Category Archives: Emerging Threats

Your Security Controls May Be Less Independent Than You Think

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Most enterprise security programs still measure strength by counting controls.

MFA is deployed. EDR is deployed. Logging is centralized. Privileged access is monitored. Cloud guardrails are active. The dashboard shows broad framework coverage, so leadership concludes that the organization has defense in depth.

That conclusion may be wrong.

The problem is not necessarily that the controls are weak. The problem is that several supposedly independent controls may rely on the same underlying service.

An identity provider may authenticate administrators to the EDR console, SIEM, cloud environment, ticketing system, and incident-response platform. A centralized telemetry pipeline may supply detection data to multiple tools. Several controls may reside in the same cloud account, depend on the same DNS or time service, or be managed through one administrative plane.

On a control matrix, these appear to be separate layers.

In the actual system, they may be branches of the same tree.

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AI Agents Need Autonomy Budgets, Not Just Governance Policies

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Most organizations are granting AI agents authority faster than they are defining the limits of that authority.

That is the problem.

We have already started treating AI agents as digital workers. That is the right mental model. An agent that can access data, call tools, trigger workflows, generate artifacts, influence decisions, or alter enterprise state is not just another application. It needs identity. It needs boundaries. It needs oversight. It needs evidence. It needs a human owner. It needs a kill switch. That has been the right foundation for agent governance.

But it is not enough.

There is another question that needs to be asked much earlier:

How much damage is this agent allowed to cause before a human must approve the next action?

Not theoretically.

Not in vague risk language.

In actual economic terms.

How much money can it spend?
How many systems can it change?
How many records can it touch?
How much customer impact can it create?
How much privacy exposure can it cause?
How much reputational risk can it accumulate?

If we cannot answer those questions, we have not governed autonomy.

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Account Recovery Is Becoming the New Identity Attack Surface

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As passkeys and phishing-resistant authentication reduce password risk, attackers will move pressure to the recovery plane.

The industry is moving in the right direction.

Passkeys, FIDO2/WebAuthn, hardware security keys, conditional access, better MFA policies, and risk-based sign-in controls are all meaningful improvements. They reduce entire classes of credential theft. They make phishing harder. They remove reusable passwords from many authentication ceremonies. They shift more of the security burden from user judgment to protocol design.

That is good.

But it is not the finish line.

In my recent passkeys article, I called out a point that deserves its own treatment: passkeys do not solve weak account recovery, help desk social engineering, stolen session tokens, OAuth consent abuse, unmanaged vendor access, or excessive privilege. They are a major step forward, but they do not remove the rest of the identity attack surface.

That matters because attackers adapt.

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Passkeys, Not Passcodes: A Practical Enterprise Guide to Moving Beyond Passwords

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There is a small terminology problem in the identity world right now, and it matters more than it looks.

A passcode or PIN is usually a local unlock secret. It unlocks a phone, a laptop, Windows Hello, an authenticator app, or a hardware security key. A passkey is different. A passkey is the standards-based replacement for passwords, built on FIDO2/WebAuthn. The user unlocks the passkey locally with a fingerprint, face scan, device PIN, pattern, or security key, but the website or application receives cryptographic proof — not a reusable password. FIDO defines passkeys as FIDO authentication credentials based on FIDO standards, tied to an account, and used with the same process the user already uses to unlock a device.

That distinction is not pedantry. It is the difference between a local unlock method and a replacement for one of the most abused controls in the history of computing.

Passwords have had a long run. They also have had a long list of failures: reuse, phishing, spraying, stuffing, database theft, weak reset workflows, help desk abuse, and user fatigue. We have spent decades trying to compensate for those failures with complexity rules, expiration schedules, password managers, SMS codes, mobile push prompts, training campaigns, and detective controls.

Some of those helped. Some just moved the pain around.

Passkeys change the model.

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Rational Security in the AI Era: How Attackers Are Evolving and How We Must Respond

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The weaponization of artificial intelligence by cybercriminals and nation-state actors has crossed a critical inflection point. We no longer live in a world where we can rely solely on traditional perimeters; the threat landscape has fundamentally shifted into what we might call “Extremistan,” where the speed and scale of attacks demand a completely new level of resilience.

