AI-powered cyberattacks are compressing the time available for enterprises to detect and contain breaches, exposing the limitations of security systems designed to respond to human-speed threats, according to Rubrik Chief Solutions Officer Alok Agrawal.
The average time taken by an attacker to move from an initial breach to other systems within a network has fallen to 39 seconds, Agrawal said, citing an industry data point discussed at the company's Global System Integrator Summit in Goa on October 9. Traditional detection technologies may struggle to keep pace with attacks that can identify vulnerabilities and chain them together at machine speed, he said.
“The technologies to detect an attack today were developed for human speed. The detection capabilities were not built for machine speed,” Agrawal said.
As enterprises deploy more artificial intelligence agents to automate tasks, attackers are also using AI tools to identify weaknesses in applications and code. The emergence of more capable frontier AI models is adding urgency to the challenge, with security teams needing to anticipate attacks that can exploit multiple vulnerabilities in sequence.
Rubrik Chief Product Officer Anneka Gupta warned that enterprises could face a wave of cyber breaches as advanced AI capabilities become more widely accessible to attackers.