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You're listening to the Cyberwire Network, powered by N2K.
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Maybe that's an urgent email from your CEO. Or maybe it's a deepfake targeting your business. Doppel is the AI native social engineering defense platform, fighting back against impersonation and manipulation. As attackers use AI to make their tactics more sophisticated, Doppel uses it to fight back, automatically dismantling cross channel attacks, building team resilience and providing agentic email protection. Doppel outpacing what's next in social engineering? Learn more@doppel.com that'S-O-P-P-E-L.com.
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Researchers find that only a quarter of AI generated patches are fully successful Ransomware attacks exploit critical Enable flaw Atlassian fixes critical flaw in robo AI LexisNexis disables some services following suspicious activity US Senate confirms Adam Cassidy as sponsors Cyber Ambassador Meta ordered to pay an additional $567 million in child safety case Water sector cyber attacks expand to new US States We've got your Monday business briefing and on our industry voices. Dave Bittner sits down with Mujtaba Hamid, EVP of Product and Strategy at Booz Allen Hamilton at Black Hat discussing AI speed, cyber defense and scammers Set sail on the Odyssey. Today is Monday, August 10th, 2026. I'm Maria Varmazes in for Dave Bittner this week and this is your Cyber Wire Intel Brief. Thank you for joining me today. Let's get started. Researchers at 1Password found that AI generated security patches are still largely unreliable. When ChatGPT 5.5 and Cloud Opus 4.8 were tested against six recently disclosed vulnerabilities generating over 6,000 patches. Only 26% of the patches fully fixed the vulnerability without introducing new problems or altering application behavior. More than half the time, the AI did not fix the flaw or introduced new vulnerabilities in the process. The researchers conclude that human expertise still plays an essential role in the process of fully resolving vulnerabilities in software without introducing unwanted side effects. Microsoft has warned that a China based cybercriminal gang is launching ransomware attacks by exploiting a critical vulnerability in Enable's N Central software, which is a widely used remote monitoring and management tool. After exploiting the flaw to gain administrative access, the hackers deploy a new ransomware strain called Storm Encryptor. Enable released emergency patches earlier this month after the flaw was observed being exploited in zero day attacks. The company then issued a second Emergency hotfix on Aug. 6 after attackers bypassed the first patch, a critical vulnerability in Atlassian's Rovoai, dubbed rovoblast, allowed attackers to use a specifically crafted link to inject malicious instructions into a victim Rovo session without requiring a jailbreak or permission bypass. Because Rovo can access enterprise systems such as Jira, Confluence, SharePoint, Slack and Microsoft 365, the flaw could have been used to retrieve and exfiltrate sensitive corporate data with a single click. Atlassian fixed the issue following a responsible disclosure by researchers at Varonis Data analytics company LexisNexis has taken its diligence, metabase, API and newsdesk services offline after detecting suspicious activity on servers managed by a third party vendor. The company is investigating the issue and rebuilding the affected systems in a new environment before restoring service. The company has not said whether customer data was compromised. Todd Larson, who is the president of the Global Nexus Solutions division of LexisNexis, said in a statement. Our investigation is ongoing and we are working with a preeminent cybersecurity forensic firm on review and remediation. The US Senate has confirmed Adam Cassidy as chief of the State Department's Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy, making him the second person to hold this position. The post had been vacant since Nathaniel Fick departed in January 2025. Cassidy, a senior official at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, was confirmed in a 5147 vote. The record notes that it is unclear how much influence the position still holds for Following a major State Department reorganization last year, a New Mexico court has ordered meta to pay $567 million and make major changes to Facebook and Instagram to better protect children, bringing the company's total liability in the case to $942 million. The ruling requires stronger age verification limits on minors, platform use, tighter controls on AI chatbot interactions and measures to address child abuse and mental health. Meta plans to appeal the ruling. A company spokesperson stated, we remain confident in our record of protecting teens online and will continue to defend ourselves against claims that misrepresent the facts. As a follow up to a story that we have been covering, New Jersey and Alabama have joined the growing list of states whose water and wastewater facilities were targeted in a cyber attack campaign linked to Iranian hackers. The campaign, which began in late July, has reportedly affected at least 12 states. New Jersey's Cape May and Woodbine water systems were targeted on July 27, disrupting phone systems but not water service. The same day, hackers targeted industrial control systems at Alabama's Childersburg water, sewer and gas system, but water services were not