Here is a message from Joel, Zane and the a16z infra team that we sent to our portfolio companies yesterday, regarding the current cybersecurity situation. Stay safe out there!
The previous week should make it obvious that things have changed. Vulnerabilities are being discovered and exploited at a rate that has never been seen before. While there has been a flood of new vulnerabilities AI agents are being adopted at scale multiplying the potential risk. Agents not only help automate the attacker lifecycle, every AI agent is an insider threat. Your environments are designed to withstand attacks from the outside, not from within. As such, we are suggesting company leaders consider the following drastic changes:
Significantly increase resources for security work. The average enterprise allocates roughly 10% of its tech spend to security. Consider doubling that. There are likely thousands of vulnerabilities that need fixing in your environments. Security through obscurity no longer works, all that can be exploited will be exploited.
Establish a zero tolerance policy for new features and product releases. Re-examine launch and release schedules and consider delays to ensure all vulnerabilities are patched before deploying new features or products.
Double tap the zombies. Find all old legacy environments that have been neglected and turn them off. Labs, test environments, zombie CI/CD projects etc. Turn it off for now. If it isn’t tied to revenue, kill it.
End the risk acceptance process. Over the last 10 years the risk acceptance process has morphed from a way to accept risks to enable the business, to a way to justify never fixing security issues. Adopt a zero tolerance policy for security issues and risks.
Going forward, scale up agents not people. The threat is moving at machine speed and you’ll need to respond in kind. Push your security team to automate as much of their detection and response process as possible. Security teams are risk averse and some have been slow to adopt new technologies. Push them to adapt.
This is general advice, Our team is also available as a resource to your security teams for any follow-up or technical questions.
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Every AI agent is an insider threat sits next to the advice to scale agents for detection and response, and those are not the same boundary. A sandbox that keeps the patch agent off the production network is isolation. It does not decide whether that agent may open a change against the service it just scanned. I would bind the write to the vulnerability id and the file the scanner named, and refuse a diff that touches anything else, even when the process never left its box.
There’s something wonderfully circular about responding to "every AI agent is an insider threat" by scaling up more agents. The real security boundary may stop being human vs machine and become authority: who or what gets to act without asking.