Rethinking Security from the OS Up in the Age of AI and more RSAC 2026 Interviews - Karen Heart, Sachin Jade, Phil Calvin, Craig Sanderson, Travis Wong - ESW #456

Rethinking Security from the OS Up in the Age of AI

Karen Heart discusses a file-system–first approach to security, arguing that most modern attacks—including ransomware and supply chain compromises—succeed because they inherit user permissions and operate inside overly trusted system structures.

She explains how limiting file access, socket (network) access, and privilege escalation at the operating system level can reduce entire classes of attacks. Rather than relying on reactive detection, her approach emphasizes immutable, allowlisted controls embedded close to the kernel layer, designed to prevent both data exfiltration and malicious code execution at the source.

The conversation also explores how AI agents and contractors expand the attack surface, reinforcing the need for strict isolation, backup protection, and deterministic system boundaries.

Segment Resources:

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Zero-Day-Secure/Karen-Heart/9781968865078

​The New Era of DNS Resilience: Breaking down the newly finalized NIST SP 800-81 Craig Sanderson from Infoblox will dive into the newly finalized NIST SP 800-81 as it marks a pivotal shift in DNS security, emphasizing resilience through modernized practices tailored for today's distributed, cloud-driven, and threat-laden environments. This update provides actionable guidance for organizations to strengthen DNS infrastructure against evolving threats like ransomware and data exfiltration, while prioritizing initiatives like DNSSEC, encryption, and protective DNS for immediate risk reduction.

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

Agentic AI and the Future of Threat Intelligence Operations Security teams collect large volumes of threat intelligence but often struggle to translate that information into coordinated operational response. This discussion explores how organizations are embedding intelligence directly into security workflows and introducing AI agents to support investigation, enrichment and response. Sachin will discuss Cyware's Agentic Fabric approach and the evolution toward an agent-centric model, where a portfolio of specialized agents assists analysts across threat intelligence, detection engineering and response workflows. The conversation will focus on how AI can support security teams while maintaining human oversight and operational control.

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

Beyond the Audit: Making Cyber Risk Continuous, Quantified, and Actionable Most companies assess cyber risk once a year and call it done — but for organizations managing dozens of subsidiaries or portfolio companies, that's a costly blind spot. In this RSA interview, Resilience's VP of Customer Engagement explores why measuring risk in dollars (not color-coded charts) changes the conversation at the board level, and why the organizations best positioned to prevent losses are the ones treating cyber risk as a continuous discipline rather than an annual exercise.

See it in action. Request a demo at https://securityweekly.com/resiliencersac.

Delinea: Redefining Identity Security for the Agentic AI Era As enterprises scale agentic AI and automation, privileged access is increasingly required by non-human identities (NHIs) that operate autonomously across hybrid and cloud-native environments, introducing risks that static, credential-based models were never designed to govern. Delinea's recent of acquisition of StrongDM.

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

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Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/esw-456