Here is an overview of content I published in September: Blog posts:

• b’Update: search-for-compression.py Version 0.0.8′

SANS ISC Diary entries:

• YARA 4.5.0 Release
• TerminalFix: PNG Steganography
• Wireshark 4.6.9 Released

Introducing Cortex XCOR: AI-Driven Observability that Delivers Autonomous Response with AI SRE

I’ve been tackling the observability problem for more than a decade, since before it was coined observability. From building internal monitoring for EC2 at AWS to building the observability platform for Uber, the holy grail was always to create a solution that would automatically tell you what the issues were and help remediate them, instead of just being a tool that showed you dashboards. But standing in the way were the foundational scale and cost challenges of cloud-native architectures, which is what my co-founder Rob Skillington and I solved by creating Chronosphere. 

With the ability to effectively manage observability data at scale and as we undergo another major industry shift with AI, we’re finally at a point in time where the technology available puts the holy grail within grasp. Six months after joining Palo Alto Networks, we’re taking a major step forward with the launch of Cortex XCOR - an AI-native observability platform that delivers on that long promise of automatically root causing the issue. 

Reimagining Observability for the Modern SDLC

Getting to this point required a fundamental leap in model intelligence. When generative AI was broadly released in late 2022, LLMs were intriguing, but the reasoning capabilities were rudimentary. Although we saw limited applications for chatbots and assistants within observability, those early models could only help the end user, they couldn’t ultimately solve the issue. They assisted investigations by summarizing logs or translating queries, but weren’t transformative. That changed in late 2025 with frontier models like OpenAI’s GPT-5 and Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet and Opus. 

My own AI moment in observability came a couple of months ago when our chat functionality evolved from acting like an assistant to functioning as an autonomous expert that gave me the answer and showed me how it got there. As I pushed our agents with increasingly complex scenarios, they began reasoning through problems far beyond their initial capabilities. Much like how LLMs have replaced my need for web search, our chat is now my primary interface in our product, completely overhauling how I interact with it. 

This shift for observability is needed now more than ever as operations teams struggle to keep up with the surge in AI-driven software development, caused by the same step up in reasoning capabilities from late 2025. Research shows that 42% of developers now report that AI writes at least half their code, up from 12% last year. Rapid code releases continuously expand the surface area for production failures and drive up the burden on developers and SREs to manually identify root causes. To match this velocity, observability needs to modernize now to avoid becoming the bottleneck for product innovation.

Introducing Cortex XCOR, the Next-Generation AI-Native Observability Platform

That is precisely why we are launching XCOR. We designed it to transform observability from static dashboards and manual remediation to an AI-first experience that automates both routine and complex investigations.

At the heart is our XCOR Operator, an AI assistant embedded throughout the platform that helps operations teams match AI-coding velocity. What makes the XCOR Operator especially powerful is that it understands the user intent and serves as the conversational interface for our specialized agents that execute behind the scenes. The user of an observability platform plays many roles depending on the situation: investigating incidents, tuning alerts and dashboards, optimizing data volumes, and so on. Each of these roles are mirrored by specialized AI agents that have been optimized to complete those task-specific workflows from end to end.

The most challenging role is the AI SRE - investigating an incident to get to the root cause and identify remediation. Triggered automatically when an alert fires, the AI SRE agent autonomously reasons through underlying issues and recommends actions and mitigations in under three minutes on average, with a 75% success rate of root cause analysis in complex production environments and a further 19% of incidents where the analysis was deemed useful. By comparison, manual responses can take 20 minutes just to locate the relevant issues, gather initial context and find the right on-call engineer.

None of this automated reasoning is possible without complete end-to-end visibility and context. With the recent acquisition of Embrace, we now bring together front-end Real User Monitoring (XCOR RUM) and proactive XCOR Synthetics with our backend and infrastructure observability to deliver a true, full-stack platform. RUM captures every web and mobile session in full fidelity without sampling, tying crashes and slow loads directly to session timelines, while synthetics simulates global user traffic to proactively catch regressions before they hit production.

Underpinning this full-stack visibility is the XCOR Fabric, which we engineered to provide our agents with rich, real-time institutional, application and infrastructure context and draws from:

• Knowledge Graph: A real-time, detailed model incorporating your infrastructure, applications and business logic. Unlike many other solutions, it normalizes and incorporates custom telemetry to provide the most complete context.
• Operational Memory: Institutional learnings and historical context captured from past incident investigations.
• User Behavior: Patterns revealing which specific queries and dashboards senior engineers rely on during active resolutions.
• Human Knowledge: Context pulled directly from runbooks, documentation, and operational files.

By delivering total visibility and grounding our AI agents in this deep operational context, XCOR delivers rapid root-cause analysis and recommends steps toward remediation.

Automated Optimization Continues to Deliver the Most Cost-Effective Platform on the Market

Yet observability without cost control is like an untrained puppy, adorable until it chews through your furniture, shoes and budget. Managing observability costs remains a persistent challenge because modern cloud and AI-native architectures produce massive volumes of telemetry data. We designed Chronosphere to solve this exact problem, and it remains a major pillar of XCOR. 

We help customers optimize data by an average of 89% without sacrificing visibility, earning top industry rankings for cost efficiency and the trust of industry leaders like OpenAI, DoorDash and Compass. Now with expanded consumption-based pricing models across the XCOR platform and granular consumption budgets that automatically adjust to usage patterns over time, we eliminate the tradeoff between critical visibility and rising costs. 

The quest for observability’s holy grail is finally within reach. As engineering teams race to keep pace with the speed and scale of AI-driven development, XCOR moves operations beyond static dashboards and manual troubleshooting toward true autonomous remediation. This is observability's AI moment.

The post Observability’s AI Moment appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.

Most cloud and security teams struggle with two fundamental questions: What is actually running across our clouds, and what is exposed? As workloads sprawl and AI models deploy faster than ever, critical posture data gets locked inside specialized consoles. Gaps go unseen until they are exploited, and shadow AI leaves teams flying blind.

To solve this visibility challenge, Palo Alto Networks is introducing CLARA Agent.

By connecting Palo Alto Networks Strata Cloud Manager (SCM) directly to Google Cloud Gemini Enterprise, CLARA Agent turns complex cloud security data into clear, conversational insights. SCM powers this integration by consolidating security across environments, automating AI-driven operations to prevent misconfigurations, and continuously enforcing zero-trust policies with real-time threat prevention. Instead of digging through endless dashboards or running manual queries, teams can simply ask plain-language questions directly inside Gemini Enterprise to get immediate, evidence-backed answers.

CLARA Agent, which will be available on Google Cloud Marketplace, provides instant infrastructure discovery, automatically surfaces production AI/ML models alongside unsanctioned shadow AI, and ranks critical vulnerabilities so teams know exactly what is exposed. By bringing security intelligence directly into everyday workplace tools, it democratizes visibility for cloud, platform, and AI teams alike.

Bringing Palo Alto Networks CLARA Agent to Google Cloud Marketplace will help customers quickly deploy, manage, and grow the AI agent on Google Cloud’s trusted, global infrastructure. Palo Alto Networks can now securely scale and support organizations using its CLARA Agent to enable their security teams to turn cloud security data into conversational insights.

Vineet Bhan, Director, Security and Identity Partnerships, Google Cloud

Built for Immediate Value and Enterprise Security

CLARA Agent supercharges your existing investment in Strata Cloud Manager by bringing its rich security telemetry directly into everyday workflows. Greenfield deployments will benefit from additional visibility into their AI and non-AI workloads.

Designed to complement SCM’s robust security architecture, CLARA Agent leverages the open Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocol and Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers to deliver fast, secure, and context-aware responses without requiring additional infrastructure setup. This integration creates a more seamless experience for security teams, empowering them to audit cloud posture, prioritize zero-day vulnerabilities, and secure rapid AI adoption faster and more intuitively than ever before. 

See CLARA Agent Live at the Security Innovations Forum 2026

Palo Alto Networks is proud to be a sponsor of the Security Innovations Forum 2026 on September 29 at the Google Event Center MP7 in Sunnyvale, CA. Join Rich Campagna, Senior VP of Products at Palo Alto Networks, and Joshua Haslett, Strategic Technology Partner  Manager at Google, on the executive panel, "Co-Innovating the Future of Cybersecurity: A C-Suite Perspective" (10:50 AM – 11:35 AM). They will discuss how agentic platforms are revolutionizing threat response and how organizations can deploy advanced AI agents at scale.

You can also visit the Palo Alto Networks kiosk during the forum to see a live demonstration of CLARA Agent, connect with our experts, and discover how we are co-innovating with Google Cloud to help safeguard agentic AI environments.

Get Started

Visit our booth at Google Cloud’s  Security Innovations Forum 2026, or contact your Palo Alto Networks representative to schedule a demo.

 

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Forward-Looking Statements (unreleased feature only)

This blog contains forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions, including, without limitation, statements regarding the benefits, impact, or performance or potential benefits, impact or performance of our products and technologies or future products and technologies. Any unreleased services or features (and any services or features not generally available to customers) referenced in this or other press releases or public statements are not currently available (or are not yet generally available to customers) and may not be delivered when expected or at all. Customers who purchase Palo Alto Networks applications should make their purchase decisions based on services and features currently generally available.

The post Introducing CLARA Agent: Instant Cloud & AI Risk Insights Available on Google Cloud Gemini Enterprise appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.

AI agents are crossing an important threshold.

They are moving from assistants that respond to us to autonomous systems that reason, plan, and act on our behalf. They can write and execute code, access enterprise data, call tools and APIs, and keep working toward a goal with limited human intervention.

That changes the security model.

An autonomous agent is designed to find a way to accomplish its objective. If one path is blocked, it reasons about another. That is what makes agents powerful, and it is why models’ built-in prompt guardrails alone are not enough.

The harness can guide what an agent should do. Security must control what an agent can do. That requires security authority outside the agent itself.

