The White House Executive Order on securing the nation against advanced cryptographic attacks accelerates the mandatory timeline for post-quantum readiness.
For years, post-quantum cryptography has been discussed as an important, yet abstract future technical migration. Because of the uncertain timeline for quantum computing, it has been difficult for most organizations to prioritize quantum readiness against more immediate security demands.
That is changing.
Signed on June 22, 2026, the Executive Order mandates the transition of federal information systems to post-quantum cryptography and establishes a national policy to migrate them to NIST-approved standards. It also extends the urgency beyond government by directing support for critical infrastructure owners and operators, advancing requirements for federal contractors, and calling for cryptographic bill of materials guidance.
The order directly addresses harvest now, decrypt later risk and sets transition milestones for federal high-value assets and high-impact systems: 2030 for key establishment and 2031 for digital signatures.
While the order directly applies to U.S. Federal civilian agencies, it should be seen as a signal of broader policy and procurement momentum. Organizations that do business with the government, support critical infrastructure, or operate in regulated industries such as energy, financial services, and healthcare should expect post-quantum readiness expectations to accelerate.
Quantum risk has shifted from a long-term research concern to a national cybersecurity priority tied to sensitive data, critical infrastructure, federal systems, procurement, and the broader digital economy. For security teams, the challenge now is turning that urgency into an operational plan.
As quantum computing advances, widely used public-key cryptography will become vulnerable to future attacks. Even before a cryptographically relevant quantum computer exists, adversaries can capture encrypted data now with the goal of decrypting it later.
This “harvest now, decrypt later” risk is especially concerning for organizations that protect sensitive information with a long shelf life. The response cannot wait until the threat fully materializes.
The broader ripple effect matters because compliance alone will not equal readiness. As requirements flow into federal acquisition rules and contractor obligations, the vendor ecosystem will be pushed to support quantum-safe capabilities in the products and services that enterprises, critical infrastructure organizations, and regulated industries rely on.
Adding support for post-quantum algorithms is not the same as safely migrating to them. Support means a system can use new algorithms. Readiness means the organization knows where cryptography exists, which systems are exposed, which dependencies matter most, and how to execute changes without creating disruption or new risk.
That matters because post-quantum migration can affect more than cryptographic libraries. Larger cryptographic objects, new protocol behaviors, hybrid modes, hardware acceleration requirements, interoperability constraints, and legacy system limitations can create real performance, availability, and compatibility challenges if changes are made blindly.
This is why cryptographic visibility must lead to actionable migration planning.
Security teams cannot migrate what they cannot see. But visibility by itself is not enough. They also need to classify exposure, prioritize high-value systems and long-lived data, understand operational dependencies, and plan changes in a way that avoids disruption, downgrade risk, or incomplete migration.
Cryptographic bill of materials guidance will be an important step toward mapping cryptographic assets. But a CBOM should be the starting point, not the finish line. An inventory can show where cryptography exists, but readiness requires understanding business impact, migration complexity, interoperability risk, ownership, and the order in which changes should happen.
Post-quantum readiness is not just an algorithm swap. It is an operating model for managing cryptographic change at scale.
The path forward starts with five practical actions.
These actions help security leaders move from awareness to readiness.
The Cryptographic Reset is already underway, driven by post-quantum risk, shorter certificate lifecycles, machine identity growth, fragmented cryptographic ownership, CA distrust events, and expanding digital infrastructure.
The organizations that move first will not simply be the ones that adopt new algorithms the fastest. They will be the ones that build the visibility, operating model, and governance needed to manage cryptographic change continuously.
Read the guide: The Post-Quantum Readiness Race Is On: Five Actions Security Leaders Can Take to Accelerate Crypto Agility.
The post New Executive Order Accelerates Post-Quantum Readiness Amid the Cryptographic Reset appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.
Securing the Future of Japan’s AI Landscape
The shift from static LLMs to autonomous agents has fundamentally changed the global threat surface. Frontier models like Anthropic's Mythos can now autonomously discover hundreds of zero-day vulnerabilities, rapidly shrinking the gap between discovery to exploitation from days to minutes. With the rise of autonomous offensive AI, multi-agent systems like the 'Zealot' proof-of-concept can independently perform reconnaissance, escalate privileges, and exfiltrate cloud data.
Prisma AIRS 3.0 is a comprehensive AI security platform that secures the new AI estate end-to-end: scanning models, agents, and artifacts before deployment, protecting runtime behavior, and enforcing unified control through posture management.To secure this new AI estate against these advanced global threats, Palo Alto Networks is pleased to announce a strategic investment designed to enhance cyber resilience: the establishment of our new local cloud location for Prisma® AIRS™ in Japan. This localized presence simplifies complex operations, enabling local data residency and low-latency processing to accelerate the secure adoption of Generative AI and Agentic Workflows.
Comprehensive Agent Security Platform The new regional expansion in Japan hosting Prisma AIRS provides Japanese organizations with domestic, high-performance access to critical AI security capabilities. As we progressively roll out our full suite of features in the region, Prisma Airs is designed to be a comprehensive AI security platform that secures an organization's entire AI ecosystem including AI applications, models, agents, and datasets, from the development phase all the way through active deployment.
Please visit the regional cloud locations of Palo Alto Networks for more information. This infrastructure optimizes operational efficiency and provides the essential security foundation for large-scale Digital Transformation (DX) projects, empowering Japanese enterprises to innovate with confidence and Deploy Bravely.
The post Expanding Our Footprint: Local Cloud Availability for Prisma AIRS in Japan appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.
The rise of Agentic AI is rapidly reshaping the enterprise, yet its deployment opens a complex new frontier for cyber threats. As organizations race to harness the power of enterprise agents, the "Data Estate" has become the new perimeter. CISOs today face a high-stakes trade-off: enabling developers to build at the speed of AI while keeping proprietary data visible, governed, and secure across the entire AI lifecycle. This requires meticulously checking user inputs, agent outputs, and tool calls for threats like prompt injections, sensitive data loss, and malicious code, while simultaneously preventing autonomous agents from performing destructive actions.
Securing the AI-driven enterprise requires a fundamental shift from reactive measures to proactive runtime protection. Palo Alto Networks and Databricks are delivering on that vision. Our partnership will integrate the Prisma AIRS API with Databricks Unity AI Gateway, embedding seamless security at runtime. This collaboration will enable organizations to innovate with AI agents, applications, models and MCP Servers at scale while maintaining a robust, policy-driven security posture. By combining the centralized AI governance and control capabilities of the Databricks platform with the runtime security protections of Palo Alto Networks, organizations can scale AI innovation without sacrificing visibility, compliance, or security.
AI security represents a fundamental departure from traditional defense. Legacy tools are designed for structured threats, leaving them incapable of parsing the intent behind complex, conversational attacks. Furthermore, the integration of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and autonomous workflows creates a dynamic attack surface that goes far beyond traditional data loss. Without AI-native oversight, organizations can face severe risks from prompt injections, custom topics, and toxic content manipulating model logic, to tool misuse, malware execution, and malicious URLs hijacking agent actions.
Modern AI development requires more than just a perimeter; it requires contextual intelligence. By integrating Prisma AIRS directly into Databricks Unity AI Gateway, we will evolve security from a reactive layer into a native pillar of the AI architecture.
The most effective way to secure an entire AI environment is at the governance layer. Our integration focuses on Databricks Unity AI Gateway, which serves as the centralized interface for all AI activity within the Databricks environment. Unity AI Gateway is designed for managing, governing, and monitoring access to all models, agents and MCP Servers—whether they are open-source models deployed within Databricks or external proprietary models. As organizations deploy more agents, applications, and models, centralized governance becomes critical. Unity AI Gateway provides a single control plane for AI usage, enabling teams to apply consistent policies, monitor activity, and manage access across AI workloads.
Through this integration, Unity AI Gateway will make real-time calls to the Prisma AIRS Runtime Security API for security inspection. Instead of managing fragmented security policies across dozens of individual applications, SecOps teams will be able to enforce consistent guardrails across the entire Agentic AI estate from one location, providing a single, unified enforcement point for all AI workloads.
