Frontier AI is moving faster than most governance and response systems were designed to handle.

The corporate landscape across the Japan and Asia-Pacific (JAPAC) region is facing an unprecedented regulatory and operational reckoning. The rise of hyper-autonomous ‘frontier’ AI models is pushing cyber security out of human hands and into a real-time war of machine against machine. This shift has triggered a highly coordinated enforcement wave cascading through JAPAC’s premier digital hubs, where regulators and enterprises are moving in lockstep to address machine-speed threats. 

With corporate watchdogs Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) and Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) firing warning shots via urgent market letters, and neighbouring authorities like the Monetary Authority of Singapore and South Korea’s central government enacting strict new AI safety rules, organisations are being forced to completely overhaul their defensive architecture. Decades of relying on slower, committee-based governance are being shattered by new threat intelligence showing that autonomous AI agents can now exploit vulnerabilities and exfiltrate critical data within minutes—turning traditional 72-hour regulatory reporting windows into mere post-mortems.

The warning comes as the gap between corporate readiness and technological reality widens right across the JAPAC corridor. Much of the region’s current governance and cyber risk architecture still reflects a legacy system engineered for predictable, slower-paced environments. We have spent years building risk models where vulnerability discovery, incident escalation, and defensive response unfold gradually enough for traditional executive oversight and committee structures to remain effective. But that comfortable pace has officially vanished.

The Machine-Speed Reality

The sheer velocity of this shift was highlighted during restricted testing of Anthropic’s advanced frontier model, Claude Mythos, under an initiative known as Project Glasswing. Palo Alto Networks was among a select group of technology and cyber security organisations chosen to evaluate the implications of the model before its broader release. Mythos demonstrated an unprecedented capability to identify and exploit vulnerabilities across major operating systems at a level matching or exceeding advanced human experts.

During combined testing involving Mythos, Claude Opus 4.7, and OpenAI’s GPT-5.5-Cyber, the real-world impact of machine speed became starkly visible. In a single month, Palo Alto Networks disclosed 26 Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) representing 75 distinct issues, a massive surge compared to a typical monthly volume of fewer than five CVEs.

While discovering flaws at that scale would historically have raised uncomfortable questions around software quality, the landscape has fundamentally shifted. In this new era, radical transparency, paired with the ability to reflect and act instantly, has emerged as a critical corporate superpower. Frontier AI is accelerating both sides of the digital chessboard simultaneously: while attackers are gaining unprecedented speed, defenders are gaining a level of visibility that simply did not exist a few years ago. Real-time warfare between AI defenders and AI attackers is rapidly becoming the standard operating model.

AI Agents: The New Corporate ‘Insiders’

This shift introduces a profound dilemma for corporate leadership. Recent regulatory guidance repeatedly emphasises the necessity of human supervision, and for good reason—ultimate accountability must always remain with people. Boards must still set risk appetite, Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) must determine operational thresholds, and security teams must decide how much authority autonomous systems should hold inside critical environments.

However, organisations must now look a step further. Autonomous AI agents—operating on behalf of employees, suppliers, or automated workflows—are quickly becoming the new corporate ‘insiders’. If not managed with extreme care, they represent massive, systemic blind spots.

Current identity and access frameworks are starting to buckle under the strain because they were never built to distinguish between human users and autonomous agents acting on their behalf. Traditional identity systems assume a predictable human pattern: a user authenticates, requests access, and operates within set boundaries. Autonomous agents, by contrast, interact continuously with APIs, generate code on the fly, move fluidly across workflows, and operate with delegated authority from trusted users.

When these agents begin operating deep inside critical infrastructure, financial services, or government workflows, the risk profile changes entirely. Security teams are no longer just dealing with stolen passwords or human misuse; they are managing autonomous systems capable of acting at machine speed across highly interconnected environments, with potentially devastating consequences if control is lost.

The Failure of the 72-Hour Window

This acceleration has effectively broken traditional regulatory reporting timelines. Recent threat observations from Unit 42 reveal that in approximately 20 percent of modern breaches, attackers successfully exfiltrate data within the very first hour of a compromise.

When data theft occurs inside 60 minutes, a 72-hour reporting window ceases to function as an effective defense mechanism. Instead, it becomes a post-mortem.

For example Australia’s current reporting obligations—including those under the SOCI Act, CPS 234, and the Privacy Act—were largely designed for static environments where defenders had sufficient time to investigate, escalate internally, and coordinate remediation before damage spread. Today, many CISOs quietly acknowledge the immense operational strain created by overlapping reporting frameworks during a live crisis. In the chaotic early stages of a compromise, security teams frequently find themselves managing compulsory reporting requirements from different regulators while their engineering teams are still actively trying to contain a fast-moving incident.

A Region-Wide Regulatory Reckoning

Australia is far from alone in this challenge. The regulatory anxiety echoing through the halls of APRA and ASIC is part of a highly coordinated, region-wide crackdown across the Japan and Asia-Pacific (JAPAC) tech corridor. As frontier models shrink the ‘time-to-exploit’ to near zero, neighbouring digital economies are rapidly realising that their legacy frameworks are equally vulnerable.

In Singapore, the regulatory response has been immediate. The Cyber Security Agency (CSA) recently issued a stark advisory warning that advanced frontier models can examine complex codebases and automate attacks faster than human developers can write patches. In lockstep, MAS finalised its Guidelines on AI Risk Management. Under these new rules, financial institutions are now mandated to perform continuous ‘AI Cyber Stress Testing’— requiring boards to prove that complex, autonomous AI-to-AI interactions within their systems won't trigger an unmanageable domino effect.

Meanwhile, South Korea has shifted from guidelines to hard law. The nation's landmark AI Basic Act (Framework Act on Artificial Intelligence) has officially entered into force, creating strict compliance mandates, mandatory data audits, and extraterritorial penalties for any enterprise deploying high-impact AI systems without ironclad human guardrails.

Across JAPAC, a uniform regulatory shift is underway: voluntary AI ethics frameworks are being replaced by proactive, real-time enforcement measures. 

