Home About Black Hat Contact Essays Fireside Chats My Take News Alerts Q&A Reels RSAC Videocasts ☰
 

SHARED INTEL Q&A: AI finds flaws faster — defenders still need to fix what attackers exploit

By Byron V. Acohido

Security teams are being told they have hours to patch.

Related: AI agents have a Lord of the Flies problem

The warning has a real basis. In June, Anthropic’s frontier red team demonstrated an AI model building working exploits from freshly patched Firefox and Windows kernel vulnerabilities, one of them in 31 minutes. Meanwhile ZeroDayClock, widely cited across the security industry, put mean time-to-exploit near a single day and projected it falling to one hour by 2027.

Root Evidence went looking for evidence that attacker behavior had actually changed.

Its recently released Vulnpocalypse Report traced confirmed in-the-wild exploitation of published CVEs from January 2018 through July 15, 2026. Of 253,912 vulnerabilities published during that period, adversaries exploited 3,769, about 1.5 percent. For vulnerabilities exploited after a patch was available, the median defender window was 116 days so far in 2026, compared with 24 days in 2018. (more…)

Share on FacebookShare on Google+Tweet about this on TwitterShare on LinkedInEmail this to someone

MY TAKE: AI agents show uncanny initiative nobody designed — and carry no values at all

By Byron V. Acohido

Give a person a goal, and they bring a lifetime of restraint to the job. Don’t lie. Don’t steal. Stop when something looks wrong. Give an AI agent a goal, and it finds a shortcut. It recruits help. It persists, finding crazy workarounds no human has the capacity to figure out — in the blink of an eye.

Related: OpenAI, Anthropic can’t control AI agents

Restraint is what separates the person from the machine. We call it values, and a human spends a lifetime acquiring them. Potent AI agents, deployed blindly, are taking over more of our digital world every day and straying far beyond any sense of values.

The question of values surfaced this week at CFX, Pindrop’s customer conference in Atlanta. The supplier of voice security and fraud detection technology used the event to roll out BotStopper. The tool detects when an AI voice agent is on an enterprise phone line, then pins down which agent it is. It can do that because Pindrop has been cataloging the distinct AI voices it detects calling its customers. In 60 days, that catalog grew from 750 voices to more than 5,000.

BotStopper is a first step, and a small one next to the size of the problem. Knowing that a machine is on the line says little about whose interests it serves or what it has been told to chase. Nor can it show whether a well-behaved agent has quietly drifted. Understanding any of that has barely begun. Holding an agent to a standard of conduct lies further off still, because nobody has agreed on what the standard should be. (more…)

MY TAKE: OpenAI, Anthropic admit they can’t control AI — for now, the machines are running free

By Byron V. Acohido

The two companies racing hardest to build AI machines smarter than people spent the week of Sept. 7 conceding they cannot control what they are building. Then each proposed to supervise the slowdown itself.

Related: A rogue AI swarm comes to life

For three years these companies answered every safety question about AI the same way: the people building the systems understand them well enough to manage the risk. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman abandoned that position within a day of each other, with both companies preparing to go public.

Both moved only after Jacob Coxon told 90 million people the two firms were gambling with their lives. On Tuesday, Sept. 8, Coxon, a 27-year-old pretraining researcher who had worked at both OpenAI and Anthropic, quit his job at Anthropic and posted his reasons. “Neither company is acting responsibly,” he wrote. “They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”

Within hours that same day, Anthropic’s alignment science lead Evan Hubinger posted that Coxon was right, put his own odds of AI killing every human above 10 percent this decade, and said Anthropic has no plan yet for aligning superintelligence and is not clearly on track to get one.

Machines on the move

Before any of it was said, the machines had broken containment, found each other, built a way to talk, invented a method to tell each other apart, and destroyed the evidence. Nobody designed any of it. Nobody saw it happening. (more…)

NEWS ALERT: Insignary launches Clarity AIR to expose hidden open-source and AI-generated code

TORONTO, Oct. 8, 2026, CyberNewswire –  Insignary Inc. today announced the general availability of Insignary Clarity AIR, a source-code scanning product built to answer a question most security teams can’t currently answer with confidence: what is actually running in their software, beyond what developers reported.

Manifests and SBOMs built from declared dependencies are only as complete as what developers chose to report. An estimated 70–90% of applications today are built substantially on open-source code, and a meaningful share of it arrives through channels no manifest captures — a function copied from another project, a snippet pulled from a forum, a block an AI coding assistant generated and nobody reviewed line by line. For a CISO signing off on an SBOM, or a legal team certifying license compliance, that gap is unmanaged risk sitting inside a document meant to prove the opposite.

