Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Researchers at LayerX warn that custom fonts can fool AI web assistants into thinking phishing pages are benign, while the human user sees something completely different. “There is a structural disconnect between what an AI assistant analyzes in a page’s HTML and what a user sees rendered by the browser,” the researchers explain.

Every year, security and tech leaders come to the RSA conference in San Francisco to take the industry’s pulse, and every RSAC tends to be dominated by a single, overarching theme. Last year, the theme was: “AI agents are coming, and governance isn’t ready.” And sure enough, the theme of RSAC 2026 was: “AI agents are here, and governance needs to catch up.”

RSA Conference 2026 made one thing clear very quickly. Security leaders are done with generic AI pitches. After two years of relentless “AI everything,” the market is now pushing back. There is a growing fatigue with vague promises, surface-level features, and what many are calling outright AI washing. The result is a trust gap. What cut through this year was not another AI-powered detection claim. It was a much more grounded question.

A finance employee receives an email that appears to come from the CFO requesting urgent payment approval. The message references a current project, uses the correct tone, and arrives at a plausible time. However, the email wasn’t written by a colleague — it was generated by AI. And it contains a malicious link. These attacks are becoming more common as threat actors use AI to produce convincing phishing emails, automate impersonation attempts, and launch social engineering campaigns at scale.

AI is moving fast. But the transition from GenAI tools that respond to prompts to AI agents that execute workflows represents something qualitatively different for security leaders. The shift goes beyond just scale, and is a fundamental change in how data moves, who touches it, and what decisions get made, often without human review.

The Terminator is often people’s reference point for artificial intelligence (AI), especially when they worry that technology will be the end of civilization. However, on the other end of the AI spectrum is the beloved, marshmallow fluff Baymax, the helper robot providing assistance to those in his presence. The reality of AI sits somewhere between these two extremes. For security teams, AI initially seemed like a revolutionary technology that would offer faster detection and automated analysis.