Moving with Discipline

Organisations broadly acknowledge that AI demands a distinct approach, yet implementation gaps remain. Businesses must move away from managing AI like standard software and instead commit the significant defensive resources needed to protect complex AI supply chains. 

The language coming from regulators reflects these exact challenges. ASIC Commissioner Simone Constant warned that frontier AI capability could expose vulnerabilities at unprecedented speed and scale, creating systemic consequences across entire sectors. Her message to corporate Australia was direct: do not wait for perfect clarity to address the threat posed by new AI models. Instead, organisations must act now, and act with discipline, to strengthen the cyber resilience fundamentals that underpin their businesses.

The testing conducted within Project Glasswing ultimately proved that while frontier models can expose weaknesses at terrifying speed, that exact same capability can be weaponised defensively. By deploying AI to reduce exposure and identify vulnerabilities before adversaries can operationalise them, organisations can effectively level the playing field.

The most resilient organisations over the next few years will be those that combine real-time frontier AI defensive capabilities with disciplined human supervision, rather than treating the two as separate priorities. In the era of machine-speed warfare, you cannot successfully have one without the other.

To learn more about how we are securing the frontier of technology, visit the Palo Alto Networks Trust Center and explore the latest threat insights from Unit 42.

The post Beyond Human Oversight: Adapting to the Frontier AI Era appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.

Our Commitment to Data Autonomy and National Resilience

The United Kingdom has established itself as a leading global cyber power. Over the last decade, Palo Alto Networks has been proud to work alongside British institutions to protect the digital borders of a highly innovative economy. As UK organisations navigate an evolving threat landscape and adopt transformative technologies, like AI, the need for security partners who understand British operational realities has never been greater.

The Path to Digital Autonomy, Resilience and Control

Organisations today require more than a technology provider. They need a partner that understands the specific legal frameworks and strategic priorities of the British landscape. We are reaffirming our deep commitment to the UK, safeguarding British data as a core part of national resilience, even as both technology and cyber adversaries evolve.

The targeting of UK infrastructure is a daily operational reality. According to our Unit 42 2026 Global Incident Response Report, attackers are moving at unprecedented speed, with exfiltration speeds for the fastest attacks quadrupling in 2025. Identity weaknesses played a material role in almost 90% of Unit 42® investigations, as attackers increasingly exploit stolen credentials and fragmented identity systems to escalate privileges and move laterally. These threats span across all sectors, from NHS patient data to local government systems and energy networks.

UK organisations need partners who understand their unique requirements. While our broader European commitments provide a strong foundation, we recognise that the UK requires a dedicated focus across data protection, critical infrastructure security and public-private collaboration. This includes a deep-rooted local presence, aligning our operations with national standards of protection to support British ingenuity and ambition.

Control Over Your Data

Genuine data control requires two things: understanding exactly how and under which laws your information is handled and having the technical capabilities to enforce that control.

For UK customers, we provide the capability to host data within UK-based infrastructure, ensuring that critical data can be stored in regions that align with UK data protection requirements. Additionally, for applicable products and services, we offer Bring Your Own Encryption Keys (BYOK) capabilities, giving you direct control over the encryption protecting your data.

Our agreements are built to comply with UK GDPR requirements and include the necessary protections for any cross-border data transfers. But beyond contractual obligations, we operate on a fundamental principle: Your data serves only the purpose for which you’ve engaged us.

How we handle different data categories:

1. Customer and Personal Data Are Processed Only to Serve You

We process your Customer Data and Personal Data exclusively to deliver the services you have purchased. This includes the content of your communications and files uploaded for support. The purpose is singular: delivering the security and protection you’ve contracted us to provide.

2. Systems Data Is Used to Enhance Functionality and Collective Defence

To provide effective security, our products generate Systems Data, which includes technical logs, performance metrics and threat indicators. This information serves three main purposes: ensuring the day-to-day functionality of your services, enabling our teams to provide expert technical support and troubleshooting, and powering our global threat research capabilities.

When a new threat is detected against a specific UK sector, our entire network receives updated protection within minutes. This allows British organisations to benefit from global threat intelligence. We handle Systems Data in ways that preserve your operational privacy, ensuring the intelligence value comes from understanding threat patterns, not identifying individual organisations.

For detailed technical information on how we categorise and handle data, see our Customer Data, Personal Data and Systems Data whitepapers.

Transparency in Practice

We publish a biannual Transparency Report detailing all government and law enforcement data requests we receive. This isn’t simply about compliance. It’s about providing UK organisations with verifiable evidence of how we handle requests, enabling informed risk assessment and governance oversight. For more information, please visit the Privacy Section in our Trust Center.

Securing Critical National Infrastructure

The UK’s 13 sectors of Critical National Infrastructure represent the backbone of society. These sectors require security solutions built with an understanding of their unique threat models, from the specific requirements of an NHS trust to the challenges facing an energy provider.

We currently serve hundreds of UK public sector organisations across government, health and critical infrastructure sectors, which include the UK Government, UK Home Office and the Ministry of Justice.

Operational Resilience

For the UK’s most critical services, operational resilience is paramount. Our security platforms are designed for high availability and reliability, helping organisations maintain continuous protection even during disruptions.

Trust and Transparency

Palo Alto Networks is deeply integrated into the UK’s security ecosystem, ensuring our solutions exceed national benchmarks for resilience and transparency.

We hold Cyber Essentials Plus certification and align with the NCSC Cloud Security Principles, providing assurance to customers that we adhere to the highest security protocols to protect their most critical assets. As a Software Security Ambassador and a committed supporter of the NCSC Telecom Vendor Assessment, we are committed to enhancing the security of the UK’s telecommunications and software supply chains.

Beyond compliance, our Unit 42 team serves as an NCSC-assured Cyber Incident Response (CIR) Enhanced Level provider, offering specialised incident support to help UK organisations navigate and recover from the most complex incidents. For customers with specific requirements, particularly in defence and national security, we can provide support from personnel in countries with compatible security standards and legal frameworks. We are committed to the Telecommunications Security Act (TSA) Code of Practice, supporting the resilience of the UK’s public telecommunications networks.

