Frequently Asked Questions about Agentic AI

Agentic AI is a term used to describe autonomous, goal-oriented, systems that are able to perceive their environment, take decisions, and act to achieve specific goals. Unlike traditional AI, which is often rule-based or reactive, agentic AI systems can learn, adapt, and operate with a degree of independence. In cybersecurity, agentic AI enables continuous monitoring, real-time threat detection, and proactive response capabilities.
How can agentic AI enhance application security (AppSec) practices? Agentic AI can revolutionize AppSec practices by integrating intelligent agents into the software development lifecycle (SDLC). These agents can monitor code repositories continuously, analyze commits to find vulnerabilities, and use advanced techniques such as static code analysis and dynamic testing. Agentic AI can also prioritize vulnerabilities based on their real-world impact and exploitability, providing contextually aware insights for remediation. What is a code-property graph (CPG) and why is it so important for agentic artificial intelligence in AppSec.  intelligent ai security  is a rich representation that shows the relationships between code elements such as variables, functions and data flows. By building a comprehensive CPG, agentic AI can develop a deep understanding of an application's structure, potential attack paths, and security posture. This contextual awareness enables the AI to make more accurate and relevant security decisions, prioritize vulnerabilities effectively, and generate targeted fixes. What are the benefits of AI-powered automatic vulnerabilities fixing? AI-powered automatic vulnerabilities fixing uses the CPG's deep understanding of the codebase to identify vulnerabilities and generate context-aware fixes that do not break existing features. The AI analyses the code around the vulnerability to understand the intended functionality and then creates a fix without breaking existing features or introducing any new bugs. This approach significantly reduces the time between vulnerability discovery and remediation, alleviates the burden on development teams, and ensures a consistent and reliable approach to vulnerability remediation.  What are some potential challenges and risks associated with the adoption of agentic AI in cybersecurity? Some potential challenges and risks include:

Ensuring trust and accountability in autonomous AI decision-making
Protecting AI systems against adversarial attacks and data manipulation
Building and maintaining accurate and up-to-date code property graphs
Addressing ethical and societal implications of autonomous systems
Integrating AI agentic into existing security tools
How can organizations ensure the trustworthiness and accountability of autonomous AI agents in cybersecurity? By establishing clear guidelines, organizations can establish mechanisms to ensure accountability and trustworthiness of AI agents. It is important to implement robust testing and validating processes in order to ensure the safety and correctness of AI-generated fixes. Also, it's essential that humans are able intervene and maintain oversight. Regular audits, continuous monitoring, and explainable AI techniques can also help build trust in the decision-making processes of autonomous agents.  What are some best practices for developing and deploying secure agentic AI systems? The following are some of the best practices for developing secure AI systems:

Adopting secure coding practices and following security guidelines throughout the AI development lifecycle
Protect against attacks by implementing adversarial training techniques and model hardening.
Ensure data privacy and security when AI training and deployment
Validating AI models and their outputs through thorough testing
Maintaining transparency in AI decision making processes
Regularly monitoring and updating AI systems to adapt to evolving threats and vulnerabilities
Agentic AI can help organizations stay ahead of the ever-changing threat landscape by continuously monitoring networks, applications, and data for emerging threats. These autonomous agents are able to analyze large amounts of data in real time, identifying attack patterns, vulnerabilities and anomalies which might be evading traditional security controls. Agentic AI systems provide proactive defenses against evolving cyber-threats by adapting their detection models and learning from every interaction. What role does machine learning play in agentic AI for cybersecurity? Machine learning is a critical component of agentic AI in cybersecurity. It allows autonomous agents to identify patterns and correlate data and make intelligent decisions using that information. Machine learning algorithms are used to power many aspects of agentic AI including threat detection and prioritization. They also automate the fixing of vulnerabilities. Machine learning improves agentic AI's accuracy, efficiency and effectiveness by continuously learning and adjusting.  Agentic AI automates many of the laborious and time-consuming tasks that are involved in vulnerability management. Autonomous agents can continuously scan codebases, identify vulnerabilities, and prioritize them based on their real-world impact and exploitability. The agents can generate context-aware solutions automatically, which reduces the amount of time and effort needed for manual remediation. By providing real-time insights and actionable recommendations, agentic AI enables security teams to focus on high-priority issues and respond more quickly and effectively to potential threats.

What are some real-world examples of agentic AI being used in cybersecurity today? Agentic AI is used in cybersecurity.

