Agentic Supply Chain Under Attack: Cisco Partners with OpenAI to Develop Daybreak

Cisco has partnered with OpenAI to develop Daybreak, an AI security solution designed to detect and prevent attacks on the agentic supply chain. The company notes that many notable breaches in recent years have been caused by attackers compromising trusted agents or packages, which are then used to execute malicious code within a target's environment.

The traditional approach to security assumes that only explicitly approved software runs within an environment, but this assumption is broken at runtime with the advent of agentic AI. Agents can load and call arbitrary artifacts from unvetted registries, making it difficult to detect malicious activity.

Cisco's solution involves a tiered architecture using Daybreak Blue and Red. Blue scans for initial threats, while Red provides a deeper analysis of heavily obfuscated payloads. The company also emphasizes the importance of inventorying what agents can load and call, as this is the first step in securing the agentic supply chain.