Upwind buys Aegis to staff a 12-person unit on agent and plugin security

An agent can interact with applications, access information and execute tasks, and each skill or plugin someone adds puts another component into the environment that has to be protected ^[12]. "We initially built Aegis as a startup to tackle the missing security layer around AI agents, skills and plugins," said Omri Limor, co-founder of Aegis ^[8]. He and Saar Ankonina will run that work inside Upwind ^[2].

The two began their careers together in 8200, an intelligence unit focused on offensive cybersecurity, and one was for a time the other's commander ^[13]. At Aegis they worked on defences against AI-generated attacks, including autonomous exploitation pipelines and large-scale credential harvesting, techniques that cut the skill needed to run an attack ^[14].

Upwind's chief executive gave a number. "We expect the team to grow from 12 people today to 25 and potentially 35 in the coming months, allowing us to expand our research and accelerate the development of new AI security capabilities," said Amiram Shachar, CEO and co-founder of Upwind ^[7]. Thirteen hires in about thirteen weeks is roughly one a week ^[16], and 35 people would be nearly three times the team that exists now ^[17].

One item on the labs' list is secret scanning, in transit and at rest. Upwind tied that to industry findings of compromised API keys and session tokens being harvested at scale ^[11].

This account covers Upwind's acquisition and Upwind's hiring plan, and there is no comparable unit at another cloud security vendor in it ^[19]. Treating agents, skills and plugins as their own engineering problem is, on this evidence, Upwind's choice, backed by two named people and a headcount target.

For whoever has to answer on Friday for the agents already running in production, a labs announcement is not the thing to evaluate. In my view the test for any vendor pitching agent security is whether it can produce, today, the list of agents, skills and plugins in your environment and the credential each one can reach. A platform that can print that list is selling scanning. If the answer comes back as a research agenda, that is recruitment. Both can be worth buying, but only one of them changes what you see in the console this quarter. Saar Ankonina said: "Integrating our technology directly into Upwind's platform gives us an immediate path to scale" ^[9]. Upwind did not say when that integration reaches customers ^[18].