Secure Your Code
Organizations have historically focused on patching and securing tangible assets like laptops, servers, and network infrastructure. In today’s threat landscape, that same discipline must be applied to source code, code libraries, and the systems used to build and deploy it.
Code repository platforms should be tightly protected and accessible only through trusted internal networks, managed identities, or other strongly controlled access paths. Organizations should proactively scan for secrets within their codebase that may be weaponized by adversaries and eliminate any practice of storing sensitive credentials in plaintext.
Similarly, organizations are still accountable for vulnerable code from their supply chains, and they must proactively plan for and defend against attacks through exploitation of compromised code libraries. This creates a conflict with updating versions and repositories immediately against holding onto known and trusted versions.
Accordingly, security controls should cover build runners, CI/CD pipelines, and other automated execution mechanisms, which are increasingly attractive targets for threat actors. AI-enabled scanning tools can help teams detect critical vulnerabilities faster and uncover groups of weaknesses that may appear minor on their own but could be chained together for exploitation.
Organizations should leverage frameworks like Wiz SITF to map their SDLC threat model and identify “attack chains” where minor, isolated weaknesses are combined by AI to create a critical breach. Additionally, one-time static or dynamic scanning is no longer sufficient. Organizations should deploy emerging commercial and open-source agentic solutions to review code and mitigate flaws before they can be exploited.
Move to Automated Security Operations
Traditional dashboards and static detection rules will struggle under the volume of automated attacks. Security operations need to become more dynamic, with a clear path toward an agentic SOC.
Legacy models are often reactive and constrained by manual workflows, By deploying specialized AI agents such as Google Cloud’s Triage and Investigation Agent and Gemini in Google Security Operations, teams can automate alert triage, analyze suspicious code without manual reverse engineering, correlate signals across multiple tools, and generate response playbooks in real time. This allows analysts to spend less time on repetitive investigation and more time on high-value decisions, helping the SOC respond to AI-enabled attacks at AI speed.
Reduce Attack Surface
Organizations should design networks with a zero trust approach and focus first on reducing exposure across internet-facing systems, critical infrastructure, control planes, and trusted service infrastructure.
Network segmentation and identity-based access controls should be in place so that if an edge device is compromised through a zero-day exploit, the blast radius is limited and easier to contain.
Maintain Continuous Asset Discovery and Posture Management
Unidentified assets are a major blindspot for organizations and a critical weakness that AI-enabled threat actors are able to exploit with increasing efficiency. Static spreadsheets and manual asset tracking are no longer a viable and scalable strategy.
Security teams need a continuously updated, automated inventory covering endpoints, servers, public-facing systems, network infrastructure, AI systems, cloud environments and ephemeral assets like Kubernetes pods. Dynamic asset discovery is critical for reducing blind spots and shadow AI. The more seamlessly known assets can be fed into downstream security tooling, the more accurate and effective frontline detection and response will be.
Expand Automated Scanning Coverage
Automated vulnerability scanning should cover every major operating system in use, including Windows, macOS, and Linux, across both endpoints and servers.
Reduce blind spots and maintain continuous, comprehensive visibility into vulnerabilities. Where possible, that visibility should feed directly into automated remediation pipelines.
Enhance Network Device Patching and Limit Connectivity
Organizations need a highly automated, repeatable process for identifying missing firmware and security updates on network devices and for scheduling maintenance efficiently. Network infrastructure has long been a preferred target for sophisticated threat actors, and AI will only accelerate the discovery of weaknesses in these often-overlooked systems.
Organizations should use perimeter controls to block unnecessary outbound connections from internal network devices. Any attempt by those devices to communicate externally should be investigated to determine whether it is required for normal operations or signals something more concerning. Proactively, organizations should baseline what outbound connections are normal, in order to alert against anomalies.
Formalize Emergency Remediation SLAs
AI may help accelerate patching, but emergency response still depends on clear human processes.
Organizations should define remediation SLAs based on severity, exposure, and asset criticality, and those expectations should be aligned across security, IT, and business stakeholders. When a vulnerability is being actively exploited in the wild, teams need a pre-approved, low-friction process to apply temporary mitigations, such as restricting public access or isolating affected systems, while permanent fixes are validated. Extremely critical business processes should each have secondary systems that can deliver the same objectives with different underlying technology. By having alternatives and fall backs for these processes, organizations give themselves more options to address emergency remediation while minimizing potential business disruption.
Secure AI Agents and Implement SAIF
As organizations deploy AI agents, they also create a new attack surface that must be protected.
Organizations should adopt frameworks such as Google’s Secure AI Framework (SAIF) to guide the secure deployment of AI models and applications. Tools like Google Cloud Model Armor or similar industry solutions can also serve as a protective layer for large language model environments by screening inputs and outputs for prompt injection, jailbreak attempts, and Google Cloud Sensitive Data Protection can prevent sensitive data leakage. Locking down connections that AI systems can establish such as MCP, with fine grained IAM roles is critical to prevent from insecure plugin use threats.
Defensive AI systems cannot become another point of compromise, and they should be secured accordingly.
Foundational Vulnerability Management Priorities
Not every organization starts from the same baseline. The priorities above assume a relatively mature security program with established tooling, ownership, and operational capacity. For organizations with limited or inconsistent vulnerability management capabilities, the first step is to build a reliable foundation before pursuing advanced AI-enabled operating models.
The Current Reality of Vulnerability Management
Vulnerability management programs vary widely based on the maturity of an organization’s overall security program. In more mature environments, vulnerability management is highly automated: in-scope vulnerabilities are identified, routed to the appropriate IT, infrastructure, or application owners, and automatically validated once remediation is complete.
In less mature environments, the opposite is often true. Vulnerability management may be inconsistent, narrowly scoped, and focused primarily on the highest-profile zero-days. Tracking may still rely on local spreadsheets, systems may be overlooked, and even trusted service infrastructure assets such as Active Directory domain controllers may remain unpatched.
Such organizations need to immediately modernize and elevate their vulnerability management programs. Most organizations were already unable to remediate every vulnerability across their technology stack, and the rise of AI-enabled threats worsens that reality, increasing the urgency of building programs that are automated, measurable, tracked, and validated.
Achieving that outcome is challenging. It requires coordination across the three foundational pillars of any security program: people, process, and technology. A prioritized and phased approach is outlined as follows.
