Announcements for the Summer of 2026
Hello Practive Security Subscribers!
Thank you for being members and for joining us in our mission to help everyone defend themselves from the threats lurking online that work against us every day. We hope and pray that our work has been valuable to you. We have some big news we would like to share with you in this open newsletter for the summer of 2026, and there’s a lot to tell.
Practive Security is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Announcements
After more than a year of active research and writing with you in mind, led by over 25 years of professional experience at the very peak of cyber security, we are having our work published in book format. That’s right, Practive Security is publishing books! We have two books releasing this summer, one focused on the topic of AI, and the other covering the essentials of our “101” series. Read more in the sections below these announcements for the details.
We have expanded the ways you can help support our work! We now have a Supporters Membership tier on our Website which provides you access to some of our favorite articles, some insider works that do not have general release, a monthly virtual meet-up, and more. Check it out at https://www.practivesecurity.com/signup
Content for our Practive Security for Professionals / Businesses is growing fast! We have been on a content writing surge as we tackle the foundations of cyber security programs in a business context – for any organization from churches to small businesses to enterprises. We have you covered!
And Practive Security is hitting the road. In July, the whole Johnston family will be representing Practive Security at the Christian Home Educators Association (CHEA) Parenting and Homeschooling Convention in California. I (Matt) will be speaking and giving a workshop for parents on the topic of Digital Health and Cyber Security for the home, while the entire family will be presenting our company in the vendor Exhibition Hall. See https://cheaofca.org/annual-parenting-homeschool-convention for more! We would love to see you there (and yes, we will have some exciting give-aways exclusive for the event).
In an attempt to make our content more available, we have updated our pricing on Substack. We have reduced the membership cost down to $8 / month. Remember that with Substack you get the big stories that we want to make more generally available, but there is more on our website so if you want the full Practive Experience, that’s where to find it. Essentials Membership is just $15 / month.
For about a year now, we have been sprinting to get a foundation for Practive Security built. We have over 100 articles and presentations combined and available to you now through our website, Substack, Spotify, and YouTube. We have written advisories about new threats, analysis of technology & security, deep strategies on a spectrum of optics, myth busting, and more. While AI has been a major focus, we have also been giving a lot of attention to Digital Health, Online Safety, Parenting, and Cyber Security. We are proud of what we have accomplished and made available to you so far.
We hope this is only the beginning, but we need your help. If you find our work helpful, please tell your friends and family about us. Please consider subscribing to one of our memberships and checking out all that we have to offer behind the paywall. Remember that more than articles, when you become a member, you also have the ability to send us questions so we can advise you specifically.
Now to all the details!
Book 1: Countering the AI Revolution
Right now, our greater work on the topic of AI that we are calling “Countering the AI Revolution,” is in the hands of editors at a major Christian publisher. It is currently undergoing multiple rounds of editorial reviews, and we are hoping for a release in early August this year, if not sooner. I am incredibly excited about this, and given how fast this revolution is moving, this work cannot come out soon enough. I’m pushing the publisher for a release in July, but we will see.
For this work, we reviewed all of our articles on the topic of AI that we have published to date for Practive Security customers and combined them into a manuscript in an order that tells the whole story sequentially. We reviewed and edited all the articles, now as chapters in a whole story, to make sure we have integrated our latest thoughts into our earlier works. We also added thoughts and expanded others, including some never-before told professional stories. Yet this is also a collection of works, so it may read that way as the story builds, section by section.
This book represents an insider’s perspective on the AI Revolution, through the eyes, mind, and experiences of a Christian man (me) who has walked through Silicon Valley for decades and is now free to write about it. The main thesis of the book is this: you are being deceived, and you need to respond intentionally. The AI Revolution is an ideological endeavor meant to transform the nature of what it means to be human, upending and replacing everything – even absorbing human agency - as a replacement guiding philosophy, religion, and governing body for all mankind. The antidote: preserve the arc of humanity by doubling down on all that it means to be human – seek transcendence in Christ where it is only possible.
But you don’t need to wait! At the bottom of this newsletter, we have the manuscript’s table of contents (subject to editorial changes before publication) with links to all the major articles that serve as the basis for the corresponding chapters in the book. With these links, you can in effect read the manuscript before it is available in book form. Those of you who have been following our work know that I am not an author by trade nor training. Alas time is short and this is a crucial moment in the human story and I believe the truth must be told, and so you will have it in the best form that I can convey it as I see it (subject of course to editorial review by the publisher).
And of course there is more we cover elsewhere. We wanted to focus this book on the core of our concern: the deception of the revolution and how to counter it. We have written much more that won’t be in the book, but is available to our customers in published articles.
Stay tuned and if you haven’t subscribed already, sign-up on Substack or our Website.
Practive Security 101
Also happening right now, our book titled “Practive Security 101 – Cyber security and digital health essentials” is under final review and should be available on Amazon.com by the end of this week in paperback and Kindle formats!
This work is a collection of all the articles we have published for customers under our “101” series. That series is intended to give you all you need to know in order to build and maintain a security posture that protects the totality of who you are from online threats. It’s the nuts and bolts of online safety & security and blends philosophy, Christian values, with technical explanations, strategies, and tactics on a wide range of topics (see table of contents below). My 25 years made practical for you.