Prisma AIRS operates as an advanced inspection layer, leveraging its API Intercept capability to provide real-time security embedded directly into the application flow. By embedding Prisma AIRS directly into the workflow, we offer a seamless 'Security-as-Code' experience that unifies development and defense. Prisma AIRS intercepts AI prompts, responses, and MCP calls—inspecting them in real time to enforce security policies with an immediate Go/No-Go verdict or by sanitizing the data in transit. Prisma AIRS uses deep learning classifiers to detect data exfiltration risks, such as the presence of PII (Personally Identifiable Information), PHI, or PCI data. If sensitive data is found, it can be dynamically redacted or blocked based on corporate policy.
This integration isn't just about blocking threats—it’s about accelerating your AI roadmap. By removing the "security friction" that often slows down production deployments, we enable teams to move faster with confidence. Key benefits include:
As agentic workflows and multi-step model interactions become the standard, a 'fail-closed' runtime security posture is no longer optional; it is foundational. The integration of Prisma AIRS API and Databricks Unity AI Gateway marks a definitive shift toward a future where enterprise AI is secure by default. By integrating Prisma AIRS API with the Databricks platform through Unity AI Gateway, organizations can centrally govern AI across models, agents, applications, and MCP servers while enforcing consistent runtime security policies. Together, Databricks and Palo Alto Networks are helping customers scale AI innovation with the control, visibility, and protection required for the agentic era.
Are you ready to secure your AI workloads and agentic applications?
check out the latest Databricks blog and stay tuned for technical deep-dive sessions coming soon.
Forward-Looking Statements
This blog contains forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions, including, without limitation, statements regarding the benefits, impact, or performance or potential benefits, impact or performance of our products and technologies or future products and technologies. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance, and there are a significant number of factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from statements made in this blog. We identify certain important risks and uncertainties that could affect our results and performance in our most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K, our most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q, and our other filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission from time-to-time, each of which are available on our website at investors.paloaltonetworks.com and on the SEC's website at www.sec.gov. All forward-looking statements in this blog are based on information available to us as of the date hereof, and we do not assume any obligation to update the forward-looking statements provided to reflect events that occur or circumstances that exist after the date on which they were made.
The post Securing the Agentic AI Frontier: Palo Alto Networks and Databricks Deliver a New Standard for AI Security appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.
After 26 years, today is my last day at EFF. It's been a terrific and wild ride — the organization has grown from a tiny band of fighty people trying to plant a flag for freedom and justice in the coming digital world into a large, established band of fighty people doing, well, much the same. The world around us has changed enormously. Our core values haven't budged.
I'm proud of what we've achieved: freeing encryption, defending coders, pushing to rein in government and corporate surveillance and ensure the right to have a private conversation online, standing up for free speech and anonymous speech, fighting for network neutrality and safe voting machines, busting stupid patents, and making sure copyright didn't become the one law that rules the internet. That's only the start. We've stopped more bad legislative, regulatory, and legal ideas than I can count, built tools that millions rely on to protect their privacy, and helped encrypt the web. I've long said EFF is the plumber of the internet — finding the clogs and barriers that prevent technology from serving freedom, justice, and innovation for everyone.
In addition to presenting cases in courts across the land, testifying in Congress and in California, in the European Parliament and at the United Nations, I went onto the internet with Stephen Colbert and engaged in a healthy disagreement with Jon Stewart. I wrote a lot of it down in a book, hoping to recruit others to the cause. The work has been hard and often frustrating at times. But looking back, the fun parts are what I remember most.
None of it would have been possible without EFF’s stalwart members. More than 30,000 people, some with big wallets and some with small ones, give us what we need to stand up to bullies and fight for the long haul. EFF has always served as a beacon for people who know that for technology to support freedom, justice, and innovation for all the people of the world, we need a dedicated band of folks working overtime on behalf of users, innovators, and creators.
There's still plenty left to do. We haven't killed the third-party doctrine, tamed the surveillance business model, or gotten metadata the constitutional protection it deserves. Stupid patents persist as does the overreach of DMCA section 1201 and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The government is now the largest purchaser of data from shady brokers, communities everywhere are fighting license plate readers and other street-level surveillance, and we haven't reined in NSA and FBI spying nearly enough. Meanwhile, the rise of AI is supercharging problems we've fought against for years.
But I'm proud of what we've built together. I'm grateful to every EFFer — past, present, and future — who threw in with us when the odds were long and the pay was much better elsewhere. I'm grateful to the EFF Board and especially to my mentors and friends Pam Samuelson and Shari Steele, along with my longtime partner in justice, Lee Tien, who has been working with me since the Bernstein case. Fighting for justice is easier when you have a posse: coworkers, co-counsel, coalitions, interns, volunteers, and the heroic clients who trusted us to steward their cases in ways that bent the law toward everyone's benefit. Twenty-six years later, EFF is part of a global diaspora of organizations defending internet freedom — and I'm proud of that too.
I'm stepping down because good leaders should make way for new ones, and the time feels right. EFF is strong and full of fight. My successor Nicole Ozer — a longtime friend and collaborator — is exactly the right person for this moment. She understands EFF's role and values at a deep level and will protect them while helping the organization rise to meet what's coming.
As for me, I'm not going far. After a few months off to reflect and walk dogs, I plan to get back into the fight for justice — likely heading back into the courtroom. And I'll be watching, cheering, donating, and wearing the merch from EFF, just like the rest of you.
Palo Alto Networks is pleased to announce the successful completion of a new Cloud Medium security assessment conducted by the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security (Cyber Centre), significantly expanding the number of Palo Alto Networks cloud services assessed for Protected B / Medium Integrity / Medium Availability (PBMM) environments. This assessment includes a broad range of capabilities across our Cortex®, Cortex Cloud and Strata™ platforms. By achieving this milestone, Palo Alto Networks enables organizations handling Canada’s most sensitive data to leverage a unified, AI-driven security architecture without compromising on compliance or operational resilience.
For years, many organizations viewed PBMM as something that only mattered to the Canadian federal government. It was often seen as a procurement requirement—a framework tied to public sector cloud adoption, relevant for departments handling Protected B information, but not necessarily for the private sector.
That assumption is changing.
The reality is that the challenges driving PBMM are no longer unique to government environments. Banks, energy providers, transportation networks, healthcare organizations, crown corporations, and other critical infrastructure operators are now facing many of the same pressures:
That is why PBMM matters far beyond Ottawa. At its core, PBMM represents a rigorous approach to validating whether enterprise-grade security platforms can operate securely in environments where trust, resilience, and operational continuity are critical.
Increasingly, that level of assurance matters to everyone.
PBMM, a rigorous cybersecurity and data classification standard used by the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security, stands for Protected B / Medium Integrity / Medium Availability. While often associated with federal cloud security requirements, PBMM is not simply a checkbox exercise. It is a comprehensive assessment framework aligned to Canadian cybersecurity guidance and operational security expectations.
What makes PBMM important is that it evaluates whether platforms and services can securely support sensitive and mission-critical workloads in real-world environments.
Palo Alto Networks meeting these rigorous PBMM requirements through three core pillars:
These are not theoretical requirements. They are practical operational expectations designed for environments where downtime, visibility gaps, or security failures can have significant consequences.
Organizations today are no longer evaluating cybersecurity solely based on features. They are evaluating whether platforms can be trusted to support critical operations at scale.
The cybersecurity landscape has evolved dramatically. Infrastructure is distributed across cloud providers, SaaS applications, remote users, third-party integrations, operational technology (OT), AI platforms, and interconnected supply chains. At the same time, attacks have become faster, more automated, and more disruptive.
In this environment, security can no longer be treated as a compliance exercise. Organizations need confidence that their platforms, operational processes, and security controls can function effectively under pressure.
This is why Palo Alto Networks has undertaken independent PBMM assessments across its portfolio, providing customers with greater assurance and trust. By meeting these rigorous standards into Strata and Cortex, we enable non-government entities—like financial institutions and utility providers—to deploy the same defensive rigor used to protect national security systems.
To effectively manage risk, critical infrastructure operators require a platform approach that helps eliminate security silos, reduce manual intervention, and accelerate threat mitigation.
One of the most significant shifts occurring across industries today is the growing focus on operational resilience. Organizations are increasingly asking questions that extend beyond traditional cybersecurity controls:
As organizations adopt cloud-native architectures, AI-driven technologies, and interconnected digital ecosystems, resilience has become a board-level concern. The ability to prevent incidents remains important, but organizations are equally focused on their ability to withstand, respond to, and recover from them.
