Two Senate committee leaders are introducing legislation to foster cybersecurity standards for the telecommunications sector nearly two years after the landmark Salt Typhoon campaign was made public.

First reported by CyberScoop, Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, the GOP chairman of the Commerce, Science and Technology panel, are introducing the Telecommunications Cybersecurity and Resilience Act.

“The Salt Typhoon intrusion was the worst telecom hack in our nation’s history and showed us just how vulnerable our critical infrastructure is, but it does not have to be that way,” Warner said. “If telecommunications companies adopt cybersecurity best practices, our networks can be more resilient. This bipartisan legislation is a good start in protecting our nation and strengthening the communications networks Americans rely on every day.”

Federal officials have repeatedly warned that Salt Typhoon — the Chinese group blamed for the massive and “indiscriminate” espionage campaign that hit major telecom carriers and siphoned data from presidential campaigns and candidates — remains a threat to this day.

Yet some cyber officials have worried that public apathy over the attacks has stifled momentum for telecom security rules. In one case the Trump administration has rolled them back.

The Warner-Cruz legislation takes the approach of trying to improve telecom security with voluntary measures jointly developed by government and industry.

“Foreign adversaries are increasingly targeting America’s communications networks. Securing them requires an approach that keeps pace with evolving threats,” Cruz said. “This sensible bill brings government and industry together to develop voluntary, telecom-specific cybersecurity best practices rather than adopting rigid federal mandates that quickly become outdated.”

Their bill would create a telecom cybersecurity working group within the National Telecommunications and Information Administration to bring together carriers, suppliers, experts and relevant government agencies. 

The working group would develop voluntary industry-wide best practices within 18 months of passage of the bill, which would be reviewed for updates every two years or after major incidents.

The best practices would “focus solely on identifying, responding to, mitigating, preventing, and remediating cybersecurity incidents and vulnerabilities,” according to the legislation, and would be in line with existing federal cybersecurity risk management frameworks.

The working group would also create a voluntary certification process through independent third-party assessors that companies could choose to use.

“What is missing” now, according to a summary of the bill, “is a common, telecom sector-specific set of best practices that brings that expertise together and can evolve as threats and technology change. Building on industry’s familiarity with security development and threat information sharing, this bill would bring stakeholders — government and private sector — together to develop and maintain effective techniques and practices to secure networks.”

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Nearly two of every 10 U.S. water and wastewater organizations have identity data actively exposed from infostealers harvesting their credentials, according to research published Tuesday.

The study from identity risk firm SpyCloud follows months of reports about a wave of cyberattacks hitting targets in the sector, which U.S. government officials suspect are tied to Iran.

The company built a database of 66,845 Environmental Protection Agency-registered systems, examined internet domains and ultimately analyzed 10,000 organizations, finding that 1,787 showed active infostealer exposure.

In one case, a single infected device at a smart meter technology provider that SpyCloud didn’t name contained saved logins linked to roughly 167 different U.S. utility metering tenants — meaning that one exposure opened the door to many more. 

That “cascading supply chain exposure” was one of the biggest findings of the report that SpyCloud shared exclusively with CyberScoop, said Jason Lancaster, chief investigations officer at the cyber firm, along with the quantitative approach” to measure exposure overall.

“We talk about it a lot,” Lancaster said of the exponential risk that one exposure can present. “There’s examples here and there, but that was a standout example of, here’s a tangible thing that is an exposure right now.”

Generally, “Infostealer exposure means the attacker isn’t guessing anymore, they’ve got legitimate points of entry,” Lancaster said. “In the investigations I’ve worked, that log data usually contains stolen session cookies, credentials, and autofill info pulled straight off the infected device. That’s enough to walk right past [multifactor authentication] by hijacking an already-authenticated session, log into corporate email or VPNs without raising a single alert, and sit there quietly for weeks while they map out the network.”

Still, the study had limitations. It doesn’t address what apparently led to the cyberattacks that unfolded in Minnesota and elsewhere this summer: internet-exposed programmable logic controllers.

It’s “important to note that our research did not focus on OT devices which run the most critical processes within these utilities, and any exposure we cite herein should not be interpreted as exposure of specific OT devices,” the report said. It did, however, find that 258 of the 1,787 organizations with active infostealer exposure carried credentials to operational technology or remote-access systems.

Some of the report’s conclusions were about the limitations of the data itself.

“Exposure concentrated in larger operators and in the vendor supply chain; small utilities were largely underrepresented,” SpyCloud said. “That’s a pattern in the data, not a claim that every water system nationwide carries this risk — and it measures identity exposure, not confirmed intrusion.”

