Defending Against Adversarial AI Agents – From Digital Darwinism to Guardrails
As enterprises adopt agentic AI, they face a new class of adversary: autonomous, goal-seeking agents that probe controls, data, and policies at machine speed. Building on ideas like “Digital Darwinism” and adversarial agents competing to optimize infrastructure, this session asks: what happens when attackers weaponize agents—and how do
we respond?
Key Questions: – How will adversarial agents change red-teaming, penetration testing, and threat modeling? – What defensive patterns are emerging for agent endpoint protection, data controls, and PII sensitivity mitigation? – Where do AI guardrails, content moderation, and design best practices fit in the security architecture versus at the application layer? – How do we monitor for agent-vs-agent “arms races” inside the enterprise and prevent unintended escalation?
Takeaways: – A taxonomy of adversarial agent threats relevant to Global 2000 environments. – Concrete examples of guardrail policies and monitoring approaches that actually reduce risk.
Peter Campbell is Senior Director of Cloud Security at The Cigna Group—a Fortune 100 global health leader—where he architects and operationalizes security across cloud, network, and IoT environments (AWS, Azure, OCI, hybrid). A recognized ONUG speaker and Fellow (and former chair of its Automated Cloud Governance working group), he spearheads strategic policy-as-code governance frameworks and pioneers AI-driven threat detection and automated response. Peter holds CEH, CISSP, CCSP, GICSP, GCSA, GRID, GCFA, and Microsoft Cybersecurity Architect Expert certifications.
Craig Connors is VP and CTO for Cisco Security Business Group. Previously, Craig served in multiple roles at VMWare: VP and GM for the SASE Business, CTO for Service Provider and Edge BU, CTO for the SD-WAN and SASE, and as Chief Architect for VMware’s SD-WAN, both before and after VMware’s acquisition of VeloCloud. Prior to VeloCloud, Craig had his first tenure with Cisco, working in the Corporate Development Technology Group’s Advanced Development Team. Craig was also a Principal Engineer and Software Development Manager for Talari Networks. Prior to Talari Networks his programming work was centered in the online gaming space. Craig is a veteran of the US Army and has a BS in Computer Science from NC State University. He has 19 issued patents in the networking and security domains.
Francisca Segovia is Director of Marketing at Netskope, where she leads the messaging and positioning of network and Infrastructure solutions. She has more than 20 years of networking and security industry experience, most recently serving as a Director of product marketing at Palo Alto Networks. Her extensive background includes prior roles at Silver Peak, Oracle, and Alcatel Lucent, spanning across engineering, business development, and marketing.
