July 27, 2022

Self-Learning AI for Zero-Day and N-Day Attack Defense

Explore the differences between zero-day and n-day attacks on different customer servers to learn how Darktrace detects and prevents cyber threats effectively.

Written by

Lewis Morgan

Cyber Analyst

Inside the SOC

Darktrace cyber analysts are world-class experts in threat intelligence, threat hunting and incident response, and provide 24/7 SOC support to thousands of Darktrace customers around the globe. Inside the SOC is exclusively authored by these experts, providing analysis of cyber incidents and threat trends, based on real-world experience in the field.

Written by

Lewis Morgan

Cyber Analyst

Jul 2022

‍Key Terms:

Zero-day | A recently discovered security vulnerability in computer software that has no currently available fix or patch. Its name come from the reality that vendors have “zero days” to act and respond.

N-day | A vulnerability that emerges in computer software in which a vendor is aware and may have already issued (or are currently working on) a patch or fix. Active exploits often already exist and await abuse by nefarious actors.

Traditional security solutions often apply signature-based-detection when identifying cyber threats, helping to defend against legacy attacks but consequently missing novel ones. Therefore, security teams often lend a lot of focus to ensuring that the risk of zero-day vulnerabilities is reduced [1]. As explored in this blog, however, organizations can face just as much of a risk from n-day attacks, since they invite the most attention from malicious actors [2]. This is due in part to the reduced complexity, cost and time invested in researching and finding new exploits compared with that found when attackers exploit zero-days.

This blog will examine both a zero-day and n-day attack that two different Darktrace customers faced in the fall of 2021. This will include the activity Darktrace detected, along with the steps taken by Darktrace/Network to intervene. It will then compare the incidents, discuss the possible dangers of third-party integrations, and assess the deprecation of legacy security tools.

Revisiting zero-day attacks

Zero-days are among the greatest concerns security teams face in the era of modern technology and networking. Defending critical systems from zero-day compromises is a task most legacy security solutions are often unable to handle. Due to the complexity of uncovering new security flaws and developing elaborate code that can exploit them, these attacks are often carried out by funded or experienced groups such as nation-state actors and APTs. One of history’s most prolific zero-days, ‘Stuxnet’, sent security teams worldwide into a global panic in 2010. This involved a widespread attack on Iranian nuclear infrastructure and was widely accepted to be a result of nation-state actors [3]. The Stuxnet worm took advantage of four zero-day exploits, compromising over 200,000 devices and physically damaging around 10% of the 9,000 critical centrifuges at the Natanz nuclear site.

More recently, 2021 saw the emergence of several critical zero-day vulnerabilities within SonicWall’s product suite [4]. SonicWall is a security hardware manufacturer that provides hardware firewall devices, unified threat management, VPN gateways and network security solutions. Some of these vulnerabilities lie within their Secure Mobile Access (SMA) 100 series (for example, CVE-2019-7481, CVE-2021-20016 and CVE-2021-20038 to name a few). These directly affected VPN devices and often allowed attackers easy remote access to company devices. CVE-2021-20016 in particular incorporates an SQL-Injection vulnerability within SonicWall’s SSL VPN SMA 100 product line [5]. If exploited, this defect would allow an unauthenticated remote attacker to perform their own malicious SQL query in order to access usernames, passwords and other session related information.

The N-day underdog

The shadow cast by zero-day attacks often shrouds that of n-day attacks. N-days, however, often pose an equal - if not greater - risk to the majority of organizations, particularly those in industrial sectors. Since these vulnerabilities have fixes available, all of the hard work around research is already done; malicious actors only need to view proof of concepts (POCs) or, if proficient in coding, reverse-engineer software to reveal code-changes (binary diffing) in order to exploit these security flaws in the wild. These vulnerabilities are typically attributed to opportunistic hackers and script-kiddies, where little research or heavy lifting is required.

August 2021 gave rise to a critical vulnerability in Atlassian Confluence servers, namely CVE-2021-26084 [6]. Confluence is a widely used collaboration wiki tool and knowledge-sharing platform. As introduced and discussed a few months ago in a previous Darktrace blog (Explore Internet-Facing System Vulnerabilities), this vulnerability allows attackers to remotely execute code on internet-facing servers after exploiting injection vulnerabilities in Object-Graph Navigation Language (OGNL). Whilst Confluence had patches and fixes available to users, attackers still jumped on this opportunity and began scanning the internet for signs of critical devices serving this outdated software [7]. Once identified, they would exploit the vulnerability, often installing crypto mining software onto the device. More recently, Darktrace explored a new vulnerability (CVE-2022-26134), disclosed midway through 2022, that affected Confluence servers and data centers using similar techniques to that found in CVE-2021-26084 [8].