This is where frameworks like PBMM provide value. Beyond evaluating security controls, PBMM assesses the governance, operational processes, monitoring capabilities, and risk management practices that help organizations operate securely.
For critical infrastructure operators, resilience is no longer simply an IT objective—it is a business imperative. Increasingly, the organizations that earn trust are those that can demonstrate they are prepared to operate effectively when disruption occurs.
PBMM may have started solely as a government assessment framework, but its relevance now extends far beyond federal environments. It represents something universal: the ability to operate securely, reliably, and transparently in environments where trust matters most.
By expanding our PBMM-assessed offerings across Cortex and Strata, Palo Alto Networks underscores its commitment to securing Canada's digital future. We provide the validated foundation organizations need to innovate with confidence, protect sensitive data, and maintain operational continuity under any circumstance.
To learn more about the Palo Alto Networks Cloud Medium security assessment, review the publicly available assessment summary report issued by the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security.
Ready to modernize your defenses with PBMM-assessed solutions? Schedule a demo with our team or contact Unit 42 to learn how we can help elevate your organization's resilience against emerging cyber threats.
The post Securing Canada’s Digital Future: Why PBMM Matters Beyond Government appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.
The release of OMB Memo M-26-14 ("Ensuring Effective and Efficient Agency Logging and Network Visibility to Defend Against Evolving Cyber Threats") marks a historic turning point in federal cybersecurity. By officially rescinding the M-21-31 directive, the White House has delivered a clear message to federal IT leaders: the era of compliance-driven data hoarding is officially over.
While the previous framework was a well-intentioned response to the SolarWinds breach, its mandate to collect and retain vast oceans of unstructured logging data created unintended, unsustainable operational burdens. For the past several years, federal agencies have faced skyrocketing cloud storage bills and overwhelmed Security Operations Centers (SOCs). Crucially, they have been left with vast quantities of cold data that lacked clear operational utility.
As OMB noted, retaining endless data without operational focus is neither cost-effective nor operationally feasible. With M-26-14, the federal government is pivoting to a smarter, sleeker, and far more decisive strategy: a risk-based, prioritized logging framework driven by AI and machine-speed defense.
M-26-14 strips away administrative "red tape" to focus on how modern cybersecurity risks have evolved. Nation-state threat actors are actively leveraging advanced automation and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to orchestrate attacks at unprecedented speeds. They move laterally across agencies in minutes, hiding behind legitimate corporate credentials.
To beat machine-speed threats, your data layer must operate at machine-scale. The new memo reorganizes federal visibility around two foundational pillars:
Continuous Event Monitoring demands that logging infrastructure shift from a passive archiving tool to a live-streaming asset. Agencies are now required to monitor network and asset activity in real time, rapidly flag anomalous behavior via behavioral analytics, and initiate immediate mitigation actions directly through their SOCs.
When a compromise is suspected, agencies can no longer spend days running slow database queries or pulling disconnected csv files. M-26-14 mandates that agencies keep 6 months of logs "hot and searchable" and 1 year fully "retrievable." This allows defenders to immediately stitch together cross-domain attack patterns, perform rapid root-cause forensics, and share threat intelligence seamlessly with CISA and the FBI.
Perhaps the most significant structural change is the explicit inclusion of Internet of Things (IoT) and Operational Technology (OT) systems. Adversaries do not respect the boundary between your corporate IT network and your physical infrastructure. Under M-26-14, your logging and threat-hunting capabilities must aggressively cover the entire enterprise—from public cloud workloads to the physical facility controls and critical infrastructure grids running on an agency's behalf.
Agencies cannot afford a passive approach. The timeline established by OMB M-26-14 moves quickly:
Trying to retrofit a legacy SIEM architecture to meet the advanced or optimal effectiveness tiers of M-26-14 is an engineering and budgetary dead end. Legacy SIEMs scale costs linearly with ingestion and rely on static, human-written correlation rules that fail against AI-fueled threats.
The FedRAMP Certified Palo Alto Networks Cortex platform—anchored by Cortex XSIAM (Extended Security Intelligence and Automation Management)—was engineered from the ground up to solve the exact problems this new memo addresses.
Legacy logging stores data in isolated silos. An analyst trying to track an adversary has to manually look at an identity log, cross-reference it with a network firewall alert, and match it to an endpoint execution.
Cortex XSIAM features a revolutionary Analytics Engine that automatically stitches multi-vendor logs across cloud, network, endpoint, and identity at the moment of ingestion. It transforms raw text into a single, cohesive, context-rich story, instantly aligning incidents with the MITRE ATT&CK framework. Cortex XSIAM doesn’t just ingest data, it understands the data which enables stitching of multiple data elements into a single, multi-context construct which accelerates analysis via AI and machine learning.
Adversaries use AI to evade signature detection. Cortex XSIAM fights fire with fire, applying out-of-the-box, unsupervised machine learning models to baseline normal behavioral patterns across your entire federal enterprise. When an anomalous lateral movement, data exfiltration attempt, or credential abuse event occurs, XSIAM flags the threat instantly—without requiring your team to spend weeks writing custom correlation code.
There is more to CEM than just monitoring network activity. Activity on endpoints, within your identity management solution(s) and in the cloud are just as important. Understanding the data, knowing which log records are related to each other across multiple log sources, which events are relevant and the context they provide is required.
Understanding these events and their contextual relationships is fundamental to providing THIRF in an efficient manner. Cortex XSIAM provides over 2,900 machine learning models out of the box, models that are trained on the data in your environment so they detect anomalous activity based on what is “normal” in your environment, not trained on generic data from other customers or a lab. These models can identify threats based on data stitched together from multiple sources to provide a more complete context yielding more accurate and consistent results while decreasing time to value.
You cannot install an EDR logging agent on a smart building HVAC system or an industrial programmable logic controller (PLC). Palo Alto Networks utilizes non-disruptive, passive network analysis to continuously discover, profile, and generate high-fidelity security logs for IoT and OT infrastructure. These logs stream directly into XSIAM, eliminating critical federal blind spots and protecting your High Value Assets (HVAs) from cross-boundary pivot attacks.
Keeping six months of high-velocity event logs fully "hot and searchable" under a traditional database indexing model creates a crushing financial burden. Cortex XSIAM fundamentally resets the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) equation by leveraging an index-free, cloud-native data lake architecture that decouples storage costs from analytical performance. By eliminating legacy ingestion taxes and infrastructure overhead, federal defenders can search petabytes of data in seconds—effortlessly meeting the 6-month searchable and 1-year retrievable thresholds. Furthermore, integrated data masking rules strip away sensitive PII or low-value data noise before it hits the SOC, ensuring agencies only pay for operationally vital intelligence.
OMB M-26-14 is a massive step forward for federal cybersecurity. It frees CISOs from the operational gridlock of untargeted data archiving and empowers them to build faster, modern, and highly responsive security operations.
Meeting the strict 120-to-320-day maturity milestones requires moving past the tools of the last decade. By partnering with Palo Alto Networks and deploying the Cortex suite, federal agencies can seamlessly transition into a risk-aligned, AI-driven SOC. They can confidently check the box on OMB compliance while achieving what the directive actually intends: protecting the resilience and integrity of the federal mission at machine speed.
Palo Alto Networks’ Cortex XSIAM is FedRAMP certified at both the moderate and high levels.
Want to learn more about how to structure your upcoming Agency Logging Plan to meet CISA's upcoming Logging Reference Architecture?
Contact the Palo Alto Networks Federal Team today to schedule an architectural deep-dive.
The post Shifting from Data Hoarding to Active Defense: Navigating the New Era of OMB M-26-14 appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.
Sovereignty has become the driving principle of Europe's technology conversation. Every policy discussion, every emerging legislative development, every procurement process, every boardroom debate comes back to which platforms and partners to trust.
Trust goes beyond compliance. It demands integrity, accountability, and transparency about the limits of what any provider can guarantee – rather than making commitments that sound reassuring but cannot be verified.
We have spent considerable time listening to public sector organizations, critical national infrastructure operators, and regulators across Europe. This is not a new concern. Over the years, what organizations are asking for has become increasingly specific. They want their data to remain in Europe. They want to know precisely who can access it and who holds the encryption keys. And they want every access event logged and visible. They want operations managed locally, under local jurisdictions and subject to local laws.