Strengthening Local Expertise with National Impact

Our investment in the UK extends across our people, infrastructure and local expertise. Operating from our London hub, we remain deeply connected to the communities we serve and make a direct and indirect contribution to the UK economy. Our UK-based teams span engineering, threat research, professional services, policy and security strategy, and have a deep understanding of the UK market and the requirements of our customers. We also partner with NCSC CyberFirst and others on developing the next generation of cyber talent, and our Cyber Academy Program partners with universities and colleges all over the UK to train the next generation of cyber defenders.

A Partnership Built on Trust and Verifiable Commitments

The UK’s digital autonomy increasingly depends on its ability to secure both cyber infrastructure and the emerging AI economy. This requires partnerships that serve the UK’s long-term national interests, grounded in trusted institutions, local expertise and transparency that enables commitments to be verified, not simply asserted.

We recognise that the UK’s cyber landscape is shaped by its legal framework, strategic priorities and threat environment. From protecting critical infrastructure to enabling the secure adoption of AI, organisations across the UK need to trust their security partner to deliver on their commitments. Palo Alto Networks is committed to maintaining and increasing that trust through verifiable action, transparency, accountability and an enduring partnership.

To learn more about our comprehensive commitment to digital trust, privacy and security, visit the Palo Alto Networks Trust Center.

The post Securing the UK’s Digital Future appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.

In the race to digitise public services, the UK’s digital estate has grown into a vast, borderless ecosystem that manual audits can no longer track. For UK Government departments, local authorities and NHS trusts, it is a sprawling, shifting landscape of cloud workloads, legacy infrastructure, shadow IT and third-party supplier connections.

This complexity creates blind spots that modern threats exploit. Recognising this vulnerability, the UK Government is moving toward a secure-by-design digital infrastructure, with the 2026 Government Cyber Action Plan (GCAP) setting a high bar for resilience. A central theme of the GCAP is the urgent need for the government to have better visibility of cyber security and resilience risk. Fundamentally, organisations cannot secure what they cannot see. As the GCAP explicitly states, the Government will use “data sources from across the government to truly understand government-wide and departmental cyber risks.”

The Challenge: Visibility in a “Landscape”

Many public sector organisations rely on a complex web of spreadsheets, data calls, legacy tools and manually curated lists to create an inventory of their internet-connected assets. But attackers do not look at an organisation's internal lists; they scan the internet for what they have forgotten to secure. Whether it is an unpatched server from a legacy project or a misconfigured database in a department, these "unknown unknowns" are the primary entry points for attackers.

The Strategic Mission: Empowering the Public Sector and Critical Industries

Palo Alto Networks Cortex Xpanse® is an active external attack surface management (EASM) solution that provides an outside-in view of organisations' entire digital footprint. It helps leaders meet national resilience goals:

• Comprehensive, Continuous Visibility: Xpanse scans the global internet space continuously and identifies every asset associated with an organisation, without requiring software agents to be installed on your systems.
• Accelerate Response: Leveraging automation, the solution streamlines response processes and enhances collaboration across dispersed teams from the sharing of findings to tracking actions and remediation.
• Supply Chain Integrity: Inline with the new Cyber Security and Resilience Bill (bringing managed service providers and critical third parties into scope), Xpanse allows organisations to assess the internet-facing security posture of third-party partners and suppliers, ensuring a weak link elsewhere doesn't compromise the broader mission.
• Alignment with GovAssure: Xpanse provides a consolidated risk profile and inventory for all internet-facing and cloud assets required for GovAssure assessments, turning a manual, months-long audit process into a continuous, data-driven cycle.
• Investment prioritisation: Xpanse provides that much needed visibility to help executive committees and boards prioritise investment decisions on legacy IT and technical debt.

Aligning to National Cybersecurity Centre (NCSC) Guidance

Palo Alto Networks Cortex Xpanse aligns with the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) external attack surface management (EASM) buyer's guide by providing automated discovery, continuous monitoring and risk prioritisation of internet-facing assets. It replaces manual, point-in-time audits with a proactive, agentless solution. By automating the discovery of all internet-accessible assets (including shadow IT and unmanaged cloud operations) the platform fulfills the NCSC’s core requirement for continuous global monitoring and rapid attribution. This data-driven approach allows for the automated prioritisation of critical exposures, such as RDP, and integrates seamlessly with multiple third-party automation and visualisation tools, including Cortex XSOAR® and XSIAM, to accelerate remediation with national incident response standards.

In fact, with Palo Alto Networks deployment of Cortex Xpanse, we were able to achieve a 95% reduction in external vulnerability management spending across more than 700,000 cloud instances, while improving coverage and outcomes.

Palo Alto Networks Cortex Xpanse Capabilities

• Discover Assets: Leveraging organisations' known asset inventory and other data points, Xpanse performs continual, automated discovery of all internet-accessible assets, effectively eliminating blind spots created by shadow IT and unmanaged cloud operations.
• Obtain Information: Always-on, continuous monitoring of an organisation's entire attack surface through daily scans of the global IP address space, ensuring that newly exposed services are identified quickly and accurately.
• Perform Analysis: Xpanse automates and prioritises alerts on all identified risks by severity, enabling organisations to optimise resolution and risk management, allowing teams to properly allocate resources and focus on the most critical risks to the organisation.
• Display Information and Provide Advice: Leveraging a unified view of the internet facing and cloud-based estate, Xpanse provides specific resolver guidance for every identified issue, supporting and monitoring automated resolution through multiple native integrations.
• Monitor Risk: Always on, discreet continual monitoring provides an independent real time status of the digital estate. Leveraging the threat intelligence capabilities of Palo Alto Networks, Xpanse is uniquely positioned to provide rapid coverage for newly discovered vulnerabilities, exploits or misconfigurations.

Securing the public sector requires a move from manual, point in time assessments to data-driven intelligence. Cortex Xpanse provides the foundations to remove blind spots, secure the supply chain and prevent unknown vulnerabilities in the face of sophisticated threats.

For further information and case studies, visit the links below, or schedule a demo.

