Pulse Security AI Report Highlights CISO‑Board Confidence Gap on Cyber Risk

Pulse Security AI released a research report, The CISO‑Board Communication Gap, based on more than 80 senior practitioners. The study finds only 12.5% of security leaders are very confident that their board fully understands the organization’s security posture, while 55% of boards have never formally defined a cyber‑risk appetite. Boards often rely on third‑party ratings and lack explicit decisions on risk mitigation, leading security leaders to spend ten or more hours preparing each board presentation.

The report arrives amid a broader surge in AI‑driven cyber threats. New open‑source AI agents such as OpenClaw expose management interfaces and enable rapid, automated attacks that outpace traditional detection. AI‑enhanced phishing, deep‑fake fraud, and autonomous malware are increasing the speed and scale of attacks, prompting calls for defensive autonomy and continuous data‑classification tools like AvePoint’s Kinetic Classification. Crypto firms report uneven access to frontier AI models such as Anthropic’s Mythos, limiting their ability to defend against AI‑assisted exploits. Industry leaders, including Haseeb Qureshi of Dragonfly, argue that cheap AI audits could have prevented recent hardware‑wallet flaws, underscoring the growing economic pressure to adopt advanced AI security measures.