These are governance requirements as much as technical ones. And what they add up to is a demand for verifiable control, not more contractual promises. The distinction matters enormously. Telling an organization you will protect their data is one thing; giving them the architecture and the visibility to verify that protection themselves is another.
It is worth being clear about who is driving this conversation. These requirements are not universal. A large enterprise running productivity tools has different needs from a government ministry managing sensitive national data or a critical infrastructure operator running systems that society depends on for clear drinking water. What we are describing here is what we hear from the most demanding end of the spectrum: public sector and critical national infrastructure. And that is where we focus, because getting it right there matters most.
The announcement of the Sovereign Cortex with T Security, together with Deutsche Telekom and Google Cloud, is our direct response to these demands and the next step in our long-standing commitment to Europe. It is not a marketing position – it is a framework that provides customers actual controls. It is built on the five elements that reflect how we fundamentally think about sovereignty. One that will set the standard across every solution we build for the region.
Each element of this framework was designed from the outside in, with the input of every European organization we collaborated with.
Here is what I believe, having spent years in this conversation across Europe. Trust is not something a provider can simply assert. It is something that has to be earned, over time, through consistent and verifiable action.
For technology companies operating in Europe, that means placing meaningful control with a trusted local European partner, being transparent about what we can and cannot guarantee, and treating sovereignty not as a compliance exercise but as a design principle.
It also means being honest about the journey. We have done significant work, yet we have further to go. The organizations we serve deserve partners who acknowledge that openly rather than presenting a finished picture.
What drives this work is straightforward: we believe in Europe’s digital future. We believe in the missions of the organizations we work with every day, whether they are protecting critical public services, securing national infrastructure, or safeguarding the data that citizens and institutions depend on. Being a committed partner to those organizations is not a product decision. It is a values decision.
And that is precisely why trust is the measure we hold ourselves to. The direction is clear, the commitment is real. But commitment means nothing without trust – and trust, like everything worth having, has to be earned every day.
Forward-Looking Statements
This blog contains forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions, including, without limitation, statements regarding the benefits, impact, or performance or potential benefits, impact or performance of our products and technologies or future products and technologies. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance, and there are a significant number of factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from statements made in this blog. We identify certain important risks and uncertainties that could affect our results and performance in our most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K, our most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q, and our other filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission from time-to-time, each of which are available on our website at investors.paloaltonetworks.com and on the SEC's website at www.sec.gov. All forward-looking statements in this blog are based on information available to us as of the date hereof, and we do not assume any obligation to update the forward-looking statements provided to reflect events that occur or circumstances that exist after the date on which they were made.
The post Trust is the Foundation of Sovereignty appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.
EFF is on the front lines of the fight against tech-enabled tyranny, but we aren't alone. Our team depends on your help to fight back against the surveillance state.
People around the world are pushing back against the mass surveillance that undermines privacy and free expression for everyone. You can help during EFF's spring membership drive.
One of the people who joined the fight for digital rights is EFF client Will Freeman. Will created the website DeFlock.me to reveal the dangers of automated license plate readers (ALPRs)—cameras that collect location data on every vehicle they see and upload that to a massive nationwide police database. Deflock.me turns the tables by enlisting ordinary people to track the locations of tens of thousands of ALPR cameras.
But when the police spy-tech company Flock Safety went after Will's website with legal threats citing trademark law, he saw it for what it was: an attempt to silence critics and dim the light on mass surveillance.
The company will try everything it can to downplay the criticism, but EFF will be right there demanding accountability.
"I was totally unprepared to receive a cease & desist letter. I can see how most people would be bullied into submission by a threat like that. That's when I remembered Dave Maass from the EFF introduced himself via email several weeks before, so I reached out for help," Freeman says.
And that's when EFF stepped in. Recognizing DeFlock.me as a quintessential expression of grassroots advocacy and a form of criticism protected by the U.S. First Amendment, EFF's lawyers helped Will fight back. And the Big Surveillance Tech flinched.
But these battles against Flock's Spying tools rage on. In cities around the country, privacy advocates are pressuring officials to block or end contracts for ALPRs—and winning. The company will try everything it can to downplay the criticism, but EFF will be right there demanding accountability.
Get the new Claw Back member t-shirt featuring a fierce feline swatting at community surveillance. You might empathize with him, but there’s a better way. Let’s end the law enforcement contracts, harmful practices, and twisted logic that enable mass spying in the first place.
"I'm really grateful the EFF was able to step in and help. Without them, free speech would be only for those wealthy enough to defend themselves against billion dollar companies. We've grown a lot since then and are expanding our efforts to expose and push back against mass surveillance on our streets," Freeman says.
stop mass surveillance tech today when you join EFF
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EFF is a member-supported U.S. 501(c)(3) organization. We've received top ratings from the nonprofit watchdog Charity Navigator since 2013! Your donation is tax-deductible as allowed by law.
Building on the momentum of NVIDIA GTC Taipei at COMPUTEX 2026, the conversation has moved beyond AI experimentation to the industrialization of intelligence. Organizations are rapidly deploying AI Factories – high-performance, purpose-built computing infrastructures designed to manufacture intelligence at an unprecedented scale. AI’s next phase is agentic. Autonomous AI agents are reshaping enterprise operations—and demand security architectures that can keep pace with the speed and scale of innovation. We are proud to announce the integration of Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSIAM with the NVIDIA DOCA Argus framework, a breakthrough that brings real-time, AI-powered security operations directly into the heart of the NVIDIA AI factory.
By operating on the NVIDIA BlueField data processor, DOCA Argus provides situational awareness through real-time memory analysis at the silicon level. This allows Cortex XSIAM to detect kernel-level rootkits and "living-off-the-land" attacks without installing security agents on the host system.
This innovation builds upon our proven foundation with Palo Alto Networks Prisma AIRS, where AI Runtime Security is deployed natively on NVIDIA BlueField, and powered by NVIDIA DOCA, bringing defense in depth. This integration enables offload , isolation and acceleration of security in AI factories.
Deployed consistently across the AI factory, DOCA Argus monitors and correlates AI application processes, network telemetry, and data access to detect sophisticated anomalies that traditional tools miss. With this integration, Cortex XSIAM recognizes the high-fidelity data from DOCA Argus as a native Palo Alto Networks sensor, allowing for better decisions with the new intelligence gathered directly from the host.
By integrating Cortex XSIAM with the NVIDIA DOCA Argus framework, we leverage the innovations of two industry leaders to deliver a seamless, high-performance SecOps ecosystem for your most valuable AI assets.
The inclusion of Prisma AIRS in NVIDIA AI Factory validated design delivers a unified security platform, providing proactive, defense-in-depth security across critical layers of the AI ecosystem.
Serving as the network enforcement engine for this architecture, Prisma AIRS secures the infrastructure of the modern AI Factory. By unifying protection and visibility into a single automated fabric, it eliminates the traditional trade-off between security and agility, allowing organizations to innovate at machine speed without compromising performance or governance.
Beyond enforcement, the broader Prisma AIRS platform acts as the security blueprint for the entire enterprise AI ecosystem—consolidating fragmented point-tools to slash total cost of ownership while providing end-to-end observability from the data plane to the model layer. The platform scales dynamically alongside your AI clusters to safeguard raw datasets, build Layer 7 micro-perimeters around autonomous agents, and protect proprietary model weights from external threats—all without throttling mission-critical performance.
By deploying the AI Runtime Firewall directly on NVIDIA BlueField, we establish a foundational network security layer that is fully offloaded, isolated, and accelerated. This provides pervasive protection across the Enterprise AI Factory without sacrificing critical compute resources.
Securing the NVIDIA AI factory requires the entire Prisma AIRS suite, which secures the AI lifecycle through five specialized pillars:
Looking ahead to the next frontier of enterprise-scale agentic AI, Palo Alto Networks is closely aligning its platform approach with the NVIDIA Vera BlueField-4 STX architecture, extending protections to AI data storage infrastructure. As AI data demands surge, high-throughput, large-scale environments require a move toward hardware-isolated, performance-neutral protection to support the rapid growth of critical AI applications.
Operating within an isolated trust domain on future BlueField-4 silicon, our inline security capabilities will maintain strict, policy-driven controls independently of the host operating system and storage systems. This co-design enables critical forward-looking innovations for data, agents, and context memory, ensuring security is offloaded, isolated and accelerated to support the next generation of the AI Factory.