Palo Alto Networks and NVIDIA Team Up to Secure Agentic AI

NVIDIA provides the accelerated computing platform, secure runtime foundation, and reference system design for agentic AI. Palo Alto Networks brings the AI security capabilities enterprises need to govern interactions, protect workloads, and control identity and access.

Together, we are extending security across three areas: AI governance with Prisma AIRS AI Gateway, runtime protection with Prisma AIRS AI Runtime Security, and Agent Identity Security powered by IDIRA.

This is the focus of our expanded collaboration with NVIDIA on the NVIDIA Open Agent Safety Platform reference design.

a) Prisma AIRS AI Gateway on NVIDIA Vera CPU

Our forward-looking architecture includes Prisma AIRS AI Gateway software running on NVIDIA Vera CPU systems, bringing AI governance and enforcement closer to infrastructure designed for agentic workloads.

The AI Gateway is the real-time enforcement point for AI Governance, Runtime, and Identity security. It continuously verifies agent identities, enforces strict least-privilege access, redacts sensitive data before it is exposed, and deeply inspects every interaction—stopping unauthorized actions before they ever reach critical host systems or cloud endpoints.

• Operationalize AI agents: Connect applications and agents to thousands of models and tools through one control point, with the reliability and flexibility to scale AI across the enterprise.
• Track usage and control costs: Monitor every AI interaction across your company to see exactly what teams are doing, track your spending, and restrict access to approved tools only.
• Enforce agent security across the enterprise: Block sensitive data exposure and malicious commands in real time, and verify agent identity before actions are taken.

b) Announcing Prisma AIRS AI Runtime Security on NVIDIA BlueField

The Palo Alto Networks AI Runtime firewall running natively on NVIDIA BlueField DPUs extends Zero Trust protection to the front-end network traffic of the AI factory and to the AI Edge, creating a tamper-proof boundary immune to application-layer attacks. Drawing on the NVIDIA Sentry reference design, Prisma AIRS AI Runtime Security accelerated on NVIDIA BlueField delivers: 

• Hardware-Isolated Boundaries: Tamper-proof boundary, ensuring a compromised model or a rogue agent can never bypass runtime controls.
• Agentless Behavioral Introspection: Monitor agent execution paths, memory structures, and tool calls with NVIDIA DOCA Argus with zero CPU overhead, and feed real-time telemetry directly into Cortex XSIAM for automated observation, analysis, and remediation.
• Zero Trust Governance: Strict least-privilege access is enforced across the network and external APIs by default, delivering a verifiable audit trail for every allow and block action.

c) IDIRA Agent Identity Security

As agents gain greater autonomy, identity becomes fundamental to controlling what they can access and what actions they can take.

Looking ahead, we plan to integrate NVIDIA OpenShell with upcoming Agent Identity Security capabilities from Idira, including identity and secrets management for the OpenShell sandbox and agent identity broker service on NVIDIA BlueField. This will help organizations apply identity-based controls and least-privilege access to agents without relying on persistent human credentials.

The Path Ahead: Security at Scale for Enterprise Agents

As agents become more autonomous, governance must extend to identity. Prisma AIRS AI Gateway will also serve as an enforcement point for Agent Identity Security powered by IDIRA. We are also expanding to include Agent Identity Broker support directly on NVIDIA BlueField, providing identity verification and access governance independently of the host environment.

Together, these capabilities are designed to prevent unauthorized execution, reduce standing access, and stop privilege escalation as agents interact with enterprise systems.

As agents gain more autonomy, enterprises need consistent control over how they connect and what they can access.

Our work with NVIDIA brings those controls closer to where agentic workloads run, while Palo Alto Networks provides the security policy, governance, and enforcement enterprises need to manage them. 

To learn more about our GA of AI Runtime Security on the BlueField DPU, read our blog — Palo Alto Networks Announces Support for NVIDIA Enterprise AI Factory.

The next phase of AI will be defined not only by what agents can do, but by whether enterprises can trust them to operate safely at scale.

Palo Alto Networks was named a Market Shaper in AI application security. Read the report: Gartner® Emerging Market Quadrant for AI Application Security – Established Vendors, September 2026.

The post Securing AI Agents at Scale with NVIDIA appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.

Cybersecurity is in the middle of a generational shift. AI has disrupted a 30-year balance of power between defenders and adversaries.

Armed with agentic AI tools and open-weight models stripped of safety guardrails, threat actors are discovering, validating, and chaining exposures at machine speed. In a recent Unit 42 investigation, the attacker used more than 50 MITRE ATT&CK techniques to reduce weeks of methodical intrusion tradecraft into less than 10 hours—97% faster than a skilled red team could have done. Time-to-exfiltration has compressed to under an hour in real-world attacks. And when new CVEs are publicly disclosed, automated adversary scanners are weaponizing them within 15 minutes.

Defending at human speed is no longer viable. Organizations must close years of accumulated exposure while securing the AI they are rapidly adopting. That demands action on five fronts: continuously find and fix vulnerabilities, reduce exposure, secure AI infrastructure, unify attack prevention, and automate detection and response at machine speed.

Today, we are announcing Unit 42 Continuous Frontier AI Defense to put the first two priorities into practice. Powered by Anthropic's Mythos models and OpenAI's latest GPT cyber models, this always-on, agentic service combines our offensive security experts with proprietary multi-model harnesses to discover vulnerabilities, validate real-world exploitability, and accelerate remediation across applications, identities, cloud infrastructure, and network assets.

Led by our offensive security experts, this service discovers, validates and remediates exposures before they can be exploited. We use proprietary AI harnesses and gated capability models—powerful models restricted from public use—to discover vulnerabilities, prove real-world exploitability, and accelerate remediation across applications, identities, cloud infrastructure, and network assets as an organization’s environment changes.

Continuous Frontier AI Defense builds on Unit 42’s Frontier AI Defense, which launched in April and introduced Frontier AI Exposure Analysis, a point-in-time exposure analysis, and a security blueprint that benchmarks current capabilities to help organizations modernize their cybersecurity systems. In August, Unit 42 expanded the list of frontier AI models to include  OpenAI’s GPT-5.6-Cyber and Anthropic's Claude Mythos 5, giving organizations access to additional AI capabilities.

A Single AI Model Is Not a Security Strategy

Frontier models are powerful, but no single AI model is a cybersecurity silver bullet and the models require equally powerful AI scanning harnesses.

Unit 42 research evaluation of model performance across enterprise codebases and live environments revealed two stark operational realities:

• Coverage caps: No single AI model catches more than 40% of vulnerabilities in a complex environment.
• Visibility: Leading cyber models such as Anthropic Claude Mythos 5 and OpenAI GPT-5.6-Cyber have less than 10% overlap in the exposures they identify.

To solve the single model gaps, Continuous Frontier AI Defense runs on proprietary multi-model harnesses. These harnesses act as an intelligent orchestration layer, routing specific offensive testing tasks to the model best suited for the job. This approach aligns model strengths, eliminates individual gaps, and keeps compute spend economical.

We combine these frontier models with Unit 42 threat intelligence, and frontline security expertise to turn raw vulnerability data into verified, actionable protection. Zero Data Retention (ZDR) architectures protect enterprise source code and telemetry, so customer data is never retained or used to train public models.

What Happens When AI Meets Real Enterprise Architecture

We did not build this service on theoretical assumptions. We built and validated it internally  across Palo Alto Networks and across more than 100 customer engagements.

During our internal deployment, continuous Mythos-based scanning achieved over a year’s worth of traditional penetration testing results in just three weeks. The harness identified 3.2 times more high and critical vulnerabilities per product than legacy testing methods, and helped engineering teams cut mean time to remediate by 51%.

When we executed the service across customer environments, the frontline data delivered a clear warning:

• Hidden exposures: In third-party applications, two out of three validated exposures had no known CVE. Vulnerability-only scanners will never see them.
• High severity: 37% of identified exposures rated high or critical in severity.
• Chained attack paths: Flaws rarely existed in isolation. In one financial sector engagement, our harness identified a sequence of individually minor flaws: an application payment link that failed to re-verify identity, a skipped one-time password check, and a session routing flaw. Chained together, an attacker could achieve complete account takeover and payment fraud without any victim action.

Moving from Discovery to Validated Protection

Finding weaknesses without fixing them only creates noise. And, security teams do not lack findings; they already have more alerts than they can act on. The bigger challenge is knowing which weaknesses an attacker can actually exploit and chain into a viable path to compromise, and then remediating them.

Unit 42 Continuous Frontier AI Defense translates findings directly into risk reduction:

• Continuous Testing Engine: Provides a full-estate baseline scan followed by always-on testing as an organization’s environment changes.
• Multi-Model AI Harness: Unit 42 deploys proprietary multi-model harnesses, the software architecture to route work to the model best suited for the task, improving efficacy and coverage while managing the cost of frontier AI at scale.
• Leading Cyber Models: The harnesses are built around gated capability models, including Anthropic Claude Mythos 5 and OpenAI GPT-5.6-Cyber, as well as open weight models. 
• Advanced Adversary Simulation: Proves real-world exploitability by validating end-to-end attack paths across first- and third-party web apps, APIs, cloud infrastructure, source code repositories, and network assets.
• Accelerated Remediation: Delivers actionable and prioritized fixes, code-level guidance, and virtual patch recommendations. To implement virtual patches before vulnerabilities are publicly disclosed or official patches exist, organizations can pair this with Frontier Virtual Patching. 

Unit 42 Continuous Frontier AI Defense is available worldwide today on an annual subscription basis. Register for our upcoming virtual Threat Briefing to see how we apply Frontier AI, our proprietary multi-model harness, and offensive security expertise to protect Palo Alto Networks and our customers.

To learn more about Unit 42 Continuous Frontier AI Defense, register for the upcoming Virtual Threat Briefing here.

The post Introducing Unit 42 Continuous Frontier AI Defense appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.

