Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

On February 28, 2026, Israel and the United States launched a joint attack against Iran. In retaliation, Iran launched its own attacks against Israel and US-allied countries and bases in the region. The escalation in the Middle East is ongoing. Cato CTRL is currently monitoring the threat landscape in the region.

Imagine two talented orchestras playing together, but without a conductor or a single score. You get noise, not music. M&A can be like that. The value lies in having every musician on the same page. Traditional networking slows M&A execution. Cato delivers a cloud-native foundation that securely connects the new organization from day one, aligns policies and workflows under a single framework, and helps leadership realize value faster.

Today, we published the 2026 Cato CTRL Threat Report, which is the second annual threat report on AI security from Cato CTRL (the Cato Networks threat intelligence team). In 2025, Cato CTRL uncovered a decisive shift in the AI threat landscape. Threat actors are no longer just exploiting AI systems. They are exploiting AI trust, workflows, and capabilities themselves.

Agentic AI does not just answer, it acts. The moment an agent has a reachable control plane, you have effectively created a “remote hands” interface into your environment. In our recent blog post, “When AI Can Act: Governing OpenClaw,” we explained why this shift breaks old security assumptions and why governance must be continuous, enforced, and context-aware rather than a one-time checklist.

Cato Networks has been named a Leader and Outperformer in the 2026 GigaOm Radar for Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) — marking the third consecutive year we’ve earned this distinction. And, once again, Cato is positioned closest to the center of the Radar, of all participants. In this year’s GigaOm Radar for SASE, Cato is positioned in the Maturity/Platform Play quadrant, reflecting the depth, completeness, and enterprise readiness of the Cato SASE Platform.

Cato CTRL’s Vitaly Simonovich (senior security researcher) has discovered a new vulnerability (CVE-2026-25611 with a “High” severity rating of 7.5 out of 10) in all MongoDB versions with compression enabled (version 3.4+, enabled by default since version 3.6), including MongoDB Atlas. The vulnerability can enable a threat actor to crash any MongoDB server. MongoDB Atlas clusters are not internet-reachable by default.

In 2020, the SolarWinds compromise showed how far attackers can go when they look legitimate. Instead of breaking in loudly, threat actors tampered with trusted software updates and gained access that appeared routine to many defenses. The U.S. government later assessed that roughly 18,000 customers installed affected Orion updates, and a smaller subset experienced follow-on intrusion activity, often discovered only after time had passed.

Encrypted data has a shelf life, and for many organizations it must remain secret for years. The post-quantum risk is not a dramatic collapse of encryption, but a quieter threat: attackers harvesting encrypted traffic today so they can decrypt it in the future. That is why post-quantum readiness is increasingly a board and CEO-level responsibility, with the CISO leading execution, because quantum risk threatens long-term business stability, compliance expectations, and trust.

AI agents aren’t applications. They’re employees. So why are we treating them like applications? AI agents don’t behave like classic applications. They access systems. They make decisions. They operate continuously. They interact with humans and other systems without being explicitly triggered each time. That’s not automation. That’s not scripts. That’s a digital worker.

Cato CTRL’s Vitaly Simonovich (senior security researcher) has identified a threat actor selling root shell access to a UK-based automation company through a compromised AI personal assistant based on OpenClaw.