Erik Nost
Senior Analyst

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Black Hat 2025: Troop Forrester Goes To Hacker Summer Camp
2025 marks the 28th year of Black Hat and—although it remains on the edgier side of corporate-focused cybersecurity conferences—it sometimes feels like the event is considering completely ditching its hoodie in favor of a collared shirt. While even a cursory glance at the Briefings agenda will confirm that offensive security is still the conference’s heart […]
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The Real Future Of Proactive Security Isn’t Finding Exposures — It’s Fixing Them
Visibility, prioritization, and remediation will always be the foundation of your proactive program, but many orgs still struggle to optimize all three principles in an integrated fashion. Learn how to prepare your security teams for the future of proactive security in this preview of a keynote at our upcoming Security & Risk Summit.
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Announcing The Forrester Wave™: Unified Vulnerability Management Solutions, Q3 2025
Vulnerability management is undergoing a seismic shift. The risk-based prioritization from vulnerability risk management (VRM) has combined with attack surface management (ASM) to form exposure management and continuous security testing — two emerging practices that prioritize visibility and prioritization over remediation and response.
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Overregulation Forges A CISO Coalition With The G7 Letter
A coalition of over 40 chief information security officers (CISOs) from leading companies, including Salesforce, Microsoft, AWS, Mastercard, and Siemens, sent a letter to the G7 and OECD, urging them to take action on aligning international cybersecurity regulations.
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MITRE-geddon Averted, But Fragility In CVE Processes Remains
This week, we saw the CVE process, as we know it, come hours from the brink of collapse when a memo started circulating on LinkedIn that DHS would cut funding to MITRE’s CVE cataloging on April 16. MITRE’s role in the CVE process is the crucial first step in assigning IDs to vulnerabilities so that practitioners, vendors, researchers, and governments across the globe can consistently reference the same vulnerability. The process also allows for responsible disclosures and accountability for vulnerabilities to software companies.
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Government Leaders: Prioritize Cyber Efficiency Amid Federal Volatility
Government agencies at the federal, state, and local levels must prepare for a future where they experience uncertainty, headcount reductions, contract cancellations, and budget cuts. This is gut-wrenchingly difficult to process, yet remaining leaders must figure out how to move forward to serve the mission. For public sector cybersecurity leaders, this is even more paramount. […]
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Detect, Defend, Deny: Zero Trust World 2025
Cybersecurity vendor ThreatLocker recently hosted its fifth annual Zero Trust World (ZTW) conference in Orlando, welcoming attendees from 28 countries to learn about Zero Trust principles and ThreatLocker offerings. Over two days, the event celebrated Zero Trust as a cybersecurity model and the ThreatLocker approach for achieving Zero Trust. Industry leaders, managed service providers, security […]
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Assessment Is Anyone’s Guess: Proving GOAT Status Requires Validation
As spectators tuned in to Super Bowl LIX to indulge in American culture rife with consumerism, T. Swift, and rap feuds, the buzz was less around the game and more on determining who is pro football’s GOAT (greatest of all time).
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Tenable To Acquire Vulcan Cyber: More Consolidation In The Vulnerability Management Market
The proactive security market is consolidating further as exposure management vendor Tenable announced its intent to acquire Vulcan Cyber, a unified vulnerability management (UVM) vendor that specializes in third-party vulnerability collection, vulnerability response, and application security posture management. This acquisition demonstrates how vendors are reacting to CISOs’ continued need to unify and consolidate their fragmented […]
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Announcing The Forrester Wave™: Attack Surface Management Solutions, Q3 2024
We’re excited to announce the inaugural release of a Forrester Wave™ evaluation covering attack surface management (ASM) solutions. We evaluated the 11 most significant ASM vendors in what is currently a rapidly evolving market segment. Forrester covers ASM and periphery markets such as exposure management and vulnerability risk management (VRM), as these segments all contribute […]
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The Shakedown From Black Hat USA, 2024
What happens when five security analysts gather at a security conference in Las Vegas? Stuff gets broke. Find out more in this review of the recent BlackHat USA event.
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My Prediction For The 2024 RSA Conference: Proactive Security Will Dominate Use Cases
While no trip to the RSA Conference is complete without seeing what security vendors are up to, this year, expect to be asked an intriguing question: “How proactive are you?” Find out why this will be such a popular question in this post.
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Exposure Management Looks To Usurp Vulnerability Management, But Is The New Emperor Wearing Any Clothes?
Hans Christian Anderson’s classic tale of the emperor that gets duped into a fancy, new, and invisible wardrobe provides lessons in swindling, pride, and truth. It’s only when the emperor struts in front of the commoners that a child finally states, “Wait a minute — there’s nothing to this outfit. He’s not wearing anything.” As […]
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Announcing The Forrester Wave™: Vulnerability Risk Management, Q3 2023
Vulnerability risk management (VRM) solutions look very different today than they did in 2019. Learn what's changed in our new Wave report.
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It’s Time That We Activate Proactive Security
Learn how focusing on proactive security behaviors can relieve the ongoing security intrusions that reactive security teams must address.
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Vulnerability Management Strategies: Avoiding A Cyber Root Canal
Vulnerability management, like flossing, is not fun, exciting, or sexy, but we know that it’s a necessary component of good hygiene. There’s a ton of evidence and research to strongly substantiate its benefits, and yet we frequently struggle to do it despite clearly understanding the consequences — we certainly don’t want a root canal! Yet, […]
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VRM And SOC Teams Can Benefit From Each Other
We’re excited to announce our latest research on vulnerability risk management (VRM) and security operations center (SOC) teams. VRM and SOC teams are pivotal parts of the security organization, with different responsibilities but shared challenges. When Allie and I kicked off our research on interlocks between these teams earlier this year, we weren’t sure what […]
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Announcing The Vulnerability Risk Management Landscape, Q2 2023
What do organizations use VRM for? Learn the five top use cases in this preview of our new report: The Vulnerability Risk Management Landscape, Q2 2023.
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Insights From The 2023 RSA Conference: Generative AI, Quantum, And Innovation Sandbox
There's growing hype around generative AI in the security world, some of it warranted, some of it not so much. Learn more by reading the Forrester security and risk team’s key perspectives from RSAC 2023.
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The US Government Is Here And Really Wants To Help Protect You From Ransomware
Ransomware Vulnerability Warnings Are Coming To A Critical Infrastructure Near You The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) launched the Ransomware Vulnerability Warning Pilot (RVWP) in January 2023 in response to ongoing concerns about the threat of ransomware. This is the CISA’s ransomware-centric take on external attack surface management for critical infrastructure. The RVWP pilot […]
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