August 13, 2026

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Thursday, again! If you’re not spending tens of billions of dollars on AI infrastructure, are you even infrastructuring, bro?

In today’s edition:

😮‍💨 Stressed out

🤝 Team up

🎩 Hats off

—Brianna Monsanto, Caroline Nihill

CYBERSECURITY

Stress test

Stressed out CEO sitting in modern office

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Depending on how they use it, AI may alleviate cybersecurity professionals’ workplace stress—or make it worse.

According to a July ISC2 study, 48% of cybersecurity pros said AI lowered their stress at work, while just under one-third (32%) said the technology either slightly or significantly heightened that stress.

The findings were based on a May survey of 856 cybersecurity professionals who use AI in their roles.

Caring too much. There were clear distinctions between the two groups of respondents. Those with increased anxiety from AI, for example, were more likely to spend additional time reviewing and validating AI outputs, and deciding when to trust an AI recommendation.

“That’s a stressor because it’s not something we potentially had to do, and hence a little bit tricky,” ISC2 CISO Jon France told IT Brew. “In the general market, there is some guidance, but there’s not a track record of, ‘How do you do that?’ and, ‘What does good output look like?’ compared to poor output?’”

Output shifts.—BM

Sponsored By SentinelOne

The cyber battlefield is changing

SentinelOne’s Annual Threat Report reveals that cyber adversaries aren’t just breaking in anymore. They’re moving inside and systematically abusing the trusted identity and infrastructure systems that run modern enterprises.

What does that look like? Here are some examples:

SentinelOne tracked over 1,000 job applications and roughly 360 fake personas linked to North Korean state actors attempting to land remote IT jobs at Western tech companies.
The report documented stolen authentication tokens being reused for more than 25 hours before triggering any additional authentication check.
Insights indicate that unmanaged legacy gateway devices (VPNs, firewalls, load balancers) create structural blind spots that state-sponsored actors weaponize.

The report provides a playbook for each phase of intrusion to help teams pivot away from reactive defense and toward proactive, context-driven resilience.

Get your copy.

SOFTWARE

Opening up

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Like Voltron, some of the biggest names in tech are deciding the best way to secure their infrastructure against AI-powered attacks is to bond together into a giant robot open-source alliance.

On Monday, Nvidia announced the Open Secure AI Alliance. In addition to Nvidia, membership includes IBM, Hugging Face, Palantir, OpenClaw, ServiceNow, Red Hat, and others. The goal: ensure that cybersecurity pros have open-source tools and techniques that they can use to secure infrastructure and find vulnerabilities, particularly as malicious AI expands the collective attack surface.

This announcement follows an open letter from some members of the alliance, alongside others, regarding concerns around potential bans on open-weight models.

Allies, unite!—CN

CYBERSECURITY

Community building

white collar workers meeting with an AI face in a computer screen

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Another day, another joint venture in the cybersecurity industry with a goal of bolstering enterprise AI security.

Earlier this month, Red Hat announced the formation of asago (short for AI Safety And Governance Orchestration), an open-source community that will help automate AI governance policies into “product-ready, safely deployed AI systems.”

Stuart Battersby, AI safety and model evaluation architect at Red Hat, told IT Brew that while the landscape of AI safety tools has matured, organizations still struggle with “slow processes” when translating AI policies into working software configurations.

“We’ve hit this inflection point where we have good AI safety tooling, but actually now what we need to do is make that AI safety tooling much more accessible to a wider business community that needs to be able to consume those things,” Battersby said. The purpose of asago is to help enterprises take AI policies to production “without needing to be experts in AI safety.”

Added expertise.—BM

patch notes

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top IT reads.

Stat: $13 billion. That’s the valuation for European vibe-coding startup Lovable. (the Wall Street Journal)

Quote: “Technology is always changing, and we’re always looking for practical ways to improve how government works.”—Bill Traverse, Barnstable County IT director, after the small community won third place in the 2026 Digital Counties Survey (Barnstable County)

Read: McDonald’s uses data to build customer dossiers—for one writer, it ran 515 pages. (Wired)

Know thy cyber adversary: SentinelOne’s Annual Threat Report reveals new insights on the tactics being used to infiltrate modern enterprises. Check it out to see what they learned and what defense strategies can combat attacks.*

^{*A message from our sponsor.}

Quiz

What do you know?

Amelia Kinsinger

The week’s biggest IT stories—now in quiz form. Test yourself on the latest cybersecurity headlines, software news, and tech breakthroughs in a quick, competitive challenge built for IT pros. Challenge your coworkers and see how your score stacks up!

Ace the quiz

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Written by Brianna Monsanto and Caroline Nihill

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☕ Stress test