Cybersecurity business as usual is not working. Vulnerability counts are accelerating, IT departments are understaffed, 30% of cybersecurity software ends up as shelfware due to lack of sufficient staffing and expertise to install, configure, maintain, and respond to notices. And now, AI is being used by hackers successfully. This author believes a large percentage of businesses are hacked today, and most do not know it because the hacker intends never to be known and goes to great lengths to remain so to monitor your company’s communications, and slowly exfiltrate your data. Some of that exfiltration is even being done by the vendors you thought you could trust, whom have some employees the cybersecurity field knows are good employees during the day, yet making their millions as blackhats at night. It is small wonder the hacking community is so large and successful, with substantial specialization and an entire economy on the dark web. This economy would not exist were it not ultimately profitable. And it’s profitable because business is stuck in a the old ways of using an architecture designed for a mostly safe environment that no longer exists.

The cybersecurity field knows very well the tools hackers use. Yet businesses continue to operate IT networks of highly insecure desktop and laptop operating systems exposed to the internet, enabling blackhat hackers use of their specialized tools. Businesses then spend substantial human and capital resources putting band-aids on this outdated and broken system to address all the weaknesses inherent in these systems, systems that were built for a time when AV software was all anyone needed. SASE is the latest trend, but at the core, each and every approach must attempt to stem the tide of blackhats by adding layers of safety tools. All well-intentioned, and often functional and effective, but costly in terms of maintenance and operations, and ultimately only partially improving security. And they are still just layers of good work on top of a base layer OS that is just not designed for the modern threat landscape.

This poor level of security on the periphery, where phishing success is inevitable if a company is a target that has more than a handful of employees, enables blackhats to establish persistent presence on the periphery. Blackhats remain there on many compromised machines, watching and planning how they will compromise your servers. Using AI, for example, they can create databases of many targeted networks, with all servers and all of their software and version history. When a new zero-day is published, they can look to whom on their targeted victims database is running that version of software with that vulnerability. They quickly assemble an attack vector strategy and deploy it against their targets before the target IT departments have time to get the patches in. The AI enables them to actually take a careful approach for the hack that keeps them under SIEM thresholds, so no alarms are ever correlated and issued in time. This is the update hell that all IT departments dread – they knew of the patch, but had a long list of patches that they had intended to get to when time allows. Yet time was not their friend.

It’s time to go to an OS that renders the vast majority of hackers’ tools useless. Modern hackers can only be stopped with modern technologies. These technologies are known and in practice in limited ways. It’s time to bring them together, and take them mainstream. And most of all, these technologies must be easy for end users and IT staff. AI and other tools make this possible, whereas 5 years ago, this approach would not have been productive for employees.

Panekana is a startup seeking initial funding to build this new architecture. We have completed the core technical OS development and are seeking funding to create an easy to use UI that even the most non-technical employees will find useful and productive, and to create a special app store, prototype our AI-driven SD-LAN networking solution, and deploy our solution to several friendly customers.

Panekana is creating a modern OS and first hop networking solution for the modern threat landscape. Please join us on this important journey.

It can be done.

It must be done.

Panekana.