What OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s testing incidents really teach defenders  In the past two weeks, two of the world’s leading AI labs have disclosed the same unsettling result. During their own safety testing, their most capable models reached real companies’ systems. First OpenAI, whose models broke into Hugging Face. Then Anthropic, whose models reached three more organizations.  Read the disclosures closely. Two facts carry the weight.  First, the safeguards were not defeated. They were switched off by design. OpenAI ran the models with reduced cyber refusals and safety classifiers disabled, to measure raw capability on a cyber benchmark. A model doing […]

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AI has introduced a new class of network traffic. Prompts, file uploads, model calls, and agent actions carrying sensitive business context now traverse the network as organizations race to adopt AI and achieve their business goals. Traditional firewalls were never built to understand these connections, AI activity often looks like ordinary web traffic, leaving the firewall unable to determine whether a prompt contains sensitive data, an agent is calling a tool it should never access, or an application’s AI model is subjected to a malicious prompt. These challenges demand comprehensive protection, which is why Check Point created the AI Defense […]

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Attackers are increasingly abandoning fake Microsoft login pages in favor of abusing Microsoft’s legitimate authentication infrastructure, allowing phishing campaigns to bypass many of the warning signs employees have been trained to recognize. Starting on June 25th through the second week of July, we identified more than 200 phishing emails targeting users across approximately 120 organizations, spanning a wide range of industries and countries worldwide. The messages impersonated Microsoft Teams task notifications from HR and directed recipients to a legitimate Microsoft sign-in page. Victims were then prompted to grant permissions to an attacker-controlled application, allowing the campaign to abuse Microsoft’s trusted […]

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Update: Hugging Face has since published a detailed technical timeline of the incident. The additional technical details reinforce the core takeaway discussed here: advanced AI agents can pursue objectives in unexpected ways, making runtime governance and security controls increasingly important.  There are certain moments in technology where you realize the conversation is about to change. I remember the first time I launched an EC2 instance. I remember trying Uber when there were only a handful of cars on the road. I remember riding in a Waymo before autonomous driving felt normal. Each one was an early glimpse of a future […]

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The model migration is ready for approval. Tests show better performance and lower costs. The application will serve the same users, process the same data, and support the same business workflow. The product team expects a straightforward technical sign-off. Then security asks the question that changes the review: which controls will survive the switch? Access rules, data protection, logging, and human approval may depend on settings provided by the current model platform. A migration can alter the organization’s effective policy even when the business use stays exactly the same. Models and providers will keep changing. The requirements attached to business […]

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Threat actor names can sound simple. LockBit. Fancy Bear. BlackCat. Scattered Spider. Anonymous Sudan. Each name gives the impression of a clear group with a defined identity.  In threat intelligence, however, the name is rarely the whole story.  Some names are chosen by attackers. Others are assigned by researchers, security vendors, governments, or public databases. One name may represent a ransomware brand, a hacktivist identity, a research label, a campaign, a malware family, or an activity cluster observed across different incidents.  For security professionals, this distinction is important. Confusing attacker created identities with researcher assigned labels can lead teams to […]

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Key Takeaways Microsoft continues to be the single most impersonated brand in Q2 2026, appearing in 23% of all brand phishing attempts, far ahead of any other company The top five impersonated brands, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Google, Apple, and Amazon, together account for more than half of all brand phishing attempts tracked this quarter Open AI’s ChatGPT entered the top ten most impersonated brands for the first time, signaling that AI tools are now firmly on criminals’ radar Technology was the most targeted industry overall, followed by Social Networks and Banking Real world cases this quarter ranged from fake payment failure […]

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As part of Check Point’s Frontier AI Readiness Program, we are releasing a jumbo hotfix with security and hardening fixes for our firewall and management products. This update includes a number of security hardening improvements and fixes, the most significant of which are outlined below. During a routine BLAST review, we discovered a few vulnerabilities. Following a thorough analysis, we identified one of those in the wild, affecting a handful of customers. This only affects a very specific configuration — when Management is exposed directly to the internet without IP restrictions. All affected customers have been notified. All Smart-1 Cloud […]

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Some security teams are reducing critical exposure within hours, while others are leaving similar issues open for days. The 2026 Exposure Gap Report shows that many organizations can identify, validate, and prioritize exposure, but the real challenge begins when teams need to turn those insights into remediation.  Across environments, organizations are often working with similar types of exposure, yet their outcomes vary significantly. The difference depends on how quickly validated findings move into remediation and how consistently teams can repeat that process at scale.  Remediation Speed Varies Significantly  According to the report, Utilities organizations resolve exposure in about 12.6 hours […]

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Microsoft’s guidance on inbound and outbound mail routing for third-party email security has prompted a fair question from customers: how should organizations evaluate inline email security for Microsoft 365?  The answer depends less on whether a solution is inline and more on how that inline architecture is implemented. Microsoft is right to call attention to mail flow designs that can introduce unnecessary complexity, create authentication challenges, duplicate processing, or disrupt the expected Microsoft 365 experience. Those risks are real when a third-party service is bolted onto the environment without careful integration.  That is also why architecture matters. A modern enterprise […]

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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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