Building on our previous Illumio Insights integration, Check Point and Illumio are expanding their partnership with an integration to Illumio Segmentation, helping organizations prevent threats, expose risky paths, contain lateral movement across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, and better align gateway enforcement with microsegmentation policy. Hybrid environments keep getting more complex. Applications and data now span data centers, private cloud, public cloud, SaaS, remote access paths, and shared services, while attackers are using AI to move faster from intrusion to impact. Security teams are not just trying to stop threats at the edge. They also need to see how traffic moves […]

The post Check Point and Illumio Expand Partnership to Secure Hybrid Environments appeared first on Check Point Blog.

The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) is warning organisations to prepare for an unprecedented wave of vulnerability disclosures, driven by AI-accelerated exploitation of technical debt. This commentary sets out how Check Point Exposure Management helps government, public sector, and CNI organisations get ahead of it.  The NCSC’s CTO, Ollie Whitehouse, published a clear and urgent warning in May 2026: AI is enabling threat actors to exploit long-standing technical debt at a scale and speed the industry has not seen before. A “patch wave” – a surge of vulnerability disclosures requiring rapid, large-scale remediation – is expected. For organisations operating critical […]

The post The NCSC Patch Wave Is Coming. Do You Know Where Your Risk Lives? appeared first on Check Point Blog.

Across the United States, the average organization faced slightly fewer cyber attacks per week in May 2026 than it did a year earlier, according to Check Point Research — the national figure was essentially flat year over year. In the Central US, however, the trend ran the other way. Organizations there faced more attacks than a year ago, and more than the national average — as they did in every month of 2026.  Through the first five months of the year, the typical Central US organization faced about 1,552 cyber attacks per week, roughly 7% above the national average of […]

The post Energy, Healthcare, and Finance: Why Midwest Industries Are Facing Surging Cyber Attacks appeared first on Check Point Blog.

Every summer, hundreds of millions of people book flights, reserve hotels, and plan vacations online. And every summer, cyber criminals show up to take advantage of exactly that. Check Point Research tracked the threat landscape heading into the 2026 summer travel season, and what they found should give travelers pause before they click “confirm booking.”  The hospitality sector is under targeted attack  The hospitality, travel, and recreation sector recorded 2,291 average weekly cyberattacks per organization in May 2026, a 24% increase compared to the same month last year. To put that in context, the global year-over-year rise across all industries […]

The post Travel Phishing and Cyber Attacks are Surging in 2026, Growing 122% over the last 3 years. Here’s What Cyber Criminals Are Actually Doing appeared first on Check Point Blog.

Shadow AI is no longer a theoretical risk. Employees are adopting AI tools faster than security teams can track them, often without IT’s knowledge, and frequently on devices and surfaces that traditional security tools simply can’t see. If you asked your security team right now how many AI tools are active across your organization, on which surfaces, and what’s being shared, could they answer? For most organizations, the honest answer is no. And that gap, between what your employees are doing with AI and what your security team can actually see, is where enterprise risk lives today.  AI adoption in the enterprise didn’t slow down and wait for governance to catch […]

The post The AI Your Security Team Can’t See Is the One You Should Worry About appeared first on Check Point Blog.

Last week, public sector leaders, cyber security practitioners, and technology experts gathered at the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C. for Check Point Engage Public Sector: Securing the Mission of Public Sector Organizations in a Hyperconnected AI World. And what was on everyone’s mind? You guessed it – how federal and other public sector organizations secure mission-critical operations in an era where AI is transforming both cyber security defense and cyber warfare. What the audience learned across our several superb panel discussions was that AI has definitively become a challenging and fast-evolving battleground in the push and pull between attackers […]

The post Check Point Engage Public Sector 2026: AI Is the New Battlefield appeared first on Check Point Blog.

The model behind a security workflow shapes how fast a threat is caught, how accurately an incident is investigated, and how much a defender can trust the result. We treat that choice with care. Today we’re taking a clear step forward: Check Point has joined OpenAI’s Daybreak initiative through its Trusted Access for Cyber (TAC) program. These are real steps in how we bring AI into our defensive operations, and in the security we deliver to our customers. What Trusted Access for Cyber Gives Us Trusted Access for Cyber is OpenAI’s program for vetted security organizations that need its most […]

The post Check Point Joins OpenAI’s Trusted Access for Cyber Program and Daybreak Initiative appeared first on Check Point Blog.

