An Intellyx Brief from Black Hat 2026
Portnox was at Black Hat with a cloud native network access control (or NAC) platform that gatekeeps wired and wireless networks, governs zero-trust SaaS and on-prem application access, and administers and protects network devices across an enterprise.
Like it or not, now that AI agents are being introduced into hybrid networks, we can expect many of their non-deterministic behaviors to become new threat vectors, with millions of possible attack chains. But fundamentally that agent comes from a device somewhere on a network, communicates with assets on the network, and lives on an endpoint. By setting and enforcing zero-trust access policies for agents, we see a continuation of the non-human identity protections that were built for cloud native networks.
This network-centric approach wouldn’t resolve all vulnerabilities an enterprise may have, but that’s not the point; there are plenty of other identity, endpoint, and permission-based solutions out there already. This NAC is particularly useful for preventing things like lateral movement of an AI agent across a network, or phishing attacks that seek to spoof a user’s credentials, or remote device management if an unexpected session starts up overnight from another country.
Hot take from Black Hat: “To the network team, AI attacks often look just the same types of attacks that we’ve seen before, and if we don’t learn from them, we’re just repeating those same mistakes over again. Poor governance of identity, poor asset management, poor access control, all contribute to these problems, but it’s funny that something as ‘unsexy’ as NAC is solving so many threats,” said Garrett Gross, Field CISO, Portnox.
Copyright ©2026 Intellyx B.V. Intellyx is the change agent analyst firm focused on customer-driven, technology-empowered enterprise transformation. Our thought leadership distills insights across the rapidly evolving enterprise IT landscape, and our advisory helps you and your customers see through the hype and get beyond the fear of technology disruption to take action and realize value through change. At the time of writing, Portnox is not an Intellyx customer. No AI was used to write this article. To be considered for a Brain Candy article or have us visit you at an event, email us at pr@intellyx.com.
