Harikrishnan Muthukrishnan

expert panel

A cybersecurity incident doesn’t have to start in the boardroom to become a leadership crisis. In October 2026, a cybersecurity disruption at the University of New Mexico Health System forced ambulances to be diverted and patient appointments to be canceled. It’s a stark reminder that what begins as a technical problem can quickly become an operational emergency, threatening business continuity, customer trust and an organization’s ability to deliver essential services.But cybersecurity isn’t just a concern when something goes wrong. The decisions that shape an organization’s security often extend well beyond the IT department, making effective protection as much a leadership responsibility as a technical one. The World Economic Forum’s Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2026 found that 99% of respondents from highly cyber-resilient organizations reported board involvement in cybersecurity, highlighting the connection between leadership engagement and organizational resilience.For senior executives, the challenge is understanding where their responsibilities begin and how their decisions affect the people charged with protecting the business. Members of the Senior Executive Cybersecurity Think Tank have extensive experience in enterprise security, risk management, threat prevention and cybersecurity leadership. Below, they share essential lessons every executive should understand—and explain how those insights should change the way leaders engage with and support their security teams.

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An AI-enabled cyberattack that succeeds against one company could soon be turned against dozens more. That’s part of the urgency behind an open letter from more than 100 companies, including major AI developers, cybersecurity firms, banks and internet infrastructure providers, calling on businesses and governments to build a collective defense against AI-driven threats. As AI makes sophisticated attacks faster and easier to scale, protecting any one organization may increasingly depend on how well the broader community works together.There’s a clear advantage to organizations learning from one another’s experiences. But sharing security intelligence isn’t as simple as forwarding a warning—customer privacy, intellectual property and potential legal exposure all complicate the equation. Current federal guidance on AI cybersecurity collaboration recognizes the importance of establishing protections and processes for exchanging information, highlighting the need to balance cooperation with responsible risk management.Turning the call for collective defense into meaningful action raises important questions about what organizations can contribute and how much they can safely reveal. Here, members of the Senior Executive Cybersecurity Think Tank explore how organizations can strengthen shared cyber defenses while protecting their own sensitive information and business interests.

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Cybercriminals don’t always need sophisticated tactics to cause devastating damage. Sometimes, they just need an opening left by a neglected security safeguard. And the financial stakes are staggering: The average cost of a data breach in the U.S. has reached $11.5 million.For businesses, implementing foundational cybersecurity practices is only half the battle. The harder challenge is ensuring they remain effective as technology evolves, operations expand and competing priorities pull attention elsewhere. That challenge is becoming increasingly difficult: A 2026 survey found that 68% of IT and cybersecurity professionals say their jobs have become harder over the past two years, with more than half reporting increased complexity and workloads. When security teams are stretched thin, even well-established safeguards can fall victim to inconsistent oversight—leaving preventable gaps that attackers can exploit.Building lasting cyber resilience requires more than knowing what works; it demands the discipline to keep doing it. Members of the Senior Executive Cybersecurity Think Tank draw on extensive experience in enterprise security, risk management and breach prevention to examine this persistent challenge. Below, they identify foundational security practices organizations still struggle to sustain and explain what it takes to make those protections stick.

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A routine IT support call might seem like an unlikely starting point for a major cyberattack. But in 2023, hackers reportedly gained access to MGM Resorts’ systems by impersonating an employee in a call to the company’s help desk. The resulting breach disrupted casino operations, hotel room access and payment systems, demonstrating how a seemingly ordinary support interaction can have serious business consequences.The threat has since flipped direction: Instead of posing as employees to fool the help desk, attackers are now posing as the help desk to fool employees. In a series of 2026 extortion campaigns, callers impersonated IT support staff, sometimes spoofing the company’s real help desk number. They reached employees on personal phones, outside corporate security controls, and pressed them to complete an urgent passkey or multifactor authentication enrollment. Victims were steered to lookalike login pages that captured both their passwords and MFA tokens, giving attackers access to corporate cloud services from which they stole data for extortion.Such attacks expose a troubling weakness: The more organizations train employees to cooperate with security changes, the easier it becomes for criminals to disguise an attack as a legitimate update. The challenge for businesses is to make sensitive support interactions more trustworthy without making assistance frustrating or time-consuming. Employees need confidence that requests are authentic, while IT teams need to resolve account problems and restore access without unnecessary delays. Members of the Senior Executive Cybersecurity Think Tank bring expertise in identity security, risk management and enterprise cyber defense to this challenge. Below, they explore how organizations can strengthen verification across help desk, identity enrollment and account recovery processes while keeping support efficient and accessible.

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Software supply chain security is often treated as a gatekeeping problem: Keep malicious code from entering the environment. But modern applications are built from dense webs of open-source and third-party dependencies, and a single compromised package can surface across numerous applications and systems downstream, far beyond the first project that installs it.Recent attacks have shown how quickly that risk can multiply. In September 2025, the self-replicating Shai-Hulud worm infiltrated the npm ecosystem through compromised maintainer accounts, spreading automatically across the registry by hijacking developer credentials. By the time it was contained, the worm had compromised more than 500 packages, prompting GitHub to remove them from the registry to stop further propagation.For security leaders, the challenge isn’t only determining whether a package is safe at the point of entry—it’s understanding how far a compromise could travel once that software is already embedded across an organization. Supply chain risk is compounded when organizations lack visibility into how the technology they rely on is developed, integrated and deployed.Members of the Senior Executive Cybersecurity Think Tank bring deep expertise in enterprise cybersecurity strategies, data breach prevention, risk management, threat detection and modern security architecture. Here, three of them examine how leaders should assess the downstream risk posed by poisoned software dependencies and what meaningful prevention and containment look like when a single compromised component has the potential to affect many systems.

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As AI agents move from assisting employees to taking actions on their behalf, organizations face a new accountability problem: It’s no longer enough to know what happened. As agents gain access to sensitive data, systems and business processes, organizations are likely to need evidence that establishes not only what an agent did but also why it was permitted to do it. That includes demonstrating that an agent had the right authority, was acting for the right purpose, and stayed within the boundaries established for that particular task.Cybersecurity experts have warned that agentic systems complicate the traditional model in which actions can be traced to an identifiable person with defined permissions and a clear audit trail. And at the moment, teams may need to work on solving the AI accountability conundrum on their own—while the issue is unquestionably on guiding agencies’ radars, NIST only began requesting input for a project on how identity standards and best practices can be applied to software agents in February 2026. Among those with an eye on the security challenges that come with AI agents are the members of the Senior Executive Cybersecurity Think Tank. They bring deep experience in enterprise cybersecurity, risk management, security architecture and emerging technology to bear on the question. Below, two of them examine how organizations should rethink evidence and auditability for agent-driven workflows and what stronger, more trustworthy proof of authorization could look like in practice.