SonicWall in the wild – 1. Zero-day attack

At the beginning of August 2021, Darktrace prevented an attack from taking place within a European automotive customer’s environment (Figure 1). The attack targeted a vulnerable internet-facing SonicWall VPN server, and while the attacker’s motive remains unclear, similar historic events suggest that they intended to perform ransomware encryption or data exfiltration.

Figure 1: Timeline of the SonicWall attack

Darktrace was unable to confirm the definite tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) used by the attacker to compromise the customer’s environment, as the device was compromised before Darktrace installation and coverage. However, from looking at recently disclosed SonicWall VPN vulnerabilities and patterns of behaviour, it is likely CVE-2021-20016 played a part. At some point after this initial infection, it is also believed the device was able to move laterally to a domain controller (DC) using administrative credentials; it was this server that then initiated the anomalous activity that Darktrace detected and alerted on.

On August 5^th 2021 , Darktrace observed this compromised domain controller engaging in unusual ICMP scanning - a protocol used to discover active devices within an environment and create a map of an organization’s network topology. Shortly after, the infected server began scanning devices for open RDP ports and enumerating SMB shares using unorthodox methods. SMB delete and HTTP requests (over port 445 and 80 respectively) were made for files named delete.me in the root directory of numerous network shares using the user agent Microsoft WebDAV. However, no such files appeared to exist within the environment. This may have been the result of an attacker probing devices in the network in an effort to see their responses and gather information on properties and vulnerabilities they could later exploit.

Soon the infected DC began establishing RDP tunnels back to the VPN server and making requests to an internal DNS server for multiple endpoints relating to exploit kits, likely in an effort to strengthen the attacker’s foothold within the environment. Some of the endpoints requested relate to:

- EternalBlue vulnerability

- Petit Potam NTLM hash attack tool

- Unusual GitHub repositories

- Unusual Python repositories

The DC made outgoing NTLM requests to other internal devices, implying the successful installation of Petit Potam exploitation tools. The server then began performing NTLM reconnaissance, making over 1,000 successful logins under ‘Administrator’ to several other internal devices. Around the same time, the device was also seen making anonymous SMBv1 logins to numerous internal devices, (possibly symptomatic of the attacker probing machines for EternalBlue vulnerabilities).

Interestingly, the device also made numerous failed authentication attempts using a spoofed credential for one of the organization’s security managers. This was likely in an attempt to hide themselves using ‘Living off the Land’ (LotL) techniques. However, whilst the attacker clearly did their research on the company, they failed to acknowledge the typical naming convention used for credentials within the environment. This ultimately backfired and made the compromise more obvious and unusual.

In the morning of the following day, the initially compromised VPN server began conducting further reconnaissance, engaging in similar activity to that observed by the domain controller. Until now, the customer had set Darktrace RESPOND to run in human confirmation mode, meaning interventions were not made autonomously but required confirmation by a member of the internal security team. However, thanks to Proactive Threat Notifications (PTNs) delivered by Darktrace’s dedicated SOC team, the customer was made immediately aware of this unusual behaviour, allowing them to apply manual Darktrace RESPOND blocks to all outgoing connections (Figure 2). This gave the security team enough time to respond and remediate before serious damage could be done.

Figure 2: Darktrace RESPOND model breach showing the manually applied “Quarantine Device” action taken against the compromised VPN server. This screenshot displays the UI from Darktrace version 5.1

Confluence in the wild – 2. N-day attack

Towards the end of 2021, Darktrace saw a European broadcasting customer leave an Atlassian Confluence internet-facing server unpatched and vulnerable to crypto-mining malware using CVE-2021-26084. Thanks to Darktrace, this attack was entirely immobilized within only a few hours of the initial infection, protecting the organization from damage (Figure 3).

Figure 3: Timeline of the Confluence attack

On midday on September 1^st 2021, an unpatched Confluence server was seen receiving SSL connections over port 443 from a suspicious new endpoint, 178.238.226[.]127. The connections were encrypted, meaning Darktrace was unable to view the contents and ascertain what requests were being made. However, with the disclosure of CVE-2021-26084 just 7 days prior to this activity, it is likely that the TTPs used involved injecting OGNL expressions to Confluence server memory; allowing the attacker to remotely execute code on the vulnerable server.

