For the last several months, we have had early, unbounded access to the latest frontier AI models. What we’ve seen from that vantage point has made it clear that the window for organizations to get ahead of what’s coming is shorter than most leaders realize.
We have moved past the era of incremental AI improvements into a threat landscape shift. Our testing has revealed a step-change in capability that demonstrates an intuitive understanding of software vulnerabilities. This is more than faster code generation, it is a shift from AI as an assistant to AI as an autonomous agent capable of discovering and chaining flaws at a scale that most defenders aren’t prepared for.
These capabilities will not stay confined to controlled environments for long. When Mythos first launched, we predicted a six-month window before attackers gained access. We now believe that timeline has accelerated significantly.
To meet this inflection point, defense must operate at the speed of the adversary. That is why Palo Alto Networks has introduced Frontier AI Defense. This initiative unites our AI-native security platforms with Unit 42® consulting and threat expertise with strategic partners to deliver continuous protection, prioritized risk mitigation and autonomous remediation.
What the Threat Looks Like Now
The latest frontier models, including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5-Cyber, Anthropic’s Mythos and Claude Opus 4.7, and the specialized variants emerging across major labs, represent roughly a 50% improvement in coding efficiency over their predecessors. That number sounds incremental, but in practice, it’s the threshold at which AI crosses from a helpful assistant into an autonomous operator.
Based on our testing and review, we found four key developments that, taken together, redefine the modern threat landscape:
Vulnerability Discovery at Scale: Frontier AI is exceptionally effective at identifying vulnerabilities across massive, complex codebases. In our testing, three weeks of model-assisted analysis matched a full year of manual penetration testing, with broader coverage.
Exploit Chaining & Synthesis: What is more consequential than individual discovery is the models’ ability to think like an attacker. They link multiple lower-severity issues into single, critical exploit paths, seeing full-stack logic, including SaaS and public-facing surfaces, in ways traditional scanners cannot.
Attack Cycle Compression: In AI-assisted scenarios, the time from initial access to exfiltration has collapsed to as little as 25 minutes. Detection and response measured in hours is no longer a viable standard; single-digit MTTR (Mean Time to Respond) is the new floor.
The Unsupervised Attack Surface: Rapid AI development and decentralized innovation are creating a massive, unsupervised attack surface in real-time. As local AI agents become commonplace, every desktop is now effectively a server, yet most organizations lack visibility into the code their own employees are generating and deploying.
Our Approach
These emerging threats form the foundation of how we have architected our platform response for the agentic era – Frontier AI Defense. Our approach moves beyond traditional, reactive defense to provide a comprehensive framework built to outpace frontier-AI-enabled attackers. This initiative is defined by:
Advanced Access: We leverage early access to frontier AI models to harden defenses and simulate attacks before they reach the mainstream.
Intelligence-Led Resilience: Unit 42 experts leverage frontier AI to fast-track discovery and remediation of exposures at machine speed through our Unit 42 Frontier AI Defense service.
Unified Global Ecosystem: We provide the scale required for global protection through our Frontier AI Alliance of elite partners, including Accenture, Armadin, Deloitte, IBM, NTT DATA, and PwC.
Machine Speed Security: By natively integrating Frontier AI across our platforms, we deliver the automated, real-time defense necessary to counter autonomous threats.
The Window Is Open. It Won’t Be for Long.
The capabilities we tested under early-access conditions are expected to become widely available over the next several months. Success in this new environment requires adapting your cybersecurity stack before these tools are in the hands of every adversary.
The threat has never been more sophisticated. The window to prepare for this shift is closing. And we're here to help secure your future at the edge of the frontier.
Modern phishing campaigns are no longer trying to convince users. They are trying to outrun them. By forcing an automatic progression from click to download, attackers eliminate the moment of hesitation entirely by forcing files to download instantly using trusted cloud platforms like Dropbox and Google Drive.
Detecting when these legitimate SaaS auto-download features are being weaponized is an immense challenge for traditional defenses. This is exactly where Cortex® Email Security steps in. By combining deep static analysis with advanced behavioral intelligence, the module can distinguish in this attack between a benign file share and a malicious, forced-momentum trigger.
This technical detection is vital because while the autodownload method is the primary cause of infection, its effectiveness relies on a clever strategy, using a wide range of changing social engineering lures. By alternating between lures like 'Invoices' or 'Quotes,' attackers rotate their themes to catch a wider variety of victims. This strategy allows attackers to convert trusted email links into rapid, dangerous file executions that effectively evade standard security measures.
How Forced Momentum Drives Auto-Downloads
The core of this attack leverages the infrastructure of real SaaS providers to eliminate the user's preview buffer. Typically, cloud sharing directs users to a webpage for file examination. In this campaign, however, forced-download parameters (such as ?dl=1 on Dropbox) are used instead. To ensure the victim executes the file once it lands on their machine, attackers hide the danger behind "visual anchors." By using double extensions like PDF and .EXE, the threat actor exploits default settings in certain operating systems that hide known extensions. The user's eyes stop at the familiar ".PDF" or ".ZIP," leading them to believe the file is a harmless document rather than a malicious executable.
When the targeted victim clicks the link in the email, it triggers an immediate file download in the browser, effectively bypassing any intermediary steps.
Attack Flow: From Email to Execution
The Bait: A highly personalized email arrives, using a trusted cloud link (like Dropbox) to lower the victim's guard.
The Trap: Clicking the link skips the usual "preview" screen and instantly drops a file onto the victim's computer.
The Disguise: The file is cleverly named to look like a safe PDF or document, hiding its true identity as a harmful program.
The Lock: In many cases, the attacker ensures only the intended victim can open the file, preventing security tools from scanning it first.
The Takeover: Once the victim opens the file, the attacker gains remote access to the system.
Multi-step attack flow, starting from targeted phishing email, to bypass security and establish persistence.
The Library of Lures Strategy
To fuel the autodownload machine, attackers employ a flexible strategy by switching between various social engineering themes. This spear phishing campaign targets specific inboxes, such as "Orders," to exploit professional routines. Some common lures found in this campaign include:
Financial Urgency – Fake "Invoices" or "Receipts" that induce anxiety. These often set close-day payment deadlines, pressuring recipients to click quickly.
Business Operations – "Quote Requests" or "Purchase Orders" that exploit professional habits.
Deceptive Naming – Concealing the download as a safe document, using display text like "invoice.pdf" in the email body to hide the underlying Dropbox URL.
Government Domain Impersonation
Attackers often leverage high-authority lures designed to paralyze a user's critical thinking. In one sophisticated wave, we observed threats impersonating a government entity by exploiting the high-reputation, official government domain. By borrowing the reputational authority associated with official infrastructure, the attacker successfully maneuvered an "Unidentified Payment Notice" past standard "Untrusted Sender" filters. To the recipient, the email carries the weight of a sanctioned document. Fearing legal or financial ramifications, they feel a heightened sense of urgency to click "View Invoice" to resolve the issue immediately.
Employee Impersonation
When government authority isn’t the angle, attackers shift to impersonating internal staff. In one case, the sender’s display name was spoofed to match a real employee in the target organization. Attackers rely on a “Momentum of Trust” tied to familiar names to overwhelm user judgment. Even when a generic Gmail address is used, users, especially those on mobile devices, rarely pause to check the underlying headers.
Internal Trust Amplification ("Human Relay")
The most effective aspect of this campaign occurs through Internal Laundering, where the threat shifts from external suspicion to a trusted internal message. This was observed when a Finance Department employee received a "Quote Analysis" file and, believing it to be a valid inquiry, mistakenly forwarded the link to the Procurement department.
At that stage, the attack no longer depended on deception, it propagated through trusted human workflows. These various tactics illustrate the sophistication and adaptability of phishing campaigns and highlight the importance of vigilance in email security.
