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Threat Intelligence & APT SecurityWeek 1 month ago

CISOs Race to Control AI Agents Without Destroying Their Value

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CyberNew Threat Research Desk
• Original Reporting: SecurityWeek
CyberNew Threat Intel Assessment
Assessed Severity: INFORMATIONAL
Impacted Surface
Cloud & Distributed Infrastructure
Intelligence Sector
Threat Intelligence & APT

Analyst Takeaway

"Two major AI pain points for today’s security leaders are adjusting to new requirements for cyber hygiene, and preventing unintended consequences from over-privileged agents. Team8 is a venture capital and private equity firm that invests in companies specializing in enterprise technologies, cyber, AI, fintech and digital health. To be successful, VC needs to thoroughly understand current..."

Recommended Defense & Mitigation

  • Threat Monitoring: Ingest published IOCs into SIEM/EDR detection rules for continuous telemetry monitoring.
  • Security Awareness: Alert staff and maintain baseline endpoint hardening across endpoints.
Curated & Verified by CyberNew Threat Intelligence Desk Standard Defense Framework (NIST / MITRE ATT&CK)
CISO Communities

Two major AI pain points for today’s security leaders are adjusting to new requirements for cyber hygiene, and preventing unintended consequences from over-privileged agents.

Team8 is a venture capital and private equity firm that invests in companies specializing in enterprise technologies, cyber, AI, fintech and digital health. To be successful, VC needs to thoroughly understand current technology and associated problem areas to select the right solution-delivering firms in which to invest.

To help its own understanding, Team8 has developed a ‘CISO Village’ – an invitation-only global community of security leaders from the world’s major enterprises. Each year, Team8 produces an annual survey report based on the latest opinions from this CISO Village. This year it tackled the era of AI, and the result confirms it is now AI software that is eating the world.

  • Seventy-one percent of CISOs are experimenting with or augmenting existing security tools using AI agent capabilities.
  • The risk surface is expanding faster than the control layer.
  • CISOs are mobilizing before they feel fully ready, investing in platforms, skills, and new control mechanisms.
  • AI and agent security is by far the biggest pain point (78%), exactly twice that of the second pain point (39%)

SecurityWeek talked to Team8’s CISO, Tim Brown, about why agent security is such a problem.

“When we look at AI, there are two aspects we need to consider. The first is our own attack surface as targeted by adversaries using AI,” said Brown. “What has been considered good security hygiene for the last 10 to 20 years is no longer adequate. We used to believe use of MFA and firewalls and good endpoint protection would prevent us becoming the victim of an opportunistic attack. Not anymore. The attacks and our attack surface have changed.”

CISOs’ first pain point is the struggle to change the corporate viewpoint of security hygiene to the new reality of AI.

The second pain point, he continued, is finding the right balance between AI-driven business enablement and new threats introduced by the use of agentic AI. If we get the balance wrong, we end up with unintended consequences.

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Written By Kevin Townsend

Source Verification & Original Intelligence

This threat report was reviewed by CyberNew analysts and cross-referenced with primary security disclosures from SecurityWeek.

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