VIP Guest Most of the AI and cybersecurity conversations over the past two years have focused on AI writing better phishing emails or cloning a voice for a fraud call. That's real, but it understates what’s happening now. What's different about agentic AI is autonomy. An attacker can hand an AI agent a goal rather than a script, and the agent will scan for exposed services, adapt when a defense blocks it, and chain together multiple stages of an intrusion with very little human input in between.
A threat intelligence disclosure in June 2026 gave the industry a concrete look at this, when researchers uncovered a fully operational threat-actor lab built specifically to develop malware capable of defeating endpoint detection tools. The setup used an AI system as a coordinating “manager” directing several agents through code generation, testing, and revision, running each build against live security products before shipping it. It wasn't theoretical red-teaming, it was a working pipeline, industrializing what used to be slow, manual malware development.
The bigger structural story sits in Sophos’ most recent Active Adversary Report – composed from 661 incident response and MDR cases. Here we found that median attacker dwell time has decreased to three days, with identity-based attacks, stolen credentials, weak MFA, poorly protected accounts, now the dominant ways attackers get in, ahead of software exploitation. This is reinforced by Sophos’ State of Identity Security 2026, which found that 71% of organisations suffered at least one identity-related breach in the past year, while 67% of surveyed ransomware victims said their ransomware incident stemmed from an identity attack. AI isn’t inventing new ways to get through the door. Instead, it’s collapsing the time between getting in and doing damage, which is arguably the more dangerous problem for defenders operating on human-paced response cycles. Malaysia's own numbers point the same way. CyberSecurity Malaysia’s Cyber999 centre logged a 29% jump in reported data breach incidents in the first quarter of 2025 alone, while credential-focused threats continued to feature prominently in reported incidents.
Why this is a governance problem, not just a tooling one
Malaysia’s regulators are asking similar questions. The Cyber Security Act 2024 and Bank Negara Malaysia’s revised Risk Management in Technology (RMiT) policy have pushed stronger governance expectations around incident reporting, risk assessment and cybersecurity controls, while the Personal Data Protection (Amendment) Act 2024 adds another layer, with mandatory data breach notification in force since June 2025 and and increased penalties for breaching data protection principles.
The policy landscape is still evolving. In July, Parliament passed the Cybercrimes Bill 2026, which is intended to replace the Computer Crimes Act 1997 and strengthen Malaysia’s framework for increasingly complex cyber threats, including the misuse of technologies such as AI. More recently, the Digital Ministry completed its draft Artificial Intelligence Governance Bill, which is expected to be tabled in Parliament this quarter or by the first quarter of 2027 at the latest. Together, these developments signal that AI and cybersecurity are increasingly becoming governance and accountability issues, not simply technology decisions left to security teams. Frameworks alone don't close the human gap, though. In January 2026, BNM fined Bank Kerjasama Rakyat Malaysia Bhd RM1 million after an external threat actor breached its IT infrastructure, citing inadequate cybersecurity controls and incident response, not a missing policy.
The challenge is that most governance frameworks were built for human-paced threats. Agentic AI changes that equation by allowing attacks to move, adapt and escalate at machine speed, forcing organisations to rethink not just their security tools, but how quickly decisions, accountability and response can happen.
So what this means in practice?
None of this calls for panic, and it doesn't mean the fundamentals have changed. It means the fundamentals matter more. A few things worth prioritizing:
Agentic AI hasn’t replaced the attacker’s human intent, and human error on the defending side still drives many incidents. What it has done is remove the friction that slowed attacks down and gave defenders a little breathing room. That breathing room now needs to be re-engineered back into enterprise defence through stronger identity controls, always-on monitoring and detection built around attacker techniques rather than signatures, before it disappears for good.
**This article is contributed by Malis Selamat – Managing Director, ASEAN, Sophos**