Black Hat Podcasts

BLACK HAT Q&A: The AI agent that clears the human door and slips past the machine gate

By Byron V. Acohido

LAS VEGAS – Companies are deploying AI agents into everyday work at a pace no security program was built for.

As Black Hat USA 2026 gets underway in Las Vegas, that question is moving rapidly from theoretical concern to operational reality.The rush is competitive. Nobody wants to be the last one still doing this by hand. What’s getting skipped is the harder question: once an agent is acting on a company’s behalf, how does anyone know what it’s actually doing?

Companies are handing routine tasks to AI agents. Each one moves through the same screens a person would, and every check along the way comes back clean. The login names whose credential is in use. It says nothing about who, or what, is actually operating the account.

Identity systems answer one question well: who is logging in. Multifactor authentication and single sign-on are built for that, and only that. Nothing checks what the login is then allowed to do.

BLACK HAT Q&A: SBOM claims what went in, binary shows what shipped, the risk lies between

By Byron V. Acohido

LAS VEGAS – Almost every company can now produce a list of what’s inside its software. Almost none can prove the list is right.

Related: SBOM’s role in cybersecurity

Construction solved this a century ago. Every steel beam carries a stamp naming the mill that poured it. Every concrete truck arrives with a ticket recording the batch. Every fire door ships with a label certifying its rating.

Software has been catching up. Every open source library pulled into a build is supposed to be logged, every third-party component identified, every dependency traced to its source. The software bill of materials, or SBOM, is the sum of that accounting: one list of everything inside the finished product.

But that accounting assumes a clean starting point, and software almost never has one. An old build carries whatever it carried the day it was assembled, and every version after it inherits the load.

BLACK HAT AUTHOR Q&A: The adversary doesn’t care which department owns the data

By Byron V. Acohido

The line between physical security, cybersecurity, privacy and reputation management is dissolving. A data leak can surface a home address.

A breached account can put an executive’s family in physical danger. The threats don’t stay in their lanes.

That’s the terrain Chuck Randolph, Jonathan Wackrow and Fred Burton map in The Protector’s Edge: Leadership Through Strategy and Action. Their argument: executive protection has outgrown the old picture of bodyguards, travel logistics and perimeter walls. Today’s protector has to read digital exposure, business continuity and reputation risk, and the pressures bearing down on the C-suite.

Doxxing, deepfakes, AI-enabled impersonation and online radicalization are forcing boards to rethink what protection means. CISOs, CSOs, legal, communications and privacy teams each watch a different dashboard. Adversaries see one target.

Byron Acohido · 260717_Jscrambler_Fireside Chat podcast

BLACK HAT FIRESIDE CHAT: Websites now leak sensitive data by design – AI is making it worse

By Byron V. Acohido

Public-facing web pages aren’t built in-house anymore. They’re composed from components supplied by outsiders, and the advertising platforms have had their run of them. The exposure is enormous, and AI is accelerating it all.

Related: No easy fixes for AI risk

The bill for all of it is arriving now. Since 2023, hospitals and health systems have paid more than $100 million to settle claims that tracking pixels on their websites leaked patient data to advertising platforms. A court approved $21.5 million against Sutter Health in February. Inova settled for $3.1 million in April. Atrium settled for $1.8 million this month. In each of these cases the pixels came from Meta or Google, and the health system paid the settlement.

Those numbers have teeth. On July 14 a federal judge refused to dismiss claims against Google and Meta over prescription data collected by pixels on a telehealth site, rejecting the argument that users had consented, and pushing both companies into discovery.

Byron Acohido · Dealing with shrinking digital certificate lifespans

Black Hat Fireside Chat: Automation takes center stage as TLS lifespans grow ever shorter

By Byron V. Acohido

The countdown is on for security teams still managing digital certificates with spreadsheets and manual workarounds.

Starting in 2026, TLS certificate lifespans will begin dropping sharply — from 398 days to just 47 by 2029. That shift isn’t just a technical nuance. It’s a foundational disruption to how enterprises maintain digital trust.

In this Last Watchdog Fireside Chat, I spoke with DigiCert’s Vice President of Product and Solutions Marketing, Ashley Stevenson, about what this transition means and how companies can prepare.

We unpacked the risks that come with shorter certificate lifecycles — including costly outages, broken workflows, and lost customer confidence — and the growing imperative to automate certificate management from a single platform. Stevenson explained how many organizations still rely on fragmented systems and manual tracking, often leading to gaps that don’t get noticed until services go offline.

Byron Acohido · Taking a unified approach to network defense

BLACK HAT FIRESIDE CHAT: Inside the ‘Mind of a Hacker’ — A10’s plan for unified threat detection

By Byron V. Acohido

In today’s threat landscape, attackers are no longer just exploiting technical flaws — they’re exploiting business logic.

Think gaps in workflows, permissions, and overlooked assumptions in how applications behave. This subtle shift is creating powerful new footholds for cybercriminals and evading traditional defenses.

A10 Networks’ Field CISO Jamison Utter calls this the new front in cybersecurity: stopping attackers who use your own processes against you.

I sat down with Utter to unpack how forward-looking companies are moving beyond static perimeter defenses to more adaptive, behavioral systems. A10’s strategy centers on deploying AI-enhanced observability and automation to detect—and respond to—subtle indicators of attack. This includes analyzing normal vs. anomalous behavior in encrypted web traffic, API interactions, and even traffic flow between legacy systems.

Byron Acohido · What it takes to mitigate advanced phishing attacks

Black Hat Fireside Chat: User feedback, AI-infused email security are both required to deter phishing

By Byron V. Acohido

I recently learned all about the state-of-the art of phishing attacks – the hard way.

An email arrived from the head of a PR firm whom I’ve known for 20 years asking me to click on a link to check out a proposal. Foolishly, I did so all too quickly. Within a few minutes, many of my contacts, and even strangers, were receiving a similar malicious email from me.

At Black Hat USA 2024, I visited with Eyal Benishti, CEO of IRONSCALES, an Atlanta-GA-based supplier of advanced email security systems. We discussed just how targeted and contextualized advanced phishing attacks, like the one I experienced, can be. For a full drill down, please give the accompanying podcast a listen.

Benishti explained how the anti-phishing protections from Google and Microsoft excel at blocking known threats but often struggle with threats that aren’t yet recognized as harmful. His observation correlates to the notion that GenAI is helping both the attackers and the defenders.

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The Last Watchdog

Black Hat Podcasts

BLACK HAT Q&A: The AI agent that clears the human door and slips past the machine gate

By Byron V. Acohido

BLACK HAT Q&A: SBOM claims what went in, binary shows what shipped, the risk lies between

By Byron V. Acohido

BLACK HAT AUTHOR Q&A: The adversary doesn’t care which department owns the data

By Byron V. Acohido

BLACK HAT FIRESIDE CHAT: Websites now leak sensitive data by design – AI is making it worse

By Byron V. Acohido

Black Hat Fireside Chat: Automation takes center stage as TLS lifespans grow ever shorter

By Byron V. Acohido

BLACK HAT FIRESIDE CHAT: Inside the ‘Mind of a Hacker’ — A10’s plan for unified threat detection

By Byron V. Acohido

Black Hat Fireside Chat: User feedback, AI-infused email security are both required to deter phishing

By Byron V. Acohido