For much of the last month, many of the cybersecurity experts I talk to and follow have been posting like they are very scared. Many have been warning of an AI-powered “Black Swan” event, have been alarmed by the number of vulnerabilities suddenly discovered, and of the apparent power of AI agents and large language models more broadly to find and exploit previously unknown bugs.

The rhetoric has ranged from worried-but-measured (things are about to get weird), to run-of-the-mill advice like update your software and make sure you have two-factor authentication on, to vagueposting about AI-powered attacks, to things like ‘the internet was nice while it lasted,’ to outright prepper-level terror.

To give you a sense of what I’m seeing, Matthew Green, a Johns Hopkins professor and one of the most respected cryptographers in the world, posted “we’re in the part of the movie where you need to throw whatever you can in the path of the zombies and hope it slows them down,” and “so many people discovering that the…