• Palo Alto Networks: Slash false positives, remediation time budget with Cortex attack surface management.
• U.S. Pentagon: Palo Alto Networks Cortex Xpanse supercharge the Cyber Defences for the Department of Defense.
• Accenture: Secure rapid growth with Cortex Xpanse.

The post Closing the Gap by Enhancing Visibility and Mitigating Risks appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.

A Pivotal Moment for National Security

As the digital landscape undergoes profound shifts, the recently released National Cyber Strategy provides the essential foundation for enduring American leadership. By prioritizing the disruption of hostile actors, future-proofing networks, accelerating quantum readiness, and securing the AI frontier, the strategy provides the strategic clarity necessary to protect our digital way of life from sophisticated adversaries. Palo Alto Networks commends National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross for his leadership and looks forward to working with the administration to operationalize this strategy.

Each pillar of the strategy galvanizes meaningful action to advance our collective defense:

Shape Adversary Behavior (Pillar 1)

This signals a decisive shift toward the proactive disruption of malicious actors. The Trump Administration has made clear that the U.S. Government should impose real costs on adversaries to change their behavior. While the private sector is already executing discrete disruptions against malicious actors, coordination has historically been fragmented. The strategy identifies that increased collaboration with private sector entities, who possess unique insight into adversary behavior, can in turn enable more impactful deterrence.

Promote Common Sense Regulation (Pillar 2)

The strategy appropriately recognizes that complexity is the enemy of security. A focus on measurable improvements in cyber outcomes (versus check-the-box compliance exercises) collectively makes us all safer. While much attention is rightfully paid toward harmonizing incident reporting requirements, which Palo Alto Networks wholeheartedly supports, let’s not stop there. The federal government can lead by example by consolidating and streamlining federal government software compliance certifications. For example, there should be logical reciprocity between FedRAMP High and DoW IL-5 certifications.

Modernize and Secure Federal Government Networks (Pillar 3)

In addition to the necessary attention on AI-powered cyber defense, cloud security and zero trust network architecture, Palo Alto Networks applauds the discrete focus on quantum-safe security ahead of “Q-Day,” the point where quantum computing capabilities will compromise legacy public key encryption that has underpinned cybersecurity for decades. As Federal CISO Mike Duffy recently stated, "Modernization without considering PQC readiness or cryptographic agility is really creating technical debt in the future, something that we don’t want to see ever.”

To address this challenge, Palo Alto Networks provides a structured quantum-safe framework organized into four stages:

• Continuous Discovery – Automating ecosystem ingestion to identify cryptographic dependencies.
• Risk Assessment & Prioritization – Evaluating vulnerabilities to establish a data-driven remediation roadmap.
• Comprehensive Remediation – Executing the transition to post-quantum algorithms across the architecture.
• Governance & Crypto-Hygiene – Maintaining long-term visibility and management.

The bottom line is that 2035 is too late. Quantum readiness must accelerate today, and this strategy will set a critical North Star to drive the necessary urgency.

Secure Critical Infrastructure (Pillar 4)

Critical infrastructure resilience is central to our homeland security, economic security, public health and safety. Unfortunately, critical infrastructure entities are increasingly under assault from emboldened cyber adversaries.

In fact, Palo Alto Networks research shows some form of operational disruption in up to 86% of major cyber incidents. Our 2026 Global Incident Response Report underscores another sobering reality: These entities are under assault from all angles. In 87% of cyber incidents, attacks targeted multiple attack surfaces, which spanned the network, cloud, endpoints and identity.

Recognizing that you can’t secure what you can’t see, we need a national-level effort to identify, prioritize and harden the critical infrastructure that the American people depend upon. This strategy puts an important marker in the ground to revitalize those efforts.

Sustain Superiority in Critical and Emerging Technologies (Pillar 5)

Palo Alto Networks was pleased to see the strategy reinforces the core tenets of the AI Action Plan, emphasizing that "secure-by-design" principles for AI technologies are non-negotiable and that AI adoption and AI security can and must be inexorably linked.

Enterprises should be able to deploy AI confidently without fear of data leakage, model tampering or rogue AI agents. However, despite our research showing an 88% success rate of “jailbreaking” techniques against widely deployed AI models, only 6% of organizations currently have an AI security strategy. It’s time to flip this paradigm and put defenders back in the driver’s seat in this AI-first moment.

To support this emerging consensus around the importance of promoting AI security, we developed the Secure AI by Design Policy Roadmap. This framework provides a four-part construct to evaluate the evolving dimensions of threats to AI systems. Palo Alto Networks is also proud to make its comprehensive AI security suite, Prisma^® AIRS, available to all federal agencies at substantial discounts through GSA’s OneGov Initiative.

Build Talent and Capacity (Pillar 6)

Recognizing America’s cyber workforce as a “strategic asset,” the strategy calls for a pragmatic and accessible pipeline for developing talent. The explicit recognition that we should take advantage of existing avenues across government, industry and academia is important. For example, Palo Alto Networks is proud of the impact of its Cybersecurity Academy – that provides free, NIST Framework-aligned curricula covering essential domains, such as cybersecurity fundamentals, enterprise and network security, cloud security, security operations and the AI/cybersecurity nexus.

Resources like this, and those for other entities, can form the basis of a renewed focus on cyber talent development.

Turning Strategic Vision Into Action

Palo Alto Networks views itself as more than a cybersecurity vendor. We see ourselves as an integrated national security partner of the federal government at a moment when defending our digital way of life demands all of us working together. To that end, we are ready to do our part to turn strategic vision into action.

This strategy should be applauded. Let’s roll up our sleeves and get to work.

The post How the National Cyber Strategy Secures Our Digital Way of Life appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.

Palo Alto Networks is proud to enter a strategic partnership with the RAF Association.

For over 90 years, the Royal Air Forces Association (RAFA) has championed a simple yet profound belief: No member of the RAF community should ever be left without the help they need. Serving personnel, veterans and their families, the RAF Association provides crucial welfare support, responding to increasingly complex needs in an era of operational changes and challenges, including persistent global deployment.