Securing Every Environment at the Speed of Frontier AI

Recognized as a Leader for the second consecutive time and positioned furthest for Completeness of Vision. Palo Alto Networks is advancing hybrid mesh firewall with one integrated platform for preemptive protection, agentic operations, AI runtime security and quantum-safe security across the enterprise.

 

We are proud to share that Palo Alto Networks has been named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant for Hybrid Mesh Firewall for the second consecutive time, and positioned furthest for Completeness of Vision.

We believe this recognition reflects the strength of our approach to network security: one natively integrated platform that delivers consistent protection, policy and operations across every environment.

It also comes at a pivotal moment for cybersecurity. Frontier AI is collapsing the time between vulnerability discovery and exploitation. AI applications and agents are creating new infrastructure and data risks. At the same time, the cryptographic reset is forcing enterprises to rethink how they establish and maintain digital trust.

Fragmented firewall architectures and manual security operations were never designed for this speed, scale or complexity, and can no longer keep pace.

One Platform Across Every Environment

Hybrid environments have traditionally required organizations to deploy and manage different security products across data centers, clouds, branches, campuses and remote users. The result is often fragmented policy, inconsistent protection and operational complexity.

Palo Alto Networks transforms hybrid mesh firewall from a collection of enforcement products into a unified, intelligent security platform, powered by Precision AI.

The  Strata Network Security Platform is our Hybrid Mesh Firewall, spanning hardware  (PA-Series), virtual (VM-Series), cloud-native (Cloud NGFW) and firewall-as-a-service (SASE) deployments with consistent policy, shared intelligence and threat prevention across environments. 

Strata Cloud Manager provides unified policy, visibility and AI-driven operations across these enforcement points. Beyond traditional firewall environments, the platform extends protection to the browser with Prisma Browser and to AI applications, models and agents with Prisma AIRS®.

Cloud-delivered security services, including Advanced Threat Prevention, Advanced WildFire, Advanced URL Filtering, and Advanced DNS Security deliver consistent, inline prevention across environments. Intelligence discovered in one part of the platform can strengthen protection everywhere, turning every enforcement point into a real-time prevention layer.

If you’re new to the concept of HMF, explore our primer on What Is a Hybrid Mesh Firewall and Why It Matters.

The Hybrid Mesh Firewall Market Is Evolving

Gartner’s 2026 Hybrid Mesh Firewall research describes a market moving toward more automated, intelligence-driven security platforms as organizations manage increasingly complex hybrid environments. 

The report identifies several trends shaping the evolution of hybrid mesh firewall, including the growing adoption of cloud-based management, AI-driven threat prevention, automation through LLM-based assistants, post-quantum cryptography and security capabilities for AI applications and workloads.

As these requirements evolve, organizations need a network security architecture that can deliver consistent protection and operations across hybrid environments while preparing for emerging AI and quantum-era risks.

Advancing Hybrid Mesh Firewall for the Frontier AI Era

Against this backdrop, Palo Alto Networks continues to advance the Strata Network Security Platform for the Frontier AI era.

Preempt attacks earlier: Advanced Threat Prevention Plus uses Frontier AI-powered vulnerability discovery and Frontier Virtual Patching to deliver preemptive protections, including before vulnerabilities are publicly disclosed or official patches are available.

Disrupt attacker infrastructure: Advanced IP Defense continuously identifies, validates and blocks attacker-controlled infrastructure in real time - even when adversaries use direct-to-IP communications, proprietary encryption, residential proxies or trusted cloud infrastructure to evade traditional security signals.

Operate at machine speed: Six purpose-built Network Security Agents in Strata Cloud Manager assist teams with deployment, troubleshooting, configuration management, posture optimization, threat investigation and data protection, with built-in guardrails and human oversight.

Secure AI and modernize digital trust: Prisma AIRS helps secure AI applications, models and agents across the AI lifecycle, while Quantum-Safe Security and Next-Generation Trust Security help organizations identify cryptographic risk and modernize digital trust. Read more about Palo Alto Networks’ approach to securing AI.

Together, these capabilities help organizations reduce exposure before attacks succeed, operate at machine speed, secure AI infrastructure and modernize digital trust for the post-quantum era.

Proven Security, Performance and Scale

A unified platform must deliver not only breadth, but also effective protection and reliable performance under demanding conditions.

Independent SecureIQLab testing demonstrated 99% security efficacy, with Palo Alto Networks scoring approximately 20 points higher than the next-best tested vendor. Miercom validation demonstrated up to 2–8 times higher AI traffic throughput, along with strong TLS inspection and stable performance under sustained load.

More than 75,000 organizations around the world rely on Palo Alto Networks to consolidate security, improve visibility and reduce risk across their hybrid environments.

This global scale provides intelligence that continuously strengthens the platform. Every attempted attack expands what the platform can learn, and every new detection can become protection for all customers.

Defining the Future of Hybrid Mesh Firewall

We believe being named a Leader for the second consecutive time reinforces our conviction in an integrated platform that delivers consistent prevention and operations everywhere an enterprise operates.

But we believe industry leadership is also about preparing customers for what comes next.

As Frontier AI accelerates attacks, autonomous systems reshape security operations and quantum risk changes the foundations of digital trust, enterprises need more than a collection of firewalls. They need an intelligent security platform that can transform shared intelligence into prevention across every environment.

Palo Alto Networks is building that future, helping organizations reduce exposure before attacks succeed, operate at machine speed, secure AI infrastructure and modernize digital trust for the post-quantum era.

Download the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant for Hybrid Mesh Firewall to learn more about why Palo Alto Networks was named a Leader.

 

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Gartner Disclaimer

Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Hybrid Mesh Firewall, 7 September 2026

This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Garner document is available upon request from Palo Alto Networks.

Gartner does not endorse any company, vendor, product or service depicted in its publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s business and technology insights organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this publication, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Gartner and Magic Quadrant are a trademark of Gartner, Inc., and/or its affiliates.

The post Palo Alto Networks Named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Hybrid Mesh Firewall appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.

Here is an overview of content I published in August: Blog posts:

• Update: base64dump.py Version 0.0.31

SANS ISC Diary entries:

• Wireshark 4.6.8 Released
• DOUBLECUP’s PNG Payload
• YARA-X 1.20.0 Release

Unit 42 is putting the latest frontier cyber models to work across customer environments to find, validate and help remediate the attack paths that matter most.

In May, we introduced Frontier AI Defense with a warning: the window to get ahead of AI-enabled attacks was shorter than most people realized. Since then, we have briefed more than 1,000 security teams around the world and introduced our Frontier AI Defense service to hundreds of customers.

Today, through our partnership with OpenAI, we are expanding Unit 42 Frontier AI Exposure Analysis to put advanced frontier cyber models directly to work in customer environments. Under Unit 42 direction, these models can find exposures, test whether they are exploitable, validate attack paths and help customers prioritize what to fix first.

Our early work shows why this approach matters: 36% of the exposures we identified map to no known CVE, often because they involve multiple gaps that have to be discovered, chained and tested together.

Bringing the Latest Frontier Cyber Capabilities to Defenders

Palo Alto Networks has been among a limited group of organizations with early access to advanced cyber capabilities from the leading frontier AI labs. Through our partnership with OpenAI, Unit 42 can now bring its latest advanced cyber capabilities, including GPT-5.6 Daybreak, to security testing and validation for our customers. Until now, GPT-5.6 Daybreak has not been available for commercial use.

Frontier models have helped inform the work of our experts. Now they can increasingly perform complex offensive security tasks directly, at machine speed and under Unit 42 direction. That allows us to go deeper than traditional vulnerability discovery by testing exploitability, reasoning across multiple weaknesses and determining how an attacker could use them to achieve an objective.

There is no single best model for every cyber task. Our research has shown that different models have different strengths and find vulnerabilities others miss. A multi-model harness routes work to the model best suited for the task, improving efficacy and coverage while managing the cost of frontier AI at scale. As stronger models emerge, we can incorporate them without rebuilding the offering around a single model or provider.

Unit 42 experts remain central to the process. We combine frontier models with our offensive security expertise, Palo Alto Networks telemetry and Unit 42 Threat Intelligence to validate findings, connect exposures into attack paths and understand what an attacker could ultimately achieve.

Built to Find What Attackers Can Exploit

The expanded service brings five capabilities together:

• Leading cyber models: Apply the latest advanced cyber models to improve exposure discovery, testing and validation.
• Multi-model harness: Use the right model for the right task to improve efficacy, expand coverage and optimize cost.
• Exposure discovery: Find vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, leaked credentials, unmanaged attack surface and other posture gaps across applications and network assets.
• Advanced adversary simulation: Actively test exploitability and validate end-to-end attack paths to understand how an attacker could compromise the environment.
• Custom remediation plan: Prioritize the fixes that break the most important attack paths and feed those findings into existing IT, development and security workflows.

Most security teams already have more findings than they can act on. The harder problem is knowing which ones create a real path to compromise. Attackers look across applications, infrastructure, identity and cloud for weaknesses they can combine to achieve an objective. Frontier AI Exposure Analysis applies that same adversarial perspective, helping defenders understand which paths matter and what to fix first.

The Asymmetry Runs Both Ways Now

For the past several months, frontier AI has been a story about what is coming for defenders: vulnerability discovery at scale, exploit chaining that sees full-stack logic no scanner catches, and attack cycles compressed to seconds from initial access to exfiltration.

All of that is still true. Our answer has been to put everything we learn testing these frontier models into the hands of defenders. Today, that gets more direct: not just what frontier models have taught us, but the models themselves, working in your environment for your defenders before those same capabilities are working for the attacker.

The window is still closing. We intend to spend it building on the side of the defenders.

Visit Palo Alto Networks Frontier AI Defense to learn more.

The post Putting OpenAI Cyber Models to Work for Defenders appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.