How We Uncovered a Single Threat Actor
Although the lures appeared diverse, a deeper technical analysis revealed that they were all orchestrated by a single, coordinated threat actor.
By mapping the campaign, we uncovered a significant pattern: Each autodownload link pointed to a different file hash to evade signature detection, but all unique executables were ultimately associated with the same parent installer hash.
The file was identified as a specific Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) executable, an administrative software used to manage computers remotely. Because RMM tools are legitimate, they often trigger fewer alerts than traditional Trojans. This allows the attacker to maintain persistent access under the guise of “authorized” system activity.
How Cortex Email Security Addresses the Threat
To defend against a campaign that emphasizes speed and rotation, behavioral analysis is essential.
The Cortex® Email Security Module addresses this threat:
Advanced URL Analysis – Detection of forced-download parameters, combined with delivery of high-risk files via URLs.
Deep Metadata Correlation– Correlating sender identity with behavioral anomalies to flag threats that traditional scanners might overlook.
The security engine triggers an alert by synthesizing LLM analysis with real-time email telemetry, global threat intelligence and behavioral signals.
Securing the Click
The combination of autodownload links and rotating lures is crafted to exploit user momentum and the "psychology of trust."
This campaign represents a shift from deception to acceleration. Attackers no longer need perfect lures, they only need to remove friction. Defenders must evolve accordingly, focusing not only on what a link is, but on what it forces a user to do.
Palo Alto Networks Cortex Advanced Email Security was built for this evolution. By moving beyond static file analysis to identify the behavioral "red flags" of autodownloads and forced-momentum URLs, we provide the visibility needed to stop these attacks before they reach the device.
The module examines email metadata, content, and behavior to uncover hidden malicious intent and sophisticated impersonation, including AI-crafted threats. By assigning precise risk scores to every detection, the system filters out the noise, allowing analysts to move past alert fatigue and focus on the most critical threats first.
Why is the "Auto-Download" parameter so effective? It removes the "moment of doubt." By bypassing the preview page, the attacker forces the file onto the computer instantly, prompting the user to "Open" it out of habit.
How does the use of rotating lures benefit the attacker? It maximizes both psychological and technical success. People have different "blind spots" (e.g., finance professionals are likely to click on invoices), and variety increases the chances of finding a template that can bypass specific customers' security filters.
Why might a sandbox fail to catch the malicious file? Because the link was "Identity-Bound." To the scanner, the link appeared to lead to a harmless error page (cloaking), resulting in a false negative.
Cloaking involves showing different content to security scanners than what is presented to the victim. By using Identity-Bound access, the file only reveals itself to the intended target.
Frontier AI is changing what is possible for attackers. To meet this escalating threat, Palo Alto Networks is teaming up with Armadin, the new offensive security company founded by Kevin Mandia. This partnership expands our newly introduced Unit 42 Frontier AI Defense service, scaling our ability to identify and remediate AI-driven exposures, and accelerating protection across the enterprise.
Over the past few weeks, we’ve spoken with hundreds of CISOs who universally feel the urgency on the frontlines. Security leaders need to know exactly where they stand against the AI-driven attacks happening right now, and the ones coming in the next six months.
Expanding Frontier AI Defense — The External AI Hyperattack Assessment
For organizations seeking to actively pressure-test their perimeter, this partnership introduces an autonomous, AI-driven offensive assessment of your external attack surface.
This added layer identifies real attack paths and proves exploitability across internet-facing assets. The platform begins with passive discovery, validating publicly exposed assets, cloud resources and secrets. Next, Armadin deploys a coordinated swarm of autonomous AI attack agents, operating at machine speed across your external footprint.
These agents execute active reconnaissance, launch attacks and exploit vulnerabilities in parallel, using over 50,000 templates. Upon initial access, the swarm simulates post-exploitation behavior to demonstrate impact, logging every attack chain as decision-grade evidence of exploitable risk.
Decision-Grade Proof of Exploitable Risk
With this added layer of autonomous simulation, Unit 42 Frontier AI Defense provides an even more rigorous, pressure-tested view of an organization's external attack surface. This allows our experts to accurately simulate the tradecraft of the most capable, AI-equipped threat actors, compressing complex attack lifecycles from days into minutes.
AI may change what is possible for attackers, but in the hands of defenders, it becomes a decisive advantage. This partnership is another important step in making sure that advantage stays with the defenders.
A member of Project Glasswing and OpenAI’s Trusted Access for Cyber (TAC) program, Palo Alto Networks remains the only company equipped to deliver this strategic level of partnership through Unit 42 Frontier AI Defense and the Frontier AI Alliance, driven to integrate cutting-edge technologies into our products and services.
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:
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
ADEM Universal Agent at a glance.
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.
Native integration with Prisma Access.
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.
Bulk deployment of Universal Agent with just a few clicks.
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.
Hop-by-hop visualization with overlay and underlay tunnel metrics.
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 theADEM webpage for more information orrequest a demo.
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.
Palo Alto Networks, ServiceNow, and Bell Canada have come together in a strategic collaboration to build an innovative ServiceNow application that creates an automated bridge between world-class security operations and industry-leading service management.
Large enterprises need robust security at cloud speed, but operational complexity keeps getting in the way. Here’s what that looks like in practice:
Operations teams juggle multiple dashboards. When an issue surfaces, they are bouncing between the Prisma® SASE (secure access service edge) console to identify the incident, ServiceNow to log the case, and a customer support portal to escalate the issue. Every handoff inflates MTTR (mean time to resolution) and introduces room for error.
Customers are stuck in a deployment purgatory. Manual infrastructure configuration, connector setup, and mobile user onboarding can stretch on for weeks or months. Every day spent wrestling with configuration files is a day that value isn’t delivered.
Multi-tenant management doesn’t scale. If operational overhead grows linearly with each new tenant, the business model ultimately caps itself.
Bell Canada, through its innovative and security-first approach in the Canadian market, is a lighthouse partner that helped pioneer this innovation through its deep engagement with ServiceNow and a strategic partnership with Palo Alto Networks. With a strong focus on delivering exceptional customer value, Bell helped drive the vision for a simplified, scalable approach to SASE management.
Driven by their commitment to service excellence and customer outcomes, Bell worked closely with Palo Alto Networks and ServiceNow on this solution, accelerating customer time to value and simplifying operational complexity. Bell was among the first to champion this vision, acting as a market thought leader and helping shape a new standard for integrated SASE and service management outcomes in Canada.
Large Enterprises and Managed Service Providers can accelerate time to value by automating the entire lifecycle of Prisma SASE, from deployment to ongoing incident response through a newly launched Prisma SASE app on the ServiceNow store. The Prisma SASE app can accelerate MSP service delivery and management, significantly shrinking time to value and thereby positively impacting both top-line revenue and bottom-line EBITDA.
The Prisma SASE Platform Is Accelerating Value through Unified Automation and Platformization
Time to value (TTV) is one of the most critical metrics for IT teams helping customers move forward. With the Prisma SASE app, customers can go from implementation to go-live in just hours. There’s no need to build custom API integrations or take on technical debt for Day 0 to Day N operations. The app automates infrastructure setup, including ZTNA connectors and mobile user workflows, so providers can get their SASE offerings to market faster.
Optimizing Service Delivery through Unified Incident Lifecycle Management.
The joint solution eliminates swivel chair operations. Security and network administrators no longer need to toggle between the Prisma SASE console, ServiceNow and support portals. Incident ingestion and management now happen in one place. Incidents stay in sync, manual overhead drops, and mean time to resolution improves. For MSPs, there’s the added benefit: they can create Palo Alto Networks CSP (Customer Support Portal) tickets directly from the ServiceNow SASE app, making incident correlation and troubleshooting straightforward.
