Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

At JFrog’s swampUP 2026 conference in New York, security leaders gathered to tackle the rapidly evolving landscape of software supply chain security and AI-driven development. In this exclusive sit-down interview from the event, former SolarWinds CISO TIM (now CISO in Residence at Team8) sits with JFrog CISO Paul Davis and reflects on the historic 2020 Sunburst breach that reshaped the cybersecurity industry. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

The way software gets built has changed faster than the standards that govern it. AI agents now create pull requests, select dependencies, refactor codebases, interpret test failures, and execute infrastructure changes across the entire Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). AI agents are autonomous team members, but unlike human engineers, they are ephemeral: their reasoning, decisions, and tool calls vanish the moment the session ends. You can’t hold an ephemeral process accountable.

As we enter the AI era, few among us have found themselves so entrenched in the throes of the shifting landscape as CISOs. With the threat landscape shifting, they are up against increasing rates of vulnerabilities and exploits alongside rapidly scaling demands for ever more secure environments. As CISOs, with our role as the protectors of an organization, we are expected to deliver guidance and security visibility. This is not a vision of the future, it’s today’s reality.