2026 CSO Award winners showcase business-enabling cyber innovation

Six award-winning cybersecurity initiatives from the 2026 CSO Awards are profiled, each demonstrating business-enabling security innovation. Copart revamped its security awareness program using gamification and automated phishing simulations, boosting reporting rates from ~20% to ~57%. HMSA implemented a Zero Trust Data Governance Initiative to eliminate confidential member data from nonproduction environments using AI-driven data masking. Hensel Phelps automated over 1,250 hours of manual security tasks through a team-driven 'automation week' approach. K&N Engineering deployed a code-to-cloud security framework using Wiz across AWS and Azure to shift security left. McDonald's launched 'Securing the Arches' to unify cybersecurity across 100+ markets with a global SOC and consistent controls. MISO developed STRIKE, a threat intelligence and hunting framework integrating MITRE ATT&CK, NIST, and DISA STIGs into a quantitative scoring model for measuring threat reduction effectiveness.