Black Hat

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 · AI-Native SOCs transform network defense

BLACK HAT FIRESIDE CHAT: The case for AI-Native SOCs built to take action, not just observe and alert

By Byron V. Acohido

The raw attack surface isn’t just growing. It’s fragmenting. Logs from SaaS apps, cloud workloads, and third-party services flood security stacks already straining to keep up. Security teams are buried in alerts they can’t triage fast enough. Meanwhile, adversaries probe for gaps that form in the seams.

This operational sprawl has become the modern SOC’s weakest link — and, increasingly, its most fixable one.

That’s the case made by George Moser, Chief Growth Officer at Anomali, who I spoke with recently. Moser frames this moment as a necessary reset: one in which AI-native security platforms shift the goal from passive visibility to predictive, autonomous mitigation. And do so in a way that scales across the real-world complexity defenders now face.

“We’re beyond the point where throwing humans at the problem works,” Moser told me. “We need actionable intelligence, and the ability to act on it instantly.”

SHARED INTEL Q&A: Inside the mind of a hacker — shadowing adversaries across API pathways

By Byron V. Acohido

In today’s digital economy, business starts with the application. Increasingly, the critical activity lives in the APIs that support it.

For Jamison Utter, Field CISO at A10 Networks, this moment marks a profound shift. Traditional defenses — WAFs, DDoS scrubbing, bot management — have long operated in silos. Each tool generates its own logs; each vendor manages its own functionality. That patchwork held together for decades. But attackers have adapted. They’ve learned to probe the seams between these disparate controls, looking for gaps in business logic where normal activity can be bent toward malicious ends.

Recent data underscores the shift. According to the OWASP Foundation, attackers are increasingly abusing business logic itself, hijacking legitimate workflows. A report by application security provider Indusface found 271 million API attacks in Q3 2024 alone, including a 3,000% increase in distributed denial-of-service attacks targeting APIs versus traditional web assets.

This trend reflects a deeper strategic shift — one that Jamison Utter describes as getting into the “mind of a hacker.” It’s not just about volume or velocity; it’s about stealth and intent. Attackers aren’t always trying to break through walls.

Byron Acohido · 250820_Straiker_FIreside Chat podcast

BLACK HAT FIRESIDE CHAT: Straiker extends ‘red teaming’ to the AI layer as AI attacks surge

By Byron V. Acohido

The enterprise software model that defined the past two decades — SaaS — is being rapidly eclipsed by a new center of gravity: AI-native systems. These are autonomous agents wired directly into company data, tools, and workflows.

Related: LLMs fuel automated attacks

According to Straiker CEO Ankur Shah, this shift is happening faster than cloud adoption ever did.

In a Fireside Chat at Black Hat 2025, Shah sketched the architecture of the AI-native stack: a reasoning model such as OpenAI’s GPT or Anthropic’s Claude, tool integrations via emerging standards like the Model Context Protocol, and unfettered access to enterprise datasets.

The payoff is unprecedented automation. The trade-off is a different kind of vulnerability altogether. The weak points now sit inside language models, tool connections, and the data they touch — places older defenses were never designed to watch.

Straiker’s answer is to meet AI with AI. Its Ascend Agent acts as a perpetual red team, probing deployed agents for weaknesses such as direct or indirect prompt injections. Its Defend Agent monitors live interactions, blocking malicious behavior in real time.

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The Last Watchdog

Black Hat

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: The case for AI-Native SOCs built to take action, not just observe and alert

By Byron V. Acohido

SHARED INTEL Q&A: Inside the mind of a hacker — shadowing adversaries across API pathways

By Byron V. Acohido

BLACK HAT FIRESIDE CHAT: Straiker extends ‘red teaming’ to the AI layer as AI attacks surge

By Byron V. Acohido