The recent hacks are the best thing that happened for Cybersecurity.

Before you disagree (many of you will), give me a chance to make my case…

This post is a summary of my recent in-depth article (free on Substack).

Let's recap what we have seen in reports in just the last few months:

• OpenAI agents escaped containment and hacked Hugging Face.
• Anthropic agents got online by mistake, and one tried to hide harmful work.
• A Meta agent got online by mistake and hacked another company.
• Kimi escaped its test system and searched online, but did not attack anyone.
• Iranian-linked hackers allegedly attacked U.S. water systems using agents

Now, back to my original thesis: Why was this the best thing could have happened for cyber security?

First, it raised attention to a hugely important topic and they made the danger impossible to ignore. Second, they (inevitably) push companies to spend more on cyber defence, perhaps going so far as to adopt a strong zero-trust posture, before a much larger attack arrives, and third, they accelerated government and international discussions about cyber defence coordination.

Good news in my book. Anything that prepares us for danger is a good thing.

Security first, zero-trust always!

BTW: A very good podcast that explains this topic in detail is available on a recent episode of Plain English with Derek Thompson with security expert Alex Stamos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWvazbGPCCI

More articles on agents are available on The Agentic Mesh Substack, as well as:

• The Agentic Mesh Podcast channel on YouTube.
• The Agentic Mesh Podcast on Apple.
• The Agentic Mesh Podcast on Spotify.