As enterprises race to bolt AI onto every business process, security leaders are being forced to answer a harder question than "should we adopt it" — it's "who's accountable when it goes wrong." To unpack this, The Cyber Express sat down with Harsha Reddy, Head of Information Security at Veterinary Emergency Group (VEG).

With nearly two decades in security leadership — including senior roles at Lixil and American Standard before joining VEG — Harsha brings a practitioner's view of where AI is genuinely changing the CISO's job, and where it's mostly just hype and shadow adoption.

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Harsha Reddy Explains Why AI Will Replace Tasks, Not Defenders

Harsha pushes back on the narrative that AI will hollow out security teams, pointing to Gartner research showing that while most fields are projected to lose jobs to AI, cybersecurity is expected to gain them. In his view, the technology is mainly absorbing the "toil" — log review, alert triage, evidence gathering — that keeps analysts from actually defending.

Also listen to S1 Episode: Awareness and Education at Young Age is the Answer to Cybersecurity Skill Gap

“It's the analyst who refuses to use AI that will get replaced by an analyst who uses it,” he says.

On adoption, Reddy points to a 2024 Microsoft-LinkedIn survey in which most executives called AI critical to their business, yet a majority had no formal plan and most had employees already bringing in their own tools. That gap, he argues, is why so many organizations are now dealing with AI-related data leaks. "Many organizations started onboarding AI like software when they should be onboarding it like staff." His fix isn't more restrictions — blocking AI just pushes it into the shadows — but guardrails, an internal AI enablement committee, and measuring actual business value instead of token consumption.

The conversation also digs into deepfake-driven fraud, why training employees to spot deepfakes is “a losing bet” at machine speed, and how he decides when to greenlight a new AI tool versus telling a business unit “not yet.”

The conversation closes with our newly introduced rapid-fire round "Express Shots" — Claude vs. ChatGPT, passkeys vs. passwords, and Reddy's prediction for the biggest cybersecurity threat of 2030.

Strip away the geopolitics, the hacktivist noise, and the espionage headlines, and one number from the first half of 2026 stands out above everything else: 1,721. That's how many ransomware attacks hit organizations in the United States between January and June, according to new research from Cyble Research and Intelligence Labs (CRIL). It's not just the highest total of any country tracked in the report — it's more than the next nine most-targeted countries combined.

Canada, in second place worldwide, recorded 179 attacks. Germany logged 155. The United Kingdom, 138. Add up the rest of the global top 10 — France, Italy, Spain, Thailand, India and Brazil — and the total still falls more than 600 attacks short of the U.S. figure alone. Out of 3,836 ransomware attacks CRIL tracked worldwide this half, roughly 45% landed on American soil.

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A Single Region, an Outsized Share

Widen the lens slightly and the picture holds. North America as a whole recorded 1,981 ransomware attacks in H1 2026 — more than half of every ransomware incident Cyble observed globally — alongside 35 data breach and leak incidents and 9 initial access sale listings. The report describes the region as home to "a mature, persistently active RaaS ecosystem operating at high volume across a wide range of industries and geographies."

Two ransomware-as-a-service operators did much of the damage. Qilin, the single most prolific gang worldwide, claimed 370 of those North American attacks on its own — nearly 19% of the regional total. Akira followed with 268, and INC Ransom added another 164. Together, Qilin and Akira alone accounted for more than half of all recorded ransomware activity across the region, a level of concentration that points to a small number of highly organized affiliate networks doing the bulk of the damage rather than a diffuse swarm of opportunists.

Also read: Qilin Ransomware Group’s TTPs Examined by Researchers

Where the Pressure Lands

Professional Services bore the brunt of North American ransomware activity, with INC Ransom showing a marked preference for law firms and other high-value services with sensitive client data. Construction, Manufacturing and Healthcare followed close behind.

One operator, AiLock, stood out for a coordinated wave of victim disclosures that all landed on the same day — March 3 — a pattern consistent with a mass-exploitation campaign rather than isolated intrusions. LockBit, despite years of law enforcement pressure and takedown attempts, kept up a steady tempo against public-sector and educational targets throughout the period, showcasing how difficult the group has been to fully dismantle.

On the data breach side, Technology and financial services (BFSI) were the most frequently targeted sectors in North America, together accounting for roughly 43% of incidents — a reflection of how much intellectual property and monetizable personal data those industries hold.

Notably, Agriculture & Livestock emerged as a significant target for initial access brokers, accounting for a third of all access listings tied to the region. Cyble flags this as a sign of "growing risk in the food supply chain," an area that has historically drawn less attention from ransomware operators than finance or healthcare.

The initial access market itself was strikingly concentrated: two sellers, tracked under the handles "redpin" and "xpl0itrs," accounted for nearly all listings targeting North American organizations. Threat actors also continued to lean on known and zero-day vulnerabilities in widely deployed enterprise platforms — including products from Ivanti and Palo Alto Networks — as their preferred way into corporate networks.

Hacktivism Blurs into Cybercrime

North America wasn't spared the hacktivism wave sweeping the rest of the world either. Collectives including SOLDADOS DIGITALES – UNIÓN AMERICANA and LYSTIC TEAM #ID drove roughly 56 data leak or dump posts and touched about 360 unique domains across the region, with Government, Technology, financial services and telecommunications entities most frequently in the crosshairs.

Cyble's broader findings suggest many groups marketing themselves as ideologically driven hacktivists are, in practice, running side businesses in stolen data brokerage and DDoS-for-hire services — a blurring of motive that complicates how defenders triage the threat.

The scale of the U.S. numbers doesn't necessarily mean American companies have weaker defenses than their global peers — the concentration also reflects the sheer size and digital density of the U.S. economy, and its outsized share of the high-value targets ransomware affiliates chase. But the data does argue for a shift in posture.

Cyble's broader recommendations — treating data exfiltration, not just encryption, as the primary risk; prioritizing patches for the recurring vendor list; and monitoring initial access markets as a leading indicator rather than an afterthought — apply nowhere more urgently than in a country absorbing this much of the world's ransomware volume on its own.