Cisco’s new Relentless Defense Report reveals that only 53% of organisations in Malaysia are confident they can detect and respond to a compromised AI agent. As AI makes cyber threats faster, approval delays, data silos and disconnected teams are slowing local defenders down.
Key Findings of the Relentless Defense Report
- AI is raising the stakes. 83% of organisations in Malaysia suffered a material, business-disrupting cyber incident in the past 12 months, and nearly one in three involved an AI-enhanced attack.
- The biggest blocker is organisational, not technical. Around six in ten struggling practitioners globally said coordination, approvals and access to data would improve their defences more than new technology.
- The best defenders organise better. Among organisations that increased security spending, Relentless Defenders were nearly twice as likely to see incidents fall (71% vs. 47% in Malaysia).
Released on 6 October 2026, the study argues that an organisation unable to coordinate a human response within a day will struggle to govern autonomous agents that act in seconds. According to Cisco, the strongest defenders do not rely on one strength. They combine broad coverage, fast response and a team working as one, without operational bottlenecks.
How Malaysia Scored
The Relentless Defense Report scored organisations on how completely they can protect their environment, how quickly they can detect, respond to and remediate a threat, and what slows them down. Malaysian organisations scored an average of 65 out of 100. Only 8%, both globally and in Malaysia, qualified for the top-performing group Cisco calls Relentless Defenders.
“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.”
Chee Kheong Lee, Managing Director, Cisco Malaysia
Where Security Teams Lose Time
The report identifies organisational friction as a key barrier. Ownership, approvals and silos sit across IT, procurement and executive leadership, so security teams cannot solve them alone. When decision rights are unclear and data is fragmented, deploying and governing AI becomes far more complex.
- Coordination: Only 43% of organisations in Malaysia say their security, networking and IT teams operate as one team with shared visibility and tooling.
- Executive influence: 29% say what they measure is too technical to persuade executives, 43% struggle to turn business metrics into information that influences decisions, and 34% have no consistent way to measure security performance at all.
- Data access: 49% spend more time collecting and correlating data across systems than tackling the actual threat, while 40% say critical insights are missed because data sits out of reach.
AI Speeds Up Defenders, but Adoption Lags
More than eight in ten practitioners report detection and response gains of at least 25%, and over one in three say AI is significantly reducing their operational burden.
Yet fewer than half of organisations have extensively deployed AI-powered security capabilities. Adoption is highest in network security, data security and privacy, and security operations, and lowest in identity and access management. Over one-third have extensively deployed AI agents in security operations, held back by concerns over data exposure, compromised systems and third-party handling.
What Relentless Defenders Do Differently
Globally, Relentless Defenders do more to reduce friction and control the AI they develop. They report stronger AI outcomes in security operations not because they spend more, but because they lead on the organisational factors that let security teams act quickly:
- 83% operate as a single coordinated security team across security, network and infrastructure, versus 37% of other defenders.
- 86% apply consistent controls to AI agents and non-human identities, versus 37%.
- 77% are very confident they could detect and respond to a compromised AI agent, versus 51%.
- 25% say AI improved threat-detection speed by more than 100%, versus 7%.
About the Relentless Defense Report
The Relentless Defense Report draws on a double-blind survey of 8,000 security professionals across 30 markets, conducted in April and May 2026. It scores organisations on coverage, speed and friction, with analysis carried out by independent third party Satori Experience. Read the full findings on the official Cisco Relentless Defense Report microsite or download the 2026 report (PDF).
For more on how the company is approaching AI, read AI Era Is Here And Cisco Is Leading the Charge.
