Artificial Intelligence
AI Has Lowered the Barrier to Entry Into Cybercrime

Kalle Bjorn, Sr Director, Systems Engineering – Middle East, Fortinet, says cybersecurity is a strategic enabler for realizing the full potential of AI
How is generative AI being utilized to enhance cybersecurity measures today?
As today’s network complexity grows, so does the need for intelligent tools that can simplify management tasks and enhance efficiency. Generative AI (GenAI) has become a cornerstone for making it happen. It can truly transform how Day 0 to Day 2 network operations are performed.
According to Gartner research, by 2026, GenAI technology is expected to influence 20% of initial network configuration, a dramatic rise from virtually none in 2023. Currently, 65% of network activities, including configuration and troubleshooting, are still performed manually, highlighting a significant opportunity for automation and efficiency improvements through GenAI.
What potential risks does generative AI introduce in the cybersecurity landscape, such as AI-driven cyberattacks?
AI has become a double-edged sword for cybersecurity. On the one hand, it has lowered the barrier to entry into cybercrime, enabling would-be criminals to generate malware even when they lack programming skills and providing more sophisticated criminals with capabilities few could have imagined a short time ago. On the other hand, cyber defenders can take advantage of AI for intelligent automation and defense strategies.
Last year, global leaders raised this issue to the World Economic Forum’s Centre for Cybersecurity, with the aim of helping organizations everywhere to better comprehend the cybersecurity implications of using AI technologies and how to adopt these offerings securely. As a result of these discussions, the World Economic Forum launched its AI and Cyber Initiative to develop guidance for organizations to manage the complex cyber risks associated with AI use.
Understanding and implementing risk management measures positively impacts more than just an enterprise’s cyber resilience. Cybersecurity is a strategic enabler for realizing the full potential of AI. By embedding security into AI systems from the ground up, organizations transform risk mitigation into a competitive advantage, ensuring trustworthiness and ethical compliance.
How can organizations leverage generative AI for proactive threat detection and response?
GenAI can analyze massive data streams, recognize patterns, and deliver actionable intelligence in real-time. It also offers advanced scripting assistance, proactive troubleshooting and IoT vulnerability diagnostics, and automated implementation of AI-recommended remediations, leading to a more secure, efficient, resilient network and, eventually, an autonomous network. FortiAI for FortiManager is revolutionizing network management by integrating GenAI to do just this. FortiAI provides rapid insights into vulnerabilities, quarantining risky IoT devices and helping organizations stay ahead of potential threats.
What ethical concerns arise when using generative AI in cybersecurity, and how can they be addressed?
AI presents a multitude of perspectives and ethical considerations, particularly concerning its development, deployment, and economic ramifications.
To ensure explainability and accountability in AI-driven security decision-making, security teams can focus opting for transparent AI models whose decision-making processes can be understood and audited by human experts. Organisations should also implement robust validation and testing, rigorously testing AI models with diverse datasets to identify and mitigate biases or inaccuracies and following any local and global regulations around AI.
How do you see generative AI evolving in the cybersecurity domain over the next few years?
As we continue to imagine AI in every aspect of cybersecurity, we’re witnessing a revolution that’s reshaping the industry, making it more proactive, responsive, and adaptive than ever before.
GenAI offers transformative potential, as demonstrated by Klarna’s AI Assistant, which now handles the workload equivalent to 700 customer service agents. For Klarna, this translates into an estimated $40 million in annual savings, showcasing AI’s ability to enhance productivity and reduce operational costs.
It is widely acknowledged that AI will have a profound impact on everyday life, though the precise nature and trajectory of this impact remain difficult to predict. Nonetheless, it is imperative that we adopt a forward-thinking approach to understanding and harnessing AI’s potential, ensuring that its development is aligned with societal benefit and economic sustainability. By prioritizing cybersecurity, organizations can protect their investments in AI, supporting innovation while strengthening defenses.
What role does human oversight (HITL) play in ensuring generative AI systems are effectively managing cybersecurity threats?
Automation is particularly important in cybersecurity given the ongoing shortage of expert security staff. However, human oversight will still be important. Security teams will need to be equipped with the knowledge and skills to understand, interpret, and manage AI-driven security systems effectively. The Fortinet Training Institute recently added two new AI-focused modules to its Security Awareness and Training service to enhance learners’ understanding of AI and the role this technology plays in cybersecurity.
AI excels at tactical responses based on predefined rules. However, defining security policies, understanding risk tolerance, and making strategic decisions still require human expertise and intuition. Analysing new and evolving threats, understanding their potential impact, and developing innovative countermeasures will also still require human intelligence and creativity.
Artificial Intelligence
Cequence Intros Security Layer to Protect Agentic AI Interactions