It’s the first study of its kind that SpyCloud has done for a specific industry, so the company doesn’t have comparisons to other industries, Lancaster said. SpyCloud has begun a responsible disclosure process for those affected within its report, he said, beginning with a briefing for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

“It’s important to remember, infostealer logs aren’t the end of an incident — they are often the beginning,” Lancaster said. “Access brokers sell these logs specifically because ransomware crews and other fraudsters want exactly this kind of entry point. So, the real question isn’t whether the exposure is dangerous. It’s how much time you have before someone weaponizes that stolen data against you.”

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The top election official for Shasta County, Calif. said he has offered convicted felon and former Mesa County, Colo. clerk Tina Peters a position as a consultant to help with the 2026 elections, but that she hasn’t accepted the position yet.  

Earlier this month, Shasta County registrar Clint Curtis told local news outlets that he intended to hire Peters as assistant registrar of voters to help with the upcoming 2026 elections, months after she was released from prison in Colorado.

In an interview with CyberScoop this week, Curtis said he was looking to hire Peters as a consultant, citing the length of time involved in hiring her as a full-time employee and the need for immediate help running the upcoming midterm elections.

Curtis said that he initially believed Peters had accepted the position, only to later hear from her that she needed to consult her legal team after her prison sentence was commuted in June.

“She’s got to check it all out, make sure it’s okay, make sure there’s not any roadblocks in there that we don’t know about [or are] illegal, so you got to walk through the whole mess,” said Curtis.

A Colorado Department of Corrections official told CyberScoop that as part of her parole conditions, Peters must be employed and live in Colorado. Peters can request a transfer to another state, but she must first receive permission from both states and go through a formal review process.

According to Curtis, hiring Peters as a consultant means she would not have local access to county email or election systems. Peters’ past conviction “doesn’t matter” because her access to county IT would be limited.

“If she’s on staff she’d have logins to the network, logins in the system, she’d basically have full access,” Curtis said in a phone interview. “But consultants don’t have any of that, nor should they, right?”

Consultants “are basically there to actually watch other people do it and make sure they do it right rather than do it themselves,” he added.

At the same time, when asked what responsibilities Peters would have, Curtis described an expansive role, with Peters helping him oversee the registrar’s office and direct his full-time staff of about 12.

Asked what drew him to Peters, Curtis said “well, she’s out [of prison] and I have this position become available [and] I need somebody that can actually supervise and knows something about elections.”

In 2024, Peters was convicted of seven felony crimes related to the theft of voting machine software from Mesa County election facilities, in a failed attempt to prove that the machines had been involved in election fraud during the 2020 election.

She served less than two years of that sentence, as legal appeals, relentless pressure from the Trump administration and eventually a commutation by Colorado Governor Jared Polis saw her released from prison in June.

Curtis said he did not reach out to any Mesa County officials before offering Peters the job, but did cite conversations with her that impressed him and his confidence that he would remain in control of the county’s elections.

“I talked to her and basically, she’s very even tempered, she’s not wild and crazy which is good,” said Curtis. “And so basically I’d still be in charge so it wouldn’t really be a problem…there’s no way she would get out of bounds on me.”

A request to Mesa County’s press office seeking comment was not returned. At Peters’ sentencing hearing in 2024, multiple Mesa County officials testified about the negative impact her crimes and behavior had on the county’s elections, finances and reputation.

When reached for comment, a representative for Peter Ticktin, Peters’ lawyer, provided CyberScoop with a statement from last week regarding Peters’ intentions.

“Tina Peters is giving consideration to helping in the efforts in Shasta County as there most definitely has been monkey business in the way the election was handled,” Ticktin said. “Tina is one of the key voices leading the effort to get the invasive machines out of our election process.”

Earlier this month, Curtis was censured by the Shasta County Board of Supervisors following investigations into  allegations of verbal abuse and threatening language to staff.

Curtis, who was appointed county registrar in 2025, also made a number of claims about what he called suspicious mail-in ballots used during the 2024 election. He claimed the ballots were different sizes and looked, felt and “smelled” different from normal mail-in ballots.

Curtis told CyberScoop he did not follow up with the county’s ballot manufacturer to ask if there was a credible explanation, saying he lacked investigative authority to do so. He also could not answer how many instances of voter fraud his office had confirmed. 

A day after speaking with CyberScoop, the Shasta County Board of Supervisors said Curtis’ claims were “frivolous” and that they “welcomed” investigations by state and federal authorities.

