Zscaler CISO Sam Curry on Agentic SOCs, Resilience and AI Governance
Anna Delaney (annamadeline) •
August 17, 2026
Sam Curry, CISO, Zscaler, and CyberEdBoard member
Security teams need a fundamentally different approach to keep pace with artificial intelligence-driven threats, said Sam Curry, CISO at Zscaler. Rather than simply automating existing workflows, organizations need new instrumentation and a change in mindset, from correlating alerts to actively finding and generating signals.
See Also: Rise of Malicious AI Skills Expands Enterprise Risk
This “agentic SOC” isn’t just about agents doing the work. It’s a new partnership between people and AI that changes what outcomes teams pursue and how they pursue them, he said. It also reshape how analysts are trained, moving from traditional tiered progression to more apprenticeship-based development models.
“I think a SecOps revolution is needed. It’s about having a DevOps-like revolution where we think about iteration,” Curry said.
In this video interview with ISMG at Black Hat USA 2026, Curry also discussed:
Why the re-emergence of the “yellow team” reflects a tooling-first mindset;
Why frontier AI models raise the risk of an unprecedented wave of destabilizing patches;
How the CISO role is evolving from technical expert to business-focused risk leader.
Curry previously was chief security officer at Cybereason and chief technology and security officer at Arbor Networks. He also spent more than seven years at RSA in senior leadership roles, including chief strategy officer, chief technologist, and senior vice president of product management and product marketing. Curry is a CyberEdBoard member.