Delivering on their mission today requires not only compassion and expertise but also resilient digital foundations. To strengthen and future-proof its operations, RAFA has entered into a strategic partnership with Palo Alto Networks. Together, we are modernising the Association's cyber security posture through a secure-by-design, zero trust architecture to enhance organisational resilience, secure sensitive beneficiary data, and improve operational agility. This helps ensure they can focus on their mission of support, not security management.

As Nick Bunting OBE, Secretary General at the RAF Association, puts it:

Cybersecurity is essential to safeguarding the trust people place in our organisation. This transformation will give us greater protection for our data and systems, ensuring that our services remain dependable and that our organisation is secure, resilient and ready for the future. Strong digital security is not just a technical requirement, it is a fundamental part of how we uphold our duty of care to every individual who relies on us.

Securing the Mission

The RAF Association operates in a distributed environment comprising headquarters’ functions, remote caseworkers, and more than 20 RAFAKidz nursery sites, supported by a growing portfolio of cloud-based services. In this context, cybersecurity is not simply an IT concern. It is a safeguarding imperative.

Disruption to systems or a compromise of sensitive beneficiary data could directly impact RAFA’s ability to deliver services and maintain the trust of the communities it supports. By consolidating fragmented legacy tools into a unified platform, this partnership ensures the Association’s digital evolution aligns security controls with GDPR obligations and safeguarding requirements.

Digital Resilience with a Unified Platform for Visibility and Control

To support RAFA's lean IT operational model, this transformation will move them away from fragmented legacy tools toward a unified platform approach. The deployment of Prisma^® SASE (secure access service edge) and Cortex XDR^® will provide RAFA with consistent visibility and control across users, devices, applications and data, regardless of location. This consolidation replaces complexity with clarity, allowing the organisation to inspect traffic for threats in real-time. Security policies are now enforced continuously, threats are detected and contained faster, and access to critical systems is governed by zero trust principles without compromising the user experience.

As Phil Sherwin, Chief Information Officer, at the RAF Association states:

Our data is one of our most valuable assets and the protection of that data, as we continue to provide life-changing support to members of the RAF community, is our most important priority. This partnership will move us into the next generation of security tools that adopt zero trust principles and is a crucial step on our journey to providing a layered approach to data protection.

One of the most critical aspects of this modernisation is supporting RAFA’s diverse workforce, particularly within the RAFAKidz nursery sites. These environments rely on nondesk-based staff using iPads and mobile devices to get their critical work done.

Using zero touch provisioning and the Prisma Browser™, we are enabling secure, seamless connectivity for unmanaged devices. This ensures that nursery staff can access necessary SaaS applications safely without complex login hurdles or manual configuration, improving their agility and allowing them to focus on caring for children rather than troubleshooting technology.

Creating Operational Advantage by Scaling Operations with AI and Automation

As a charity, RAFA has a responsibility to ensure resources are used efficiently. A critical goal of this partnership is to improve productivity and allow the organisation to scale its services without increasing the IT burden.

By adopting Strata™ Cloud Manager with AIOps (artificial intelligence for IT operations), RAFA is shifting from reactive security operations to proactive, automated management. Machine learning helps identify configuration risks and performance issues before they affect users, while standardized policies enable the secure, consistent onboarding of new sites. This shift is projected to significantly reduce operational overhead, enabling RAFA to scale its support network cost-effectively. This shift is projected to reduce operational overhead by 40–50%.

A Resilient Future

This partnership is about more than deploying technology. It is about ensuring RAFA remains resilient, trusted and capable of supporting the RAF community for decades to come.

As Darren Bisbey, Head of Group Information Security for the RAF Association, puts it:

We live in an era where digital threats are accelerating in both scale and sophistication, creating unprecedented challenges for organisations. Our partnership with Palo Alto is a statement of intent, reflecting our unwavering commitment to building the most secure environments possible for our data.

At Palo Alto Networks, we are honored to support RAFA in this journey, providing the digital armour and operational advantage necessary to protect those who serve and have served.

As Alistair Wildman, Palo Alto Networks CEO for Northern Europe states:

For over 90 years, RAFA has been a lifeline for the RAF community; it is our privilege to ensure that legacy endures in a digital-first world. By embracing a unified, AI-driven platform, RAFA is moving beyond complex, fragmented security to a posture that is Secure by Design. This partnership allows them to navigate today’s threat landscape with confidence, ensuring their resources remain focused where they belong: on the families who need them.

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Key Takeaways

1. Digital Resilience – Strategic Shift to Zero Trust Architecture: RAFA is modernizing its cybersecurity posture by implementing a comprehensive zero trust architecture. This transition involves moving from fragmented legacy tools to a unified platform approach, deploying Prisma^® SASE and Cortex XDR for 360-degree visibility and complete control over access and traffic.
2. Interoperability – Secure, Seamless Access for Diverse Workforce: The partnership ensures operational agility by simplifying security for nondesk-based staff, particularly at the RAFAKidz nursery sites. Solutions like Zero-Touch Provisioning and the Prisma Access Browser enable secure, seamless connectivity for unmanaged devices, allowing nursery staff to focus on their critical work without complex login or configuration issues.
3. Creating Operational Advantage – Efficiency and Scalability through AI and Automation: RAFA is leveraging technology to scale services efficiently and reduce operational overhead. By using Strata Cloud Manager with AIOps (Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations), the organization can shift to proactive management and automating remediation, which is projected to reduce operational overhead by 40–50%.

The post Empowering the RAF Association with Next-Generation Cyber Resilience appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.

The early weeks of 2026 have already made one thing clear: Government cybersecurity is in a new phase, shaped not by incremental change, but by the rapid integration of AI into core public-sector missions. AI systems are now embedded in critical infrastructure, federal service delivery, research environments, as well as state and local operations. At the same time, nation-state adversaries are leveraging AI to accelerate intrusion, scale deception and manipulate trusted systems in ways not possible even a year ago.

As Senior Vice President of Public Sector at Palo Alto Networks, I see a decisive shift underway. Defending the public sector in 2026 means navigating a world where security depends on verifying identity, securing data and governing AI-driven systems that act without human intervention. Success now hinges on architectures that assume automation, operations that prioritize coordination, and governance frameworks capable of managing AI at mission scale.

