As interest in new AI tools accelerates, cybercriminals are finding ways to exploit the trust surrounding them. Check Point Research (CPR) has uncovered Yoba, a malware campaign using fake GitHub projects impersonating supposed ChatGPT and Claude desktop applications, while abusing legitimate, signed OpenAI and Anthropic executables to help load malware. The campaign shows how the rush to access new AI tools is creating opportunities for social engineering, even when the AI platforms themselves have not been compromised. Key Findings Attackers used fake GitHub projects impersonating supposed ChatGPT and Claude desktop applications to distribute Yoba malware. Legitimate, signed OpenAI and Anthropic […]

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In a short period, Check Point has appeared across three new Gartner research publications examining autonomous remediation, exposure assessment, and the future of preemptive cybersecurity. These three reports ask very different questions. But how do they connect? One examines how organizations can trust autonomous remediation. Another looks at the growing exposure management market and the increasing importance of exploitability. The third looks further ahead at the technologies Gartner believes will shape preemptive cybersecurity. Taken together, the reports capture a broader change already underway across the industry. Exposure management is expanding from identifying risk toward understanding exploitability and enabling action. Exploitability […]

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Every partner knows this conversation. A customer agrees their firewalls need replacing. Their teams are using AI tools, they are connecting more systems, and the threats are moving faster than their hardware was built for. They want to upgrade. Then the quote goes into the capital approval process, and the deal goes quiet. This year, that conversation is happening more often. Today we launched Firewall-as-a-Subscription to help partners get those deals moving again. Why deals are stalling Inflation and rising interest rates are increasing borrowing costs and shrinking capital budgets, and security is feeling the pressure. According to the IANS […]

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Check Point’s Firewall-as-a-Subscription Puts Advanced AI-Era Protection Within Reach of Every Organization Attacks don’t wait for budget approval. But firewall purchases often do, and that wait is getting longer. Rising interest rates have made borrowing more expensive. For a midsize company, a single rate rise can cost the equivalent of a branch office firewall. A large hardware purchase now means a harder conversation with finance and a longer approval cycle. Meanwhile, the old firewall stays in place; the network grows, and so does the risk. Security is urgent. The way organizations pay for it isn’t keeping pace. Check Point Firewall-as-a-Subscription […]

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How 300 Academic Partnerships Are Helping Close the Cyber Skills Gap Check Point’s SecureAcademy has reached 300 academic partnerships across more than 80 countries, connecting educational institutions with industry-aligned cyber security training and resources. While the milestone reflects the program’s continued growth, it also highlights a broader shift: educational institutions are increasingly looking for ways to align cyber security education with the skills employers need today. Turning Classrooms into Career Pathways Organizations worldwide continue to face a shortage of cyber security professionals, while educational institutions are under pressure to keep pace with rapidly evolving technologies and threats. Through SecureAcademy, institutions […]

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AI assistants have quickly become part of everyday work, particularly for developers. Tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor and GitHub Copilot increasingly sit alongside source code, cloud environments and other sensitive business resources, making the credentials and sessions connected to these tools increasingly important to protect. New research from Check Point Research (CPR) into the Aokigahara infostealer shows how attackers are adapting to this shift. The malware specifically collects authentication files, session data and configuration files associated with popular AI applications and development tools. The significance goes beyond gaining access to an AI account. If stolen credentials or session tokens […]

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When the PHP2Shell vulnerabilities became public, my thoughts went back to Log4Shell.  Five years ago, Log4Shell showed how difficult it can be to respond to a critical vulnerability in software used across countless applications and services. PHP2Shell presents a similar challenge. The technical details are different, but the need to quickly understand where you’re exposed and take action is very familiar.  I believe we should expect more incidents like this. AI is making it possible to discover vulnerabilities in widely used software at a speed and scale we haven’t seen before. As these capabilities become more accessible, we are likely […]

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Two critical vulnerabilities in PHP, the programming language behind a large share of the world’s websites, online stores and internet services, are being actively targeted. Since details of CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, known as PHP2Shell, leaked ahead of planned disclosure, 10% of organisations worldwide have been impacted (“impacted” means exploitation attempts, we have no way of knowing if the attack has been successful), according to Check Point Research. Hourly activity peaks at midnight, when fewer security teams are watching. Government institutions in the Netherlands and Finland have taken some of their websites offline as a precaution. What PHP2Shell is and why […]

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Key takeaways Only 14 percent of organizations say they have formal GenAI policies that are actively enforced and audited, according to Check Point’s 2026 Cloud Security Report. →The costliest AI mistakes break rules no vendor ships. Air Canada was held liable for a refund its chatbot promised and the airline never offered →The usual fixes fall short. Models can be argued out of system prompts, keyword lists miss meaning, and US-centric DLP lists miss the data your regulators protect →Custom guardrails turn a sentence into an enforced rule. Describe it, test it in under five minutes, and run it on […]

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Initially published Oct 21st at 6 AM PT- last updated 8:40AM PT Patch Now: Ensure you are up to date with the latest version IPS protection- CPAI-2026-15172 – Check Point Software. PHP Remote Code Execution (CVE-2026-109618, CVE-2026-109619). Check Point WAF protects against this threat How does Check Point protect you? Check Point Intrusion Prevention System (IPS):  IPS protection was just released to active this evening – PHP Remote Code Execution (CVE-2026-109618, CVE-2026-109619).  Always  Make sure gateways pull IPS updates automatically and set new critical protections to Prevent, not Detect. Watch Check Point Advisories for a new CPAI entry covering these […]