Drive Scalable Growth by Automating Cross-Instance Support with Service Exchange
ServiceNow’s Service Bridge is a major unlock for Managed Service Providers scaling their SASE offerings. It automates cross-instance support so critical security incidents and status updates flow between the MSP’s ServiceNow instance and the customer’s ServiceNow instance without manual sync work. This creates operational transparency and a better service experience for customers while MSPs can deliver faster without adding headcount or complexity.
Key Takeaways:
Rapid Time to Value: Shift from months of manual configuration to hours of automated deployment by leveraging out-of-the-box integrations that eliminate custom R&D and technical debt.
Unified Operational Excellence: Eliminate "swivel chair" management by unifying incident ingestion, ticket syncing and support portal escalation into a single ServiceNow interface, significantly reducing MTTR.
SASE at Scale: The Prisma SASE app provides a unified architecture that scales across tenants automatically, ensuring security keeps pace with business growth.
Take the Next Step
As you adopt SASE, take out the complexity of implementation with the Prisma SASE app.
Download the App: Visit the ServiceNow Store today and download the Prisma SASE app to start automating your deployment.
Meet Us at MWC: Are you heading to Barcelona forMobile World Congress (MWC)? Come see these integrations in action. Stop by the Palo Alto Networks booth (Hall 4, Stand D55) for a live demo and to chat with our experts about simplifying your SASE implementation.
Contact our sales team for any additional questions.
Traditional Security Is Blind to the Agentic Endpoint
Modern endpoints are no longer defined only by executables. Increasingly, endpoint behavior is shaped by non-binary software, such as code packages, browser extensions, IDE plugins, scripts, local servers (including MCP), containers and model artifacts. They are installed directly by employees and developers without centralized oversight. Because these components are not classic binaries, they often fall outside the visibility and control of traditional endpoint security tooling.
AI agents compound this problem. They are legitimate tools that operate with the user’s credentials and permissions, enabling them to read, write, move data and take privileged actions across systems. When compromised or misused, agents become the “ultimate insider.” They can autonomously discover, invoke and even install additional components at machine speed, accelerating risk across an already expanding, largely unmanaged software layer.
Weaponizing Trusted Automation
This is not a future concern. The recent viral emergence of OpenClaw serves as a cautionary tale for the agentic era. Developed by a single individual in just one week, it rapidly secured millions of downloads while gaining broad permissions across users' emails, filesystems and shells. Within days, researchers identified 135,000 exposed instances and more than 800 malicious skills in its marketplace, underscoring how a single unvetted agent can create an immediate, global attack surface.
OpenClaw is not an outlier. Recent research highlights how quickly this risk is materializing:
Vibe Coding Threats: An AI extension in VS Code was found leaking code from 1.5 million developers. This tool could read any open file and send it back to the developer, collect mass files without user interaction, and track users with commercial analytics SDKs.
Malicious MCP Server:Koi documented the first malicious Model Context Protocol (MCP) server in the wild. When developers added a specific skill to tools like Claude Code or Cursor, it silently forwarded every email to the plugin creator. What’s more, this capability was added later, after developers had already started using it.
Compounding this risk is the fact that autonomous agent actions are often difficult to trace or reconstruct, leaving Security Operations Centers (SOCs) without the visibility they need when an incident occurs.
A New Category of Protection
Complete endpoint security for the rapidly expanding risk of agentic AI calls for a new category of protection: Agentic Endpoint Security. That’s why we announced our intent to acquire Koi, a pioneer in this space. Koi is designed to eliminate blind spots across the AI-native ecosystem and help organizations govern agentic tools safely.
Its technology rests on three core pillars:
See All AI Software – Gain complete visibility into the AI tools, agents and non-binary software running in your environment.
Understand Risks – Continuously analyze and understand the intent and risk level of all software and AI agents.
Control the AI Ecosystem – Enforce policy in real-time to remediate issues and block risky behaviors.
Securing the Agentic Enterprise
We are convinced that Agentic Endpoint Security will soon become a standard requirement for enterprise security. Upon closing the proposed acquisition, we intend to integrate Koi’s capabilities across our platforms to help our customers secure the AI-native workspace.
The wave of AI agents approaching the enterprise cannot be held back. Instead, we must offer secure tools that enable companies to confidently embrace agentic innovation.
Forward-Looking Statements
This blog post contains forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties, and assumptions, including, but not limited to, statements regarding the anticipated benefits and impact of the proposed acquisition of Koi on Palo Alto Networks, Koi and their customers. There are a significant number of factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from statements made in this blog post, including, but not limited to: the effect of the announcement of the proposed acquisition on the parties’ commercial relationships and workforce; the ability to satisfy the conditions to the closing of the acquisition, including the receipt of required regulatory approvals; the ability to consummate the proposed acquisition on a timely basis or at all; significant and/or unanticipated difficulties, liabilities or expenditures relating to proposed transaction, risks related to disruption of management time from ongoing business operations due to the proposed acquisition and the ongoing integration of other recent acquisitions; our ability to effectively operate Koi’s operations and business following the closing, integrate Koi’s business and products into our products following the closing, and realize the anticipated synergies in the transaction in a timely manner or at all; changes in the fair value of our contingent consideration liability associated with acquisitions; developments and changes in general market, political, economic and business conditions; failure of our platformization product offerings; risks associated with managing our growth; risks associated with new product, subscription and support offerings; shifts in priorities or delays in the development or release of new product or subscription or other offerings or the failure to timely develop and achieve market acceptance of new products and subscriptions, as well as existing products, subscriptions and support offerings; failure of our product offerings or business strategies in general; defects, errors, or vulnerabilities in our products, subscriptions or support offerings; our customers’ purchasing decisions and the length of sales cycles; our ability to attract and retain new customers; developments and changes in general market, political, economic, and business conditions; our competition; our ability to acquire and integrate other companies, products, or technologies in a successful manner; our debt repayment obligations; and our share repurchase program, which may not be fully consummated or enhance shareholder value, and any share repurchases which could affect the price of our common stock.
Additional risks and uncertainties that could affect our financial results are included under the captions "Risk Factors" and "Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations" in our Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q filed with the SEC on November 20, 2025, which is available on our website at investors.paloaltonetworks.com and on the SEC's website at www.sec.gov. Additional information will also be set forth in other filings that we make with the SEC from time to time. All forward-looking statements in this blog post 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 window for defense has collapsed, and most SOCs weren’t built for the speed of today’s attacks. According to the 2026 Unit 42® Global Incident Response Report, some end-to-end attacks now unfold in under an hour. Attacks that used to take days or weeks now happen in minutes.
Most traditional SOC models are trapped in a cycle of alert overload, fragmented tools and limited engineering capacity that slow investigations and delay response. Traditional SIEM and MDR models were designed to react to alerts. They were not designed to continuously improve detections, correlations and response with threats that move at machine speed. Over time, that gap between attacker speed and defender capability keeps widening, and it’s exactly why we built Unit 42 Managed XSIAM 2.0 (MSIAM).
Today marks the availability of the next evolution of our managed SOC offering – one that reflects how modern security operations must run in today’s threat landscape. MSIAM 2.0 is built on Cortex XSIAM®, Palo Alto Networks SOC transformation platform, and operated by Unit 42 analysts, threat hunters, responders and SOC engineers who handle the most complex incidents in the world. With this solution, Unit 42 provides organizations with a 24/7 managed SOC that delivers continuous detection, investigation and full-cycle remediation across the entire attack surface while improving operations over time.
We don’t just manage alerts. Unit 42 continuously engineers detections, correlations and response playbooks within XSIAM, refining them as attacker behavior evolves. This ongoing engineering ensures defenses improve over time, driven by real-world incidents and frontline threat intelligence, not static rules that quickly fall behind.
Why Managed XSIAM 2.0 Is Different
Elite SOC on Day One
We want SOC teams up and running as fast as possible. Experts lead onboarding, data mapping and configuration, and then your managed SOC team takes responsibility for operating and optimizing XSIAM on a day-to-day basis. The result is a SOC that improves over time without adding operational burden.
