Meet SIGNAL Media's The Cyber Edge Writing Award Winners

AFCEA International has named its top three winners of the seventh annual The Cyber Edge Writing Award, sponsored by MANTECH.

This year, the theme was “Securing the AI-Driven Future: Defense and Offense in the Age of Generative Intelligence.” AFCEA was looking for articles that address the issues caused by generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), including AI-generated phishing campaigns, deep-fake misinformation, automated malware and autonomous cyber attacks, and suggest solutions and implementation plans to minimize these growing threats.

“AI-driven cyber warfare is now a permanent part of our operating environments, and failure to maintain dominance will be extremely costly,” said Chris Cleary, vice president of MANTECH’s Cyber Practice. “Winners of this year’s Cyber Edge Award show the best way to combat these threats: strategies that defend sensitive systems, develop AI-enabled deterrents and establish clear rules of engagement in cyberspace."

Out of 109 submissions, judges from AFCEA’s Cyber, Homeland Security, Technology and Intelligence Committees helped select three winning articles, on topics ranging from neuro-cybersecurity to symbiotic autonomy.

Andrew Vaughn, an associate fellow and cyber integrator at Lockheed Martin, won first place with his article “AI-Driven Silent Breach: A Ghost Within Your Organization.” His piece focuses on the way individuals are infiltrating hiring processes using GenAI, citing incidents caused by malicious cyber actors like the Lazarus Group, North Korean state-sponsored actors who posed as recruiters targeting defense contractors.

Vaughn joined the U.S. Air Force in 2011, serving as a client systems technician and working in information assurance. After leaving active duty in 2017, he joined Lockheed Martin and held roles in systems engineering IT and cyber engineering. He currently works in governance, risk and compliance.

This will be Vaughn's first published article, and he said he hopes his work brings awareness to the great lengths cyber actors will go to gain access to a company’s data from within.

“These are human vector attacks, and most of us aren't really looking for ways to prevent people from being hired on into organizations,” Vaughn said. “I hope that [readers are] taking this in and thinking, ‘How can we mitigate this?’ By adding an extra layer to our hiring process or an extra layer to our interviewing process because they're using AI to generate even the human factor to be on video Zoom calls.”

David Geer placed second with his “The Intent Architect: Reclaiming the Cyber Initiative Through Symbiotic Autonomy” piece. Geer has 26 years of experience as a cybersecurity and technology journalist and has been published in technical and trade publications such as Communications of the ACM (CACM), IEEE Computer, Network World and TechTarget.

As someone who has written about AI since it was just an algorithmic tool to sort data, Geer said he wanted to demonstrate how humans can work with AI to create seamless cyber defenses despite the risks and hesitation to fully trust it.

“There's been a lot of characterization of symbiotic relationships, and often these are in sci-fi movies and shows where the symbiotic relationship takes on a negative connotation, but it's a very close relationship where they can interact, the host and the symbiote, with each other in a way that any other type of relationship would not make possible,” Geer explained.

Geer’s article explains how humans and AI can work together to defend just as quickly as adversaries use AI to attack; it will take trust and diligent logging of AI behavior.

“With anything that comes along in technology, there are going to be risks, and there are going to be those that are going to use it in an inappropriate manner, but there are always positive uses,” Geer emphasized.

The third-place award went to Ms. Kritika for her article “Defending the Netware: Neuro-Cybersecurity Strategies Against GenAI-Powered Cognitive Attacks.” Kritika, who publishes under one name, is an independent cybersecurity researcher who focuses on the human side of digital risk, exploring how cyber actors mimic patterns of the human brain. She recently wrote a book called “Cybersecurity Meets Neuroscience.”

In her article, Kritika explains how GenAI uses compelling deception to get past human defenses. To counter the threat, cognitive authentication systems can study behavioral biometrics like interaction patterns and decision rhythms to detect GenAI attacks.

“Cybersecurity has only focused on protecting systems, networks, codes and critical infrastructure,” Kritika said. “Unlike a firewall, the human brain simply cannot be patched. . . . Once neural data, our brain data, gets breached, it's breached forever. The person knows how to trick you, how to manipulate you.”

The top three contest winners will receive engraved awards, monetary prizes and recognition during an awards ceremony on June 1, 2026, in conjunction with TechNet Cyber, a flagship AFCEA event, in Baltimore. Additionally, the articles will be published in the July issue of SIGNAL Magazine and posted online to SIGNAL Media.

“Through The Cyber Edge Writing Award, AFCEA’s own SIGNAL Media drives both innovation and connection among and between government, military, industry and academia across the defense industrial base,” said AFCEA President and CEO Lt. Gen. Susan S. Lawrence, USA (Ret.) “As we have seen the explosive growth of GenAI in all sectors, the voices of those operating in this environment on behalf of global security must be amplified and shared, as they have been for seven years through The Cyber Edge Writing Award.”

Details about the 2027 The Cyber Edge Writing Award will be available this fall.