In Greek mythology, a mortal king of Corinth, Sisyphus, was condemned by the gods to roll a boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down each time. For eternity.
The punishment was not the labor itself, but the absence of an end point. No finish line, endgame, or closure.
Jonathan Langer, co-founder and CEO of Act Security, argues that the image fits much of modern cloud security. Security teams work through an ever-growing list of findings, including vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and risky settings, one item at a time. “Nobody ever finishes the list,” Langer told me. “That’s the dirty little secret in cybersecurity.”
His company has built its brand around this, even including the message “don’t be a Sisyphus.” When we spoke, I wanted to understand whether that was simply a memorable metaphor - or a useful way of thinking about an industry that keeps finding more work for itself.
Langer’s thinking about this began at Medigate, the medical-device security company he previously co-founded. Its technology could show customers what devices they had and the risks associated with them. But customers eventually asked a fairly obvious question: Now what?
The dashboard problem
“Now I know. Now I have all this risk. Now I have all these issues and findings. What do I do with it?” he recalled them asking. The idea with Act is to reduce the access that makes attacks possible, including permissions that allow an application or person to reach systems they do not need.
The problem was documented long before today’s AI boom. Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 analyzed more than 680,000 identities across 18,000 cloud accounts for its 2022 research. It found that 99% of the cloud users, roles, services, and resources examined had excessive permissions left unused for at least 60 days. (That measures identities with excessive permissions, rather than the proportion of all permissions going unused.)
Langer’s approach rests on a premise that an attacker needs access to enter an environment, move through it, and extract data. In cloud environments, permissions granted at deployment tend to persist because teams fear that removing them will break applications. Narrowing an over-broad permission at its source can resolve many findings at once, rather than one ticket per symptom.
Act Security was founded in 2025 and left stealth this summer. It has raised $60 million, comprising a $20 million seed round led by Team8 and Bessemer, and a $40 million Series A led by Notable Capital. And it is selling a solution to this problem.
Unused does not mean unnecessary
The obvious challenge here is that unused access does not immediately label it as unnecessary. Some permissions exist for emergencies or infrequent operations. Langer said Act tries to reconstruct a developer’s original intent from documentation, tickets, observed traffic, and code scanning, and removes only access that exceeds it. It also checks new deployments to prevent excessive permissions from returning.
Without that second step, cleaning up existing access would simply begin another cycle.
As with most cybersecurity solutions, the margin for error is narrow. Even a 90% success rate, he said, would mean disrupting production in the remaining 10% of cases, which he called unacceptable. He described the target as “five nines,” or 99.999% accuracy. This is an aspiration - Langer did not cite customer results during our conversation.
Will the permissions return?
Understanding an organization well enough to change its permissions safely requires more than recognizing that something has been idle. Recent AI incidents in the news underline why those boundaries remain important.
Langer remains optimistic that better controls can contain most attacks, even if cybersecurity problems cannot disappear completely. “This world that we live in, physics still applies. If there is no access between one sandbox and another, or a sandbox to the internet… and we use strong deterministic controls, even if you have the smartest AI out there, it cannot defy the laws of physics.”
Cybersecurity may never have a finish line. But that does not mean every task should repeat indefinitely. The test is whether removing unnecessary access today leaves an organization harder to attack tomorrow, without disrupting the work those permissions were meant to support.
[Note: In the recording, I mistakenly referred to Sisyphus as a god. He is a mortal king of Corinth]
[Preview: Why Act Security built its brand around Greek mythology]
