Today is AI Appreciation Day, and honestly, we mean it. AI has changed how we write code, analyze threats, and get work done faster than anyone thought possible a few years ago. It deserves a moment of gratitude. But at Check Point, we spend most of our year studying the other side of that coin and our newly released AI Security Report 2026 makes one thing very clear: the same qualities we’re celebrating today are exactly what’s made AI such a powerful tool for attackers too. So in the spirit of appreciating AI honestly, not just enthusiastically, here’s what a […]

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Security programs are built around moments of closure: the finding is closed, the control passed, and the release can move forward.  AI security refuses to cooperate with that model.  A passing test is useful evidence, but only for a specific system, configuration, and moment.  Production AI keeps moving. Models change behavior, prompts are revised, retrieval sources are added, agents gain tools, and users introduce unexpected context. Attackers adapt just as quickly. Yesterday’s clean result may not describe tomorrow’s risk.  That has been the practical case for continuous AI red teaming. Now, research from the National Institute of Standards and Technology […]

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Key Takeaways Vulnerability response times have collapsed from days to hours. AI can reason about code well enough to generate working exploits at scale, so defenders now face patch windows of 12 to 72 hours instead of the traditional timeframe Your exposed AI infrastructure is being actively probed right now. Model servers, inference endpoints, and agent control panels are facing the internet, and most security teams don’t know they’re there Data leakage through approved AI use doubled in one year. Employees sharing context with generative AI to get useful answers are exposing credentials and source code in ordinary workflows, no […]

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Every AI vendor is talking about agents – autonomous systems that handle complex tasks without constant human input. The promise is real. But one question gets asked too rarely: what makes an agent reliable enough to trust with your network security?  The answer isn’t the model. It’s the harness.  Agents Run on LLMs. Reliability Runs on Something Else AI agents get their reasoning power from large language models (LLMs). LLMs are impressive. They understand context, reason through complex problems, and plan across a wide range of tasks.  But on its own, an LLM is a generalist. It knows a little about everything and not enough about your […]

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Key takeaways  AI agents create a new email attack surface because they can process content before humans see it Email Agent Hijacking hides instructions in email content to manipulate AI interpretation, decisions, or outputs Post-delivery controls are too late when an AI agent acts immediately after delivery Organizations need preventive protection for AI-consumed content and validation for AI-generated responses AI agents are now reading and writing emails before humans ever see them. What was once a human-centric communication channel is quickly becoming an AI-driven workflow, and that shift introduces a new and largely unprotected attack surface.  Much of the industry’s recent attention has centered […]

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A student receives what looks like a routine summer job offer from a trusted school account. The link goes to Google Forms. The email passes authentication. There is no malware, no fake login page, and no strange-looking domain. To the student and to many security tools, it looks harmless.  But this is where modern phishing succeeds: it borrows trust instead of faking it. In this case, Check Point Research observed more than 3,200 copies of a phishing campaign targeting students with the promise of flexible summer work. The emails were sent from a compromised but legitimate school mailbox and directed […]

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Walk into almost any executive leadership meeting right now and you’ll find the same dynamic playing out. The CEO is asking how the company can do more with AI, faster. Engineering teams are already three sprints deep into building something new. And when the CISO walks into the room, the energy subtly shifts. The unspoken question is always the same: is this person here to help us move, or to slow us down? That dynamic is an issue, and I think it’s one the security community has to own. The CISO has long carried the label of the “Office of […]

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Key takeaways Weekly cyber-attacks per organization reached 2,270 in June 2026, up 10% from May and 17% higher than June 2025 Education, Government, and Telecommunications again sat at the top of the industry list, with Education and Telecommunications posting double-digit gains while Government rose 5% year over year Most regions grew year over year, led by Latin America at a 27% increase, while Africa was the exception with a 9% decline GenAI exposure held roughly steady, though Healthcare and Telecommunications emerged as the industries carrying the most risk from unsafe prompts Ransomware attacks reached 646 for the month, a 33% […]

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As organizations adopt both on-premises firewalls and cloud-delivered SASE, security becomes more distributed and complex. Users connect from headquarters, branch offices, and remote locations, expecting the same secure and seamless internet experience everywhere. When Internet Access policies across firewalls and SASE are managed separately, maintaining consistency becomes harder, increasing the risk of human error and misconfiguration.  The 2026 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report found that misconfiguration is one of the top recurring error types in breaches year after year, noting that, “the fact that Misconfiguration remains among the top errors over time is rather concerning.” In environments with separate Internet Access policies, that risk is […]

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Risk is concentrating. The 2026 Exposure Gap Report shows vulnerabilities claiming a larger share of critical exposure, and that shift has real implications for how security teams prioritize their response. Two findings are central to this change. Vulnerabilities now represent a much larger share of critical exposure, and only a small percentage of vulnerability alerts are validated as exploitable. Together, these findings show why prioritization depends on context, validation, and a clear understanding of which exposures require action. Exposure Is Shifting Toward Vulnerabilities Vulnerabilities now account for 42.6% of critical exposure, up from 18.7% in 2025. This increase shows that […]

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Key Findings Trust is being manufactured at scale. A single threat actor built a cross-platform ecosystem: a WordPress phishing hub, GitHub and SourceForge projects, a YouTube channel, crypto forums, and even posts on legitimate news sites, all engineered to make a malicious “tool” look popular, vetted, and safe Reputation systems themselves are now a target. The actor seeds benign votes and “safe” community comments on VirusTotal samples that already carry low detection rates, nudging reputation-based defenses toward misclassifying clearly malicious files as harmless AI is woven into the lure. Fake “tutorial” videos pair real-looking desktop demos with AI-generated narrators and […]

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AI security is getting attention because AI has stopped being a side experiment.  It is now part of how work gets done. Employees use copilots to write, research, code, and analyze. Product teams are adding AI into customer experiences. Developers are building applications on top of foundation models. Business teams are experimenting with agents that can read email, summarize documents, query data, and trigger workflows.  That is a very different world from the one many AI review processes were designed for.  An AI system can pass a benchmark and still fail in production. It can behave safely in a clean test environment and then encounter real […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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