Cyber Dialogues by Palo Alto Networks
Cyber Dialogues by Palo Alto is your trusted source for clear, strategic conversations on today’s most critical cybersecurity issues. Each episode brings together Palo Alto Networks experts, industry leaders, and forward-thinking customers to unpack emerging threats, resilient security approaches, and the innovations shaping the digital landscape.
Through thoughtful dialogue and real-world insight, Cyber Dialogues empowers security professionals with the perspective and knowledge they need to make confident decisions.
Whether you’re leading transformation, navigating risk, or staying ahead of the threat curve, Cyber Dialogues keeps you informed, inspired, and equipped to protect what matters.
Cyber Dialogues by Palo Alto Networks
Agentic AI: The Autonomous Threat and the New Frontier of Defense
Guest: Andrew Milroy, Distinguished Analyst and Founder of Veqtor8
In this episode of Cyber Dialogues, we explore the rapid emergence of Agentic AI, autonomous systems that can perceive, reason, plan, and execute actions independently.
Host Sharmin Jassal speaks with renowned analyst Andrew Milroy about the unprecedented security challenges and defensive opportunities this technology presents.
Andrew explains that the current rush to adopt AI for productivity is creating an exponentially larger attack surface, a pattern he likens to the early days of Cloud and Mobile adoption where security was an afterthought. He details two critical and unique vulnerabilities:
- Model Poisoning and Prompt Injection: How malicious data or disguised commands can manipulate an autonomous agent's behavior, leading to unauthorized actions or sabotage.
- Detection Difficulty: Why the adaptive, constantly changing nature of Agentic AI makes it difficult for static security rules to detect anomalous or compromised activity.
The conversation then pivots to the offensive power of these agents, discussing how they can supercharge threats with speed and scale, making phishing attacks almost indistinguishable from legitimate communications. Finally, Andrew offers an optimistic outlook, highlighting the opportunity for enterprises to adopt Agentic SecOps - autonomous defense systems capable of instantly detecting, responding to, and shifting security posture against sophisticated, evolving threats.
Key Takeaways:
- The AI Vulnerability: AI adoption is currently being driven by enthusiasm for efficiency, often ignoring security risks, leading to a massive expansion of the attack surface.
- The Attacker's Edge: Agentic AI enables attackers to create fully automated, Cunning, and adaptive threats that can respond dynamically to human attempts at validation.
- The Defender's Opportunity: Security Operations Centers can leverage Agentic AI to automate threat hunting, reduce false positives, and achieve response speeds that were previously impossible, effectively turning defense into an autonomous function.
- Market Transformation: Andrew believes Agentic AI will disrupt the entire IT industry, potentially marking a shift away from standardized SaaS platforms toward highly customized, data-proximate agent architectures.
- Connect with Andrew Milroy on LinkedIn: