When Security Is Doing Everyone’s Job

Once, security was a defined discipline—a tight set of technical practices meant to keep systems safe. Today, it’s the junk drawer for every responsibility no one else wants to own.

The trust and safety work stripped from platforms for political expediency? Security now has to pick it up to succeed. The resilience planning deprioritized in favor of speed? Security must step in and own it. The ethical guardrails quietly written out of AI procurement rules? Security can’t ignore them because without that work, defense will fail.

The word security is doing too much work.

And the people holding the line are carrying a load no one team should sustain but if they must, they need to do it intentionally and strategically, because here’s why.

How Trust & Safety Gaps Become Security Threats

When trust and safety functions are gutted, the harms they once mitigated don’t disappear, they evolve into attack surfaces.

Gaps in content moderation, bias detection, and abuse prevention don’t just leave users vulnerable; they invite exploitation. Misinformation floods the space left by absent verification protocols. Biased algorithms become tools to disenfranchise specific communities. Without abuse reporting and enforcement mechanisms, phishing, harassment, and social engineering can run at scale without friction.

In a world of autonomous agents and AI-driven systems, understanding behavior becomes even more important. Trust and safety functions now have to apply in security contexts, or work in close collaboration with security teams, to identify anomalous or escalating agent behavior before it can be weaponized or unanticipated behavior causes unwanted harm.

Adversaries understand this better than most defenders. Erode trust, and you weaken defenses. Destabilize a community’s sense of reality, and you can operate inside the noise.

Safety failures soften the ground, security failures finish the job.

The Escalation: AI as a Combatant

Now add AI to the mix, a technology capable of scaling exploitation at machine speed, and unpatched trust gaps become accelerants, not just vulnerabilities.

As Nicole Perlroth warned in her Black Hat keynote, the signals were there: Shamoon, SolarWinds, NotPetya, Colonial Pipeline. None were Black Swans. Each built on the last. Each was a preview. And now, the warnings are blinking red.

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