“Mr. Curtis was hired to enhance transparency, strengthen election integrity and restore trust. While some progress has been achieved, including the promotion of meaningful observation within the Elections Office, Mr. Curtis has failed significantly in other core responsibilities, undermining the very principles he was appointed to uphold.”

The press office for California Secretary of State Shirley Weber’s told CyberScoop that irrespective of whom a county employs or contracts with, they must comply with California law, security and confidentiality requirements, and “maintain the integrity of our state’s elections and election processes.”  

Weber also sharply questioned Peters’ involvement in California elections.

“As Secretary Weber has stated, ‘The mere thought of letting someone near any part of California’s elections when that person was convicted of serious election-related crimes while serving as an election official, is simply outrageous,’” Weber’s office wrote in an email. “Our office is monitoring the situation and, as always, will act within our authority and work closely with law enforcement officials to ensure that all elections in our state remain transparent, safe, and fair for all eligible voters.”

Curtis expressed frustration to CyberScoop at the delays, saying he needed immediate help and expressing concern that Peters’ legal roadblocks may make it harder to hire her at all.

“You know, if they stall sufficiently enough, then she won’t be able to get any help to me,” said Curtis. “So I need her fairly quickly. We start early voting in…30 days, something like that. So we need it quickly, we need to get her in here, tell her what to do, set people up and get it ready to go. Otherwise, I have to do it all, and that’s going to be a pain.”

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Artificial intelligence has never been more important to the federal government.

Under the Trump administration, AI has been adopted rapidly across the private sector and federal agencies. Software developers now use large language models to generate much of their code. Frontier AI models are escaping testing sandboxes to hack live internet infrastructure. Foreign governments are conducting cyber and kinetic attacks targeting data centers and other AI-related infrastructure.

The AI industry’s lightning-fast evolution since 2022 and growing importance to U.S. economic and national security have prompted calls  for stronger federal oversight in order to better manage emerging threats.

A new report published Thursday from the nonprofit Americans for Responsible Innovation, shared exclusively with CyberScoop, calls for the federal government to declare key AI models, companies and its supporting industries as critical infrastructure. It also calls for naming the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency as the lead agency managing cyberthreats for the sector.

The report defines the AI sector as organizations, facilities, technologies, and industries “whose primary purpose is the development, training, deployment, and operation of AI systems.” It includes frontier model designs, model weights, evaluation and alignment systems, datacenters and AI-specific hardware, semiconductor chips and the platforms and infrastructure used to deploy and serve AI models at scale.

“The AI sector already bears all the hallmarks of critical infrastructure,” wrote authors Terrence Kelly and Jessica Maksimov. “It is interwoven with public and private services, concentrated among a handful of foundation models, and increasingly interdependent with [critical infrastructure] sectors, meaning a single attack on the AI stack could cascade across multiple sectors at once.”

In an interview, Maksimov told CyberScoop that while there are other options, CISA makes the most sense to lead the sector’s cybersecurity efforts because of its statutory mission, experience managing eight other critical infrastructure sectors and background dealing with cybersecurity problems that cross different sectors and industries.  

“We want an agency that has coordination authority across all other departments, because we believe that AI will just be so prevalent across different infrastructure [impacting] finance, energy, government services, that’s already equipped to coordinate across the entire interagency and talk about infrastructure in that way,” she said.

The U.S. is particularly susceptible to AI supply chain disruptions because frontier AI companies and most of their computing resources are based in the country. As the Trump administration pushes broader adoption across government and the private sector, experts warn that a major disruption could have outsized economic consequences. 

The past year has offered a potential vision of that future, with Iranian drones attacking Amazon-owned datacenters and Ukrainian drones striking Russian e-commerce giant Wildberries, causing disruptions to critical internet services.

“I would say that because of the value that attackers would put on U.S. AI capabilities and systems, that the infrastructure that supports all those capabilities is very vulnerable,” to both physical and cyber attacks, Maksimov said.

There are currently 16 critical infrastructure sectors managed by the federal government, and the designation carries real weight in terms of how departments and agencies prioritize their limited resources.

Matt Hayden, a former assistant secretary of homeland security for cyber infrastructure risk and resilience, said designating a sector or industry as critical infrastructure means the government puts you in a special category where you’re “identified as being a component of a national critical function that the U.S. population, the economy, depend on.”

The designation unlocks a wide range of federal tools and resources, often free of charge, including operational continuity and incident response services, cybersecurity software, access to federal systems like Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM), and bespoke, real-time threat intelligence.