As organizations race to deploy agentic AI, legacy network security solutions are ill-equipped to keep up, forcing productivity tradeoffs while exposing coverage gaps. At the same time, Frontier AI is proving capable of discovering vulnerabilities and creating exploits in real-time. Navigating this shift requires more than incremental feature enhancements; it requires a bold, market-defining vision backed by relentless customer focused execution. 

Today, we’re proud to announce that Gartner® has once again recognized Palo Alto Networks as a Leader in the 2026 Magic Quadrant™ reports for both Security Service Edge and SASE Platforms. This marks the fourth consecutive year that Palo Alto Networks has been recognized, making us the only security vendor to be recognized as a Leader in both reports for four years in a row.

In this year’s Magic Quadrant for SSE, Palo Alto Networks was placed highest in ability to execute and furthest in completeness of vision for Prisma Access.

Every day we focus relentlessly on understanding the needs of our customers and channeling that back into products and services that create real value for them. Our product strategy centers on where our customers' environments and security needs are heading, not just where it sits today.

Vision Matters More than Ever in the AI Era

The AI landscape is changing daily - in this new reality, we strive to be the visionary leaders to serve our customers. GenAI and Agentic AI are exposing enterprises to novel categories of risks like prompt injection, over-privileged agents, and poisoned models. At the same time, Frontier AI is accelerating vulnerability discovery and attack speed resulting in attack timelines being compressed by over 95%.

Gartner projects that by the end of this year, 40% of enterprise applications will feature embedded agents, up from less than 5% today. And by 2028, 60% of brands will use agentic AI to facilitate streamlined one-to-one interactions. Operating a business in this new reality requires security architecture engineered to anticipate threats that haven't yet emerged. Success cannot be achieved by retrofitting legacy products with support for AI infrastructure. It demands a unified future-ready foundation that natively secures users, applications, sensitive data, and non-human identities across every touchpoint. The platform enterprises use today determines whether they'll be prepared for tomorrow's threats.

As the cybersecurity landscape undergoes its biggest shift in decades, to us, the Gartner recognition as a Leader on vision and execution across both reports means more than ever before. In our opinion, it not only validates Palo Alto Network’s ability to serve the world’s largest enterprises but also celebrates our strategic product capabilities as shaping the future of cybersecurity through industry leading innovation such as securing AI traffic flows and agents that simplify manageability of SASE operations.

Vision Backed by Relentless Execution

We believe being placed highest in execution and furthest in vision is only as valuable as the ability to execute on it, and Palo Alto Networks has a proven record of creating value for our customers. Our recent milestone of crossing the $1.6 billion ARR mark while growing 40% year over year for Prisma SASE reflects the trust customers have placed in us. Over 6,800 organizations, including over one third of the fortune 500, trust us because we consistently turn market-defining innovation into enterprise-grade reality. Our execution leadership is built on a strong foundation:

• Security powered by Precision AI: Our platform delivers universal zero trust through distributed and flexible enforcement points. We inspect traffic as close to the user as possible to ensure that whether your teams are at the corporate HQ, a remote branch, a coffee shop or working from home, they receive the same protection at their precise point of interaction.
• Unmatched performance and resilience: By leveraging global hyperscalers, we provide the massive scale and reach that modern organizations require. For specialized, high-performance and sensitive needs, SASE Private Location brings that same cloud-delivered resilience directly to private campuses.
• Unified platform: With a truly unified policy engine, data platform and operations, we ensure that as enterprises adapt to the future, our architecture remains an accelerator for secure productivity rather than a bottleneck. We accelerate vendor consolidation for enterprise customers, replacing fragmented legacy point products with a single platform that slashes operational overhead and reduces total cost of ownership (TCO) by up to 50%.

Building for the Future 

As the rules of cybersecurity are rewritten in real time, leading the market requires more than following past trends, it requires setting the trajectory. Our aim is to continuously be at the forefront of defining the future of cybersecurity to power the agentic enterprise of tomorrow.

Protecting with AI

Palo Alto Networks continues to innovate to keep enterprises safe at the speed of AI. Our Precision AI security service blocks over 30B threats every single day defeating sophisticated and highly evasive tactics. When combined with our virtual patching and IP defense security services, organizations receive proactive defense that secures at the speed of Frontier AI with flexible enforcement that provides consistent protection everywhere. We are delivering comprehensive security across network, edge, and cloud infrastructure to stop hidden threats that are invisible to traditional networks security solutions. 

This AI-powered defense in depth strategy operates across the entire attack lifecycle to enable proactive protection that shifts enterprise security postures from reactive incident response to preemptive defense. 

Securing AI 

Safely enabling employee adoption of AI tools and agents requires special considerations to mitigate risks around data leaks, intellectual property exposure, and compliance. Prisma SASE and Prisma Access solve these challenges by discovering all AI usage and agentic actions, enforcing granular least privilege access for human and non-human identities, and preventing exposure of risky data to AI and agents. Through AI Access Security™, Prisma SASE provides unified data security across the AI lifecycle by integrating GenAI app visibility and control, real-time prompt analysis, shadow data discovery, and  protection on endpoint. Prisma Browser provides a secure AI workspace that safeguards both human and autonomous agent workflows across any LLM by defending against data leaks, prompt injections, and agent hijacking. 

To secure the rapid adoption of AI agents by enterprises, Prisma Access will natively integrate with Prisma AIRS AI Gateway to provide a unified LLM, MCP, and A2A gateway giving security teams a single pane of glass for AI observability, cost governance, and runtime inspection.

This innovative approach represents an evolution away from traditional device and user centric fabrics towards an agent-aware platform capable of securing AI for the enterprise of tomorrow, today. 

Operating with AI

We continue to invest in capabilities that make our platforms proactive, efficient and easier to use. Our new deployment agents enable customers to onboard their SSE or SASE environment more efficiently, reducing their time to value while increasing productivity. Once onboarded, autonomous AI agents within Strata Cloud Manager continuously evaluate network and security posture to proactively identify configuration drift, performance degradation, and security policy gaps. By uncovering potential disruptions before they impact users or expose the organization to risk we’ve created automated systems capable of finding issues and automatically remediating them, with human-in-the-loop oversight calibrated to the administrator's comfort level, from guided recommendations to full autonomy.

The practical outcome is a dramatic reduction in mean time to resolution (MTTR) and a measurable reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO) while significantly reducing administrative burdens and making Palo Alto Networks products easier to maintain and operate.

Learn More

Download your complimentary copies of the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ reports to learn why Palo Alto Networks has been recognized as a Leader in both SASE and SSE for the fourth consecutive year.

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Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Security Service Edge, 29 July 2026, John Watts Et Al.
Gartner, Magic Quadrant for SASE Platforms, 28 July 2026, By Jonathan Forest Et Al.
Gartner does not endorse any company, vendor, product or service depicted in its publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s business and technology insights organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this publication, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
Gartner and Magic Quadrant are a trademark of Gartner, Inc., and/or its affiliates.
This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Palo Alto Networks.

The post Palo Alto Networks Recognized as the Only Vendor to be Named a 4X Leader in SASE and SSE Gartner Magic Quadrant Reports appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.

Palo Alto Networks works closely with OpenAI across our product platform and Unit 42, leveraging advanced frontier model capabilities. Furthermore, we are a partner in the OpenAI Daybreak Cyber Partner Program, working with OpenAI to bring trusted, AI-powered cyber defense to more organizations. Today, we’re announcing native integration of Prisma AIRS Runtime API with OpenAI Codex. This milestone deepens our partnership and drives our shared mission forward: equipping defenders with the industry's most advanced tools.

AI coding assistants have transformed software development, accelerating shipping velocity and changing how engineers solve problems. But as integration of AI coding assistants deepens across development teams, security and compliance teams constantly struggle with enabling developer productivity while helping protect proprietary source code and credentials, and reducing the risk of runtime threats entering the codebase.

Streamlined Security in Minutes

We designed this integration to eliminate complex traffic steering and heavy client-side hooks. Securing your entire developer organization takes just a few clicks inside Codex Enterprise Management UI. Here is how you can enable it:

1. Retrieve Credentials: Generate your API key and endpoint from the Prisma AIRS management console.
2. Configure Codex: Paste the Prisma AIRS API key and endpoint directly into your Global Admin Console.
3. Activate Org-Wide Scanning: Once saved, all user prompts across your entire organization in Codex are automatically routed through the Prisma AIRS Runtime API for real-time inspection.

What Prisma AIRS Brings to OpenAI Codex

By connecting the Codex in ChatGPT for Enterprise workspace to the Prisma AIRS Runtime API, security teams gain comprehensive, automated security controls across two critical vectors:

1. Enterprise Data Loss Prevention (DLP)

Developers frequently paste context – logs, config snippets, or functions – into AI coding assistants. Prisma AIRS scans inputs to help identify sensitive data before it is submitted.

• Secrets & Credentials: Intercept API keys, hardcoded passwords, tokens, and private keys.
• PII & Financial Data: Automatically detect personally identifiable information and regulated data patterns.
• Proprietary Code & IP: Enforce custom pattern rules to help prevent sensitive internal code, architecture details, or trade secrets from being submitted.

2. Advanced Threat & Malicious Code Detection

AI prompts and contextual inputs can contain content that introduces security risks into development workflows. Prisma AIRS Runtime API inspects incoming developer inputs for:

• Malicious Code Patterns: Detect obfuscated scripts, dangerous command executions, or known exploit patterns within developer prompts.
• Malicious URLs & Links: Flag unverified, phishing, or malicious domain references before they influence generated code or enter internal repos.
• Prompt Manipulation Attacks: Detect adversarial inputs that may attempt to bypass system controls or alter model behavior.

Built for DevSecOps Alignment

Security controls only work if developers actually use them. Because the inspection happens at the platform administrative level via API, developers continue working natively in Codex without changing their IDE setup or downloading local hooks. SecOps gain centralized visibility, consistent policy enforcement, and audit-ready logging capabilities across the entire engineering organization, while developers keep the speed and experience they expect.

