Talos on curiosity: the defensive skill that still doesn't scale

Cisco Talos posted its Threat Source column on Wednesday. William Largent, writing on the Talos blog, used it to argue — through a detour into board games — that innate curiosity is what he calls “the currency of our cyber family.” The rest of the column runs the usual Threat Source structure: the week’s headlines, a batch of ARToken and password-spray IOCs, a note on CVE-2026-48558 in SimpleHelp’s RMM. Read alongside the essay, the two halves make one point.

The point is worth taking seriously.

What Largent actually argued

The board-games framing is not decorative. Largent runs through Ticket to Ride (multiple valid winning strategies, and the discipline of noticing which one an opponent is committed to), Go (a rule set a child can learn in an afternoon and an adult cannot master in a lifetime), and a handful of others — Machi Koro, Catan, Pathfinder, second-edition AD&D — as microcosms for the parts of a defender’s job that don’t fit neatly into a runbook.

Each of those games rewards the same thing: forming a hypothesis about what an adversary is doing, watching for the small tell that the hypothesis is wrong, and then updating rather than doubling down. In Ticket to Ride the tell is which routes the opponent keeps refusing to fight over. In threat hunting the tell is a beacon on a cadence that doesn’t match a service’s normal jitter, or a service account touching a mailbox it has never touched in six months of baseline. Same skill. Different table.

The essay’s tightest line — “innate curiosity is the currency of our cyber family” — is doing more work than it looks like. Currency, not accessory. The thing you spend to get everything else. Without it, the analyst has training and tooling and dashboards, and no reason to look past the green tick.

The other half of the column

The IOCs and CVEs Largent slots into the same post aren’t unrelated to the essay. They are the essay’s evidence.

• ARToken, the phishing-as-a-service kit affiliated with the EvilTokens actor, and its 81-million-request password-spray campaign against Microsoft 365 tenants. We covered Talos’s initial ARToken writeup earlier this week. It is not, technically, a novel intrusion class — device-code phishing has been documented since Microsoft first shipped the flow. It is, however, a workflow that ordinary M365 audit trails render as a compliant user authentication. Detecting it is a curiosity problem, not a signature problem.
• SimpleHelp CVE-2026-48558, an authentication bypass in a remote-management tool that half of a mid-sized MSP’s downstream customers are exposed through without knowing. Vendors ship the fix; customers install it or don’t. The catch is knowing that “your MSP uses SimpleHelp” is a fact about your attack surface. Not everyone asks.
• A pile of coinminer, KMS-activator, and process-patcher samples — the boring end of the intake queue. The essay’s argument, applied here, is that the boring end is where the interesting drift usually shows up. The atypical LOLBIN chain gets buried in a stack of unremarkable coinminers unless someone bothers to look.

That is why Largent bundled the two halves together. Curiosity is the resource that turns the intake queue into signal.

What this says about where the job is going

The last two years of SOC discourse have been dominated by a specific promise: agentic AI, autonomous triage, LLM-driven detection engineering, red teaming as a multi-agent architecture (see Rapid7’s own writeup this week on formalizing exactly that). Some of that will land. Enrichment, correlation, initial triage — those are pattern-matching problems, and pattern-matching is what the current generation of models is genuinely good at.

The part that will not automate, or at any rate has not automated yet, is the step Largent’s essay is about: noticing that the pattern you’ve been matching against is the wrong pattern. That is a curiosity move. It is the analyst asking a question that nobody has typed into a detection rule yet, because nobody has thought of it yet, because the tell has not surfaced anywhere else.

This is the same mistake, different decade. Intrusion-detection vendors in the late 1990s promised the same abstraction over the same skill and were selling the same story: buy the box, retire the analyst, sleep at night. What actually happened is that the boxes got very good at the 90% of alerts a trained junior could handle, and the 10% that a trained junior couldn’t handle became the entire job for anyone senior. The floor rose. The ceiling did not.

The AI generation of the promise is more capable than the IDS generation was. The shape of the outcome is likely to be similar. More of the checklist gets absorbed. The curiosity work becomes a larger share of what remains — and a smaller share of what most SOCs are actually staffed for.

What to do with this, if you do anything

Not much of an action list. The column is not a call to arms; it is a reminder.

If you run a security team: audit whether your junior analysts have unstructured time to poke at things. Not sprint tickets, not KPI cases, not queue-clearance. Time to follow a hunch through three dashboards and come back with nothing on paper. That is where the tell in six months’ incident report first got noticed, or didn’t.

If you are one of those juniors: play the games. Or don’t play the games — the games are Largent’s hook, not the actual point. The actual point is to keep asking why after everyone else has moved on.

That habit is why some people still find things the tooling missed. It is not clear that anything else is.

Sourcing

• Cisco Talos Blog: Catan and Mouse — William Largent, 2 July 2026
• NVD: CVE-2026-48558
• Related: Talos on ARToken PhaaS and EvilTokens’ M365 device-code phishing
• Related: ConsentFix / ClickFix and the M365 OAuth grant that outlives a password reset
• Related: Rapid7 on formalizing red-team methodology as a multi-agent AI architecture