Cequence Security has announced significant enhancements to its Unified API Protection (UAP) platform to deliver a comprehensive security solution for agentic AI development, usage, and connectivity. This enhancement empowers organizations to secure every AI agent interaction, regardless of the development framework. By implementing robust guardrails, the solution protects both enterprise-hosted AI applications and external AI APIs, preventing sensitive data exfiltration through business logic abuse and ensuring regulatory compliance.
There is no AI without APIs, and the rapid growth of agentic AI applications has amplified concerns about securing sensitive data during their interactions. These AI-driven exchanges can inadvertently expose internal systems, create significant vulnerabilities, and jeopardize valuable data assets. Recognising this critical challenge, Cequence has expanded its UAP platform, introducing an enhanced security layer to govern interactions between AI agents and backend services specifically. This new layer of security enables customers to detect and prevent AI bots such as ChatGPT from OpenAI and Perplexity from harvesting organizational data.
Internal telemetry across Global 2000 deployments shows that the overwhelming majority of AI-related bot traffic, nearly 88%, originates from large language model infrastructure, with most requests obfuscated behind generic or unidentified user agents. Less than 4% of this traffic is transparently attributed to bots like GPTBot or Gemini. Over 97% of it comes from U.S.-based IP addresses, highlighting the concentration of risk in North American enterprises. Cequence’s ability to detect and govern this traffic in real time, despite the lack of clear identifiers, reinforces the platform’s unmatched readiness for securing agentic AI in the wild.
Key enhancements to Cequence’s UAP platform include:
- Block unauthorized AI data harvesting: Understanding that external AI often seeks to learn by broadly collecting data without obtaining permission, Cequence provides organizations with the critical capability to manage which AI, if any, can interact with their proprietary information.
- Detect and prevent sensitive data exposure: Empowers organizations to effectively detect and prevent sensitive data exposure across all forms of agentic AI. This includes safeguarding against external AI harvesting attempts and securing data within internal AI applications. The platform’s intelligent analysis automatically differentiates between legitimate data access during normal application usage and anomalous activities signaling sensitive data exfiltration, ensuring comprehensive protection against AI-related data loss.
- Discover and manage shadow AI: Automatically discovers and classifies APIs from agentic AI tools like Microsoft Copilot and Salesforce Agentforce, presenting a unified view alongside customers’ internal and third-party APIs. This comprehensive visibility empowers organizations to easily manage these interactions and effectively detect and block sensitive data leaks, whether from external AI harvesting or internal AI usage.
- Seamless integration: Integrates easily into DevOps frameworks for discovering internal AI applications and generates OpenAPI specifications that detail API schemas and security mechanisms, including strong authentication and security policies. Cequence delivers powerful protection without relying on third-party tools, while seamlessly integrating with the customer’s existing cybersecurity ecosystem. This simplifies management and security enforcement.
“Gartner predicts that by 2028, 33% of enterprise software applications will include agentic AI, up from less than 1% in 2024, enabling 15% of day-to-day work decisions to be made autonomously. We’ve taken immediate action to extend our market-leading API security and bot management capabilities,” said Ameya Talwalkar, CEO of Cequence. “Agentic AI introduces a new layer of complexity, where every agent behaves like a bidirectional API. That’s our wheelhouse. Our platform helps organizations embrace innovation at scale without sacrificing governance, compliance, or control.”
These extended capabilities will be generally available in June.
Artificial Intelligence
Fortinet Expands FortiAI Across its Security Fabric Platform

Fortinet has announced major upgrades to FortiAI, integrating advanced AI capabilities across its Security Fabric platform to combat evolving threats, automate security tasks, and protect AI systems from cyber risks. As cybercriminals increasingly weaponize AI to launch sophisticated attacks, organizations need smarter defenses. Fortinet—with 500+ AI patents and 15 years of AI innovation—now embeds FortiAI across its platform to:
- Stop AI-powered threats
- Automate security and network operations
- Secure AI tools used by businesses
“Fortinet’s AI advantage stems from the breadth and depth of our AI ecosystem—shaped by over a decade of AI innovation and reinforced by more patents than any other cybersecurity vendor,” said Michael Xie, Founder, President, and Chief Technology Officer at Fortinet. “By embedding FortiAI across the Fortinet Security Fabric platform, including new agentic AI capabilities, we’re empowering our customers to reduce the workload on their security and network analysts while improving the efficiency, speed, and accuracy of their security and networking operations. In parallel, we’ve added coverage across the Fabric ecosystem to enable customers to monitor and control the use of GenAI-enabled services within their organization.”
Key upgrades:
FortiAI-Assist – AI That Works for You
- Automatic Network Fixes: AI configures, validates, and troubleshoots network issues without human help.
- Smarter Security Alerts: Cuts through noise, prioritizing only critical threats.
- AI-Powered Threat Hunting: Scans for hidden risks and traces attack origins.
FortiAI-Protect – Defending Against AI Threats
- Tracks 6,500+ AI apps, blocking risky or unauthorized usage.
- Stops new malware with machine learning.
- Adapts to new attack methods in real time.
FortiAI-SecureAI – Safe AI Adoption
- Protects AI models, data, and cloud workloads.
- Prevents leaks from tools like ChatGPT.
- Enforces zero-trust access for AI systems.
FortiAI processes queries locally, ensuring sensitive data never leaves your network.
Artificial Intelligence
SandboxAQ Platform Tackles AI Agent “Non-Human Identity” Threats