SadKitty

At MicroSolved, our mission is to provide rational cybersecurity for an irrational world. To do that effectively, we must look unflinchingly at the data.

The Problem and the Metrics

The numbers tell a stark story of industrialization at machine speed. According to recent threat reports, AI-enabled adversaries increased their attack volume by 89% year-over-year. More concerning is the velocity: the average eCrime breakout time has collapsed to just 29 minutes, with the fastest recorded intrusion moving from initial access to lateral movement in a staggering 27 seconds.

The financial impact is equally severe. The FBI IC3 recorded over 22,000 AI-related complaints with adjusted losses exceeding $893 million in 2025 alone, including tens of millions lost to AI-enabled Business Email Compromise (BEC). AI is accelerating attack speeds by 4x, making human-speed incident response no longer viable.

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AI Agents Are Already Working for You. Who’s Managing Them?

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AI Agents Are Not Applications. They Are Digital Workers.

Most organizations are adopting AI agents faster than they are learning how to govern them.

That is the problem.

A chatbot that answers questions is one thing. An AI agent that can access business data, use tools, trigger workflows, generate artifacts, make recommendations, or alter enterprise state is something else entirely.

At that point, the organization is no longer just deploying software.

It is introducing a new kind of operational actor.

That actor needs identity.

It needs boundaries.

It needs oversight.

It needs evidence.

It needs a human owner.

It needs a kill switch.

In other words, AI agents must be managed more like digital workers than ordinary applications.

AIAgentBanner

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Why My AI Agents Needed CaneCorso as a Security Control Plane

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AI agents are powerful because they can read, reason, summarize, decide, and act across a wide range of information sources.

That is also what makes them dangerous.

The more useful an agent becomes, the more likely it is to consume data I do not fully trust. Emails. Newsletters. RSS feeds. API responses. Documents sent as attachments. Social media. YouTube transcripts. Scraped search results. Web pages. Translated content. Random bits of text pulled from places where I do not control the author, the formatting, the intent, or the payload.

That is a very different security model than the one most of us are used to.

In traditional applications, we spend a lot of time separating code from data, users from administrators, trusted networks from untrusted networks, and internal systems from the internet. With LLMs and agents, all of those boundaries start to blur. Instructions, context, content, and intent all arrive in the same stream. The model has to reason over that stream, and the agent has to decide what to do with the result.

That is exactly why I wanted a security control plane in front of my own AI agents.

For me, that control plane became CaneCorso™.

CaneCorsoAI

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CaneCorso™ and the Real Problems AI Is Creating for the Business

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AI didn’t sneak into the enterprise.

It walked in through productivity.

Email triage. Document handling. Support workflows. Internal copilots. Retrieval systems. Early agentic use cases. All of it made sense at the time. All of it still does.

But something changed along the way.

We didn’t just adopt AI—we embedded it into workflows that can influence decisions, expose data, and take action.

That’s where the problem starts.

And it’s exactly where CaneCorso™ is designed to operate.

CaneCorsoAI

AI Risk Isn’t a Model Problem — It’s a Workflow Problem

There’s a persistent misunderstanding in the market right now.

Most conversations about AI security still center on the model—what it knows, how it behaves, whether it can be tricked.

That’s not where the real risk lives.

The real risk shows up when:

  • Untrusted content enters a workflow
  • That workflow uses AI to interpret or transform it
  • And the output influences business operations

That content might come from:

  • Email
  • Documents
  • OCR pipelines
  • Retrieved knowledge (RAG)
  • Support tickets
  • External data sources

Once it’s in the workflow, it’s no longer just data.

It’s influence.

CaneCorso™ exists to control that influence—before it becomes an operational problem.

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Introducing CaneCorso: An AI Application Firewall Built for Real Workflows

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AI has officially crossed the line from experiment to infrastructure.

