Fireside Chat

Byron Acohido · Networks can enforce AI agent boundaries

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.

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.

Byron Acohido · The psychology of deepfakes

FIRESIDE CHAT: Deepfakes exploit human emotion, making employee reflex training essential

By Byron V. Acohido

The wire transfer went through. The CFO on the video call looked right, sounded right, and gave the authorization — except there was no CFO on that call.

Corporate deepfake attacks of that kind, executives impersonated to authorize fraudulent wire transfers, accounted for roughly $550 million of the $2.19 billion in deepfake-related fraud losses reported globally through the first quarter of 2026, according to Surfshark’s April 2026 analysis.

What’s more, deepfake fraud attempts have surged 2,137 percent over the past three years, and Deloitte projects AI-enabled fraud in the U.S. will reach $40 billion by 2027.

“The deepfake itself is just a new iteration of a very old trick,” observes Perry Carpenter, Chief Deception Strategist at KnowBe4, a Clearwater, Fla.-based provider of a digital workforce security platform.

I sat down with Carpenter at KB4-CON 2026 in Orlando to discuss this. For a full drill down, please give the accompanying podcast a listen. Here is what I learned that you should know.

Hijacking minds

Every con in history has worked the same way. The target’s nervous system is hijacked before the rational mind has time to engage. The deepfake is just the newest instrument for doing it.

Deepfakes are grabbing headlines because AI content generation tools have made them cheap, convincing, and scalable. But the deepfake itself is a distraction. What matters is the psychological mechanism underneath it — the one that has powered every con, phishing email, and social engineering attack for the past century, and that no detection tool has yet managed to neutralize.

Comment | Read | June 2nd, 2026 | Fireside Chat | Top Stories

Byron Acohido · Insurers dip toes into cybersecurity

FIRESIDE CHAT: Cyber insurers deepen SMB security role as supply chain attacks spread

By Byron V. Acohido

The cyber insurance industry set out to manage financial risk. Along the way, it has quietly became the security operations provider for a significant share of American small businesses. An $11 billion acquisition agreement announced earlier this year suggests it intends to stay in that role.

Related: No easy AI security fixes

I sat down with Tony Anscombe, chief security evangelist at ESET, on the floor at RSAC 2026 to discuss this. Tony has spent years tracking the intersection of cyber insurance and SMB security from inside the insurance ecosystem. Here is what I learned that you should know.

The causality chain is not complicated, but it took about five years to play out. Around 2020, ransomware payouts started overwhelming cyber insurers. Losses mounted. The industry responded the way it always does — by tightening requirements.

Byron Acohido · Leaked secrets in the AI era

FIRESIDE CHAT: Leaked secrets are now the go-to attack vector — and AI is accelerating exposures

By Byron V. Acohido

A consequential shift is underway in how enterprise breaches begin. The leaked credential — once treated as a hygiene problem — has become the primary on-ramp.

Related: No easy fixes for AI risk

Last August’s Salesloft campaign was the pattern in miniature. Stolen OAuth tokens from one chatbot vendor pulled Salesforce data from 760 enterprise instances — Cloudflare, Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, and TransUnion among them, according to Mandiant. Google’s Threat Intelligence Group reported the primary intent: credential harvesting, each stolen key the path into the next victim.

That is the shape of the modern enterprise breach, says Dwayne McDaniel, senior developer advocate at non-human identity security firm GitGuardian, whom I interviewed at RSAC 2026. Each leaked credential, he explained, is a key to a door behind which sit more keys.

Leaks spiking

GitGuardian scans every public GitHub commit — every new batch of developer code published to a shared repository — for hard-coded secrets: credentials typed directly into source code. Its latest report documented 28.6 million such exposures in 2025 alone — a 34 percent year-over-year jump, the largest in five years. Private repositories ran six times worse.

Byron Acohido · Digital passports for AI agents

Fireside Chat: PKI has carried digital trust through every tech advance—now comes the hardest one

By Byron V. Acohido

Public key infrastructure — the authentication and encryption framework that has held digital commerce together through every chaotic leap forward in technology — is facing a double whammy.

Autonomous AI agents are flooding enterprise networks, most without verified identities or any meaningful governance. What’s more, quantum computers are just around the corner — and when they arrive, current encryption becomes obsolete overnight.

I sat down with DigiCert CEO Amit Sinha at RSAC 2026 to discuss this. The identity management and encryption communities are not sitting on their hands. Here is what I learned that you should know.

PKI has been the quiet backbone of digital trust for 30 years. E-commerce needed it to authenticate strangers. The cloud and IoT needed it to manage machine identities at scale.

Byron Acohido · How AI agent exploit mobile APIs

Fireside Chat: AI agents are reshaping mobile attacks — and exposing weak API trust models

By Byron V. Acohido

SAN FRANCISCO — A new exposure is emerging in mobile security as AI begins to act on behalf of users — and attackers move to exploit that shift.

In a Fireside Chat at RSAC 2026, Approov CEO Ted Miracco described how mobile apps are starting to hand control to AI agents that can carry out tasks such as placing orders or accessing services. That upends a core assumption that has held since the rise of smartphones: apps, devices and backend systems were all designed with the expectation that a human is in control, making deliberate, bounded requests through the interface.

When that control shifts to an AI agent, the behavior changes. Actions can be executed faster, repeated continuously, and carried out without the natural limits of human interaction.

At the same time, attackers have quickly recognized how this shift can be manipulated — and are using AI to exploit it.

Byron Acohido · Treat AI as a privileged user

FIRESIDE CHAT: AI gives rise to a semantic attack surface, forcing a new class of network defense

By Byron V. Acohido

SAN FRANCISCO — Enterprises rushing to deploy AI in their operations are opening a security exposure most of their existing tools were never designed to address. That’s the hard message coming out of RSAC 2026 — and it’s one worth sitting with.

Jamison Utter, A10 Networks field CISO, draws a distinction that the industry tends to blur. The problem isn’t that AI has made familiar attacks faster or more powerful — though it has done that too. The deeper issue is that AI deployment creates an entirely new kind of attack surface: one that is semantic and non-deterministic, responsive to language, images, and multimodal input in ways no firewall, WAF, or API security tool was built to govern. “Every other tool we have today — none of them solve the semantic problem,” Utter said, “because that’s not what they were designed to do.”

The good news, he argues, is that the infrastructure layer is largely understood. Cloud security, Kubernetes, API protection, DDoS — enterprises have those tools. The new frontier is what happens when language itself becomes the attack surface.

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The Last Watchdog

Fireside Chat

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

By Byron V. Acohido

FIRESIDE CHAT: Deepfakes exploit human emotion, making employee reflex training essential

By Byron V. Acohido

FIRESIDE CHAT: Cyber insurers deepen SMB security role as supply chain attacks spread

By Byron V. Acohido

FIRESIDE CHAT: Leaked secrets are now the go-to attack vector — and AI is accelerating exposures

By Byron V. Acohido

Fireside Chat: PKI has carried digital trust through every tech advance—now comes the hardest one

By Byron V. Acohido

Fireside Chat: AI agents are reshaping mobile attacks — and exposing weak API trust models

By Byron V. Acohido

FIRESIDE CHAT: AI gives rise to a semantic attack surface, forcing a new class of network defense

By Byron V. Acohido