‘Don’t panic’: AI reality checks dominate major cybersecurity conference
‘Don’t panic’: AI reality checks dominate major cybersecurity conference
https://www.cybersecuritydive.com/news/ai-cybersecurity-hype-reality-check-gartner/821867/
Publish Date: 2026-06-03 12:02:00
Source Domain: www.cybersecuritydive.com
One of the most important jobs for CISOs in the AI era is to stay calm and carefully assess their organizations’ risk exposure, experts said this week at the annual Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit in National Harbor, Md.
“Don’t panic,” Katell Thielemann, a VP analyst at Gartner, said during a talk on Tuesday about AI’s impact on the security of cyber-physical systems such as industrial control equipment.
“Yes, things are changing fast,” Thielemann said, “but there are some low-hanging fruit” that CISOs can tackle, such as disconnecting critical devices from the internet and monitoring remote access to the remaining infrastructure.
The recent debuts of Anthropic’s Claude Mythos and OpenAI’s Daybreak, two powerful new AI models that can find software vulnerabilities much more quickly than previous tools, have rattled cybersecurity leaders, who have sought help countering the resulting risks. Technology vendors and consultants have rushed to meet that demand for help, in some cases with unnecessary or counterproductive advice and products. At Gartner’s conference, experts urged CISOs and other security executives to focus on the basics rather than the hype.
“What does Mythos or Daybreak change? Velocity and volume,” Dennis Xu, a VP analyst at Gartner, said during a session on Tuesday. Attackers are “coming at us much faster, and in the next 12 months [they will attack at] a much higher volume.”
Still, Xu said, CISOs should remember two things: “Don’t panic” and “communicate.”
“You need to communicate … to the executive team [and] to the board that we are fighting a different game now,” he said, adding that security executives shouldn’t be afraid to use the new threat environment as an opportunity to demand larger budgets.
But despite the increased velocity and volume, Xu said, businesses’ defensive priorities should remain largely the same, with a…