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As Amazon prepares for Prime Big Deal Days, its Fall Prime Day event on October 6-7, cybercriminals are already exploiting the anticipation surrounding one of the year’s largest online shopping events. New findings from Check Point Research reveal a significant increase in Amazon-related domains, alongside ongoing phishing campaigns and malicious websites designed to target online shoppers. Amazon-Related Domain Registrations Continue to Rise Check Point Research observed a steady increase in newly registered Amazon- and Prime Day-related domains in the months leading up to the event. New Amazon- and Prime Day-related domain registrations have risen for three straight months, climbing from […]

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Where global enterprises lose ground Ask any global IT leader what slows their enterprise down, and they’ll rarely identify the network itself as the issue. The friction often shows up at the borders, where one country’s infrastructure meets another’s regulations and coherence quietly falls apart. Every new region a company enters brings its own regulatory regime, infrastructure boundaries, and performance challenges. Stitch enough of these together, and the result is a patchwork architecture, held up by exceptions rather than one unified design. AI adoption is stretching that patchwork to its limits. It’s compounding growing demands from distributed SaaS, always-on collaboration […]

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In this article An agent’s goal rarely says how the agent may reach it, and capable agents are good at finding routes nobody planned for. →NVIDIA Open Agent Safety Platform puts the boundary in the infrastructure, outside the agent’s reach →Check Point semantic monitoring judges whether each step still fits the task →the two already work together in a beta integration with NVIDIA OpenShell →the monitor’s verdict can arrive before the action runs, in under 100 milliseconds What the Goal Leaves Out When an organization hands an autonomous agent a job, such as processing supplier invoices, it states the goal […]

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Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management (CAASM) solved a significant problem. Security teams can now say with confidence what they own.  But, two things separate a CAASM tool that stops there from one that actually moves the needle on risk. The first is what the inventory itself carries. The second is what it connects to. 1. An inventory needs to do more than list what exists A list of assets is just the beginning. The tools worth building on now attach criticality and connection data to every asset from day one, so a security team isn’t just looking at a spreadsheet […]

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A new kind of AI model returns decisions instead of text. We spent a day trying to change its mind. It cost about 50 cents. In this article Jev is a new kind of AI model that returns typed decisions instead of text, built for software to call rather than for people to read. We put it inside a realistic application and tried to change its verdict from the outside. →every configuration we tested was broken: risk downgraded to low and investment advised, on a document that flags every warning sign →about 50 cents per successful break, with our strongest […]

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AI agents are moving into the enterprise much faster than most security programs were designed to handle. They are no longer just answering questions or generating content. Agents can read email, access SaaS applications, query databases, invoke APIs, use MCP tools, modify records and execute business workflows. In other words, AI is moving from generating answers to taking actions. For CISOs and C-level leaders, that changes the security conversation. The question isn’t simply whether an organization is using AI safely. A more important question is: Can we confidently identify, govern, monitor, and control every AI agent before it becomes our […]

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In this article The new Workforce AI MCP is Check Point’s own Model Context Protocol server for Workforce AI Security. Connect a compatible AI client and you can query, analyze, and manage your employee AI usage policy in natural language instead of working through filters, screens, and individual rule checks. →ask plain questions such as which rule applies to a given user and application, or whether a rule is shadowed by a higher-priority one →work across users, managed assets, GenAI application usage, DLP data types, and agent and MCP activity in a single conversation →create and update rules by request […]

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As part of Check Point’s Frontier AI Readiness Program, we continue to release Jumbo hotfixes with security fixes and hardening improvements for our Firewall and Management products. This advisory addresses the active exploitation described below, and the immediate steps customers should take to protect affected systems. Check Point Research has identified active exploitation of two vulnerabilities affecting Security Gateway and Security Management: A fix for CVE-2026-85102 has been available since September 9, and customers who have applied it are already protected. CVE-2026-93616 is a newly discovered zero-day vulnerability in Security Management, and a fix is available now as part of […]

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In this article Nineteen Check Point AI Security R&D teams spent two days on one prompt: build the demo customers would ask to see twice. Three of the results tell a single story about securing AI agents, and none of it starts with an attacker. →an autonomous agent took dangerous actions with no attacker involved, it simply hit a wall and improvised →a single poisoned file in a code repository turned a popular coding agent into a data exfiltration channel →questioning an off-track agent prevented as many attacks as blocking it, and completed more legitimate work →the lesson for anyone […]

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Security teams are under pressure.   Networks are growing. Cloud environments are expanding. AI is accelerating change across users, applications, and infrastructure.   At the same time, security teams are expected to maintain strong protection, support business initiatives, and operate efficiently.  The challenge is not a lack of security control. The challenge is keeping up with a hybrid environment that changes faster than people can manage it.   This challenge will only grow as organizations adopt AI. Gartner predicts that by 2028, 15% of day-to-day work decisions will be made autonomously by agentic AI. As environments become more dynamic, security operations will need to be adapted.   This is where agentic network security […]

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