Connect your Claude, Codex or OpenClaw for full transcripts on millions of podcasts. Two week free trial, cancel anytime.

Start free trial →
DG Duncan Greatwood On CyberWire Daily

“We now have AI in the hands of hackers, and that is allowing the hackers to outpace the patch cycle by a considerable distance. … It used to be that you could stay ahead by patching, but now people are falling quite a long way behind.”

CyberWire Daily · Software Engineering & Infra · November 2026

“We now have AI in the hands of hackers, and that is allowing the hackers to outpace the patch cycle by a considerable distance. … It used to be that you could stay ahead by patching, but now people are falling quite a long way behind.” — Duncan Greatwood, CyberWire Daily

Context

In a sponsored Industry Voices segment, Dave Bittner asked what has changed about patching. Greatwood, CEO of Xage Security, says AI-discovered bugs and AI-built exploits have overwhelmed the traditional detect-and-respond approach.

Listen to the episode → More from Duncan Greatwood → More Software Engineering & Infra quotes →

Transcript

CyberWire Daily Around 11:51 into the episode
Speaker 3

that, you'll never look at a free night's plan the same way again. Learn more at txu.com, rep number 10004.

Dave Bittner

Duncan Greatwood is CEO at Zage Security. In today's sponsored Industry Voices segment, we discuss the cybersecurity problem you can't patch away.

Speaker 4

A few things have changed, and the single biggest one is that we now have AI in the hands of hackers, and that is allowing the hackers to outpace the patch cycle by a considerable distance. You know, traditionally, patching has been a matter of threat detection, threat analysis, response, and detection response still has a place in the cyber pantheon, but it's really being almost overwhelmed right now with the case of bugs that AI is discovering, the exploits that AI is able to create, and the ability of AI to run those exploits against companies and other organizations. So suddenly, it used to be that you could stay ahead by patching, but now people are falling quite a long way behind.

Dave Bittner

Is it fair to say that there are a lot of defenders out there who are feeling overwhelmed?

Speaker 4

I think June of 26 was the biggest month for patches of Windows and Linux and everything we'd ever seen by a factor of two or three. And then July was twice as big as that, and August, even bigger. So we've seen this kind of almost exponential growth really in the need to patch. And also the number…

Dave Bittner

Help me understand the situation where an organization knows that a system is vulnerable, but they simply can't patch it. What sort of things keep them from fixing it?

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

More from CyberWire Daily

“If you have one printer in your organization and it gets malware injected into it, there could be hundreds of other similar printers on your network. But there's no reason why you need to allow one printer to talk to a different printer. … You can make it a one printer problem and not a 100 or a 500 or 1,000 printer problem.” — Duncan Greatwood, CyberWire Daily “They're hitting the defrost mode and going up to as high as 175 degrees on something that's supposed to be a freezer.” — Chris Grove, CyberWire Daily