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Harness’ Rahul Sood: AppSec in the Agentic Era Is About More Than Code. It’s About Authority

23 September 2026 at 05:31

The Cyber Express Rahul sood Interview

AI is changing how software is built, tested, and secured, but the speed of development is also creating new challenges for application security teams. As AI coding tools and autonomous agents increase the volume and pace of software development, security teams are facing a growing gap between vulnerability detection, prioritisation, and remediation. In this interview with Rahul Sood, GM, Application Security at Harness, we explore how AI application security is evolving as developers increasingly rely on AI-assisted coding and software agents. Sood discusses why traditional checkpoint-based security processes are struggling to keep pace, how organisations can bring security controls closer to the point where code is created, and why automated vulnerability remediation could become increasingly important. The conversation also examines the security risks associated with AI agents that can access repositories, APIs, infrastructure and production environments. Sood explains why identity, least-privilege access, observability and human oversight will become increasingly important as software gains greater autonomy, and why application security will need to address not only what software contains, but also what autonomous systems are authorised to do. Read the full interview below for Rahul Sood’s perspective on the changing application security landscape and the security challenges emerging as AI takes a more active role in software development.

The Cyber Express: What is the biggest change AI is bringing to the application security landscape?

Rahul Sood: The biggest change is speed. We have spent years making software development faster, and AI has accelerated that dramatically. Security processes, however, haven't accelerated at the same rate. Most security scanning is still triggered at fixed checkpoints - a pull request, merge, or nightly build - designed for a world where a developer produces a handful of meaningful commits a day. LLM-based scanning can potentially find 10x more vulnerabilities vs. traditional scanning tools. That sounds great, but it also means the discovery side of the pipeline is now outpacing triage and remediation even more than it already was. That's where AI agents also become part of the answer, not just part of the problem. An agent can identify something and begin acting on it in close to the same motion, which is exactly the kind of compression this gap needs. The challenge is making sure that speed is matched with the right judgment and oversight.

The Cyber Express: AI coding assistants can introduce insecure code at scale. What should teams be doing differently?

Rahul Sood: The instinct is to assume AI-generated code is introducing more vulnerabilities because AI is somehow worse at writing secure code. I don't think that's the real story. Even if AI wrote code exactly as securely as a person does, the sheer volume of code now being produced would still overwhelm the way most organisations scan for issues today. Scanning at the commit is already struggling to keep pace, as we discussed. The next step is pushing security further left than that, into the coding tool or agent itself, so secrets detection, dependency checks, and application security testing happen as the code is being written, and those same controls continue through build and deployment rather than starting over at each stage. You need both: controls at the point of creation to cut volume, and a verification layer that confirms what's really going out the door. I expect the industry to move from automated detection towards much more automated resolution. Systems will increasingly identify an issue, establish whether it is actually exploitable, create a potential fix, verify that fix and then bring a developer in where judgement or approval is required. Human oversight remains important, but it should be concentrated on decisions where human judgement adds value rather than every mechanical step surrounding them.

The Cyber Express: What new security challenges emerge when AI agents can make decisions and take actions?

Rahul Sood: A coding assistant can suggest something insecure, but there are usually other controls between that suggestion and production. An agent with access to APIs, repositories or infrastructure is different. It has been given authority to act. That makes identity, permissions and the scope of that authority fundamental security questions. One principle I think will become increasingly important is that autonomy should be proportional to the consequence of the action. The more consequential and difficult an action is to reverse, the stronger the controls around it should be. More broadly, enterprises will need a security architecture for non-human actors: distinct identities, least-privilege access, short-lived credentials, complete auditability and clear boundaries around which decisions an agent can make independently. The important question isn't how autonomous an agent is. It's what we've given it the authority to do, where the boundaries are, and what happens when it gets a decision wrong.

The Cyber Express: What becomes harder to secure when applications behave dynamically?