Key Takeaways

• Security as Invisible Infrastructure: Prisma AIRS integrates at the Codex administrative layer, applying security and DLP controls without requiring additional developer workflow changes. Developers can continue working in Codex while security teams maintain centralized policy controls.

• Unified Governance for Frontier Models: Prisma AIRS acts as an inline security layer that scans AI traffic in real-time before prompts ever reach the destination model. This architecture can help organizations identify sensitive information moving outward while detecting prompt manipulation and potentially malicious content moving into development workflows. If Prisma AIRS API detects a threat, a block verdict is sent to OpenAI Codex, and the prompt does not reach the destination model or MCP server.

• Organization-Wide Compliance: Deployment speed is a strategic advantage, not just an IT convenience. By configuring the Prisma AIRS API within the Global Admin Console, organizations can achieve org-wide governance without complex traffic steering. This can help development teams shift from unmanaged AI use toward more consistent, auditable security practices.

Getting Started

The Prisma AIRS integration helps organizations maintain consistent security controls while preserving the speed and productivity gains of Codex. Organizations can combine Palo Alto Networks’ security capabilities with OpenAI Codex to maintain centralized security and governance controls.

Choose your path forward:

• Attending Black Hat 2026: Stop by the Palo Alto Networks booth to check out the Prisma AIRS live demo.
• Ready to secure your rollout: Contact Prisma AIRS AI Security Experts to discuss your specific governance and deployment needs.
• Ready to build: Visit the Prisma AIRS Documentation to connect your endpoints in minutes.

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Forward-Looking Statements

This blog contains forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions, including, without limitation, statements regarding the benefits, impact, or performance or potential benefits, impact or performance of our products and technologies or future products and technologies. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance, and there are a significant number of factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from statements made in this blog. We identify certain important risks and uncertainties that could affect our results and performance in our most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K, our most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q, and our other filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission from time-to-time, each of which are available on our website at investors.paloaltonetworks.com and on the SEC's website at www.sec.gov. All forward-looking statements in this blog are based on information available to us as of the date hereof, and we do not assume any obligation to update the forward-looking statements provided to reflect events that occur or circumstances that exist after the date on which they were made.

The post Strengthening Security of AI Coding: Prisma AIRS API Integration with OpenAI Codex appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.

Modern enterprise security is at a pivotal moment where CIOs and CISOs have a clear opportunity to build a cybersecurity architecture for both today’s environment, and for the future. Doing so requires redefining enterprise resilience across three critical dimensions. 

First, Frontier AI driven threat velocity and novelty. Frontier AI models have automated the entire attack lifecycle. Adversaries aren’t just compressing exploit windows to near-zero timelines, they are also generating novel, highly evasive threats at machine speed, bypassing traditional signatures and often before patches are generated. 

Second, surging network traffic is overwhelming traditional defenses. Driven by AI workloads, inter-datacenter traffic will nearly triple¹ over the next decade dramatically expanding the volume of data teams must inspect and secure. 

Finally, major shifts are forcing a “cryptographic reset.” Shrinking certificate lifecycles, internet-scale distrust events, and quantum computers powerful enough to crack public key cryptography are combining to shake the foundation of all digital communications. 

Meeting these challenges requires more than incremental fixes. Today, we are proud to introduce PAN-OS 12.2 Ceres, a landmark release representing a major leap forward in network security. 

Ceres brings to market 55+ innovations, including three flagship, core capabilities, designed to shift the balance of power back to defenders.

Introducing Frontier Virtual Patching: Preemptive Defense Against Frontier AI Exploits

Today, Palo Alto Networks is giving defenders the ultimate advantage with the launch of Frontier Virtual Patching. By harnessing Frontier AI to discover unknown vulnerabilities, and deploying protections in hours, we are collapsing the exposure window from the industry-average 55 days² it takes to deploy a traditional patch down into a near-zero window of exposure. This isn’t just about faster patching; it’s about eliminating the attacker’s chance by neutralizing exploits before they ever reach your network.

The new reality: Exploitation far outpaces patch deployment

We’ve built this capability as a collaborative, force-multiplying ecosystem, with our industry partnerships across the enterprise software and OT vendor landscape to accelerate vulnerability disclosure, remediation and customer protection. This includes our collaboration with Project Lightwell, which combines our rapid network-level protection with software remediation to help organizations reduce exposure to emerging threats. We’re also partnering with vulnerability clearinghouses, software maintainers, and industry initiatives to continuously expand a real-time pool of protected vulnerabilities.

This approach builds on recent Unit 42 research, where the autonomous AI system NOVA identified more than 14,000 previously unknown vulnerabilities in just two months – a clear signal that defenders must pair AI-powered discovery with equally fast, coordinated protection. We have built an all-new detection engine, “vaulted protection," that enables us to deliver these rapid protections in a safe and responsible manner. When one participant identifies a threat, the entire ecosystem is protected instantly. Individual discovery becomes global protection. 

This is especially valuable for operational technology (OT), critical infrastructure, healthcare, and IoT: environments where systems can’t be taken offline to patch, where patch cycles can stretch for months, and where a single unpatched device can expose an entire network. Frontier Virtual Patching closes that gap in the network, blocking the exploit without applying a patch, rebooting a system, or causing any downtime to critical operations.

Bad actors will lean into Frontier AI to reduce the attack lifecycle from months to minutes. To keep pace, organizations require security partners to match that machine speed. To this end, Palo Alto Networks is raising the bar with its Frontier Virtual Patching, moving beyond compensating controls. By safely and efficiently discovering undisclosed vulnerabilities and deploying protection long before traditional patches can be rolled out, Palo Alto Networks deep security capabilities are flipping network defense from a reactive to proactive operational model.

Will Townsend
Chief Analyst, LoneStar Advisory & Research

And for existing Palo Alto Networks network security customers, getting started is effortless.  Frontier Virtual Patching is available as a PAN-OS software upgrade with persistent, automatic content updates, so protections keep arriving as new threats emerge, with no new hardware and no manual intervention. 

Clearly, Network Security is evolving quickly. Frontier Virtual Patching is part of a huge set of innovations that the team at Palo Alto Networks is delivering in PAN-OS Ceres 12.2 to enable you to stay protected.

Advanced IP Defense: Blocking attacker infrastructure before they can strike

Modern threat actors continuously work to hide their attacks and evade existing controls. Adversaries are increasingly evading traditional perimeter detection of their command-and-control traffic by leveraging direct-to-IP connection techniques that bypass DNS and URL inspection entirely. Attackers are also weaponizing massive proxy networks and hundreds of thousands of residential IP addresses to conduct stealthy, large-scale scanning, brute-force attacks, and exploitation that bypass traditional defenses such as IP reputation and blocklists.

To counter this, Palo Alto Networks is introducing a new preventative solution, Advanced IP Defense, with three powerful new capabilities:

• Real-time IP-layer intelligence. We leverage global telemetry from over 70,000 customers to track and block attacker infrastructure inline across the entire attack lifecycle. Our researchers track these threats 24/7, so your team doesn’t have to.
• Zero-Trust IP enforcement. We don’t just look at an IP’s past reputation. We verify the intent of the connection itself. By validating that every network connection maps to a legitimate DNS resolution, we provide a critical guardrail against attackers attempting to evade detection.
• Powerful IP-layer context. We continuously monitor every connection across more than 40 distinct security attributes, letting you proactively shrink your attack surface and block high-risk traffic from the internet’s “bad neighborhoods” with confidence.

The transition to the Frontier AI era isn't a distant future. It’s happening right now. The organizations that thrive won't be those trying to run old, reactive playbooks faster; they have to scale their defenses to match a whole new velocity of risk. When threats occur at machine speed, relying on human-scale operations is no longer an option. That is why AI and automation are becoming essential tools to meet these challenges head-on.

Varinder Singh
CIO, NXP Semiconductors

Network Security Agents: Making admins superhuman

When threats execute in minutes, human-only operations become a bottleneck. To reduce fatigue and accelerate response, we’re launching an elite suite of AI agents for every major role a network administrator performs.

These six specialized AI-powered Network Security Agents, available through Strata Cloud Manager, are trained on your enterprise context and operational workflows. From onboarding and configuration to threat assessment and troubleshooting, they automate the hundreds of routine, repetitive tasks that consume an admin’s day. And you stay in control: for each workflow, you choose the level of oversight that matches your risk tolerance — human-in-the-loop, human-on-the-loop, or human-out-of-the-loop.

Expanding platform protection across every edge

Securing the modern enterprise means extending these AI-powered capabilities across every surface, from data center cores to remote industrial sites, and from custom AI applications to the web browser.

Today we’re introducing PAN-OS Ceres 12.2, which, in addition to the innovations above, expands our platform across five more areas:

• Quantum-safe & next-generation trust security. Automates digital certificate lifecycle management and accelerates post-quantum cryptographic readiness, including a cryptographic inventory spanning network security, endpoint, SIEM, and vulnerability management integrations for a complete view of enterprise readiness.
• 5th-generation ML-optimized hardware. New high-performance PA-Series firewalls equipped with 400G interfaces, and 300 Gbps of threat inspection, and active clustering, these platforms eliminate capacity limits for AI-era data centers. These firewalls also  scale to 1.4Tbps of throughput while delivering 5-microsecond latency ensuring peak performance. 
• Modernized OT & critical infrastructure defense. Purpose-built PA-50R ruggedized 5G firewalls that extend real-time, AI-powered threat prevention to remote, extreme-environment OT networks and critical infrastructure.
• AI and agent security. Prisma AIRS is now delivered as a scalable, cloud-native service explicitly engineered to secure AI models, applications, and autonomous agent workflows. The same platform on which we built CloudNGFW has now been extended to provide security for AI with the addition of Prisma AIRS.
• Browser-to-firewall integration. Imagine the browser as a secure fast-lane that doesn’t just protect users, it empowers them. By integrating Prisma Browser with our NGFWs, we’ve eliminated the need to decrypt on the endpoint while delivering full Layer 7 protection. This is proactive security that neutralizes threats before they can even touch your network. For security admins, policy is fully unified from device to network, delivering a streamlined, automated experience.

