I have some vision what the blue team would look like, but I cannot imagine red team being a viable career anymore.

what are some free certifications that are genuinely helpful while learning as well as look good on your resume?

CISA has added CVE-2026-43456, a Linux kernel local privilege escalation vulnerability, to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog following confirmed in-the-wild exploitation. Here's everything covering the affected kernel versions, the vulnerability itself, which distributions have shipped fixes, and the available mitigations. If you're maintaining Linux systems, it may be worth checking whether your kernel has already been updated by your distro. Patch Now.

Backend engineer, ~5 YOE, 1 year at current. I've been offered an internal move to AppSec.

At my previous job I was the security guy on my team ("Security Champion" programme, but for technical people) - moving security initiatives for our app, exploratory testing (found a few big vulns while messing around), and owning the security side of a cloud migration: data classification, SAST in CI/CD, and passing internal audits - this was around 20% of my capacity, the rest were usual developer work. I liked it and wanted to grow in security, but left for a better BE offer.

Current job is distributed systems with e2e ownership in a great team, so I've picked up solid devops experience too. The really great team makes the choice a bit harder too :).

Two things worry me:

• AppSec seems like it could mean really different stuff depending on the company - scanner triage at one place, threat modeling and architecture review at another. What is the real-deal appsec engineer job have to look like so I can be competitive if I decide to grow in this field?
• Would the previous BE experience(granted that some of it ~2YOE was with a security flavour) hurt my prospects if I try to pursue an appsec role, and vice versa would the appsec experience hurt future BE prospects. Basically is there bidirectional transfer of skills. I'm guessing so, but I might be guessing badly.
• Is AppSec going to be impacted badly by LLMs?

Anyone made this switch? What should I look for in an appsec role.

Disclaimer: I've used AI to make this post more understandable, English is not my native language, neither am I too good with words.

Have you had to deal with this and if yes, how have you overcome it?

My last role was running the Red Team all by myself. It got so stressful to the point I started getting headaches and would feel lightheaded if I saw another request come in. At one point, I had to take 2 weeks off due to the stress.

Now, I worry about getting another Red Team role due to the experience.

So, I'm curious, what is your role and how stressful is it?

Who else is going to DEFCON in Vegas and is excited!?

I keep seeing this debate everywhere and honestly can't tell what's true anymore. Every other day there's a headline about AI causing layoffs, but when you actually read the story, half the time it sounds like normal cost-cutting or restructuring, and companies are just using "AI" as a convenient reason to say it out loud. But then some layoffs do seem real, like certain roles are actually shrinking because AI tools now handle most of what a junior person used to do.

I have 5 years of experience[India], mostly in data engineering, and I'm about to start a new job that's a mix of cybersecurity and AI data engineering. On paper it feels like a safer space since security work isn't going anywhere and AI is actually making that field grow rather than shrink. But I have a lot of financial responsibilities and people depending on me, so I can't just assume I'm safe and relax.

This is where I'm stuck. Should I go all in on this job and get really good at it, or should I use some of my time and energy to build something on the side, like a business, just in case things change later. I genuinely don't have the bandwidth to do both properly right now, so I have to pick one as my main focus for the next couple of years.

If anyone has been in a similar spot, new job, real financial pressure, watching all this AI job talk and wondering if your role is actually safe or not, how did you decide where to put your energy? You focus fully on the job or build something on the side as backup?

I come from true data engineering and AI background - Do you recommend coming to cybersecurity domain? Any tips

Edit1: My role: I’ll be building and automating end-to-end vulnerability management workflows on the ASM team - Python pipelines that normalize and route vulnerability data into Databricks/SIEM/SOAR systems, plus AI/ML components like model-based risk scoring and LLM-assisted triage. I will be trained on these certifications - I GCIA, GCIH, GMON

I recently left an incident response role after several years to join a cybersecurity vendor in a customer-facing position. (For a well known fortune 100 company) - loved the job but stress caught up and opportunities for internal moves became scarce.

The new role is still technical and security-focused, but instead of responding to incidents internally, I’m helping customers understand security events, detections, and the platform. The pay and work-life balance are significantly better, which was a big factor in the move.

I currently hold CISSP, GCIH, and BTL1.

My concern is whether spending a few years in a role like this could make it harder to move back into an internal security role (IR, security operations, detection engineering, security engineering, etc.). This new role feels much more adjacent to customer success with some technical stuff.

Has anyone made a similar move and later returned to an internal security team? Did recruiters or hiring managers view your vendor experience as a positive, neutral, or negative?

I’d appreciate hearing from anyone who’s been through something similar.

Holiday weekends continue to be attractive for ransomware operators. This roundup tracks several healthcare organizations added to leak sites.