Cynthia Brumfield is a veteran communications and technology analyst who is currently focused on cybersecurity. She runs a cybersecurity news destination site, Metacurity.com, consults with companies through her firm DCT-Associates, and is the author of the book published by Wiley, Cybersecurity Risk Management: Mastering the Fundamentals Using the NIST Cybersecurity Framework.
Cynthia holds a Master of Planning Degree from the University of Virginia and a Bachelor’s degree from The George Washington University. She has won multiple AZBEE awards for her work on CSO, including two in 2025.
AI is lowering the barrier to sophisticated attacks and shrinking defenders’ response time, forcing CISOs to treat geopolitical threats as an increasingly urgent enterprise risk.
The FBI’s takedown of QTFY exposes how China’s reliance on private cyber contractors gives state hackers scale and stealth. It also underscores why CISOs can no longer trust IP reputation alone.
Disruption of a tiny UK generator and attacks on US water systems point to a growing wartime cyber tactic — exploiting internet-connected industrial equipment at small facilities that lack the money and staff to defend it.
When AI agents get compromised, new research shows the model usually isn’t to blame — the code wrapped around it is. And most organizations aren’t watching it closely enough.
As AI increasingly accelerates and individualizes cyberattacks, cracks in security leaders’ foundational defensive strategies are only becoming easier to find.
Investigators are chasing two open questions in the coordinated attack on Minnesota water systems: who was behind it, and whether a shared vulnerability in widely used industrial controllers made dozens of small utilities exploitable at once.
The future of the security operations center may depend less on technology than on how well security leaders manage human attention, expertise, and resilience.
AI is giving elite security orgs new ways to automate red teaming, detection engineering, and vulnerability discovery. But experts debate whether the technology will deepen cyber’s long-standing resource divide — or finally help close it.
