Security architecture and threat landscape
Why this matters right now Applied machine learning is now a first-class dependency in critical systems: Fraud and abuse detection Authentication and anomaly detection Malware and phishing classification Access control and risk scoring Those systems are now high-value cyber targets. The attack surface has quietly expanded: Inputs are programmable: An attacker can craft payloads to…
Why this matters right now Solid-state batteries look like a materials-science problem. In practice, they are a cyber-physical and supply-chain problem. If you ship software into vehicles, charging infrastructure, or energy systems, you’re about to inherit a new class of attack surface—whether or not your org ever touches a cathode slurry. Three things are converging:…
Why this matters right now Most teams didn’t design their security posture. It just…emerged. Identity: “We’ll wire Okta/AAD later.” Secrets: “Put it in the CI variable store for now.” Cloud security: “We’ll run a scanner before launch.” Supply chain: “We pin dependencies, mostly.” Incident response: “We have PagerDuty; we’ll figure it out.” That worked when:…
Why this matters right now AI “agents” and automated workflows are escaping slide decks and landing in production: LLM-powered copilots wiring directly into CRMs, ticketing, and code repos AI workflows replacing brittle RPA in finance, HR, and IT Orchestration layers gluing together SaaS, internal APIs, and third‑party tools From a cybersecurity perspective, this isn’t “just…
Why this matters right now Most organizations already have shadow LLM usage. If you haven’t seen it, it’s because: Engineers are pasting logs and stack traces into public chatbots. Analysts are dropping CSVs into “AI assistants”. Product is experimenting with SaaS copilots wired into internal tools. You can pretend this isn’t happening, or you can…
Why this matters right now Most fintech infrastructure teams still think in terms of features: faster payouts, better FX rates, slick onboarding, real-time balances. But if you’re moving money at scale, your primary product in production is not payments. It’s risk-adjusted, regulator-compliant, adversarially robust transaction processing. Three things have converged in the last ~3 years:…
Why this matters right now AI in software engineering is no longer a side experiment. It’s in: Code review and pull requests Test generation and coverage Architecture decision records and design proposals CI/CD workflows and rollout plans That means AI now influences: What code gets written How it’s tested How it’s deployed Which means it…
Why this matters right now Cloud security on AWS used to mean “don’t leak S3 buckets” and “rotate IAM keys.” That’s quaint now. Serverless, ephemeral infrastructure, and platform engineering have shifted the failure modes: Blast radius is smaller, but blast frequency is higher. Privilege is more granular, but IAM graph complexity explodes. Infra is more…
Why this matters right now Most ML-in-production conversations obsess over accuracy, latency, and GPU cost. Meanwhile, the security story is usually “we put it behind the API gateway; we’re done.” That’s no longer defensible. Two things are true at the same time: Any non-trivial ML system now handles sensitive data (behavioral logs, internal documents, PII-laden…
Why this matters right now Solid-state batteries are not just a chemistry upgrade. They’re a system architecture change that turns power storage into: A deeply integrated cyber-physical subsystem A remotely updatable, networked component in EVs and grid-scale storage A safety-critical device whose failure mode is “thermal event,” not just “service degradation” If your org touches…
Why this matters right now Most teams are still doing security as a department, not as a dependency graph. They buy tools, wire alerts into Slack, and hope their cloud security posture management and secrets manager make them “secure enough.” Then an incident hits and they realize: Identities don’t map cleanly to workloads. Secrets are…
Why this matters right now AI automation is finally escaping slide decks and hitting production: Sales ops teams wiring GPT-based agents into CRMs. Finance automating invoice handling and approvals. Support teams deploying AI copilots to resolve tickets end-to-end. DevOps gluing together “AI workflows” that talk directly to infrastructure APIs. This is real: lead time drops,…
Why this matters right now LLMs are not “just another API.” They are stateful probabilistic systems that: Consume your most sensitive data (prod logs, tickets, deal notes, HR chatter) Produce outputs that can’t be trivially reconstructed or explained Sit at the junction of multiple compliance domains (security, privacy, vendor risk, legal) If you’re in a…
Why this matters right now If you touch money programmatically, you are in the security business. The old split—“payments team ships features, security team files tickets”—is breaking. The real world looks like this: Fraud and AML adversaries iterate faster than your quarterly roadmap. Regulators increasingly expect control evidence, not architecture diagrams. Card networks, banks, and…
Why this matters right now AI is no longer a “sidecar” in software engineering. It’s inside your: IDE (codegen, refactors, docstrings) CI/CD (test generation, static analysis, security scanning) Incident response (runbook lookup, log summarization, suggested fixes) That’s a lot of direct influence on production systems. From a cybersecurity lens, this changes three things: Where you…
Why this matters right now Serverless on AWS has quietly become the default for a lot of new work: APIs on API Gateway + Lambda or Lambda + ALB Event-driven glue with SQS, SNS, EventBridge Data pipelines with Kinesis, Lambda, Step Functions, DynamoDB Internal platforms built on top of these building blocks From a security…
Why this matters right now If you’re running applied machine learning in production, your attack surface has quietly changed. You now have: Models that will happily output whatever an attacker coaxes from them. Feature pipelines that trust external data more than your SRE team ever would. Evaluation and monitoring stacks that assume “data drift” is…
Why this matters right now Solid-state batteries are moving from slideware to pilot lines. Automakers and grid operators are betting on them for: Higher energy density (more range, smaller packs) Better safety (non-flammable solid electrolytes) Faster charging and longer cycle life This is mostly framed as a materials and manufacturing story. But for anyone responsible…
Why this matters right now Most teams are doing security-by-add-on: bolt on an IdP, buy a CSPM tool, encrypt a few things, call it “zero trust”. Attackers don’t care about your tools. They care about your shape: – How identity is modeled and granted authority. – How secrets actually move and sit at rest. –…
Why this matters right now AI automation has escaped the lab and is now sitting in the middle of real business workflows: “Agents” updating tickets and configs. Copilots auto-drafting customer replies and legal docs. Workflow orchestrators pushing data between SaaS tools. RPA replacements driving your browser and internal apps. If these systems can: – Read…
Why this matters right now Most orgs are bolting LLMs onto existing systems faster than they’re updating their threat models, retention policies, or SOC2/ISO control mappings. That’s a problem. Three things are colliding: LLMs are incredibly data-hungry They encourage “just send the context” patterns: tickets, logs, customer chats, CRM data, internal docs, incident reports. That’s…
Why this matters right now If you run a fintech product—payments, lending, wallets, brokerage, BNPL, open banking—your infrastructure is a security system. Not “secured by” a system; it is the system. Every decision you make about payments routing, ledger design, onboarding, and user experience either: Makes fraud, AML, and account takeover cheaper to detect and…
Why this matters right now AI codegen and testing tools are already inside your SDLC, whether you’ve blessed them or not. What changed in 2023–2024 isn’t that “AI can write code” — it’s that: Developers are past the toy phase and shipping AI-assisted code to production. Security and compliance teams are behind the adoption curve….
Why this matters right now If your org is going heavy on AWS serverless and platform engineering, your threat model has quietly changed more in the last three years than in the previous ten. Key shifts: You don’t own the OS anymore. Your “hosts” are ephemeral and unpatchable (by you). Blast radius is defined by…
