Cybersecurity crises that vendors love

SAN FRANCISCO—A crisis is a terrible thing to waste, said Stanford economist Paul Romer. This is certainly the case with AI and cybersecurity.

At the RSAC Cybersecurity Conference here in San Francisco last week, the advent of agentic AI gave the community a lot to talk about, with practitioners pointing out that AI acts as an accelerator for cyber threats.

Meanwhile, existing vendors as well as startups have begun to look for potential solutions to the cybersecurity risks posed by AI, especially including agentic AI.

The RSAC context was interesting, given the selloff in many cybersecurity stocks last week and especially on Friday, as rumors about new AI cybersecurity tools being released by Anthropic hit the market.

Let’s take a look at what we saw at RSAC.

Software vendors and practitioners describe a daily battle to push back against boards and CEOs who want to aggressively deploy AI, while they struggle to implement it safely.

“Nobody thinks about security when they code,” said Tom Pace, co-founder and CEO of supply-chain cybersecurity company Netrise. Pace, who spent 16 years as a cybersecurity practitioner in roles at enterprises as diverse as PNC Bank, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and the US Marine Corps, believes that because AI speeds up the creation of software, it will accelerate the threats posed by software around the world.

“There isn’t a piece of software on this planet that doesn’t have a problem,” Pace said. “In the near term, AI makes the problems much bigger. It’s a negative compounding factor.”

In the presentations and RSAC talks, similar concerns were raised.

“Now every day there are news stories where agents are doing something strange with enterprise data,” said Rehan Jalil, president of product and data at Veeam Software, in an RSAC presentation. “Whether it’s exposing sensitive data or deleting data… or deleting entire repos of data. It’s happening.”

In the same session, Best Buy vice president and chief privacy officer Michael Dolan said the power and potential risks of AI demand an entirely new way of thinking about things.

“The whole way we think about security and governance is different,” Dolan said.

Software vendors are busy introducing innovative new products and features to address the growing risks. RSAC’s key topics include secure identity, governance, agentic AI security, and enforcing supply-chain trust.

Vin Sharma, co-founder and CEO of Vigil, an AI security company, told me that enterprises are struggling to ensure secure agentive operations: “There’s a pattern of enterprises getting close to adoption, then retreating. Enterprises worry about three things: 1) Is it reliable? 2) Can I protect it — I don’t want it to be hijacked; and 3) If it fails, what’s the blast radius?” Is.”

Feros Abukhadjieh, founder and CEO of Socket, a company focused on securing AI code, told me that as AI-generated code proliferates, the risks to the software supply chain are skyrocketing.

“We are seeing all types of attacks,” Abukhadijeh said. “It’s not that humans have done a good job of checking the code, but now agents are doing it, and they’re doing it faster. It’s the same trend, only fifty percent more third-party code is being brought in.”

Socket has raised a total of $65 million led by Abstract Ventures with participation from Andreessen Horowitz (A16Z) and others. It is using the funding to expand engineering teams, enhance AI-powered security features, and scale operations

Market leaders released a steady stream of announcements to respond to the trends, including agentic AI defense solutions and more sophisticated identity products that can authenticate not only humans but also machines.

Cisco announced Identity Intelligence and Defense Security, In which Cisco implements active scanning of identity, functions, MCP servers and assets.

Jitu Patel, president and chief product officer of Cisco, spoke about Cisco’s growing role in a keynote speech Monday, which he also detailed in his blog. Patel said that in a Cisco survey of major enterprises, 85% reported running AI agent pilots. Only 5% had moved those agents into production.

“The 80-point difference does not raise doubts about the potential of AI,” Patel wrote in his blog. “It’s a rational response to a real security problem. Organizations can see what agents can do. They’re not yet sure they can trust them to do it safely.”

“With chatbots, the worst-case scenario is the wrong answer,” Patel wrote in his blog previewing the keynote on Monday. “With an agent, the worst-case scenario is a wrong action, and some actions cannot be undone.”

