Join us TOMORROW, Friday [07-24-26], for "Hacking the Reduced Tech Stack"

Join us Friday, July 24, 2026, for “Hacking the Reduced Tech Stack: An hour of critical thinking about how AI and complexity are forcing leaders to limit tools and dependencies.”

It all begins at 1 PM ET/10 AM PT tomorrow, with guests TC Niedzialkowski, Head of IT & Security, Opendoor and Ross Young, co-host, CISO Tradecraft. We'll have fun conversation and games, plus at the end of the hour we'll do our meetup in breakout rooms.

>>> REGISTER HERE for the Friday, July 24th, 2026 show <<<

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Defense in Depth
Identity and Access Management (IAM) in an Agentic AI World

Traditional IAM was built around people. Agentic AI changes the equation of identity. What's changed and how do organizations get ready?

Check out this post by Tomás Maldonado, CISO, NFL, for the discussion that is the basis of our conversation on this week’s episode co-hosted by me, David Spark, the producer of CISO Series, and Yaron Levi, CISO, Dolby. Joining is Will Gregorian, vp of information technology & security, Galileo Medical.

Listen to the full episode here.

From who to what

The identity model organizations have relied on for decades doesn't map cleanly onto agents. "The hardest part is mapping intent to action when autonomy is moving," said Matan Agazan of Collective. "Context boundaries just keep blurring." Daisy S. of YUJ Designs framed this as a structural mismatch, saying, "In a traditional IAM setup, a service account has a fixed scope. But an agentic AI is dynamic by nature." The implication, she said, is a foundational shift in how control needs to work: "We're going to have to stop managing who they are and start managing guardrails for what they can do."

The manipulation problem

Credential compromise is only part of the risk. "The biggest risk isn't just credential compromise, it's manipulation," said Brenan Duffy, CISO at the ACLU. "If an attacker can influence an agent's inputs, prompts, or data sources, they may be able to coerce the agent into legitimately exercising its privileges on the attacker's behalf." That bypasses many traditional IAM assumptions, he said, shifting the required response toward "workload identity, tightly scoped permissions, and strong policy enforcement at the API layer, with short-lived credentials and continuous monitoring of agent behavior." David Girvin of Assury identified the ceiling on what identity controls can accomplish on their own. "Identity can't fix the agent problem," he said, "since hallucinations and confused deputy attacks happen post policy and identity."

Cryptographic accountability

The credential infrastructure organizations rely on today wasn't built for agents. "Service accounts tend to share one static credential across many workloads, instances, and replicas," said Mrinal Wadhwa of Autonomy. "When something goes wrong, the log says which credential was used but not which agent used it." The alternative requires agents to have their own cryptographic identities, provisioned in milliseconds, with "each action signed by a specific agent, traceable through a delegation chain back to whoever authorized it" and "credentials that expire in minutes, not months." With agents the framing itself needs to change. "This isn't IAM evolution," said Navrina Singh of Credo AI. "It's GIAM: Governance-first Identity and Access Management." We need to ask "should this agent exist, under what conditions, and who is accountable when it acts?"

The audit gap

The tooling needed to govern agentic AI at scale doesn't yet exist. "The moment an agent takes an action with real business consequences, nobody's sure who signed off on it," said Adrian Mercer of AutoQuill AI. The ownership question will be what trips most companies up first, he said, and "the tooling for agent-level audit trails barely exists yet." Nicholas Imperillo of GeoComply put lifecycle and monitoring at the top of his list as agentic AI scales. "Static service account approaches won't cut it for truly autonomous behavior," he said. He has been tracking the an interesting emerging standard, the ERC-8004 protocol: "the on-chain trust layer for AI agents with identity, reputation, and validation registries."

Please listen to the full episode on your favorite podcast app, or over on our blog, where you can read the full transcript. If you’re not already subscribed to the Defense in Depth podcast, please go ahead and subscribe now. Thanks to our podcast sponsor ActiveState. Also thanks to our security tip sponsor for this episode, Malanta.

Huge thanks to our sponsor, ActiveState

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Rip, Replace, Repeat: What CISOs Actually Learn From Swapping Security Tools

Ripping out a security tool sounds simple in theory, but in practice it's budget battles, vendor retention calls, and the rare executive who suddenly cares about a line item they've ignored for years.

For our recent Reddit AMA, CISO Series brought together a group of seasoned security veterans to talk through what actually triggers a rip-and-replace, from a compromised subsidiary to eight years of stagnant updates. Read the full article here.

Big thanks to our participants:

• Steve Zalewski, (u/cybersecsteve), co-host, Defense in Depth

• Howard Holton, (u/cxo-analyst), former CEO, GigaOm

  • Check out Howard’s new analyst and advisory firm - Phronia Counsel

• Bil Harmer, (u/wilharm3), CISO, Supabase

• Adam Glick, (u/CISOAdam), CISO, PSG Equity

Cybersecurity Headlines - Department of Know

Our LIVE stream of The Department of Know happens every Friday at 4 PM ET / 1 PM PT with CISO Series producer Richard Stroffolino, and a panel of security pros. Each week, we bring you the cybersecurity stories that actually matter, and the conversations you’ve been having at work all week long.

Friday’s episode will feature Nick Espinosa, host, The Deep Dive Radio Show and Dennis Pickett, vp, CISO, Westat. Join us on YouTube and catch up on what shaped the week in security.

Thanks to our Cybersecurity Headlines sponsor, QuilrAI

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Cyber chatter from around the web...
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"Hugging Face discloses breach linked to autonomous AI agent" (More here)

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Coming up on Super Cyber Friday:

• [07-24-2026] - “Hacking the Reduced Tech Stack”

• [07-31-2026] - “Hacking the SMB Security Gap”

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Cybersecurity Headlines - Daily News Shorts

Subscribe to the CISO Series YouTube channel, for daily shorts videos from CISO Series reporter, Rich Stroffolino. You can find all of the stories he’s covered, plus new content every weekday, at the Cybersecurity Headlines Shorts YouTube playlist.

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