Expand Strategic Collaboration to Secure the AI Enterprise

The transition from generative AI to agentic AI represents one of the most significant shifts in the history of enterprise technology. As organizations move from simple chatbots to autonomous agents that can execute business processes, the attack surface isn't just changing, it's exploding.

At Google Cloud Next 2026 in Las Vegas, Palo Alto Networks is proud to announce a series of groundbreaking integrations with Google Cloud. These innovations are designed to do more than just monitor the new AI-driven landscape; they are built to secure it by design. AI deployment is currently outpacing AI governance. By embedding our security platform into Google Cloud’s infrastructure, we are giving today’s enterprises the foundation to become the autonomous organizations of tomorrow.

Here is a look at the four major milestones of our partnership being unveiled this week.

Secure AI Agents with Google Cloud + Prisma AIRS

As autonomous AI agents become the new enterprise standard, security can no longer be an afterthought; it must be architectural. By integrating Prisma AIRS™ natively with Google Cloud Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, we provide the proactive defenses required to govern complex agentic workflows. This integration ensures that as you scale your autonomous workforce, your security scales with it, providing comprehensive operational integrity without hindering the speed of innovation.

We are delivering capabilities across three critical pillars:

• Protecting Agent-Specific Runtime Risks: In an agentic ecosystem, the primary risk is unauthorized or a destructive action taken by the AI agents themselves. Prisma AIRS secures the "agent-to-tool" interface, preventing poisoned context from triggering malicious scripts or destructive actions. The solution monitors agent execution in real-time, so agents cannot leak sensitive credentials or tool schemas, maintaining the boundary between agents and their access to enterprise data.
• Securing the GenAI Application Surface: Modern AI applications and agents require a secure-by-design approach. Prisma AIRS AI Runtime Security™ provides prevention of more than 30 adversarial prompt injection and jailbreak techniques, as well as malicious code and URLs within LLM outputs. Prisma AIRS utilizes over 1,000 predefined patterns out of the box and ML-powered Enterprise DLP to stop sensitive data leakage.
• Enforcing Enterprise AI Safety and Grounding: Trust in AI is built on the consistency and safety of its output. Prisma AIRS allows organizations to define safety policies in natural language and filter toxic content across eight distinct categories to protect brand reputation. Using contextual grounding, Prisma AIRS can prevent misleading outputs that contradict internal RAG data, keeping agents tied to real facts.

This integration ensures that as you scale your autonomous workforce, your security posture scales with it, providing operational integrity without hindering the speed of innovation.

Security-as-Code for Prisma AIRS Integration with Application Design Center (ADC)

The traditional bolt-on approach to security is no longer viable in a cloud-first world. Google Cloud’s Application Design Center (ADC) is revolutionizing how applications are built, using an intuitive canvas and natural language via Gemini Code Assist.

Palo Alto Networks is announcing that it will be published as a template within the Application Design Center, providing more capabilities to engineering teams:

• Drag-and-Drop Security – Visually "snap" VM-Series firewalls and Prisma AIRS AI protections directly into network flows.
• AI-Driven Architecture – Use natural language prompts to generate secure-by-default, multiregion architectures.
• Simultaneous Deployment – Deploy entire application stacks and security services in a single, unified workflow, ensuring protection is present from the very first minute of deployment.

Zero-Day Protection at Scale with Advanced Malware Sandboxing for Google Cloud NGFW Enterprise

The battle against malware has shifted to the cloud. Modern attacks are faster, more evasive and capable of bypassing traditional defenses.

That is why we are excited to announce Advanced WildFire^®, powered by Palo Alto Networks, natively integrated into Google Cloud NGFW Enterprise, delivering AI-driven malware prevention directly within Google Cloud environments.

This integration embeds inline sandboxing and real-time threat intelligence directly into Google Cloud’s distributed firewall to stop advanced and unknown threats before they impact workloads, enabling:

• Secure Detonation – Suspicious files are safely executed in a controlled sandbox environment to uncover hidden and unknown threats.
• Inline Traffic Inspection – Inbound and outbound traffic is analyzed in real time to prevent lateral movement of malicious payloads across cloud environments.
• AI-Driven Threat Prevention – Leverages global threat intelligence by Palo Alto Networks to block zero-day threats before they compromise workloads.