SandboxAQ has announced the general availability of AQtive Guard, a platform designed to secure Non-Human Identities (NHIs) and cryptographic assets. This critical security solution arrives as organizations worldwide face increasingly sophisticated AI-driven threats capable of autonomously infiltrating networks, bypassing traditional defenses, and exploiting vulnerabilities at machine speed.
Modern enterprises are experiencing an unprecedented surge in machine-to-machine communications, with billions of AI agents now operating across corporate networks. These digital entities – ranging from legitimate automation tools to potential attack vectors – depend on cryptographic keys, digital certificates, and machine identities that frequently go unmanaged. This oversight creates massive security gaps that malicious actors can exploit, leading to potential data breaches, compliance violations, and operational disruptions.
“There will be more than one billion AI agents with significant autonomous power in the next few years,” stated Jack Hidary, CEO of SandboxAQ. “Enterprises are giving AI agents a vastly increased range of capabilities to impact customers and real-world assets. This creates a dangerous attack surface for adversaries. AQtive Guard’s Discover and Protect modules address this urgent issue.”
AQtive Guard addresses these challenges through its integrated Discover and Protect modules. The Discover component maintains continuous, real-time visibility into all NHIs and cryptographic assets including keys, certificates, and algorithms – a fundamental requirement for maintaining regulatory compliance. The Protect module then automates critical security workflows, enforcing essential policies like automated credential rotation and certificate renewal to proactively mitigate risks before they can be exploited.
At the core of AQtive Guard’s capabilities are SandboxAQ’s industry-leading Large Quantitative Models (LQMs), which provide organizations with unmatched visibility and control over their cryptographic infrastructure. This advanced technology enables enterprises to successfully navigate evolving security standards, including the latest NIST requirements, while maintaining robust protection against emerging threats.

Marc Manzano, General Manager of Cybersecurity at SandboxAQ
“As organizations accelerate AI adoption and the use of agents and machine-to-machine communication across all business domains and functions, maintaining a real-time, accurate inventory of NHIs and cryptographic assets is an essential cybersecurity practice. Being able to automatically remediate vulnerabilities and policy violations identified is crucial to decrease time to mitigation and prevent potential breaches within the first day of use of our software,” said Marc Manzano, General Manager of Cybersecurity at SandboxAQ.
SandboxAQ has significantly strengthened AQtive Guard’s capabilities through deep technical integrations with two cybersecurity industry leaders. The platform now features robust integration with CrowdStrike’s Falcon® platform, enabling direct ingestion of endpoint data for real-time vulnerability detection and immediate one-click remediation. This seamless connection allows security teams to identify and neutralize threats with unprecedented speed.
Additionally, AQtive Guard now offers full interoperability with Palo Alto Networks’ security solutions. By analyzing and incorporating firewall log data, the platform delivers enhanced network visibility, improved threat detection, and stronger compliance with enterprise security policies across hybrid environments.
AQtive Guard delivers a comprehensive, AI-powered approach to managing NHIs and cryptographic assets through four key functional areas. The platform’s advanced vulnerability detection system aggregates data from multiple sources including major cloud providers like AWS and Google Cloud, maintaining a continuously updated inventory of all cryptographic assets.
The solution’s AI-driven risk analysis engine leverages SandboxAQ’s proprietary Cyber LQMs to accurately prioritize threats while dramatically reducing false positives. This capability is enhanced by an integrated GenAI assistant that helps security teams navigate complex compliance requirements and implement appropriate remediation strategies.
For operational efficiency, AQtive Guard automates the entire lifecycle management of cryptographic assets, including issuance, rotation, and revocation processes. This automation significantly reduces manual errors while eliminating the risks associated with stale or compromised credentials. The platform also provides robust compliance support with pre-configured rulesets for major regulatory standards, customizable query capabilities, and comprehensive reporting features. These tools help organizations accelerate their transition to new NIST standards while maintaining continuous compliance with evolving requirements.
Available now as a fully managed, cloud-native solution, AQtive Guard is designed for rapid deployment and immediate impact. Enterprises can register for priority access to begin early adoption and conduct comprehensive risk assessments of their cryptographic infrastructure.
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