Cyber Storm

The reality of a modern

Ever wonder if your network could actually survive a total blackout of the internet's backbone? It's a scary thought but honestly, most of us just hope it never happens instead of actually planning for it.

National exercises like 2020, which is a massive government-sponsored drill, shows us that our biggest weaknesses are often in things we take for granted like dns and bgp. When these core services get hit, it doesn't matter how good your firewall is; the whole nation's identity ecosystem starts to wobble.

• Core Infrastructure Vulnerability: The Cyber Storm 2020 After-Action Report highlighted that attacks on dns and certificate authorities (ca) can lead to total traffic interception.
• Whole-of-Nation approach: We’ve moved past just "protecting servers" to needing a strategy that includes everyone from healthcare to retail.
• Distributed Response Lag: A big lesson was that remote teams—like we all are now—often struggle with coordination during catastrophic events, causing major delays.

Now we got ai agents everywhere in our enterprise software stack, and honestly, it's getting messy. These non-human identities often have way too much access, making them a huge liability if someone hijacks their scim or saml integrations.

Treating an automated agent like a regular service account is a recipe for disaster. If an agent with too much "write" access gets compromised, a small leak turns into a total storm before you even finish your coffee. Next, we’ll look at how these machine identities are actually breaking our traditional perimeters.

Identity governance in the age of automation

Ever feel like you're just one bad api key away from a total meltdown? Honestly, managing ai agents right now feels like trying to herd cats that have admin privileges on your azure entra tenant.

If you don't have a plan for when these agents "die," you’re leaving backdoors wide open. Most teams are great at spinning up new bots but suck at turning them off. scim (System for Cross-domain Identity Management) is basically your best friend here because it automates the provisioning—and more importantly, the de-provisioning—across your stack.

• Automated Offboarding: Using scim ensures that when a project ends, the agent's access is killed instantly across okta and other apps.
• SAML for Auth: Don't let agents use hardcoded passwords; stick to saml for federated identity so you can manage everything from one spot.
• Audit Trails: You need to know exactly what an agent did at 3 AM. If it’s not logging to a central dashboard, it didn't happen.

Who actually owns the identity when your ai is running in a third-party cloud? It’s a bit of a gray area that gets people in trouble. You're responsible for the "identity" part, while the provider handles the infrastructure. If an agent credential gets popped, the "blast radius" can be huge if you haven't restricted its permissions.

As mentioned earlier in the Cyber Storm 2020 reports, the "whole-of-organization" coordination is the only way to survive these hits.

You need a centralized view of every api key and token. If you're in healthcare or finance, a leaked token isn't just a tech issue—it's a massive compliance nightmare.

Basically, if you treat an ai agent with the same casualness as a Slack integration, you're asking for a storm. Next, we're diving into how these machine identities are straight-up wrecking our old-school perimeters.

Hardening your workforce identity systems

Ever feel like your security policy is just a bunch of "best guesses" until a real mess hits the fan? Honestly, watching how people handle machine identities right now is like watching someone leave their front door wide open because they think the neighborhood is "safe enough."

We gotta stop treating ai agents like they're just humans who don't sleep. They need a totally different level of hardening because they don't have feelings or "gut instincts" to stop them from doing something stupid if they get a bad command.

• Ditch the passwords: Use certificate-based auth for every agent. As mentioned earlier in the CISA reports, certificate authorities are big targets, so you gotta manage these keys like they're the crown jewels.
• mTLS is the way: While 2fa works for us humans, your bots need mutual TLS (mTLS). It ensures both the client and server actually know who they’re talking to before a single byte of data moves.
• Behavioral baselines: You need to monitor for "weird" traffic. If a retail bot that usually just checks inventory suddenly tries to export a database to an unknown IP, you need to kill that session instantly.

Explaining your ai identity policy to a non-technical auditor is basically my version of a nightmare. But with regulations like soc2 or hipaa, you can't just say "the bot did it" and hope for the best.

• Immutable logs: If an agent performs an action, it needs to be written in stone. You need a trail that shows exactly which api key was used and what it touched at 3 AM.
• Agent "Death" certificates: Just like we talked about with scim earlier, you need a hard process for offboarding. If a project in a finance firm ends, that agent's credentials should be nuked from azure entra immediately.

According to the Cyber Storm 2020 After-Action Report, successful response requires "whole-of-organization" coordination, not just the tech guys in the basement.

If you aren't auditing your non-human identities with the same intensity as your admins, you're basically inviting a storm. Next, we're looking at how these machine identities are straight-up wrecking our old-school perimeters.

Scenario planning for the next big hit

Ever feel like you’re just waiting for the sky to fall? Honestly, in cybersecurity, we spend so much time putting out small fires that we forget to plan for the actual hurricane.

You can't just hope your scim and saml integrations hold up when things get weird. You gotta break them yourself first. Running tabletop exercises that specifically target your ai agents is the only way to see where the cracks are before a hacker does.

• Red Team your Agents: Simulate a "man-in-the-middle" attack on your internal agent communications. If an agent's api key is swiped, how far can the attacker go?
• The Kill Switch Test: Test how fast your team can revoke access for 1,000 agents at once. If you're clicking "delete" manually in okta or azure entra, you've already lost.
• Vignette Testing: Use the scenario vignettes mentioned earlier in the CISA reports—like bgp hijacking or unauthorized ca issuance—to see if your automated systems even notice the traffic shift.

We’re moving toward a world where ai governs ai. It sounds like sci-fi, but "self-healing" security systems are becoming a real thing. If a bot starts acting out in a retail app or a healthcare database, the system should kill its saml session without a human needing to wake up at 3 AM.

• Standardization: We need better ways for agents to identify themselves across different companies. Right now, it's a bit of a "Wild West" with every vendor doing their own thing.
• Automated Governance: The goal is a system that spots a leaked token and rotates it instantly. No tickets, no delays.
• Shared Responsibility: As previously discussed, you own the identity, even if the ai runs in someone else's cloud.

Look, the next "Cyber Storm" isn't a matter of if, it's when. If you treat your ai agents like an afterthought, you're basically leaving the keys in the ignition. Stay messy with your testing, but stay precise with your identity governance. That's the only way to keep the lights on.