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Zero Trust Concepts

AI Fights AI. Zero Trust Changes the Rules.

Cynthia Kaiser — former FBI Cyber Deputy Director, now leading ransomware research at Halcyon — put it plainly in a recent LinkedIn comment defending the use of advanced AI models for cyber defense:

"The only way to defend against bad actors gaining AI capabilities is to use those same capabilities to stop them."

She's right. And the events of the past week gave that argument an unintended proof point.

Stop the SPOF

A Single Point of Failure (SPOF) is any person, credential, system, or pathway where a single compromise leads to total loss. Zero Trust exists, in large part, to eliminate them.

The incidents below are not edge cases or nation-state exceptions. They are the normal consequence of implicit trust — an assumed-safe account, a trusted update, a vendor with standing access. In every case, one thing failed and everything followed.