Cisco recently announced their newest cybersecurity product, Cisco Hypershield. As AI continues to evolve and the access to it increases, cybersecurity threats will increase exponentially. Similar to the old adage ‘fight fire with fire’, the only way to stop these AI attacks is with AI. Cisco Hypershield is an AI-native product that revolutionises across on-prem and cloud environments. It features a new distributed architecture network and workload enforcement points under one single management system. Now let’s take a look at what this product so ground breaking.

As we mentioned, Hypershield is AI-native, that means it has many capabilities that legacy security platforms did not. Below we’ve included some of the most exciting features that Hypershield provides.

One of the features that will have the IT teams beaming ear-to-ear is the Self Upgrading Infrastructure built into Hypershield. Having to regularly upgrade platforms is vital but the pressure it puts on those responsible is great. That’s why the task is often postponed or avoided altogether. This means thousands of organisations across the globe have outdated security infrastructure which makes them ripe for the picking for cyber criminals.

Ideally with Cisco Hypershield, you will never have to manually upgrade again. It will be self-upgrading! Hypershield’s dual dataplane technology allows live production traffic to operate under current rules while sending a copy to a shadow dataplane for testing new upgrades or policy changes without impacting production. This enables IT and security teams to deploy updates more frequently and confidently, ensuring strong defenses without business disruption.

In hyper-distributed environments, segmentation of applications can become very difficult. The average time to segment a single application exceeds 40 days, and rules often become outdated almost immediately after implementation. This creates significant security gaps, allowing hackers to move laterally through networks and greatly increasing risk.

Hypershield has an Autonomous Segmentation module which uses a variety of methods. It will segment itself and continually adapt to adjust to current realities. It will also use comprehensive data that goes further than network flows by looking at process behaviours and application updates. The longer Hypershield is active for the better it becomes at protecting you. It starts with wide protection parameters and then finely tunes itself to ensure optimal risk prevention.

With the increased access to AI, vulnerabilities are becoming more dangerous, with Cisco Talos discovering hundreds of new ones annually and about 80 new CVEs reported daily. Attackers often use stolen credentials and tools to bypass traditional security measures, logging in instead of hacking in.

Hypershield goes beyond commercial vulnerability scanners by checking if vulnerabilities exist in memory or are already being exploited. It also assesses the value of the attacked asset. The AI assigns a risk score to prioritise the most severe vulnerabilities.

The AI within Hypershield evaluates all potential threats across your environment, prioritising them for appropriate compensating controls, ensuring protection while allowing security teams time to investigate and mitigate.