Does Behavioural Detection Work Against AI Agent API Traffic?

AI can flag thousands of suspicious events and create a clear summary of each one. But the bigger question is whether security teams can understand how AI reached its conclusions. In this episode of the Security Strategist Podcast, Dan Williams from Cambridge Intelligence joins John Tolbert, Principal Analyst and Director of Cybersecurity Research at KuppingerCole Analysts, to discuss how AI and visualisation are changing cybersecurity investigations. They look at how graph visualisation, AI and automation can help security teams make sense of complex data. Williams explains how visualisation can turn machine output into something analysts can understand, investigate and act on, while also helping them see what AI is doing behind the scenes. Why Use Graph Visualisation in Security? Graph visualisation maps the links between accounts, devices, IP addresses, malware and vulnerabilities. Analysts can see how an attack connects instead of reading a list of isolated events. Williams traces the idea back to his company's roots. Before cybersecurity, Cambridge Intelligence served law enforcement, anti-fraud teams and intelligence agencies, who have long relied on link analysis. Picture the detective's wall of photos and string. It looks theatrical, but it works because mapping a problem is the natural way to get your head around it. The approach has since been applied well beyond network mapping. Security teams now use graphs to connect threat intelligence, cloud infrastructure, industrial control systems and software bills of materials. Tolbert also points to identity, where graphs can expose links between devices, accounts and potential insider threats. Williams cites a Wiz presentation that described a security graph containing roughly a trillion links. “Everything is a graph, really,” he says. Attackers are looking for a route from A to B, while security teams need to see those connections and understand where they lead. With a trillion links in the picture, that is not something an analyst can work through manually. AI can help sift through that volume, but it raises another question: if the system identifies a connection, can a security team see why it matters? How Does AI Help Investigations? AI is most useful when each approach is doing a specific job. Traditional machine learning can flag anomalies and classify activity, while generative AI can summarise the results and explain them in plain English. Visualisation then gives analysts a way to see what those findings represent. Williams says the industry has moved beyond simply asking where AI can be added. The more practical question is whether the cost can now be justified. How much are organisations spending on tokens, and what are they getting back? He describes this as a move from exploration to explanation. Experienced investigators may still spend hours working through data without knowing exactly what they are looking for. But, he argues, there are many more people who need a clear account of what happened. This now creates another problem because there is too much information. Machine learning can generate a long list of alerts, while large language models can add pages of text to explain them. Neither necessarily makes an incident easier to understand. Williams believes visualisation needs to be part of that process, giving analysts a way to follow the AI's reasoning and see where its findings came from. He compared it to when you use a maps app; you are not trying to examine every road in a city. You have somewhere to go and need to get to your destination. This is what a junior analyst needs: something similar, a way through the relevant data rather than an overview of everything available. It could be a playbook, a timeline or a short interactive narrative. Williams compares the ideal experience to watching a film, where the sequence follows an attacker from the initial entry point through to the exposed data and the misconfiguration that made it possible. If pre

In the recent episode of The Security Strategist podcast, host Shubhangi Dua, podcast host and producer at EM360Tech, sits down with Chenxi Wang, Managing General Partner at Rain Capital, a cybersecurity veteran of more than two decades, a Fortune 500 board member and a VentureBeat Women in AI Award winner. They talk about self-improving AI agents (SIA) and their more advanced cousin, recursive self-improving agents (RSIA), from what they are, why they're suddenly dominating research conferences, and why most enterprises, especially regulated ones, aren't remotely ready to run them without a human in the loop. Key Takeaways RSIA updates the mechanism that improves the agent, not just the agent Sandbox "no" feedback pushes agents toward workarounds, not compliance Governance depends on evidence chains and observability, not approval gates Self-improving agents haven't reached production at scale Regulated industries aren't ready for zero-human-in-the-loop agents C-suites should focus on adoption pressure and provable policy enforcement

What happens when the walls of your organisation can no longer keep your data safe? AI, remote work, and fast-moving data are changing how organisations operate, and the traditional perimeter model is becoming harder to maintain. In this episode of the Security Strategist Podcast, host Chris Steffen sits down with Dr Bill Anderson of Mattermost and JP Ayyappan, Director of Product Management at Virtru, to explore why the future of security isn't about stronger walls. It's about protecting the data itself. Zero Trust Beyond the Network Anderson, who trained as a cryptographer, says this blind spot has been around for decades. Organisations built networks like fortresses, assuming that anyone inside could be trusted. But that approach no longer reflects how people work. Employees use phones, home networks and third-party platforms every day, meaning the traditional security perimeter is no longer enough. Major breaches have shown how risky that assumption can be. This is where zero trust comes in. But Anderson argues that many organisations still apply it mainly to networks and devices, rather than to the data moving through them. Collaboration tools have made this gap even clearer. People are creating and sharing sensitive information every day through meetings, chats and shared documents, often without a way to identify and protect that data as soon as it is created. How AI Changes Data Classification The conversation then turned to one of the biggest challenges facing security teams: AI can combine information in ways that are difficult to predict. Anderson described how a series of seemingly harmless questions about flight paths, weapons ranges, and timing could be combined by an AI system to produce sensitive information, even if no one set out to create it. Steffen gave a similar example. A simple first prompt can lead to a series of follow-up questions, with each response shaping the next. By the third or fourth exchange, the AI could produce highly sensitive information without a clear record of how it was created. This creates a problem for traditional data classification. Rules designed for static documents are harder to apply when information is generated and combined in real time. Ayyappan pointed out that AI can also help address this problem. It can be trained to classify and tag information as new context emerges, but only if organisations already have a clear and consistent tagging structure. Security That Protects the Data Rather than relying on network access to determine who can be trusted, Virtru's approach applies permissions directly to the data through an open framework called the Trusted Data Format. Ayyappan explained that files can carry their own access rules, allowing organisations to control who can access them regardless of the network or device being used. This approach keeps protection with the data, even when a file is shared outside the organisation. It can also make it easier to give external partners or emergency teams access to specific information without giving them access to the wider network. AI Agents Need Access Controls Too Both guests agreed that AI agents, integrations and plugins need to be treated as identities within an organisation's access control model. Anderson explained that Mattermost applies the same user, resource and action controls to AI agents as it does to people. This allows organisations to control what each AI system can access. Ayyappan added that two executives using the same AI agent and accessing the same data could receive different answers based on their individual permissions. This allows organisations to use AI without giving every user or system access to all available data. For security teams, both experts recommended starting with clear limits on which AI systems different groups can access. As organisations develop clearer classification rules, more of these controls can be automated. Ayyappan also stressed that data privacy and protection need to be con

