SMBs from all industries are being hammered in today’s threat landscape. While headlines spotlight high-profile cyberattacks and sophisticated hacks, SMBs are the most impacted sector in cybersecurity. They face the same attacks large companies do, including increasing AI threats, but with far fewer resources.
In 2025, the Identity Theft Resource Center found that as threat actors embraced AI, more than 80% of small businesses reported a cybercrime. The trend showed no signs of deceleration in 2026. The 2026 Verizon DBIR noted that a shocking 96% of all ransomware attacks hit SMBs.
AI allows cybercriminals to reduce exploitation times from months to hours while scaling attacks to record-high levels. SMBs from all sectors are being targeted, including healthcare, agriculture, commerce, mining, logistics, energy, manufacturing, banking and fintech, software development and other industries.
While the cyberattack stats may be discouraging for SMB decision-makers, the advances made in agentic cybersecurity technologies can help them turn the trend around and protect their business.
In this report, executives, leaders and experts from HackerOne, 0rcus, Moonlock by Mac Paw and EC-Council guide SMBs on what agentic security tools can do, how they can deploy the tech safely and cost-efficiently and how SMBs can secure their digital surface, from front-end to workers’ devices.
What Can AI Cybersecurity Agents Do Today?
As AI accelerates the speed and volume of threats and attacks, agentic security tools are designed to help companies respond. Until recently, these technologies were only accessible to large, well-funded companies. However, today SMBs can access them through big tech platforms and other vendors at competitive prices.
There are a wide range of AI cybersecurity tools in the market for SMBs, including SentinelOne Singularity, Microsoft Defender for Business, Google Agentic SOC, GitHub Copilot Security and others developed by Amazon Web Services (AWS), CISCO, Palo Alto Networks and CrowdStrike, to name just some. Each agentic tool is developed for specific cases, whether it be securing software development pipelines, managing identities, keeping supply chains safe, or guarding industrial IoT, back-end and front-end operations, or logistics.
“Agentic AI changes the speed and scale of security work,” Kara Sprague, CEO of HackerOne, a cybersecurity company that unites AI and ethical hackers under a continuous threat exposure management platform, told me.
“In an average deployment, agentic AI does two things reliably: reconnaissance at machine speed and surfacing candidate findings faster than any manual process,” said Sprague. The value today is straightforward: AI absorbs the volume and provides coverage so that your scarce expert attention lands on the findings that could actually hurt you, said Sprague.
“Attackers automated, small business defense remain manual,” Nic Adams, cofounder and CEO of 0rcus, an AI-native offensive cyber company, told me.
Those who automate take a win. An IBM report found that companies using AI and automation in their security operations save an average of $1.93 million per breach and identify incidents 65 days faster.
Adams explained that an agentic tool holds a job description. “You give it a goal and permission to act inside a boundary you define,” Adams said. The agent triages the alert queue, correlates signals across endpoints, identities, emails, clouds and ranks which unpatched vulnerability is reachable from the internet, said Adams. The agent can also isolate a compromised device without waiting for a human and write up the incident report that your insurer and auditor will demand, Adams explained.
“Speed is the entire product,” said Adams. “That is inherently the cheapest win available to a small company,” Adams added.
For SMBs, the value of agentic AI is not simply adding another security tool, Jay Bavisi, founder and group president at EC-Council, told me.
“It is helping smaller teams make faster, better decisions from the tools they already have,” said Bavisi. These systems can investigate alerts, correlate signals, prioritize risks and, within defined limits, recommend or take action, Bavisi added.
Agentic security tools can therefore provide smaller organizations the capabilities that once required larger security teams. “The key question for SMBs is whether the technology reduces workload and complexity without introducing new risks,” said Bavisi.
“Cost, integration requirements, data privacy and the availability of human oversight will all determine how accessible these tools become,” said Bavasi.
How AI Cybersecurity Agents Complement Existing Tech Stacks?
A common misconception is that a full tech stack overhaul is needed to deploy agentic cybersecurity. This is not the case for SMBs. Agentic cybersecurity tools are deployed as an intelligence layer that sits on top of existing tools.
“Agentic AI is less a replacement for the existing security stack and more a connective layer across it,” said Bavisi.
An SMB may already have endpoint protection, identity controls, cloud security, vulnerability management and email security, but those systems often operate in silos. “An AI agent can help bring those signals together, investigate what is happening and determine what deserves attention first,” said Bavisi.
