Adversarial AI exposes dormant security debt, Cognizant exec warns

According to SiliconANGLE, Salvi said in an interview with theCUBE, SiliconANGLE's livestreaming studio, that the impact of AI on cybersecurity has fundamentally changed over the past six months. "What's different in the last six months is the way in which AI is impacting and making a big change to the ways we look at cyber, both in terms of how AI is deployed within the cybersecurity, but also adversarial AI," he said. He noted that frontier AI can now find vulnerabilities that humans have missed for almost three decades, making dormant vulnerabilities visible at scale.

Salvi observed that many enterprise customers are hesitating, waiting for the market to settle before committing to a strategy. He advised simplification over accumulation of tools, arguing that working with multiple tools creates a bigger risk than a more simplified architecture. "In cyber world, we don't only worry about just managing and protecting, because we cannot assume that you're not going to get breached. The key thing is how soon you can act and how soon you can contain and recover," Salvi said.

On the growth of AI agents, Salvi noted that conservative estimates point to 50 non-human identities for every human in an organization, potentially reaching 100 in the future. He said governing these agents is a policy problem the industry already knows how to solve. "You need to teach the agents the same aspect, because if you don't, then they will go berserk and they will execute their task without these guardrails. It's not rocket science. We know how to build policies, and we need to apply the same policies for the non-human identities," he explained.

Cognizant recently launched secure AI services aimed at helping enterprises scale agentic systems. The interview was part of SiliconANGLE's and theCUBE's coverage of Fal.Con, with theCUBE as a paid media partner for the event.