How Microsoft Is Securing the Agentic Enterprise | Aaron Zollman
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The top story has been that the AI models are happy. The models went out under the the Internet and tested the security of several organizations. Is it something to be scared of? Yes. Is it something to throw up your hands and worry about? No. You've done all of these things before. We have created containerization and factories. We have secured applications with vulnerabilities. The qualities of these agents, they're unpredictable. They're irrational. They're prone to lashing out. And as you go through this list, you arrive at the point where you're like, Jesus, these sound like interns.
If you just start with, oh, well, it's just gonna run as me. That's gonna end poorly. Yes. You're going back to first principles, but you also have to go even a little deeper and start to redefine what does containerization even mean for you.
The issue was never that the CISO didn't know it was broken. The issue and the difficult part of being a CISO was knowing what to fix Because you had a finite resource, which was a programmer, and now that seems that the math is gone.
We were only three weeks out from NASA supply chain chain, but Wait.
What's the massive supply chain thing?
Oh,
man. When first appeared inside Microsoft, the security team's reaction was familiar. How do we ban this? The next question turned out to be much more important. How do we make it work? In this episode from Black Hat, a sixteen z's Joel De La Garza sits down with Microsoft Gaming Deputy CISO Aaron Zollman to talk about securing AI agents that can access data, use tools, write code, and act on behalf of employees. They discuss why agents need their own identities, what air gapped means when a model can find unexpected paths to the Internet, and why securing this new generation of software requi
So today, we've got Aaron Zollman from Microsoft, the deputy CSO over there responsible for a whole lot of different things. And you've been at the forefront, like everyone, I guess, at this point, dealing with AI AI rollout into an environment. And you're probably at a company that's leaning in a lot more to AI than probably most companies, and everybody's So leaning in thank you so much for joining. We'd love to talk The last couple weeks It's funny, it's like weeks have become like dog years, right? It's like every week is seven weeks in old world time. The last couple of weeks have been ve
think we were terrified of it at first, right, as everyone was. This thing explodes. Everyone wants to install it overnight, and it has no guardrails. It has no guardrails. And worse than that, know, it had fully open remote pull whatever down from the Internet supply chain pain. And so our immediate reaction was how have we banned this? And then the immediate reaction after that was, well, wait, everyone wants to do this. How do we find a way to make this work? Right. And then
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