Palo Alto Networks said on Tuesday it released network security research and new products to respond to the frontier AI era.

The company said Unit 42, Palo Alto Networks' threat intelligence organization, developed NOVA, an autonomous system for vulnerability discovery, validation and reporting using multiple frontier AI models.

NOVA analyzed 3,915 open-source software projects over two months and identified 14,090 vulnerabilities. Of those, 99.4% were previously unknown, undisclosed vulnerabilities. Forty percent of the vulnerabilities found were classified as "high" or "critical" severity.

Memory corruption, which existing automated tools mainly found, accounted for 8% of the total. The remaining 92% were semantic and logical flaws such as access control, path traversal, code injection and SSRF. Unit 42 said the time gap between disclosure and exploitation is shrinking rapidly as vulnerability discovery speeds up, and it analyzed that the importance of virtual patching is increasing. It also said it is working with vulnerability information-sharing bodies such as Lightwell and Accrete to responsibly disclose discovered vulnerabilities to software maintainers.

Palo Alto Networks also announced PAN-OS 12.2 Ceres, a new version of its network security platform that adds more than 55 new features.

The company highlighted 3 key functions.

Advanced Virtual Patching is a proactive defense feature that deploys protective measures for newly discovered vulnerabilities within hours, based on Unit 42 research. It shortens the patch application period, which averaged 55 days, to effectively close to zero.

Advanced IP Defense provides real-time IP-layer threat intelligence and zero-trust IP policy verification to respond to direct-to-IP attacks and large-scale proxy network attacks that bypass DNS and URL detection.

Network Security Agent consists of 6 AI agents provided through Strata Cloud Manager. It automates administrator tasks such as onboarding, configuration, threat analysis and troubleshooting, and allows administrators to set the level of involvement themselves.