Rahul Sood: AI-native applications introduce another layer because some risks only become visible through behaviour. The security question is no longer limited to whether the underlying code contains a known vulnerability. You also need to understand what the system is doing at runtime. One of the more concerning findings in the AI-native application security research we conducted last year was how basic the visibility problem still was. Many security practitioners told us they didn't have a reliable way of identifying all of the LLMs operating within their environment. That's a significant problem because you cannot meaningfully govern something you don't know exists. As applications become more dynamic, understanding behaviour becomes just as important as understanding what's in the code.

The Cyber Express: Is shift-left still enough?

Rahul Sood: Shift-left was an important correction because security was happening far too late. But moving security earlier in development doesn't solve the entire problem on its own, since risk doesn't only enter through code. It can come through a dependency, an API, a model interaction, a deployment configuration, or the way an application behaves once it's actually running. There is also a growing mismatch between how quickly vulnerabilities can be exploited and how long organisations take to remediate them. The 2026 Edgescan Vulnerability Statistics Report puts the average time to close high and critical vulnerabilities at roughly 55 days. At the other end of that equation, exploitation of newly disclosed vulnerabilities can now begin within hours. Finding a vulnerability earlier is useful, but the more consequential metric is the period between discovery and protection. The next phase of application security is less about moving a scanner to an earlier point in the lifecycle and more about compressing the entire exposure window, from discovery to protection.

The Cyber Express: How can teams identify which risks actually matter?

Rahul Sood: Security teams don't have an alert problem as much as they have a context problem. A vulnerability can have a severe technical rating and still present relatively little immediate risk if the affected component isn't reachable or exposed. Another vulnerability with a lower score could sit in an internet-facing, business-critical application and deserve immediate attention. So prioritisation has to move beyond severity. That means combining technical severity with signals like EPSS scores for real-world exploit probability, static reachability analysis to confirm whether a vulnerable path can actually be called, and false-positive reduction to cut out findings that never posed real risk in the first place. The goal shouldn't be to help a security team process 10,000 alerts faster. It should be to make sure they don't have to treat 10,000 alerts as equally important in the first place.

The Cyber Express: What does a healthy developer–security relationship look like?

Rahul Sood: The healthiest organisations I've seen don't treat security as a handoff between two teams. Developers understand that security is part of building good software, while security teams take responsibility for making the secure path practical. If following security policy means leaving the developer workflow, opening a ticket, waiting several days and then interpreting a scanner report, people will inevitably look for ways around the process. That's an operating-model problem, not simply a developer behaviour problem. We saw how wide that gap had become in research we conducted last year. Seventy-four percent of security professionals surveyed said developers viewed security as a blocker to AI innovation. Security teams should define acceptable risk, policies and guardrails. Engineering teams should then be able to work within those boundaries without constantly asking for permission. That is ultimately what a mature DevSecOps model should achieve. Security becomes part of the engineering system rather than another team standing beside it.

The Cyber Express: What one assumption should organisations rethink today?

Rahul Sood: One assumption I would rethink is that knowing what software contains is enough to understand its security posture. Application security has traditionally been very good at analysing components: the code, libraries, dependencies, APIs and vulnerabilities that make up an application. But with autonomous software, knowing what it's made of is only part of the picture. We also need to understand the authority we've given it. An agent may be built from approved components and have no obvious vulnerability in its code, yet still create significant risk because it can access the wrong data, has excessive permissions or can take an action that was never anticipated when those permissions were granted. We have spent decades building security around software that executes instructions written by people. We are now introducing software that can interpret a goal, decide how to pursue it and interact with other systems along the way. The security architecture for that world cannot rely only on finding vulnerabilities. It also has to govern delegated authority. I think that will become one of the defining application security problems of the agentic era.

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Have a story, expertise, or perspective to share? Let’s start the conversation.

