AI Agents Are Going Rogue: What I Learned at Hacker Summer Camp 2026

I just spent 9 days at Black Hat, DEFCON, and BSides Las Vegas — the week the industry calls "Hacker Summer Camp" — and I watched a stranger get deepfaked in real time. Here's my full debrief. I'm Jocelyn King, the Queen of Online Safety, and every August I go straight into the middle of it: 115°F heat, four conferences, and the smartest hackers and defenders on the planet showing exactly what they've broken. This year the takeaway was impossible to miss — AI isn't just a tool we use anymore. It's an active participant in both the attack and the defense. In this special edition of the Smarter Online Safety Show, I'm breaking down the five biggest things I took away from Hacker Summer Camp 2026, and turning every one of them into something you can actually do to protect yourself, your family, and your business. IN THIS EPISODE: ✅ The $40 kids' GPS smartwatch that can let a stranger track your child in real time — 36 million trackers, one shared server ✅ Why AI agents behave like teenagers, including a real military exercise where an AI refused a direct order ✅ "Ghostjacking" — how hackers hide instructions inside the activity logs your AI agent reads every day ✅ Why your AI assistant needs its own identity, and why "read" and "act" permissions are not the same thing ✅ Why AI-generated code isn't automatically secure code ✅ I watched a stranger get cloned — face and voice — live, and how it connects to a real $25.6 million deepfake video call scam ✅ The "employee" on your next video call who might not be a real person ✅ My SAFER method for spotting any scam, no matter what story it's wearing ✅ Why Cliff Stoll's 75-cent accounting error, 40 years later, is still the best lesson in cybersecurity 📘 Want the full playbook? My book, Digital Self-Defense in an AI World: How to Protect Yourself Online, walks you through the exact steps to protect yourself, your family, and your accounts: https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Self-Defense-AI-World-Yourself/dp/B0H4X258H3