT reads.

Stat: 78%. That’s the proportion of 1,600 surveyed CISOs who consider GenAI a major security risk, according to enterprise cybersecurity company Proofpoint. The figure marks an 18 percent increase from last year. (Cybersecurity Dive)

Quote: “At the minute, basically all of the transparency about these risks that is coming from the companies is entirely voluntary.”—Joe Benton, a former AI safety research lead at Anthropic, on the lack of insight into how autonomous systems defy human instructions (NBC News)

Read: A practical PC-maintenance checklist that only takes 30 minutes. (PCWorld)

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