Here are the developments that will define the year ahead.

Federal Government

1. AI-Native Security Must Become Integral to Federal Operations

AI in federal environments is no longer an experiment. Agencies are now designing workflows, SOC missions and cloud architectures around AI-driven detection and response. The emphasis is shifting from supplementing human analysts to building systems that maintain visibility, correlate threats, and respond autonomously when human capacity is limited. This builds on what we forecasted last year, when federal cybersecurity teams began using AI to replace manual workflows and drive down detection and response times.

The shift will be practical. Federal teams must plan to deploy AI systems that correlate logs, identify behavioral anomalies, prioritize threats, and suppress noise before analysts ever see an alert. Manual, ticket-based workflows will no longer meet federal timelines for investigation or reporting, particularly as adversaries automate more phases of attack.

2. Identity Emerges as the Central Federal Security Challenge

The biggest shift in 2026 will be the collapse between “identity” and “attack surface.” Deepfake technologies now operate in real time. AI-generated voices and video can impersonate senior leaders at a level undetectable by traditional controls. Machine identities continue to proliferate; they will outnumber human identities this year. And autonomous agents can initiate high-impact actions without human oversight. This reflects a broader crisis of authenticity now reshaping how enterprises defend identity itself.

Identity abuse will no longer be limited to credential theft. This turns identity into a systemic risk. One compromised identity (human, machine or agent) can cascade through automated systems with little friction. Federal programs will need to prioritize continuous identity verification, stronger proofing and governance frameworks that validate the legitimacy of both human and AI-driven activity.

3. AI Systems Must Be Secure-by-Design

Stemming from the clear mandate in the AI Action Plan (and subsequent work by NIST to develop an AI/Cyber Profile on top of the existing Cybersecurity Framework) agencies will steadily integrate AI security into their deployment of AI technologies.

This imperative is critical as AI systems are susceptible to novel threats. Data poisoning of training sets, manipulated inputs and hidden instructions in untrusted datasets compromise the intelligence that agencies rely on for analysis, planning and mission support. To support the security of this AI-first moment, Palo Alto Networks was proud to make its AI security platform, Prisma^® AIRS™, available through the GSA OneGov initiative.

4. Nation-State Operations Expand Through AI Automation

Adversaries will use AI to compress the time between reconnaissance, exploitation and lateral movement. We expect rapidly increasing the use of AI to chain vulnerabilities, tailor social engineering campaigns, and generated malware variants that adapt in real time.

The focus will broaden beyond IT networks. AI will be used to disrupt OT systems and target sensitive research environments. Foreign intelligence services will weaponize AI to blur the line between intrusion and information operations, producing hybrid campaigns that attack both systems and the legitimacy of institutions.

5. Autonomous SOC Capabilities Become Essential

Federal SOCs will evolve from human-centered command centers to hybrid operations where autonomous agents run major components of the detection and response mission. These agents will triage alerts, enforce containment, and initiate predefined responses.

This evolution comes with risk. AI agents with broad authority can be misused or manipulated if not properly governed. Agencies will need safeguards to track agent behavior, enforce least privilege on agents, and prevent misuse through runtime monitoring and “AI firewall” controls designed to stop malicious prompts and unauthorized actions. The same pressures are shaping enterprise security, where controls like AI firewalls and circuit breaker mechanisms are becoming standard practice. Automation will only strengthen federal security if paired with rigorous oversight and continuous validation of agent activity.

6. Shared and Federated SOC Structures Gain Momentum

As threats scale, agencies will increasingly operate through shared or federated security structures. Instead of isolated SOCs, agencies will adopt analytics layers capable of correlating activity across departments and exchanging findings in real time.

This shift will reduce redundancy and provide faster insight into nation-state campaigns that cross federal boundaries. Early adopters will establish shared analytic and response frameworks that allow agencies to coordinate without sacrificing mission-specific control. Civilian agencies will lead early adoption with broader participation across defense and national security stakeholders expected later in the year.

7. The Post-Quantum Deadline Becomes Immediate

In 2026, post-quantum cryptography planning will move to implementation. Accelerated advances in quantum computing and AI-based cryptanalysis will push agencies to transition from pilot efforts to mandated modernization.

Agencies will focus on discovering where vulnerable algorithms are used, replacing outdated libraries, and implementing crypto-agility so systems can evolve without major redesigns. Systems with unpatchable cryptographic components will be flagged for full replacement, forcing agencies to reconcile years of accumulated “crypto debt.”

8. Data Trust and Cloud Workload Protection Become Priority Missions

The rise of AI workloads will force agencies to rethink how they protect data. Infrastructure controls alone cannot detect when training data has been manipulated or when model outputs no longer reflect real-world conditions.

Agencies will unify developer and security workflows and use tools like Data Security Posture Management and AI security posture management (AI-SPM) to track data lineage and enforce protections at runtime. Enterprises are addressing the same issue by bringing development and security teams together under shared data governance models. Ensuring model trustworthiness will become a mission-support requirement, not just a security objective.

9. Platform Consolidation Becomes Necessary

Fragmented tools cannot support the visibility and oversight required for AI governance. Executives will push for platform consolidation to unify network, identity, cloud, endpoint and AI security. Integrated platforms will gain favor because they enable consistent policy enforcement and a single operational picture across increasingly automated environments.

State, Local and Educational Institutions

1. AI Adoption Splits SLED into Distinct Tiers

In 2026, disparities in funding and technical capacity will widen. Some states will deploy AI across security operations, citizen services and identity verification. Others will struggle to maintain legacy systems.

Well-resourced jurisdictions will reduce response times and improve resilience. Underfunded ones will remain exposed to ransomware and disruption. Without targeted modernization efforts, a national divide in SLED cybersecurity maturity will deepen.

2. Regional Models Become the Practical Path Forward

Silos are no longer sustainable. SLED organizations will rely on shared SOCs, regional threat intelligence hubs and coordinated incident response agreements. States will formalize partnerships to share expertise, reduce costs and defend interconnected systems. This evolution represents the maturation of the “team sport” mentality we predicted in 2025. These models reflect operational reality: Compromised data or infrastructure in one jurisdiction often creates immediate risk for its neighbors.

