Enemy within
One deeply unfamiliar problem is that agents themselves are an emerging attack surface within the enterprise and must be constantly assessed. Traditionally, security tools defend the environment, and the idea that an agent system doing the same job could itself become a direct threat is new. But what makes agentic AI unsettlingly is its non-deterministic nature, which means that, unlike a traditional security tool, it has the potential to do things you didn’t tell it to and haven’t planned for.
“Organizations are deploying autonomous systems that access sensitive data, use privileged identities, interact with applications, and execute actions. Those agents can be compromised, manipulated, or behave unexpectedly,” says Tom Findling, CEO and cofounder at AI SOC startup Conifers.ai. “Security operations will need visibility into agent identities, permissions, actions, and decision-making processes, and the ability to detect and contain dangerous behavior.”
CrowdStrike’s answer, relaunched at this year’s Fal.Con, is Falcon Guardian, an AI detection and response (AIDR) solution featuring runtime enforcement, agent discovery, execution graph mapping prompts, and quarantining for misbehaving agents. Similar capabilities will be needed for any agent platform but the mere fact that security systems now need their own security systems underscores what CrowdStrike’s Sentonas was referring to with his software-as-actor remark at Fal.Con. Human SOCs need to protect their enterprises from their AI SOC helpers.
