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About
Rashid Feroze is a security leader with over a decade in the field, securing high-growth fintech and e-commerce environments through periods of rapid scale and tightening regulation. He is currently Head of Security Engineering at one of India's largest fintech platforms, where he built and leads the security function - covering cloud security, threat detection and response, application and data protection, and AI security. He increasingly focuses on the security challenges emerging at the intersection of regulated financial infrastructure and AI systems, from supply chain threats in the AI ecosystem to the new risks introduced by agentic systems. He is a regular speaker at international security conferences, including BlackHat USA, Bsides, Nullcon, and ElasticON, and contributes to industry conversations on cloud security, AI security, and security leadership.
Rashid Feroze
Published content
expert panel
Cybersecurity leaders have never had the luxury of moving slowly, but the second half of 2026 may test even the most mature security teams. AI is accelerating both sides of the fight: Attackers can find vulnerabilities, craft more convincing scams and move faster, while businesses (and employees) are racing to embed AI into products, workflows and everyday operations. That combination raises the stakes for every leader responsible for protecting data, systems, customers and trust.The challenge isn’t just technical. As cyber risk spreads across engineering, finance, operations, legal, HR, procurement and executive teams, the old model of security as a separate checkpoint no longer fits how businesses actually run. The organizations that handle this next phase successfully will need to rethink cybersecurity as a shared operating discipline, not a last-minute review, compliance exercise, or problem for one department or leader to solve alone.Members of the Senior Executive Cybersecurity Think Tank have deep expertise in enterprise cybersecurity strategies, risk management, threat detection and cybersecurity leadership. Below, a group of them discusses what they see as the biggest cybersecurity challenges for leaders in the second half of 2026 and how organizations move from reactive defense to enterprisewide resilience.
expert panel
AI agents are quickly moving from helpful assistants to active participants in business workflows, and that shift is creating a new access-control challenge for security leaders. To do their jobs well, these systems often need to interact with customer records, financial systems, employee data, proprietary information and other sensitive resources. That creates a difficult balance: The more access agents have, the more useful they may become—but the more damage they can do when something goes wrong. And that risk isn’t theoretical. A 2025 IBM report found that among organizations that experienced an AI-related breach, 97% lacked proper AI access controls, and 63% had no AI governance policies at all.Traditional access models weren’t built for autonomous tools that can act across systems, make rapid decisions and process large volumes of data in seconds. When convenience trumps safety in AI adoption, loose access can expand an organization’s attack surface before security teams can assess the risk. As AI agents become more embedded in daily operations, organizations need to think differently about identity, permissions and accountability. Members of the Senior Executive Cybersecurity Think Tank bring deep expertise in enterprise cybersecurity strategies, data breach prevention, risk management and modern security architecture. Below, five of them share how leaders should weigh the trade-offs of AI agent access and rethink permissioning for AI-driven systems.