3. Higher Education Redesigns Its Security Baseline

Universities will classify cybersecurity alongside energy, research infrastructure and physical security as essential institutional functions. Secure browser adoption, stronger vendor oversight and centralized identity governance will become the norm.

AI research environments will receive increased scrutiny, and universities participating in federally funded research will face stricter compliance requirements to prevent data poisoning and model manipulation. Institutions with large research portfolios will prioritize securing lab environments where AI models are trained and evaluated.

4. K–12 Systems Enter a New Phase of Security Oversight

States will introduce new security mandates for K–12 environments, covering MFA, network segmentation, secure browsers, identity verification and foundational zero trust principles. AI-enabled ransomware will remain a threat. Smaller districts will adopt managed services or regional support structures as they confront growing operational and compliance demands. Districts that modernize identity controls and browser security will significantly reduce their exposure compared to those reliant on legacy tools. Building on the regulatory momentum we predicted in 2025, K–12 institutions will continue moving from defensive posture to proactive security adoption.

5. Local Governments Face Escalating AI-Driven Ransomware

Municipal governments remain high-value targets due to limited staffing and aging infrastructure. AI gives threat actors the ability to automate reconnaissance, craft targeted phishing messages, and identify vulnerabilities with little effort.

Attacks timed to public safety incidents or weather emergencies will increase, meaning local governments will need stronger identity controls, automated endpoint protection and access to managed detection and response. Operational continuity will depend on reducing time-to-detect and time-to-contain, capabilities that smaller municipalities cannot achieve without external support.

6. Managed Services and Platform Consolidation Become Standard

As technical demands grow, SLED organizations will move toward managed SOC models and consolidated vendor ecosystems. Platforms that integrate data protection, threat detection, identity governance and AI oversight will gain traction. Point tools without interoperability will decline. Budget-constrained environments will favor comprehensive platforms that reduce operational burden and simplify compliance.

7. Identity and Data Trust Become Central SLED Priorities

SLED organizations manage sensitive student records, election data and social services information. These environments are increasingly strained by the rapid growth of machine identities and AI-driven applications.

Synthetic identities and AI-generated credentials will be used to infiltrate systems with limited oversight. Continuous identity verification, data lineage tracking and posture management will become essential to prevent fraud, service disruption and data manipulation. Identity assurance and data integrity will become the foundation of public trust at the state and local level.

The post 2026 Public Sector Cyber Outlook: Identity, AI and the Fight for Trust appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.

Why the GSA OneGov Agreement Is a Game-Changer for Federal Cybersecurity

The mission to modernize government IT is accelerating at lightning speed, largely thanks to the transformative power of artificial intelligence (AI). Federal agencies are strategically leveraging AI to boost efficiency, enhance citizen services, and strengthen national security – a vision fully supported by the administration’s AI Action Plan.

At Palo Alto Networks, we are all-in on helping agencies deploy AI bravely and securely. Because the challenge isn't just about using AI for cyberdefense, but also about defending AI itself. We appreciate the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) recognizing the critical need for scalable, efficient solutions.

That is precisely why the GSA OneGov Initiative is a massive, game-changing step forward. We are proud to be the first pure-play cybersecurity vendor to secure a OneGov agreement with the GSA. This strategic alliance simplifies and standardizes the process for agencies to access our world-class, AI-powered security platform, ensuring security is foundational to this crucial modernization mission.

The Wake-Up Call: The Silent Threat of AI Agent Corruption

If you needed a clear sign that AI has fundamentally shifted the cybersecurity landscape, our own Unit 42 research provides it. The new reality isn't just about hackers using AI in their attacks; it’s also about how internal AI provides another attack surface for threat actors.

The most insidious new threat we've observed is AI Agent Smuggling, where malicious attackers use AI agents to exploit other agents. Our Unit 42 research highlights two major vectors:

• Indirect Prompt Injection: A security risk in LLMs where a user crafts input containing deceptive instructions to manipulate the model’s behavior, which can lead to unauthorized data access or unintended actions.
• Agent Session Smuggling: Exploit vulnerabilities in agent-to-agent communication, injecting malicious instructions into a conversation, hiding them among otherwise benign client requests and server responses.

This confirms our core belief as stated in a recent secure AI by Design blog: The AI ecosystem (the models, data and infrastructure) is now a complex, expanding attack surface that traditional perimeter defenses were simply not designed to protect.

As I’ve said before, “If you’re deploying AI, you must deploy AI security.”

Secure AI by Design: A Strategic Alliance with GSA

The GSA’s OneGov Initiative aims to streamline procurement and drive down costs by leveraging the purchasing power of the entire federal government. This is more than an agreement; it’s a direct response to the call for a "secure-by-design" approach to federal AI adoption. This agreement simplifies and standardizes the process for agencies to access our world-class, AI-powered security platform, ensuring that security is foundational, not an afterthought. It provides industry leading AI security tools into the hands of our cyber defenders today.

Under the Hood: Technical Capabilities for the AI Ecosystem

To counter the autonomous threats we’re seeing, we provide a platform that protects the entire AI lifecycle, from the developer's keyboard to the data center.

1. Runtime Protection for AI Workloads

Securing the AI supply chain requires visibility across every stage, especially during runtime when models are processing sensitive data.

• Prisma^® AIRS delivers comprehensive security for the entire AI lifecycle, in one unified platform. It allows organizations to deploy traditional apps as well as AI applications, models and agents with confidence by reducing risk from misuse, data loss and sophisticated AI-driven threats. Prisma AIRS provides a clear, connected view of assets in multicloud environments, so teams can eliminate silos, accelerate responses, as well as scale cloud and AI apps securely.
• Our Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) has achieved the FedRAMP High designation, making it the preferred Code to Cloud solution to secure the entire application lifecycle from development to runtime. Our industry-leading CNAPP eliminates silos to deliver comprehensive visibility and best-in-class protection across multicloud environments.