The path forward

We are investing heavily in the innovations you need to defeat today’s threats while future-proofing your enterprise for tomorrow.

The transition to the Frontier AI era demands a bold strategy. The winners will be the organizations that adopt a prevention-first architecture capable of stopping threats long before weaponization occurs. With PAN-OS Ceres 12.2, Palo Alto Networks is giving defenders the speed, scale, and platform foundation to turn the tables on modern adversaries.

 

Forward-Looking Statements 

This blog contains forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions, including, without limitation, statements regarding the benefits, impact, or performance or potential benefits, impact or performance of our products and technologies or future products and technologies. Any unreleased services or features (and any services or features not generally available to customers) referenced in this or other press releases or public statements are not currently available (or are not yet generally available to customers) and may not be delivered when expected or at all. Customers who purchase Palo Alto Networks applications should make their purchase decisions based on services and features currently generally available.

 

​​Sources: 
1 https://www.nokia.com/artificial-intelligence/explainer-network-traffic-is-fundamentally-changing-in-the-ai-supercycle/
2 According to the Verizon 2024 Data Breach Investigations Report

 

The post Redefining Network Security for the Frontier AI Era appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.

Our mission is to be the cybersecurity partner of choice, protecting our digital way of life. Fulfilling that mission demands that we continually ensure our customers’ trust and instill confidence in our commitments.

In continuing to elevate global data trust, we have obtained both the Global Cross-Border Privacy Rules (CBPR) Certification and the Global Privacy Recognition for Processors (PRP) Certification.

These systems were originally established under the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Privacy Framework and expanded by the Global CBPR Forum. Through independent third-party audits, these globally recognized credentials validate that our data privacy practices meet rigorous international privacy standards.

These milestones join our existing portfolio of privacy and security certifications, reinforcing our ongoing commitment to responsible, accountable cross-border data protection.

To learn more, see the following resources:

• Global CBPR Forum Privacy Certifications
• Palo Alto Networks Global CBPR and PRP Certification Whitepaper
• Palo Alto Networks Trust Center

The post Palo Alto Networks Achieves Global CBPR and PRP Certifications appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.

Every modern enterprise is moving from an organization run by software to one orchestrated by AI, creating a tension between velocity and control. To resolve this tension, organizations require a unified architecture. Today, we are announcing the general availability of the Prisma AIRS AI Gateway, the AI control plane for the enterprise. 

Driven by the absolute conviction that an AI Gateway is foundational to the modern AI infrastructure stack, we are bringing AI innovations from the Portkey acquisition to Prisma AIRS just six weeks after closing. You can now scale AI at machine speed without compromising on enterprise-grade security and control.

Your AI Footprint is Outpacing Controls

Our next-generation firewall telemetry reveals that MCP activity climbed from 11% late last year to 41.4% by mid-2026. Monthly AI transaction volume grew twelve-fold over the same six months; some individual sessions moved hundreds of megabytes of enterprise data outbound. The AI footprint you can govern today is the smallest it will ever be.

Some of the most rapid AI adoption is happening with – coding assistants, enterprise agents and copilots.

• Coding agents access code repositories, file systems, configurations, and credentials. When this context, including source code and secrets, is sent to a frontier model, it risks exposing sensitive data, and a runaway loop could burn a fortune in tokens overnight.
• Enterprise agents run with broad access and standing privileges sharing context with each other. A single agent stretched beyond its scope can massively increase the risk of data breach, impact business reputation and customer trust.
• Copilots now sit inside the SaaS and productivity tools employees already use. Copilots with broad access can surface data an employee was never meant to see.

As this enterprise data leaves when an AI request goes out, it creates a security and governance challenge at an unprecedented scale and speed.

What breaks when every team adopts AI 

AI adoption rapidly outpaces the security and governance infrastructure meant to secure it:

• Shadow AI (Cost and usage are both hidden): You can't see the AI your teams already use or what it costs. 
• Data Exposure (Sensitive data leaves without a trace): AI interactions can expose sensitive data, bypass policy and trigger unsafe outputs.
• Agents Overstep (Actions run without accountability): Agents act across systems without clear identity, permission, or accountability. Keys get shared and agents run with broad, standing privileges, so no one can say which identity authorized a specific action or reverse it when an agent takes a wrong turn at machine speed.

Faced with this, most leaders either block traffic entirely or stay permissive and promise to govern later. Both approaches fail because they skip the critical step: seeing what agents do at runtime and controlling their actions while they happen.

Accelerate AI Adoption with Control

To scale AI adoption safely, you need a single control plane sitting between every AI interaction and the backend models. Prisma AIRS AI Gateway brings AI governance, identity and runtime controls together in one place. With the AI Gateway, you can:

• Discover AI usage: Know exactly which apps, models, users, teams and agents are active, what they are accessing, and what they cost in a single unified view.
• Govern AI interactions: Enforce central rules for model access, tool use and budgets while inspecting prompts and responses inline to prevent data leaks.
• Secure every agent: Verify agent identities and enforce just-in-time, least-privilege access so autonomous systems only touch what they need, when they need it.

How the AI Gateway works 

Prisma AIRS AI Gateway sits inline between every AI interaction, model provider, and agentic interaction (Agent/AI App to LLMs, MCP Tool Calls, and A2A). It acts as a unified LLM, MCP, and A2A Gateway with a single enforcement point for all operational and security controls. Your teams keep using their existing coding assistants, enterprise agents, and copilots, while enforcement moves to the infrastructure layer where the platform team can own it.

Capabilities delivered through this unified control plane are:

Observability

Every request maps to a single unified view: tracking usage, users, projects, token counts, latency and cost so you can retire shadow AI infrastructure immediately.

Governance

Centrally define approved models, tools, and access without touching developer configurations. To drive FinOps and usage management, track every request's cost, tokens, and latency by team or project. Answer cost questions instantly, shut down unsanctioned AI usage, and proactively enforce budgets and rate limits before access is granted.

Coding Assistant Security

Protect credentials, proprietary code and development systems from risky AI actions. The gateway replaces raw provider keys with scoped credentials per user and team.

Operational Controls

Apply data protection, usage limits and policy checks as AI interactions happen. Traffic distributes via a Universal API across providers ensuring quotas are enforced and outages never stall your pipeline.

Agent Identity Security

Establish trusted identities by binding a verifiable, ephemeral identity to agents at execution. The AI Gateway acts as an enforcement point to enable only authenticated agents to make approved calls.

Runtime Security 

Powered by Prisma AIRS AI Runtime Security, the gateway inspects every prompt and response inline, stopping source code, secrets and customer data from leaving the network while neutralizing prompt injection attempts aligned with the OWASP LLM Top 10 and OWASP Top 10 for Agentic Applications.

Watch Anand Oswal break down why an AI gateway is foundational to this architecture.

The AI Control Plane for the Enterprise

Prisma AIRS AI Gateway brings AI governance, identity and runtime controls together in one place. Point products filter text strings or route a single API call and they buckle under real enterprise volume.
Most products fail at scale. Prisma AIRS AI Gateway is built on an architecture tested in the most demanding enterprises for their ever evolving AI workloads: 

• 68 Trillion+ tokens processed in the last month alone.
• Sub-millisecond routing latency and inline inspection secures AI interactions without degrading user experience.
• 99.999% availability helps ensure your AI operational pipeline does not experience a single point of failure.

Learn about Prisma AIRS AI Gateway and register for our webinar to see the AI Gateway in action. 

Your developers have already adopted their agents. The agentic enterprise is a reality. As the recently named "company to beat" in AI Security Platforms by Gartner, Palo Alto Networks is uniquely positioned to help you. Let’s build it securely, together.

The post Announcing the General Availability of Prisma AIRS AI Gateway appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.

By Yogesh Ranade from Palo Alto Networks, and Senthil Ramakrishnan from AT&T

The digital world is currently navigating a dual-speed revolution. Acceleration of AI and hyperconnectivity is unlocking unprecedented economic value. The silent but rapid progress of quantum computing is fundamentally threatening the cryptographic foundation upon which that value is built.

As leaders in global networking and cybersecurity, Palo Alto Networks and AT&T Business launched Secure Connectivity solutions for Business Customers. We recognize that quantum-readiness is no longer a distant milestone; it is now a strategic imperative. With threatening data longevity and Trust Now, Forge Later targeting digital identities, the risks are already looming. 

By integrating Prisma SD-WAN’s cryptographic innovation with AT&T’s global network, Palo Alto Networks and AT&T Business are proud to deliver the Quantum-Resilient SASE Fabric.

The Quantum Shift Towards Building Resilience for Tomorrow’s Reality

For over 30 years, the difficulty of mathematics has been our primary defense. Classical algorithms, like RSA and Diffie-Hellman, provided the shield for our global economy because they were computationally impossible for classical machines to solve. However, quantum computing fundamentally changes this landscape by providing an exponential speed-up. By leveraging Shor’s Algorithm, quantum computers can break these classical cryptographic foundations, turning a decryption process that would take a classic supercomputer millennia into a task of mere hours.

