From awareness to AI-driven resilience: Protecting identities, data, and agents

Every October Cyber Security Awareness Month reminds organizations to pause and reflect on their defenses. But in 2025 awareness alone isn’t enough. As artificial intelligence (AI) transforms digital operations as well as the threat landscape, cybersecurity must evolve from education to execution — from awareness to resilience.

“As AI drives the next wave of digital transformation, Cyber Security Awareness Month reminds us that cyber-resilience — not just visibility — is key to securing our digital future,” says Kavitha Mariappan, Chief Transformation Officer at Rubrik. “AI is forcing leaders to transform their infrastructure and applications and adopt more cloud, which makes cyber-resilience the top priority for cybersecurity.”

The new frontline: Identities and agents under attack

The most common way attackers gain access today isn’t through brute-force hacking; it’s via compromised identities. Nearly 80% of cyberattacks in the past year were identity-driven, as adversaries exploit stolen credentials to log in rather than break in, according to a report from Rubrik Zero Labs.

“Digital walls might have worked when attackers were breaking in, but a new approach is needed, because increasingly they’re simply logging in,” says David Rajkovic, Regional Vice President for Australia and New Zealand at Rubrik. “Zero-trust principles like least privilege and just-in-time access can minimize risk, while AI-powered anomaly detection helps find identity-based threats in real time.”

Identity has become the new perimeter, encompassing both human and nonhuman identities — from employees to service accounts to AI agents. As AI becomes embedded in business processes, these agents are emerging as targets for manipulation, data exfiltration, or impersonation.

AI agents: The next frontier of cyber-resilience

As AI becomes a core part of enterprise operations, organizations are increasingly relying on autonomous or semiautonomous agents that make decisions, move data, and interact with systems. These agents have significant potential but, like human users, can be compromised. The emerging discipline of AI agent resilience focuses on ensuring that these digital workers remain trustworthy, recoverable, and secure even if adversaries try to manipulate or hijack them.

“Enterprises need to focus on identity resilience — securing both human and nonhuman identities,” says Mariappan. “That includes the new wave of AI agents that are becoming part of every organization’s digital fabric.”

5 ways to turn awareness into action

This Cyber Security Awareness Month, Rubrik encourages every organization to operationalize its awareness efforts through tangible resilience practices:

1. Test recovery, not just detection. Make time-to-recovery your most important performance metric.
2. Treat identity like data. Inventory and map every human and nonhuman identity and its access to sensitive systems.
3. Use AI to defend AI. Employ machine learning to detect anomalies in agent and user behavior.
4. Operationalize awareness. Conduct tabletop exercises that simulate credential compromise or agent manipulation.
5. Combine prevention with recoverability. Adopt zero trust and immutable backups so recovery is fast, reliable, and complete.

A security imperative

Cyber Security Awareness Month is evolving from a call for vigilance to a blueprint for resilience. As attackers harness AI to scale their efforts, defenders must do the same, embedding intelligence, automation, and recovery into every layer of security.

“Awareness must lead to action — simpler systems, stronger data protection, and faster recovery,” Mariappan says.

Resilience is fast becoming the true benchmark of cyber-maturity: the ability not only to prevent attacks but also to recover from them with speed and confidence. As AI reshapes both offense and defense, organizations that embrace resilience as a cultural and operational imperative will be the ones best equipped to thrive in the digital era.

Take the next step toward heightening your cybersecurity operations for greater resilience.