With Advanced WildFire embedded directly into Google Cloud NGFW Enterprise, organizations can extend consistent protection across their cloud infrastructure while maintaining operational simplicity.

Cloud NGFW Enterprise Advanced Malware Sandboxing will be available in Public Preview soon.

Defining the Future with the Google Cloud Marketplace

Palo Alto Networks has joined the Google Cloud Marketplace Agent-as-a-Service as a launch partner to introduce the Prisma AIRS Model Security agent. Operating as an Agent-as-a-Service, this solution scans AI models for vulnerabilities and policy noncompliance before they reach production.

Available in the Agent Gallery inside Gemini Enterprise, this marketplace offering runs entirely within the customer’s own Google Cloud environment, providing both new and existing Prisma AIRS users a seamless and simple deployment experience inside Gemini Enterprise.

Securing AI Innovation at Scale

The collaboration between Palo Alto Networks and Google Cloud is built on a shared vision: Security should be an accelerator for innovation, not a bottleneck. As we look toward the future of the AI-powered enterprise, our commitment remains to provide the most robust, platform-driven security for every workload, every agent and every interaction.

Want to see these integrations in action? Contact your Palo Alto Networks representative to learn more about how we are securing the future of the cloud together. If you’re attending Google Cloud Next 2026, join us at these sponsored sessions:

• Wednesday, April 22 @ 12:30 PM - 1:15 PM
  The AI-Ready Enterprise: Securing Access and Data in an AI-first World
• Thursday, April 23 @ 9:15 AM - 10:00 AM
  Securing and managing Agentic AI at scale: What Google and Palo Alto Networks are building together
  Munish Khetrapal, vice president of Cloud Engagement, GCP - Palo Alto Networks
  Mike Buratowski, deputy chief information security officer - The Home Depot
  
• Thursday, April 23 @ 9:15 AM - 10:00 AM
  The agentic era: Governing an invisible AI workforce
• Thursday, April 23 @ 12:00 PM - 12:45 PM
  The AI Attack Surface: Strategizing Defense for the modern AI-Powered Enterprise

The post Palo Alto Networks and Google Cloud appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.

The Google Cloud and Palo Alto Networks Partnership

As AI agents move into business-critical environments, they are transforming everything from security operations to internal workflows. However, scaling these AI applications introduces unprecedented hurdles for security executives, from detecting "shadow AI" and unsanctioned usage to governing complex nonhuman identities across multimodel environments.

To overcome these challenges, organizations need more than just tools; they need a layered architecture built on a foundation of platformization. The long-standing partnership between Palo Alto Networks and Google Cloud provides this essential framework, offering customers:

• Integrated Security Ecosystems: Seamlessly manage the full agent lifecycle with visibility and observability across your entire AI infrastructure.
• Jointly Engineered Solutions: Leverage over 80 co-engineered integrations designed to eliminate the tradeoff between a cloud-native experience and best-in-class security.
• Proven Scale and Performance: Benefit from a partnership that has already delivered impactful, AI-driven solutions to protect joint customers from evolving threats.

Google Cloud Marketplace enables customers to discover, try, buy and use industry-leading applications that have been validated to run on Google Cloud. Palo Alto Networks has closed $2.4 billion in GCP bookings, helping address evolving customer needs, such as simplified procurement and seamless deployment.

Kevin Ichhpurani, President, Global Partner Ecosystem at Google Cloud:

We’re pleased to celebrate Palo Alto Networks as our Global Technology Partner of the Year… Palo Alto Networks has consistently delivered impactful, AI-driven security solutions that help Google Cloud customers better protect their organizations from evolving threats.

The extensive, long-standing collaboration between Palo Alto Networks and Google Cloud includes jointly engineered offerings, built on 80 solution integrations that help customers build, run and secure AI-enhanced cloud infrastructure and applications with end-to-end protection.

Palo Alto Networks Wins 2026 Global Technology Google Cloud Partner of the Year Award

At Google Cloud Next, Palo Alto Networks has been recognized with four 2026 Google Cloud Partner of the Year awards. By partnering with Google Cloud, we help customers securely leverage the power of the cloud and AI-driven growth with comprehensive cloud-native security offerings. Wins included the following:

• Global Technology
• Marketplace: Technology
• Marketplace: Security
• Security: Artificial Intelligence

These Partner of the Year Awards underscore our expanding partnership with Google Cloud. We share a mutual dedication to improve cloud, network security and AI observability, as well as the progress we’ve made in protecting our joint customers from today’s and tomorrow’s cyberthreats.