Your engineering team assigns an AI agent a seemingly routine overnight task with limited human oversight. By morning, the agent has moved beyond the task’s intended scope. The AI agent spots a weakness in the sandboxed infrastructure. This weakness gives the agent a path to data it is not permitted to access. But your Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) dashboard doesn’t flag the problem. To the tools in the environment, the AI agent's activity looks like routine processing. That visibility gap is central to the broader question raised by a July 2026 incident, when OpenAI models circumvented sandbox controls and accessed evaluation data hosted on Hugging Face. In this episode of The Security Strategist podcast, host Richard Stiennon, Chief Research Analyst at IT-Harvest, is joined by Brandon Dixon, Co-Founder and CTO of Ent. Together, they unpack how OpenAI models, operating inside an evaluation sandbox with reduced safeguards, circumvented the controls designed to contain them. The conversation moves from that incident into a much bigger question: as AI agents start acting directly on laptops, servers, and enterprise software, what does the control point of the future actually look like? Key Takeaways OpenAI’s Hugging Face incident shows how agents can cross intended boundaries even when individual actions appear permitted. EDR can observe processes and system activity, but it does not inherently understand the context or intent behind them. Agentic tools, remote-control features, ClickFix, FileFix, and malvertising can make risky activity look like normal work. Prompts and tool calls can now provide clues to an agent’s stated objective, but behaviour and context are still needed to determine risk. Built-in agent guardrails provide an important first layer of protection, but they are not a complete security control. For certain workloads, local AI can offer meaningful advantages in cost, speed, privacy, and data sovereignty. Some enterprises are reconsidering endpoint compute and local GPU investments as the economics and risks of cloud-only AI become clearer. Isolated-tenant design, learned at Microsoft, now shapes Ent's architecture. The opportunity is to rebuild endpoint security around context, intent, and real-time prevention.

Every CISO’s inbox is hot with this email at least once a year: the audit is four months away, and it's time to stop everything. As a result, progress comes to a halt, and a person then spends two weeks logging into 30 different consoles, taking screenshots in order to show that MFA has been turned on. After the audit is over, the evidence becomes invalid, and exactly twelve months later the same frantic situation begins all over again. That is precisely the kind of situation that Jonathan Schipp, Senior Director of Product Management at Rapid7, aims to end, and it is the focus of the most recent episode of The Security Strategist podcast. In this episode, host Richard Stiennon, Chief Research Analyst at IT-Harvest, is joined by Schipp to talk about the reason why governance, risk and compliance (GRC) is moving from being a yearly rush to becoming a continuous, API-driven element of security operations. They also address why AI is causing this change to happen more quickly than most GRC teams can keep up with. “Compliance turns into something you have to put everything else aside for,” Schipp tells Stiennon. “When an enterprise carries out its SOC 2 audit, most of them are not well prepared; it disrupts the business flow.” Key Takeaways Rapid7 launched CyberGRC to connect live security telemetry to compliance evidence Continuous monitoring replaces manual screenshot evidence with API-based checks SOC 2 and ISO 27001 still require annual audits; continuous monitoring closes the gaps between them Roughly 1% of discovered vulnerabilities are actually exploitable, per Schipp AI models are finding more vulnerabilities mainly by scanning source code faster Automated exploitation attempts generate high log volume, making them detectable Rapid7's GRC platform supports ISO/IEC 42001 and the NIST AI RMF Rapid7 serves roughly 11,000 customers, many now requesting AI-specific controls GRC's role is to move the business through AI risk, not block AI adoption Boards typically have audit and risk committees but no dedicated security committee Vulnerability risk should be classified by business impact, not treated as uniform Basic controls — MFA, asset inventory, patching exploitable exposures — stop most attacks, AI-driven or not Chapters 00:00 Introduction and guest overview 02:07 Incentives for security maturity 03:06 European and US regulatory developments 03:50 Connecting security telemetry with GRC 04:16 Continuous compliance and audit cycles 05:16 The importance of continuous control monitoring 06:20 Using APIs for evidence collection 07:16 Managing vulnerabilities and exceptions 08:18 Classifying vulnerabilities and risk 09:15 AI in security and human accountability 09:53 The reality of AI discovering vulnerabilities 11:08 Managing noise and false positives in AI detection 12:10 Integrating AI systems for proactive security 13:26 Preemptive security and threat intelligence 14:17 Risks of AI in attack scenarios 15:16 AI misuse and governance challenges 16:23 Balancing AI adoption with controls 17:22 The importance of basic security controls 18:22 Key takeaways for CISOs and security leaders 20:19 Closing remarks and next steps For further information, visit rapid7.com and em360tech.com.