AI Is Accelerating Cyberattacks Faster Than Defenses

Okta's Brett Winterford on Identity Threats and Agentic AI Risks Jennifer Lawinski • April 8, 2026

Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming the threat landscape, enabling attackers to move faster, scale operations and exploit identity-based vulnerabilities in ways that traditional defenses were not designed to handle. Brett Winterford, vice president at Okta Threat Intelligence, said AI is allowing adversaries to collapse multiple stages of an attack and execute them in parallel, dramatically increasing the speed and complexity of intrusions.

See Also: Defending Identity in the Age of AI Attacks

Winterford said this shift forces organizations to rethink long-standing risk assumptions. Attacks that once required time, effort and persistence can now be automated and iterated by AI agents, making previously tolerable vulnerabilities far more exploitable.

"Because we now have AI augmented attacks in which the threat actor is able to collapse multiple stages of the attack and run them in parallel, the ...