The AI-Driven Threat Frontier: Zero Trust, Identity & Supply Chain Resilience

The threat landscape is being fundamentally reshaped by the weaponisation of artificial intelligence. Threat actors are deploying AI for reconnaissance automation, vulnerability discovery, social engineering at scale, and adaptive attack campaigns that evolve in real-time to evade defensive controls. This paper analyses the AI-driven threat frontier and argues that effective defence requires the convergence of three previously separate disciplines: zero trust architecture (eliminating implicit trust assumptions that AI-powered attacks exploit), identity governance (managing the human and machine identities that represent the primary attack surface), and supply chain resilience (securing the extended enterprise against AI-enhanced supply chain attacks).

The paper provides practical architectural guidance for integrating these three defensive pillars into a unified resilience posture.