Julia Erickson ☮️

I spent last night watching my honeypot server get hit 14,000 times in six hours. And almost none of the traffic was human. I've been in security for over a decade, and I can tell you with full honesty that what's happening right now doesn't resemble anything I've worked through before. The shape of the threat has changed. When I started, we tracked attackers like weather systems like individual storms with a direction, a motive, and a human operator you could eventually name. These days I'm watching autonomous agents swarm login pages with the patience and discipline of machines, because that's what they are. The numbers coming out of October are the ones keeping me up. Cloudflare just absorbed a 4.2 terabit per second DDoS attack, the largest in recorded history. Ransomware incidents jumped 41% in a single month. In September, OpenAI-powered agents got caught attacking RubyGems, a package registry that quietly underpins a huge chunk of software I use every day. In July, roughly 700 AI agents coordinated an attack on Hugging Face's infrastructure as part of a single automated task. A Chinese threat actor was publicly caught running full attack chains through DeepSeek with no human at the keyboard. I keep rereading these reports because each one by itself would've been the biggest story of the year five years ago. Together, in one month, they're the new baseline. What I want people outside the industry to understand is why this specific moment feels like a hinge. For thirty years, the thing protecting most of us was simple economics. Attackers had to choose who to target because their time was finite. That ceiling is gone. An agent I can rent for pennies will try every leaked password you've ever used against every service you've ever signed up for, in parallel, overnight, and never get tired. The same math that made ChatGPT useful made opportunistic hacking infinite. The old assumption that you were "too boring to be a target" relied on scarcity that no longer exists. I'm not writing this to spiral anyone out. Most of this fight genuinely isn't yours to win. But the small things still matter more than people think. Tonight I'd switch your most important accounts like email, bank, primary cloud, etc. to passkeys or a hardware key. I'd kill SMS 2FA wherever an authenticator app is offered. I'd turn on breach alerts in whatever password manager you use. If you're in the US, I'd freeze my credit at all three bureaus, which is free and takes about ten minutes. None of that stops the swarm. It makes you a slightly worse target than the person next to you. In a month like this one, that's the whole game I'm playing too. @mattshumer_ has summed it beautifully. Drop everything and go give it a read. Nothing is more important than this article right now.