When I walked the floor at Black Hat earlier this year, one thing stood out – the vocabulary of cybersecurity is changing faster than ever. Gone are the days when the buzz was about Zero Trust, EDR, or SASE. This year’s hot topics are reflective of the buzz in the industry and every conversation – AI. Deep Fake Detection, GenAI Protection, Agentic AI Pen Testing, Session Defense, MCP Gateways and LLM Firewalls all featured in one or more booths.
It is easy to get overwhelmed by the acronyms, the new buzzwords which feel like marketing noise. Listening closely, it appears that there is a deeper story unfolding. The industry isn’t just reacting to AI anymore; it’s being redefined by it. What I saw is the rise of context-driven, AI-empowered, autonomous security. The cyber-security landscape is developing into defense that is adaptive, intelligent, and, increasingly, machine-led.
1. Context is King
AI is now both the attacker and the defender. Agentic AI brings about its own security challenges because it is difficult to identify the source of the action being taken. In the future, when there is a security threat identified because of an action taken by an agent, is the agent responsible? Is the user who invoked the agent/ prompted the agent to perform a task responsible? Or is the author of the original code to blame? Agentic AI makes it difficult to establish the identity of the entity making the request. Context based identification becomes important and it is an area that is gathering a lot of attention among startups everywhere. This context is derived from logs, activity patterns and the destination of the request. The who-you-are is as important as where-are-you-going, what-you-are-doing and why. Essentially, it’s about teaching systems to differentiate between a “good” autonomous agent and a rogue one.
2. Cloud and Application Security Reinvented
Cloud and application security are getting a makeover. It is no longer about securing APIs or cloud misconfigurations in isolation, it is about creating continuous visibility and protection loops across dynamic environments.
The phrase Cloud Application Defense and Response (CADR) popped up frequently – a next-gen evolution of traditional workload protection. Add to that Application Security Posture Management (ASPM), and you start to see how vendors are converging on a model that’s proactive, context-aware, and runtime-focused.
Enterprises want fewer tools, more integration, and real-time insights that translate into action. The future of app security isn’t about more dashboards – it is about better context and automatic defense.
3. Visibility, Exposure, and Continuous Context
Another big trend was Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM), or how enterprises manage the risks of exposure to threats in their environment. This year’s narrative wasn’t just about scanning for exposures but about prioritizing them through context.
Even legacy areas like SIEM are evolving into Next-Gen SIEMs, powered by AI reasoning and large-scale data mining. Every event and log entry is a potential signal, waiting for AI to connect the dots.
Visibility is no longer a checkbox. It’s becoming the foundation for contextual understanding – the common thread across every product category.
Final thoughts
The next phase of cybersecurity will be about reasoning and understanding not just what is happening but why it’s happening and what it means. Defense using AI is manifest in different ways – AI-native firewalls, LLM firewalls, designed to protect large language models from prompt injection or data leakage. Whether it’s an AI firewall deciding if an LLM query is safe, or a session defense tool isolating a browser tab in real time, decisions will increasingly be made on context, intent, and behavior.
In many ways, security is becoming an adaptive conversation – not just between people and systems, but between systems themselves. We’re moving from rulebooks to reasoning, from humans in control to humans in partnership with AI. The key takeaway? The new battlefront is AI versus AI. We’ve entered an era where machines are defending against other machines. Terminator 2 and Transformers do not seem all that far away in the future any more.
Mithun's Musings 