Cyber Pioneers Ponder Past as Prologue

Five cybersecurity pioneers — RSnake, Katie Moussouris, Rich Mogull, Richard Stiennon, and Bruce Schneier — revisit their most memorable Dark Reading columns from the past 20 years and reflect on how their insights have aged. RSnake traces the evolution from early bot scrapers to AI-driven web crawling. Moussouris warns that AI-accelerated vulnerability discovery is overwhelming human triage capacity, threatening open source ecosystems. Mogull revisits his 'Simple Doesn't Scale' principle as AI floods security teams with automated findings. Stiennon credits PCI DSS as a model for effective security regulation and notes the maturation of the compliance industry. Schneier revisits his argument that cryptography alone cannot secure modern networks, and extends it to AI's emerging role in both finding vulnerabilities and writing exploits — with uncertain implications for the attacker-defender arms race.