Cisco rolls out solutions to address AI security issues

Cisco has introduced a range of solutions designed to address AI security issues and remove the barriers to enterprise adoption of agentic AI.

The company is extending Zero Trust Access to AI Agents, with new Duo IAM capabilities integrating with MCP policy enforcement and intent-aware monitoring in Cisco Secure Access to enforce strict access control.

Customers can register agents in Duo IAM and map them to accountable human owners, ensuring every agent has a verified identity and enabling traceability of actions. Cisco Identity Intelligence also discovers agentic and non-human identities to help organisations understand existing AI usage.

Agents are assigned fine-grained permissions only for the specific tasks they perform or resources they need for a short duration, with all tool traffic routed through an MCP gateway to eliminate blind spots.

The company also announced Cisco Defense: Explorer Edition, a self-service solution.

After signing up, users can begin red teaming the AI models and applications that will be deployed into agentic workflows to uncover susceptibility to attacks and measure risk posture before deployment. This toolkit enables AI developers, AppSec teams, and security researchers to build and secure AI agents.

which lets organisations red team AI models and applications that will be deployed into agentic workflows. This will help customers uncover susceptibility to attacks and measure risk posture before deployment.

At launch, Cisco AI Defense: Explorer Edition features the ability to conduct multi-turn adversarial testing for models and applications that power agentic workflows, with Cisco's bespoke AI red teaming framework, as well as being able to validate resistance to prompt injection, jailbreaks, and other unsafe outputs.

Users can also tap into CI/CD integration for GitHub Actions, GitLab, Jenkins, and custom pipelines, plus invite teammates; upgrade to AI Defense Enterprise for advanced role-based access control (RBAC).

Separately, Cisco is unveiling its Agent Runtime Software Development Kit (SDK), which embeds policy enforcement directly into agent workflows at build time. The Agent Runtime SDK supports major frameworks including AWS Bedrock AgentCore, Google Vertex Agent Builder, Azure AI Foundry, LangChain, and more.

Cisco is also introducing the LLM Security Leaderboard, a resource for evaluating model risk and susceptibility to adversarial attacks. By providing transparent evaluation signals, this leaderboard aims to contextualise model performance metrics against evaluations of how models handle malicious prompts, jailbreak attempts, and other manipulation strategies.

The company unveiled DefenseClaw - a secure agent framework designed to eliminate friction between development and security. By integrating a suite of essential open source tools — including Skills Scanner, MCP Scanner, AI BoM, and CodeGuard - DefenseClaw intends to help ensure that every skill is scanned and sandboxed, every MCP server is verified, and every AI asset is automatically inventoried.

DefenseClaw features will directly hook into NVIDIA’s OpenShell, extending the ongoing collaboration to provide automated security at the runtime level.

Splunk, part of Cisco's security portfolio, also announced a range of updates.

Now integrated into Splunk Enterprise Security by default, Exposure Analytics provides a continuously updated inventory of all assets and users, delivering real-time risk scoring and relationship mapping, providing visibility using data that organisations are already ingesting.

Detection Studio is a unified workspace that intends to streamline the entire detection engineering lifecycle - planning, building, testing, deploying, and monitoring detections. It automatically maps detection coverage against the MITRE ATT&CK framework to identify and close gaps with precision. 

Federated Search is a unified search that allows SOC analysts to uncover and correlate data across multiple environments.

Splunk also introduced specialised AI agents, including the Detection Builder Agent, Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) Agent, Triage Agent, Malware Threat Reversing Agent, Guided Response Agent and Automation Builder Agent.

“AI agents aren't just making existing work faster; they're a new workforce of co-workers that dramatically expand what organizations can accomplish,” said Jeetu Patel, president and chief product officer at Cisco.

“Projects shelved for lack of resources are now within reach. The only limit is imagination, and security teams are the key to unlocking this opportunity by making the agentic workforce safe enough to trust."