By Anthony Grieco,
Publication Date: 2026-10-01 13:00:00
Thirty years ago, a Cisco customer service representative named Greg Akers picked up the phone to help a customer whose router was behaving strangely. Nobody knew it then, but he was fielding what would become one of the first cybersecurity service calls in the history of the commercial internet. At the time, Cisco had been building internet infrastructure for a decade. We didn’t have a security team. We didn’t have a security process. Cybersecurity did not really exist … yet. We couldn’t have predicted the scale or sophistication of the attacks that are now routine. We were focused on building something the world had never seen, and the people trying to break it hadn’t caught up yet.
That gap between what we build and what we can defend is not new, and it is not evidence of recklessness. It’s evidence of novelty. There is no playbook. If innovators only built within the limits of what they could already secure, they wouldn’t be innovating at all; they’d be…