Our ongoing collaboration with NVIDIA focuses on these essential pillars for reimagining AI security:
The Palo Alto Networks platform approach delivers a comprehensive solution to secure an enterprise's entire AI ecosystem. By integrating Cortex XSIAM with the NVIDIA DOCA Argus framework, we are extending this comprehensive, deep visibility and protection to the very heart of the AI Factory. With this integration, security teams can leverage an agentless approach via DOCA Argus to gain deep visibility into AI systems hosts by simply downloading the content pack from the Cortex Marketplace.
The Palo Alto Networks platform secures the entire AI journey, protecting the infrastructure, intelligent applications, agents and data it produces. With the inclusion of Prisma AIRS in NVIDIA Enterprise AI Factory Validated Design, we have delivered the blueprint for secure AI.
Palo Alto Networks and NVIDIA are redefining security for the AI factory. Together, we are ensuring your security architecture is as fast, scalable and innovative as the intelligence it protects, empowering you to scale AI production with reduced latency and stronger governance.
Discover more through the Palo Alto Networks partner directory, or read the official press release from NVIDIA for more details.
The post Reinventing Security for the Agentic NVIDIA AI Factory appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.
I am incredibly proud to share that Palo Alto Networks has been named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant
for Endpoint Protection Platforms for the fourth consecutive year. For us, this recognition is a testament to our team's relentless vision as we continue to define endpoint defense—from the pioneer days of XDR to the new frontier of agentic AI.
We believe our repeated recognition as a Leader is built on a single, uncompromising commitment to our customers and partners: empowering organizations with reduced overhead, rapid threat response, a strengthened security posture, and the resilient protection required to close the most critical security gaps. We are now leading the shift into the agentic era. While AI agents significantly boost enterprise productivity, they also introduce novel attack surfaces that legacy EDR tools are unable to protect. As the pioneer of XDR, we are committed to defining the next generation of cybersecurity by securing this new frontier.
Cortex® XDR is helping customers:
We are incredibly proud to be recognized as a Leader once again, an acknowledgement that belongs just as much to our customers and partners as it does to us. Your trust, feedback, and real-world challenges keep us sharp and dictate our roadmap. At the end of the day, our continued leadership is built on one core promise: make each day more secure than the day before.
To get the full story and a comprehensive analysis of the endpoint security market, I invite you to read the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant report.
Get Your Complimentary Copy of the Report
Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Endpoint Protection Platforms, By Deepak Mishra, Evgeny Mirolyubov, Nikul Patel, May 29, 2026
Gartner and Magic Quadrant are trademarks of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. Gartner does not endorse any company, vendor, product or service depicted in its publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s business and technology insights organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this publication, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
The post A 4X Gartner Magic Quadrant for EPP Leader. Built for the Agentic Era. appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.
In the rush to block young people from certain parts of the internet, lawmakers are creating a privacy and security nightmare for everyone. This scenario is already playing out globally. Help us stop it and keep the web open and accessible for all.
Protect the web for everyone
Even with the best intentions, every online age verification scheme has the same result: users are forced to reveal sensitive personal information to third parties simply to access the web. Once that valuable data is centralized, it becomes an immediate target for leaks, hacks, and misuse. This isn’t hypothetical: it has already happened several times.
Support digital rights in EFF's new Claw Back member t-shirt and Privacy Badger Crewneck.
Thanks to our members, EFF is on the front lines fighting against online age gating and identity verification online. We’re working with lawmakers to pass better policies, educating the public, and fighting the wildfire of age verification proposals around the world. Now all we need is you.
We all want young people to be safe online, but we don’t need to trade everyone's digital rights to achieve it. These new restrictive mandates are used to justify government-led censorship and expanded surveillance. That's no accident.
Whether you trust today’s lawmakers or not, handing anyone keys to new forms of censorship and surveillance is a serious risk. Because history shows us that these powers are always abused. It’s time to demand better.
Help us claw back your privacy
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EFF is a member-supported U.S. 501(c)(3) organization. We've received top ratings from the nonprofit watchdog Charity Navigator since 2013! Your donation is tax-deductible as allowed by law.
We recently updated our privacy policy for the first time since 2022. Most of the changes are clarifications, reorganizations, and improvements in transparency, particularly around how third-party tools that run parts of our site operate. But one change is substantive enough that we want to address it directly.
We want to know how we’re doing with our advocacy: which campaigns get your attention and which do not, which topics you are very interested in, which less so, and which not at all. It helps us to do our work better and to prioritize or rethink our strategies as we push to build support for freedom, justice and innovation around the world.
So, to give us a rough picture of how we’re doing, we are introducing the option for you to provide explicit, opt-in consent for us to see how you interact with the emails we send you. That includes whether you open emails, and whether you click on the links inside them.
We know what you’re thinking: Doesn’t EFF strongly oppose nonconsensual tracking? You bet we do. Sneaky email tracking is ubiquitous on the web and EFF’s opposition to it remains unchanged. We have never used email tracking pixels and we’re not changing that. We’re not building profiles and we’re not sharing the data and we’re definitely not selling it.
But we do want to give you the option of allowing us to learn about how our communications are landing with you. Here’s how consent will work. We will ask, and if you say yes, we’ll be able to see whether you opened an email or not, and whether you clicked on any links. That's it.
If you say no, or ignore the ask entirely, nothing will change and we’ll do no tracking.
If you say yes, you can change your mind and opt out at any time by clicking an opt-out link in any future email or by contacting membership@eff.org.
We have heard many EFF members say that EFF is one of the only organizations that they trust with consent to track their emails. That trust is important, and we do not take it lightly. But it led us to think that if we ask, enough of you would agree that we could have a better picture of how our campaigns and other emails to you are landing and that, in turn, could help us decide what to double down on and what to change.
By giving you a real ability to consent, EFF is taking a very different path than most of the web. Asking isn’t the norm; it’s more or less never an option to say no and dark patterns often make it hard even if it looks like you can. Unfortunately, estimates have shown that 2/3s of emails received by users contain tracking, regardless of whether the senders received explicit consent at the time when a recipient signs up to receive their mailings. Automatic, nonconsensual tracking doesn’t have to be the default, and it shouldn’t be.
We hope our approach works and it inspires others. It shouldn’t be an abnormality that users are not tracked by default, and that only users who feel comfortable doing so choose to consent to tracking. We hope that our example will show mailing platforms, organizations, and users that a privacy-protective approach is better and worth doing and can still give an email sender a solid understanding what campaigns and other messages resonate with recipients. We weighed this decision carefully. We know that email tracking is something we've criticized when used covertly or without meaningful consent and that many people don’t like at all. For EFF, an opt-in requirement isn't a formality. It's the key distinction between a sneaky strategy and an aboveboard relationship with you. And to us, it’s just a common sense approach based on respect.
It’s also consistent with our advocacy and approach to technology. We have said for many years that strong consumer privacy laws must require real opt-in consent before data is collected. And we have walked our talk in other ways as well, including in pushing for Do Not Track policies and in Privacy Badger, which protects you from ads and trackers that violate the principle of user consent.
Again, this behavior has been our suggestion for privacy policies, and privacy laws. In 2022 we released a guide for nonprofits that recommended the following:
Not tracking email open rates can, unfortunately, sometimes cause list “hygiene” problems, because it becomes difficult to know whether email subscribers on your list are still interested. You can send occasional emails to ensure subscribers want to receive emails, either using open or click tracking, and informing people that the purpose of that specific email is to determine active subscribers. The essential point is to let users know when you are using tracking, and to do it in a limited way when possible....
The Internet Archive found that while they preferred to use no open tracking in their emails to subscribers, too many unreachable email addresses had been added to their list over the years, and some email addresses had even become spam traps. To continue working with their email service provider, they needed to activate some tracking. They needed email open data to know whether an email address was still active or not; but they didn’t need or want gender, age, or demographic data. They settled on informing users that their email open rates are being tracked, and offering the alternate option to sign up for plain-text versions of their emails, which won't transmit any data at all.
In 2019, we recommended that all strong consumer privacy laws must include opt-in consent for data collection. We wrote:
Right to opt-in consent
New legislation should require the operators of online services to obtain opt-in consent to collect, use, or share personal data, particularly where that collection, use, or transfer is not necessary to provide the service.