By combining our industry-leading security engineering with Google Cloud’s industry-leading cloud infrastructure and services, we’re providing advanced protection for every stage of a customer’s digital journey. We want customers to feel secure from the formative steps of lifting workloads into the cloud, to expanding digital innovation across platforms, to reaching new levels of business scale and velocity.

Protecting these journeys requires alignment and modernization of infrastructure (lift and shift), applications (refactoring) and user access models (zero trust). It requires an advanced AI drive security operations transformation across all IT domains, leveraging machine learning and sophisticated models to minimize human interventions and unguarded sides.

Our relationship with Google Cloud is based on a deep engineering relationship, yielding integrated solutions that help customers achieve better digital outcomes. Our partnership can help your organization eliminate tradeoffs between a cloud-native experience and best-in-class security. We have more than 80 co-engineered integrations, helping to improve and protect hybrid workers, cloud migrations and application modernization efforts.

We remain committed to our goals of outpacing cyberthreats, helping customers at every stage of their cloud journey, and creating a world where tomorrow is more secure than today.

Whether you’re just beginning your cloud journey or managing complex transformational projects, our jointly engineered, AI-driven solutions are designed to deliver seamless, scalable security. Explore the dynamic partnership between Palo Alto Networks and Google Cloud. Join us at Google Cloud Next '26 in Las Vegas from April 22-24 to discover how to secure your development lifecycle from code to cloud.

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The release of the newest frontier AI models marks a turning point for cybersecurity. Palo Alto Networks has conducted early testing of the latest frontier AI models, including Anthropic’s Mythos model as part of Project Glasswing and OpenAI’s latest models as part of Trusted Access for Cyber program. The conclusion is clear: They are extraordinarily capable at finding vulnerabilities and generating corresponding exploits.

This generational improvement in coding ability directly translates to a significant advance in vulnerability discovery and exploit generation. These capabilities, however guardrailed, will not stay contained. Similar advances will appear across other major AI labs, Chinese models, and open source models. Attackers will find the seams in those guardrails. They will use advanced AI to discover zero-day vulnerabilities at scale, generate exploits in near real time, and develop autonomous attack agents unlike anything the industry has faced.

Within six months, advanced AI models with deep cybersecurity capabilities will become commonplace. Organizations that have not put appropriate safeguards in place will face an entirely new class of risk across their enterprise and critical infrastructure.

Frontier AI: A Quantum Leap in Code Fluency

As you have probably already seen, the latest unbounded models like Mythos represent roughly a 50% improvement in coding efficiency over Anthropic’s previous leading model. Palo Alto Networks has had early access to unbounded models and we’ve been able to leverage this vast improvement in coding to a quantum leap in scanning and offensive capability.

Hundreds of our best security engineers have been assessing these capabilities and developing best practices for using it effectively. The results revealed several core truths:

• Vulnerability discovery at scale: Frontier AI is exceptionally effective at identifying vulnerabilities in code. In less than three weeks, it accomplished the equivalent of a full year’s worth of penetration testing effort.
• Attack path determination: Perhaps more impressive than finding individual vulnerabilities, Frontier AI excels at vulnerability chaining, combining multiple lower-severity issues into critical-level exploit paths. For example, linking two medium-severity and one low-severity vulnerability into a single critical exploit.
• Full-stack logic analysis: Frontier AI can analyze the full exposure surface of applications, including SaaS and public-facing platforms, identifying logic-based vulnerabilities that traditional tools miss.

