Palo Alto Networks Security-Intel Boss Calls AI Agents 2026'S Biggest Insider Threat

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/04/ai_agents_insider_threats_panw/

AI agents represent the new insider threat to companies in 2026, according to Palo Alto Networks Chief Security Intel Officer Wendi Whitmore, and this poses several challenges to executives tasked with securing the expected surge in autonomous agents.

"The CISO and security teams find themselves under a lot of pressure to deploy new technology as quickly as possible, and that creates this massive amount of pressure - and massive workload - that the teams are under to quickly go through procurement processes, security checks, and understand if the new AI applications are secure enough for the use cases that these organizations have," Whitmore told The Register.

"And that's created this concept of the AI agent itself becoming the new insider threat," she added.

According to Gartner's estimates, 40 percent of all enterprise applications will integrate with task-specific AI agents by the end of 2026, up from less than 5 percent in 2025. This surge presents a double-edged sword, Whitmore said in an interview and predictions report.

On one hand, AI agents can help fill the ongoing cyber-skills gap that has plagued security teams for years, doing things like correcting buggy code, automating log scans and alert triage, and rapidly blocking security threats.

"When we look through the defender lens, a lot of what the agentic capabilities allow us to do is start thinking more strategically about how we defend our networks, versus always being caught in this reactive situation," Whitmore said.

[...] One of the risks stems from the "superuser problem," Whitmore explained. This occurs when the autonomous agents are granted broad permissions, creating a "superuser" that can chain together access to sensitive applications and resources without security teams' knowledge or approval.

"It becomes equally as important for us to make sure that we are only deploying the least amount of privileges needed to get a job done, just like we would do for humans," Whitmore said.

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