Tactile breaks can improve cybersecurity problem solving

On May 7, 2026, Cisco Talos published a Threat Source newsletter urging cybersecurity teams to incorporate short tactile breaks into their workday. The newsletter recommended activities such as walking, knitting, miniature painting and building mechanical keyboards as ways to reduce mental fatigue and restore focus.

Talos researchers described the field of security as heavily abstract, with practitioners working through logs, packets and threat indicators. The newsletter explained that extended focus on abstract data can cause cognitive overload and stall analytical thinking. Hands-on activities were presented as a method to give the brain a sensory reset and allow attention to return to complex problems.

The newsletter included an in-office example in which a colleague opened a miniature painting kit and taught others how to drybrush 3D-printed figurines; staff reported an immediate lift in energy. It suggested practical options: a ten-minute walk without earbuds, knitting between meetings, assembling a small physical project, building a mechanical keyboard to feel switches and hear keycaps, completing a detailed LEGO set or preparing espresso. Readers were invited to try a brief break and return to work refreshed.

Separately, Talos announced an operational change to its threat intelligence: the team expanded tracking of phone numbers as indicators of compromise in scam emails. Research from Talos found attackers increasingly use API-driven VoIP numbers to run high-volume telephone-oriented attack delivery campaigns. Those actors rotate through sequential blocks of numbers, impose cool-down periods, and reuse the same digits across unrelated lures and impersonated brands.

Talos advised defenders to cluster scam lures by shared phone numbers and to prioritize real-time reputation monitoring of telephony infrastructure. The newsletter noted that tracking short-lived sender email addresses often provides limited visibility, while phone numbers can serve as more stable anchors to link multiple artifacts and expose organized scam operations.

The advisory also recommended deploying AI-assisted email security solutions, citing Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense as an example that can evaluate email components to detect targeted attacks. Talos said a full list of related indicators of compromise is available on the Talos blog. The recommendations appeared in the Threat Source newsletter published by Cisco Talos on May 7, 2026.