Xage Security Delivers Critical Asset Protection, Providing Comprehensive Asset Defense as AI-enabled Threats Grow Exponentially

Proven Zero Trust controls now shield applications, cloud services, enterprise AI agents and other digital assets from AI-driven cyber attack

Key Takeaways

• Threat actors are using AI to discover and exploit software vulnerabilities at a greater scale and faster than human security teams can deploy patches.

• Xage is extending its proven Critical Asset Protection beyond industrial assets to modern digital systems, comprehensively covering everything from critical business applications to dynamic, ephemeral and machine-driven workflows.

• New capabilities use identity-based microsegmentation to hide assets, broker access, restrict lateral movement, and control human and machine actions – all without costly architectural redesigns.

Xage Security, the leader in identity-based Zero Trust for high stakes environments, announced the expansion of Xage Critical Asset Protection from industrial systems to critical business applications, workloads, infrastructure, cloud services, AI systems, and other digital assets.

Microsoft reports that 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 that organizations faced 50% more critical vulnerabilities to patch on average than the previous year. Adversaries 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 to be protected and controlled.

These shifts mean modern digital assets require the same preemptive protections once reserved for vulnerable legacy industrial systems. Xage reduces organizational exposure before an exploit is launched by hiding assets from unauthorized discovery, brokering every interaction, and restricting communications to explicitly approved actors, actions and paths.

Preemptive Protection for Digital Assets

Patching and detection are increasingly insufficient as the primary defense against AI-accelerated attacks. Detection often occurs only after an attacker has established access. Meanwhile patching, while important, can require downtime, testing, specialized expertise, or vendor support – in other words, patching is too slow given the speed at which attackers can now move.

Xage provides a more 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 be long-lived, things like cloud workloads and AI resources can be 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 that is compounded when identities and communication paths become dynamic.

Xage meets this new reality by applying 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.

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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, CEO 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.”

As legitimate AI components themselves become an increasingly rich target for attackers, Critical Asset Protection is also needed to avoid “AI-on-AI violence” where an attacker’s AI can be used to accelerate the compromise of an organization’s legitimate AI systems.