MALAYSIA, 6 OCTOBER 2026 — Only 53% of organisations in Malaysia are highly confident in their ability to detect and respond to a compromised artificial intelligence (AI) agent, highlighting a growing cybersecurity readiness gap as businesses increasingly adopt AI-powered technologies.

The findings come from Cisco’s latest Relentless Defense Report, which examines how security practitioners are adapting to a threat landscape increasingly reshaped by AI. The report evaluates organisations based on how comprehensively they can protect their environments, how quickly they can detect, respond to and remediate threats, and the operational barriers that may slow them down.

Organisations in Malaysia recorded an overall average score of 65 out of 100, while only 8% of organisations in Malaysia and globally qualified as Cisco’s best-performing group, known as Relentless Defenders. According to Cisco, these organisations stand out not because they rely on a single strength, but because they combine broad security coverage, rapid response and strong coordination across teams.

“AI has fundamentally raised the stakes for cyber defense. In a post-Mythos era, the speed of defense is driven by operational agility, not technology alone. The organizations that stay ahead will be those that embed security into how they operate, treat it as more than a compliance exercise, and break down operational silos so the right people can make the right decisions at the right time,” said Chee Kheong Lee, Managing Director, Cisco Malaysia.

The report identifies organisational friction as a major barrier to stronger cyber defense. In Malaysia, only 43% of organisations say their security, networking and IT teams operate as one team with shared visibility and tools. Meanwhile, 29% say the metrics they measure are too technical to influence executives, while 43% struggle to translate business metrics into information that can support decision-making.

Data accessibility is another challenge. 49% of organisations in Malaysia spend more time collecting and correlating data across systems than addressing the actual threat, while 40% say critical insights are missed because data remains out of reach.

At the same time, AI is helping security teams respond faster, although concerns over security are slowing adoption. More than eight in ten security practitioners report improvements of at least 25% in threat detection and response, while more than one-third say AI is significantly reducing their operational burden.

Despite these benefits, fewer than half of organisations have extensively deployed AI-powered security capabilities. Adoption is highest in network security, data security and privacy, as well as security operations, while identity and access management records lower levels of adoption. More than one-third of organisations have also extensively deployed AI agents within security operations.

However, concerns around data exposure, compromised systems and third-party handling continue to hold organisations back. As a result, only 53% of organisations in Malaysia are highly confident that they could detect and respond to a compromised AI agent.

The report also highlights what sets Relentless Defenders apart. Globally, 83% of these organisations operate as a single, coordinated security team with shared visibility and tools across security, network and infrastructure, compared with 37% of other defenders. They are also more likely to apply consistent controls to AI agents and non-human identities, with 86% doing so compared with 37% of other organisations.

Relentless Defenders also demonstrate greater confidence in responding to AI-related security threats. 77% are highly confident they could detect and respond to a compromised AI agent, compared with 51% of other defenders. In addition, 25% report that AI has helped improve threat-detection speed by more than 100%, compared with just 7% of other organisations.

The report further points to a connection between operational readiness and security outcomes. Among organisations that increased their security spending, Relentless Defenders were nearly twice as likely to report a reduction in security incidents, at 71% compared with 39% among other defenders.

As AI agents become increasingly capable of making decisions and taking action within seconds, Cisco’s findings underline the need for organisations to ensure their people, processes and governance frameworks can move at a similar pace. Technology alone may not be enough if operational silos, fragmented data and complex approval processes continue to delay responses to emerging threats.