Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

AI is making social engineering attacks significantly more effective, according to a new report from cyber insurance firm Resilience. These attacks were behind more than 85% of losses in the first half of 2026, compared to less than 20% during H1 2024. “Losses tied to phishing, social engineering, and transfer fraud have climbed from 17.7% of incurred losses in H1 2024 to 85.3% in H1 2026, the single largest increase in the report’s five half-year comparison,” Resilience says.

For twenty years, the software security playbook has worked the same way. You find the vulnerability, score it, open a ticket, assign it to a human, wait for the fix, ship the patch, and prove it happened. Every step in that sequence assumes humans can review each fix individually and still keep up. Frontier AI broke that assumption. The exploit window has collapsed from weeks to hours. Attackers reason across your codebase, chain their findings, and ship exploits before a CVE is even published.

The riskiest thing an AI agent does all day isn’t writing code. It’s shopping. Every few minutes, it reaches out for a package, an AI asset, or a tool, and pulls it in with no real way to check what’s inside. We think the fix is agent immunization: security that lives inside what an agent consumes, builds, and ships, not a wall built around it.

Agent observability tools capture traces, metrics, logs, and evaluations across AI agent workflows. They help teams reconstruct execution paths, inspect tool calls and handoffs, diagnose failures, and monitor latency, cost, and output quality. This guide also covers complementary security platforms that discover agents, enforce runtime policies, or control the privileges agents receive. Agents don’t fail in straight lines.

Adversaries are using AI to launch cyber attacks in record time, forcing security teams to measure responses in minutes instead of months. Phishing campaigns built with large language models (LLMs) achieve click-through rates 4.5 times higher than traditional methods,1 and the average time between initial compromise and lateral movement has fallen to just 29 minutes.2 This is a 65% increase from the prior year.2 State and local governments and higher education institutions are at an inflection point.

Ask any security engineer what they actually think about their vulnerability scanner, and you will get a version of the same answer. They trust maybe 20% of what shows up in the patching queue. The rest gets a suspicious glance, and a slow death in a backlog. That is the real cost of a false positive. It is quiet, it compounds, and it hollows the tool out from the inside. It is also the reason autonomous pentesting came to replace hypotheses with confirmed exploits.

Two teams inventory the same organization and return different numbers. One counts forty-one AI assets, the other counts one hundred and twelve. Neither is wrong, because they counted different things, and nobody had decided what a row represents. ‍ Guidance on building an AI inventory covers which fields a row should carry and skips what a row is. That question determines the count, the risk scores, the regulatory classification and whether two inventories can ever be reconciled.

As generative AI adoption surges, so does a dangerous new enterprise risk: AI prompt data leakage — the unintentional exposure of confidential corporate data to third-party Large Language Models via user prompts. Why does it happen? Driven by productivity pressure and the need to speed up their work, employees routinely bypass traditional DLP controls.

Join us at swampUP New York, September 1-3, for our joint session Trusted AI Delivery at Scale: Securing Every Artifact from Curation to Cloud, where we walk the full chain of custody from the moment a package enters your organization to the moment your agent runs on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore. Register here. AI agents are becoming real users of internal systems. They open pull requests, run queries, and pull and publish artifacts in repositories like JFrog Artifactory.

Artificial Intelligence has quickly become one of the most important conversations in cybersecurity. Much of that conversation focuses on what attackers might create next: AI-generated malware, deepfakes, autonomous attacks, or entirely new categories of threats. Those risks matter, but focusing only on new attack techniques misses a much larger transformation already taking place. The real impact of AI is not only what attackers can create. It is how efficiently they can operate.