SMARTpod talks to Fred Streefland, Global Field CISO for EMEA at Check Point Software Technologies, about framing modern cyber defence around adaptability, rapid decision-making, and the OODA loop adapted for cybersecurity.

Between doomscrolling, rapid-fire Slack notifications, and algorithmic video feeds, the average employee is trapped in an aggressive, highly engineered dopamine loop that automatically shuts down in traditional training situations.

The global cybersecurity landscape is approaching a turning point as quantum computing accelerates faster than most organisations realise; the shift is not a distant, theoretical concern, but a present-day business risk that demands immediate action.

Industrial organisations now rely on interconnected systems, remote access, cloud-based analytics, and unified IT and OT environments to maintain production. Fortinet’s 2026 State of OT and Cybersecurity Report illustrates why visibility, segmentation, and integrated security are essential.

The SMART Security Summit 2026, to be hosted by SMART Security Solutions at the Indaba Conference Centre in Fourways on 10 September 2026, will deliver a roadmap from reactive survival to structured resilience.

Buildings may be getting smarter, but too many control rooms are still anchored to yesterday’s technology, such as on-site servers, rigid architectures and a patchwork of interfaces that are expensive to run and slow to evolve.

AI security is heading in an uncomfortable direction following Microsoft’s research showing how prompt injection can be chained to remote code execution vulnerabilities in AI agent frameworks, including work involving Semantic Kernel

From January to April 2026, Kaspersky detected more than 33 300 attacks on small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), in which malicious or unwanted software for PCs was disguised as popular artificial intelligence (AI) services.