Google celebrated its 28th birthday on September 27, 2026.
For most people, Google’s story is associated with Search, Gmail, YouTube, Maps, Android, cloud technology and, increasingly, artificial intelligence.
For cybersecurity professionals, however, the same 28 years tell another story.
As digital technology became more useful, connected and powerful, the systems we needed to protect became more complex.
The evolution of Google therefore mirrors a larger transformation in cybersecurity itself.
When the Internet Became Everyday Infrastructure
In Google’s early years, the internet was important, but it had not yet become the foundation of everyday life that it is today.
Now consider the information routinely handled online:
business communications,
financial transactions,
personal documents,
location information,
corporate data,
health information,
customer records,
intellectual property,
authentication credentials,
and enormous amounts of personal communication.
The value of digital systems increased.
Naturally, their value to attackers increased as well.
Cybersecurity consequently moved from being primarily a technical concern to becoming a business and societal concern.
Search Made Information Accessible — Attackers Learned to Use Information Too
The internet created unprecedented access to knowledge.
Unfortunately, access works in both directions.
Attackers can research organizations, employees, suppliers, technologies, email formats and publicly exposed information before attempting an attack.
Social engineering became more sophisticated because attackers could build convincing context.
A phishing email no longer had to look obviously suspicious. It could mention the right company, role, colleague, product or current event.
Today, artificial intelligence can make those attacks even more convincing.
The security lesson is important: information itself has become part of the attack surface.
Organizations therefore need to think beyond servers and firewalls. They need to consider identity, data exposure, employee awareness, cloud configuration, third-party risk and the information publicly available about the business.
Passwords Are Giving Way to Stronger Identity
For decades, the password was the primary key to digital life.
Unfortunately, passwords created predictable security problems.
People reused them.
Attackers stole them.
Fake login pages captured them.
Data breaches exposed them.
Credential-stuffing attacks reused compromised credentials elsewhere.
The industry has consequently been moving toward stronger authentication methods.
Google has been among the companies promoting passkeys, which use cryptographic authentication and are designed to resist phishing attacks.
This transition illustrates an important cybersecurity principle.
Sometimes improving security does not mean teaching people to perform a weak process more carefully.
It means redesigning the process so the weakness becomes harder to exploit.
Cybersecurity Is Becoming More Invisible
Some of the most effective security controls are controls users barely notice.
Spam filtering is a good example.
Billions of malicious or unwanted communications can be analyzed before users ever interact with them.
Modern browsers can warn about dangerous websites.
Devices can identify suspicious behavior.
Cloud platforms can detect unusual activity.
Authentication systems can evaluate contextual risk.
Artificial intelligence is increasingly being used to strengthen these capabilities.
Users should still understand cyber risk, but the long-term objective of security cannot be to expect every employee to identify every sophisticated attack manually.
Security architecture must provide protection around them.
Artificial Intelligence Changes Both Sides of the Equation
AI has become one of the most significant technology changes in Google’s recent history.
It is also reshaping cybersecurity.
Defenders can use AI to analyze large volumes of events, identify patterns, prioritize alerts and accelerate investigations.
Attackers can use similar capabilities to improve social engineering, automate research, create convincing content and scale fraudulent activity.
This creates a familiar cybersecurity dynamic.
Technology itself is rarely exclusively defensive or offensive.
What matters is how it is implemented, governed and monitored.
Businesses adopting AI therefore need to ask security questions at the same time they ask productivity questions.
What information can the AI system access?
What data can employees submit?
Who controls the tool?
What happens to sensitive information?
Which integrations are enabled?
How is access reviewed?
How are AI-generated actions logged?
How do we respond when something goes wrong?
AI governance and cybersecurity increasingly belong in the same conversation.
Security Cannot Be a One-Time Project
Google looked very different in 1998 from the company celebrating its 28th birthday in 2026.
Enterprise technology has changed just as dramatically.
A cybersecurity programme designed around yesterday’s infrastructure will struggle against tomorrow’s threats.
Organizations therefore need continuous security processes:
risk assessment,
vulnerability management,
identity governance,
security monitoring,
incident response,
security awareness,
secure development,
third-party risk management,
cloud security,
and regular review of emerging technologies.
The objective is not to eliminate every possible risk.
That is unrealistic.
The objective is to understand important risks, reduce exposure and build the ability to detect and respond when prevention fails.
The Next 28 Years Will Bring New Security Questions
Nobody in 1998 could have predicted every technology that would eventually sit inside today’s digital ecosystem.
We should be equally cautious about pretending we know exactly what the next 28 years will bring.
What we can predict is that businesses will continue to depend on technology, attackers will continue to adapt and security teams will need to adapt with them.
Google’s birthday therefore offers an interesting cybersecurity lesson.
Digital transformation and cybersecurity are not separate journeys.
Every new way of connecting, searching, communicating, automating and working creates both value and responsibility.
Organizations that understand that relationship will be better positioned to innovate safely.
Happy 28th birthday, Google — and here’s to building the next generation of technology with security designed in from the beginning.
CTA As organizations adopt cloud services, AI and increasingly connected digital platforms, cybersecurity needs to evolve with the business. DevOM Consulting helps organizations identify security risks, strengthen controls and build practical approaches to digital resilience.
To know more about Anand Shinde and his work in cybersecurity, awareness, and books:
https://anandshinde.com/
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