Aaron Levie: Agent swarms can help enterprises defend against security risks
Box CEO Aaron Levie believes that the enterprise security risk surface is highly fragmented, and most large enterprises struggle even to keep up with libraries, tools, and infrastructure. Once data and infrastructure are properly organized, agent swarms can distribute calls to security tools, test attack variants, read logs, and assess enterprise data risks. This type of capability has only emerged in the past few months and depends on long-running agents and sufficiently good computer use. He believes that every layer of the security stack—identity, firewalls, network, code scanning, data protection, and so on—represents a huge opportunity, but the prerequisite is to first do the foundational work well.
View original postIt's been an eventful week. Multiple vulnerabilites in Internet facing software, coding repositories, examples of agent behavior that seem concerning and a flurry of security specialists with solutions that can partially solve your problem. There in lies the challenge. Given the state of IT and security infrastructure, no one solution works. Let's break it down: 1/3 1. Vulnerabilites are being found and will continue to be found as models get more capable, the fragmented nature of the effort denies us the opportunity for a comprehensive find and replace option. 2. Even if all vulnerabilities could be found instantly and patches available - we will be reliant on the ability of enterprises to deploy all these changes at speed. It is not clear what the collateral impact of all these patches will/could be to our infrastructure of deployed en masse. We will need a hybrid patch approach. 3. Virtual patching(VP) is needed in conjunction with direct patching but for a comprehensive (VP) solve you have to be lucky enough to have "modern frontier defenders" (Cyber companies that have vaulted infrastructure that can create patches at speed and push content rapidly to protect their customers) you need them for your network traffic, your traffic to applications on the cloud, your WAF, your end point. 4. There will continue to be patches that will need to be deployed directly but virtual patching will take the heavy load off. 2/3 Medium term solve: Unfortunately token economics and current cyber architectures will not allow for defender swarms to contend with an offensive attack launched using agents. (Some x pundits who aren't steeped in cyber should take heed). Yes, theoretically we should aspire to have these agentic swarms defend us when we are under attack, unfortunately an attack is a sniper moment, chained vulnerabilities, cloaked attack followed by swift exfiltration. It's a speed program not a brute force problem. To solve for this, enterprises need to get their SOC architecture right, logs, feeds, cyber products orchestrated via a modern SOAR for swift response. Only then can we deploy agents to detect and remediate. In addition, enterprises need to modernize and dare I say platformize their perimeter stack to ensure consistency. Unfortunately, enterprises still seem to not see the urgency across the board, decisions are stuck, CIO/CISO's have a lot on their plate. While some honestly have bit seen the scale of such a problem before and it's hard convincing the organization that one needs to open the floodgates on modernizing the IT and security infrastructure. So we will continue to see environments being brought down to patch today it's for PHP, tomorrow it will be for the next one. 3/3 AI deployments are the"wild wild west" - LLM capabilities are expanding faster than we can build products to secure them. Sure an agent will jump across guardrails in a research lab, which is a lesson for all of us to deploy agents securely. But there is a lag between the discovery, the availability of that in a public model and the time needed for the cyber industry to build governance or an antidote. And no, dear frontier lab friends, the world cannot just trust you to build the solve. The infrastructure industry in tech builds and the cyber industry secured and provides assurance to the boards and organizations around security and safety. AI security is the new attack surface. CEOs (present company included) want AI adoption, getting the pace of adoption wrong could be the last decision we make, at the same time "deploying it wrong" could have the same consequence. There are billions of dollars being spent on coding, is your coding harness secure? Start there. If agents can jump guardrails, they can hide stuff in code. Validate business outcomes needed, test your user case and ensure agentic deployments are well guard railed. Deploy a second set of eyes to watch your deployments for drift, compliance and verifiability.