Neutralizing the Quantum Crisis

Palo Alto Networks is embedding Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) as a native pillar of the Prisma SASE fabric. We are moving beyond the forklift-upgrade model to a software-defined, standards-based foundation, which is built on strict separation of management and data plane components:

• Universal Control Plane Hardening (TLS 1.3): We have transitioned all control plane traffic to TLS 1.3 (Transport Layer Security 1.3), the global gold standard for Internet encryption. This secures the "brain" of the network (where routing configurations and security policies are managed), making it immune to quantum-enabled impersonation and credential theft.
• PQC-Hardened Data Plane (IETF Standards): We are operationalizing PQC across the entire fabric by adopting official standards published by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), specifically RFC 9370, 9242, and 8784. In plain terms, these standards allow us to use "hybrid key exchanges." This means we wrap your data in two layers of protection at once: a classical mathematical shield for immediate compatibility, and a quantum-resistant shield to protect against future decryption threats, all without causing packet fragmentation or network slowdowns.
• Logs and Telemetry Plane: All network telemetry and metadata (the automated operational logs and traffic pattern data generated by the network, rather than the actual content of your business files) are encrypted in transit via TLS 1.3. This architecture guarantees that even this secondary network metadata is geofenced to your chosen region with no cross-region aggregation, satisfying the most stringent data residency mandates.
• Crypto-Agility as a Standard: "Crypto-agility" is natively built into our systems, which means the software is designed to adopt new mathematical algorithms. As the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) refines its guidelines, our systems can be upgraded seamlessly via simple, automated cloud updates without requiring expensive hardware replacements to ensure our customers’ security posture.
• Secure Boot Support: Palo Alto Networks Prisma SD-WAN ION hardware supports Secure Boot to ensure that only cryptographically signed bootloaders, kernels, and trusted applications are executed during the boot process. This establishes a chain of trust from the BIOS firmware to the operating system, preventing the execution of unauthorized or tampered software. ION hardware appliances ship with an integrated, dedicated Trusted Platform Module (TPM), which provides hardware-level root-of-trust by securely storing cryptographic keys, certificates, and sensitive data to prevent unauthorized physical tampering and ensure secure device authentication. The OS/software layers use PQC algorithms to negotiate and secure the management, control plane and data plane tunnels. This ensures quantum readiness without requiring an immediate, widespread rip-and-replace of physical branch hardware.

The AT&T Perspective Views Security at Global Scale

From the perspective of a global leader like AT&T, PQC is an operational mandate. Providing connectivity to the world’s most regulated industries means that security cannot be bolted on. Security must be an inherent property of the transport layer and the connectivity infrastructure itself.

Turning Complexity into a Strategic Advantage

Managing a global footprint that spans across 5G, fiber, and legacy underlays requires an institutional expertise that few can match. For AT&T, the move to a more secure quantum-ready fabric with Dynamic Defense is about providing security where it matters most: the network. Our customers shouldn't have to worry about whether their data is traveling over an MPLS circuit or the public internet.

Through this collaboration, AT&T expands the delivery of Dynamic Defense:

• Cross-Underlay Consistency: We enable PQC protection to be applied uniformly across all transport mediums, eliminating the "weak links" that often exist in hybrid environments where data moves between private and public circuits.
• Automated PQC Policy Orchestration: New branch locations are seamlessly integrated into the quantum-ready fabric through automated policy distribution. The moment a device is activated via zero touch provisioning, the branch is enabled to be protected against HNDL threats from the first packet without requiring manual site-by-site intervention.
• Compliance: With mandates like NIS2/DORA in Europe and NORA/CNSA 2.0 in the U.S., our clients face a closing window for compliance. AT&T provides the verifiable chain of trust required to prove "Quantum Readiness" across the entire circuit path, ensuring your fabric is audit-ready and compliant with global standards.

The Power of the Post-Quantum Secure Fabric

The true value of this relationship lies in the synergy between the network and the security stack. By combining our strengths, we have built a solution that is significantly more resilient than the sum of its parts.

The SPI Advantage Is Performance Without Compromise

Through Service Provider Interconnect (SPI), Palo Alto Networks' security platforms natively integrate with AT&T’s private network core to deliver a seamless quantum-safe on-ramp. This means business traffic can connect directly to a secure AT&T network without having to build slow, complex software tunnels over the public internet, preserving high performance while delivering next-generation encryption. Historically, high-level encryption meant a "performance tax" on latency and throughput. Our combined architecture allows quantum-safe traffic to flow over AT&T’s network backbone, enabling organizations to modernize their security without sacrificing the user experience.

Securing the Decentralized Perimeter (The Branch as the Edge)

In today’s highly distributed business landscape, the traditional corporate "headquarters" is no longer the center of gravity. The network perimeter has shifted to the branch (decentralized edge locations like retail storefronts, remote clinics, regional bank offices, and warehouse hubs) and the individual 5G-connected devices employees use. Securing these remote, local edge points is critical because they represent the primary gateway where sensitive company data first enters the network. 

By utilizing AT&T’s leadership in WAN, 5G and cellular technologies, we leverage Hybrid Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) to secure these edge locations. Hybrid PKI is a digital identity framework that issues dual security credentials to every device: one "classical" identity to ensure compatibility with existing networks today, and one "quantum-resistant" identity. This double-verification guarantees that a cellular-connected remote branch or a mobile site is just as immune to quantum decryption or identity spoofing as a fortified corporate data center.

The Path Forward Is a Vision for Long-Term Trust

The transition to a quantum-ready future is a marathon, not a sprint, and the first steps must be taken now. Palo Alto Networks and AT&T Business are offering a clear, practical path to quantum resilience.

We are delivering more than a simple software update as we prepare customers for the next generation of digital commerce. Together, we are designing our network to help ensure the data of today remains protected against the threats of tomorrow, securing the digital integrity of every enterprise we serve.

As we redefine the boundaries of security in connectivity, we invite you to join us in helping secure your organization’s digital future. Contact your or Palo Alto Networks account representative today to begin a strategic Quantum-Readiness Assessment and experience the power of the Quantum-Resilient SASE Fabric.

The post Palo Alto Networks and AT&T - Delivering Quantum-Resilient SASE Fabric appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.

Here is an overview of content I published in June: Blog posts:

• Update: base64dump.py Version 0.0.30

SANS ISC Diary entries:

• Microsoft’s Coreutils for Windows
• Evil MSI Background: BASE64 Statistical Analysis
• YARA-X 1.18.0 and 1.19.0 Release

The White House Executive Order on securing the nation against advanced cryptographic attacks accelerates the mandatory timeline for post-quantum readiness.

For years, post-quantum cryptography has been discussed as an important, yet abstract future technical migration. Because of the uncertain timeline for quantum computing, it has been difficult for most organizations to prioritize quantum readiness against more immediate security demands.

That is changing.

Signed on June 22, 2026, the Executive Order mandates the transition of federal information systems to post-quantum cryptography and establishes a national policy to migrate them to NIST-approved standards. It also extends the urgency beyond government by directing support for critical infrastructure owners and operators, advancing requirements for federal contractors, and calling for cryptographic bill of materials guidance.

The order directly addresses harvest now, decrypt later risk and sets transition milestones for federal high-value assets and high-impact systems: 2030 for key establishment and 2031 for digital signatures.

While the order directly applies to U.S. Federal civilian agencies, it should be seen as a signal of broader policy and procurement momentum. Organizations that do business with the government, support critical infrastructure, or operate in regulated industries such as energy, financial services, and healthcare should expect post-quantum readiness expectations to accelerate.

Quantum risk has shifted from a long-term research concern to a national cybersecurity priority tied to sensitive data, critical infrastructure, federal systems, procurement, and the broader digital economy. For security teams, the challenge now is turning that urgency into an operational plan.

Operationalizing the quantum mandate

As quantum computing advances, widely used public-key cryptography will become vulnerable to future attacks. Even before a cryptographically relevant quantum computer exists, adversaries can capture encrypted data now with the goal of decrypting it later.

This “harvest now, decrypt later” risk is especially concerning for organizations that protect sensitive information with a long shelf life. The response cannot wait until the threat fully materializes.

The broader ripple effect matters because compliance alone will not equal readiness. As requirements flow into federal acquisition rules and contractor obligations, the vendor ecosystem will be pushed to support quantum-safe capabilities in the products and services that enterprises, critical infrastructure organizations, and regulated industries rely on.

Adding support for post-quantum algorithms is not the same as safely migrating to them. Support means a system can use new algorithms. Readiness means the organization knows where cryptography exists, which systems are exposed, which dependencies matter most, and how to execute changes without creating disruption or new risk.

That matters because post-quantum migration can affect more than cryptographic libraries. Larger cryptographic objects, new protocol behaviors, hybrid modes, hardware acceleration requirements, interoperability constraints, and legacy system limitations can create real performance, availability, and compatibility challenges if changes are made blindly.

This is why cryptographic visibility must lead to actionable migration planning.

Security teams cannot migrate what they cannot see. But visibility by itself is not enough. They also need to classify exposure, prioritize high-value systems and long-lived data, understand operational dependencies, and plan changes in a way that avoids disruption, downgrade risk, or incomplete migration.

Cryptographic bill of materials guidance will be an important step toward mapping cryptographic assets. But a CBOM should be the starting point, not the finish line. An inventory can show where cryptography exists, but readiness requires understanding business impact, migration complexity, interoperability risk, ownership, and the order in which changes should happen.

Post-quantum readiness is not just an algorithm swap. It is an operating model for managing cryptographic change at scale.

Five actions for post-quantum readiness

The path forward starts with five practical actions.

• First, see cryptographic exposure. Organizations must gain visibility into cryptographic usage across all environments to mitigate the risks associated with undocumented encryption.
• Second, prioritize what matters most. Cryptographic exposure varies in urgency. Organizations should prioritize protecting authentication, high-value assets, and long-lived sensitive data based on risk and business impact.
• Third, modernize trust infrastructure. Existing systems rely on fixed cryptographic assumptions. Post-quantum readiness demands flexible infrastructure and trust services that support evolving standards.
• Fourth, automate cryptographic change. Manual tracking with spreadsheets provides an incomplete, point-in-time snapshot that quickly becomes outdated and is insufficient for the coming changes. Automation allows organizations to manage cryptographic updates and trust operations in a consistent, controlled manner.
• Fifth, govern readiness over time. Post-quantum migration requires continuous governance to track progress, align ownership, and adapt to evolving threats and standards.

These actions help security leaders move from awareness to readiness.

