GDG Cloud Southlake #58: Sal Mineo: AI Attacks Systems Through Identities. See How to Stop It.

Abstract: When AI agents are turned loose, they will find the weakest path to their objective. In many organizations, that path leads straight to Active Directory, an environment not designed for security, let alone autonomous AI driven attacks. This session walks through a live, simulation showing an AI attack, from initial access through full domain compromise — timing each stage, mapping the techniques used, and showing exactly where existing controls fail to keep up.
We'll cover differences compared to human attackers: how AI attackers parallelize attack paths instead of running a single sequential kill chain, how they exploit identity-specific weak points like standing privileged access, service accounts, and legacy protocols (NTLM, Kerberos) that most environments still can't fully retire.
We'll close with the architectural case for inline, runtime enforcement at the authentication layer: what it actually takes to evaluate and condition access in real time, rather than relying on log correlation and after-the-fact response, and why identity has to function as an active control point rather than a monitored one.
Expect attack timelines, technique breakdowns, and a live demo, not just slide ware.

Sal Mineo started on a help desk pre-Y2K at a global pharma company and eventually worked his way up to managing all of the things like Active Directory, Exchange, virtualization, and all of the old infrastructure - including ADFS 2.0.

Parting ways there after almost two decades, he joined a leading biotech company, pivoting to an IAM focus and implementing PingFederate - which led to a a great opportunity working at Ping Identity, where he was the team lead for customer success architects.

His next stop was a brief stint at a Fortune 25 healthcare orginations, acting as the lead application architect for the 20M+ member customer IAM program.

He's currently helping folks with their identity security as a Silverfort sales engineer.