Stop Attacks Everywhere with Cisco Hybrid Mesh Firewall

Tony Giandomenico of Cisco Talos and Ant Ducker of Cisco explained how adversaries are using AI and how Cisco’s hybrid mesh firewall approach is designed to stop attacks everywhere. The session covered AI-assisted and semi-autonomous attack techniques, Cisco’s extension of hybrid mesh firewall to third-party policies, smart switches, and eBPF-protected workloads, and the threat model used for the day’s demos.

Giandomenico said adversaries have moved from human-controlled missions to AI-assisted workflows and are now testing bounded autonomy, though Talos has not seen full autonomy in the wild. Attackers use open source tools with AI built in, such as PentestGPT, to automate reconnaissance, exploitation, and proof-of-concept development. Talos also found 84 malware samples across four families with embedded text meant to trick AI-based file analysis tools into treating the file as harmless. Talos also analyzed implant code that sends reconnaissance data to multiple LLMs. The LLMs vote on the next action from a menu, and the implant executes the winning action with no human involved. Ducker then explained how Cisco extends Gartner’s hybrid mesh firewall concept beyond a single control plane for its own firewalls. Cisco’s version also manages third-party firewall policies, enforces policy at individual switch ports through smart switches, and controls workloads at the kernel level with eBPF.

Giandomenico warned that humans will eventually set a mission and let agents complete it. Agents iterate so fast that attackers may not bother with stealth, because they can be in and out before thousands of alerts are triaged. Ducker argued that hyper-distributed applications demand control from process to socket to network to enforcement point. His example finance app spans legacy tiers, replicated data centers, Kubernetes microservices, and an LLM. He outlined the threat model for the day, built on the Talos implant research. It starts with a browser exploit, moves laterally into SQL injection and zero days across two data centers, then attacks Kubernetes and ends in exfiltration. He positioned Cisco Cloud Control as the platform that manages Cisco’s technology domains, hosts its agentic workforce, and runs on a data fabric built from Splunk.