Cloud complexity expands the attack surface
Speed matters because cloud environments have become complex, with sprawling identities, permissions, APIs, workloads, and trust relationships. That complexity makes it harder for defenders to understand how individual weaknesses connect, while giving agents more relationships to map and test.
As agents proliferate, network boundaries matter much less than who (or what) can access your cloud, says Alissa Knight, founder and CEO of Assail. “The perimeter is the identity graph now, not the virtual private cloud,” says Knight, who counts more than 20 years in offensive security.
Authentication alone is not enough to protect against wider infiltration. Knight has seen agentic AI-generated applications where a user could authenticate with an MFA code without providing a username, while the code could be repeatedly guessed because there was no maximum number of attempts.