Every Threat Exposed
Unit 42 goes beyond reactive monitoring with continuous, proactive threat hunting across the entire attack surface. When a new threat is found in the wild, we produce threat impact reports that show how those techniques apply to each customer’s environment. We then translate those insights into custom detections and automated response actions, while also monitoring and investigating the correlation rules your team creates. Both the global threat intelligence and your unique use cases are backed by our 24/7 analysis, closing gaps quickly and strengthening defenses over time.
We also now support both native and third-party EDR telemetry, so organizations can benefit from Unit 42 expertise and Cortex® AI-driven analytics, regardless of the security technologies they use today. This enables customers to receive the strongest possible managed defense now, while creating a natural, low-friction path toward deeper platform consolidation as their environment evolves.
Machine-Speed Response
When incidents escalate, we don’t just hand you a ticket; we take ownership. Collaborating with your team, we establish pre-authorized workflows to execute immediate responses across your entire environment, from endpoints and firewalls to identity and cloud. We pair the platform’s native speed with expert oversight. By validating threat context and business impact, every response action is precise and safe, giving you the confidence to unleash full-cycle remediation. This allows MSIAM 2.0 to move seamlessly from detection to resolution with both velocity and precision.
And we stand behind our solution with a Breach Response Guarantee. If a complex incident strikes, you have the world’s best responders in your corner with up to 250 hours of Unit 42 Incident Response included. This built-in coverage removes the administrative hurdles of crisis response, enabling our experts to immediately transition from monitoring to deep forensic investigation and complete eradication, so you can focus on recovery.
Proven in the Real World with the Green Bay Packers
Working with Unit 42 and the Cortex XSIAM platform, the Green Bay Packers modernized their security across a complex hybrid environment, demonstrating what Unit 42's managed services deliver in real-world operations. By consolidating telemetry and accelerating investigation and response, they reduced response times from hours to minutes, investigated 54% more alerts and saved over 120 hours of analyst time without adding headcount.
These outcomes reflect the key benefits of MSIAM: Unit 42 experts working to apply frontline intelligence as new attacker behavior emerges, translating it into reporting and tailored detections that improve response where it matters most. When a machine-speed platform is operated by experts handling real incidents every day, defenses continuously strengthen as threats evolve.
The Future of the SOC
Unit 42 MSIAM 2.0 helps your SOC operate as it should by combining AI-driven analytics and automation with expert-led operations and engineering. This combination provides teams with the confidence that their defenses are always on, always improving and ready when it matters most. That’s the SOC that security leaders need today, and the one we’re building for tomorrow.
MSIAM is now delivered through two service tiers, Pro and Premium. Organizations can start where they are and grow at their own pace. Pro provides AI-driven managed SOC operations with continuous detection, investigation and response. Premium extends into full-lifecycle SOC engineering, with designated experts and customized detections, automation and tailored response playbooks as your security maturity grows.
To learn more about Managed XSIAM 2.0, join us at Symphony 2026, a Palo Alto Networks premier virtual SOC event, where Unit 42 and Cortex® experts will share frontline threat intelligence from the new 2026 Unit 42 Incident Response Report alongside real-world SOC transformation insights from organizations operating at machine speed.
The enterprise security landscape has reached an inflection point. As organizations accelerate adoption of cloud, automation and artificial intelligence, identity has become the primary attack surface of the modern enterprise. Not because defenses have weakened, but because identities have multiplied and now operate continuously at machine speed, often with elevated access.
When attackers succeed today, it almost always starts with identity. Identity is now the number one attack vector. Eighty-seven percent of organizations experienced at least two successful, identity-centric breaches in the past 12 months. These breaches can lead to outages, regulatory exposure, financial loss and reputational damage.
This reality is why today marks such a pivotal moment. CyberArk is officially joining Palo Alto Networks. This step reflects a shared conviction that identity security is no longer a supporting function. To stay ahead of modern attackers, organizations need best-in-class identity security that is deeply integrated into their broader security strategy.
The Reality of the Modern Identity Attack Surface
For years, identity security focused on a relatively small population of human users, administrators and periodic access reviews. That model no longer matches reality.
Today’s enterprises depend on vast numbers of machine identities, including workloads, services, APIs and increasingly, autonomous AI agents. Machine identities now outnumber human identities by more than 80 to 1, while 75 percent of organizations acknowledge that their human identities are governed by outdated, overly permissive privileged models.
Attackers have adapted. Rather than breaking in through vulnerabilities, they increasingly log in using stolen credentials or by exploiting excessive, poorly governed access. Identity-based attacks have become the dominant breach vector because identity sprawl and standing privilege create opportunities that are difficult to detect with traditional tools.
Yet many identity programs remain fragmented. Access management, privileged access and governance often operate in silos, with delayed visibility and manual processes. Risk accumulates silently between reviews, leaving security teams reacting after the fact.
This is the problem CyberArk was built to solve.
Why Identity Security Must Be Continuous
Securing identities in this environment requires a fundamentally different approach. Identity risk changes constantly as new identities are created, permissions shift and systems scale dynamically. Controls must operate continuously, not episodically.
This means three things:
First, organizations need real-time visibility into who or what has access to critical systems across human, machine and AI identities.
Second, privilege must be applied dynamically. Access should be granted only when needed and removed automatically when it is no longer required. Standing privilege should be the exception, not the norm.
Third, governance must evolve from periodic compliance exercises to continuous enforcement that adapts as environments change.
This is the identity security vision that has guided CyberArk for decades and why joining Palo Alto Networks is such a natural next step.
Elevating Identity to a Core Platform
As part of Palo Alto Networks, CyberArk elevates identity security to a core platform pillar.
CyberArk’s Identity Security Platform is proven at enterprise scale and trusted to protect some of the world’s most critical environments. Our approach extends privileged access principles beyond a narrow set of administrators to every identity that matters.
By treating every identity as potentially privileged, organizations can dramatically reduce their attack surface. Excessive access is identified. Unnecessary privilege is removed. Attackers lose the ability to move laterally by using stolen credentials.
Elevating identity security to a platform level also enables tighter alignment with network security, cloud security and security operations. Identity becomes a powerful control plane that informs policy enforcement, detection and response across the enterprise, delivering a more complete and actionable view of risk.
Securing the AI-Driven Enterprise
This shift is especially critical as organizations deploy AI-driven systems and autonomous agents.
These systems often require persistent access to sensitive data and infrastructure, making them attractive targets for attackers and difficult to govern with legacy identity models. Most enterprises today lack effective identity security controls for machine and AI-driven systems, leaving these identities overprivileged and undergoverned.
Applying privileged access principles universally enables organizations to secure AI-driven environments without slowing innovation. Identity security becomes the trust layer that allows enterprises to scale AI responsibly, ensuring access is controlled, monitored and adjusted dynamically as systems evolve.
What This Means for Customers
For customers, elevating identity security to a core platform delivers tangible outcomes.
Organizations gain clearer insight into identity access and risk across human, machine and agentic identities. They gain stronger protection against credential-based attacks by limiting excessive privilege and reducing the paths that attackers rely on to move undetected. They also gain operational simplicity by replacing fragmented tools and manual governance with consistent, scalable controls.
Most importantly, customers gain confidence. Confidence to adopt cloud, automation and AI, knowing that identity risk is governed continuously. Confidence that security can keep pace with change rather than reacting after the fact.
Moving Forward
CyberArk’s Identity Security solutions will continue to be available as a standalone platform. Customers can rely on the solutions they trust today while benefiting from an accelerated roadmap focused on resilience, simplicity and improved security outcomes.
At the same time, integration is underway to bring CyberArk’s best-in-class identity security capabilities more deeply into the Palo Alto Networks security ecosystem. Our priority is to listen closely to customers, meet their immediate needs, and build the path forward together.
