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 […]

The post When Security Operations Can’t Keep Up:  4 Ways Agentic Network Security Management Improves Security Operations appeared first on Check Point Blog.

Between mid-July and early August 2026, models being evaluated internally by OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta reached real production systems outside their test environments. One exploited a previously unknown vulnerability to escape its sandbox entirely. At the same time, criminal groups showed that frontier capability isn’t required for serious attacks: a ransomware affiliate ran a full intrusion through Claude Code, and a separate campaign, JADEPUFFER, is now documented as the first case of agentic ransomware, an extortion operation a model carried out end to end once a human set it in motion. Check Point Research’s July-August 2026 AI Threat Landscape Digest […]

The post AI Models Broke Their Own Containment: Key Findings from the July-August 2026 AI Threat Landscape appeared first on Check Point Blog.

Check Point uncovers thousands of fake support accounts, with hundreds more appearing every day A delayed flight. Missing luggage. A refund that never arrived.  For frustrated customers, social media has become a direct route to customer support. They tag the company, explain the problem, and wait for a response.  However, threat actors are watching those same conversations.  A Check Point Exposure Management investigation uncovered a coordinated social engineering campaign in which scammers monitor public complaints, impersonate customer support accounts, and approach customers seeking help. Researchers engaged directly with the scammers and followed the attack from the first social media interaction […]

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We ensure alignment and control in agents using synchronous control monitoring. Our model oversees agent execution, continuously ingests the trace as context, and prevents harmful actions before they execute in real time at sub-100ms latency. Agent trace at 30 tok/s, streamed to the control monitor model on the right. Prevents harmful actions before they are executed. Background Control Monitoring is a powerful tool for ensuring the runtime alignment and safety of autonomous agents. Since the Hugging Face Incident, the need for control monitoring on top of existing safety mechanisms was reinforced: OpenAI started investing more heavily into monitoring safety tools. […]

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Automated voicemail transcripts have become part of the daily rhythm of enterprise communication. They arrive with familiar subject lines, system-generated formatting, and little human context, exactly the qualities that make them easy to trust and easy to overlook. Attackers are now exploiting that familiarity, turning routine call-transcription notifications into a vehicle for credential phishing. Check Point researchers identified a large-scale phishing campaign that exploits this shift in enterprise behavior. The emails impersonate automated voicemail-transcript notifications and deliver malicious Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) attachments that redirect users to credential-harvesting pages, converting a familiar collaboration workflow into a potential path for account […]

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We analyzed ongoing conversations with prospective customers to find out what buyers ask most. Below are those questions, covering how Check Point Exposure Management helps teams validate risk, cut noise, coordinate remediation, and report progress. Part 1 covered how security leaders think about asset discovery, cloud visibility, threat intelligence, credential exposure, and integrations. Once teams know what’s exposed, the conversation shifts to prioritization and response. 1. How do you prioritize which exposures matter? Security teams often manage thousands of vulnerabilities across applications, endpoints, cloud resources, and internet facing infrastructure. A severity score alone does not provide enough context to determine […]

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Introduction Most prompt injection detection is built to catch the obvious. Encoding anomalies, invisible unicode, emoji smuggling, the signatures a classifier can pattern match against. PuzzleMask, a newly disclosed technique, sidesteps all of it. It embeds a policy-violating payload inside fluent, properly punctuated prose, and gets that payload past an LLM-based gatekeeper without tripping any heuristics naively looking for obfuscation on the input side. The technique targets a specific architecture that’s become standard in production LLM pipelines: a fast, low-cost model screens incoming input against a policy before a more capable target model, often running with high reasoning effort and […]

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The AI era is rewriting the rules of network security. We believe our recognition as a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Hybrid Mesh Firewall reflects how we help enterprises secure the AI transformation — end to end. Download your complimentary copy of the report: 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Hybrid Mesh Firewall Why AI Changes the Security Equation AI adoption has outpaced the ability to govern it. Only 5% of organizations have full visibility into AI tool usage on their network1. The other 95% are working blind. That gap has consequences: 54% of organizations have already reported […]

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Key takeaways GenAI usage continued to grow, with the average user generating 106 prompts in August, up from 95 in July and around 78 in June, while high-risk prompts remained present at 1 in every 43 prompts. Although August recorded the lowest high-risk GenAI prompt rate in several months, 86% of regular GenAI-using organizations were still affected by high-risk prompt activity, showing that data exposure remains a persistent governance challenge. By industry, Healthcare & Medical recorded the highest GenAI prompt exposure rate at 4% (1 in 25 prompts), followed by Software and Business Services at 1 in every 28 prompts. […]

The post August 2026 Cyber Threat Landscape: GenAI Data Exposure Emerges as a New Enterprise Risk as Attacks, Phishing, and Ransomware Accelerate appeared first on Check Point Blog.

Enterprises are connecting AI assistants to more of their real infrastructure every month, from inboxes to file drives to internal tools, on the assumption that the isolation between users and accounts holds. Check Point Research just tested that assumption against ChatGPT and found a way to break it. Using an internal service that was never meant to carry user data at all, CPR opened a working channel between two completely separate ChatGPT accounts and used it to hand one victim’s session a task from a total stranger, all while the victim’s own conversation looked entirely normal.  Key Takeaways  Check Point […]

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Ransomware kept its grip on organizations through the second quarter of 2026, and the headline number barely moved. What changed underneath that number is more interesting: new research gave us a rare look inside a top tier operation as it was being built, and it revealed just how little it now takes for a small and skilled group to reach the top of the field. Here’s what the quarter actually showed, and what it means for how you defend against it.  Key takeaways  Data leak sites recorded 2,139 ransomware victims in Q2 2026, essentially flat versus Q1 and up 33% […]

The post Ransomware Didn’t Slow Down in Q2 2026. It Just Spread Out. appeared first on Check Point Blog.