Any request for opt-in consent should be easy to understand and clearly advise the user what data the operator seeks to gather, how they will use it, how long they will keep it, and with whom they will share it. This opt-in consent should also be ongoing—that is, the request should be renewed any time the operator wishes to use or share data in a new way, or gather a new kind of data. And the user should be able to withdraw consent, including for particular purposes, at any time.
Opt-in consent is better than opt-out consent. The default should be against collecting, using, and sharing personal information. Many consumers cannot or will not alter the defaults in the technologies they use, even if they prefer that companies do not collect their information.
We are sticking to those recommendations, which unfortunately are not yet the law, and following our principles.
We hope that you will feel comfortable opting in, but we also respect that you need to make that decision for yourself, and that you may need to change it as you go. We’ll do our part to make that as clear and easy as possible. And if you do agree, we’ll be grateful for getting a chance to learn a little more about how we’re doing, hopefully in ways that can make us even more effective at ensuring that technology supports freedom, justice and innovation for all the people of the world.
The rest of the update is largely about being more precise and provide more transparency into our practices.
Cookies on eff.org: The new policy tightens our cookie practices. Previously, we carved out exceptions for "remember me" and logged-in users; now we don't use persistent ID cookies on the eff.org domain at all. We also clarified that other EFF-operated sites‚ like acteff.org and shopeff.org‚ have their own cookie policies and that our policies aren’t the ones that apply there. We’re not happy that you have to navigate multiple policies like this, but it’s one of the ways that the cookie ecosystem has gotten unfortunately complex. We want to be sure you know that and know where to look for all the information.
Third-party tool transparency: Similarly, while the vast majority of EFF’s public-facing websites, online tools and tech projects are created internally, self-hosted, and self-maintained, some of them are not. In this new policy, we are working to be more detailed and explicit in the new policy about those third-party services, and how they operate under their own privacy policies, not solely ours.
To help you understand exactly what choices you have when using these tools, we're publishing dedicated Privacy Guides for each of them. The first is live now for our shop, which runs on Shopify: EFF Shopify Privacy Guide. Guides for our other third-party tools are coming soon. As always, we recommend installing Privacy Badger to limit exposure from third-party tracking.
Overall, EFF believes that when a project like the Atlas of Surveillance doesn't exist, and we think it should, we build it and maintain it. But what matters most to us is protecting your digital rights. So the time required to maintain and upgrade the tools we have built has to be weighed against our need to build new projects to fight new fights. And sometimes, a tool that was needed when we built it, like EFF’s Action Center, can be replaced by something that can take some of the weight off our internal staff.
To help make space for new projects, we carefully investigate services we rely on—like our campaign tools, payment processors, and online shop—and look for third party options that are the best in the industry and offer a level of privacy our users deserve. In this new privacy policy we try to give you as much information about those third-party services as we can.
GDPR data management: We added a clear, dedicated process for users in the EU and elsewhere to request deletion of their personal data. Email info@eff.org with the subject line "GDPR Data Deletion Request" and we'll respond within the legally required timeframe.
Data retention: We reorganized and clarified how long we keep different types of records (communications, financial records, donation paperwork) into a cleaner list. The substance is unchanged, but the structure should make it easier to find what's relevant to you.
Action Center: You may notice that the previous policy included a dedicated section on our Action Center - how we handled your campaign participation data, what we retained, and so on. That section is gone because we're transitioning our campaign tools to a third-party provider. This is the kind of situation the new third-party transparency language addresses: that provider operates under its own privacy policy, which we'll link to in its dedicated Privacy Guide. Our commitment to your privacy in those contexts doesn't change‚ it just lives in a different place now.
The fundamentals remain what they've always been: we don't sell your information, we don't share it with third parties without your real (not manufactured or dark-patterned) consent, outside of legal requirements we cannot change. We actively push back on legal demands we believe are improper. EFF's mission is to protect your digital rights, and our own practices will continue to reflect that. The changes we’ve described above will help us in that mission.
You can read the full updated policy at eff.org/policy. If you have questions, we're always reachable at info@eff.org.
Cybersecurity partnerships are operating in a more demanding environment. As customers consolidate vendors, modernize security architectures and adopt artificial intelligence (AI) across the enterprise, they’re placing greater expectations on partners to help guide decisions across network, cloud and security operations. They also want clearer evidence that their selected partners have invested in growing the skills and expertise needed to support more integrated and fast-changing security priorities.
The Palo Alto Networks NextWave Partner Program has evolved to help partners meet these heightened expectations. As security delivery becomes broader and more strategic, customers are placing more weight on what a partner’s credentials actually represent. That’s why stronger performance and enablement requirements are part of our reimagined program. The new requirements help partners better understand what they need to build real capability and advance within our program. They also give more substance to the designations customers see when choosing a partner.
Our objective was never simply to raise the standards for engagement in our program. It was to inspire partners at all levels – Registered, Innovator, Platinum and Diamond – to invest deliberately and continuously in learning, so they can deepen their proficiency and earn specializations that will help them stay competitive and build and deliver the future of security.
Raising performance expectations was only part of the work in evolving the NextWave program. We also wanted to give our partners compelling reasons to invest in the capabilities Palo Alto Networks wants to see scale. That meant looking more closely at how standards, specializations and incentives fit together, and how we can help accelerate mutual success.
We are providing our partners with better access, better visibility and better support for learning and enablement. In turn, we are recognizing and rewarding partners for their efforts to develop and maintain the competency, capability and capacity needed to go to market successfully with Palo Alto Networks.
This approach, shaped largely by partner feedback, is designed to make incentives easier to access while still directing partner investment toward deeper specialization and next-gen security capabilities. Program levels and product specializations help define what partners need to do to grow within our program and to excel at selling, supporting or delivering Palo Alto Networks products and services.
The program’s Partner Development Fund adds another dimension to this evolved model. It gives all partners a more deliberate way to reinvest a portion of their earned incentives into the capabilities they need to stay competitive and innovate, including training, certification, workshops, demos and other strategic activities that help strengthen their team’s overall readiness over time. In that sense, the program is both rewarding current performance and driving mutual growth.
As we continue to strengthen our partner program, Palo Alto Networks is refreshing courses, updating certification paths and redesigning training to better reflect the customer needs that partners are helping to address today, including emerging areas like AI security.
Notable improvements:
Our aim with these changes is to keep learning options relevant, practical and easier to engage in and apply in practice. We believe product and services training should help partners deepen expertise, validate skills and stay current as technologies, customer expectations and threats shift. It should also recognize the experience many professionals already bring to the table, with learning paths that are rigorous without being repetitive or unnecessarily burdensome.
Ultimately, the impact of providing more effective enablement for our partners (and outlining clear requirements for advanced specializations and total certified staff for specific partner paths) positively impacts the customer experience through more informed conversations, stronger design guidance and more consistent support across the entire security lifecycle.
Part of what makes the current evolution of the NextWave program so significant is its focus on helping partners build the bench strength they will need to stay competitive as security becomes more platform-driven, AI-influenced and interconnected across domains. The program also encourages bookings tied to next-generation security priorities, helping direct partner investment toward the areas customers are prioritizing most. That focus is especially visible in areas such as Idira®, Prisma® SASE, Cortex® Cloud and Cortex, where customer demand and program priorities are increasingly aligned.
The benefits of that alignment extend beyond the partner organization. Customers gain access to partners that are better prepared to support more connected security strategies without adding unnecessary complexity. They can work with partners that are building expertise around the technologies and use cases becoming more central to modern enterprise security programs.
This kind of alignment also strengthens the broader ecosystem. It creates a clearer connection between customer needs, partner capabilities and Palo Alto Networks platform strategy. It’s the value exchange in cybersecurity in action: Ongoing investment in knowledge, skills and services that helps partners grow while giving customers faster time-to-value realization.
For customers, stronger requirements for our Nextwave program can make partner distinctions more meaningful. A specialization or program level should point to something real, such as training completed, certifications maintained and expertise developed. While those accomplishments don’t guarantee security outcomes, they do provide evidence that a partner has built the depth needed to support more complex environments.
Partner distinctions are also reinforced through an active compliance framework rather than treated as a one-time achievement. Partners have ongoing visibility into their progress and can be recognized immediately throughout the year as they meet requirements. Reviews take place on a defined cycle, and status changes are subject to oversight. Taken together, these elements add credibility to the designations customers see and give them more weight in the partner selection process.
