Can Zero Trust survive the AI era?
Can Zero Trust survive the AI era?
https://cyberscoop.com/ai-zero-trust-security-federal-agencies-elastic-public-sector/
Publish Date: 2026-03-19 17:08:00
Source Domain: cyberscoop.com
For the past decade, cybersecurity experts in the federal government have argued that trust, or a lack of it, was key to developing effective security policies for agency systems and data.
But today, cybercriminals and state-sponsored hackers are using artificial intelligence to develop and launch cyberattacks more quickly and efficiently. Governments and businesses are facing pressure to adopt AI-powered cybersecurity defenses, along with security architectures that delegate key security decisions to AI agents.
Jennifer Franks, Director of the Center for Enhanced Cybersecurity at the Government Accountability Office, said federal agencies were currently grappling with how to do both.
“We’re having to consider a two-in-one approach,” Franks said Thursday at the Elastic Public Sector Summit presented by FedScoop. “It’s not something that we have to consider as a tool that’s nice to have, it’s a needed necessity right now in an environment to really look at the best practices for really anticipating the adversaries that could target your environment.”
Zero Trust – a set of security principles with roots in older cybersecurity concepts like “least privilege access” — essentially argues that defenders should treat everything on their network as a potential compromised asset. Thus, everything requires constant verification of identity, access, and authorization to protect from hackers, data breaches and insider threats.
But threat researchers are reporting that malicious hackers have been able to leverage AI-driven automation and scaling to significantly increase the speed of their attacks, making it increasingly difficult for human operators on the defensive side to keep up or make decisions in real time.
At the same event Mike Nichols, general manager for security solutions at Elastic, said his company and other threat research firms have found that AI tools have helped drive down the time it takes to…
