Cato Networks to Present on Hidden Risks of Policy Misconfigurations at BSides Newcastle 2025
Cato CTRL to showcase cutting-edge AI strategies, tackling the security risks that traditional security tools often miss
TEL AVIV, Israel, September 18, 2025 – Cato Networks, the SASE leader, today announced that Avidan Avraham (director of research at Cato Networks and member of Cato CTRL) will present at BSides Newcastle 2025.
The session, “Contextual Agentic Garbage Collector: Sweeping Up Misconfiguration Crumbs Before Attackers Do” (Saturday, September 27 at 2:15 PM BST), will spotlight an innovative AI-driven approach to detecting and remediating policy misconfigurations.
Modern policy engines are complex ecosystems. Beyond structured configurations, free-text metadata (i.e. names, descriptions, annotations, and multilingual notes) often tells the real story behind a policy rule. Temporary fixes, ad-hoc tweaks, or legacy testing exercises leave behind contextual “crumbs” that can evolve into hidden vulnerabilities.
At BSides Newcastle 2025, Cato CTRL will introduce the concept of a “Contextual Agentic Garbage Collector,” inspired by the way software garbage collectors clean up memory leaks. This pioneering AI agent continuously analyzes unstructured fields and applies advanced natural language processing (NLP) and contextual classification to decode intent, detect anomalies, and reveal overlooked security gaps.
“Traditional security tools catch the obvious issues, but threat actors thrive on the overlooked details. Our work demonstrates how AI can be harnessed to clean up policy misconfiguration ‘crumbs’ before they become liabilities,” said Avidan Avraham, director of research at Cato Networks and member of Cato CTRL.
To learn more about Cato’s threat intelligence team, visit the Cato CTRL page.
Resources
- [Photo] Avidan Avraham
About Cato CTRL
Cato CTRL (Cyber Threats Research Lab) is the world’s first CTI group to fuse threat intelligence with granular network insight, made possible by Cato’s global SASE platform. By bringing together dozens of former military intelligence analysts, researchers, data scientists, academics and industry-recognized security professionals, Cato CTRL utilizes network data, security stack data, hundreds of security feeds, human intelligence operations, AI (Artificial Intelligence), and ML (Machine Learning) to shed light on the latest cyber threats and threat actors.
About Cato Networks
Cato Networks delivers enterprise security and networking in a single cloud platform. The SASE leader creates a seamless and elegant customer experience that effortlessly enables threat prevention, data protection, and timely incident detection and response. With Cato, organizations replace costly and rigid legacy infrastructure with an open and modular SASE architecture based on SD-WAN, a purpose-built global cloud network, and an embedded cloud-native security stack.
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