Can We Trust AI Agents With Security Decisions? Adarsh Kant Sinha Explains

decoding AI agents with Adarsh Kant Sinha

As organizations race to move from AI chatbots and copilots toward autonomous AI agents, security leaders are being forced to answer a harder question than "should we adopt AI?" β€” it's "can we trust AI to make security decisions?" To unpack this, The Cyber Express sat down with Adarsh Kant Sinha, Founder and CEO of ANVE.AI. With expertise spanning AI architecture, Agentic AI, AI automation, and secure AI infrastructure, Adarsh brings a practitioner's and builder's perspective to the rapidly evolving AI landscape. He has built a community of more than 25,000 ethical hackers, mentored startups, trained enterprise teams, advised organizations on AI strategy, and currently leads the development of AI products focused on agentic systems and voice-first human-computer interaction.

Watch the Full Podcast:Β 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kr0YXyIu5iU

Adarsh Kant Sinha Explains Why AI Agents Could Become a New Cybersecurity RiskΒ 

Adarsh challenges the idea that the biggest AI security concern is simply whether an AI model can be manipulated. In his view, the bigger question is what happens when AI agents are given the ability to act independently across business systems.Β  An AI agent with access to Slack, email, CRM platforms, financial systems, and cloud infrastructure could potentially do far more than generate an incorrect answer. If compromised or manipulated, it could potentially use legitimate access to perform unauthorized actions β€” creating a new class of cybersecurity risk.Β  The shift from AI assistants to autonomous agents therefore changes the security equation. "Everyone wants AI agents," but the more independence an organization gives an AI system, the more important it becomes to define what that system can access, what decisions it can make, and where human oversight remains necessary.Β 

Not Everything Called an "AI Agent" Is OneΒ 

Adarsh flags a separate problem before the trust question even applies: most of what founders and enterprises are calling "AI agents" isn't agentic β€” it's automation with better branding.Β 
  • Teams are still defining rigid workflows, not work goals β€” scripting the steps rather than giving the system an objective and letting it choose the pathΒ 
  • The label shifted industry-wide this year, but the underlying architecture in many deployments didn'tΒ 
  • Business understanding is mixed β€” some are cautiously testing what can actually be automated; others have already rebranded existing automation as "agentic"Β 
The distinction matters for security teams specifically: a system executing a fixed script has a bounded, auditable action space. A system pursuing a goal with discretion over how to get there does not. Conflating the two scopes assigns governance to the wrong risk category β€” writing oversight policy for autonomous decision-making when what's running in production is deterministic automation, or the reverse.Β  Also Read: AI Won't Replace Cybersecurity Jobs, It'll Replace the Toil – Harsha Reddy Explains What's NextΒ  The conversation also explores why businesses may be moving faster with AI adoption than they are with AI governance. While organizations are investing heavily in AI capabilities, questions around permissions, accountability, data protection, and responsible deployment can sometimes come later.Β  Adarsh argues that AI security needs to move beyond protecting the model itself. Organizations need to consider the entire ecosystem around AI β€” including agents, data, identities, integrations, tools, and the actions AI systems are authorized to perform.Β  The conversation also digs into new risks around Voice AI. A realistic synthetic voice could create new opportunities for impersonation, social engineering, and fraud. As voice becomes more natural, it could also become another significant attack surface.Β  The discussion turns to another important question: should CISOs be more concerned about dramatic AI-generated attacks, or about AI systems quietly making the wrong decisions? Adarsh explores why excessive permissions, manipulated inputs, insecure integrations, and insufficient governance could become more significant risks as AI becomes embedded into enterprise workflows.Β  He also shares how he would approach red-teaming an AI-powered enterprise, why prompt injection may not be the only threat security teams should focus on, and what "enterprise-ready" AI should actually mean from a security perspective.Β  The conversation that leads to Express Shots, a new rapid-fire-styled questionnaire by The Cyber Express. Adarsh shares his take on AI Copilots vs. AI Agents, open-source vs. closed-source models, passwords vs. Passkeys, and the technology he believes is being overhyped.Β 

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AI agents are no longer a future concept; they're already inside your Slack, your CRM, your finance stack. But what happens when one of them makes the wrong ...