disrupted. So far, affected utilities have reported limited impact, and officials continue to say that drinking water is safe. The attacks have targeted ICS devices made by Rockwell Automation and may involve equipment from other major vendors. The FBI confirmed at least seven states have been targeted as of July 30, but has not publicly provided further updates. And now it's time for our Monday business briefing. Last week's business breakdown highlights just over a staggering $1 billion raised across 17 investments and one acquisition. For investments, Horizon 3 raised $250 million in a Series E round led by NightDragon and NEA. The US based autonomous pen testing company is now valued at $2 billion. Horizon 3 plans to use the funding to scale its GTM operations, accelerate its product roadmap and support its entry into both Singapore and Australia. Additionally spur the US based IP intelligence provider raised $200 million from Insight Partners. With the funding, the company is looking to expand investment across product development, intelligence coverage integrations and enterprise operations lines. In acquisitions Okta, the US based IAM company acquired Permiso Security by acquiring the Identity Security platform. Okta is looking to expand its footprint beyond identity management and add core soc capabilities through Promiso's P0 labs. And that wraps up this week's business breakdown. For deeper analysis on major business moves shaping the cybersecurity landscape. Make sure to subscribe to N2K Pro and check out TheCyberWire.com every Wednesday for the latest updates. Stick with us now. After the break, dave bittner sits down with mujtaba hamid, evp of product and strategy at booz allen hamilton at black hat usa to discuss AI speed, cyber defense and scammers set sail on the odyssey.
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AI is making phishing attacks faster, more convincing and harder for people to spot, and traditional security awareness and phishing training weren't designed for this level of attack. Hoxhunt helps security teams prepare employees for the attacks they face every day with personalized phishing training that adapts to each employee and reduces risky behavior over time for IT and security leaders looking to strengthen their human layer of defense without adding more manual work. Visit hoxhunt.com cyberwire to learn more. That's H o x h u n t.com cyberwire.
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Recently at Black Hat usa, Dave Bittner sat down with Mujtaba Hamid, EVP of Product and Strategy at Booz Allen Hamilton as they discussed AI speed cyber defense. Here's their conversation.
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We talked about agentic for cybersecurity. The best innovation ideas and product ideas will also be the ones that are agent native and grow out and scale very fast. Which means, especially if you're a technology company or you're leveraging technology for your work, you will be having a lot of agentic IP that you have to develop rollout and scale very quickly.
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Well, welcome back. We are here at Black Hat 2026 and I am pleased to be joined by Mujtaba Hamid, who is Executive Vice President for Product and Strategy at Booz Allen Hamilton.
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Welcome and thank you for joining us.
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Good to be here. Thanks, Dave.
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So we want to talk about AI today and before we dig into some of the specifics, I would love to get your take on kind of the state of things like where do we find ourselves in this moment when it comes to security professionals and enterprise folks in general in dealing with this wave of AI?
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Yeah, well, I'm surprised you're starting by AI, but yeah, I think every so often there's a new tech wave and the tech stack gets either evolved or reshaped. And we've been through a few of those depending on how old you are. You know, the 95 wave and then the wave when the mobile phones and smartphones came, and then the cloud wave. And think we're at this new wave where the. But this wave seems to be different because it's not just that a new layer is getting added, but potentially the whole stack will get redrawn as well. I mean, I can imagine these LLMs and that infrastructure, and now we're starting to see open weight models come to life. So a new infrastructure layer is getting set up on which not just software gets built, but then applications and the whole stack gets rebuilt on that. With that, then you need a new middleware type of layer as well, which we're also starting to see, be it harnesses or agentic governance or policy controls and then the apps on top. So I think this wave is a culmination of several things. But yeah, I think the stack is getting redone. But every time the stack gets redone, the prior waves are still there. We still have mainframes running, ATM software, so all of those. So for cybersecurity professionals, the complexity just expands and compounds. And I think that's what we are going through right now. So you're barely trying to keep up with what you had to worry about and suddenly a whole new redrawing of the tech stack with ginormous amounts of code getting written, vulnerabilities getting found and so to call it. I think it's overwhelming for the industry, for the CISOs, for everyone involved.
