Microsoft reports threat actors are incorporating exploits for known vulnerabilities faster than before, increasing pressure on the window between disclosure, patch availability, and deployment.
At the same time, the 2026 Verizon DBIR found organizations faced 50 percent more critical vulnerabilities to patch on average than the previous year. Furthermore, threat actors can use AI to discover more vulnerabilities, automate reconnaissance, generate exploits, and adapt attacks faster. Meanwhile, organizations are adding more AI systems, agents, applications, workloads, and connected infrastructure, all of which needs protection.
These shifts mean modern digital assets require the same preemptive protections once reserved for vulnerable legacy industrial systems. To that end, Xage reduces organizational exposure before an exploit launches by hiding assets from unauthorized discovery, brokering every interaction, and restricting communications to explicitly approved actors, actions and paths.
Patching and detection are increasingly insufficient as the primary defense against AI-accelerated attacks. Detection often occurs only after an attacker established access. Meanwhile patching, while important, can require downtime, testing, specialized expertise, or vendor support. Having said that, patching is too slow given the speed at which attackers can now move.
Practical Approach
Indeed, Xage provides a practical approach by combining access control with identity-based microsegmentation, applied directly to interactions between assets.
Modern digital assets introduce a different protection challenge. While some critical business applications may enjoy a long life, things like cloud workloads and AI resources can end up created, scaled, moved, or retired rapidly.
Traditional approaches to contain risk like firewall rules and network zones are too complex to implement the narrow permissions needed in the age of accelerated AI attacks, a challenge compounded when identities and communication paths become dynamic.
Xage applies granular, just-in-time controls comprehensively, allowing organizations to hide resources, broker connections, and authorize only approved identities, actions, and communication paths without redesigning the underlying network.
The expansion of Critical Asset Protection enables organizations to:
- Hide assets from unauthorized discovery, reconnaissance, and vulnerability scanning.
- Broker access so human and non-human identities do not connect directly to protected resources.
- Verify every identity and apply least-privilege policy before and during access.
- Apply connectivity just-in-time and policy as assets, identities, and access requirements change.
- Restrict communications and lateral movement to explicitly approved identities, actions, and paths.
- Protect dynamic, ephemeral, and legacy assets without waiting for patches or redesigning the network.
“Organizations need to assume that any asset could contain an exploitable weakness and prevent attackers from reaching or interacting with it in unauthorized ways,” said Duncan Greatwood, chief executive at Xage Security. “The security industry has spent decades trying to eliminate vulnerabilities faster than adversaries can exploit them. AI makes that race increasingly unwinnable. The next era of cybersecurity will be defined by controlling exposure. That means governing every interaction with and between assets, so that a vulnerability does not automatically become a path to compromise.”
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