Impacts on the Cyber Landscape

Attackers have been using LLMs for years, but based on our testing of frontier AI models, there are three key areas where they will have a significant impact on the cybersecurity landscape:

1. The Vulnerability Deluge: Frontier AI models will dramatically accelerate the rate at which vulnerabilities are discovered, by defenders and attackers alike. This will be particularly acute in open source and critically, the flood of patches that follows will itself create risk. Every patch that is not applied immediately becomes a known, targetable vulnerability. Organizations will need to accelerate and automate their patching programs, rethink how they prioritize and apply patches, and ensure best-in-class protections are in place to mitigate vulnerability until they can be remediated.
2. Rise of Inside-Out Attacks: Recent supply chain attacks on tools like LiteLLM and Trivy demonstrate a growing pattern where attacks land adversaries inside an organization’s infrastructure, bypassing multiple conventional attack steps and reducing the number of prevention opportunities available to defenders. The rapid deployment of AI infrastructure has made this problem more acute as the AI supply chain, including runtime environments, communication infrastructure, and model dependencies, is often insufficiently protected. While open source usage and patching practices must become significantly more robust, organizations will need structural containment of potential attacks through zero trust, identity modernization, outbound connection restrictions and lateral movement protections.
3. Faster AI-Assisted Attack Cycles: I expect the most consequential shift with frontier AI models is the move from AI-assisted to AI-driven attacks. Attackers will build autonomous attack agents that dramatically compress attack cycle times. What once took days or weeks of skilled manual effort will soon be executed in minutes. This democratization of advanced attack capabilities means that defenders must match that speed with near-real-time detection and response, which is only possible with extensive AI and automation throughout security operations. Organizations whose Mean Time to Detection and Mean Time to Response are not measured in low single-digit minutes will be outpaced.

The Defenders Guide: Assessment, Protection, Platformization

The framework for defending against AI-driven threats is not completely new, but the standard for execution must be absolute. Organizations that are “mostly protected” are effectively unprotected. What follows is a phased approach – assessment, protection and platformization – that organizations should pursue in parallel to close gaps before attackers exploit them.

Assessment: Every organization should use the latest AI models to assess its entire code and application landscape and build a comprehensive asset and exposure inventory.

Key priorities:

• Leverage AI models to identify vulnerabilities across your codebase, applications and infrastructure before attackers do.
• Evaluate exposure with full context, including how vulnerabilities chain together to form critical exploit paths.
• Audit your open source supply chain, including AI infrastructure, runtime environments and model dependencies.
• Map your current sensor coverage. Detection, prevention and telemetry gaps represent critical blind spots.

Protect & Remediation: Remediating and reducing exposure is table-stakes. What in the past may have been difficult due to cross-organizational friction of finding and fixing at pace should now be accelerated with the c-suite attention of these new AI models. But this must go further and extend to comprehensive deployment of best-in-class attack prevention capabilities where the new standard is 100% coverage and optimization.

• XDR everywhere, with emphasis on real-time ML-based detection and prevention of attacks; all hosts on prem and cloud included.
• Agentic endpoint security to secure wide-scale adoption of vibe coding and AI security across the enterprise (e.g. Prisma AIRS and our recent acquisition of Koi is now a necessity for securing the agentic endpoint).
• With an average of 85% of work now happening in the browser, secure enterprise browsers with real-time security become a must-have for attack prevention.
• Zero trust and identity security are foundational to securing every user and every connection.

Real-Time Security Operations: With attack cycle times shrinking rapidly, the legacy approach to security operations simply doesn’t work. Disparate tools analyzing data in silos overlaid with manual processes must be replaced with AI and automation throughout. Cortex XSIAM, our AI-driven SOC platform, is what I consider to be the gold standard for how to take a next-generation approach to deliver MTTD and MTTR in single digit minutes.

• Attack detections must be AI/ML driven to detect even frequently-changing and novel attacks at scale.
• These AI detections must operate against a wide range of 1st party and 3rd party data sources – a best in class AI SOC must operate on ALL relevant data sources.
• Automation both natively integrated and throughout the SOC lifecycle is necessary to achieve single digit MTTR; this automation will increasingly be agentic.
• This must be delivered as a platform to remove the seams and gaps between point solutions.

We’re Here to Help

Achieving this level of resilience requires the right platforms and the right expertise.

To help you navigate this shift, we are introducing Unit 42 Frontier AI Defense. This new offering is designed to discover and remediate your current exposure before attackers do, strengthen controls that reduce exposure and contain impact and modernize operations so teams can detect and respond at machine speed.

This is the moment we’ve been preparing for. The threat has never been more sophisticated, but the path forward has never been clearer, and we’re here to partner with you on what comes next.

The post Defender's Guide to the Frontier AI Impact on Cybersecurity appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.

