All news with #agentic ai tag

🛠️ Vertex AI Agent Builder is a unified platform for building, grounding, and deploying production-grade AI agents, designed to move organizations from prototype to scalable, secure services. It centers development on five pillars: Agent frameworks, Model choice, Tools for taking actions, Scalability and performance, and Built-in trust and security, and supports the Agent Development Kit (ADK) and third-party models including Gemini 2.5 Flash Pro. The platform offers managed runtime features such as sandboxed code execution, Agent-to-Agent collaboration, Bidirectional Streaming, and a streamlined one-line path from ADK prototype to Agent Engine deployment, while enterprise controls like VPC-SC and CMEK address compliance and data protection.

🤖 Mr. Cooper partnered with Google Cloud to develop CIERA, a modular agentic AI framework that assembles specialized agents to support mortgage servicing representatives and customers. The design assigns distinct roles — orchestration, task execution, data retrieval, memory, and evaluation — while keeping humans in the loop for verification and personalization. Built on Vertex AI, CIERA aims to reduce research time, lower average handling time, and preserve trust and compliance in regulated workflows.

🚀 Google Cloud highlights how its differentiated AI tech stack is accelerating startup innovation worldwide, with nine of the top ten AI labs, most AI unicorns, and more than 60% of generative AI startups using its platform. Startups are leveraging Vertex AI, TPUs, multimodal models like Veo 3 and Gemini, plus services such as AI Studio and GKE to build agents, generative media, medical tools, and developer platforms. Programs like the Google for Startups Cloud Program provide credits, mentorship, and engineering support to help founders scale.

🔒 Zscaler's annual ThreatLabz Ransomware Report (April 2024–April 2025) warns of a marked rise in extortion-focused attacks: incidents increased 146% year-over-year while exfiltrated data grew 92%. The vendor attributes this to a strategic shift from pure encryption to data theft and public shaming, with criminals using stolen files as leverage. Researchers also report that generative AI is increasingly incorporated into attackers' playbooks to enable more targeted and efficient campaigns. The U.S. accounted for half of all recorded attacks, Germany saw a nearly 75% rise and is the EU's most affected country, and the most-targeted sectors were manufacturing, technology and healthcare.

🔒 Azure outlines a layered blueprint for building trustworthy, enterprise-grade AI agents. The post emphasizes identity, data protection, built-in controls, continuous evaluation, and monitoring to address risks like data leakage, prompt injection, and agent sprawl. Azure AI Foundry introduces Entra Agent ID, cross-prompt injection classifiers, risk and safety evaluations, and integrations with Microsoft Purview and Defender. Join Microsoft Secure on September 30 to learn about Foundry's newest capabilities.

🧰 MCP Toolbox now includes comprehensive Firestore tools that let AI assistants connect directly to Firestore from environments like Gemini CLI and other MCP-compatible interfaces. Built on the Model Context Protocol, these pre-built tools support document reads, collection queries, targeted updates, and security-rules validation to accelerate debugging, testing, and maintenance for NoSQL applications. Developers can perform complex queries and targeted updates in natural language, validate security rules before deployment, and reduce context switching between consoles and emulators. The release is accompanied by docs, quick start guides, a GitHub repo, and community channels to help teams adopt the features quickly.

🛡️ Enterprises adopting agentic AI must update red‑teaming practices to address a rapidly expanding and interactive attack surface. The article summarizes the Cloud Security Alliance’s Agentic AI Red Teaming Guide and corroborating research that documents prompt injection, multi‑agent manipulation, and authorization hijacking as practical threats. It recommends five pragmatic steps—change attitude, continually test guardrails and governance, broaden red‑team skill sets, widen the solution space, and adopt modern tooling—and highlights open‑source and commercial tools such as AgentDojo and Agentgateway. The overall message: combine automated agents with human creativity, embed security in design, and treat agentic systems as sociotechnical operators rather than simple software.

🔍 CrowdStrike unveiled Threat AI, described as the industry’s first agentic threat intelligence system, built on the Falcon platform to reason, hunt, and act across adversary activity. The initial agents — a Malware Analysis Agent and a Hunt Agent — automate complex workflows like reversing, classification, retrohunting, and continuous threat hunting to surface actionable recommendations. CrowdStrike also released a Threat Intelligence Browser Extension for Chrome to provide intelligence in analysts’ workflows, aiming to accelerate investigations and help SOCs respond at machine speed.

🤖 CrowdStrike is expanding its agentic AI strategy following its $290 million acquisition of Onum, introducing two initiatives designed to accelerate real-time telemetry and automate SOC workflows. The Agentic Security Platform builds an "enterprise graph" with a semantic data model that acts as a Rosetta Stone to normalize diverse telemetry and enable a global query and command engine. Agent Works provides a no-code environment to create, test, and deploy agentic systems, while the Agentic Security Workforce delivers mission-ready agents in Falcon sensors to automate repetitive analyst tasks and enforce data-protection controls across endpoints.

