The CyberHub Podcast

Something every security professional should be thinking about right now

We've all watched the headlines: Cisco, Ivanti, Microsoft. Another zero-day. Another patch. Another incident response. It can start to feel like background noise.

But there's a critical difference between a vendor having a bad year and a vendor showing signs of a deeper engineering problem. And as a security leader, knowing which one you're dealing with changes everything about how you respond.

In 2026 alone, Cisco's SD-WAN platform has had 7 actively exploited zero-days—all tracing back to the same categories of flaws in overlapping parts of the codebase. That's not bad luck. That's a pattern. Ivanti has faced the same China-linked espionage group returning for a fourth exploitation campaign across its products. Microsoft's Exchange crisis in 2021 showed that scale alone doesn't protect a vendor from sustained attacker focus.

And now AI is entering the equation. Google's threat intelligence team confirmed the first zero-day built with AI assistance this past May. The pace of vulnerability discovery is going to accelerate significantly which means every vendor on your stack is going to face more pressure, not less.

The question for security leaders isn't "should we replace this vendor?" It's "have we built an organization resilient enough to keep operating when our most important vendors have their worst day?"

New article up on Substack walking through the patterns, the practical steps, and what you should be negotiating into every major vendor contract right now.

Link in comments worth a read if you're responsible for managing enterprise technology risk.
https://open.substack.com/pub/jamesazar/p/when-good-vendors-have-bad-years?r=g932m&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true