Frontier AI models have given the security industry a preview of what comes next. As they become weaponized, attackers will automate the discovery and chaining of vulnerabilities in near real-time – compressing timelines, increasing scale and outpacing human-led defense.

Until now, defenders have had time to detect activity, investigate signals and contain threats before exposures were chained into full attacks. AI is quickly closing this window.

Defending against AI-driven threats means engineering a resilient architecture that limits how easily attackers can exploit discovered weaknesses, that contains the blast radius when they do, and enables faster response at scale. It also means using AI to accelerate the security program itself, from vulnerability discovery and code review to triage, remediation and incident response.

The transition should cover three areas. First, discover and remediate your current exposure before attackers do. Second, strengthen controls that reduce exposure and contain impact. Third, modernize operations so teams can detect and respond in real-time.

To help organizations make this shift, Palo Alto Networks is launching Unit 42^® Frontier AI Defense.

Powered by the latest AI models, Unit 42 Frontier AI Defense helps organizations answer a critical question: Are your defenses ready for AI-powered attacks?

Unit 42 Frontier AI Defense combines three core components delivered by expert consultants, coupled with 6 months of complimentary access to Cortex^® XDR, Cortex Xpanse^® and Koi Agentic Security.

Frontier AI Exposure Analysis: Identify and validate the exposures most likely to be chained into real attacks before attackers weaponize them.

Actions

• • Use the latest frontier models, Unit 42 offensive security expertise, threat telemetry and Unit 42 Threat Intelligence to assess your environment.
  • Identify the vulnerabilities, misconfigurations and posture gaps most likely to be exploited across infrastructure, applications, code, identity and cloud.
  • Validate the attack paths most likely to matter in real-world attacks.

Outputs

• • A prioritized view of vulnerabilities and attack paths that matter most
  • Clear actions to fix the exposures that matter first

Autonomous Security Blueprint: Benchmark current capabilities and define the changes required for machine-speed defense.

Actions

• • Assess current-state capabilities across attack surface, identity, software supply chain, zero trust containment, as well as real-time detection and response.
  • Identify where AI-powered threats create the greatest exposure and where current controls are most likely to fail.
  • Define the technical and operational changes required to close those gaps.

Outputs

• • A clear blueprint for immediate action
  • A prioritized roadmap to reduce exposure, strengthen containment and modernize security for the AI era

Agentic Defense Transformation: Implement the prioritized architecture, control and operating changes needed to modernize defenses for AI-driven threats.

Actions

• • Implement the architectural, operational and control changes required to defend against AI-driven threats.
  • Modernize exposure management, harden the software supply chain, and advance zero trust architecture.
  • Build response capabilities that can keep pace with autonomous attacks.

Outputs

• • Accelerated implementation of the changes that matter most
  • A more modern security architecture, built to reduce exposure and improve containment

The Window Is Still Open, for Now

AI is the biggest security inflection point since enterprises moved to the cloud. Organizations that act now will be the ones that are ready. Those that wait will be forced to respond under maximum pressure on the worst possible day.

Frontier AI is changing what is possible for attackers. In the hands of defenders, it can become a decisive advantage.

Human-speed security is no longer enough. A modern security approach is required. Get started with Unit 42 Frontier AI Defense today.

*The complimentary offer is not available to public sector customers or current Cortex XDR, Cortex Xpanse or Koi customers.

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

Our Commitment to Data Autonomy and National Resilience

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

The Path to Digital Autonomy, Resilience and Control

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

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

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

Control Over Your Data

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

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

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

How we handle different data categories:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transparency in Practice

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

Securing Critical National Infrastructure

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

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

Operational Resilience

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

Trust and Transparency

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

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

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

Strengthening Local Expertise with National Impact

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

A Partnership Built on Trust and Verifiable Commitments

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

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

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

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

Delivering Exceptional Branch Experience for Modern Distributed Enterprises

In modern enterprises, the "network perimeter" is a relic of the past. As organizations scale globally to support home offices, satellite branches and third-party clouds, the challenge has shifted. Now the onus is on optimizing the end-to-end digital experience. And to maintain that edge, enterprises must operate at machine speed, supported by agentic autonomous operations. They must make sure that every user, regardless of their location or underlying hardware, experiences uninterrupted performance, seamless security and peak user experience from “Day 0” to keep pace with the speed of business.

