Inside the Semiconductor Data Breach Crisis
A single compromised supplier can now take down a chipmaker’s operations without a single attacker ever touching the chipmaker’s own network. That is the uncomfortable lesson of the last three...
Security and Compliance Blog
Learn security strategies, compare vendors, and implement best practices to prevent breaches and compliance violations from risky third party communications.
Posts by Patrick Spencer
Patrick Spencer, Senior Vice President, Americas Marketing & Industry Research, Kiteworks
Patrick is charged with building thought leadership and communications programs that increase brand awareness and engagement and propel lead-generation programs. He has nearly two decades of experience in various senior marketing roles within cybersecurity at Contrast Security, Fortinet, and Symantec.
He holds a doctorate from the University of Durham and two masters and a bachelor’s degree from Abilene Christian University.
AI Agent Access Control Belongs at the Data Layer, Not the System Prompt
A system prompt telling your AI agent to show users only the data they’re cleared to see is not a security control. It’s a suggestion, written in English, sitting in...
Why the Shadow AI Identity Gap Is the Real Enterprise Risk in 2026
Nearly half of all enterprise AI activity now happens through identities your security team cannot see, cannot audit, and cannot produce evidence for when a regulator asks. That is the...
Why the Enterprises Winning with AI Agents Are Limiting What They Can Do
The enterprises getting a real return on agentic AI have a plot twist nobody predicted two years ago. They are not the organizations that gave their AI agents the widest...
AI Agents Outlive Revoked Credentials: What Black Hat and DEF CON 2026 Taught CISOs
Revoking a credential used to end an incident. At Black Hat and DEF CON 2026, it barely slowed one down. Both conferences, held in Las Vegas in August 2026, have...
The CMMC 2.0 Roadmap: Getting From Where You Are to Certified
Most defense contractors don’t fail CMMC 2.0 because they misunderstand the framework. They fail because they treat it as a single deadline instead of a sequence of stages, each with...
What a New Carnegie Mellon-Larridin Study Reveals About AI Adoption and Revenue Growth
Every enterprise now claims an AI strategy. Almost none of them can prove it moved the business. A new working paper out of Carnegie Mellon University’s AI Capstone Program, produced...
State of CMMC 2.0 in the DIB: What 273 Defense Contractors Reveal About Compliance After the Assessment Pause
The pause of third-party CMMC assessments did not lower the compliance bar for a single defense contractor. It only made the gap between what contractors say and what they can...
5 Supply Chain Security Challenges UK Manufacturing Companies Face Today
UK manufacturing companies operate in an interconnected ecosystem where sensitive data flows between suppliers, partners, and customers across complex digital networks. This interconnectedness creates significant security vulnerabilities that can disrupt...
Kiteworks Secure MCP Server Arrives on Anthropic’s Connector Marketplace
Most enterprises did not choose to expose sensitive data to AI models. They backed into it, one well-intentioned Claude or ChatGPT prompt at a time, because the alternative was to...
AI Agent Security Now Dominates Cybersecurity Seed Funding—Here’s Why That Should Worry You
Venture capital just confirmed what security leaders have been arguing internally for the better part of a year: agentic AI is now the single largest new attack surface enterprises have...
Why Sysadmins Still Don’t Trust AI With Production Systems
Two years of vendor promises about self-patching infrastructure have collided with a much less exciting reality: the people who actually run production systems still won’t let AI near the controls....
The IBM 2026 Cost of a Data Breach Report Proves AI Governance Failure, Not AI Itself, Is Driving Costs
Every year, someone writes the same headline off this report: the average cost went up, here’s the number, here’s a quote about how cybersecurity matters more than ever. That headline...
AI Agents Are Reaching Data No One Approved — Three New Surveys Confirm the Governance Gap
Three independent research efforts, published within days of each other in the summer of 2026, landed on the same uncomfortable conclusion from three different vantage points: most enterprises can’t say...
The 2026 Annual Survey Report Is In: The AI Governance Gap Didn’t Close. It Widened.
An untested kill switch is not a control. It is an assumption, and this year’s data shows just how many organizations are operating on one. We just closed data collection...