⚠ Villager is an AI-native red-teaming framework from a shadowy Chinese developer, Cyberspike, that has been downloaded more than 10,000 times in roughly two months. The tool automates reconnaissance, exploitation, payload generation, and lateral movement into a single pipeline, integrating Kali toolsets with DeepSeek AI models and publishing on PyPI. Security firms warn the automation compresses days of skilled activity into minutes, creating dual-use risks for both legitimate testers and malicious actors and raising supply-chain and detection concerns.

🔒 Astrix introduces the industry's first Agent Control Plane (ACP) to enable secure-by-design deployment of autonomous AI agents across the enterprise. ACP issues short-lived, precisely scoped credentials and enforces just-in-time, least-privilege access while centralizing inventory and activity trails. The platform streamlines policy-driven approvals for developers, speeds audits for security teams, and reduces compliance and operational risk by discovering non-human identities (NHIs) and remediating excessive privileges in real time.

🚀 Google Cloud and SAP announced tighter integration to unify enterprise data and accelerate intelligent automation. SAP Business Data Cloud now connects to BigQuery via Datasphere, enabling bidirectional replication and AI-ready analytics. Procurement is simplified on the Google Cloud Marketplace with SAP BTP. New agent tooling—Agentspace, the Agent Development Kit, A2A and MCP standards—and expanded M4 memory-optimized VMs certified for SAP HANA aim to speed deployments, improve data consistency, and enable autonomous process automation.

🤖 Security leaders report early wins from AI in detection, triage, and automation, but emphasize limits and oversight. Prioritizing high-value telemetry for real-time detection while moving lower-priority logs to data lakes improves signal-to-noise and shortens response times, according to Myke Lyons. Financial firms are experimenting with agentic AI to block business email compromise in real time, yet researchers and practitioners warn of missed detections and 'ghost alerts.' Organizations that treat AI as a copilot with governance, explainability, and institutional context see more reliable, safer outcomes.

🚀 The CrowdStrike Falcon fall release reframes the platform as an Agentic Security Platform, introducing four core innovations: Enterprise Graph, Charlotte AI AgentWorks, the Agent Collaboration framework (powered by MCP), and an AI-native console. Enterprise Graph unifies telemetry into a real-time, AI-ready data layer to give humans and agents shared context. Charlotte AI AgentWorks delivers a no-code environment to design, test, deploy, and govern mission-specific security agents at scale, while MCP enables secure, orchestrated multi-agent collaboration.

⚠️ The AI-driven penetration testing framework Villager, attributed to China-linked developer Cyberspike, has attracted nearly 11,000 PyPI downloads since its July 2025 upload, prompting warnings about potential abuse. Marketed as a red‑teaming automation platform, it integrates Kali toolsets, LangChain, and AI models to convert natural‑language commands into technical actions and orchestrate tests. Researchers found built‑in plugins resembling remote access tools and known hacktools, and note Villager’s use of ephemeral Kali containers, randomized ports, and an AI task layer that together lower the bar for misuse and complicate detection and attribution.

🔒 Cybersecurity leaders report the mission to defend organizations is unchanged, but threats, technology and operating pressures are evolving rapidly. Five trends — shrinking or stagnating budgets, AI-enabled attacks, the rise of agentic AI, accelerating business speed, and heightened vendor M&A — are forcing changes in strategy. CISOs are simplifying tech stacks, increasing automation and outsourcing, and deploying AI for detection and response while wrestling with new authentication/authorization gaps. Vendor viability and consolidation now factor into resilience planning.

🔗 Azure's Agent Factory blog emphasizes that interoperability is the key to moving agentic AI from isolated prototypes to enterprise-scale solutions. The post promotes open standards like Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent2Agent (A2A) to enable shared context, reusable tools, and cross-framework collaboration across runtimes such as Semantic Kernel. It explains how Azure AI Foundry combines these protocols with thousands of connectors, unified observability, and governance so agents can act across SaaS, legacy systems, and custom APIs without costly rewrites.

🤖 Generative AI remains the dominant force shaping enterprise security priorities, but the initial hype is giving way to more measured ROI scrutiny and operational caution. Analysts say gen AI is entering a trough of disillusionment even as vendors roll out agentic AI offerings for autonomous threat detection and response. The article highlights rising risks — from model theft and data poisoning to AI-enabled vishing — along with brisk M&A activity, a shift to identity-centric defenses, and growing demand for specialized cyber roles.

🛡️ The Agentic SOC Workshop is a complimentary, half-day event series from Google Cloud designed to help security professionals apply agentic AI and cloud-native threat intelligence to real-world operations. Attendees will participate in hands-on labs, a Capture the Flag challenge, and peer networking to learn how Gemini and Google Cloud tools can reduce alert fatigue and automate routine workflows. Sessions start in Los Angeles on Sept. 17 and Chicago on Sept. 19, with additional dates in October.

🤖 Ask Ralph is a conversational AI styling companion built on Azure OpenAI, available in the Ralph Lauren app in the US. It uses natural-language prompts to interpret open-ended requests, asks clarifying questions, and returns curated, fully stylized, visually presented and shoppable outfit recommendations drawn from real-time inventory. Powered by agentic AI capabilities, the experience plans, reasons, and acts to deliver personalized looks at scale. Microsoft positions this as part of broader Azure AI solutions for retail innovation.