To meet this demand, we are proud to announce the general availability of the Autonomous Digital Experience Management Universal Agent, or ADEM Universal Agent, for Prisma^® Access customers. This breakthrough marks a significant milestone in our mission to automate deployment and operations by unifying fragmented infrastructure and providing the flexibility to deploy, using infrastructure hardware of your choice.

Continued Data Gap Is a Roadblock for Agentic Operations

Organizations are shifting toward "best-of-breed" architectures to operate at machine speed, but they often lack the unified telemetry required for automated operations. Any tool built on top of this architecture to enhance the digital experience is only as effective as the data it consumes. Traditional monitoring tools often lack the precise data and contextual correlation needed to drive agentic resolution. In this siloed landscape, three critical gaps have emerged:

• Data Entropy: Fragmented data is inconsistent and leads to unreliable automation. Without unified data, automated workflows become unreliable and risky to execute at scale.
• Hardware Dependency: Traditional monitoring agents often require specific hardware platforms, which can severely limit deployment speed and the ability to adapt to diverse customer infrastructures.
• Blind Spots: Data entropy and hardware dependency have resulted in data gaps, and therefore visibility gaps at the edge, and as a result, automated systems cannot pinpoint root causes, leaving IT teams trapped in manual troubleshooting.

To operate at machine speed, enterprises need more than visibility. They need a unified, high-fidelity data engine to create the foundation of fail-safe autonomous operations for a stellar digital experience.

The Universal Agent Contributes to a Unified Data Engine for Agentic Autonomy

The ADEM Universal Agent is a hardware-agnostic solution that can be deployed on any branch site connecting to Prisma Access. It can be hosted on virtual machines or Docker containers, regardless of the underlying infrastructure. ADEM Universal Agent transforms branch experiences by providing a unified data engine for agentic operations:

• Deploy Anywhere and Monitor Everywhere
  The Universal Agent can be deployed at any branch site connected to Prisma Access, enabling IT teams to run synthetic tests from the branch regardless of underlying infrastructure hardware.

• Bridge the Gap Between Vendor-Locked Silos and Machine-Speed Operations
  The Universal Agent aggregates disparate environment data into key metrics geared toward agentic operations, enabling IT teams to move beyond fragmented troubleshooting, toward unified, proactive governance of their entire IT footprint.

• Accelerate Troubleshooting with Granular Path Analysis
  When a user in a remote branch reports a slowdown, IT teams need more than a "red/green" status light. The Universal Agent provides a granular path analysis, delivering a hop-by-hop visualization with both overlay and underlay tunnel metrics, enabling them to quickly pinpoint bottlenecks.

Thus, by mapping the entire path from the Universal Agent to the target application, IT teams can pinpoint exactly where the friction lies.

• Is it a local network issue?
• An ISP (internet service provider) bottleneck?
• A bottleneck at a handoff between providers?
• Is the application's own network at fault?

The Universal Agent Offers Inherent Security and Operational Simplicity

To help ensure that organizations can maintain peak performance and security amidst a constant stream of changes, the Universal Agent is built on a foundation of robust features:

• Native Integration with Prisma Access for Accelerated Troubleshooting
  The Universal Agent is natively integrated with Prisma Access and automatically discovers the POP (Point of Presence) location and IP infrastructure where the branch site is connected to monitor overlay and underlay, hop-by-hop, ISP health, all the way to the application to deliver precise root-cause analysis.

• Simplified Deployment at Scale
  IT teams can deploy and manage multiple agents at scale with just a few clicks from the Strata™ Cloud Manager Platform. Through our autonomous AI operations platform, we leverage enriched telemetry to watch the network and proactively manage it all from a unified platform.

• Comprehensive Full-Stack Visibility
  We utilize a single agent per branch site to deliver deep visibility into both overlay and underlay tunnel metrics. This granular path analysis allows IT teams to pinpoint network bottlenecks using hop-by-hop visualizations from the Universal Agent all the way to the target application.

