#460 - Sponsor Spotlight - Silverfort

Jeff and Jim are joined by Rob Ainscough, Chief Identity Security Advisor at Silverfort and host of the Identity Decoded podcast, to look at what happens when an autonomous AI attacker goes after identity. Rob shares how a decade running a 400,000-person IAM program at a UK retailer, and one identity-driven incident, moved him from compliance-led to threat-led identity. He walks through the AI Attack Lab, where an AI red agent called Cypher went from a network foothold to domain dominance in under four minutes by chaining familiar identity weaknesses in parallel. The conversation covers why governance alone can't stop machine-speed attacks, identity as a drawbridge that rises with the threat level, why agents favor non-human identities, and giving every account a protection plan. Plus podcasting lessons, community building, and the return of the Identity Mullet.

This episode is made possible with support from Silverfort. Learn more at silverfort.com/idac

Connect with Rob: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rob-ainscough/

Identity Decoded podcast: https://www.silverfort.com/identity-decoded-podcast/

Connect with us on LinkedIn:

Jim McDonald: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimmcdonaldpmp/

Jeff Steadman: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffsteadman/

Visit the show on the web at idacpodcast.com

00:00 Intro, and an apology to Mark

01:33 Meet Rob Ainscough

01:53 Falling into identity at a UK retailer

03:43 The incident that changed everything

05:48 Orphaned account war stories

07:59 Account correlation in the age of agents

09:23 The Identity Decoded podcast

11:11 What Silverfort has been focused on

13:21 Black October: hype vs. reality

15:51 Familiar techniques, new speed and scale

18:52 What is the AI Attack Lab?

23:23 Watching Cypher compromise a domain

27:58 What identity programs left behind

29:25 Building the attacker and keeping it contained

32:16 Controls that stay transparent to the model

34:08 What surprised Rob most

35:27 Goal-oriented to a fault

37:23 Was the lab environment rigged?

39:16 How security teams react

43:16 Why good governance isn't enough

47:19 Where to start: every account has a plan

49:31 Why AI attackers target NHIs

51:19 Lessons from a first season of podcasting

56:38 Nerves before hitting record

58:27 The Identity Mullet

01:02:38 Wrap-up

IDAC, Identity at the Center, Jeff Steadman, Jim McDonald, Rob Ainscough, Silverfort, Sponsor Spotlight, Identity Decoded, AI Attack Lab, Cypher, AI agents, agentic AI, autonomous attacker, Black October, threat-led identity, identity threat detection and response, ITDR, Active Directory, Kerberoasting, AS-REP roasting, golden ticket, lateral movement, credential harvesting, domain compromise, non-human identities, NHI, service accounts, PAM, IGA, identity debt, runtime enforcement, identity security, CISO, red team, Mythos