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By the Time Your Credentials Appear in a Dump, You’re Already Behind
NordVPN’s CTO Marijus Briedis on dark web credential markets, the limits of breach monitoring, zero trust theatre, and whether the security industry is overstating its capabilities.
In 2025, IBM discovered more than 300,000 stolen ChatGPT credentials available for purchase on the dark web. In the same period, 1.8 billion credentials were stolen globally in just six months. These are not isolated incidents — they are symptoms of an industry adopting artificial intelligence faster than it can secure it, while attackers are using the same technology to strike with greater precision, scale, and sophistication than ever before.
Few people are better positioned to assess that reality than Marijus Briedis . As Chief Technology Officer at since 2019, he has led the company’s technology vision across security, privacy, scalability, and user protection — a career grounded in government IT, freelance web development, and hands-on Linux administration long before cybersecurity became a boardroom conversation. He is a regular voice at international conferences and a contributor to sector-wide research on emerging threats and digital privacy.