Immediately after successful exploitation of the Confluence server, the infected device was observed making outgoing HTTP GET requests to several external endpoints using a new user agent (curl/7.61.1). Curl was used to silently download and configure multiple suspicious files relating to XMRig cryptocurrency miner, including ld.sh, XMRig and config.json. Subsequent outgoing connections were then made to europe.randomx-hub.miningpoolhub[.]com · 172.105.210[.]117 using the JSON-RPC protocol, seen alongside the mining credential maillocal.confluence (Figure 4). Only 3 seconds after initial compromise, the infected device began attempting to mine cryptocurrency using the Minergate protocol but was instantly and autonomously blocked by Darktrace RESPOND. This prevented the server from abusing system resources and generating profits for the attacker.

Figure 4: A graph showing the frequency of external connections using the JSON-RPC protocol made by the breach device over a 48-hour window. The orange-red dots represent models that breached as a result of this activity, demonstrating the “waterfall” effect commonly seen when a device suffers a compromise. This screenshot displays the UI from Darktrace version 5.1

In the afternoon, the malware persisted with its infection. The compromised server began making successive HTTP GET requests to a new rare endpoint 195.19.192[.]28 using the same curl user agent (Figures 5 & 6). These requests were for executable and dynamic library files associated with Kinsing malware (but fortunately were also blocked by Darktrace RESPOND). Kinsing is a malware strain found in numerous attack campaigns which is often associated with crypto-jacking, and has appeared in previous Darktrace blogs [9].

Figure 5: Cyber AI Analyst summarising the unusual download of Kinsing software using the new curl user agent. This screenshot displays the UI from Darktrace version 5.1

The attacker then began making HTTP POST requests to an IP 185.154.53[.]140, using the same curl user agent; likely a method for the attacker to maintain persistence within the network and establish a foothold using its C2 infrastructure. The Confluence server was then again seen attempting to mine cryptocurrency using the Minergate protocol. It made outgoing JSON-RPC connections to a different new endpoint, 45.129.2[.]107, using the following mining credential: ‘42J8CF9sQoP9pMbvtcLgTxdA2KN4ZMUVWJk6HJDWzixDLmU2Ar47PUNS5XHv4Kmfdh8aA9fbZmKHwfmFo8Wup8YtS5Kdqh2’. This was once again blocked by Darktrace RESPOND (Figure 7).

Figure 6: VirusTotal showing the unusualness of one of these external IPs [10]

Figure 7: Log data showing the action taken by Darktrace RESPOND in response to the device breaching the “Crypto Currency Mining Activity” model. This screenshot displays the UI from Darktrace version 5.1

The final activity seen from this device involved the download of additional shell scripts over HTTP associated with Kinsing, namely spre.sh and unk.sh, from 194.38.20[.]199 and 195.3.146[.]118 respectively (Figure 8). A new user agent (Wget/1.19.5 (linux-gnu)) was used when connecting to the latter endpoint, which also began concurrently initiating repeated connections indicative of C2 beaconing. These scripts help to spread the Kinsing malware laterally within the environment and may have been the attacker's last ditch efforts at furthering their compromise before Darktrace RESPOND blocked all connections from the infected Confluence server [11]. With Darktrace RESPOND's successful actions, the customer’s security team were then able to perform their own response and remediation.

Figure 8: Cyber AI Analyst revealing the last ditch efforts made by the threat actor to download further malicious software. This screenshot displays the UI from Darktrace version 5.1

Darktrace Coverage: N- vs Zero-days

In the SonicWall case the attacker was unable to achieve their actions on objectives (thanks to Darktrace's intervention). However, this incident displayed tactics of a more stealthy and sophisticated attacker - they had an exploited machine but waited for the right moment to execute their malicious code and initiate a full compromise. Due to the lack of visibility over attacker motive, it is difficult to deduce what type of actor led to this intrusion. However, with the disclosure of a zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2021-20016) not long before this attack, along with a seemingly dormant initially compromised device, it is highly possible that it was carried out by a sophisticated cyber criminal or gang.