Clarity AIR is built to close it, at the source-code level rather than the manifest level: (more…)

News alert: Aembit gives enterprises new controls over personal AI agents accessing sensitive systems

SILVER SPRING, Md., Oct. 6, 2026, CyberNewswire — Aembit, the identity control plane for AI agents, today announced support for securing personal agents’ access to enterprise environments, available immediately to existing customers at no additional cost.

As personal agents, such as Meta Muse and OpenAI Dots, move into workplace use, they can gain access to email, cloud applications, code repositories, internal tools, and other enterprise services through employee credentials and delegated permissions. That raises the risk of sensitive data exposure, unauthorized changes, and activity that is difficult to distinguish from the employee’s own actions. Those credentials may also be stored in the personal agent platform, outside the security team’s direct control. (more…)

News alert: Archipelo launches Salmon to create verifiable audit trails for AI agent activity

SAN FRANSICO, Sept. 25, 2026, CyberNewswire — Archipelo today announced Salmon, Execution Verification Infrastructure (EVI) for AI agents and autonomous systems, powered by a cryptographic protocol designed to make execution history verifiable. Salmon establishes verifiable execution history and state lineage across humans, AI agents, and automation.

The launch follows the OpenAI–Hugging Face incident, in which OpenAI reported that models participating in cybersecurity evaluations circumvented isolation controls, gained internet access, exploited vulnerabilities, accessed third-party systems, collaborated and delegated work across agents, and took actions their developers did not direct. OpenAI called the incident a “warning shot” and said sophisticated AI systems require safeguards that operate at the speed of the agents themselves. (more…)

Guest Essay: Before AI agents takes hold, define who can challenge them and who owns the outcome

By Michael J Padilla-Pagan Payano

Early in my military career, I learned a simple lesson: when you give people a task, you also have to give them room to think.

Related: AI agents take initiative, unchecked

As a young “door kicker,” I made a point of telling my teams to ask why. Not because every decision needed a debate, but because the person closest to the work often sees something the person giving the order does not.

During a deployment in Afghanistan, after operating in the same area for three weeks, we received intelligence about a location that did not match what the team had seen on the ground. One of my team members asked, “Why are we accepting this intelligence as current? Where did it come from, how old was it, and who had vetted it?”

His question was valid. We had been moving so quickly from one operation to another that we had not stopped to verify the intelligence, revalidate the source, or revise the plan before moving. It reinforced a lesson I carried into business: rank carries responsibility, but it does not give a leader a monopoly on judgment. (more…)

News alert: SCOUTz gives MSPs security evidence to help turn prospects into customers

PHOENIX, Sept. 24, 2026, CyberNewswire — SCOUTz, a prospect intelligence platform built for managed service provider (MSP) security sales, is now available in open beta. The platform gives an MSP dated evidence about a prospect’s environment before the first meeting and keeps that evidence attached through delivery and reassessment.

The open beta is available at https://scoutzsecurity.io/open-beta

30 days at no charge from the day the workspace is provisioned, then $279 per month at list price. Fifty MSPs from three peer communities shaped the platform in a closed beta that preceded the public release.

The channel has many tools that earn an MSP a first appointment, and several that earn their keep after signature, including professional services automation (PSA) and remote monitoring and management (RMM) platforms. The stretch between a booked meeting and a signed agreement, where the selling happens, has been left to templates and the seller’s own preparation. SCOUTz is built for that stretch. (more…)

Black Hat Fireside Chat: As AI agents spread, the network shifts from traffic mover to policy enforcer

By Byron V. Acohido

The network’s job has always been simple: watch the traffic. Authority stopped there.

Related: AI agents have a Lord Of The Flies problem

For decades, network traffic came from something physical: a server, a laptop, a badge reader, a printer, each with a fixed address. An AI agent isn’t physical, and it has no fixed home on the network. It appears, acts and disappears, with no device to hang a policy on. Watching isn’t enough anymore.

Across the networking industry, vendors are moving to meet that shift. HPE Networking, Palo Alto Networks, Cisco and others are folding security enforcement directly into the network itself, and integrating their own governed AI agents into that work.

David Hughes leads HPE’s piece of that work as senior vice president for SASE and security. We talked at Black Hat USA in Las Vegas about what folding AI into network enforcement actually looks like in practice. The full conversation is available on the accompanying Last Watchdog podcast. (more…)