loading
loading
Here is a message from Joel, Zane and the a16z infra team that we sent to our portfolio companies yesterday, regarding the current cybersecurity situation. Stay safe out there! The previous week should make it obvious that things have changed. Vulnerabilities are being discovered and exploited at a rate that has never been seen before. While there has been a flood of new vulnerabilities AI agents are being adopted at scale multiplying the potential risk. Agents not only help automate the attacker lifecycle, every AI agent is an insider threat. Your environments are designed to withstand attacks from the outside, not from within. As such, we are suggesting company leaders consider the following drastic changes: - Significantly increase resources for security work. The average enterprise allocates roughly 10% of its tech spend to security. Consider doubling that. There are likely thousands of vulnerabilities that need fixing in your environments. Security through obscurity no longer works, all that can be exploited will be exploited. - Establish a zero tolerance policy for new features and product releases. Re-examine launch and release schedules and consider delays to ensure all vulnerabilities are patched before deploying new features or products. - Double tap the zombies. Find all old legacy environments that have been neglected and turn them off. Labs, test environments, zombie CI/CD projects etc. Turn it off for now. If it isn’t tied to revenue, kill it. - End the risk acceptance process. Over the last 10 years the risk acceptance process has morphed from a way to accept risks to enable the business, to a way to justify never fixing security issues. Adopt a zero tolerance policy for security issues and risks. - Going forward, scale up agents not people. The threat is moving at machine speed and you’ll need to respond in kind. Push your security team to automate as much of their detection and response process as possible. Security teams are risk averse and some have been slow to adopt new technologies. Push them to adapt. This is general advice, Our team is also available as a resource to your security teams for any follow-up or technical questions. This newsletter is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. Furthermore, this content is not investment advice, nor is it intended for use by any investors or prospective investors in any a16z funds. This newsletter may link to other websites or contain other information obtained from third-party sources - a16z has not independently verified nor makes any representations about the current or enduring accuracy of such information. If this content includes third-party advertisements, a16z has not reviewed such advertisements and does not endorse any advertising content or related companies contained therein. Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by a16z; visit https://a16z.com/investment-list/ for a full list of investments. Other important information can be found at a16z.com/disclosures. You’re receiving this newsletter since you opted in earlier; if you would like to opt out of future newsletters you may unsubscribe immediately.
document fetched 2026-10-24 12:16 · canonical https://a16z.news/p/patch-or-die