On the other hand, the Confluence case engaged in a slightly more noisy approach; it dropped crypto mining malware on vulnerable devices in the hope that the target’s security team did not maintain visibility over their network or would merely turn a blind eye. The files downloaded and credentials observed alongside the mining activity heavily imply the use of Kinsing malware [11]. Since this vulnerability (CVE-2021-26084) emerged as an n-day attack with likely easily accessible POCs, as well as there being a lack of LotL techniques and the motive being long term monetary gain, it is possible this attack was conducted by a less sophisticated or amateur actor (script-kiddie); one that opportunistically exploits known vulnerabilities in internet-facing devices in order to make a quick profit [12].

Whilst Darktrace RESPOND was enabled in human confirmation mode only during the start of the SonicWall attack, Darktrace’s Cyber AI Analyst still offered invaluable insight into the unusual activity associated with the infected machines during both the Confluence and SonicWall compromises. SOC analysts were able to see these uncharacteristic behaviours and escalate the incident through Darktrace’s PTN and ATE services. Analysts then worked through these tickets with the customers, providing support and guidance and, in the SonicWall case, quickly helping to configure Darktrace RESPOND. In both scenarios, Darktrace RESPOND was able to block abnormal connections and enforce a device’s pattern of life, affording the security team enough time to isolate the infected machines and prevent further threats such as ransomware detonation or data exfiltration.

Concluding thoughts and dangers of third-party integrations

Organizations with internet-facing devices will inevitably suffer opportunistic zero-day and n-day attacks. While little can be done to remove the risk of zero-days entirely, ensuring that organizations keep their systems up to date will at the very least help prevent opportunistic and script-kiddies from exploiting n-day vulnerabilities.

However, it is often not always possible for organizations to keep their systems up to date, especially for those who require continuous availability. This may also pose issues for organizations that rely on, and put their trust in, third party integrations such as those explored in this blog (Confluence and SonicWall), as enforcing secure software is almost entirely out of their hands. Moreover, with the rising prevalence of remote working, it is essential now more than ever that organizations ensure their VPN devices are shielded from external threats, guidance on which has been released by the NSA/CISA [13].

These two case studies have shown that whilst organizations can configure their networks and firewalls to help identify known indicators of compromise (IoC), this ‘rearview mirror’ approach will not account for, or protect against, any new and undisclosed IoCs. With the aid of Self-Learning AI and anomaly detection, Darktrace can detect the slightest deviation from a device’s normal pattern of life and respond autonomously without the need for rules and signatures. This allows for the disruption and prevention of known and novel attacks before irreparable damage is caused- reassuring security teams that their digital estates are secure.

Thanks to Paul Jennings for his contributions to this blog.

Appendices: SonicWall (Zero-day)

Darktrace model detections

· AIA / Suspicious Chain of Administrative Credentials

· Anomalous Connection / Active Remote Desktop Tunnel

· Anomalous Connection / SMB Enumeration

· Anomalous Connection / Unusual Internal Remote Desktop

· Compliance / High Priority Compliance Model Breach

· Compliance / Outgoing NTLM Request from DC

· Device / Anomalous RDP Followed By Multiple Model Breaches

· Device / Anomalous SMB Followed By Multiple Model Breaches

· Device / ICMP Address Scan

· Device / Large Number of Model Breaches

· Device / Large Number of Model Breaches from Critical Network Device

· Device / Multiple Lateral Movement Model Breaches (PTN/Enhanced Monitoring model)

· Device / Network Scan

· Device / Possible SMB/NTLM Reconnaissance

· Device / RDP Scan

· Device / Reverse DNS Sweep

· Device / SMB Session Bruteforce

· Device / Suspicious Network Scan Activity (PTN/Enhanced Monitoring model)

· Unusual Activity / Possible RPC Recon Activity

Darktrace RESPOND (Antigena) actions (as displayed in example)

· Antigena / Network / Manual / Quarantine Device

MITRE ATT&CK Techniques Observed

IoCs

‍

Appendices: Confluence (N-day)

Darktrace model detections

· Anomalous Connection / New User Agent to IP Without Hostname

· Anomalous Connection / Posting HTTP to IP Without Hostname

· Anomalous File / EXE from Rare External Location

· Anomalous File / Script from Rare Location

· Compliance / Crypto Currency Mining Activity

· Compromise / High Priority Crypto Currency Mining (PTN/Enhanced Monitoring model)

· Device / Initial Breach Chain Compromise (PTN/Enhanced Monitoring model)

· Device / Internet Facing Device with High Priority Alert

· Device / New User Agent

Darktrace RESPOND (Antigena) actions (displayed in example)

