Disaster Recovery Journal Spring 2026

The New Enterprise Attack Surface: AI Agents, Browsers, and Invisible Data Flows

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By PRAKASH MANA

or decades, enterprise secu rity strategies have been built around a relatively stable understanding of risk. Users logged in from managed devices, applications lived in known environments, and access patterns followed pre

confidence. However, that clarity is now slipping away. The rapid adoption of AI across enter prises has fundamentally altered how work gets done. Employees increasingly rely on AI-powered tools to write, analyze, code, summarize, and automate tasks. AI is no longer limited to experimental labs or innovation teams; it is embedded directly into everyday workflows. Yet much of this adoption is happening quietly, without the same level of architectural planning

or security scrutiny applied to traditional enterprise systems. The result is not a dramatic breach or a sudden collapse of defenses. Instead, the enterprise attack surface is expand ing subtly, through invisible data flows that bypass long-standing assumptions about how access, inspection, and control work. Security teams may still see traffic, users, and applications, but the underlying behavior has changed in ways that demand a rethinking of enterprise security.

dictable paths. Even as cloud adoption grew, security teams could still reason about traffic flows, trust boundaries, and enforcement points with a fair degree of

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