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It's been an eventful week. Multiple vulnerabilites in Internet facing software, coding repositories, examples of agent behavior that seem concerning and a flurry of security specialists with solutions that can partially solve your problem. There in lies the challenge. Given the state of IT and security infrastructure, no one solution works. Let's break it down: 1/3 1. Vulnerabilites are being found and will continue to be found as models get more capable, the fragmented nature of the effort denies us the opportunity for a comprehensive find and replace option. 2. Even if all vulnerabilities could be found instantly and patches available - we will be reliant on the ability of enterprises to deploy all these changes at speed. It is not clear what the collateral impact of all these patches will/could be to our infrastructure of deployed en masse. We will need a hybrid patch approach. 3. Virtual patching(VP) is needed in conjunction with direct patching but for a comprehensive (VP) solve you have to be lucky enough to have "modern frontier defenders" (Cyber companies that have vaulted infrastructure that can create patches at speed and push content rapidly to protect their customers) you need them for your network traffic, your traffic to applications on the cloud, your WAF, your end point. 4. There will continue to be patches that will need to be deployed directly but virtual patching will take the heavy load off. 2/3 Medium term solve: Unfortunately token economics and current cyber architectures will not allow for defender swarms to contend with an offensive attack launched using agents. (Some x pundits who aren't steeped in cyber should take heed). Yes, theoretically we should aspire to have these agentic swarms defend us when we are under attack, unfortunately an attack is a sniper moment, chained vulnerabilities, cloaked attack followed by swift exfiltration. It's a speed program not a brute force problem. To solve for this, enterprises need to get their SOC architecture right, logs, feeds, cyber products orchestrated via a modern SOAR for swift response. Only then can we deploy agents to detect and remediate. In addition, enterprises need to modernize and dare I say platformize their perimeter stack to ensure consistency. Unfortunately, enterprises still seem to not see the urgency across the board, decisions are stuck, CIO/CISO's have a lot on their plate. While some honestly have bit seen the scale of such a problem before and it's hard convincing the organization that one needs to open the floodgates on modernizing the IT and security infrastructure. So we will continue to see environments being brought down to patch today it's for PHP, tomorrow it will be for the next one. 3/3 AI deployments are the"wild wild west" - LLM capabilities are expanding faster than we can build products to secure them. Sure an agent will jump across guardrails in a research lab, which is a lesson for all of us to deploy agents securely. But there is a lag between the discovery, the availability of that in a public model and the time needed for the cyber industry to build governance or an antidote. And no, dear frontier lab friends, the world cannot just trust you to build the solve. The infrastructure industry in tech builds and the cyber industry secured and provides assurance to the boards and organizations around security and safety. AI security is the new attack surface. CEOs (present company included) want AI adoption, getting the pace of adoption wrong could be the last decision we make, at the same time "deploying it wrong" could have the same consequence. There are billions of dollars being spent on coding, is your coding harness secure? Start there. If agents can jump guardrails, they can hide stuff in code. Validate business outcomes needed, test your user case and ensure agentic deployments are well guard railed. Deploy a second set of eyes to watch your deployments for drift, compliance and verifiability.
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Good assessment of the on the ground reality for security in most large enterprises right now. The fragmented landscape of the risk surface is only going to get more gnarly, making it even more complex for enterprises to solve.
There’s a never ending set of libraries to keep up with, tools to leverage, and sprawling infrastructure, data, and code to secure. Most large enterprises can barely keep up with this, let alone smaller startups or most companies outside of tech.
In many cases enterprises need to work to modernize their tech stacks. Data, in most organizations, is highly fragmented which means you don’t really know the state of risk at any given time. Some systems are open up privileges too broadly, and others are operating primarily via security through obscurity. Lots of upgrading here to do.
Once you can get your data and infra into a better spot, at least you have a chance for agents to help you secure the environment. Agent swarms can fan out, leverage any security tool, test various perpetuations of attacks, read through logs, process enterprise data for risk level, and more. This capability only emerged in the past few months, and none of it would be possible before we had long running agents and computer use good enough.
This is a huge area of opportunity right now for every layer of the security stack across identity, firewall, network, code scanning, data protection, and more. And it’s at least one reason to be optimistic about the balance of offensive and defensive capability.
But everyone does need to do the hard work of getting the basics right at the start.