· Antigena / Network / Compliance / Antigena Crypto Currency Mining Block

· Antigena / Network / External Threat / Antigena File then New Outbound Block

· Antigena / Network / External Threat / Antigena Suspicious Activity Block

· Antigena / Network / External Threat / Antigena Suspicious File Block

· Antigena / Network / Significant Anomaly / Antigena Block Enhanced Monitoring

MITRE ATT&CK Techniques Observed

IOCs

References:

[1] https://securitybrief.asia/story/why-preventing-zero-day-attacks-is-crucial-for-businesses

[2] https://electricenergyonline.com/energy/magazine/1150/article/Security-Sessions-More-Dangerous-Than-Zero-Days-The-N-Day-Threat.htm

[3] https://www.wired.com/2014/11/countdown-to-zero-day-stuxnet/

[4] https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=SonicWall+2021

[5] https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2021-20016

[6] https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2021-26084

[7] https://www.zdnet.com/article/us-cybercom-says-mass-exploitation-of-atlassian-confluence-vulnerability-ongoing-and-expected-to-accelerate/

[8] https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2022-26134

[9] https://attack.mitre.org/software/S0599/

[10] https://www.virustotal.com/gui/ip-address/195.19.192.28/detection

[11] https://sysdig.com/blog/zoom-into-kinsing-kdevtmpfsi/

[12] https://github.com/alt3kx/CVE-2021-26084_PoC

[13] https://www.nsa.gov/Press-Room/Press-Releases-Statements/Press-Release-View/Article/2791320/nsa-cisa-release-guidance-on-selecting-and-hardening-remote-access-vpns/

Written by

Lewis Morgan

Cyber Analyst

Inside the SOC

Written by

Lewis Morgan

Cyber Analyst

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July 7, 2026

Securing AI: Analysis of the Complete Security Stack with Governance and Controls

Why traditional cybersecurity approaches are not enough for AI

AI adoption outpaces most security programs’ ability to adapt. That gap is now one of the most consequential sources of cyber risk facing enterprises. As organizations embed generative and agentic AI into development workflows, business operations, and security tooling itself, the question is no longer whether AI will introduce risk. The question is whether organizations understand where that risk actually lives and how to manage it operationally.

Two recent pieces of guidance underscore this shift:

The upcoming Cybersecurity Framework Profile for AI from NIST

The Five Eyes government guidance on the careful adoption of agentic AI services

Taken together, they point to a critical conclusion. AI security cannot be reduced to model hardening or prompt filtering. It requires a defense in depth strategy that treats AI as both a new attack surface and a force multiplier for defense, while accounting for how AI fundamentally changes scale, speed, and autonomy.

Recent threat research suggests that today's cyber risk is driven less by initial compromise and more by an adversary's ability to blend into normal operations over time. AI systems create the same exposure in a new form: more autonomy, more scale, and more opportunities for risky behavior to blend into normal operations.

How NIST defines the three core pillars of AI security

The NIST profile organizes AI risk across three inseparable focus areas that span all cybersecurity functions, Secure, Defend and Thwart. These areas are not sequential. They exist simultaneously and must be addressed together.

Secure

This treats AI as an attack surface. It includes models, prompts, agents, pipelines, training and inference data, retrieval augmented generation corpora, and the AI supply chain itself. AI systems are opaque, probabilistic, and non-deterministic by design. Some vulnerabilities are inherent in how models are trained or how data is sourced. Traditional patching does not fully mitigate these risks. This is also where many enterprises are weakest today and, critically, where many security programs stop.

Defend

This is AI as a defensive force multiplier. AI can improve detection speed, scale, correlation, and response, but only if the right models are used and operationalized correctly. Machine-speed behavior-based detection, response and containment becomes critical in defending non-deterministic systems. Accuracy, explainability, governance, testing, validation, and integration into SOC workflows matter as much as capability. Without those controls, hallucination risk, over automation, and misplaced trust become security risks themselves.

Thwart

This treats AI as an adversarial accelerant. Threat actors are already using AI to generate targeted social engineering attacks, deepfakes, malware, and autonomous attack agents. Asymmetric warfare is highlighting faster vulnerability discovery and exploitation with a lag on patch development, testing and deployment.

How this looks in practice

Darktrace researchers observed scaled, automated exploitation of the React2Shell vulnerability within days of disclosure. A vulnerable cloud asset was exploited in under 120 seconds of being deployed. Darktrace research team observed an AI/LLM-generated malware sample used in exploitation activity tied to React2Shell. The significance isn't novelty. It is that AI lowers the barrier to producing usable offensive tooling and compresses the time between experimentation and deployment.