Guild Group’s Mohammad Arif on the Security Risks of Enterprise AI

20 August 2026 at 06:53

The Cyber Express Mohammad Arif

Every enterprise wants the upside of AI β€” faster workflows, sharper decisions, leaner teams. Far fewer have asked the harder question: what happens when the same systems delivering that upside are also quietly rewriting who, or what, has access to the crown jewels? Autonomous agents are now reading contracts, touching customer data, writing production code, and triggering workflows once reserved for trusted employees. The attack surface hasn't just grown β€” it's changed shape entirely. Mohammad Arif, Head of Information Security at Guild Group, has been on the front line of that shift, helping enterprise leaders separate genuine AI-driven cyber risk from the noise around it. In this interview with The Cyber Express, he makes the case that AI security isn't a niche technical concern to be handed off to a working group β€” it's a boardroom issue, sitting at the intersection of data protection, vendor risk, identity, and human accountability. His warning is blunt: organisations still treating AI security as tomorrow's problem are already behind, and the cost of catching up only rises from here.

The Cyber Expres: Everyone is talking about AI productivity. From a security leadership perspective, what is the biggest shift AI is creating for enterprises?

From a security leadership perspective, the biggest shift is that AI is changing the enterprise trust model. It is no longer only about protecting systems, networks, and users. Organisations now need to consider what AI can access, what data it can process, what decisions it may influence, and what actions it may trigger. AI can significantly improve productivity, cyber defence, and business decision-making. But the risk increases when adoption moves faster than governance. If AI tools are connected to sensitive data, enterprise workflows, identity systems, APIs, or business processes without clear controls, the risk is no longer just a technology issue. It becomes a data, privacy, operational resilience, and trust issue. So the real shift is this: AI is not just another productivity tool. It is becoming part of the enterprise operating model, and therefore it needs to be governed and secured like any other critical capability.

The Cyber Express: What worries you most about the current pace of AI adoption across organisations?

What worries me most is the gap between the speed of AI adoption and the maturity of AI governance. Many organisations are moving quickly to unlock productivity benefits, but they may not yet have clear rules around approved use cases, sensitive data handling, vendor assurance, retention of information, model outputs, and human accountability. The immediate risk is uncontrolled or "shadow" AI adoption, where employees or teams use public or unapproved AI tools without understanding what data is being entered, how that data may be retained, or whether it could be used to improve external models. This can create confidentiality, privacy, intellectual property, and regulatory risks. The challenge for enterprises is not to slow down innovation unnecessarily. The challenge is to enable AI safely β€” giving employees approved pathways to use AI, while putting the right controls around data protection, access, monitoring, and risk-based governance.

The Cyber Express: At what point does AI stop being just a productivity tool and become a real enterprise security challenge?

AI becomes a real enterprise security challenge when it moves from simply generating content to being connected to enterprise data, identity, applications, APIs, tools, and workflows. A standalone AI assistant used for drafting general content has a different risk profile from an AI agent that can access customer information, analyse internal documents, write code, trigger workflows, or make recommendations that people rely on. The risk increases further when AI has autonomy, can call external tools, or can operate across multiple systems. This is where agentic AI becomes important. The question is no longer only "what can the model say?" It becomes "what can the AI access, what can it do, and who is accountable for the outcome?" That is the point where traditional security controls need to extend into AI governance, identity, permissions, logging, monitoring, and human oversight.

The Cyber Express: Do you think most organisations are prepared for AI-driven cyber threats, or are many still treating AI security as a future problem?

Preparedness varies significantly. Some organisations are taking AI security seriously and are building governance, security review, data protection, and monitoring into their AI adoption programs. But many are still treating AI security as a future problem, even though AI is already inside the enterprise through productivity tools, SaaS platforms, coding assistants, analytics tools, third-party services, and employee-led experimentation. The issue is that AI adoption is often decentralised. It may start in business teams, technology teams, vendors, or individual users before the organisation has a complete view of the risks. That means security leaders need to shift from reactive control to proactive enablement. AI security readiness should include clear acceptable-use guidance, approved tools, data classification, vendor due diligence, secure development practices, incident response scenarios, awareness training, and monitoring. Without those foundations, organisations may not know where AI is being used, what data is exposed, or where the risk is accumulating.