The Universal Agent Optimizes End-to-End Digital Experience with Unified Operations

The launch of the ADEM Universal Agent represents a fundamental shift in how we architect the distributed enterprise, from moving beyond managing data gaps into agentic, machine-speed orchestration. Natively integrated with Prisma Access, the Universal Agent synthesizes disparate network data across multiple branch sites into a unified, vendor-agnostic ecosystem. By eliminating the 'noise' of traditional monitoring, it provides the deterministic precision and real-time context required to fuel agentic autonomous operations, enabling every automated action to be accurate, impactful and optimized for a flawless digital experience.

Ready to gain complete application experience from all branch sites and remote users? Watch our announcement video below to see the Universal Agent in action. Visit the ADEM webpage for more information or request a demo.

The post Announcing ADEM Universal Agent appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.

The World Economic Forum’s Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2025 concurred that cyber risk is increasingly driven by operational complexity rather than lack of technology. As security environments expand, many organizations struggle with hands‑on skill gaps, slow issue resolution, and training that does not reflect how their environments de-facto operate. The result: higher operational risk – even in well‑equipped organizations.  To address these challenges, Check Point Services offers PS Private Training (Custom ILT): a tailored, instructor‑led program designed to strengthen operational mastery in real environments. The service replaces one‑size‑fits‑all instruction with customized training, hands‑on labs, and field‑proven best practices delivered by active Professional Services consultants, enabling […]

The post PS Private Training: Turning Cyber Complexity into Operational Control appeared first on Check Point Blog.

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

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

The Challenge: Visibility in a “Landscape”

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

The Strategic Mission: Empowering the Public Sector and Critical Industries

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

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

Aligning to National Cybersecurity Centre (NCSC) Guidance

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

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

Palo Alto Networks Cortex Xpanse Capabilities

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

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

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

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

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

Kaspersky Security Services provide a comprehensive cybersecurity ecosystem, taking enterprise threat protection to another level. Services like Kaspersky Managed Detection and Response and Compromise Assessment allow for timely detection of threats and cyberattacks. SOC Consulting provides a practical approach ensuring the corporate infrastructure stays secured, while Incident Response is suited for timely remediation with a maximized recovery rate.

This new report brings together statistics across regions and industries from our Managed Detection and Response and Incident Response services, and for the first time, it also includes insights from our Compromise Assessment and SOC Consulting services — all to provide you with more comprehensive view of different aspects of corporate information security worldwide.

The scope of MDR and IR services

Provision of Kaspersky’s MDR and IR services follows a global approach. The majority of customers accounted for the CIS (34.7%), the Middle East (20.1%), and Europe (18.6%).

MDR telemetry

Following the previous year’s numbers, in 2025, the MDR infrastructure received and processed an average of 15,000 telemetry events per host every day, generating security alerts as a result. These alerts are first processed by AI-powered detection logic, after which Kaspersky SOC analysts handle them as required. Overall, a total of approximately 400,000 alerts were generated in 2025. After counting out false positives, 39,000 alerts were further investigated.

Incident statistics

The distribution of remediation requests by industry has slightly changed as compared to previous years’ pattern. Government (18.5%) and industrial (16.6%) organizations are still the most targeted industries in regards to cyberattacks that require incident response activities. However, this year, the IT sector saw a growth in the number of IR requests, eventually being placed third in the overall industry distribution rankings and thus replacing financial organizations, which were targeted less often than in 2024. This is equally true for smaller-scale attacks that can be contained and remediated through automated means — the only difference is that medium- and low-severity incidents are more often experienced by financial organizations.

Key trends and statistics

This section presents key findings and trends in cyberattacks in 2025:

• The number of high-severity incidents decreased, following a downward trend that we’ve been observing since 2021. The majority of those incidents account for APT attacks and red teaming exercises, which indicates two landscape trends. On the one hand, skilled adversaries make efforts to increase impact, while on the other, organizations spend more resources on probing their defense systems.
• The most common vulnerabilities exploited in the wild were related to Microsoft products. Half of all identified CVEs led to remote code execution, notably without authentication in some cases.
• Exploitation of public-facing applications, valid accounts, and trusted relationships remain the most popular initial vectors, and their overall share has increased, accounting to over 80% of all attacks in 2025. In particular, attacks through trusted relationships are evolving: their share has increased to 15.5% from 12.8% in 2024. They are also becoming more complex: for instance, we witnessed a case where adversaries had compromised more than two organizations in sequence to ultimately gain access to a third target.
• Standard Windows utilities remain a popular LotL tool. Adversaries use those to minimize the risk of detection during delivery to a compromised system. The most popular LOLBins we observed in high-severity incidents were powershell.exe (14.4%), rundll32.exe (5.9%), and mshta.exe (3.8%). Among the most popular legitimate tools used in incidents we flag Mimikatz (14.3%), PowerShell (8.1%), PsExec (7.5%), and AnyDesk (7.5%).

