The carets were supposed to be subscripts, so like the ironies of A squared, I squared, or AI squared, and that expands to the ironies of automation and artificial intelligence in incidents. We're going to be talking about automation and AI, and how they show up in incidents. As I said, what do we mean by ironies of automation? What are we going to talk about today? Ironies of automation, what do I mean by that? What does this have to do with AI? What do we mean by ironies of AI? I promised incident story time, so we will have incident story time.
Unfortunately, even though Greg was no longer around, his account was, and it retained extensive privileges, including domain admin rights, SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) operator access, and even the ability to perform help desk functions. It's unclear if someone from auditing ever needed this level of access, but a former employee definitely did not.
Costello's "Watching the Detectives" captures the quieter side of vigilance. The song is observational, almost clinical. Is there anything more detached than the woman who is "filing her nails while they're dragging the lake"? It is about paying attention without inserting yourself into the scene too quickly. That analytical distance is familiar to anyone who has monitored an evolving situation and resisted the urge to act before understanding it.
Grafana has confirmed that an unauthorized party gained access to its GitHub environment after obtaining a compromised token, allowing the attacker to download parts of its codebase. In a public statement shared on X, the company said its investigation found no evidence that customer data or personal information was accessed and that no evidence that customer systems or operations were affected. The breach was discovered after unusual activity triggered a forensic investigation.
Tracebit has built cloud-native threat deception technology that uses tailored canaries to detect threats everywhere on a system. The canaries, which are described as fake honeypots, are deployed across the entire environment to attract threats and help organizations prevent cyberattacks and respond to incidents faster, employing an 'assume breach' approach.
Web browsers are among the top targets for today's cybercriminals, playing a role in nearly half of all security incidents, new research reveals. According to Palo Alto Networks' 2026 Global Incident Response report, an analysis of 750 major cyber incidents recorded last year across 50 countries found that, in total, 48% of cybercrime events involved browser activity. Individuals trying to connect to the web, including business employees, are exposed to cyberthreats on a daily basis.
On February 3rd, we identified evidence of a problem with our systems that allowed an unauthorized third party to access limited user data without permission, including email addresses, phone numbers, and other internal metadata,
When your intern accidentally clicked on phishing link, don't panic. Take consistent but confident action. Even knowledgeable, tech-savvy people can click a fishing link. They may do this due to haste or the cunning design of a phishing message. Such events happen more often than you think. The consequences can vary. It may be an innocent redirect to a fake website, or downloading malicious software
Security in 2026 is defined by convergence, complexity, and scale. Enterprise organizations are navigating a world where cyber incidents are causing physical shutdowns, and physical breaches are creating digital vulnerabilities, all while cloud-dependent systems are becoming the backbone of operations, and AI is being used as a tool by both defenders and attackers. Incidents in 2025, especially the AWS outage, have painfully exposed just how interdependent modern security environments have become.
Microsoft first acknowledged the issues at 0900 UTC (although the status page for the service stated it spotted the problem at 0922 UTC). At the time, Microsoft blamed the Azure OpenAI Service's availability issues on "an unhealthy backend dependent service, which led to cascading failures." The Windows behemoth noted problems when using modes such as GPT-5.2, GPT-5 Mini, GPT-4.1, and related APIs.
Cloudflare recently published a detailed resilience initiative called Code Orange: Fail Small, outlining a comprehensive plan to prevent large-scale service disruptions after two major network outages in the past six weeks. The plan prioritizes controlled rollouts, improved failure-mode handling, and streamlined emergency procedures to make the company's global network more robust and less vulnerable to configuration errors. Cloudflare's network suffered significant outages on November 18 and December 5, 2025, with the first incident disrupting traffic delivery for about two hours and ten minutes