The Cyber Express: What AI-related security incidents do you realistically expect enterprises to face over the next 12 months?

Over the next 12 months, I expect most enterprises to see AI-related incidents in a few practical areas. The first is AI-assisted social engineering. Phishing, impersonation, business email compromise, and executive fraud will become more convincing because AI allows attackers to generate personalised and credible content at scale. The second is sensitive data leakage into AI tools, which may happen when employees enter confidential business information, customer data, source code, contracts, security information, or internal documents into tools that have not been approved or assessed. The third is insecure AI integration. As teams connect AI to internal knowledge bases, applications, plugins, and workflows, weaknesses such as prompt injection, excessive permissions, poor output validation, or weak monitoring may create new attack paths. The fourth is AI supply-chain risk. Organisations increasingly rely on third-party models, APIs, datasets, plugins, open-source components, and AI-enabled SaaS platforms β€” each introducing dependencies that need to be assessed and monitored. So the threat is not one single scenario. It is an expanded attack surface across people, data, applications, vendors, and business processes.

The Cyber Express: AI-generated phishing and deepfakes are receiving significant attention. Have these threats become genuinely dangerous, or are they still more hype than reality?

They are genuinely dangerous, but the risk needs to be understood properly. The concern is not only that AI can create fake emails, voices, images, or videos. The bigger issue is that AI reduces the effort required to create believable, personalised, and scalable deception. Traditional phishing often had indicators such as poor grammar, generic wording, or obvious formatting issues. AI reduces those indicators. Attackers can tailor messages to specific roles, business processes, recent events, or organisational language. Deepfakes also create risk where organisations rely heavily on voice, video, or informal executive instructions for approvals or sensitive actions. This does not mean every organisation will face sophisticated deepfake attacks immediately. But it does mean that trust-based processes need to be strengthened. Payment approvals, changes to bank details, privileged access requests, sensitive data transfers, and executive instructions should have strong verification controls that do not rely on one communication channel alone.

The Cyber Express: Do enterprises fully understand the risks of feeding sensitive data, business context, or internal information into frontier AI systems?

Not always. Many organisations understand the general concern, but they may not fully understand the practical ways sensitive information can be exposed through AI usage. The risk is broader than simply entering customer data into a public tool. Employees may enter internal strategies, contracts, security designs, source code, incident information, board papers, commercial terms, or confidential business context. Even if the data is not used for model training, there may still be risks around retention, access, logging, jurisdiction, vendor terms, and downstream use. Enterprises need to apply the same discipline to AI that they apply to other sensitive platforms β€” understanding what data is allowed, which tools are approved, whether enterprise-grade privacy and security settings are enabled, how data is retained, and whether the vendor's contractual terms align with the organisation's obligations. The practical starting point is data classification. If organisations do not know what data is sensitive, they cannot consistently govern how that data should or should not be used with AI.

The Cyber Express: We have seen supply-chain attacks target software and open-source ecosystems. Could AI models, tools, plugins, agents, datasets, and integrations become the next major supply-chain risk?

Yes, AI supply-chain risk is likely to become a major area of focus. In traditional technology environments, organisations already assess software vendors, cloud providers, managed service providers, open-source libraries, and third-party integrations. AI expands that supply chain. The AI supply chain can include foundation models, fine-tuned models, datasets, model providers, APIs, plugins, orchestration platforms, vector databases, prompt libraries, AI coding tools, agent frameworks, and embedded AI features in SaaS products. A weakness or compromise in any of these areas can affect the confidentiality, integrity, or reliability of AI-enabled systems. A poorly governed dataset could introduce bias or inaccurate outputs. A vulnerable plugin could expose data. A compromised package could affect an AI-enabled application. An over-permissioned AI agent could access more information than it needs. These are not only technical risks; they are third-party, operational, and governance risks. Enterprises should therefore treat AI supply-chain assurance as part of broader cyber risk and vendor risk management, including due diligence, contractual controls, security testing, data protection review, monitoring, and clear accountability between the organisation and its providers.

