The defender’s head start is gone. Cisco’s Liz Centoni on the fight to get it back

Presented by Cisco

Ask any network operations leader what changed this year, and most won’t point to a single incident. They’ll tell you the timeline changed. The pace of enterprise IT used to be dictated by the people running it, patch cycles, audit schedules, change windows. Frontier AI models don’t wait for any of that.

Cisco has a name for what that shift produces: a post-Mythos threat, an attack built and adapted by AI capable of compressing reconnaissance, exploit development, and lateral movement into a single automated pass. Most enterprise infrastructure was never designed to be watched, patched, and defended at that speed, and the businesses running it are only starting to find out.

“The math defenders have relied on for decades no longer holds,” says Liz Centoni, EVP and Chief Customer Experience Officer at Cisco. “Reconnaissance and exploit generation that used to take weeks now take minutes, sometimes less. Quarterly audits and static inventories were never built…