Black Hat 2026: AI, Vuln Management & Cyber Resilience

At Black Hat USA 2026, security leaders highlighted growing challenges like AI governance and vulnerability management. Here's the thing: security teams are gaining more visibility into risks, but acting on that visibility is becoming harder. Shira Sagiv of Radware noted that only 17% of organizations have full visibility into their AI agents. This makes discovering, governing, and protecting these agents a fundamental requirement. Srinivas Mukkamala from Securin pointed out that recent attacks, like one that shut down water treatment controls in a Minnesota town, show how quickly threats can materialize. He emphasized that AI has sped up an existing fight, and the key is quickly fixing threats that can cause real harm. Kara Sprague, CEO of HackerOne, reported a significant drop in the resolution rate for critical vulnerabilities on their platform, from 85% to 44% in the last year. Despite teams fixing issues 53% faster, the backlog of unresolved critical vulnerabilities is up 29 times. The bottom line is that while finding vulnerabilities might not be the hardest part anymore, closing them fast enough to matter is the critical challenge facing organizations today.