Tactics are getting more and more creative in order to string together steps of an attack kill chain. This creates a dependency on behavior-based detection, autonomous investigation, autonomous containment, training, resilience investment, and recovery planning across the entire enterprise.

Why agentic AI fundamentally changes enterprise cyber risk

The Five Eyes guidance on agentic AI highlights material changes to the cyber risk profile of an organization. Unlike generative AI systems that produce content for human consumption, agentic AI systems reason, plan, and act autonomously across tools, data, and environments. That autonomy, combined with access to real systems, amplifies the impact of traditional cyber failures and introduces new system level risks that are difficult to predict, observe, and contain.

Risk in agentic systems does not live in the model alone. It emerges from interactions between models, prompts, memory, tools, APIs, identities, privileges, inter-agent trust relationships, and human assumptions baked into design. Vulnerabilities are often introduced through data, connectors, natural language interfaces, protocols, and drift by design.

In supply-chain incidents, attackers did not need sophisticated exploits to scale impact. They abused trusted systems built for automation and implicit access. Agentic AI inherits that model. Once a system can act across tools, data, and workflows, compromise propagates through trust relationships that were never designed for machine autonomy.

The major agentic AI risk classes include the following:

The identity control for non-human identities or autonomous agents makes it difficult to mitigate over-permissioning, limiting access, scope, and duration, as well as access hygiene

Agents are frequently over permissioned

Compromised tools inherit agent authority

Static secrets enable impersonation

Implicit trust between agents enables lateral movement

Design and configuration risks compound this, including privileges evaluated once at startup, poor segmentation, unvetted third party tools, reused authorization decisions outside their original context, and guardrail limitations.

Behavioral risk

Agents can optimize for goals in unsafe ways, misinterpret ambiguous intent, chain actions into unintended sequences, change behavior during evaluation, and exhibit deceptive or sycophantic responses.

Structural risk

Structural risk follows from agentic systems that are tightly coupled, multicomponent ecosystems. Failures can propagate across agents. Hallucinations cascade downstream. Resource exhaustion becomes systemic. Tool misuse enables indirect prompt injection and command execution. Rogue agents can poison peer agents through trust relationships.

Accountability

Accountability becomes unclear as autonomy increases. Autonomous agents assume human identity permissions, and humans should have clear ownership of these agents, but they don’t, and this model is flawed. Decision paths are opaque and non-deterministic. Logs are fragmented and difficult to interpret. Reproducing an incident will be impossible without explicit design for observability and forensics. An agent compromise is functionally an insider threat, often with better access and fewer behavioral constraints than a human.

What does defense in depth look like for AI?

Agentic AI runs on software, networks, identities, and data. It must be governed using the same foundational principles that have proven resilient under uncertainty, including secure by design, defense in depth, zero trust, least privilege, continuous monitoring, behavior-based advanced threat detection and containment, and incident response and recovery.

Core components to a Defense in depth Strategy for Securing the use of AI:

Strong, precise identity control plane to include an identity per agent (cryptographic, non‑shared)
- Privilege monitoring and just‑in‑time access

Data Governance

Secure‑by‑default configurations
- Security Posture Management
- Zero Trust principles

Strong guardrails, deny‑by‑default policies, and isolation

Explicit instruction hierarchies and controlled context

Behavioral-based detection across entire enterprise to include inputs, tools, and outputs as well as AI used on the endpoint, across the network, cloud, SaaS, email, and OT
- Runtime anomaly detection and goal‑drift detection
- Autonomous containment to mitigate risk and minimize damage

Hard boundaries on autonomy and delegation

Testing, Evaluation, Validation and Verification
- Determine when autonomous action and when human in the loop
- Adversarial training and agent‑specific testing
- Simulation, red teaming, and chaos testing

Kill‑switches, rollback, and containment mechanisms
- Forensics data captures, interpretability, autonomous containment, and remediation/recovery plans

Until standards, tooling, and assurance methods mature, organizations should assume agentic AI systems will behave unexpectedly and design deployments around resilience, behavior-based detection, reversibility, and containment, not efficiency.

How security leaders should prepare for enterprise AI adoption

AI security is not model security alone. Data, pipelines, identities, and agents are first class assets. Many AI attacks succeed through standard cyber failures amplified by AI. Identity, data, and supply chain risk dominate. Behavior-based detection and response are critical, not optional. Logging, provenance, versioning, and forensics data capture of detections are mandatory because you cannot investigate or recover from AI incidents without them.

