What to expect during Black Hat USA: Join theCUBE Aug. 5-6
Artificial intelligence has propelled the cybersecurity world into a new phase, driven by startlingly advanced autonomous attacks and an urgent need to adopt technology to defend against them.
This week’s launch of the Open Secure AI Alliance provided further evidence of the tech industry’s focus on securing AI. The initiative’s inaugural partners include Nvidia, IBM, Snowflake, Cisco, Adobe, Salesforce, Red Hat and Databricks, along with dozens more. This will be the backdrop next week for Black Hat USA, an annual industry gathering in Las Vegas that brings together leading cybersecurity researchers and companies.
“This year’s Black Hat reflects that AI is on track to become part of the security team, part of the attack surface and part of the enterprise operating model,” said Krista Case, principal analyst and practice lead for cyber resilience and security at theCUBE Research. “That shift is still early, but it’s already reordering priorities.”
TheCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, will provide on-the-ground coverage of Black Hat USA from Las Vegas, airing Aug. 5-6. This will include discussions of the latest news and announcements from key players such as Fortinet, Elastic, TENEX.ai, Delinea, Menlo Security and Absolute Security during the event. Tune in for on-site reporting and exclusive interviews as theCUBE examines how security leaders are responding to AI-driven threats, expanding attack surfaces and mounting pressure to protect increasingly complex cloud, application and identity environments. ( Disclosure below.)*
Cybersecurity manages new challenges
Recent experiences at Hugging Face Inc., the open-source AI model and tool repository, highlight the challenges currently facing the cybersecurity community. The company, which also joined the newly formed Open Secure AI Alliance, recently suffered a breach when OpenAI models escaped a controlled evaluation environment, gained access to the internet and compromised Hugging Face’s infrastructure while attempting to obtain answers for a cybersecurity test.
OpenAI disclosed that the models chained vulnerabilities across its research environment and Hugging Face’s production infrastructure. They used stolen credentials and zero-day vulnerabilities to find a remote-code-execution path on Hugging Face servers and obtain test solutions from a production database. Hugging Face’s security team and AI-assisted detection systems identified and stopped the activity. During its subsequent investigation, the company initially attempted to use commercial frontier models to analyze attack commands, exploit payloads and command-and-control artifacts. Those requests were blocked by the providers’ safety guardrails, prompting Hugging Face to run its forensic analysis using the open-weight Z.ai GLM-5.2 model on its own infrastructure.
OpenAI also disclosed that the models accessed four additional third-party accounts during the incident. One was used as an outbound relay and staging path, another was used for data storage and two were accessed in a read-only manner. Incidents such as these have highlighted new dynamics that are forcing the cybersecurity world to develop safeguards for how AI agents are used and managed.
“AI agents will become operational identities inside the enterprise,” Case noted. “The challenge will be understanding what authority an agent has, what data it can access, and who is accountable for its actions.”
Agents defend against agents
One company with a new framework for guarding against agent-driven attacks is Microsoft Corp. On Monday, the company introduced its inaugural in-house cybersecurity model, MAI-Cyber-1-Flash, alongside a broader multi-model agentic security system called Project Perception.
Project Perception coordinates specialized red-team agents that identify potential paths to compromise, blue-team agents that investigate and prioritize risks and green-team agents that strengthen protections. The system connects insights with corrective actions while keeping human defenders in control.
Cybersecurity is now entering a new world in which agents are capable of defending against agentic attacks. This will be one of the many key developments theCUBE will explore during its Black Hat coverage next week.
“We have attackers who have an advantage over defenders,” said Hayete Gallot, executive vice president of Microsoft Security, during the company’s recent press conference in San Francisco. “It’s about attack, defend and harden. We believe you need a new cyber stack. So we built it.”
TheCUBE event livestream
Don’t miss theCUBE’s coverage of Black Hat USA, Aug. 5-6. Plus, you can watch theCUBE’s exclusive content on demand after the event.
How to watch theCUBE interviews
We offer you various ways to watch theCUBE’s coverage of Black Hat USA, Aug. 5-6, including theCUBE’s dedicated website and YouTube channel. You can also get all the coverage from this year’s event on SiliconANGLE.
TheCUBE podcasts
SiliconANGLE’s “theCUBE Pod” is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and YouTube, which you can enjoy while on the go. During each podcast, SiliconANGLE’s John Furrier and Dave Vellante unpack the biggest trends in enterprise tech — from AI and cloud to regulation and workplace culture — with exclusive context and analysis.
SiliconANGLE also produces our weekly “Breaking Analysis” program, where Dave Vellante examines the top stories in enterprise tech, combining insights from theCUBE with spending data from Enterprise Technology Research, available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and YouTube.
Guests
During theCUBE’s coverage of Black Hat USA, Aug. 5-6, company executives and industry experts will discuss how security leaders are responding to AI-driven threats, expanding attack surfaces and mounting pressure to protect increasingly complex cloud, application and identity environments.
Stay tuned for exclusive interviews with industry experts from Fortinet, Elastic, TENEX.ai, Delinea, Menlo Security, Absolute Security, Qualys, Onyx Security and Rubrik, among others.
( Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Black Hat USA. Sponsors of theCUBE’s event coverage do not have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)*
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