The Cyber Express: How should security leaders rethink traditional cybersecurity strategies in a world where AI can write code, analyse vulnerabilities, automate tasks, and support attackers as well as defenders?

Security leaders should not abandon traditional cybersecurity principles. Instead, they need to extend them into AI-enabled environments. Identity and access management remains critical, but now we need to consider identities and permissions associated with AI agents, service accounts, APIs, and automated workflows. Data protection remains critical, but now we need to monitor prompts, outputs, embeddings, and knowledge retrieval systems. Secure development remains critical, but now we need to assess AI-generated code, model behaviour, prompt injection risks, and third-party AI components. The same applies to monitoring and incident response. Security teams need visibility into AI usage, unusual activity, sensitive data exposure, misuse of AI tools, and unexpected agent behaviour. Incident response plans also need to consider AI-specific scenarios such as data leakage through AI platforms, compromise of AI integrations, prompt injection, poisoned data, or misuse of AI-generated code. The key point is that AI security should not sit outside the cybersecurity operating model. It should be integrated into governance, architecture, procurement, engineering, monitoring, awareness, and incident response.

The Cyber Express: Are existing cybersecurity teams equipped to handle AI-era threats, or does the industry need new skills and operating models?

Existing cybersecurity skills remain highly relevant, but they need to be expanded. The fundamentals still matter: identity, data protection, secure architecture, vulnerability management, incident response, third-party risk, and governance. However, AI introduces new concepts that security teams need to understand. Security professionals now need AI literacy β€” how large language models work at a practical level, how AI applications are integrated, how prompts and outputs can be manipulated, how retrieval-augmented generation works, how AI agents interact with tools, and how AI supply chains are structured. The operating model also needs to evolve. AI security cannot be owned by security alone. It requires collaboration between cybersecurity, technology, data, privacy, legal, risk, procurement, HR, and business teams. In many organisations, the most effective model will be a cross-functional AI governance group supported by security-by-design processes. So yes, the industry needs new skills, but not at the expense of existing cybersecurity disciplines. The future is a combination of traditional cyber expertise, AI literacy, risk management, and business enablement.

The Cyber Express: AI vendors promise speed, scale, and automation. Where should organisations avoid over-relying on AI in cybersecurity and business decision-making?

Organisations should avoid over-relying on AI in areas where decisions are high-impact, sensitive, difficult to reverse, or require strong judgement. AI can assist, but accountability should remain human. In cybersecurity, this includes incident severity decisions, containment actions, identity and privileged access approvals, regulatory interpretation, legal assessments, and decisions that could materially affect customers, employees, or critical operations. AI can help summarise information, detect patterns, prioritise alerts, and recommend actions, but those recommendations should be validated by qualified people. There is also a risk of automation bias, where people trust AI outputs because they appear confident or well-structured. That can be dangerous if the output is incomplete, inaccurate, or based on weak context. Organisations need clear rules for where AI can automate, where it can recommend, and where human approval is mandatory. A practical principle is this: the greater the potential impact, the stronger the need for human oversight, auditability, and accountability.

The Cyber Express: If you were advising enterprise leaders today, what are the first three things they should do to prepare for the security impact of frontier AI models?