The AI era is redefining how enterprises operate and how attackers operate alongside them. Securing every identity, human, machine and AI agent is no longer optional. It is foundational.
By bringing CyberArk into Palo Alto Networks, we are taking a decisive step toward redefining identity security for the modern enterprise and helping our customers stay secure as they innovate at speed.
The rapid adoption of AI is transforming the enterprise, unlocking unprecedented productivity and accelerating workflows at a record pace. However, this velocity creates a new productivity paradox: The faster AI moves, the more it can expose the organization to entirely new categories of risk. Without specialized guardrails, unchecked AI can inadvertently bypass company policies, violate legal standards, or ignore ethical norms.
To bridge this gap, Glean, the Work AI platform, and Palo Alto Networks Prisma® AIRS have integrated to provide an essential security layer that empowers organizations to adopt generative AI with confidence, helping ensure that massive productivity gains never come at the cost of trust, security or compliance.
Glean and Prisma AIRS stop AI attacks in runtime.Prompt injection threat blocked in real time.
Real-Time Defense Against the Modern AI Threat Surface
Generic filters often fail to catch the sophisticated nuances of AI-driven attacks. The integration of Glean and Prisma AIRS provides a purpose-built defense that acts in real time across three critical areas:
1. Neutralizing Prompt Injection
Prompt injections are malicious instructions designed to trick AI models into ignoring their safety protocols, potentially leading to the exposure of sensitive data or the execution of unauthorized actions.
For instance, an attacker could craft a prompt that causes the AI to leak its own system instructions leading to data loss. Glean and Prisma AIRS instantly detect these sophisticated manipulation attempts, blocking the request and notifying the user before the organization's integrity is compromised.
2. Safeguarding Against Harmful and Toxic Content
AI interactions must remain professional, ethical and safe.
By scanning both user prompts and AI-generated responses against organizational policy, Glean and Prisma AIRS automatically block requests that contain toxic, biased, or otherwise harmful content. This enables AI to remain a positive and productive asset for the entire workforce.
3. Preventing Malicious Code and Unsafe URLs
AI models can sometimes generate unsafe code snippets, get data from a poisoned source, or provide harmful links that lead to phishing sites or malware downloads.
For example, a developer might ask an AI assistant for a code library to process data, and the model could inadvertently suggest a malicious package that compromises the application. The Glean and Palo Alto Networks integration provides a crucial safety net, inspecting all generated content for malicious patterns and preventing employees from interacting with risky URLs, keeping the entire AI-driven development and research lifecycle secure.
Secure AI in Minutes with Out of the Box Integration
The true power of the Glean and Palo Alto Networks partnership lies in its simplicity. We’ve removed the friction of complex security configurations, enabling organizations to realize value immediately through a seamless, out of the box integration.
Onboarding is completed in three simple steps within the Glean admin console:
Navigate to AI Security and select Palo Alto Networks AI Runtime Security.
Paste your Prisma AIRS Runtime Security API Key.
Click Save.
Activate Prisma AIRS from the Glean admin console.
With these three clicks, the integration is live, providing an invisible but invincible layer of defense across your AI chats and agent interactions.
Glean admin panel showcasing all findings.
Partnering for a Secure AI Future
As enterprises scale their AI initiatives, specialized security becomes non-negotiable. Prisma AIRS provides the advanced, granular protection needed to catch threats that standard vendors can often miss, and its integration with Glean delivers that protection exactly where work happens.
Drive productivity, foster innovation, and secure your future with Glean and Palo Alto Networks.
Key Takeaways
Real-Time Threat Mitigation: Instantly block prompt injections, toxic content, and malicious code, transforming AI from a risk factor into a secure asset.
Frictionless Deployment: Achieve comprehensive AI security in minutes with a simple, three-click API integration within the Glean console.
Time to value: Scale AI adoption across the enterprise by ensuring every interaction complies with internal policies and global safety standards.
The cybersecurity landscape continues to evolve at an extraordinary pace. AI-driven threats are expanding the attack surface, demanding faster, more precise responses and greater resilience. At the same time, customers want fewer vendors, deeper integrations and trusted advisers who can help them achieve positive, measurable outcomes and reduce unnecessary complexity.
Meeting these challenges and expectations requires a potent combination of world-class technology and world-class partnership. That’s why, in 2026, Palo Alto Networks is evolving our partner program and unifying it with our value exchange framework.
We are excited to share that we have rolled out new program features. The changes we’re introducing are designed to strengthen how we work with our ecosystem across every partner motion – from resale and cosell to delivery, support and managed services. The goal of this evolution is simple: Create clearer, more scalable paths for growth and mutual success.
Why We’re Evolving to Meet the Demands of a Changing Market
The same forces transforming the cybersecurity landscape are also changing what it means to be a successful partner. As customers reduce their reliance on disparate point solutions, choose to consolidate platforms and lean harder on AI-driven automation, they’re turning to partners for much more than technology procurement. They want design guidance, integration expertise and ongoing, outcome-focused support.
Our partners are also clear about what they need from us. They’ve asked Palo Alto Networks for a partner program that is simpler to engage with, more predictable in how it rewards impact, and more closely aligned with how they build and deliver value across resale, services and managed offerings. Our partners also seek less complexity and more room to differentiate through their own investments and innovation.
The evolution of our partner program is our response not only to feedback from our partners but also to extensive market research. It will bring greater structure where our partners seek consistency, greater flexibility in how and where they innovate, as well as greater transparency in how the value they deliver is recognized. These strategic changes will help ensure our mutual customers benefit the most when they work with our vast and diverse ecosystem in today’s platform-first, outcome-driven marketplace.
A Unified Growth Model = Partner Program + Value Exchange
Palo Alto Networks NextWave Partner Program and value exchange framework were designed to work together, not as separate tracks, but as one powerful engine for driving growth. This unified framework makes it easier for partners to engage with us and get the most from the partner program. It rewards impact, expertise and customer success rather than focusing narrowly on transactions.
This evolved model is built on the foundation of three guiding principles:
Predictability – Consistent expectations and program structures that support long-term planning.
Repeatability – Enablement and tools that help partners scale practices with confidence.
Profitability – Incentives, rebates and routes to growth tied directly to customer value.
The new framework can help partners build sustainable businesses while accelerating the adoption of platformized AI-powered security. Let’s take a look at the many benefits our partner ecosystem may experience through this reimagined program.
What Our Partners Can Expect
Our redesigned partner program enables greater alignment between the investments you make and the outcomes you achieve. Across Palo Alto Networks NextWave Partner Program, we’re strengthening how partners can scale, differentiate and grow their business with improvements in three key areas.
1. Access That Accelerates Scale
We’re expanding access to the tools and resources that can help partners reach customers faster and deliver solutions with confidence:
Broader on-demand learning and persona-based enablement.
Labs and demos that make it easier to showcase platform value.
Improved quoting tools and API-driven automation that can ease operational friction.
Enhanced support resources that improve quality delivery and the customer experience.
These and other capabilities can help reduce complexity and accelerate your ability to propose, design and deploy high-quality, platform-based solutions for customers.
2. Commitment That Reflects Intentional Investment
As the cybersecurity market evolves, so does the definition of partnership. Our newly evolved program introduces clearer expectations and meaningful rewards for partners who invest in specialization and growth. We’re raising the bar on the program’s standards:
Higher bookings and growth targets.
Increased specialization depth across key areas.
New targeted rebates aligned to value creation.
A strengthened global distribution strategy to support scale.
These enhancements will recognize partners who lean into the platform approach and drive meaningful impact for customers.
3. Profitability That Helps Fuel Long-Term Growth
A top priority for our updated program is helping partners build predictable, repeatable and profitable business practices in 2026 and beyond. Here are some of the measures we’re introducing:
Default service quoting (Authorized Support Center and Authorized Professional Services) to help strengthen delivery economics.
