Nikesh Arora, the CEO of $300 billion cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks, has sounded an alarm on a sharp increase in cyberattacks, warning that hacking incidents will accelerate rapidly from here on out. The top executive recounted that he sounded the alarm six months ago, highlighting that incident response teams will be busier than ever as high-level, AI-powered capabilities become widely available. His comments came days after responders scrambled to patch critical vulnerabilities found in PHP, a widely used open-source scripting language that powers websites and web applications.

What has changed: 3 key points behind the surge

Contrary to common assumptions, the underlying methods behind these intrusions have not turned entirely exotic. Instead, the sudden spike is driven by volume, speed and automation.

Attacks will accelerate from here on – We are there: Six months ago I said Mythos like capability will be widely available. It’s happening. A critical vulnerability, a social engineering attack that looks innocuous, or daisy chaining publicly available vulnerabilities and conducting a sniper strike is all being witnessed in the wild. Incident responders have never been busier.

Some key points:

Attacks are not becoming more sophisticated, it’s the same attacks, faster and by a lot more people.

Attack path discovery which took trial and error and multiple attempts is now trivial, open source LLMs are here to help.

You are as secure as your supply chain, insecure down or upstream players who have access to your infrastructure could be the next attack path, marketplaces and supply chain is an easier vector.

Nikesh Arora’s advice to companies

To defend against the incoming wave of activity, the executive laid out clear operational guidance for leadership teams and security professionals:

The increase in activity is a result of more people becoming better at hacking due to the ease of being able to attack. Had not contemplated that in my calculus.

Please:

1. Test your infrastructure for accessible vulnerabilities and misconfigurations

2. Fix your code and demand your vendors do.

3. Old infra, or insecure infra at the perimeter needs to be updated first

4. New AI tools, especially coding need a security framework. Your developers will do more with code, new skills, and more automation. Don’t forget the coding models have trained on human code.

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