Risk will often be visible in behavior before it is clearly defined in policy or guidance. The same pattern has been seen in pre-CVE disclosure detection, where abnormal activity appears before the industry has named or described the vulnerability. AI systems introduce that uncertainty by design.

Security leaders should prioritize controls before AI is fully deployed, avoid generic AI security checklists, integrate AI risk into existing cyber programs, and mitigate the risk of non-deterministic technology with continuous oversight, monitoring, behavior analytics, anomaly detection, autonomous investigation, and autonomous containment.

Visibility has a different connotation with AI. Previously, audit logging worked for software/people, but with Generative AI-based systems, interpretability and explainability is difficult to understand, you cannot "undo" what has been done, or see the logic or control a chain of events. This is why behavioral-based detections and containment becomes critical.

What capabilities should every AI security program include?

If an organization asked “what must be in place before scaling AI?”:

AI Risk board and approval workflow

IAM + PAM for all AI services and agents

AI asset inventory

Prompt/output DLP with sanctioned AI access – This is not just pre- and post- filters, but behavior-based detections of semantic interface as well as behavior-based analysis of output with associated risk context.

Shadow AI identification

Secure MLOps – This is an entire paper itself

Runtime guardrails and tool restrictions
- Including AI Gateway/SASE/Zero trust/

Runtime security with behavior-based detections
- Complete visibility, monitoring, behavior analytics, anomaly detection, risk/intent/context evaluation of anomalies, autonomous investigation and autonomous containment of all AI assets across endpoint, network, SaaS, SASE, cloud, OT, email, and messaging platforms

Secure data pipelines and data governance

SOC workflow changes from malicious classification workflows to behavior-based detection workflows

Remediation plans for AI-related incidents

Layered Governance and Security Stack for Securing AI

The following outline considers governance and security tools that should be considered, well-integrated, deployed, tested, operationalized and embedded within security workflows. These tools and controls map to NIST’s CMF for AI.

These considerations do not need to be implemented in order. Runtime Detect and Respond will help mitigate risk while Governance, Visibility, and Identity mature.

Category	Tooling	Controls
Governance & Visibility	AI asset inventory / AI CMDB Shadow AI discovery SaaS discovery AI usage on non-endpoint managed systems via network or cloud telemetry MCP server/client usage via protocols Browser telemetry Gateway or SASE telemetry	Establish a risk board to set up controls Mandatory registration of AI systems Owner, data classification, intended use, and risk tier Supplier disclosure requirements Risk mitigation plan for AI adoption, innovation, or development
Identity, Access & Agent Control	Non-human autonomous agents should not have the full permissions associated with a human user. IAM with workload identities PAM for AI service accounts Secrets management with short-lived tokens Zero Trust principles Identity, permission, and token hygiene	Unique identities per model, agent, and pipeline Least privilege for tools, data, and APIs Explicit approval for autonomous actions
Data Security & Privacy	Data classification and labeling Enterprise DLP across endpoint, email, network, cloud, and SaaS Forensics data capture after risky detections	Prompt-level DLP through behavior-based semantic analysis with risk and intent context Input/interface analysis for risky data requests Output analysis for sensitive data Data integrity evaluation Retention and redaction policies for prompts and responses
Secure MLOps / LLMOps	Secure CI/CD with AI-specific gates Model registries with approval workflows Dependency, container, and artifact scanning SBOM/AIBOM generation IaC security scanning Security posture management Misconfiguration identification Hardening recommendations	Signed models and prompts Versioned datasets, configurations, logging, and controls Securing data pipelines Controlled promotion Quality assurance Adversarial testing
Runtime Security	Securing runtime goes beyond guardrails and model firewalls to include behavior-based detections, response, and containment. Detection, monitoring, and SOC integration Centralized visibility into prompts, outputs, and tool calls AI-specific detections Behavior-based detection for AI usage patterns Model drift and behavior monitoring Autonomous containment Behavior-based detection of model inputs and outputs Prompt injection detection Model manipulation, including jailbreaking, poisoning, and related attacks Sensitive data access attempts Behavior-based detection across low-code agents, high-code agents, MCP clients and servers, endpoint, network, cloud, email, SaaS, SASE, IoT, and OT	Policy enforcement between users, models, tools, agents, SaaS models/tools, and MCP servers/clients Risk, intent, and context evaluation for detections and response actions
Response & Recovery	Autonomous containment AI-assisted playbooks Forensics data capture for AI-related events Model rollback mechanisms Backup and restore for models and datasets	Kill switch for agents Autonomous response to agents performing risky behaviors Model and dataset rollback Remediation plans Tabletop exercises Supplier coordination plans Post-incident AI performance validation

