Disclosure as Information Imbalance
6–1–2026 (Monday)
Hello, and welcome to The Intentional Brief - your weekly video update on the one big thing in cybersecurity for middle market companies, their investors, and executive teams.
I’m your host, Shay Colson, Managing Partner at Intentional Cybersecurity, and you can find us online at intentionalcyber.com.
Today is Monday, June 1, 2026, and, at least as I’m recording this, the war in Iran continues and the Strait of Hormuz remains closed.
Disclosure as Information Imbalance
This week, we’re going to look at a bit of a nuanced area of cybersecurity, that focused on vulnerability research and responsible disclosure.
Now, of course, for those regular watchers, we’ve been covering the vulnerability topic more broadly quite a bit of late in the context of Mythos and other AI-driven tooling and its potential to materially accelerate vulnerability discovery.
This week, however, we’re going to focus on the public response from Microsoft to a rash of recently released Windows vulnerabilities.
In a blog post last week, Microsoft talked about their Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure, claiming that recent “vulnerabilities known as RedSun, UnDefend, BlueHammer, YellowKey, GreenPlasma, and MiniPlasma were not responsibly disclosed.”
But more than this, Microsoft says a couple of paragraphs later that “Our Digital Crimes Unit will continue bringing cases against these actors and those that enable their criminal activity – coordinating as needed with law enforcement around the world.”
This is drawing a bit of consternation, to say the least, from some in the security community. Microsoft, as you might imagine, does have quite a bit of reach and connectivity with law enforcement agencies around the world, and appears to be threatening to aim them at researchers (one, in particular, known as Nightmare Eclipse, who is behind these vulnerabilities).
It’s important to remember, also, that Microsoft owns GitHub, the largest source code repository on the planet, and one where many of these vulnerability “proof of concepts” are stored or distributed.
Microsoft has kicked Nightmare Eclipse off of GitHub, and also had their vulnerability reporting portal account disabled (making it hard to comply with the request in the future).
But beyond that, the Microsoft strategy here is interesting, given the near certainty that individual researchers are going to be able to generate these type of high impact zero day vulnerabilities moving forward. In fact, Anthropic noted with their release of Opus 4.8 last week that they “expect to be able to bring Mythos-class models to all our customers in the coming weeks.”
It’s hard to read too much into this posturing from Microsoft, since even they are likely to be overwhelmed by volume in the very near future. And, instead of finding ways to partner more closely with those discovering these vulnerabilities, they seem to be actively threatening them.
The lesson for all of us here is one around communication and expectation. If people identify a security issue in your system, software, or setup, what do you want them to do? If you want them to do something that looks the least bit like responsible disclosure (i.e. coming to you first before making it public), you’re going to catch more flies with honey (as they say).
Fundraising
From a fundraising perspective, a nearly mirror week with $8.6B in newly committed capital.
Some nuance has emerged around the payments to Anthropic as relates to the SpaceX IPO, but the numbers are so huge that it feels like that old line from Who’s Line - where “everything’s made up and the points don’t matter.”
A reminder that you can find links to all the articles we covered below, find back issues of these videos and the written transcripts at intentionalcyber.com, and now sign up for our monthly newsletter, the Intentional Dispatch.
We’ll see you next week for another edition of the Intentional Brief.
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