Programmatic discounts and improved quoting tools to speed sales cycles.
A new Partner Development Fund (PDF) to help partners build capabilities and pipeline.
Our aim is to create a more consistent, performance-driven model that supports partner strategy today and creates room for expansion tomorrow.
What These Changes Mean for Customers
A more connected and enabledpartner ecosystem doesn’t just benefit our partners. It elevates the entire customer experience.
Customers can expect smoother, simplified engagement with trusted cybersecurity advisers who speak the same language and share the same goals. And with greater consistency across sales, delivery and ongoing support, organizations won’t be saddled by complexity that slows transformation and makes it harder to adopt, build and deploy AI boldly yet safely.
Customers can also move forward with greater confidence in expanding their use of our Palo Alto Networks integrated, AI-driven cybersecurity platform, knowing their partners are equipped with the training, tools and know-how to help guide them every step of the way.
Driving Shared Success Through the Value Exchange
The value exchange in cybersecurity reinforces a principle that has long guided the approach of Palo Alto Networks to partnering: Growth follows value creation. It’s the foundation for how we work with our ecosystem, strengthening connections among partners, customers and our platform.
This is the power of a global ecosystem moving with purpose. When platform innovation, partner expertise and customer needs are aligned, everything moves faster and desired outcomes are more readily achieved. Deployments accelerate, architectures are simplified, and enterprises gain the resilient security postures needed to withstand the pressures of an AI-driven threat landscape.
What’s Next
We encourage you to review a set of short videos in The Learning Center for Partners, which provide more details about the planned changes to Palo Alto Networks NextWave Partner Program.
We believe the year ahead offers one of the most significant opportunities for innovation and growth our ecosystem has ever seen. By reimagining our partner program and value exchange framework, Palo Alto Networks is doubling down on the promise of our shared success, mutual growth and long-term value.
To our partners, thank you, as always, for your commitment, collaboration and belief in what we’re creating together. What’s ahead is more than an evolution of a long-standing and successful partner program. It’s a new era of partnering with precision to build the future of cybersecurity.
Key Takeaways
A reimagined partner program accelerates sustainable growth. Beginning in early February, a single, scalable framework will guide every partner motion and reward meaningful impact.
Partners have more ways to scale and differentiate. Expanded enablement, automation and incentives can help build stronger, more profitable practices.
Customers will benefit from more consistent experiences. A more aligned ecosystem enables simpler engagement, smoother delivery and increased confidence in the platform.
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 New Frontier of Agentic Development: Accelerating Developer Productivity
The world of software development is undergoing a rapid transformation, driven by the rise of AI agents and autonomous tools. Factory is advancing this shift through agent-native development, a new paradigm where developers focus on high-level design and agents, called Droids, handle the execution. Designed to support work across the software development lifecycle, these agents enable a new mode of development, delivering significant gains in speed and productivity, without sacrificing developer control.
As developer workflows increasingly rely on autonomous development agents, the way software is built evolves. This shift introduces important security considerations, such as prompt injection, sensitive data loss, unsafe URL access and malicious code execution, which, if left unaddressed, can undermine the very benefits these agents offer. Accelerating productivity depends not just on deploying agents, but on deploying them securely. This is where Palo Alto Networks, with its purpose-built AI security platform, Prisma® AIRS™, plays a critical role.
The Productivity Paradox: Where Agents Introduce Risk
Autonomous agents operating across the software development lifecycle accelerate developer productivity, while also introducing a complex, language-driven threat surface that traditional security tools are not equipped to handle. As a result, new risks emerge, such as prompt injection or leaking secrets that extend beyond the visibility and control assumptions of traditional security approaches. Addressing these considerations is essential to preserving the benefits that agentic development provides.
Recognizing this shift, Palo Alto Networks has introduced targeted capabilities to accelerate secure development workflows. These efforts focus on three critical defense areas: preventing prompt injection, blocking sensitive data leaks and enabling robust malicious code detection capabilities, all of which are necessary to secure the full lifecycle of agent-driven systems.
The Solution: Securing Agentic Workflows for Acceleration
The solution is designed to convert security challenges directly into deployment confidence, dramatically accelerating productivity. By natively integrating Prisma AIRS within Factory’s Droid Shield Plus, the platform is able to inspect all large language model (LLM) interactions, including prompts, responses and subsequent tool calls, to enable comprehensive security across each interaction with the agent.
Prisma AIRS is a comprehensive platform designed to provide organizations with the visibility and control needed to safeguard AI agents across any environment. The platform continuously monitors agent behavior in real time to detect and prevent threats unique to agent-driven systems.
Droid Shield Plus, powered by Palo Alto Networks
How Security Drives Speed
Embedding security natively into the Factory platform enables two crucial outcomes. To start, it delivers a secure, agent-native development experience for every developer, fostering immediate trust in the integrity of the generated code and documentation. This assurance removes friction often associated with AI-powered workflows, which can accelerate enterprise adoption and scaling of the Factory platform across the organization.
When developers can trust the agents and the integrity of the generated code and documentation, they can innovate faster and deploy with greater confidence. Instead of waiting for security reviews or dealing with fragmentation, security is woven seamlessly into the development lifecycle.
Factory-Prisma AIRS Integration Flow
The integration follows a clear API Intercept design pattern:
• When a user enters a prompt or initiates work in Factory, Prisma AIRS intercepts the workflow. If a malicious prompt is detected, the platform can add logic to coach or block the user.
• Similarly, after the LLM generates code, Prisma AIRS intercepts the generated content. If secrets are detected, the platform again adds logic to coach or block the result before it reaches Factory or the user.
This real-time inspection of prompts and generated code enables development teams to be protected against threats, such as privilege escalation, prompt injection and malicious code execution, without disrupting developer velocity.
Deploy Bravely
Prisma AIRS 2.0 establishes a unified foundation for scalable and secure AI innovation. By combining Factory’s agent-native development platform with the threat detection capabilities of Palo Alto Networks Prisma AIRS, organizations gain a powerful advantage. Together, this approach helps organizations adopt agentic development with confidence by embedding security directly into the development experience.
For enterprises looking to confidently scale AI automation and realize the immense productivity gains offered by Factory’s Droids, integrating Prisma AIRS is the next step. This combined approach enables teams to "Deploy Bravely." To learn more about this strategic partnership and integration, see our latest integration announcement and review the Droid Shield Plus integration documentation.
Key Takeaways for Secure Agentic Development
When adopting Factory with Prisma AIRS, enterprises realize immediate benefits that accelerate their AI strategy:
Specialized Threat Defense
Enterprises gain real-time, targeted protection against agent-specific threats, specifically prompt injection attacks and data leaks, which legacy tools cannot address.
Native, Seamless Security Moving from a fragmented review process to a continuous, automated defense via API Interception, security enables compliance without slowing down development velocity.
Deployment Confidence The native integration transforms security risks into operational assurance, accelerating the large-scale enterprise adoption and scaling of your Factory agent-native automation initiatives.
Artificial intelligence has shifted to being the primary engine for market leadership. To compete, enterprises are shifting from general-purpose computing to AI factories, specialized infrastructures designed to manage the entire lifecycle of AI. However, this transition requires robust security without sacrificing performance and efficiency.
The integrated solution embeds zero trust security directly into the AI infrastructure, providing comprehensive protection without impacting AI performance. By deploying Palo Alto Networks Prisma® AIRS™ Network Intercept directly onto the NVIDIA BlueField and extending to the cloud, Prisma AIRS establishes an essential zero trust governance fabric for the AI factory, enabling enterprises to accelerate innovation while maintaining control.
This critical architectural shift enables optimal AI performance and infrastructure efficiency by offloading security processing to an isolated domain, while leveraging the DPU's hardware acceleration via NVIDIA DOCA to enforce security policies at line speed. The implementation also leverages real-time workload information captured using DOCA Argus, which is then passed to Cortex XSIAM® where it is used for AI-driven responses using the Cortex XSOAR® orchestration platform.
