Award announcements tend to blur together, especially during Black Hat week, when everyone in Las Vegas has something to celebrate. So let’s start with the part we actually spent time thinking about: the criteria.
This week, Cyber Defense Magazine named Bolster AI a finalist in two of its 2026 programs, the Top InfoSec Innovator Awards, now in their 14th year, and the Top 25 Most Innovative Cybersecurity Companies in the World. Judging is handled by working infosec practitioners rather than a marketing panel, which is a meaningful distinction in a category full of them.
What the Judges Said They Were Looking For
“Bolster AI embodies three major features we judges look for with the potential to become winners: understanding tomorrow’s threats, today, providing a cost-effective solution and innovating in unexpected ways that can help mitigate cyber risk and get one step ahead of the next breach,” said Gary S. Miliefsky, Publisher of Cyber Defense Magazine.
Three things, and the first one is the hardest. Understanding tomorrow’s threats today is easy to put on a slide and difficult to operationalize, because it requires you to be looking at attacker behavior that hasn’t produced a victim yet.
Innovation, Right Now, Means Getting Ahead of the Campaign
Here’s the shift we’ve been tracking. The cost of producing a convincing fake has collapsed. Cloning a checkout page or standing up a lookalike domain used to take real skill and real time. Now it takes neither, and the same is true of fraudulent sponsored ads, counterfeit mobile apps, and deepfaked executives. Attackers respond to falling costs the way any rational operator would, by producing more.
That’s why the thing hitting your customers is almost never a single artifact. It’s a campaign. One operator stands up dozens of domains, buys ad placements against your branded keywords, spins up social profiles, lists counterfeit goods, and routes everything through shared infrastructure. Inside the targeted company, though, that single operation arrives in fragments: a phishing page reported to security, a spike in chargebacks that lands with fraud, branded traffic behaving strangely enough that marketing notices, and a support queue filling up with confused customers. Four teams open four tickets, and none of them can see that they’re all looking at the same adversary.
Defending artifact by artifact against that is a losing trade. You take down the page, the operator relaunches from infrastructure they already own, and the queue never gets shorter.
So we’ve been building in the other direction: detecting the infrastructure attackers stage before a campaign goes live, connecting related threats so analysts see the whole operation instead of a stream of disconnected alerts, and enforcing at the campaign level. AI does the heavy lifting on detection and takedown volume, and our analysts stay in the loop for the edge cases and the complicated escalations that genuinely need human judgment. That combination is what makes the volume survivable.
Why This Recognition Lands for Us
“Being named a finalist by judges who do this work for a living means something to our team,” said Rod Schultz, CEO of Bolster AI. “The threats our customers face got cheaper and faster almost overnight, and the only real answer is to meet that speed with better technology. We’re glad to see that approach recognized, and we’re nowhere near done.”
What Happens Next
Judging continues through October 2026. Winners will be announced online, in print, and at CyberDefenseCon 2026, taking place October 20 and 21 at The Ritz-Carlton in Orlando, where a selected group gets to present to the Top Global CISOs at CDM’s invitation-only conference.
Come Find Us at Black Hat
If you’re in Las Vegas this week, stop by booth #4900 in the Business Hall. We’ll show you what’s already out there impersonating your brand, and what it takes to shut the whole campaign down rather than one page at a time. See what’s targeting you →
About Bolster AI
Bolster AI protects organizations from phishing, impersonation, and fraud across domains, social media, app stores, marketplaces, paid ads, and the dark web. Our AI-driven platform detects threats and drives takedowns at scale, backed by analysts who handle the complex cases, so security, fraud, and brand teams can shut down attacks before customers get hurt. Learn more at bolster.ai.
About the Cyber Defense Awards
Cyber Defense Magazine is in its fourteenth year of recognizing infosec innovators worldwide. The program is open to startups, growth-stage companies, and public companies in the information security space. Learn more at cyberdefenseawards.com.