Key Findings:   Check Point Research identified a critical vulnerability chain in LangGraph, an open-source framework from the creators of LangChain that enables developers to build complex, stateful, and controllable AI agent workflows using LLMs; they have approximately 46.5 million monthly downloads, making it one of the most widely adopted AI agent platforms in the world An SQL injection in LangGraph’s function could allow attackers to gain full control via remote code execution of a server by exploiting weaknesses in how the system processes and handles data. A compromised LangGraph server exposes everything the agent touches, including LLM API keys, customer data, CRM credentials, conversation history, and internal network […]

The post When Your AI Agent’s Memory Becomes a Security Liability appeared first on Check Point Blog.

The FIFA World Cup 2026 kicks off on June 11. Across 16 cities in the US, Canada, and Mexico, billions of people will be watching, traveling, betting, and spending. Threat actors have been watching too, and for far longer. Check Point Research and Check Point Exposure Management spent the past year tracking the cyber threat landscape building around this tournament. What emerged is a coordinated pre-positioning effort across three sectors that sit at the center of the World Cup economy: finance, travel and hospitality, and gambling. The infrastructure is already built, with most of them already live. Financial Sector: Fraud […]

The post Fraud, Ransomware, and Fake Apps Are Already Targeting FIFA 2026 appeared first on Check Point Blog.

When people hear about hackers “asking an AI chatbot” to help them take over Instagram accounts, the instinctive reaction is to file it under prompt injection, jailbreaks, or “the model got tricked.”  That may be the wrong lesson.  According to reporting from 404 Media, hackers claimed they used Meta’s AI support chatbot to gain access to high-profile Instagram accounts by asking it to change the email address associated with the target account. The reported incidents coincided with several high-profile account takeovers, including accounts linked to the Obama White House, Sephora, and the Chief Master Sergeant of the Space Force.    […]

The post The Meta AI Account Recovery Incident Wasn’t Just a Chatbot Problem appeared first on Check Point Blog.

As the U.S. approaches the 2026 elections in November, the greatest threat to voting integrity will likely not be from hackers targeting voting machines or altering ballots, but from a growing war over reality itself.   Voter influence operations are increasingly focused on manipulating the information environment surrounding voters, flooding social media and search results with misleading narratives and fake content, and impersonated news sources designed to erode trust in what people see and hear online. Sophisticated operators have already cloned major media brands like Reuters, The Washington Post, and Fox News using look-alike domains that can fool even attentive readers at a glance. In this new era of AI-powered disinformation, the […]

The post The 2026 U.S. Midterms Have a Cyber Problem, But it’s Not at the Ballot Box appeared first on Check Point Blog.

At GTC Taipei during COMPUTEX 2026, NVIDIA is highlighting the growing adoption of its NVIDIA Vera BlueField-4 STX architecture and introducing new NVIDIA DOCA-powered innovations designed to secure the next generation of enterprise AI infrastructure. As organizations continue scaling AI factories, private LLM environments, distributed inference systems, and increasingly autonomous AI operations, enterprise infrastructure requirements are rapidly evolving. Modern AI environments combine high-performance compute, distributed storage systems, inference pipelines, Kubernetes clusters, APIs, GPU server farms, and sensitive enterprise data operating continuously at enormous scale. At the same time, AI-driven environments are introducing increasingly dynamic machine-to-machine interactions across infrastructure, applications, and […]

The post Check Point Lays the Groundwork for the Future of AI Factory Security with NVIDIA appeared first on Check Point Blog.

Attackers are now agentic. AI agents run reconnaissance, test exploits, and weaponize vulnerabilities at machine speed – collapsing the mean time from CVE disclosure to confirmed exploitation from 2.3 years in 2018 to roughly 10 hours in 2026, with 72.7% of exploited CVEs in 2026 hitting as zero days, up from 16.1% in 2018.   Every year, the major breach reports tell the same story. Misconfigurations. Unpatched systems. Identity sprawl. Flat networks. The root causes barely change, and yet organizations continue to get breached, not because they lack visibility into these problems, but because closing them at scale is genuinely hard. Too many […]

The post The Autonomous Security Platform Built for Attacker Speed appeared first on Check Point Blog.