The first priority is to establish AI governance. Organisations need clear policies on approved use cases, acceptable tools, data handling, human oversight, and accountability. Governance should not be theoretical β€” it needs to be embedded into procurement, technology delivery, data management, security review, and business processes. The second priority is to protect sensitive data before scaling AI adoption. This means strengthening data classification, access controls, data-loss prevention, retention rules, and monitoring. Enterprises should know what data can be used with AI, under what conditions, and through which approved platforms. The third priority is to integrate AI into the cyber risk management operating model β€” including third-party risk assessments, threat modelling, secure development, incident response, employee awareness, logging, monitoring, and assurance activities. Security teams should also start preparing for AI-specific risks such as prompt injection, insecure integrations, sensitive data exposure, excessive agency, and AI supply-chain compromise. AI can create significant value, but only if organisations adopt it with discipline. The organisations that treat AI security as a future issue may already be behind.
"AI adoption without governance is not innovation β€” it is unmanaged risk. The next phase of enterprise security is about controlling what AI can access, what it can do, and who remains accountable." β€” Mohammad Arif, Head of Information Security, Guild Group

AI Won’t Replace Cybersecurity Jobs, It’ll Replace the Toil – Harsha Reddy Explains What’s Next

14 August 2026 at 02:56

AI, Cybersecurity, Harsha Reddy

As enterprises race to bolt AI onto every business process, security leaders are being forced to answer a harder question than "should we adopt it" β€” it's "who's accountable when it goes wrong." To unpack this, The Cyber Express sat down with Harsha Reddy, Head of Information Security at Veterinary Emergency Group (VEG).

With nearly two decades in security leadership β€” including senior roles at Lixil and American Standard before joining VEG β€” Harsha brings a practitioner's view of where AI is genuinely changing the CISO's job, and where it's mostly just hype and shadow adoption.

Watch the Full Interview:

Harsha Reddy Explains Why AI Will Replace Tasks, Not Defenders

Harsha pushes back on the narrative that AI will hollow out security teams, pointing to Gartner research showing that while most fields are projected to lose jobs to AI, cybersecurity is expected to gain them. In his view, the technology is mainly absorbing the "toil" β€” log review, alert triage, evidence gathering β€” that keeps analysts from actually defending.

Also listen to S1 Episode: Awareness and Education at Young Age is the Answer to Cybersecurity Skill Gap

β€œIt's the analyst who refuses to use AI that will get replaced by an analyst who uses it,” he says.

On adoption, Reddy points to a 2024 Microsoft-LinkedIn survey in which most executives called AI critical to their business, yet a majority had no formal plan and most had employees already bringing in their own tools. That gap, he argues, is why so many organizations are now dealing with AI-related data leaks. "Many organizations started onboarding AI like software when they should be onboarding it like staff." His fix isn't more restrictions β€” blocking AI just pushes it into the shadows β€” but guardrails, an internal AI enablement committee, and measuring actual business value instead of token consumption.

The conversation also digs into deepfake-driven fraud, why training employees to spot deepfakes is β€œa losing bet” at machine speed, and how he decides when to greenlight a new AI tool versus telling a business unit β€œnot yet.”

The conversation closes with our newly introduced rapid-fire round "Express Shots" β€” Claude vs. ChatGPT, passkeys vs. passwords, and Reddy's prediction for the biggest cybersecurity threat of 2030.

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As enterprises race to bolt AI onto every business process, security leaders are being forced to answer a harder question than "should we adopt it" β€” it's "who's accountable when it goes wrong."

Your Next Insider Threat May Be an AI Coworker

12 June 2026 at 11:09

Heimdal sysadmin Alex Panait spent weeks testing Claude Cowork inside the company. His verdict was blunt. It felt like onboarding a junior employee with no manager, no scoped access, and no clear accountability when something goes wrong. Except this one can delete your SharePoint. That is the uncomfortable reality behind autonomous AI desktop assistants. They […]

The post Your Next Insider Threat May Be an AI Coworker appeared first on Heimdal Security Blog.

How to Avoid Holiday Shopping Scams (From a Former Cyber Detective)

11 December 2025 at 10:53

Christmas is the time where we allow our imaginations to run wild, it’s the season of goodwill, high spirits and Christmas joy. However, cybercriminals don’t take holidays. We still have to be on our guard, and question what is real and what is not. Common Holiday Scams Fake Online Stores Around this time of year, […]

The post How to Avoid Holiday Shopping Scams (From a Former Cyber Detective) appeared first on Heimdal Security Blog.

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