Hayden said that the AI ecosystem described in the report captures many critical industries, and he believes that at the very least, frontier models will one day be covered as critical infrastructure, whether through a new designated sector or existing ones, like the IT and telecommunications sector.

But he noted that other sectors, such as space or cloud computing, have similarly argued for a critical infrastructure designation. He also predicted that any effort to formalize a federal lead for AI security would result in a bureaucratic turf war. Under the Trump administration, the Departments of Commerce and Treasury have played more prominent roles in shaping policy and regulation around AI systems.

“We have fought those battles in the policy circus for trying to get space-based critical infrastructure carved out, and it’s as complicated as trying to find an owner,” said Hayden, now a vice president at General Dynamics Information Technology. “Everyone in the government has to agree that that [agency] is the primary, and as a result it’s very difficult to get those documents across the finish line.”

Hayden also said that new programs like ANCHOR-CI allow CISA to quickly convene ad-hoc stakeholder meetings to address emerging cyber threats. It also gives the CISA director authority to add individual companies to existing critical infrastructure sectors.

Bob Kolasky, former director of the National Risk Management Center at CISA, told CyberScoop that he believes companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as data center operators, will eventually be designated as critical infrastructure. He said it’s still an open question whether ANCHOR-CI, which was rolled out by DHS in July, will be an improvement over the existing processes scrapped by the Trump administration last year.

“Every sector is going to rely on artificial intelligence and making more resilient the sectors themselves and understanding how they use AI and the dependencies” is still going to be an important task, said Kolasky, now senior vice president of critical infrastructure at Exiger.

And while CISA is well-positioned as a potential lead, Kokasky said the AI sector is likely to bring its own unique set of challenges and coordination issues.

“If you just sort of layer on another sector and say ‘function like the other 16 sectors,’ right now, those 16 sectors are all over the place in terms of how they’re functioning,” said Kolasky. 

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Like seemingly everything else these days, artificial intelligence will re-shape the way voters gather information on candidates running in the 2026 midterm elections.

In some ways, this is already the reality. Voters are increasingly turning to AI chatbots for information instead of Google.  Political campaigns are deploying deepfakes of their opponents. And AI systems have been developed to carry out increasingly complex  hacks.

Since the last major U.S. election in 2024, major tech companies have  embedded AI into their products while hundreds of millions of people have adopted the tools, either by purchasing subscriptions to commercial models or using open-source models. Yet both research and experts state that while AI systems have gotten better at handling basic facts, they’re nowhere near reliable enough to be a main source of  accurate or complete information. 

While chatbots are becoming a primary way that voters gather information on  local races, candidates, issues, and voting information, they are not substitutes for more authoritative sources, like a voter’s state or local election office. 

“I think this is one of the first elections we’re seeing…where AI is just everywhere,” said Thania Sanchez, senior vice president of research and analytics at the nonprofit States United Democracy Center. “Even if you just Google it, [now] the first thing that comes up is the AI overview.”

While AI companies have worked to cut down on errors in their model’s responses for questions around basic election information, they continue to fall short in important ways.

In new research shared exclusively with CyberScoop ahead of its release, States United Democracy Center tested two of the most popular tools — OpenAI’s ChatGPT’s free tier and the AI interface used alongside Google Search — for their performance on a series of basic questions around elections, such as how to register to vote, or a list of candidates in a race.

The models were chosen because they are free and easy to access. For Google AI, the nonprofit tested two types of accounts: ones running in Incognito Mode and ones that had a history of browsing election-skeptical websites.

The nonprofit ran two rounds of testing in 2025 and 2026, collecting nearly one thousand responses from the models submitted by users across six swing states (Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin).

In 2025 tests, 6.9% of responses from Google AI and 8.2% responses from ChatGPT“contained verifiable factual errors,” like not listing the correct candidates in a race or false guidance around polling site locations.

However, follow up tests in 2026 across Arizona, Pennsylvania and Michigan found that the error rates in both models had dropped to zero. The study notes that “this is real progress and should be acknowledged.”

But underneath those topline numbers, a more murky picture emerges around the tools’  reliability.

An AI response can sound accurate without actually being complete.  To wit: ChatGPT provided incomplete lists of current gubernatorial primary race candidates 88.9% of the time when queried.

Linking to a state election website – an output the study considers the single most important measure of voter utility  — happened less than 40% of the time. Whether due to formatting issues or the model ingesting outdated information, it’s a problem if voters use them as their primary information source for elections.