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How much do you think that this is a matter of velocity, that everything is, it seems to me, is coming so much more quickly at all the people who are trying to adjust to all of this.
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Yeah, and that's also another thing that, to me, I don't think it's new. I'm. As technology develops, every wave of technology, the velocity increases. And here the velocity is maybe even exponentially faster than the prior waves. And we see that in the adoption. And just in my personal experience and probably yours and others, the changes we used to see in a year or two years in terms of new tools or resources coming now, we're seeing that in a matter of months. I grew up in a semiconductor industry when the Moore's Law was fully active, and we'd be very proud that every 18 months, you could double the computing power while the LLMs. And this whole wave is going much faster than Moore's role right now.
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And how do you see the adversaries taking advantage of that? What are some of the specific things you're tracking?
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There's things that we track as Booz Allen, given the sensitive clients that we work with, but there's a lot that all of us are seeing. The news coming out the hugging face news that came out, the wave before that, when the Mythos news was released. Now super Patch Tuesday, with hundreds and hundreds of vulnerabilities being found. So we're all seeing and living through the impact with the pace and velocity and depth of changes. And as with all technology, technology can be used for good or evil, and the adversaries are as smart, if not smarter, and they have a lot of strong tools better than they've ever had at their disposal. And we're seeing the effects of that, honestly. And so to me, as a product manager and going through this case, we have to be in that line between hope and fear, right? Like too much hope and too much fear. Like both of them. So you have to be in that. Okay, what do you do about it? Right? Like, how do you use the tools at your disposal in a way that you can remain a tech optimist, and you're out there at the front lines and you're helping the companies protect their mission systems, their crown jewels, their operational readiness, so they can keep doing what they're doing?
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So you alluded to the scale of an organization like Booz Allen, and I think that extends to the types of customers that you tend to work with. How do you reconcile this velocity issue with large organizations that have to deal with things like regulations, like, you know, there's that old saying, you can't just turn a battleship on a dime. How do you align those things?
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Yeah, there's no magic trick here. Yeah. And so the position we have given who we work with and the scale complexity and the unique threats and regulations that our set of customers have to work with is one, you have to be really good at thinking in systems and being systematic and seeing patterns at scale. Second, really understanding the customer environment deeply, be it to deploy zero trusted or to kind of do penetration testing or to kind of come up with a cyber defense, but really that stems from a deep knowledge of the environment itself and then go execute at pace. So what we see from Booz Allen is, yeah, we bring a lot of the commercial technology into Bayer as well. You have to be focused on the mission, grounding then environment knowledge and then thinking like large scale systems and applying that.
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And what are the strategies that you and your colleagues think are going to be most successful here? Are we talking about fighting AI with AI?
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Well, I'd be one of 500 people here talking about fighting AI with AI. It's true, you probably have heard that a few times.
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Once or twice.
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Yeah. But I think we can all say fight AI with AI. But what do we mean when we say that? Right? Are you applying AI at the fringes? Are you looking at AI at the workflow level or are you looking at AI as fundamentally reimagining how the value is provided to the customer? So for example, given the scale sophistication and what the adversary is doing, what I believe is we need to kind of have we're fighting AI with AI at all levels right here. What we have from a product standpoint is the advantage of coming in with fresh ideas. And so we fundamentally are going AI native. So really look at AI at the ground up, at the core of our technology solution to fight this threat. Instead of if we were an incumbent or established, we would be looking at, okay, how do I start to kind of bring in AI from the fringes of my product down? But we're actually like reimagining it from the inside out. And I believe that both approaches are needed, but our approach is also needed in order to scale at the velocity that we need right now.
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Help me understand that. Does that mean that the products at their core are AI focused as opposed to having AI grafted on after the fact?