We are also excited about brining this work to you in portable format, and we are hoping that this can serve individuals and parents as a practical guide for understanding online threats and how to counter them. In fact, bundled with John Dyer’s, “From the Garden to the City,” and Rod Dreher’s, “Live Not by Lies,” we think this book will make an excellent companion for high-school level education on the topic of media ecology. In fact, we will be sending it to multiple Christian education organizations for consideration in high-school curriculum. But this wasn’t only written for younger minds. We wrote all of our content with peer adults and fellow parents in mind, so this work is really for everyone.
In a very practical sense, this book is a compilation of many articles (again, see list below) written in isolation, and so there is a bit of repetition throughout. That is intentional. We want this book to be usable for anyone as a basis for understanding the issues strategically and philosophically, with some practical steps to guide you toward deciding how to implement our recommendations. But given that each of us have different concerns, priorities, and knowledge, this book covers each topic by itself – thus there will be overlaps if you read cover-to-cover.
We will be sure to let you know as soon as this is available, but watch Amazon.com for the title “Practive Security 101” by Matt Johnston. It should be available by June 12, 2026. We hope that parents will add this to the stack of books you can use to equip your household with essential knowledge to protect yourself from online threats.
More Books
We aren’t done there. In fact, there is much more to come. Customers of our Essentials Membership at PractiveSecurity.com know that we have much more content organized for different contexts. We have content bundled on the specific topics of Personal Security, for Parents, we have Threat Advisories, Topical Analysis & General Strategies, and we have an entire other part of the business designed for Professionals and Business Owners or Organizational Leaders. In those professional contexts, we bring our customers strategies and information that you normally have to pay large consultant organizations hundreds of dollars an hour to get access to, and (spoiler alert), I’ve been a consultant to those consultant companies. You get all that from me for a tiny fraction of the cost - because I believe in this work and I believe that you matter and should be protected from these threats.
Depending on how these first two books are received, we may continue releases of our content in book format so you have a portable means to access all we have to share.
Practive Security for Professionals
Right now, on the Professional / Business Essentials side of Practive Security, we are working through the release of our “Pillars of Cyber Security” articles. These contain a combination of guidance we would give to a CISO who is looking to build or mature their Information Security Program along with lessons learned from having practiced in this context and having been a strategic advisor to CISOs for major corporations. But our heart is really to make this knowledge and experience available on a practical level, and so we make sure that all that we write about is applicable even in the smallest context. In fact, our strategic guide for building an information security program was written for small businesses, and we realized in review that it matches exactly what we would advise to larger corporations.
Throughout our Professional content, we focus largely on principles, philosophy, and strategies, or as we group it on the website, “Strategic Mindset,” and “Lessons Learned.” This work is also designed for individuals who are working in IT or Cyber Security and could benefit from the years of experience we have to offer.
We have also been working on content that appeals back to the heart of the Cyber Security industry. One of the reasons we’re offering Practive Security for Professionals / Businesses is because we believe the Cyber Security industry has lost its way. It has been corrupted by the power lust of Silicon Valley and now exists mostly for its own sake, rather than that of protecting you and I and the companies and institutions we rely on every day. So, some of our content attempts to remind our fellow Cyber Security professionals of who we are, what our original mission is, and to recapture the heart of what we are supposed to be doing and why.
You can help us by sharing the news and spreading the word about this work to anyone you think can benefit from our efforts. We hope to serve individuals in Cyber Security, Business and Organization leaders, Small Business Owners, Church Leadership…anyone who has IT systems linked to a “professional” context that need to be secured.
In Closing
Again, we hope this is only the beginning of our work through Practive Security, but we need your help. If you find our work helpful, please tell your friends and family about us. If you are a customer, please send your feedback, questions, and general thoughts. We’re here for you.
If you would like to engage us to speak to your community or your organization, we are at your service. If you have anything related to our expertise that you need us to research and provide you guidance for, please take up the opportunity.
Countering the AI Revolution Chapters
1. An Introduction to the Revolution
2. An Essential Understanding of AI
3. All-In on AI
4. A Lie from the Start (the deception of AI)
5. The AI Singularity of 2026 (and where we’re headed)
6. The Origin and Development of AI (ideological, technological, and mythological)
also here
7. The Darkness from Which The Revolution Emerged
8. A New Socialism – the future of 100% unemployment
9. Agentic AI is Ending Human Agency
10. Examples of the Political Weaponization of AI
11. Countering the Revolution (new)
12. Christianity’s Answer to AI
14. An Ethical Evaluation (and Framework) for AI
15. Restoration as a Counter Revolution (new)
16. Preparing our Children for the AI Future
17. Preserving the Arc of Humanity
Practive Security 101 Chapters
If you are an Essentials member at PractiveSecurity.com, browse to our content collections titled “101” and “Personal Security,” and you will see all that is in the book. For non-members, here’s the chapter list:
1. An Inherently Dangerous World
2. Introducing Your Oline Adversary
3. The Internet Gold Rush: Free Apps and Monetization of You
4. Cybercrime and the Underground Economy
5. What You Should Protect and How
6. In Introduction to Cyber Security
7. Digital Privacy
8. Managing Your Online Exposure
9. VPN Explained
10. Device Protection Fundamentals
11. Account Security and your SmartPhone
12. Passwords and Account Access Security
13. Strategies for Secure Messaging
14. Web Based Threats
15. Safe Web Browsing
16. Engaging Social Media
17. Finding the Real and the True
18. Guarding Hearts and Minds from Influence
19. Email Security
20. Essential Security for your Home
21. AI
Practive Security is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.