Cyber Daily Report

Alan Shimel--securityboulevard.com
published date: 2026-01-12 00:00:00 UTC

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Here is the ugly truth about security incidents today. The bad guys don’t storm the castle breaking down the walls. Most attacks start with a login that was obtained. Once inside they see where they can go and what they can do. They enter the front door with working keys.And now, because the universe has a sense of humor, we’re handing a new class of “digital workers” (AI agents) those very same keys. Not bots. Not scripts. Not interns with questionable judgment. Fully autonomous agents that think like humans but scale like machines.In a recent webinar, Zero Trust for Autonomous Agents: Extending Identity-First Access Control, Ido Shlomo (Token Security) and Jason Garbis (Numberline Security) put it bluntly:The identity frameworks built for people and the identity frameworks built for traditional workloads don’t work for these new hybrid AI creatures.Agents don’t fit either box, they break both.<h3 class="p3">The New Identity Crisis </h3>There is a new Identity crisis that AI agents are creating. Identity security used to be fairly linear.In the first wave: Humans—Employees, contractors, customers. They were messy but manageable. The tools we used were AD and early gen IAM.The second wave: Machines—Scripts. Containers. Lambdas. API-driven everything. Again messy, but in a different way. The challenge was massive scale, high velocity, and a fleet of snowflake identities scattered across clouds.But now? AI agents don’t just blur the lines—they blow them up.Agents behave like machines:<ul class="ul1"> <li class="li4">Operate 24/7</li> <li class="li4">Run a million tasks in parallel—scale like crazy</li> <li class="li1">Never get tired, cranky, or hungry</li> </ul>But wait, they also behave like humans:<ul class="ul1"> <li class="li4">Interpret intent</li> <li class="li4">Handle ambiguity</li> <li class="li4">Make decisions on the fly</li> <li class="li1">Go “off script” if the situation demands it</li> </ul>This hybrid nature creates a bit of an identity challenge that makes everything before childs play<h3 class="p3">Welcome to the Flexibility Trap</h3>At the heart of the AI secure operational model is a contradiction:We deploy AI agents because they adapt, learn, and work in unstructured environments. But security requires structure, predictability, and guardrails.Ido Shlomo summed it up perfectly:“An AI agent is an automated process that has all of the characteristics and flexibility of a human, needs role or intent-based access, and has the scale of machines.”Translation:If you lock agents down too tightly, you neuter the value. Give them too much freedom, and you might as well leave your cloud console wide open on TikTok Live.Three big landmines follow:1. Access Control Just… BreaksTraditional Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) was built for static permissions. Agents live in dynamic behavior. They need intent-based access, access that shifts as the scenario shifts. That’s not what today’s IAM tooling was designed to handle.2. Legacy Credentials Come Roaring BackLong-lived service accounts.Stale API tokens.Backend identities that never got MFA.All the things we spent the last decade trying to fix?Agents drag them back out of the grave.3. Accountability Gets Fuzzy FastWho owns an agent’s behavior?The team that built it?The human who supervised it?The model?The vendor?Your compliance auditor doesn’t care about the philosophical debate,they want an audit trail.Good luck producing one if multiple agents chain actions, hallucinate a workflow, or start thinking your production database looks tasty.<h3 class="p3">Zero Trust: Strategy, Not Magic Dust</h3>Jason Garbis made the point security leaders still need to hear:“Zero Trust is a strategy. It’s not something you buy.”Exactly. Zero Trust is a way of thinking, not an SKU. In the age of agentic AI, Zero Trust isn’t a “nice-to-have.” It’s the only thing standing between you and an uncontrollable identity wildfire.For AI agents, Zero Trust boils down to three operational disciplines:1. Dynamic Policy EnforcementStatic ACLs won’t cut it.Policies must adapt as quickly as the agents themselves.2. Machine-Speed Least PrivilegeNot “sort of least privilege.”Not “we’ll fix that later.”Real minimum viable access… in real time.3. Zero Trust Across All Five Pillars<ol class="ol1"> <li class="li1">Identity</li> <li class="li1">Devices</li> <li class="li1">Networks</li> <li class="li1">Applications</li> <li class="li1">Data</li> </ol>If an agent touches any of these, Zero Trust should be asking:Which agent? Which device? Which resource? Under what conditions? For what reason?<h3 class="p3">Four Foundational Practices That Actually Work</h3>The bad news: You can’t prevent every AI-agent failure scenario.The good news: You don’t have to.Shlomo and Garbis laid out four foundational practices that meaningfully reduce risk:1. Define Boundaries Before You DeployIf your policy model is “we’ll tighten permissions later”… you won’t.Every agent needs a clearly defined, explicit-access boundary from day one.2. Give Every Agent a Unique IdentityStop using shared service accounts.Stop minting static tokens.Every agent instance gets its own identity.Period.3. Build Full ObservabilityAgents behave unpredictably. By design.You need:<ul class="ul1"> <li class="li4">Full visibility into identities</li> <li class="li4">Complete service account monitoring</li> <li class="li4">Continuous token and API access analysis</li> <li class="li6">Real-time blocking of unexpected behavior (e.g., an agent suddenly touching prod for the first time)</li> </ul>4. Enforce Credential Hygiene Like Your Job Depends On ItBecause it does.Long-lived credentials = massive blast radius.Rotation must be automatic.Expiration must be measured in minutes, not months.<h3 class="p3">The Stakes Are Rising Faster Than Your Policies</h3>Organizations are deploying agents at warp speed. Every poorly governed agent becomes a new entry in your security debt ledger. And here’s the thing about agents:They don’t fail gracefully. They cascade. One hallucination feeds the next.One misjudged access call sparks a chain reaction. Look no further than the recent Cloudflare outage.If you don’t put guardrails in place now, you won’t be able to bolt them on later.Zero Trust isn’t just a philosophy anymore. It’s your AI agent operating manual.Continuous verification, Least-privilege access, Holistic, identity-first policy enforcement.This is the only path to governing autonomous agents without waking up to an unexpected crisis.Want to learn more? 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