The AI Factory is the new engine for value creation, and securing it is a board-level imperative. The validation of Palo Alto Networks Prisma AIRS accelerated with NVIDIA BlueField within the NVIDIA Enterprise AI Factory enables a new security architecture for the AI era. We are embedding trust directly into the infrastructure, giving leaders the confidence to safeguard their proprietary intelligence and deploy AI bravely.
Kevin Deierling, senior vice president of Networking at NVIDIA said:
AI is transforming every industry and security must evolve to protect AI factories. To be scalable, security must be distributed and embedded within the AI infrastructure. This is achieved with NVIDIA BlueField running Palo Alto Networks Prisma AIRS to deliver robust, runtime security for the AI factory, with optimal AI performance and efficiency.
Deploy AI Bravely with a Future-Proof Foundation
The Future of Secure AI Factories
In addition to deploying Palo Alto Networks Prisma AIRS on NVIDIA BlueField in a distributed model, it’s essential to maintain a centralized Hyperscale Security Firewall (HSF) cluster at the ingress and egress points of the AI factory to enforce a defense-in-depth strategy. Beyond network segmentation, individual workloads can selectively route traffic through hyperscale clusters to detect advanced application-layer threats and prevent lateral movement. These hyperscale firewall clusters scale elastically with demand, delivering session resiliency and the high availability required for critical AI operations.
This architecture fundamentally improves the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for AI infrastructure. By isolating security functions on BlueField, enterprises enable 100% of host computing resources to be dedicated to AI applications. This elimination of resource contention allows the AI Factory to maximize token throughput and capital efficiency.
This validated design is the blueprint for immediate efficiency. It provides a seamless path for enterprises to shift from general-purpose clusters to secure AI factory infrastructure without costly overhauls. More importantly, this collaboration establishes an unparalleled roadmap for future-proofing your investment. By securing operations with the high-performance NVIDIA BlueField-3 today, the architecture is inherently ready for the next generation, NVIDIA BlueField-4. This forward compatibility helps AI factories immediately handle gigascale demands, scaling up to 6X the compute power and doubling the bandwidth when BlueField-4 becomes available.
The inclusion of the Palo Alto Networks Prisma AIRS platform in the NVIDIA Enterprise AI Factory Validated Design bolsters enterprise AI security. By establishing the zero trust governance fabric of Prisma AIRS runtime security on NVIDIA BlueField, organizations gain a comprehensive defense. Proprietary and sensitive data is secured throughout the entire stack, and models are protected from adversarial threats, such as prompt injection attacks. With Prisma AIRS, the world's most comprehensive AI security platform, leaders gain the confidence to innovate and deploy AI bravely. This validated design is the essential blueprint for securely accelerating your market leadership without compromising security.
Join our "How to Secure the AI Factory" breakout session at NVIDIA GTC 2026, March 16-19, in San Jose, CA to hear more about this transformative solution and accelerate your AI innovation securely.
Transforming Real-Time Protection with Cloud-Delivered Security Services
Discover how unified prevention provides IT leaders with real-time protection across every attack surface.
The line between innovation and exposure has never been blurred in today’s hyperconnected digital world. Every new device, application and cloud workload expands the modern attack surface, creating endless opportunities for adversaries who are scaling faster and becoming more sophisticated than ever before. The threat landscape is no longer defined by isolated malware or phishing emails. The modern attack surface has evolved into a dynamic, adaptive ecosystem, driven by automation and artificial intelligence. Traditional security is no longer enough against AI-powered adversaries; protecting the modern attack surface demands a unified, intelligent Cloud-Delivered Security Services (CDSS) platform.
Attackers have learned to weaponize the same innovations that once gave defenders an advantage. Generative AI now enables them to craft convincing phishing messages, generate polymorphic malware that changes with every delivery, and automate reconnaissance at an unprecedented scale. Ransomware groups operate with the speed and agility of modern startups, using AI to identify weaknesses while staying one step ahead of detection. The result is an era where breaches unfold in minutes rather than days. Organizations are left with little room for error, underscoring the urgent need for security that goes beyond traditional approaches.
The Power of a Unified, Cloud-Delivered Security Service Platform
The power of our Cloud-Delivered Security Services lies in our ability to bring together every layer of protection into a single, intelligent, connected system. This unified platform combines Advanced Threat Prevention, Advanced WildFire® (AWF), Advanced DNS Security (ADNS) and Advanced URL Filtering (AURL) into a single AI-powered fabric that operates at the speed of the cloud.
Powered by Precision AI®, this framework delivers real-time contextual awareness across every stage of the attack lifecycle. It continuously analyzes billions of signals across networks, users and applications to transform raw data into actionable insights. This capability enables organizations to move from reactive detection to proactive prevention, stopping threats before they can disrupt operations.
Every day, our CDSS services analyze up to 5.43 billion new events, detect nearly 8.95 million never-before-seen attacks, and block up to 30.9 billion threats inline. This scale of visibility is strengthened by AI that’s trained on shared threat data from more than 70,000 customers, creating a powerful network effect that delivers patient-zero prevention everywhere. This depth of intelligence provides the visibility and context needed to understand and stop even the most sophisticated attacks as they evolve.
CDSS Advanced Core Security Services
Shared telemetry flows naturally across services, helping ensure threats are detected and prevented without operating in silos. A phishing domain identified by Advanced DNS Security can immediately inform Advanced URL Filtering to block the malicious site. When Advanced WildFire uncovers a new zero-day technique or malicious artifact, that intelligence is shared instantly across the CDSS intelligence layer. Inline services, like Advanced Threat Prevention and Advanced URL Filtering, are enabled to strengthen protections in real time without manual intervention.
For IT leaders and security teams, this unified approach delivers comprehensive visibility and protection that keeps pace with their environment. Continuous intelligence adapts as conditions change, reducing complexity and improving operational efficiency. With consistent policy enforcement, faster decision-making and unified management across the enterprise, organizations can shift their focus from maintenance to innovation and growth.
The Moment Traditional Security Stopped Being Enough
There was a time when traditional network security was enough. Perimeter defenses and signature-based tools could reliably detect and block most threats before they caused harm. For years, this layered approach gave organizations a sense of confidence and control. But that moment has passed.
Our Unit 42® team has found that attacks are now faster, more sophisticated and more disruptive than ever, with 86% of major incidents in 2024 resulting in business disruption. This shift underscores how quickly traditional defenses are being outpaced and why yesterday’s security models no longer match today’s threat landscape.
Traditional, siloed architectures simply cannot keep up with modern attackers. What once served as a strong defense is now outmatched by adversaries who use AI to move faster and slip through the cracks of static security controls. Attackers no longer need to rely on predictable patterns or known exploits. They can use machine learning to probe defenses, mimic legitimate activity and disguise malicious activity within normal traffic, allowing them to bypass systems once they are considered unbreakable.
Older security products that depend on static signatures or manual policy updates cannot match this speed and scale. They respond to what has already happened, not to what is happening right now. By the time a new rule is written or a patch is applied, the threat has already evolved. Fragmented visibility and delayed response times give adversaries the upper hand, leaving IT teams defending blind against threats that adapt and shift faster than their defenses ever could.
In an effort to compensate, many organizations continue to add more tools: One for web filtering, one for DNS, one for malware analysis and one for data protection. While each solution provides value, they rarely work together. The result is an overcomplicated ecosystem of disconnected products that create visibility gaps, duplicate alerts, inconsistent policy enforcement and operational overhead. These gaps are exactly where attackers find their opportunity.
The moment traditional security stopped being enough was the moment attackers learned to think and move like machines. The rise of AI-powered threats marked the end of static defense and the beginning of a new kind of warfare, one that demands prevention and is predictive, adaptive and unified.