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Yeah. So the core of our products, they're essentially agent, agentic products. So with an orchestrator, with a swarm of agents and an agentic framework underneath, so we can Be ensuring that all the agents in our product are resilient. We have immutable logs of what those agents are doing. We can move towards compliance for our agents. But essentially we're an agentix swarm setup product portfolio. So everything starts from there, which then gives us the ability to scale branch off very quickly as well. So if there's an adjacent idea that comes in or a gap we see, a lot of times it could just be a refactoring of that agent swarm, or you add a few more agents into that swarm, task them differently and you have a full governance on it. So that's what I mean by an agent native product approach.
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How do you train your own models on that adversary mindset and do it in such a way that it is responsible, controllable, all of those things that folks worry about.
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Yeah. So in terms of models, that whole ecosystem is also evolving very fast. Right. Just the news of the last few weeks has been the breakthroughs in these open weight models and which ecosystems open weight models are getting traction and how small can they be and how specialized can they be. So I believe this arc will play out. We've started out with just using models that are available, both the frontier models largely, but also some of the other specialized models. And we will continue to ride that arc. Perhaps we will have some of our own models as this open weight ecosystem grows up. But then the innovation and the technology we had to deploy is exactly what you were saying is how do you trust the models that we have? So we have a proprietary framework for our Veloc suite which we call the VELOC Agentic framework, which is sitting underneath all of our products. And in that is the provenance layer. I believe compliance for agentic solutions is coming. Luz island is one of the leaders in compliance over the decades for the federal government. So we're already proactively thinking about agentic compliance. And from that we have a product in Preview called Velox Layer 1. It's actually a proxy that sits between the agent and the LLM and it governs everything going out and coming back. And you can deploy policy. We have immutable logs. So the techniques we are using, our customers are interested in having access to those techniques. So we're introducing a product around that as well.
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Interesting. Mujtaba Hamid is Executive Vice President for Product and Strategy at Booz Allen Hamilton. Thank you so much for joining us.
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Thanks.
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That was Mujtaba Hamid and Dave Bittner discussing AI speed cyber defense. For more information on this conversation, be sure to check out our show Notes.
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What's the one thing in business that's spreading as fast as AI? AI risk. Every new tool your team signs up for. Every vendor that turns on AI features, every new integration, each one is another opportunity for something to go wrong. And most security programs weren't built to keep up with AI's pace of growth. Enter Vanta. Vanta is the number one agentic trust platform trusted by more than 16,000 fast moving companies like Ramp, Purser and Harvey to help them stay audit ready. And now Vanta helps companies like yours keep an eye on the risks that appear between audits across your vendors, your AI tools, and your entire environment. The Vanta Agent works like a 24.7grc engineer. In the background, it finds, issues, drafts, fixes for you, and can cut vendor assessment time by up to 50%. Whether you're a fast growing startup or a global enterprise, Vanta is here to help you automate your security and compliance and earn and prove trust. Get started today@vanta.com cyber that's V A N T A dot com cyber.
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Last Up Tell us Muse of the dangers of sailing the high seas. Because if you've been waiting to see the Odyssey but can't make it to the cinema, beware of anyone offering you a convenient shortcut. You the highly anticipated film is being used as bait in a wave of fake streaming scams, with criminals setting up convincing websites, complete with phony reviews and even dubbed versions tailored to a visitor's location. Victims are lured into signing up for free access, only to be asked for their bank details. And yeah, as you might expect, there's no movie waiting on the other side. Instead, victims could end up with money stolen from their accounts, malware on their computers, and a fresh invitation to future phishing scams. Hooray. Now, while Christopher Nolan may want you to experience his epic on the big screen, he probably didn't have a malware download in mind for the encore. And that's the Cyber Wire. For links to all of today's stories, check out our daily briefing@thecyberwire.com we'd love to know what you think of this podcast. Your feedback ensures we deliver the insights that keep you a step ahead in the rapidly changing world of cybersecurity. If you like our show, please share a rating and review in your podcast app. Please also fill out the survey in the show notes or send an email to cyberwire2k.com N2K's lead producer is Liz Stokes. We are mixed by Trey Hester with original music and sound design by Elliot Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Ibin. Peter Kielpe is our publisher. And I'm Maria Varmanzas in for host Dave Buettner this week. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow,
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Sam.