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Chris Hughes: Not Prevention, But Resiliency
In the inaugural episode of In Progress, Aviatrix CEO Doug Merritt talks with Chris Hughes — CISA Cyber Innovation Fellow, author of Software Transparency, Effective Vulnerability Management, and Securing AI Agents, and writer of Resilient Cyber — about the forces reshaping security: exponential CVE growth, AI as both attacker and defender, the limits of "human in the loop," and why resilience now matters more than prevention.
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The Speaker
Doug Merritt is Chairman, Chief Executive Officer, and President of Aviatrix. Most recently, Doug served as Splunk President and CEO from 2015 to 2021. During his tenure as CEO, Doug led the transformation of Splunk from an on premise, perpetual license software company with the equivalent of $220 million in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), to a cloud-based SaaS company with ARR of $3.12 billion. In his first year at Splunk, Doug served as the Senior Vice President of Splunk’s go-to-market functions including sales, marketing, support, business development, partners, and other customer facing functions.
Doug Merritt
The Guest
Chris Hughes is the Founder of Resilient Cyber and the VP of Security Strategy at Zenity, where he drives the company's mission to establish agentic AI security as the defining challenge of the modern enterprise. With over 20 years of cybersecurity experience spanning the Department of Defense, Federal Government, and commercial organizations, Chris has held roles including CISO, Security Engineer, and Security Architect, giving him a practitioner's perspective on the real-world challenges security teams face as AI transforms the threat landscape.
Chris Hughes
Key Summary
- CVEs are exploding — over 40,000 in 2025, with 2026 projections near 60,000 (some estimates up to 100,000) — while AI makes vulnerabilities easier to find and exploit.
- Patching capacity has long lagged below 10% of the backlog; broken production risk and competing business priorities keep it there.
- Security should shift from trying to prevent every incident to containing and recovering from the ones that happen.
- "Human in the loop" doesn't scale against AI-driven attack volume — defenders need to fight AI with AI.
- Security teams that act as collaborators, not blockers, avoid the shadow-IT workarounds that punitive policies create.
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