This becomes increasingly important as customers look for security partners that can do more than support a single transaction or product decision. Many are seeking guidance at the architecture stage and during implementation, and expecting continuity as IT environments evolve and new risks emerge. It also raises the level of scrutiny that partner selection deserves:
In a fast-moving security market, questions like these can help customers make more informed decisions about which partners are best equipped to deliver long-term value.
Now that we’ve introduced our new program requirements, partners should take stock of whether their certifications, specializations and go-to-market priorities are aligned to where customer demand and the future of security are headed. Steps partners can take:
Partners that take the time now to assess our new requirements and create a plan to meet them will be better positioned to advance within and benefit from our partner program, while developing the capabilities needed to help build the future of security.
Partners with a designated Palo Alto Networks Channel Business Manager can get detailed data and analysis now on their progress and performance in the Nextwave program, including the status of their certifications and which team members have engaged in training, demos and more. In the second half of 2026, we plan to make the same dashboard capabilities and insights directly available to all partners, so they can understand exactly what they need to do to excel in our program. These red-yellow-green dashboards are simple but powerful tools, and we are eager to put them in our partners’ hands soon.
Visit the NextWave Partner Portal to learn more.
The post The “Why” Behind NextWave’s New Requirements appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.
Over the past few weeks, we have reached a critical turning point in cybersecurity. Following the launch of our Frontier AI Defense initiative, we’ve continued testing the latest frontier models (including Anthropic’s Mythos and Claude Opus 4.7, as well as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5-Cyber) as part of the Trusted Access for Cyber program.
The urgency to innovate continues to ramp up. As Lee Klarich recently detailed in his Defender's Guide to the Frontier AI Impact on Cybersecurity, our current landscape is defined by a brief three-to-five-month window to gain a strategic advantage over attackers. To outsmart AI-based exploits, enterprises must decisively address vulnerabilities across their code and stand up the right security stack to enable real-time, automated defenses.
With such a ticking clock in front of us, acting rapidly and at-scale to support our customers is paramount. Today, we exponentially grow our scale of delivery by expanding our Frontier AI Alliance.
Since introducing this initiative, our collaboration with initial partners – Accenture, Deloitte, IBM, NTT DATA, and PwC – has already begun changing the defensive math for our customers. This is a moment that calls for radical collaboration across the entire security ecosystem, so today we are proud to welcome a new cohort of strategic partners – Cognizant, HCLTech, Kyndryl, TCS, Infosys, McKinsey & Company, Orange Cyberdefense, and Wipro – who will join us in delivering AI readiness at scale.
While this expansion significantly increases our reach, this is only the beginning. We are committed to a continuous evolution of this alliance and will be adding more critical partners in the future across the globe to ensure our customers have the most robust defense network possible.
By combining our technology with these partners’ deep consulting expertise, we are delivering:
The stakes are high. The attack cycle has compressed with the time from initial access to data exfiltration collapsing to just 39 seconds. Machine-speed MTTR (mean time to respond) is no longer an ambitious goal, it is a requirement.
This initiative underscores our commitment to providing every client with integrated, real-time protection.
Forward-Looking Statements
This blog contains forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions, including, without limitation, statements regarding the benefits, impact, or performance or potential benefits, impact or performance of our products and technologies or future products and technologies. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance, and there are a significant number of factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from statements made in this blog. We identify certain important risks and uncertainties that could affect our results and performance in our most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K, our most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q, and our other filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission from time-to-time, each of which are available on our website at investors.paloaltonetworks.com and on the SEC's website at www.sec.gov. All forward-looking statements in this blog are based on information available to us as of the date hereof, and we do not assume any obligation to update the forward-looking statements provided to reflect events that occur or circumstances that exist after the date on which they were made.
The post Beyond the Frontier — Expanding the Ecosystem for Autonomous Defense appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.
Millions of people around the world use EFF's Privacy Badger. This browser extension blocks the hidden trackers that twist your web browsing into a commodity for Big Tech, advertisers, scammers, and data brokers. But did you know that we’re trying to solve an issue that’s even bigger than creepy ads and user profiling? You can help.
Online tracking isn't just creepy and unethical. It also enables government surveillance. Widespread commercial surveillance and weak privacy laws allow data brokers to harvest your data and sell it to law enforcement agencies including the FBI, CBP, and ICE. The government exploits this system to buy sensitive information about you that they would ordinarily need a warrant to collect, like your location over time.
With your help, EFF is fighting back. Our team is working to enact stronger laws to uphold your privacy. We’re advocating for consumer rights in the courts. We’re investigating how these technologies affect our communities. And we’re cutting off surveillance advertising at the source with tools like Privacy Badger for everyone. You can support this work as an EFF member.
Privacy is a human right because it gives you a fundamental measure of security and freedom. That is why we at EFF focus on your ability to have private conversations and interact with the world using technologies that you choose. But when tools that many of us must rely on serve corporate surveillance, they also feed government surveillance. We owe it to ourselves to fight the mass spying used to control and intimidate people. Let’s do this.
For a limited time, you can join EFF as a monthly or one-time donor and pick up a new Privacy Badger Crewneck sweatshirt. The embroidered Privacy Badger mascot appears above Traditional Chinese for "privacy” because human rights are universal.
You can also get a set of puffy stickers as a token of thanks. Our little Ghostie protects privacy in Arabic, English, Japanese, Persian, Russian, and Spanish.
Claw Back! This year’s member t-shirt is hot off the press featuring an orange cat swatting at the street-level surveillance equipment multiplying in our communities. You might empathize with him, but there’s a better way. Let’s end the law enforcement contracts, harmful practices, and twisted logic that enable mass spying in the first place.
You can support our mission for technology in the public interest today. Join the movement and become an EFF member.
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EFF is a member-supported U.S. 501(c)(3) organization. We've received top ratings from the nonprofit watchdog Charity Navigator since 2013! Your donation is tax-deductible as allowed by law.
By now, you’ve heard about the latest frontier AI models that are remarkably good at finding vulnerabilities in code and creating potential exploits. So good, in fact, that these models have been significantly limited from general use in an attempt to give defenders time to find and fix vulnerabilities before attackers find and exploit them.
For context, on April 7, 2026, we began testing Anthropic’s Claude Mythos model as a launch partner for Project Glasswing. Our conclusion was clear: The latest models are extraordinarily capable at finding vulnerabilities and changing them into critical exploit paths in near-real-time. In Defender's Guide to the Frontier AI Impact on Cybersecurity, I shared our early findings and recommendations.
Since then, we’ve continued testing the latest frontier AI models, including Anthropic’s Mythos and Claude Opus 4.7 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.5-Cyber as part of the Trusted Access for Cyber program. The big question just a few weeks ago was: “Are we overstating the model capabilities?” With more testing, I can confidently say we weren’t. In fact, these models are likely even better at finding vulnerabilities than we initially realized. Today, we’re providing an update on our ongoing research, our learnings uncovered in the process, and the approach we’re taking to protect our customers.
Today, we released our May “Patch Wednesday” security advisories, our monthly cadence of transparent vulnerability disclosure and remediation. This is the first time where the majority of findings were the result of frontier AI models scanning our code.
It's important to understand this isn’t a one-and-done situation. We’re now rescanning, applying all our learnings about how to provide the right context and threat intelligence to the models. We intend to fix every vulnerability we find before advanced AI capabilities become widely available to adversaries.
While incredibly powerful, AI models aren’t simply magic. To achieve high-fidelity results, you need to build AI scanning harnesses, leverage context, guardrails and threat intelligence. We’ve also discovered a variance across models, due to variations in their training. A multimodel approach is required to identify the superset of vulnerabilities. And finally, while the immediate priority is finding and fixing the vulnerabilities that organizations currently have, the longer-term shift is incorporating these models directly into the software development lifecycle. This is the light at the end of the tunnel: A future where software is secure by design.
Regardless of the current restricted access, we believe these capabilities will flow more broadly to other models. We now estimate a narrow three-to-five-month window for organizations to outpace the adversary before AI-driven exploits start to become the new norm. This impending vulnerability deluge demands urgency. Organizations that haven’t put appropriate safeguards in place will face an entirely new class of risk. Here’s what we recommend:
So far, frontier AI models only find new attacks, not new attack techniques. This means that with the right innovations, we can expand our use of AI to solve the security challenges that organizations are facing, and deliver what our customers need to stay ahead of the ever-evolving threat landscape, including:
We recognize that not everyone has the capacity and/or expertise to action all of the recommendations to effectively counter frontier AI-driven risks in the short timeframe mandated by AI innovation. Our Unit 42 Frontier AI Defense service is designed to discover and remediate your current exposure before attackers do, strengthen controls that reduce exposure and contain impact and modernize security operations so teams can detect and respond at machine speed.
