Cisco: Only 53% of Organisations Across Malaysia Are Confident in Detecting, Responding to Compromised AI Agent

An organisation that can’t coordinate a human response in a day will struggle to govern autonomous agents that act in seconds. New research from Cisco, which builds the critical infrastructure for the AI era, has found that the organisations best at defence do not rely on one strength. They combine broad coverage, fast response and a team working as one, without operational bottlenecks.

The Relentless Defense Report by Cisco examines how security practitioners are adapting to a threat landscape being reshaped by AI. The report scored organisations on how completely they can protect their environment; how quickly they can detect, respond, remediate a threat, and what slows them down. The global average score in Malaysia is 65 out of 100. Only 8% globally and in Malaysia qualified in the best performing group Cisco calls Relentless Defenders.

“AI has fundamentally raised the stakes for cyber defence. In a post-Mythos era, the speed of defence is driven by operational agility, not technology alone. The organisations that stay ahead will be those that embed security into how they operate, treat it as more than a compliance exercise, and break down operational silos so the right people can make the right decisions at the right time,” said Chee Kheong Lee, Managing Director, Cisco Malaysia.

Where Security Teams Lose Time, According to Cisco

The Cisco report identifies organisational friction as a key barrier to stronger cyber defence. But friction is not something security teams can solve alone. Ownership, approvals and silos sit across IT, procurement and executive leadership, which is why they persist. And when teams can’t act as one, decision rights are unclear and data is fragmented, deploying and governing AI becomes increasingly more complex.

• Coordination: Only 43% of organisations in Malaysia say security, networking and IT teams operate as one team with shared visibility and tooling.
• Executive influence: 29% in Malaysia say what they measure is too technical to persuade executives, 43% struggle to translate business metrics into information that can influence decision making, and 34% have no consistent way to measure security performance at all.
• Data access: 49% in Malaysia spend more time collecting and correlating data across systems than addressing the actual threat, and 40% say critical insights are missed because data sits out of reach.

AI Is Making Defenders Faster, But Security Concerns Delay Adoption

According to Cisco, more than eight in ten practitioners report detection and response gains of at least 25%, and more than one in three say it is significantly reducing operational burden.

Yet fewer than half of organisations have extensively deployed AI-powered security capabilities. Adoption is highest in network security, data security and privacy as well as security operations and lowest in identity and access management. Over one-third have extensively deployed AI agents in security operations. They are held back by concerns over data exposure, compromised systems and third-party handling, among others. Only 53% are very confident they could detect and respond to a compromised AI agent.

What Relentless Defenders Do Differently

Globally, Relentless Defenders do more to reduce friction and control the AI they are developing. They are also more likely to report stronger AI outcomes in security operations—not because they spend more, but because they lead across the organisational dimensions that enable security teams to act quickly:

• 83% operate as a single coordinated security team with shared visibility and tools across security, network and infrastructure, versus 37% of all other defenders.
• 86% apply consistent controls to AI agents and non-human identities, versus 37%. 77% are very confident they could detect and respond to a compromised AI agent, versus 51%
• 25% reportAI helped improve threat-detection speed by more than 100%, versus 7%.

Among organisations that increased security spending, the Relentless Defenders were nearly twice as likely to see incidents fall (71% vs. 39%).