Cisco announces AI-powered Hypershield for autonomous exploit patching in the cloud

Compounding this architectural change, the time attackers needed to exploit vulnerabilities had shrunk to days and would soon be hours or minutes. Meanwhile, in contrast, the time required to apply patches remained stuck at between 20 and 45 days, he said.

A third challenge was the difficulty of upgrading infrastructure, especially in sectors full of older equipment. “Critical infrastructure is being attacked on a regular basis because traditional infrastructure is not being upgraded.” Despite this, “these are all solvable problems,” said Patel.

Cisco Security Cloud expands

The context for Hypershield is acquisitions such as SIEM-like data analytics platform Splunk and cloud security startup Lightspin. More recently, it bought Isovalent, the outfit behind Cilium, a pioneering open-source application that uses a technology called the extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF).