By Jaspreet Singh
Oct 28 (Reuters) - Palo Alto Networks PANW.O is expanding its artificial intelligence-powered cybersecurity offerings, as clients seek to secure their business operations from rising hacking incidents.
Palo Alto's AI tools, combined with its planned acquisition of Israeli peer CyberArk Software, are deepening its security offerings amid a wave of high-profile cyberattacks that has hit global companies, including F5 FFIV.O and UnitedHealth Group UNH.N.
Chief Executive Nikesh Arora said some recent breaches underscore how back-end infrastructure compromises can expose thousands of customers by revealing vulnerabilities in shared source code.
Palo Alto launched new versions of its cloud security platform, Cortex Cloud, and AI application security platform Prisma AIRS on Tuesday.
The company said Prisma AIRS 2.0 integrates technology from its recently acquired Seattle-based startup Protect AI, creating a combined platform to secure AI applications from development to deployment. It also uses AI systems to automatically find loopholes in other such systems.
The Cortex Cloud 2.0 now incorporates agentic platform Cortex AgentiX and a cloud command center, its unified view of cloud assets to showcase risks and threats across cloud services of multiple providers.
Customers will have the ability to tailor those agents for specific user roles, Arora said, adding the pricing of the new agentic AI offerings would be consistent with the company's existing Cortex XSOAR platform that unifies and automates incident response across all security tools.
"We're not going to take actions where the customers can't reverse them, or the customers can't have that a human in the middle type of activity. So most of our agents will have humans in the middle," he added.
The agents are trained on 1.2 billion real-world security incident responses. Palo Alto's standalone AgentiX platform is expected to launch early next year, the company said.
(Reporting by Jaspreet Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Maju Samuel)
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