Building Defense for the Agentic Era: Kevin Mandia

If you don't have a defense, unless you have a great offense to go up against, you wanna be the Baltimore Ravens defense of two thousand. You kinda wanna have your practice offense really push you. That's what Armadin's gonna do. We're gonna be the all-star team on offense coming at you, so you can train your defense with what we're doing.

But you built Mandiant, a great success. Why did you decide to get back on the field?

I don't wanna sit out the AI shift change when I've done thirty years in security, and the whole damn thing's about to change. What AI does in, in a microsecond would take seventy humans. They can't even do it. It's apples to oranges.

This is a tsunami like has never been seen before in security.

The whole, "Let's slow down the models. We don't want cyber risk," too late. The open models are already good enough. Armadin, since January of this year, we have found over ninety zero days at customer sites, all in production.

This is not, like, rinky-dink companies. Like, these are, like, Fortune five hundred companies. The differences or similarities between nation state attacks compared to AI today, and then where you think AI can be in a couple of years.

On the defensive side, we're gonna say, "We're being attacked by these models, but we're not sure who's behind them."

Yeah.

Is it a nation? Is it a human? Is it-

Kevin Mandia has spent thirty years in cybersecurity. His view of the AI transition is simple: "Everything I did is dead, and then everything else is new." In this episode, David George sits down with Kevin, founder and CEO of Armadin and the founder of Mandiant, to talk about what happens when cyberattacks move from human speed to machine speed. Kevin explains why AI gives attackers an immediate advantage, from probing thousands of paths simultaneously to making less sophisticated attackers dramatically more capable. And he makes the case that there's only one viable response. Defense has to become autonomous, too. We also get into how Armadin uses AI to continuously attack customer networks, what the team has learned from finding more than ninety zero days this year, and why Kevin believes the next two years could remake nearly every layer of the cybersecurity stack. Kevin, thanks for being here.

No, thank you.

Okay, so you built Mandiant.

Yes.

Obviously a great success. Many different chapters.

Mm-hmm.

You know, it ended up inside of Google-

Right

... ultimately. Why did you decide to get back on the field?

It's a good question, and I don't know if I decided it, and that'll sound weird. But I met with David Slater and with Travis Lanham, the other founders, and Evan Pena I knew. I could say they started this company. They are the founders. I met them. They had the idea. They pitched me on what they wanted to do, and I saw the talent in them. Travis is a generational talent. David Slater's, and I mean this in a positive way, freak of nature. [chuckles]

Yes.

Like, these guys are really, really good. Evan Pena is exceptional at what he does. And when you meet that team and you talk to them, the whole time I was listening to what they were doing, I was thinking, "I wanna be a part of this." I don't wanna sit out the AI shift change