This page sets out how IgniteIt Cybersecurity reports, what we will and will not publish, how we use AI tools, and who is accountable for every piece on this site. It is a standing commitment, not a statement of intent.
Independence
Editorial decisions are made by editors. No advertiser, sponsor, exhibitor or event partner sees a story before publication, approves coverage, or is given the opportunity to change it. Buying advertising, sponsoring an event, or exhibiting at one earns no editorial consideration whatsoever — favourable or otherwise.
IgniteIt Cybersecurity is published by IgniteIt Inc., which also produces commercial events. Where we cover a company that is an IgniteIt customer, sponsor or event partner, we disclose that relationship in the story.
Sourcing and verification
We work from primary sources: SEC filings including Form 8-K incident disclosures, CISA advisories and the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, court records, regulator actions, company statements on the record, and our own reporting. Where a figure comes from a third party we name them. Where a number is an estimate, we say so and say whose.
We do not report a company’s claim about itself as fact. “The company said” is not a hedge, it is an accurate description of what we know.
Anonymous sourcing is used sparingly, only when a source faces a real professional risk, and only when a named editor knows the source’s identity and has judged them credible.
How we use AI
We use AI tools in our newsroom. We think readers are entitled to know where, and to know that a named human being is accountable for every word we publish regardless.
Every article on IgniteIt Cybersecurity falls into one of three tiers, and the tier is disclosed on the article itself:
- Reported. Written by a human journalist. No model drafted it. All interviews, investigations, analysis and opinion are in this tier, always.
- AI-assisted. A model produced a draft from sources our journalist gathered. A named author verified every factual claim against those sources, edited the piece, and published it. The disclosure names that person.
- Data Desk. Compiled automatically from structured public records, then reviewed and published by a named editor. Used for trackers, roundups and logs. Never for narrative reporting.
Rules that hold across all three tiers:
- No article publishes without a human being clicking publish. There is no automated path to the live site.
- No AI byline, ever. No invented author names, ever.
- Any negative assertion about a named person or private company — an investigation, a lawsuit, a breach, financial distress, regulatory action, layoffs — is verified by a human against the primary document before publication. No exceptions.
- A model may only assert what is present in the sources it was given. Where we cannot verify a claim, we do not publish it.
The “Burn After Reading” summary at the top of an article is written by an AI model from that article alone, and is reviewed by our editors. It never adds facts that are not in the story.
Incidents and named victims
IgniteIt Cybersecurity covers the business consequences of security incidents. We do not publish stolen data, link to leak sites, or reproduce material taken in a breach, and we do not name individual employees as the cause of an incident unless a court or regulator has.
We report an attack as attributed only when the victim, a government agency or a named, credible researcher has attributed it, and we say who did.
Corrections
We correct errors quickly and visibly. Corrections are appended to the article, dated, and describe what was wrong rather than quietly fixing the text. See our Corrections Policy.
Advertising and the editorial firewall
Sponsored content is labelled as sponsored, above the fold, in a form no reasonable reader could miss. It never appears under an editorial byline and never appears unlabelled in the news feed. Links in sponsored material carry the appropriate rel attribute.
Press releases are not editorial. We publish them, when we publish them, in a clearly marked section that is excluded from search indexing, with a standing notice that the content is unedited company material. Our full standards are in our Advertising and Sponsorship Policy.
What we will not publish
- Stolen or leaked data, or links to where it is posted.
- Working exploit code or step-by-step attack instructions.
- Investment advice, price targets, or recommendations to buy or sell.
- Vendor claims we cannot source, in editorial or in advertising.
- Affiliate links in editorial.
Conflicts of interest
Staff disclose financial interests in companies they cover and recuse themselves where a holding is material. Staff do not accept paid travel, gifts, or honoraria from companies in our coverage area.
Questions
If something on this site falls short of what is written here, we want to know. Contact us.