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 Platform Security Engineer and Information Protection Senior Director at Evernorth Health Services. As Co-Chair of the ONUG Agentic AI Working Group, he leads efforts to define standards for securing autonomous AI agents and reducing Agentic AI risk.
With a technical foundation forged in the U.S. Navy, Peter brings a unique investigative lens to cloud security. His current research and consulting focus on Ransomware Resilience and DFIR, specifically leveraging AI to accelerate the forensic lifecycle in digital investigations. A holder of numerous advanced certifications (including CISSP and GCFA), he is committed to architecting resilient ecosystems that can withstand the next generation of extortion and automated threats.
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.
Steve Riley is a Field CTO at Netskope. Having worked at the intersection of cloud and security for pretty much as long as that’s been an actual topic, Steve offers that perspective to field and executive engagements and also supports long-term technology strategy and works with key industry influencers. A widely-renowned expert speaker, author, researcher, and analyst, Steve came to Netskope from Gartner, where for five years he maintained a collection of cloud security research that included the Magic Quadrant for Cloud Access Security Brokers and the Market Guide for Zero Trust Network Access. Before Gartner, Steve spent four years as Deputy CTO of Riverbed Technology and held various security strategy and technical program management roles at Amazon Web Services for two years and at Microsoft for eleven years. Steve’s interest in security began all the way back in 1995, when he convinced his then-employer that it would be a good idea to install a firewall on their brand new internet connection.