What this means for cybersecurity now

The Cryptographic Reset is already underway, driven by post-quantum risk, shorter certificate lifecycles, machine identity growth, fragmented cryptographic ownership, CA distrust events, and expanding digital infrastructure.

The organizations that move first will not simply be the ones that adopt new algorithms the fastest. They will be the ones that build the visibility, operating model, and governance needed to manage cryptographic change continuously.

Take the next step

Read the guide: The Post-Quantum Readiness Race Is On: Five Actions Security Leaders Can Take to Accelerate Crypto Agility.

More resources

• Blog: The Cryptographic Reset Has Begun
• Watch: Palo Alto Networks Quantum
• Blog: Palo Alto Networks Leads the Way with Quantum and Multicloud Security
• Blog: Introducing Palo Alto Networks Quantum-Safe Security
• Blog: Palo Alto Networks Announces New Quantum Security Innovations
• Press Release: Palo Alto Networks Delivers Enterprise Wide Quantum Security Readiness for All Customers

The post New Executive Order Accelerates Post-Quantum Readiness Amid the Cryptographic Reset appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.

Securing the Future of Japan’s AI Landscape

The shift from static LLMs to autonomous agents has fundamentally changed the global threat surface. Frontier models like Anthropic's Mythos can now autonomously discover hundreds of zero-day vulnerabilities, rapidly shrinking the gap between discovery to exploitation from days to minutes. With the rise of autonomous offensive AI, multi-agent systems like the 'Zealot' proof-of-concept can independently perform reconnaissance, escalate privileges, and exfiltrate cloud data.

Prisma AIRS 3.0 is a comprehensive AI security platform that secures the new AI estate end-to-end: scanning models, agents, and artifacts before deployment, protecting runtime behavior, and enforcing unified control through posture management.To secure this new AI estate against these advanced global threats, Palo Alto Networks is pleased to announce a strategic investment designed to enhance cyber resilience: the establishment of our new local cloud location for Prisma® AIRS™ in Japan. This localized presence simplifies complex operations, enabling local data residency and low-latency processing to accelerate the secure adoption of Generative AI and Agentic Workflows.

 

Comprehensive Agent Security Platform The new regional expansion in Japan hosting Prisma AIRS provides Japanese organizations with domestic, high-performance access to critical AI security capabilities. As we progressively roll out our full suite of features in the region, Prisma Airs is designed to be a comprehensive AI security platform that secures an organization's entire AI ecosystem including AI applications, models, agents, and datasets, from the development phase all the way through active deployment.  

• AI Model Security:
  Enables the safe adoption of third-party AI models by scanning them for vulnerabilities and secures the AI ecosystem against risks, such as model tampering, malicious scripts and deserialization attacks.
  
• AI Red Teaming:
  Uncovers potential exposure before bad actors do. Performs automated penetration tests using our Red Teaming agent that learns and adapts like a real attacker to stress test AI deployments at machine speed.
  
• AI Runtime Security™:
  Protects LLM-powered AI apps against runtime threats, such as prompt injection, sensitive data leaks, and Indirect Prompt Injection (IDPI) embedded in benign-looking websites.
  
• AI Agent SSPM (SaaS Security Posture Management):
  Secures AI agents against new agentic threats, such as identity impersonation, memory manipulation and tool misuse. This governs autonomous connections and prevents attackers from weaponizing a company's internal AI assistants.
  

Please visit the regional cloud locations of Palo Alto Networks for more information. This infrastructure optimizes operational efficiency and provides the essential security foundation for large-scale Digital Transformation (DX) projects, empowering Japanese enterprises to innovate with confidence and Deploy Bravely. 

The post Expanding Our Footprint: Local Cloud Availability for Prisma AIRS in Japan appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.

The rise of Agentic AI is rapidly reshaping the enterprise, yet its deployment opens a complex new frontier for cyber threats.  As organizations race to harness the power of enterprise agents, the "Data Estate" has become the new perimeter. CISOs today face a high-stakes trade-off: enabling developers to build at the speed of AI while keeping proprietary data visible, governed, and secure across the entire AI lifecycle. This requires meticulously checking user inputs, agent outputs, and tool calls for threats like prompt injections, sensitive data loss, and malicious code, while simultaneously preventing autonomous agents from performing destructive actions.

Securing the AI-driven enterprise requires a fundamental shift from reactive measures to proactive runtime protection. Palo Alto Networks and Databricks are delivering on that vision. Our partnership will integrate the Prisma AIRS API with Databricks Unity AI Gateway, embedding seamless security at runtime. This collaboration will enable organizations to innovate with AI agents, applications, models and MCP Servers at scale while maintaining a robust, policy-driven security posture. By combining the centralized AI governance and control capabilities of the Databricks platform with the runtime security protections of Palo Alto Networks, organizations can scale AI innovation without sacrificing visibility, compliance, or security.

 

The Context: Why AI Security is Different

AI security represents a fundamental departure from traditional defense. Legacy tools are designed for structured threats, leaving them incapable of parsing the intent behind complex, conversational attacks. Furthermore, the integration of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and autonomous workflows creates a dynamic attack surface that goes far beyond traditional data loss. Without AI-native oversight, organizations can face severe risks from prompt injections, custom topics, and toxic content manipulating model logic, to tool misuse, malware execution, and malicious URLs hijacking agent actions.

Modern AI development requires more than just a perimeter; it requires contextual intelligence. By integrating Prisma AIRS directly into Databricks Unity AI Gateway, we will evolve security from a reactive layer into a native pillar of the AI architecture.

 

The Joint Solution: Centralized Security at the Gateway

The most effective way to secure an entire AI environment is at the governance layer. Our integration focuses on Databricks Unity AI Gateway, which serves as the centralized interface for all AI activity within the Databricks environment. Unity AI Gateway is designed for managing, governing, and monitoring access to all models, agents and MCP Servers—whether they are open-source models deployed within Databricks or external proprietary models. As organizations deploy more agents, applications, and models, centralized governance becomes critical. Unity AI Gateway provides a single control plane for AI usage, enabling teams to apply consistent policies, monitor activity, and manage access across AI workloads.

Through this integration, Unity AI Gateway will make real-time calls to the Prisma AIRS Runtime Security API for security inspection. Instead of managing fragmented security policies across dozens of individual applications, SecOps teams will be able to enforce consistent guardrails across the entire Agentic AI estate from one location, providing a single, unified enforcement point for all AI workloads.

Figure 1: Centralized AIRS guardrail configuration delivers instant protection across all applications, agents and MCP Servers without requiring client-side code refactoring

 

Mechanism: API Intercept for AI Runtime Security

Prisma AIRS operates as an advanced inspection layer, leveraging its API Intercept capability to provide real-time security embedded directly into the application flow. By embedding Prisma AIRS directly into the workflow, we offer a seamless 'Security-as-Code' experience that unifies development and defense. Prisma AIRS intercepts AI prompts, responses, and MCP calls—inspecting them in real time to enforce security policies with an immediate Go/No-Go verdict or by sanitizing the data in transit. Prisma AIRS uses deep learning classifiers to detect data exfiltration risks, such as the presence of PII (Personally Identifiable Information), PHI, or PCI data. If sensitive data is found, it can be dynamically redacted or blocked based on corporate policy.

 

Key Benefits for the Enterprise

This integration isn't just about blocking threats—it’s about accelerating your AI roadmap. By removing the "security friction" that often slows down production deployments, we enable teams to move faster with confidence. Key benefits include:

• Zero-Friction Governance: Developers continue working within their familiar Databricks environment. Security is enforced via the Unity AI Gateway API, meaning there are no bulky agents to install and no complex architectural re-wiring required.
• Prevention of Data Leakage: Leverage Prisma AIRS’s data classifiers to automatically protect sensitive intellectual property, preventing data leaks to public models and unauthorized users.
• Resilience Against AI-Specific Attacks: Protect your Unity AI Gateway deployments from emerging threats that standard network security tools cannot see, including prompt injection, toxic content, custom topics, malware detection and malicious URL detection.

 

Key Takeaway

• Ease of use and unified Policy Management: Enable runtime security through the Unity AI Gateway to gain centralized control over security enforcement.
• Audit-Ready Compliance: Every transaction mediated by the Unity AI Gateway is logged with detailed security metadata, delivering enriched insights in Strata Cloud Manager. This provides the forensic trail required for regulatory compliance in highly governed industries like finance and healthcare.
• Protection for Agentic Workflows: Future-proof your multi-step AI agents against sophisticated Agentic Threats by inspecting function and tool calls within the runtime.

 

Looking Ahead

As agentic workflows and multi-step model interactions become the standard, a 'fail-closed' runtime security posture is no longer optional; it is foundational. The integration of Prisma AIRS API and Databricks Unity AI Gateway marks a definitive shift toward a future where enterprise AI is secure by default.  By integrating Prisma AIRS API with the Databricks platform through Unity AI Gateway, organizations can centrally govern AI across models, agents, applications, and MCP servers while enforcing consistent runtime security policies. Together, Databricks and Palo Alto Networks are helping customers scale AI innovation with the control, visibility, and protection required for the agentic era.

Are you ready to secure your AI workloads and agentic applications?
check out the latest Databricks blog and stay tuned for technical deep-dive sessions coming soon.

 

Forward-Looking Statements

This blog contains forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions, including, without limitation, statements regarding the benefits, impact, or performance or potential benefits, impact or performance of our products and technologies or future products and technologies. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance, and there are a significant number of factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from statements made in this blog. We identify certain important risks and uncertainties that could affect our results and performance in our most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K, our most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q, and our other filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission from time-to-time, each of which are available on our website at investors.paloaltonetworks.com and on the SEC's website at www.sec.gov.  All forward-looking statements in this blog are based on information available to us as of the date hereof, and we do not assume any obligation to update the forward-looking statements provided to reflect events that occur or circumstances that exist after the date on which they were made.

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