The full 2026 Global Report provides additional information about cyberattacks, including real-world cases discovered by Kaspersky experts. We also describe SOC Consulting projects and Compromise Assessment requests. The report includes comprehensive analysis of initial attack vectors in correlation with the MITRE ATT&CK tactics and techniques and the full list of vulnerabilities that we detected during Incident Response engagements.

Kaspersky Security Services provide a comprehensive cybersecurity ecosystem, taking enterprise threat protection to another level. Services like Kaspersky Managed Detection and Response and Compromise Assessment allow for timely detection of threats and cyberattacks. SOC Consulting provides a practical approach ensuring the corporate infrastructure stays secured, while Incident Response is suited for timely remediation with a maximized recovery rate.

This new report brings together statistics across regions and industries from our Managed Detection and Response and Incident Response services, and for the first time, it also includes insights from our Compromise Assessment and SOC Consulting services — all to provide you with more comprehensive view of different aspects of corporate information security worldwide.

The scope of MDR and IR services

Provision of Kaspersky’s MDR and IR services follows a global approach. The majority of customers accounted for the CIS (34.7%), the Middle East (20.1%), and Europe (18.6%).

MDR telemetry

Following the previous year’s numbers, in 2025, the MDR infrastructure received and processed an average of 15,000 telemetry events per host every day, generating security alerts as a result. These alerts are first processed by AI-powered detection logic, after which Kaspersky SOC analysts handle them as required. Overall, a total of approximately 400,000 alerts were generated in 2025. After counting out false positives, 39,000 alerts were further investigated.

Incident statistics

The distribution of remediation requests by industry has slightly changed as compared to previous years’ pattern. Government (18.5%) and industrial (16.6%) organizations are still the most targeted industries in regards to cyberattacks that require incident response activities. However, this year, the IT sector saw a growth in the number of IR requests, eventually being placed third in the overall industry distribution rankings and thus replacing financial organizations, which were targeted less often than in 2024. This is equally true for smaller-scale attacks that can be contained and remediated through automated means — the only difference is that medium- and low-severity incidents are more often experienced by financial organizations.

Key trends and statistics

This section presents key findings and trends in cyberattacks in 2025:

• The number of high-severity incidents decreased, following a downward trend that we’ve been observing since 2021. The majority of those incidents account for APT attacks and red teaming exercises, which indicates two landscape trends. On the one hand, skilled adversaries make efforts to increase impact, while on the other, organizations spend more resources on probing their defense systems.
• The most common vulnerabilities exploited in the wild were related to Microsoft products. Half of all identified CVEs led to remote code execution, notably without authentication in some cases.
• Exploitation of public-facing applications, valid accounts, and trusted relationships remain the most popular initial vectors, and their overall share has increased, accounting to over 80% of all attacks in 2025. In particular, attacks through trusted relationships are evolving: their share has increased to 15.5% from 12.8% in 2024. They are also becoming more complex: for instance, we witnessed a case where adversaries had compromised more than two organizations in sequence to ultimately gain access to a third target.
• Standard Windows utilities remain a popular LotL tool. Adversaries use those to minimize the risk of detection during delivery to a compromised system. The most popular LOLBins we observed in high-severity incidents were powershell.exe (14.4%), rundll32.exe (5.9%), and mshta.exe (3.8%). Among the most popular legitimate tools used in incidents we flag Mimikatz (14.3%), PowerShell (8.1%), PsExec (7.5%), and AnyDesk (7.5%).

The full 2026 Global Report provides additional information about cyberattacks, including real-world cases discovered by Kaspersky experts. We also describe SOC Consulting projects and Compromise Assessment requests. The report includes comprehensive analysis of initial attack vectors in correlation with the MITRE ATT&CK tactics and techniques and the full list of vulnerabilities that we detected during Incident Response engagements.