cybersecurity

Two years ago I knew virtually nothing about Christchurch. This year WitFoo sponsored two final-year projects at the University of Canterbury, and a third student put our open dataset to work. What Dylan, Matthew and Ben found, and what comes next.

Answers to the questions that came into my session at Tech Summit 2026 on Cybersecurity in the Age of AI

I presented "Cybersecurity in an AI Age" at Canterbury Tech Summit 2026. Here is the practice recording and the full argument: why these machines guess, what criminals are doing with that, and the eight controls that still hold.

Sales manages opportunities. Uber manages trips. Hospitals manage patients and beds. Naval Aviation managed gripes and readiness. Navy cybersecurity, when I arrived 24 years ago, managed nothing at all. On the unit of work we went looking for, and found.

115 breach attempts hit our network in one day. 16 were driven by AI agents. Zero got in. The "agentic attacker" turns out to be unimaginative, derivative, and losing to the same hygiene that beat the teenage authors of Blaster and Sasser.

We cut the haystack by more than 95% and lost not one needle. I have come to believe that is only possible one way, and the probabilistic shortcut the whole industry is reaching for can never get there.

Two detectives, same case. The one who guesses fast, or the one who shows her work? Why cybersecurity can't run on lucky guesses — and how empathetic processing bridges the two.

In this episode, James talks to Charles Herring about what happens when an IT wizard runs away to join the Navy, works on fighter jets, and then gets thrown into cybersecurity right after 9/11? He shares his unconventional journey from the Wild West days of network defense, complete with fighting worms with worms—to being CISO during the Target breach. Plus: why trauma creates silos, why your SOC is like throwing receipts in garbage bags, and what it takes to build a "good neighborhood" in cybersecurity.

Earlier this week, WitFoo and the University of Canterbury released 100 million labelled cybersecurity records to Hugging Face under Apache 2.0. Here's a three-prompt walk-through for putting it to work in a stack you already own (Grafana, Sentinel, Splunk, Elastic), using Empathetic Processing to translate, detect, and visualise across your own data.