2. Protecting Users and Data at the Edge

Even the most advanced AI defenses are undermined if users accessing applications and data are left vulnerable outside corporate security boundaries. The explosive growth of generative AI tools and the unseen behavior of AI agents are amplifying data exposure risks.

• Prisma SASE (secure access service edge) secures all users, apps, devices and data, no matter where they are and no matter where applications reside.
  • Prisma Access (FedRAMP High Authorized) and Prisma Browser (FedRAMP-Moderate Authorized) integrate security capabilities, like zero trust network access (ZTNA), secure web gateway (SWG) and cloud access security broker (CASB), to provide a unified policy framework and a consistent user experience.
• This approach helps agencies outpace the speed of AI-driven threats, safeguarding critical data and simplifying operations for a frictionless user experience. It ensures that the human element interacting with the AI is protected by the most stringent security controls available.

Deploy AI Bravely

The GSA OneGov agreement is a pivotal moment that provides federal agencies with the cost-effective, streamlined access they need to deploy AI with confidence. By leveraging our unified, AI-powered platform, government organizations can stop reacting to threats and start building secure-by-design AI environments. We are committed to remaining a key partner in this strategic initiative and helping the government achieve its mission outcomes safely.

For more information and access to promotional offers for new contracts signed on or before January 31, 2028, federal agencies can visit the GSA OneGov website.

The post Securing the AI Frontier appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.

Modernizing Vulnerability Sharing for a New Class of Threats

In cybersecurity, vulnerability information sharing frameworks have long assumed that conventional threats exploit flaws in software or systems, and they can be resolved with patches or configuration updates. AI and machine learning (ML) models upend that premise as adversarial attacks, like poisoning and evasion, target the unique way AI models process information. Consequently, the risks for AI systems include tactics like model poisoning (from evasion attacks) in datasets and training, which are not conventional software vulnerabilities. These new vulnerabilities fall outside the scope of traditional cybersecurity taxonomies like the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) Program.

There is a need to bridge the gap between the existing cybersecurity vulnerability sharing structure and burgeoning efforts to catalog security risks to AI systems. Provisions in the White House AI Action Plan, which Palo Alto Networks supports, call for the creation of an AI Information Sharing and Analysis Center (AI-ISAC), reinforcing the importance of addressing that disconnect. This integration is essential, as leveraging the existing, widely adopted cybersecurity infrastructure will be the fastest path to ensuring these new standards are accepted and operationalized.

Established Construct for Vulnerability Management and Disclosure

The global cybersecurity community relies on a mature infrastructure for sharing standardized vulnerability intelligence. Central to this ecosystem is the CVE List, established in 1999 as the authoritative catalog of cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Through CVE IDs and a network of CVE Numbering Authorities (CNAs), this framework enables consistent vulnerability documentation and disclosure.

Similarly, the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) provides standardized severity assessments, allowing security teams to prioritize responses. Together with resources like the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) and CISA’s KEV Catalog catalog, these tools form the backbone of global vulnerability management, information sharing and coordinated disclosure.

Why AI Breaks the Traditional Model

While this infrastructure has served the cybersecurity community effectively for over two decades, it was designed around traditional threat models that AI systems substantially upend. Attacks on AI systems represent a critical departure from traditional cybersecurity threats as they operate insidiously, subtly corrupting core reasoning processes, causing persistent, systemic failures, some of which only become evident over time. Most traditional cybersecurity tools are not equipped to recognize those breakdowns because they assume deterministic behavior and rules-based logic. AI systems defy those assumptions because AI is probabilistic, not deterministic. Consequently, attacks on AI models may remain hidden for extended periods.

Unlike traditional cybersecurity threats that target code, adversarial AI attacks target the underlying data and algorithms that govern how AI systems learn, reason and make decisions. Consider the following predominant adversarial attack methodologies on machine learning:

• Poisoning attacks inject malicious data into training datasets, corrupting the model's learning process and creating deliberate vulnerabilities or degraded performance.
• Inference-related attacks exploit model outputs to extract sensitive information or learn about its training data. This includes model inversion, which reconstructs sensitive data from the model's outputs, as well as membership inference, which identifies whether specific data points were used in training.

The expansion of existing security frameworks and programs is necessary to cover the enumeration, disclosure and downstream management of security risks to AI systems.

Advancing AI Security Through the AI Action Plan

In July, the Administration unveiled the AI Action Plan, an innovation-first framework balancing AI advancement with security imperatives. The Plan prioritizes Secure-by-Design AI technologies and applications, strengthened critical infrastructure cybersecurity and protection of commercial and government AI innovations.

Notably, it recommends establishing an AI Information Sharing and Analysis Center (AI-ISAC) to facilitate threat intelligence sharing across U.S. critical infrastructure sectors and encourages sharing known AI vulnerabilities, “tak[ing] advantage of existing cyber vulnerability sharing mechanisms.” These provisions affirm that AI security underpins American leadership in the field and, where possible, should be built upon existing frameworks.

Redefining Boundaries for AI Threats

To position the CVE Program for the AI-driven future, Palo Alto Networks is engaging directly with industry and program stakeholders to chart the path forward. Traditionally, the CVE Program serves as an ecosystem-wide central warning system. It provides a unified source of truths for security risks. A security risk catalog and identification system are needed for AI systems, as they currently fall outside the traditional scope of the CVE Program that has focused exclusively on vulnerabilities rather than on malicious components. The historical aperture of the current CVE Program excludes harmful artifacts, such as backdoored AI models or poisoned datasets, which represent fundamentally different attack vectors, in turn creating security blind spots.

Securing AI’s Promise

The United States leads in AI innovation and must equally lead in securing it. As momentum builds behind the AI Action Plan and the establishment of the AI-ISAC, we have a critical window to shape information sharing frameworks of the future. The goal is to ensure that cybersecurity and AI security infrastructure advance in unison with the technology itself. Integrating new AI vulnerability standards into trusted frameworks like the CVE Program aligns with industry focus and needs. Through proactive, coordinated action, we can unlock AI’s full promise while safeguarding the models that are embedded in the critical systems on which our nation depends.

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