Security Conversations on AI, Agents, and Emerging Threats from Black Hat 2026 – Michael Leland, Ido Geffen, Sean Murphy, Idan Plotnik – ASW #399

We showcase recordings from this year's Black Hat.

The Hidden Risks of the AI Supply Chain - Black Hat interview with Michael Leland, VP and Field CTO of Island

Agents can independently discover and install tools, but the emerging ecosystem of Skills and MCP servers lacks many of the trust and security controls applied to traditional software. Michael Leland discusses Island's research uncovering thousands of malicious repositories, widespread security flaws across MCP servers, and a new attack technique called “AgentBaiting,” in which attackers manipulate agents into finding and recommending malware to users. The conversation explains how enterprises can govern AI capabilities without slowing adoption.

Segment Resources:

For more information about Island's research, please visit https://securityweekly.com/islandbh

After Mythos: Securing Frontier AI as Attack and Defense Accelerate - Black Hat interview with Sean Murphy, Field CISO - North America of F5

Frontier AI is compressing the time between discovering and exploiting vulnerabilities, forcing enterprises to rethink how they secure modern applications and AI systems. Sean Murphy shares how security teams can prepare for the next generation of AI-powered threats, why known vulnerabilities may become a bigger risk than zero-days, and what it takes to secure AI at scale from shadow AI and governance to agent and API protection.

This segment is sponsored by F5. Visit https://securityweekly.com/f5bh to learn more about them!

The Perfect Storm: When AI Writes the Code and Sharpens the Attacks - Black Hat interview with Idan Plotnik, Co-Founder and CEO of Apiiro

Two storms are converging on how software gets built. The first: AI coding assistants are generating far more code than any security team can review, and with it, far more risk. The second: AI is sharpening the tools attackers use to find and exploit weaknesses faster than ever. Idan Plotnik explains why this convergence has moved the security perimeter to the coding agent itself, and makes the case for a prevention-first model where an AI AppSec agent guards coding agents in real time, governed by the principle that the agent writing the code cannot be the one to secure it.

This segment is sponsored by Apiiro. Visit https://securityweekly.com/apiirobh to learn more about them!

Model, Harness, Gym: Why Novee Owns the Full AI Pentesting Stack - Black Hat interview with Ido Geffen, Founder & CEO of Novee Security

Most AI security tools are thin wrappers around a general-purpose frontier LLM — reasoning capability rented from someone else, applied to a generic scanning workflow. In this interview, Ido Geffen breaks down what it means to own the full AI pentesting stack — the proprietary offensive reasoning model, the harness that coordinates specialized agents, and the training gym where those agents are continuously benchmarked, post-trained on real attacker tradecraft, and promoted into production.

Ido explains why owning each layer matters: it's how Novee's model consistently outperforms frontier LLMs at live browser exploitation, how the platform improves at a rate the customer feels every cycle, how Novee keeps security testing cost-efficient rather than relying on tokenized pricing models, and how new attacker techniques get injected into agent memory the moment Novee's research team observes them in the wild. He then makes the case that owning the model is only half the story. The other half is the Asset Intelligence Model — a living understanding of each customer's environment, workflows, permissions, APIs, and business logic. That's what turns a generalist AI hacker into a bespoke one: not just an attacker that reasons well, but one that reasons well about your specific business. He closes with how this advantage leads to findings that get more targeted every cycle, remediation tailored to an organization's tech stack, and a platform whose ceiling rises as attackers get faster.

This segment is sponsored by Novee Security. Visit https://securityweekly.com/noveebh to learn more about them!