SCS Distinguished Industry Lecture - Mark Russinovich
October 26, 2026 5:00PM—6:30PM
Location:
In Person
-
Rashid Auditorium, Gates Hillman 4401
Speaker:
MARK RUSSINOVICH,
Chief Technical Officer
Deputy Chief Information Security Officer, and Technical Fellow
Microsoft Azure
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/author/mark-russinovich/
Intelligence Is Not a Security Boundary: Building Controls Before AI Agents Outrun Them
Monday, October 26, 2026, 5 – 6:30pm AI is changing the security model of computing. It puts expert capability into anyone’s hands, operates at machine speed, and turns software from passive code into an active participant that can discover vulnerabilities, exploit systems, deceive overseers, and reason about the constraints meant to contain it. At the same time, alignment safeguards that keep AI systems operating within their intended goals and constraints can be removed, unsafe models can gain capability from aligned ones, and untrusted information can steer agents toward privileged actions. These are not just new bugs; they challenge assumptions that have shaped computer security for decades. We need a new security stack, one based on isolation, capabilities, provenance, and deterministic enforcement. Intelligence cannot be the security boundary.
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Mark Russinovich is CTO, Deputy CISO, and Technical Fellow for Microsoft Azure, Microsoft’s global enterprise-grade cloud platform. A widely recognized expert in distributed systems, operating systems and cybersecurity, Mark earned a Ph.D. in computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. He later co-founded Winternals Software, joining Microsoft in 2006 when the company was acquired. Mark is a popular speaker at industry conferences such as Microsoft Ignite, Microsoft Build, and RSA Conference. He has authored several nonfiction and fiction books, including the Microsoft Press Windows Internals book series, Troubleshooting with the Sysinternals Tools, as well as fictional cyber security thrillers Zero Day, Trojan Horse and Rogue Code.
CMU community welcomed.
Event Type: SCS Distinguished Lectures
Room Number: In Person
Building: Rashid Auditorium, Gates Hillman 4401
Speaker's Name: MARK RUSSINOVICH
Speaker Website: azure.microsoft.com…
Speaker's Professional Title: Chief Technical Officer, Deputy Chief Information Security Officer, and Technical Fellow, Microsoft Azure
Talk Title: Intelligence Is Not a Security Boundary: Building Controls Before AI Agents Outrun Them
For More Information: scs-dls@cs.cmu.edu
Affiliations: Computer Science Department (CSD), Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII), Language Technologies Institute (LTI), Machine Learning Department (MLD), Ray and Stephanie Lane Computational Biology Department (CBD), Robotics Institute (RI), Software and Societal Systems Department (S3D)
Organization(s): School of Computer Science
For More Information:
scs-dls@cs.cmu.edu