Shant Ebenezer Jena

In March, an Iran-linked group calling itself Handala claimed a cyberattack on the medical device maker Stryker, disrupting a company most people would never connect to a conflict in the Middle East. Weeks later, CISA and the FBI reported Iranian-affiliated actors disrupting programmable logic controllers across US water, energy, and government systems.

A former US diplomat and senior Pentagon official breaks down how Iran turns cyber operations into statecraft, and the seven things CISOs should do about it. How do states turn cyber operations into instruments of power? Former US diplomat and senior Department of Defense official Armand Cucciniello III joins InfoSec Leadership to break down how nation-states use cyber as a tool of signaling, coercion, and statecraft, using Iran as the case study.

Security governance for agentic AI has focused almost entirely on the reasoning layer. What agents decide, which detections they act on, whether a human signs off before a consequential action runs. That work matters, and it is not finished. But it leaves a different problem building underneath it. The Model Context Protocol layer connects agents to the tools, data sources, and APIs they need to function.