This is a pivotal moment for our industry. While the scale of the challenge presented is real, I’m confident in our ability to solve it. We’re here to help our customers navigate this transition and ensure that as the landscape continues to evolve, the advantage remains with the defender.
Forward-Looking Statements
This blog contains forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions, including, without limitation, statements regarding the benefits, impact, or performance or potential benefits, impact or performance of our products and technologies or future products and technologies. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance, and there are a significant number of factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from statements made in this blog. We identify certain important risks and uncertainties that could affect our results and performance in our most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K, our most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q, and our other filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission from time-to-time, each of which are available on our website at investors.paloaltonetworks.com and on the SEC's website at www.sec.gov. All forward-looking statements in this blog are based on information available to us as of the date hereof, and we do not assume any obligation to update the forward-looking statements provided to reflect events that occur or circumstances that exist after the date on which they were made.
The post Defender's Guide to the Frontier AI Impact on Cybersecurity: May 2026 Update appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.
is Palo Alto Networks next-generation identity security platform, extending privileged access controls to every human, machine and AI agent identity in the AI enterprise.Since Palo Alto Networks and CyberArk came together in February, customers have been asking me the same question: What does the future of identity security actually look like?
At IMPACT, I got to answer that question.
I am proud to introduce Idira, the next-generation identity security platform from Palo Alto Networks. Idira secures every identity in the AI enterprise (human, machine, AI agent) on a single control plane that discovers risk, applies privilege dynamically, and governs the full lifecycle from first access to last session.
Idira begins with a belief shaped by more than 20 years of working on this problem. Privilege is the most challenging aspect of identity security. For a generation, the industry learned how to manage it well for a small population – administrators inside the most security-sensitive organizations in the world. That was necessary. But it is no longer enough.
The moment has come to extend that same rigor to every identity, because every identity today carries the power to move the business, or enable an attacker. That is the journey Idira takes us on. From privilege controls for administrators, to privilege controls for every identity.
For most of the last two decades, identity security was built on a comfortable assumption: One can maintain a firm divide between a small number of powerful administrators and a much larger number of ordinary users; that is enough to secure the organization. That assumption no longer holds.
Our Chairman and CEO, Nikesh Arora, calls it the “IAM fallacy,” and the data in the 2026 Identity Security Landscape Report makes clear why it is time to retire this assumption.
Based on responses from 2,930 cybersecurity decision-makers worldwide:
The old model is not failing because identity became less important. It is failing because identity and privilege became universal and ubiquitous.
Every major breach I have studied over the last two years follows the same pattern. An attacker steals a credential. They move laterally using standing access that should have expired. They escalate privilege. They reach the data, the infrastructure or the business systems they came for: Okta, MGM, Microsoft. Different industries. Different scales. The same pattern.
One overprivileged identity unlocks the entire enterprise.
And when defenders have a chance to respond, they are already behind and disadvantaged. 97% of practitioners tell us that fragmented tools add 12 hours to every identity incident response time. All while Unit 42® has observed the fastest attackers move from a first foothold to exfiltration in as little as 72 minutes.
Identity is now the enterprise perimeter. And the perimeter was built for a threat model that no longer exists.
The premise of Idira is simple. Every identity in your organization is privileged.
Every login, every token, every service account, every workload, every AI agent can trigger a workflow, call an API, or reach sensitive data. Some can create and destroy infrastructures, direct organizational spend, or create new identities. Privilege is no longer reserved for a small class of administrators. It is distributed across the enterprise, quietly and continuously, every second of the day.
The controls that protect privilege cannot be reserved for the few, either.
Idira changes three things from day one.
Idira continuously finds every identity, every entitlement and every access path across your entire environment: humans, machines, workloads, secrets, certificates and AI agents everywhere – on the network, in the cloud, on servers and endpoints, in the browser. If someone or something can authenticate, Idira knows it is there, knows what it can reach, and evaluates how much of that access is actually necessary.
Idira replaces static, always-on accounts attackers rely on with dynamic privileges that exist only in the moment of use. Zero standing privilege moves from aspiration to default, and it applies equally to the administrator logging into production, the developer deploying code, and the AI agent calling a tool. This is the shift to identity-centric active security.
Idira automates the identity lifecycle end-to-end. Governance stops being a quarterly compliance exercise and becomes a continuous enforcement loop. The 12-hour fragmentation tax closes.
This is what I mean when I say we are democratizing privilege controls. We are not loosening them. We are extending the strongest privilege controls the industry has ever built to every identity that now carries the weight of the business, without penalizing these identities for the powers they carry.
Idira is not launching into an empty runway. We have been executing against this roadmap since the day we joined Palo Alto Networks, and the early results give us real confidence in what comes next.
Earlier this year at the RSA Conference, we launched Next-Generation Trust Security (NGTS), the first network-native platform to automate certificate lifecycle management and accelerate post-quantum readiness. That matters because 71% of organizations have not yet automated certificate renewal. As public TLS lifetimes compress to 47 days and manual workloads multiply, that gap becomes more than an operational burden. It becomes a business continuity risk.
NGTS closes it in the network itself.
As one of the core platforms of Palo Alto Networks along with Strata® and Cortex®, Idira is providing deep identity integrations across the entire portfolio to enhance platform value for customers. Prisma® Browser delivers privileged access directly in the place where enterprise users work. Prisma AIRS 3.0 natively integrates with Idira to extend deep identity security and privilege controls to AI agents. Cortex will receive first-party identity signals to sharpen detection and take automatic identity- and privilege-driven response actions when indicators of compromise are detected.
Customers are already seeing the impact. Northern Trust improved password compliance by 137 percent. Panasonic Information Systems rebuilt its security operations around identity. Healthfirst grounded its zero trust program in identity-first controls. PDS Health secured clinical access for more than 900 practices. They had different problems with the same answer.
Different challenges. One answer. One platform. Consistent privilege controls applied to every identity that matters.
AI has changed the speed, scale and economics of identity risk.
Frontier models have crossed a threshold. Anthropic's Claude Mythos Preview has already identified thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities across the operating systems and browsers that businesses rely on every day. Every exposed secret, every standing admin path, every forgotten service account can now be discovered, validated and weaponized faster than most security teams can respond. 55% of the decision-makers in our 2026 survey named AI-enabled threats as their top identity concern.
Our answer is clear: We fight AI with AI.
If frontier models are rewriting the economics of attack, the only credible response is to rewrite the economics of defense with the same technology.
Idira is how we do that in identity. AI is built into the platform to surface hidden entitlements, identify risky access combinations, recommend the least privilege automatically, and drive surgical remediation. That same intelligence lets attackers find the weakest link in 72 minutes and helps defenders close it in seconds.
When code cannot be patched fast enough, identity becomes the control plane that can still adapt at machine speed.
For more than two decades, the pioneers of privileged access have management-built controls trusted to safeguard the world's most critical environments. That mission created a category and earned the trust that made today possible.
Idira carries that mission forward and expands it to match the scale of the problem we now face.
This is the first wave, not the last. The roadmap extends privilege controls to workforce identity, advances machine and agentic identity security, and unifies a fragmented market into one platform. We are building it in the open, shaped by the customers in the room with us at IMPACT and by the realities they face every day.
The future of identity security will not be defined by access alone. It will be defined by control. See what Idira is built to deliver.
This blog contains forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions, including, without limitation, statements regarding the benefits, impact, or performance or potential benefits, impact or performance of our products and technologies or future products and technologies. Any unreleased services, integrations or features (and any services or features not generally available to customers) referenced in this or other press releases or public statements are not currently available (or are not yet generally available to customers) and may not be delivered when expected or at all. Customers who purchase Palo Alto Networks applications should make their purchase decisions based on services and features currently generally available.
The post Idira — Our Journey to Democratize Privilege Controls appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.
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.
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:
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:
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.
Visit Palo Alto Networks Frontier AI Defense to learn more.
The post A New Era of Security: Frontier AI Defense appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.
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