AI security requires continuous visibility and behavioral detection

AI changes how fast systems move, how decisions are made, and how risk propagates. It does not change the fundamentals of security. Organizations that succeed will be the ones that apply those fundamentals rigorously, assume failure, and build systems that can detect, contain, and recover when AI behaves in ways they did not anticipate. Security is not what AI is allowed to do. It is whether the organization can understand, trust, and control what AI actually does in practice.

Take this guidance to understand different initiatives that organizations should be considering. Securing AI is the most critical component to AI safety. As organizations invest more in AI adoption, they should be investing in security in order to mitigate the risk of AI adoption. Organizations should be evaluating their governance and security stack to include well-integrated tools that are deployed, tested, operationalized and embedded within security workflows. While organizations mature in governance, visibility and identity access management, they should be investing in behavior-based detection and autonomous containment to mitigate AI risk.

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July 6, 2026

NIST Just Proved It: AI Security Can’t Be Solved With Rules

Static AI guardrails are inherently limited

As organizations adopt generative AI, many still assume that the right set of guardrails will be enough. The problem is you can’t anticipate every way these systems might be misused, abused or attacked. What NIST has done is put a mathematical foundation under that intuition.

In recent research building on Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, which showed that any system built on a fixed set of rules will always have gaps, NIST demonstrates that there is no finite set of guardrails that can be universally robust against adversarial prompts. In plain terms, if your defense is based on a fixed set of rules, there will always be inputs that bypass them. Not because the rules are badly written, but because the problem space is bigger than static rules can ever cover.

This is not new in cybersecurity - detection rules have always had to live with this trade-off. What is different with GenAI is the scale and shape of that problem. These systems are built on human language, and human language is not bounded. It is fluid, contextual and deliberately ambiguous. The number of ways intent can be hidden is effectively limitless. You are not defending against a defined protocol or a fixed exploit chain. You are defending against the entire expressive capacity of people.

So attempting to create a complete set of rules is the wrong starting point. It assumes the problem can be deterministically described. NIST’s work shows that it cannot. Organizations still need a way to manage AI risk, but the traditional approach of defining allowed and disallowed patterns is always going to lag behind what is actually happening. The same input can be benign in one context and risky in another, and static rules struggle to capture that distinction.

The question then is what fills that gap?

AI security must shift from rules to behavior

What's required is a shift in what you are trying to understand. Rules try to describe what should and shouldn't happen. Behavior shows you what is happening. Or to put it another way, if inputs are unbounded and adversaries adapt, the only stable signal is behavior.

In a GenAI context, that means analyzing how an AI model is being used, how prompts evolve over time, how outputs are shaped, and where AI agent interactions start to drift from what is expected. It means moving from static definitions of bad to a more dynamic understanding of intent.

Instead of trying to predict every bad prompt, you focus on identifying when behavior starts to move outside expected norms. Instead of asking whether a single input matches a rule, you ask whether the overall pattern of activity makes sense for the system and how it’s being used.

Guardrails remain important but they are only one layer

This does not eliminate the need for guardrails. They still play a role. But they will never address the entire problem space and are simply one part of your defense in depth approach.

NIST’s proof is useful because it makes this explicit. It removes the assumption that with enough effort, a complete rule set is achievable. It isn’t.

Once you accept that, the shift becomes unavoidable. This is no longer a problem of writing better rules, but of understanding behavior in a space where the possible inputs are effectively unbounded.

For security leaders, that changes the nature of the problem. It is less about defining what should be allowed, and more about recognizing when something is no longer consistent with expected behavior.

That does not remove the need for guardrails, but it does change their role. They set boundaries, but they do not define understanding. The gap between the two is where risk now sits.

In the end, this is what “can’t be solved with rules” really means. Rules will always leave gaps, and those gaps are not theoretical. They show up in how systems actually behave Not what we expect them to do, or what we intended them to do, but what they are doing in practice. That is where the signal is, and increasingly, that is where the security problem sits.

References:

https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2026/06/nist-mathematical-proof-supports-transition-continuous-monitor-and-update

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11475847

About the author

Andrew Hollister

Principal Solutions Engineer, Cyber Technician

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