Darktrace’s top cybersecurity experts share forward-looking insights on the evolving landscape of AI in cybersecurity.
Nicole Carignan, Vice President of Strategic Cyber AI at Darktrace:
The year of AI agents and multi-agent systems: A challenge for cyber professionals, and an opportunity for threat actors
“Following significant advances in generative AI in 2022 and 2023, throughout 2024 we saw significant focus on innovation and development of AI agents, which are autonomous AI systems that are designed to complete specific tasks. We predict 2025 is set to be the year of multi-agent systems (or “agent swarms”). That means we’ll see increasing use cases across businesses where teams of autonomous AI agents are working together to tackle more complex tasks than a single AI agent could alone. However, the rise of multi-agent systems, particularly in cybersecurity, is a double-edged sword.
“The rising use of multi-agent systems will introduce new attack vectors and vulnerabilities that could be exploited if they aren’t secured properly from the start. Attacks that we see today impacting single agent systems, such as data poisoning, prompt injection, or social engineering to influence agent behavior, could all be vulnerabilities within a multi-agent system. But the impacts and harms of those vulnerabilities could be even bigger because of the increasing volume of connection points and interfaces that multi-agent systems have.
“One benefit of AI agents is that they can discover other agents and communicate, collaborate and interact. Without clear and distinct communication boundaries and explicit permissions, this can be a huge risk to data privacy. These are not issues that traditional application testing alone can address.
“Moreover, the stakes for these systems will be extremely high. Multi-agent systems are poised to make AI tools even more useful and productive for consumers, and as they increase adoption for critical daily tasks such as managing household finances, these systems will contain increasingly sensitive and valuable data.
“That’s why robust security measures and data guardrails are required at the start to prevent these systems from being exploited and running amok.”
Marcus Fowler, CEO, Darktrace Federal:
Insider threat risks will force organizations to evolve zero trust strategies
“In 2025, an increasingly volatile geopolitical situation and the intensity of the AI race will make insider threats an even bigger risk for businesses in 2025, forcing organizations to expand zero trust strategies. The traditional zero-trust model ensures protection from external threats to an organization’s network by requiring continuous verification of the devices and users attempting to access critical business systems, services, and information from multiple sources. However, as we have seen in the likes of Snowden, or the more recent Jack Teixeira case, malicious actors can still do significant damage to an organization within their approved and authenticated boundary.
“To circumvent the remaining security gaps in a zero-trust architecture and mitigate increasing risk of insider threats, organizations will need to integrate a behavioral understanding dimension to their zero trust approaches. The zero trust best practice of ‘Never Trust, Always Verify’ will evolve to become ‘Never Trust, Always Verify, Continuously Monitor.’”