Today, enterprises don’t need more point products. They need a single, intelligent security fabric so they can see, understand and act across every vector, from DNS to SaaS to endpoint, in one coordinated motion. Attackers increasingly weaponize GenAI to craft more evasive phishing pages, malware and domain infrastructures. So, security teams must rely on defenses that can counter these techniques in real time by effectively battling AI with AI.
Having the proper security tools is only part of the equation. Real protection comes when those tools are fully enabled, integrated and working together to secure the organization. Cloud-delivered security services deliver their greatest value when they are live and continuously analyzing traffic, sharing intelligence and adapting in real time to support the business.
Too often, organizations have the right capabilities in place but leave them underutilized or inactive. Protection begins the moment each service is turned on and working in unison to deliver real-time prevention at scale. Ensuring that these capabilities are fully enabled and actively defending the network is what turns investment into impact.
Prevention is about readiness, not reaction. The most resilient organizations are those that activate early, integrate completely and allow automation to amplify what human oversight cannot. When IT leaders enable Advanced Threat Prevention, AWF, ADNS and AURL, prevention becomes continuous, intelligent and aligned with the pace of modern threats.
The power of our CDSS lies in both their advanced technology and the unity they create. Together, these services form an intelligent defense that connects detection, prevention and response into one seamless operation, all powered by Precision AI.
Precision AI Foundation for Advanced Security Services
Now, with AI reshaping both innovation and risk, CDSS helps organizations stay confidently ahead. IT leaders who enable these capabilities strengthen visibility, simplify operations and elevate their overall security posture.
Fully enable your defenses and have them ready to prevent threats at each stage of the attack lifecycle. Learn more about activating CDSS through Strata™ Cloud manager or speak with your Palo Alto Networks representative to see how unified, AI-powered prevention can strengthen your organization’s security posture.
Key Takeaways
Traditional Security Is Insufficient Against Modern Threats
The rise of AI and automation has created an era in which attackers move faster and are more sophisticated than traditional, siloed security products can handle, leading to an increasing number of major incidents that disrupt business.
Unified Cloud-Delivered Security Services (CDSS) Are Necessary for Proactive Prevention
Protecting the modern attack surface requires a single, intelligent, connected CDSS platform that unifies all layers of protection (e.g., Advanced Threat Prevention, AWF, ADNS, AURL) into an AI-powered fabric, enabling proactive, real-time prevention rather than reactive detection.
Real Protection Depends on Full Activation and Integration Having the right security tools is only part of the solution. The greatest value and protection are realized when your fully enabled CDSS is integrated and working in unison to continuously analyze traffic and share intelligence.
The transformative potential of artificial intelligence (AI) across industries is undeniable. But realizing AI's true value hinges on three cybersecurity imperatives: Understanding the AI-cybersecurity nexus, harnessing AI to supercharge cyber defense, and embedding security into AI tools from the ground up through Secure AI by Design.
Nowhere is this convergence more urgent than in financial services. Sitting at the center of our global economy, financial institutions face a dual mandate: Embrace AI for cybersecurityandcybersecurity for AI.
I was honored to cover these key principals in my testimony before the House Committee on Financial Services, led by Chairman French Hill. The hearing, entitled “From Principles to Policy: Enabling 21st Century AI Innovation in Financial Services” convened witnesses from Palo Alto Networks, Google, NASDAQ, Zillow and Public Citizen. Together, we examined AI use cases in the financial services and housing sectors, including those specific to cybersecurity. We assessed how existing laws and frameworks apply in the age of AI.
The Defense Advantage Is AI-Powered Security Operations
Attacks have become faster, with the time from compromise to data exfiltration now 100 times faster than four years ago. The financial sector bears disproportionate risk, given the value of its data and interconnected systems, while firms contend with evolving regulatory expectations, talent shortages and the persistent tendency to elevate cybersecurity only after an incident.
Generative and agentic AI intensify these pressures by accelerating every phase of the attack chain, from deepfake-driven fraud to tailored spear phishing campaigns. Our researchers at Unit 42® have found that agentic AI, autonomous systems that can reason and act without human intervention, can compress what was once a multiday ransomware campaign into roughly 25 minutes.
To keep pace, financial institutions must pivot to AI-driven defenses that operate at machine speed.
Security operations centers (SOC) have long been overwhelmed by traditional alerts and fragmented data. Security teams, forced into manual triage across dozens of disparate tools, face an inefficient model that leaves vulnerabilities exposed, burns out analysts and makes it impossible to operate at the speed necessary to outpace modern attacks.
The average enterprise SOC ingests data from 83 security solutions across 29 vendors. In 75% of breaches, logging existed that should have flagged anomalous behavior, but critical signals were buried. With 90% of SOCs still relying on manual processes, adversaries have the clear advantage.
AI-driven SOCs flip this paradigm, acting as a force multiplier to substantially reduce detection and response times. To illustrate the scale of this necessity, consider our own security operations. Palo Alto Networks SOC analyzes over 90 billion events daily. Without AI, this would be an impossible task for human analysts. But by applying AI, we distill that down to a single actionable incident.
Financial institutions migrating to AI-driven SOC platforms are seeing transformative results:
One customer reduced the Mean Time to Respond (MTTR) from one day to 14 minutes.
Another prevented 22,831 threats and processed 113,271 threat indicators in less than 5 seconds.
A large bank saved 180 hours per year by automating security information and event management reporting; 500 hours through automated data collection; 360 hours by automating four Chief Technology Officer playbooks; and 240 hours with automated threat intelligence enrichment.
These improvements are critical to stopping threat actors. But none of this would be possible without AI.
Securing the New AI Attack Surface
As AI adoption grows, it will further expand the attack surface, creating new vectors targeting training data and model environments. AI's rapid growth is outpacing the adoption of security measures designed to protect it. Nearly three-quarters of S&P 500 companies now flag AI as a material risk in their public disclosures, up from just 12% in 2023.
Traditional security tools rely on static rules that miss advanced attacks, like multistep prompt injections or adversarial manipulations. Autonomous AI agents can take unpredictable actions that are difficult to monitor with legacy methods.
Rapid AI adoption has exposed organizations' infrastructure, data, models, applications and agents to unique threats. Unlike traditional cyber exploits that target software vulnerabilities, AI-specific attacks can manipulate the foundation of how an AI system learns and operates.
A Secure AI by Design
Even with an understanding of the risks, many organizations struggle with the lack of clarity on what effective AI security looks like in practice. Recognizing the gap between intent and execution, Palo Alto Networks developed a Secure AI by Design policy roadmap that provides organizations with a comprehensive roadmap that integrates security throughout the entire AI lifecycle.
A proactive stance ensures security is a feature, not an afterthought, crucial for building trust, maintaining compliance and mitigating risks. The approach addresses four imperatives organizations most pressingly face in AI adoption:
1. Secure the use of external AI tools.
2. Secure the underlying AI infrastructure and data.
3. Safely build and deploy AI applications.
4. Monitor and control AI agents.
The Path Forward
For financial institutions, Secure AI by Design must be anchored in enterprise governance. Institutions should maintain risk-tiered AI inventories, enforce strict access controls and implement testing commensurate with risk. Governance structures should enable board oversight and align with established model risk practices.
Policymakers also have a critical role to play in promoting AI-driven security operations, championing voluntary Secure AI by Design frameworks, ensuring policies safeguard innovation, enabling controlled experimentation and strengthening public-private collaboration.
Ultimately, the financial institutions that will thrive will recognize cybersecurity as the foundation that makes innovation possible. By embracing AI-driven defenses and securing AI systems from the ground up, the sector can confidently unlock AI's transformative potential while safeguarding the trust and stability that underpin the global economy.
Read the full testimony to learn more about how cybersecurity can enable AI innovation in financial services.
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