Adams from 0rcus agreed. “Basically they (agentic AI tools) run on top of what you already bought,” said Adams. “Keep your EDR, identity provider, email filtering, backups,” said Adams. Traditional cybersecurity tools produce telemetry (data) and what AI agents do is act as the analyst, Adams explained.
Securing SMBs’ Digital Surface: From Back-End to Public-Facing to Endpoint Security and Workers’ Devices
From public-facing online resources to remote workers devices, to the back-end software and processes that power HR, finance teams, managers and executives, the majority of SMBs today have a broad digital surface. Understanding and securing this digital surface is the gold standard in cybersecurity.
Knowing how that digital surface changes is also important. “The surface moves every time code ships, a configuration changes, a new device connects, or a new AI capability goes live,” Sprague from HackerOne said.
“So the work is continuous: validate what you find, rank it by exploitability and business impact, assign each item to someone who can close it and verify the fix,” said Sprague.
“Keep asking one question as things change: what is exposed right now, can it actually be exploited and how much does it matter?” said Sprague.
Operating Systems and Security in SMBs’ Digital Surface
What type of operating system SMBs run in their operations no longer separates those who can be breached from those who cannot. Moonlock Lab’s mid-2026 threat report found criminals are targeting both Mac and Windows in the same campaigns, using the same infrastructure and delivery methods.
“Think of your whole setup (your cloud accounts, your website, your computers and staff-owned devices) as one connected target, because attackers already treat it that way,” Mykhailo Pazyniuk, senior malware research engineer at MacPaw’s Moonlock, a cybersecurity company developing security tools for Macs, told me.
“So if your business runs Macs but your security was built with Windows in mind, that’s a real gap,” said Pazyniuk.
While agentic cybersecurity tools in the market can autonomously monitor, detect and remediate threats across your digital surface, basic security principles still apply.
To secure your digital surface, start with the basics that cover the most: make everyone sign in through a single trusted login with strong two-factor (ideally passkeys, not just text codes), give people access only to the tools they actually need and make sure someone (or a managed service) is actually watching the alerts your Macs generate, said Pazyniuk.
For your public side, keep track of every account, app and server you own so nothing gets forgotten and left exposed and train your team on today’s most common cyberattacks, including “ClickFix,” where users are tricked into installing malware themselves, Pazyniuk explained.
On the computers themselves, management tools can be used to switch on built-in protections like disk encryption and Apple’s Gatekeeper, automatically on every Mac, while security software tools can monitor how programs behave rather than just checking them against a list of known threats, Pazyniuk said.
“SMBs should stop thinking about the attack surface as simply a list of devices,” said Bavasi.
They need to understand the relationships between identities, endpoints, cloud applications, APIs, public-facing systems, back-end infrastructure and AI agents, he added.
“AI can help identify those relationships faster, but as AI gains access and authority, it also becomes part of the attack surface,” said Bavasi.
How Can SMBs Deploy Agentic Security Safely?
Sprague from HackerOne said that SMBs deploying AI cybersecurity agents should start where failure is expensive, not where deployment is easiest. For most small and mid-sized organizations, that means public-facing applications, APIs and identity systems, said Sprague.
“These are the assets that an attacker reaches first,” Sprague added.
“The measure of success is simple: is confirmed exposure going down and are your critical vulnerabilities getting fixed faster?” said Sprague.
Sprague said for safe agentic cybersecurity deployment, SMBs must consider that an agent running live reconnaissance can take down production, this makes read-only, rate-limited access and a human able to stop it the agent, fundamental. Additionally, the agent itself becomes part of the attack surface and is vulnerable to attacks like prompt injection, which are becoming popular among cybercriminals. Finally, knowing where company data is flowing to is key.
“Before handing any tool your vulnerability data, ask whether it leaves your environment and whether it trains someone else’s model,” said Sprague.
Final Thoughts
AI cybersecurity agents are now within reach of SMBs no matter what sector or industry they operate in. As attackers intensify threat campaigns and AI drives all types of cyberattacks to new heights, SMBs, which are the most disproportionately impacted sector, can no longer afford not to modernize. Agentic AI tools can build an intelligence layer on top of existing tech stacks and help SMBs secure their entire digital surface, from back-end to workers’ devices.