Microsoft Launched new identity features Rails preview in Microsoft Foundry as well as in Entra ID to track and control agent behavior.

SentinelOne unveiled A batch of new offeringsThat includes Prompt AI Agent Security, a real-time governance control plane designed to monitor and prevent unauthorized agentic actions.

Data management giant Databricks looked to boost its security credentials with Lakewatch, an agentic SIEM tool powered by Anthropic’s cloud model. This launch is targeted at SOC infrastructure.

Just before the conference, Futuriom 50 company and identity security specialist Teleport announced Beams. Beams are trusted runtime environments that provide access to secure, isolated infrastructure for AI agents.

Ironically, the RSAC triggered a massive selloff in popular cybersecurity stocks like CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks after AI leader Anthropic announced new agentic AI features with the February launch of cybersecurity tools, including Cloud Code Security. The selloff intensified on Friday after the conference closed, with rumors that Anthropic’s cloud “Mythos” model would include new autonomous threat detection capabilities.

Shares of Palo Alto Networks have been under selling pressure throughout the year and fell about 4% on the week, despite the launch at RSAC, which also included the launch of Prisma Browser for Business, a secure web browser targeted at small and medium businesses.

Similarly, crowdstrike, an industry favorite among investors, is on the decline having lost 16% of its value so far this year.

Some Wall St. analysts have called the decline a buying opportunity for many cybersecurity stocks, but this week’s selloff comes on the heels of a slight decline that week, which is expected to provide a boost to the industry.

This has not slowed the flow of venture capital, as cybersecurity remains a fertile area for funding. Some major funding announcements:

• One week before RSAC, Cloaked announces massive $375 million funding To expand your enterprise-grade privacy platform. Cloaked has products targeting data security and privacy for both consumers and enterprises, but it looks like this recent round will help it expand its enterprise offerings, which include data cleansing, secure identity, and encrypted password management.

• surf ai Launched with $57 million funding For its agentive security operations platform. The round was led by Accel, with participation from existing investors CyberStarts and BoldStart Ventures. Surf AI says it will drive security with a single agentic platform that connects business context and data scattered across an organization’s systems. The platform reads signals from identity, cloud, security, data, HR and IT tools to create a living context graph that connects assets, owners, permissions and dependencies.

• above securityTel Aviv, Israel-based AI-native agent managed insider threat platform has emerged from stealth and announced $50 million in funding. The round was led by Ballistic Ventures, Merlin Ventures and Norwest, with participation from Jump Capital and QPV Ventures.

• Futuriom 50 Company EclypsiumThe company, which specializes in securing hardware and AI infrastructure, has raised an additional $25 million in financing. The round was led by PEAK6 Strategic Capital, with participation from three top US banks. Previous backers include Ten Eleven Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Pavilion Capital (Seviora Group), Qualcomm Ventures, and Madrona Ventures.

• native announced on tuesday It raised $42 million in total funding as it emerged from stealth, addressing the growing challenge of enforcing security policies in multi-cloud environments. The latest raise is a $31 million Series A led by Ballistic Ventures, with participation from General Catalyst, YL Ventures, and Merlin Ventures. Phil VenablesThe former CISO of Google Cloud and now venture partner at Ballistic Ventures has joined Native’s board of directors.

In short, the AI ​​security crisis is big business. As agentic AI rises to the top of boardrooms around the world, cybersecurity professionals may be scrambling to implement new tools and architectures to navigate the chaos. Keep an eye on implementing more autonomous SOC, identity security, and MCP on a regular basis. But investors will continue to keep an eye on developers in the AI ​​community as they launch their own tools to compete with traditional cybersecurity vendors.

Futuriom provides paid research and marketing services to technology companies, with the goal of providing accurate insight into how the cloud and AI infrastructure markets are evolving. These services include subscription research, custom research, and report sponsorships. Over the past twelve months, Futuriom has had a research relationship with several of the companies mentioned in this article, including Cisco, Eclypsium, and Teleport. The author has no positions in the individual technology stocks mentioned in this article.