Hacktivism and ransomware targeting organizations across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland increased 124% in 2025, according to Check Point Exposure Management (based on published attacks on the web and dark web). Three distinct dynamics drove the surge, each with its own logic and its own implications for security teams in 2026.  Germany Absorbed Most of It  Germany accounted for more than 80% of regional incidents, with Switzerland at 12% and Austria at 8%. Across Europe, the DACH region represented 18% of all recorded attacks, placing Germany above France, Spain, and Italy by individual country share.  The concentration reflects Germany’s economic and […]

The post Hacktivists, Ransomware, and a 124% Surge Across DACH appeared first on Check Point Blog.

Vulnerability remediation has become an execution problem. Security teams are generating more findings than ever, but too often those findings do not translate into timely risk reduction. The gap between newly introduced exposure and effective remediation continues to widen.  Addressing that gap requires more than improved scanning, better dashboards, or additional tooling. It requires a dedicated operating model. This is the role of the Vulnerability Operations Center, or VOC. As Dr. Natalie Foster Johnson, Executive Director of the CyberMINDS Research Institute, explains, “Operationalizing a VOC is a maturity step that allows organizations to address exposure concerns earlier, reducing risk before incidents occur rather than reacting afterward.”  A VOC centralizes how organizations […]

The post The Case for a Vulnerability Operations Center appeared first on Check Point Blog.

The FIFA World Cup 2026 is one of the most anticipated sporting events in history, and cyber criminals are already capitalizing on excitement. As matches kick off across the United States, Canada, and Mexico, threat actors are flooding the internet with fake merchandise stores, fraudulent betting platforms, and phishing domains designed to steal your money and personal data. This report breaks down the latest threat landscape so fans can stay safe while enjoying the beautiful game.  As the host countries of the FIFA World Cup 2026, the United States, Canada, and Mexico all recorded an increase in the weekly average number of cyber-attacks per organization in April 2026 compared to both […]

The post Before the First Whistle: How Cyber Criminals Are Targeting World Cup 2026 appeared first on Check Point Blog.

Key Findings  The Gentlemen RaaS has 400+ public victims and is the #2 most active ransomware group globally in 2026   Their internal systems were breached in May 2026, exposing their full operational structure   The group is run by approximately nine named operators organized around a single administrator (zeta88 / hastalamuerte), who not only manages the platform but personally participates in encryption events  That administrator has been identified as a former affiliate of the Qilin ransomware program — a career criminal who learned the trade under an established operation before building a competing one  Initial access is almost exclusively via unpatched edge devices or purchased credentials   Data stolen from one […]

The post When the Ransomware Gang Gets Hacked: What the Gentlemen Leak Reveals About Modern Ransomware Risk appeared first on Check Point Blog.

Every Region Recorded Higher Attack Volumes in April In April 2026, global cyber-attack activity rebounded sharply following the brief moderation observed in March. Organizations experienced an average of 2,201 weekly cyber-attacks, representing a 10% increase month over month and an 8% increase year over year. This reversal underscores the volatility of today’s threat landscape. After three consecutive months of gradual decline, April’s data confirms that the earlier easing was temporary rather than structural. Attackers continue to leverage automation, expanded digital footprints, and exposed cloud and GenAI environments to sustain elevated pressure across industries and regions. Check Point Research data shows […]

The post Cyber Threats Spike in April 2026 as Ransomware Expands and Attack Volumes Climb After Short-Lived Moderation appeared first on Check Point Blog.

Ransomware activity remained elevated in Q1 2026, continuing the trend established over the past year. According to the State of Ransomware Q1 2026 report from Check Point Research, overall attack volume stayed near historic highs. At the same time, the structure of the ransomware ecosystem changed materially. After two years of increasing fragmentation, activity is consolidating around a smaller number of dominant groups. For organizations, this shift reduces the number of active actors but increases the potential impact of individual incidents.  Key Findings: 2,122 organizations were listed on ransomware data leak sites in Q1 2026, making it the second-highest Q1 on record The top […]

The post Q1 2026 Ransomware Report: Fewer Groups, Higher Impact appeared first on Check Point Blog.

As we recognize World Password Day in 2026, the traditional advice to “use a complex password with numbers and symbols” feels hopelessly outdated. Today, a 16-character password is useless if an infostealer malware extracts it directly from a browser cache, or if an employee willingly pastes it into an unmanaged AI chatbot. Welcome to the real World Password Day 2026. Not the one where we remind you to add an exclamation mark to “Password123.” The one where we pull back the curtain on the global industrial marketplace that has quietly been built on the back of our collective password failures — a […]

The post World Password Day 2026: Why “Strong Passwords” Can’t Save You from AI, Infostealers, and the Telegram Underground appeared first on Check Point Blog.