NEWORDER brings Lasso’s AI agent controls to South Africa

NEWORDER has partnered with Lasso Security, a Tel Aviv-based AI security company, to bring agentic AI protection to South Africa. The platform lets NEWORDER run continuous adversarial testing against a client’s AI agents — attacking them the way an outsider would, to find where they give way.

An AI agent is not a chatbot that answers questions. It is software that reads a document, decides what it means and then acts: pulls a record, sends a message, updates a system, calls another piece of software. It holds credentials, and it reads whatever it is pointed at. The usual comparison is a junior employee with system access, no training and no judgement — except this one works at machine speed at 3am, with nobody watching.

That same agent takes instructions from anyone who can get text in front of it. A serious flaw found in a major corporate AI assistant last year allowed company data to leave the business through an instruction hidden inside an ordinary incoming e-mail. Nobody clicked anything. Nobody made a mistake.

South African organisations have spent two years deploying these agents, and many still cannot say who the agents answer to. “In NEWORDER’s experience, few organisations can produce a list of the agents running in their estate,” says Bennie Barnard, chief commercial officer at NEWORDER. “They arrive through assistant rollouts, developer tools, vendor integrations and ordinary human beings solving real problems with whatever works.”

NEWORDER, the Pretoria-based tactical managed cybersecurity firm, is Lasso Security’s official partner in South Africa. Local organisations can now reach the platform through NEWORDER: one contract, one commercial relationship, one team doing the deployment.

The platform sits between a company’s AI agents and every business system they touch. It identifies the agents an organisation is running, including the ones nobody registered. It reads each instruction before the agent acts on it and stops the ones that break the rules. It also flags when an agent starts behaving out of pattern.

Lasso Security was founded in Tel Aviv in 2023, is certified to ISO 27001 and SOC 2, and has customers across Europe, the US and Israel.

“We are excited about this partnership,” says Elad Schulman, chief executive and co-founder of Lasso Security. “It strengthens our in-country presence and capabilities in a region moving quickly on AI adoption, and it pairs our research with a team that can act on it locally. Research on its own secures nothing. It has to reach an organisation through people with the expertise to apply it, and that is exactly what NEWORDER brings.”

In April 2026, the department of communications & digital technologies gazetted a draft national AI policy, then withdrew it 16 days later after journalists found that several of its 67 references were fabricated. The state got to pull the document and start again. A board does not get that option.

“There is no official AI law in South Africa, and there will not be one soon, and that changes nothing,” says Barnard. “King V made the board accountable this financial year. Joint Standard 2 already requires evidence of testing.