CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz highlighted in his RSA Conference 2026 keynote that the fastest recorded adversary breakout time has dropped to 27 seconds. The average is now 29 minutes, down from 48 minutes in 2024. That is how much time defenders have before a threat spreads. Now CrowdStrike sensors detect more than 1,800 distinct AI applications running on enterprise endpoints, representing nearly 160 million unique application instances. Every one generates detection events, identity events, and data access logs flowing into SIEM systems architected for human-speed workflows.Cisco found that 85% of surveyed enterprise customers have AI agent pilots underway. Only 5% moved agents into production, according to Cisco President and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel in his RSAC blog post. That 80-point gap exists because security teams cannot answer the basic questions agents force. Which agents are running, what are they authorized to do, and who is accountable when one goes wrong.“The number one threat is security complexity. But we’re running towards that direction in AI as well,” Etay Maor, VP of Threat Intelligence at Cato Networks, told VentureBeat at RSAC 2026. Maor has attended the conference for 16 consecutive years. “We’re going with multiple point solutions for AI. And now you’re creating the next wave of security complexity.”Agents look identical to humans in your logs In most default logging configurations, agent-initiated activity looks identical to human-initiated activity in security logs. “It looks indistinguishable if an agent runs Louis’s web browser versus if Louis runs his browser,” Elia Zaitsev, CTO of CrowdStrike, told VentureBeat in an exclusive interview at RSAC 2026. Distinguishing the two requires walking the process tree. “I can actually walk up that process tree and say, this Chrome process was launched by Louis from the desktop. This Chrome process was launched from Louis’s cloud Cowork or ChatGPT application. Thus, it’s agentically controlled.”Without that depth of endpoint visibility, a compromised agent executi …
