Check Point Software CTO Jonathan Zanger met with CSO Spain during the software company’s Engage 2026 user conference last week in Paris.
At the event, Check Point executives and representatives discussed how the company is dealing with various types of threats, how it is adopting AI securely, and how Check Point and others can leverage AI for their own benefit.
“That’s why I believe 2026 is a fascinating year to work in this field. Every technological change drastically affects cybersecurity,” Zanger told CSO Spain. “I think we’re currently witnessing the biggest change since the advent of the internet. So, without a doubt, we’re facing significant transformations.”
What follows CSO Spain’s discussion with Zanger, edited for length and clarity.
How are AI agents changing the way we detect and stop cyber threats? What new risks are they creating?
I’ll try to answer on several levels. The first is how we operate differently as a cybersecurity company protecting our clients.
We’ve always had teams of experts monitoring threats, identifying malicious actors, and creating new defenses for our products. Consequently, whenever we detected an APT group, we investigated it and created signatures to protect against it. Or when we saw a suspicious network used by threat actors, we identified its location and blocked it. While it’s true that, in many ways, we were always limited by the number of talented people capable of gathering that intelligence and turning it into actionable defenses, what has AI allowed us to do? Dramatically scale this operation.
Could you give an example?
We’ve always had red teams testing our products to ensure their security. And we’ve always valued those teams highly because they made our products significantly more secure. Now, those teams are incredibly powerful thanks to AI, working 20 times more efficiently. What do we have now? A combination of people and AI agents, with around 300 instances continuously monitoring and testing our systems. This is what allows us to deliver better cybersecurity and scale our capabilities.
But it’s clear that malicious actors are using AI to carry out their operations…
That’s right. Just as it helped us scale our operations, it’s also helped them. We’re now seeing a proliferation of smaller, faster threat groups and malicious actors, capable of conducting phishing campaigns with less expertise than before. Consequently, we’re seeing more people entering the field of offensive cybersecurity. So, perhaps the final piece of the puzzle is that organizations are adopting AI systems, and now we have a new challenge: How are we going to protect them?
In this context, what security challenges arise when AI agents can access and operate enterprise systems? In your opinion, what should organizations prepare for?
Systems used to be deterministic: Given the same input, they produced a predictable output, which made them easier to protect. With AI agents, this changes, as they understand natural language, handle ambiguity, and their behavior isn’t always predictable, requiring a new approach to cybersecurity. Furthermore, something very important must be considered: AI depends on the systems it’s connected to. There’s a tension between security teams, who seek to limit these connections to reduce risks, and those promoting AI, who want to integrate it throughout the organization to gather information from any area.
In other words, the more connections AI has, the greater the attack surface and the security risk.
How is generative AI making it easier for attackers to create cyberattacks? From your perspective, what are the most important defenses today?
AI has transformed software development, making it much faster and more accessible. But what’s happening? Cybercriminals are exploiting this same capability, allowing them to escalate attacks like phishing, ransomware, malware, and vulnerability exploitation, increasing both the speed and volume of threats.
What do you recommend doing in this scenario?
Defenders must also embrace AI. Detection and response are no longer enough when an attack can cause damage in seconds, so prevention plays a key role. While attackers maintain a certain advantage because they only need to hit once and are not subject to regulations, defenders have a differentiating factor: collaboration between teams, organizations, and security companies, which helps to level the playing field.
But you can’t deny that many AI platforms still have vulnerabilities…
That’s right, because innovation often advances faster than security. That’s why I recommend incorporating a layer of security from the very beginning of any AI project and not assuming that a platform is secure simply because it comes from a reputable vendor.
How can AI platforms be used securely in the face of the expanding attack surface? What do you consider to be the most significant risk?
Throughout the evolution of systems, innovation, and organizations, security hasn’t always been a priority from the outset of product development. We see this because we investigate different platforms, especially AI platforms, to assess their security. This has allowed us to uncover serious vulnerabilities in every AI platform we’ve analyzed over the past year, as well as in all major AI development tools.
Now, I’m not criticizing anyone here, because their job is to launch innovative products quickly. But I do believe security gaps exist. That’s why I think that, in many cases, this is the role of organizations like ours: to work with companies to ensure that when they use this innovative technology, they do so in a way that protects their data, safeguards their employees, and doesn’t increase their risk.
Would you share any lessons you’ve learned from adopting AI?
Absolutely. The lesson I take away is that when you adopt AI, whatever the use case, you must do so by incorporating a layer of security. And don’t assume a platform is secure just because it comes from an innovative AI company.
In your opinion, what are the most important innovations in security platforms today? And how do they help customers and organizations stay protected?
I’d like to identify three major areas where AI is transforming cybersecurity. The first is the use of AI to strengthen defense operations. Just as it has revolutionized software development, AI is changing how security teams work, enabling them to detect vulnerabilities, assess security posture, implement changes, and respond to threats more quickly, efficiently, and scalably.
The second area is the protection of the AI applications and agents themselves. As these technologies are integrated into corporate networks, the challenge arises of ensuring they do not become a new attack vector or expose sensitive information. This is a very recent field, driven by the rapid adoption of generative AI, in which there is still ample room for innovation.
Finally, I want to emphasize the need to defend against increasingly rapid and sophisticated AI-driven attacks. To this end, I advocate combining advanced models capable of detecting zero-day vulnerabilities and anomalous behavior with AI systems that simulate the behavior of an ethical attacker. This way, organizations can anticipate cybercriminals, identify their attack surface, and strengthen their defenses before an incident occurs.
The final question concerns the needs of small and medium-sized organizations, which want AI systems to be more transparent and easier to audit when they help detect or respond to threats. What are your thoughts on this?
I believe explainability is a crucial part of what we must offer our clients as cybersecurity advocates. There’s always a tension between blocking something immediately and, at the same time, being able to explain why it was blocked. People like to understand what happened, and this presents a delicate balance. Therefore, my perspective is that we should automatically block as many threats as possible, without requiring human intervention, but we must also enable humans to understand what happened and modify the future behavior of the protection mechanisms.
Víctor Manuel Fernández attending Engage 2026 as a guest of Check Point Software.