Same Tactics, New Speed: Defend Identity and Prevent AI-Accelerated Attacks

AI agents no longer just follow attack scripts—they diagnose failures and adapt in real time, without a human at the keyboard. In the past year, a state-linked group used an AI coding agent to automate most of an espionage campaign. A ransomware crew let an agent run an entire attack end to end, fixing its own failed login in under a minute. And a major AI platform was breached by an agent that wasn’t even supposed to be attacking anyone.
Strip away the AI headlines, and the pattern is familiar: standing credentials and lateral movement. What’s changed isn’t the method, it’s the speed. Detection alone is no longer enough, attacks must be prevented before they succeed.
This session separates the real shift from the fear-mongering and shows what it means for the identity systems most enterprises actually run: Active Directory and Entra ID. We’ll cover a few real incidents and a practical framework for cutting exposure before attackers—human or otherwise—find it.
Attendees will leave with:

• What’s genuinely new in AI-driven attacks—and what’s the same old story
• A framework for evaluating AD/Entra exposure to faster, more adaptive attackers
• How risk assessment, real-time threat blocking, and detection and response stop these attacks in their tracks