1040: Cybersecurity for the Agentic AI Era, with Amy Blackshaw

In Episode #1040, Amy Blackshaw (SVP at Palo Alto Networks) joins Jon Krohn to explain what changes about cybersecurity when attackers can think for free. Nearly every breach, Amy argues, comes down to someone getting hold of an identity they should not have had, and frontier AI has not created new attack techniques so much as deleted the cost of the expert reasoning that used to chain them together. The recent Hugging Face intrusion is her case in point: agents sustained an action every 20 seconds for four and a half days, but what let them reach the crown jewels was ordinary privilege hygiene. In this episode, she explains why the line between privileged and ordinary users has dissolved, what makes an agentic identity unlike either a human or a service account, and what she wants every organisation to do first.

Additional materials: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠superdatascience.com/1040⁠⁠⁠

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In this episode you will learn:

• (02:26) What identity security actually means

• (05:09) Why AI changed the economics, not the attacks

• (07:41) What really went wrong in the Hugging Face breach

• (19:26) Why agentic identities are unlike anything before them