Defense

Defending a computer has always meant building walls and waiting. The attacker moves, you react, and the distance between those two things is measured in human hours — because somewhere in the middle a person has to read an alert and decide whether it matters. That gap is now the entire game. Attacks arrive in seconds. A careful investigation still takes someone an afternoon. So: if the attackers get agents, can we have some too? The answer turns out to be yes, and cheaply — but the more useful question is who should be holding them. Because almost everything written about this points the work at the people least able to do it. ...

For forty years, malware was code. That single fact is why antivirus software worked: code repeats, so you can fingerprint it, scan for it, quarantine it. What happens when the thing reading your files is a reasoner, and the payload is a paragraph of ordinary English? The research is already done. The answer is a worm with no code in it at all. The Agentic Threat Surface — a five-part series. ...