“It will be like ‘this person is the Republican candidate and this person is the Democratic candidate’ but it is not telling you there’s also these other third-party candidates,” said Sanchez. “It’s not giving you complete information, so the voter thinks these are the [only] two people running.”

A June survey from the Pew Research Center found that about half of U.S. adults reported having used chatbots at least once, up from a third in 2024, while a quarter reported using them daily. The top use case listed for engaging with the chatbot was searching for information.

Isabel Linzer, an elections policy analyst at the Center for Democracy and Technology, told CyberScoop that voters, campaigns and governments alike are using AI more freely and with fewer restrictions.

Bad actors in the information space have followed suit, and “we are in a phase now of generative engine optimization” where information operations are structured to rank higher in AI model responses.

“We’ve moved beyond [SEO] to [Generative Engine Optimization], and that’s where we’re seeing campaigns thinking about how to structure their materials to make sure that they are in a format that AI models want to use when they’re searching the web…to develop their responses to user queries,” she said.

There is also the underlying problem of frontier AI companies constantly tinkering with their models, their algorithms and the technologies they are intertwined with. . Election officials, by contrast, have decades of experience educating voters about their options.

A prime example of this churn occurred this past February, in between the first and second round of the study, when Google AI suddenly shifted to providing only links for election related queries in incognito mode, replacing the written summaries that showed up in the first round.

Like the study’s authors, Linzer said most people are still best served by going directly to local sources for accurate information on elections. With issues like ideological bias, the potential for bespoke or sycophantic answers for each user based on their prior chat histories and lack of predictability, voters should still be very careful about using AI chatbots as political truth machines.

The best thing that tech companies can do to educate voters is “making sure that for high-stakes situations like elections, that chats are connecting directly to the most important sources, like the website where you can actually register to vote,” said Linzer.

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Sen. Ron Wyden implored a trio of federal leaders Monday to lead a comprehensive campaign to purge older, insecure virtual private networks that are directly accessible via the public internet from federal agencies.

“For too long, federal agencies and government contractors have suffered devastating cyberattacks due to their reliance on legacy, insecure, internet-facing VPN servers to grant employees remote access,” Wyden, D-Ore., wrote in his missive to top officials at the Office of Management and Budget, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and National Institute of Standards and Technology. They should coordinate “require the adoption of modern, secure remote-access technology across the federal government,” he said.

Such VPNs serve as a digital “front door” accessible via the public internet that allows mobile devices and remote employees to log in, Wyden said in a letter first reported by CyberScoop.

Wyden referenced several attacks that have affected federal agencies, including the ArcaneDoor attacks on Cisco firewalls, the FortiBleed credential exposures across Fortinet gateways and vulnerabilities that hackers exploited across Ivanti and Check Point VPN appliances.

“Modern remote-access solutions eliminate this vulnerability entirely. Instead of leaving an open door accessible from the public internet, modern solutions provide remote access without broadcasting their presence,” he said. “This effectively makes these servers invisible, ensuring that hackers cannot attack an entry point they cannot see.”

Agencies should move away from what a Congressional Research Service report to Wyden called a “castle-and-moat” approach of assuming anyone inside the network is authorized to access an organization’s resources that VPNs rely upon by extending virtual bridges to a more remote workforce, he said. They should instead focus on zero-trust architecture that uses a never-trust, always-verify approach, he said.

Furthermore, CISA, the OMB and NIST need to fundamentally change how the federal government approaches agency vulnerabilities, Wyden wrote. 

“The federal government has become trapped in an endless game of ‘whack-a-mole’ in responding to widespread compromises of legacy remote access technologies,” he said. “To keep federal networks online, CISA has been forced to repeatedly issue extraordinary Emergency Directives and hyper-accelerated patch mandates. These reactive emergency mandates are unsustainable for federal cybersecurity teams, and fail to address the fundamental issue that these flaws are inherent in the use of legacy remote-access appliances.”

CISA needs to issue a binding operational directive that gives agencies two years to fully expunge legacy, public-facing remote access systems, he said. NIST needs to issue implementation standards for transitioning to zero-trust architectures.

OMB needs to issue a memo directing agencies to prioritize zero-trust architecture spending. And OMB needs to team with CISA and the Defense Department to update procurement rules to block agencies and defense contractors from buying network edge, VPN or other remote access solutions unless a vendor supplies an attestation that it complies with NIST zero-trust standards, Wyden wrote.