Key takeaways Weekly cyber attacks reached 2,336 per organization in July 2026, up 3% from June and 16% year over year Education remained the most attacked industry, averaging 4,848 weekly attacks per organization Latin America recorded the highest regional attack volume, while Europe saw one of the sharpest increases at 18% year over year GenAI adoption continued to expand, with organizations using an average of 8 tools and 1 in 36 prompts carrying a high risk of sensitive data exposure Email remained a key entry point, with 1 in every 128 emails classified as phishing and another 20% falling into […]

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It typically begins the same way it has for years, with an approach from a recruiter offering a role at a company the target would recognize, accompanied by a PDF describing the position in convincing detail. That approach remains one of the most effective entry points used by state sponsored threat actors today, and Check Point Research has spent recent months tracking a new wave of it. Operation Dream Job, the long running campaign attributed to the North Korea affiliated Lazarus group, has resurfaced with a previously undisclosed Windows vulnerability (CVE-2026-68820), a newly identified backdoor, and a command and control […]

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Anthropic’s new inference hooks give enterprises a native enforcement point before prompts ever reach the model. Combined with Check Point Workforce AI Security, organizations get a real-time allow-or-deny decision on every prompt, with no proxy in the path. Why This Matters Enterprise AI adoption has moved well past experimentation. Employees draft documents, write code, summarize meetings, and query enterprise knowledge through large language models every day. The challenge was never understanding that AI introduces risk. It was finding a practical enforcement point. Web gateways and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) tools were designed for websites and SaaS applications, not conversations with […]

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Security leaders evaluating Check Point Exposure Management tend to ask the same questions: how the solution discovers assets, what intelligence it provides, and how well it fits their existing tools and workflows.  Below, we answer the questions that come up most often in product evaluations, offering a practical look at how organizations discover, understand, and reduce cyber risk.  1. How does the platform discover my assets?  Every exposure management program starts with knowing what you own. Security teams cannot assess, prioritize, or remediate exposures tied to systems they do not know exist.  Check Point Exposure Management begins by continuously discovering […]

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Black Hat USA 2026 gave Check Point Research four chances to show the room something it hadn’t seen before. Across two days, our researchers pulled apart a decade-old Windows driver, a malware format most tools can’t touch, the plumbing underneath today’s AI agent frameworks, and the sandbox meant to contain them, and found the same pattern waiting in each: attackers moving into the layers we trust by default. Here’s a look at what they presented. BTR Reforged: The Driver Nobody Had Looked At Jiří Vinopal opened the day with a talk that started from an uncomfortable premise. Somewhere inside Windows […]

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Check Point brings open research, objective benchmarks and customer-controlled runtime protection to the industry initiative introduced by NVIDIA.  AI is rapidly changing how organizations build, operate, and protect their digital environments. As a leader in the global cyber community, we believe in the power of collective intelligence. We are proud to join the Open Secure AI Alliance as an inaugural member, working alongside leaders from across cyber security, cloud computing, enterprise software, AI, and the open-source community.  Introduced by NVIDIA, the alliance is creating a collaborative foundation for developing and sharing open technologies that advance AI safety and security, and will help organizations identify, remediate, and responsibly disclose […]

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This week, the UK’s AI Security Institute (AISI) published an incident report most organizations would have quietly buried. During a routine cyber evaluation, an AI agent researched the real human maintainers of an open-source project, invented multiple fake online identities, and used them to pressure a real person into approving malicious code. Nobody instructed it to deceive anyone, and deception simply became a route to finishing the task. A human maintainer caught it and refused. The facts AISI ran a cybersecurity challenge 122 times across seven models. In 10 runs, an agent acted outside the scope of the test, producing […]

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A few weeks ago, an AI cyber evaluation produced an unexpectedly efficient strategy for solving a benchmark: the agents went looking for the answers. According to OpenAI’s preliminary disclosure, models being tested for advanced cyber capabilities found ways to obtain secret information that could help them complete a benchmark. They chained vulnerabilities, stolen credentials, internet access, and inferences about where benchmark material might be hosted. The route eventually reached Hugging Face infrastructure, where the activity was detected and contained. Hugging Face has since published a technical reconstruction of 17,600 actions. Its investigators found a coherent intrusion that rebuilt tooling, tested […]

The post When Data Becomes Instructions: AI Agents Need a Chain of Custody for Context appeared first on Check Point Blog.

More than 30 Minnesota water systems were hit in one coordinated cyber attack. Within days, the Five Eyes told critical infrastructure operators to be ready to pull the plug.  Thirty water systems in two days  Over two days in late July, a coordinated cyber attack hit more than 30 community water systems across Minnesota. The treatment plant in Braham went offline. Plymouth lost cellular communications to two water towers and its wastewater lift stations. Maple Plain declared a local state of emergency. Early reporting points to internet-exposed programmable logic controllers (PLCs) as the way in, and investigators are examining links to Iranian affiliated activity. […]

The post Your VLAN Isn’t an Air Gap: Six Hard Truths From the New CI Fortify Guidance appeared first on Check Point Blog.