Autonomous threat detection and response platforms that continuously monitor networks and endpoints for malicious activity
AI-powered vulnerability scans that prioritize and identify security flaws within applications and infrastructure
Intelligent threat intelligence systems gather data from multiple sources and analyze it to provide proactive protection against emerging threats
Autonomous incident response tools that can contain and mitigate cyber attacks without human intervention
AI-driven fraud detection solutions that identify and prevent fraudulent activities in real-time
How can agentic AI help bridge the skills gap in cybersecurity and alleviate the burden on security teams? Agentic AI can help address the cybersecurity skills gap by automating many of the repetitive and time-consuming tasks that security professionals currently handle manually. Agentic AI systems free human experts from repetitive and time-consuming tasks like continuous monitoring, vulnerability scanning and incident response. Agentic AI's insights and recommendations can also help less experienced security personnel to make better decisions and respond more efficiently to potential threats.  Agentic AI helps organizations to meet compliance and regulation requirements more effectively. It does this by providing continuous monitoring and real-time threat detection capabilities, as well as automated remediation. Autonomous agents can ensure that security controls are consistently enforced, vulnerabilities are promptly addressed, and security incidents are properly documented and reported. The use of agentic AI raises new compliance concerns, including ensuring transparency, accountability and fairness in AI decision-making, as well as protecting privacy and security for data used to train and analyze AI. How can organizations integrate agentic AI into their existing security tools and processes? To successfully integrate agentic AI into existing security tools and processes, organizations should:

Assess their current security infrastructure and identify areas where agentic AI can provide the most value
Develop a clear strategy and roadmap for agentic AI adoption, aligned with overall security goals and objectives
Make sure that AI agent systems are compatible and can exchange data and insights seamlessly with existing security tools.
Provide training and support for security personnel to effectively use and collaborate with agentic AI systems
Create governance frameworks to oversee the ethical and responsible use of AI agents in cybersecurity
Some emerging trends and directions for agentic artificial intelligence in cybersecurity include:

Collaboration and coordination among autonomous agents from different security domains, platforms and platforms
Development of more advanced and contextually aware AI models that can adapt to complex and dynamic security environments
Integration of agentic AI with other emerging technologies, such as blockchain, cloud computing, and IoT security
Exploration of novel approaches to AI security, such as homomorphic encryption and federated learning, to protect AI systems and data
Advancement of explainable AI techniques to improve transparency and trust in autonomous security decision-making
How can AI agents help protect organizations from targeted and advanced persistent threats? Agentic AI provides a powerful defense for APTs and targeting attacks by constantly monitoring networks and systems to detect subtle signs of malicious behavior. Autonomous agents are able to analyze massive amounts of data in real time, identifying patterns that could indicate a persistent and stealthy threat. Agentic AI, which adapts to new attack methods and learns from previous attacks, can help organizations detect APTs and respond more quickly, minimising the impact of a breach.

What are the advantages of using agentic AI to detect real-time threats and monitor security? The benefits of using agentic AI for continuous security monitoring and real-time threat detection include:

Monitoring of endpoints, networks, and applications for security threats 24/7
Rapid identification and prioritization of threats based on their severity and potential impact
Reduced false positives and alert fatigue for security teams
Improved visibility into complex and distributed IT environments
Ability to detect novel and evolving threats that might evade traditional security controls
Faster response times and minimized potential damage from security incidents
How can agentic AI enhance incident response and remediation? Agentic AI has the potential to enhance incident response processes and remediation by:

Automatically detecting and triaging security incidents based on their severity and potential impact
Contextual insights and recommendations to effectively contain and mitigate incidents
Orchestrating and automating incident response workflows across multiple security tools and platforms
Generating detailed reports and documentation to support compliance and forensic purposes
Continuously learning from incident data to improve future detection and response capabilities
Enabling faster, more consistent incident remediation and reducing the impact of security breaches
What are some of the considerations when training and upgrading security teams so that they can work effectively with AI agent systems? Organizations should:

Provide comprehensive training on the capabilities, limitations, and proper use of agentic AI tools
Foster a culture of collaboration and continuous learning, encouraging security personnel to work alongside AI systems and provide feedback for improvement
Develop clear protocols and guidelines for human-AI interaction, including when to trust AI recommendations and when to escalate issues for human review
Invest in upskilling programs that help security professionals develop the necessary technical and analytical skills to interpret and act upon AI-generated insights
Encourage cross-functional collaboration between security, data science, and IT teams to ensure a holistic approach to agentic AI adoption and use


the benefits of agentic AI with the need for human oversight and decision-making in cybersecurity? To achieve the best balance between using agentic AI in cybersecurity and maintaining human oversight, organizations should:

Establish clear roles and responsibilities for human and AI decision-makers, ensuring that critical security decisions are subject to human review and approval
Implement transparent and explainable AI techniques that allow security personnel to understand and trust the reasoning behind AI recommendations
Test and validate AI-generated insights to ensure their accuracy, reliability and safety
Maintain human-in the-loop methods for high-risk security scenarios such as incident response or threat hunting
Encourage a culture that is responsible in the use of AI, highlighting the importance of human judgement and accountability when it comes to cybersecurity decisions.
Regularly monitor and audit AI systems to identify potential biases, errors, or unintended consequences, and make necessary adjustments to ensure optimal performance and alignment with organizational security goals