The attackers are ahead.
In cybersecurity, that’s reality right now, Evan Peña, cofounder and chief offensive security officer at startup Armadin, told me onstage Wednesday at Fortune, Lightspeed, and AWS’s Cyber 60 event.
“I definitely think the attackers are winning right now,” said Peña, listing recent headline-grabbing cyber vulnerabilities. “Look at the last few weeks: You have Citrix, BeyondTrust, PHP, Node.js, all within a three or four week window. These are unprecedented emerging threats… [Using AI] attackers can now scan the entire external attack surface of a Fortune 500—over 10,000 externally facing systems—within hours. Humans could never scale like that…. What you can do in hours would have taken us a year. The scale and speed are just unparalleled.”
Speed, scale, and high stakes have been the story of cybersecurity in 2026, from the much-discussed cataclysm the rise of Mythos promised to OpenAI agents’ attack on Hugging Face.
“We’re living in a continuum,” said Lior Div, cofounder and CEO of 7AI, on one panel. “…The gap between events is going to shrink and shrink and shrink.”
Yesterday’s event, held at the New York Stock Exchange, marked the release of the 2027 Cyber 60, Fortune’s annual list of cybersecurity’s most innovative startups. The companies acknowledged include longtime Term Sheet mainstays like open source security juggernaut Chainguard, new names on the list like frontier AI security company Irregular, and honorable mentions like data loss prevention startup Jazz. Bringing many of these startups together, the message was clear: AI is the best tool an attacker could ever hope for.
“The biggest thing is the attackers have no barriers,” Nick Schneider, CEO of cybersecurity unicorn Arctic Wolf, said onstage. “An organization has to go through change control. They have to get budgets, convince their teams, convince their boards. Many organizations weren’t built AI-native. They weren’t built to operate at the speed of bad actors. Bad actors don’t care: They’ll carry out the attack en masse, and if they don’t get anything, no big deal, they move on to the next one.”
Our digital world, in short, has changed for good—and a whole lot of work lies ahead.
“We’re living in a very vulnerable world,” said 7AI’s Div. “Everything is vulnerable, and you can hack everything. The idea that you have a perimeter that can’t be penetrated just isn’t true.”
See you tomorrow,
Allie Garfinkle X: @agarfinks Email: [email protected]
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The post “The attackers are winning”: Cyber 60 founders say AI is giving hackers the upper hand appeared first on Fortune.
