Zero trust is the best-selling security idea nobody actually owns. Adoption is near-universal in name. Maturity is a rounding error. What you'll hear: • What it actually is — NIST 800-207: assume breach, verify explicitly, least privilege, continuous verification • The execution gap — <1% mature in 2023, ~10% projected for 2026, while 63% claim adoption • What it stops and what walks around it — phishing-resistant MFA blocks 99%; Scattered Spider just called the help desk • ZTNA vs VPN — per-app access vs the flat lateral-movement highway; SASE and SSE decoded • The federal reality — the FY2024 mandate came and went; the Pentagon's on a harder track • Zero-trust washing — why 'it's a journey, not a product' is the truest line in security • Monday steps + exam — PDP/PEP, microsegmentation ≠ VLAN, passkeys first — Andrés Sarmiento #zerotrust #cybersecurity #ZTNA #SASE #networking #NetworkPlus #SecurityPlus #infosec #TechUpdates #microsegmentation
Remember Dave's service account from 2017? It's still there — and now it has 108 friends. 79 of them are AI agents nobody owns. What you'll hear: • The ratio grew — 45:1 became 80:1, 109:1, up to 144:1 in cloud-native shops (and why the spread is the story) • The scariest stat — 64% of secrets leaked in 2022 were STILL live in January 2026 • 28.65M new secrets on public GitHub last year; AI coding assistants leak at 2x the baseline • The breaches — ShinyHunters OAuth reuse (200+ orgs), Vercel, the npm worm; 3 NHI vendors acquired in 3 months • The fix emerging — agent passports: Entra Agent ID, Okta for AI Agents, workload identity standards • What works — inventory first (67% of NHIs are invisible to IAM), short-lived secrets, least privilege, human owners — Andrés Sarmiento #machineidentity #NHI #cybersecurity #IAM #secretsmanagement #identitysecurity #TechUpdates #infosec #AIagents #SecurityPlus
Machines outnumber humans in the cloud 25-to-1. Somebody has to secure that army. Special Series role #5: the Cloud Security Engineer. What you'll hear: • What the job actually is — posture management, IAM least-privilege, pipeline security, cloud detection • The money — $85–125K entry, $166K mid, $201K senior, $300K+ staff at big tech; AWS Security Specialty averages $203K • The catch — Gartner: 99% of cloud failures are the customer's fault; 3,000+ misconfigs at any moment • The defining breach — Salesloft Drift OAuth tokens bypassing MFA into 700+ orgs • How to get in — SysAdmin or SOC path; Security+ → AWS Security Specialty/AZ-500 → CCSP • Hype vs reality — gold rush pitch, IAM-policy-hell reality; budget is now the #1 hiring blocker — Andrés Sarmiento #cloudsecurity #cybersecurity #AWS #Azure #cybersecurityjobs #CCSP #SecurityPlus #TechUpdates #infosec #cloudcomputing
Attackers hand off your network in 22 seconds. Your tier-1 analyst is still opening the ticket. That's the whole argument for the agentic SOC — and why it terrifies people. What you'll hear: • The '92%' trap — three vendors, three different metrics wearing the same number • What's actually shipping — Cisco/Splunk's six agents, CrowdStrike, Microsoft, and the AI-SOC startups • The reality check — ~17% have deployed agents; ~89% of pilots never reach production; the SIEM market grew to $19B • Where it breaks — hallucinated IOCs, cascading agent errors, and the 50% of AI error reports that get ignored • The career shift — the tier-1 seat closes, the detection engineer + AI-oversight seats open • Exam relevance — CySA+/Security+ test SOAR and when NOT to automate — Andrés Sarmiento #SOC #SIEM #cybersecurity #AIsecurity #detectionengineering #SecurityPlus #CySA #infosec #TechUpdates #agenticAI
Two-thirds of web traffic is already post-quantum encrypted. Your browser did it without telling you. The migration got real. What you'll hear: • Your browser already switched — hybrid ML-KEM in Chrome/Edge/Firefox TLS by default • Our June predictions, graded — Cisco's full-stack PQC shipped; SD-WAN + hardware accel rolling out; Quantum Ready Assessments live • The whole ecosystem shipped — Apple PQ3, AWS, Microsoft, OpenSSL/OpenSSH • Why the clock moved — qubits to break RSA-2048 collapsed from 20M (2019) to under 100K (2026) • Now it's law — EO 14412: PQC key exchange by 2030, authentication by 2031; RSA/ECC disallowed by 2035 • The exam angle — same protocols, new key exchange; crypto agility is the concept — Andrés Sarmiento #postquantum #cryptography #cybersecurity #networking #quantumcomputing #PQC #TechUpdates #SecurityPlus #encryption #NIST