Cato Networks announced a new capability that reduces time-to-protect for newly disclosed vulnerabilities to 45 minutes. The company attributes this reduction to the use of agentic threat research designed to accelerate protection against emerging exploits.

Traditional appliance-based security depends on a slow customer-operated patching cycle: vendors develop protections, customers receive updates, teams test them, and thousands of distributed appliances must be upgraded or configured. In the AI era, that model cannot keep pace with exploit velocity.

“Attackers move in minutes. Appliance-centric security still moves in patch cycles,” said Shlomo Kramer, CEO of Cato Networks. “Cato closes the gap by turning new CVE intelligence into protections deployed globally across our cloud service, with zero customer effort. In the AI era, security architecture is no longer a matter of efficiency. It is a do-or-die security decision.”

When exploits move at AI speed, architecture becomes the difference

Frontier AI models, like Anthropic’s Claude Mythos and OpenAI’s ChatGPT-cyber, are accelerating the scale and speed of CVE disclosure. According to NIST, CVE submissions increased by 263% between 2020 and 2025, and submissions during the first three months of 2026 were nearly one-third higher than the same period last year.

Meanwhile, traditional patching cannot keep pace. Verizon’s 2025 DBIR found that only about 54% of edge device vulnerabilities were fully remediated throughout the year, with a median remediation time of 32 days. Legacy security operations were not designed for the volume and velocity of the AI era.

The result: Security teams are no longer fighting time-to-protect, they are fighting to reduce time-to-exploit.

Cato: Built to close the protection gap

Cato brings agentic acceleration to a CVE protection lifecycle already proven at cloud scale. For nearly a decade, Cato has monitored CVEs, developed protections, validated efficacy, and deployed updates automatically across the Cato Cloud with near-zero false positives, enabling record setting CVE mitigation even before the development of agentic researchers. Agentic CVE mitigation builds on this proven operating model, using AI agents to accelerate each step of the process and deliver faster protection to customers.

Cato’s agentic CVE mitigation runs the full protection lifecycle with human supervision, but without human involvement:

• Monitor and triage publication of disclosed vulnerabilities from multiple sources
• Extract IoCs and exploit reproduction in a lab environment
• Develop threat signatures based on Cato’s unique and contextual language
• Test and simulate threat signatures to eliminate false positives and disruption
• Deploy threat signature to the global Cato Cloud Platform

Cato’s cloud-native platform is updated automatically, removing the burden of customer-owned patching across a distributed security infrastructure. Cato brings together the three architectural requirements for agentic security operations: the network to see attacks, the platform to correlate context, and the cloud to enforce protection globally. This combination enables Cato to operationalize security at machine speed.

Agentic security requires the right architecture

Cato’s agentic CVE mitigation demonstrates a broader industry shift: Security operations are moving from manual, customer-operated workflows to continuous, machine-scale protection delivered through cloud-native platforms. By automating vulnerability analysis, exploit reproduction, protection generation, and validation, Cato reduced protection generation time to as little as 45 minutes.

“The breakthrough here is not just speed,” said Elad Menahem, SVP of Research at Cato Networks. “It’s that vulnerability response itself can now operate continuously and at machine scale.”