Email flows into copilots. Documents feed RAG pipelines. Support tickets trigger agents that can take action. The convenience is real—and so is the risk.

What hasn’t caught up is security.

Most security models were built for a world where inputs were predictable and trust boundaries were well-defined. That world doesn’t exist anymore. Today, untrusted content flows directly into systems that can reason, decide, and act.

That’s exactly where things get interesting—and dangerous.

When Good Data Carries Bad Instructions

One of the biggest misconceptions about AI security is that it’s a model problem. It’s not. It’s a workflow problem.

Attackers don’t need to break in anymore. They ride along with legitimate data—emails, PDFs, tickets, knowledge base entries—and inject instructions that your AI system may interpret as truth.

Think about what that means in practice:

  • A support ticket that contains hidden instructions
  • A PDF with embedded prompt injection
  • A knowledge base entry that poisons RAG outputs
  • An approval workflow manipulated through summarization

Layer in human behavior—blind trust, over-privileged access, weak validation—and you’ve got a system primed to fail in ways that traditional controls simply won’t catch.

CaneCorsoAI

A More Rational Approach to AI Security

CaneCorso™ takes a different path.

Instead of trying to block everything suspicious (and breaking workflows in the process), it follows what’s described in the Rational AI Security model —security that behaves more like an immune system than a wall.

That means:

  • Detecting and isolating threats without stopping the system
  • Treating all inbound content as untrusted by default
  • Preserving business continuity while reducing risk
  • Producing measurable, auditable outcomes

This isn’t theoretical. It’s a direct response to how AI systems actually behave in production.

One Control Plane for AI Workflows

At its core, CaneCorso gives you a shared AI Application Firewall—a single control plane that sits between your workflows and your models.

Instead of every team building its own brittle filters, you get consistent, reusable protection across:

  • Email triage and analysis
  • RAG pipelines and knowledge systems
  • Document AI and OCR ingestion
  • Support and ticketing workflows
  • Agent-driven automation

The platform delivers:

  • Runtime decisions: allow, sanitize, tokenize, or block
  • Privacy controls: redact or tokenize sensitive data before model exposure
  • Audit-ready logs: reasons, scores, and evidence you can actually use
  • Adversarial validation: Injection Scanner proves controls before and after deployment

This isn’t just about stopping attacks—it’s about making security operationally usable.

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Update on PromptDefense Suite and AI Security Research

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Last week, I discussed why and some of how we built the new PromptDefense Suite. 

This week, we are discussing the product’s future internally and how we might go to market. This is mainly due to two new capabilities we have built into the product. 

The first is an API and workflow automation mechanism. This allows organizations to stand up a single instance of PromptDefense and then use it to protect multiple AI/agent workflows. The code no longer has to be embedded directly in the project; instead, all defensive capabilities and logging can be accessed via an API instance. The API is robust and supports API key restrictions that tie into a rules engine, so that different workflows can have different trust models and actions pre-assigned in an audit-friendly way. 

Secondly, we have developed a licensing mechanism that covers protected workflows and skips the per-seat, per-token models that seemed too confusing for most firms looking for these kinds of tools. They told us they wanted a simpler licensing approach, and we developed a new licensing mechanism to make it easy, manageable, and auditable. Our testers have been calling it a win! 

As we continue with the beta-testing process and lock down our decisions about where the product is going, the news that drove us to create it continues to flow in. More of our clients are working on agents and AI-integrated workflows, which require this level of protection. While we continue to develop PromptDefender, we are also working to develop and release extended frameworks for AI model, agent, and product management, along with policies, procedures, and vendor risk assessment tools for these frameworks, for our vCISO clients. We’re also busy researching ongoing compliance implementation for AI workflows and agents, and should have more on that shortly. 

In the meantime, if you want to discuss AI or agent security, risk management, or other relevant topics, please reach out. We would love to talk with you and help align our modernization capabilities with your emerging needs. You can always email us at info@microsolved.com or call us at +1-614-351-1237. 

As always, thanks for reading. Stay safe out there, and stay tuned for more updates.