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As AI-enabled hacking becomes a bigger threat for cybersecurity and national security, public attention has focused on mainly a few leading frontier AI companies developing more powerful large language models.

These models, and the billions of dollars behind them matter, but they’re only part of a larger shift. Enterprises are now building their own technology platforms that take these general-purpose LLMs and turn them into bespoke cybersecurity tools.

Industry professionals refer to these tools as a “harness.” They control the model’s behavior, limit its risks, and connect it to internal IT systems and networks so it can work reliably at scale.

New research from Cato Networks shared exclusively with CyberScoop shows how much power can come from a harness. It paired OpenAI’s ChatGPT 5.5 and GPT 5.5-Cyber models with its own tool and tested the abilities of the agent to hack into a victim network with as little human direction as possible.

Across six different scenarios, the pairing achieved complete end-to-end attack chains, including domain administrator privileges and Active Directory access, sometimes in as little as 40 minutes.

“What was most surprising is that first we saw that it was capable of doing accelerated reasoning and attack, and interacting and doing all this by itself, like doing all of the stages of the attacks,” said Guy Waizel, a tech evangelist at Cato Networks and one of the authors behind the research.

Critically, the most successful scenarios happened when the model was given appropriate operational context from the technical harness developed by Cato Networks.

“It does support that it’s not just about the frontier model,” said Waizel. “We found that [our harness] really helps the reasoning” of the LLM.

The agent was given some – but not abundant – resources to complete its tasks, including an external Kali Linux attack host, the simulated target’s public IP address and a set of low-level domain credentials acquired through phishing.

It was not provided with any other details, and had to probe further for key information, such as further knowledge of the server type (Microsoft Exchange), the target’s operating system, version, build number, internal network topology, access to higher privilege accounts and other critical assets, nor was agent given any predetermined attack paths.

The Cato Networks research uses OpenAI models, but only as an example. Waizel said he believes other models would likely achieve similar results. In any event, if current trends hold, the kind of capabilities provided by LLMs like GPT 5.5 are likely to be open-source within a year.

Cato Networks is far from alone. Most enterprises have their own AI harnesses, and  executives tell CyberScoop they are playing an increasing role in more effectively steering the frontier model workflows.

While AI tools can struggle to duplicate human workflows in other areas, LLMs have long shown potential in cybersecurity and coding, improving greatly over the past few years. The Trump administration has set up a new federal clearinghouse for exchanging information between the public and private sectors on AI-discovered vulnerabilities, while European groups are setting up their own organizations to coordinate globally on AI cyber threats.

Eric Doerr, chief product officer at Tenable, told CyberScoop a harness used in the company called “Hexa”  offers a defensive advantage:  it can work with different commercial LLMs while delivering consistent  results.

“One of the first things we do when we get a [new] model is say ‘Well, let’s run it through Hexa and see what we learn,’” said Doerr. “We have a whole bunch of benchmarks. Is it the same, is it better? Where is it better? Where is it worse?”

Hexa is meant to ensure that whichever model or models become dominant, Tenable will be able to integrate it into their tech stack and protect their most sensitive assets from unintended behaviors. That frees up the LLM to do what it does best: find vulnerable code and establish attacker pathways for exploiting them.

“For years, it has been true that there are way more potential issues that a company has to deal with: code vulnerabilities, things that are unpatched, misconfigurations,” said Doerr. “There’s way more than you can actually remediate, and you really need to understand the difference between what’s a theoretical problem and a real problem.”

Dan Rapp, chief AI and data officer at Proofpoint, said their harness, “Satori,” has become a critical tool for keeping their agentic AI on track while giving humans the ability to step in when things go awry.

“I think what you’re seeing in the foundation of frontier models is you have raw intelligence, raw reasoning power, but to get these systems to perform the way you want to, both context engineering – the content provided ensuring that its accurate and relevant – and the harness engineering are essential to actually get the systems to perform well,” Rapp told CyberScoop.

That was a common theme in interviews with companies. While frontier models come and go, or are overtaken by international competitors, there will always be the need for the model to operate with data and context that often only the organization can provide.  

It suggests that while policymakers and cybersecurity experts have focused on the spread of newer and more powerful frontier models, industry – and likely soon the cybercriminal underground — has quickly developed the kind of technical infrastructure that is becoming far more important to AI cyber defensive and offensive tasks.

“We’ve had to bootstrap quite a few of these systems from first principles, and what it always boils down to is how effective you are with the tool calling… bringing in data, enriching the context,” said John Hopper, vice president of product engineering at SpecterOps.

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