Fortinet enhances AI to tackle emerging cyber threats

Fortinet has announced a significant expansion of its FortiAI capabilities, embedding new artificial intelligence (AI) features across its Security Fabric platform to bolster protection against emerging cyber threats and streamline operations.

"Fortinet's AI advantage stems from the breadth and depth of our AI ecosystem—shaped by over a decade of AI innovation and reinforced by more patents than any other cybersecurity vendor," said Michael Xie, founder, president, and chief technology officer at Fortinet.

"By embedding FortiAI across the Fortinet Security Fabric platform, including new agentic AI capabilities, we're empowering our customers to reduce the workload on their security and network analysts while improving the efficiency, speed, and accuracy of their security and networking operations," he said.

"In parallel, we've added coverage across the Fabric ecosystem to enable customers to monitor and control the use of generative AI (GenAI)-enabled services within their organisation," Xie added.

According to Fortinet, the growing use of AI in cyberattacks—such as those designed to bypass defences, automate attack vectors and exploit system vulnerabilities—requires organisations to deploy AI-driven security tools capable of both defending against and protecting their own AI systems from compromise. Fortinet has developed its AI systems over 15 years, supported by more than 500 AI patents either issued or pending.

The newly expanded FortiAI now covers Fortinet's full AI-driven approach to security and network operations. Integrated within the Fortinet Security Fabric platform, it delivers autonomous and intelligent capabilities for threat detection, operational efficiency and AI model protection.

Two major enhancements are central to this expansion: FortiAI-Assist and FortiAI-Protect.

FortiAI-Assist combines GenAI, agentic AI, and artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) to simplify security and network tasks using automation and data analytics.

New capabilities include agentic AI applications for network operations, where a GenAI assistant autonomously manages network configuration updates, validates and corrects existing configurations, and resolves issues without human input. The system can also proactively identify and address network issues across wired, wireless and SD-WAN environments.

In security operations, agentic AI is used to triage alerts by prioritising notifications based on context and historical risk data. It suppresses duplicates and flags high-confidence threats. The system also supports adaptive threat hunting and root-cause tracing of incidents using AI-driven reasoning, while threat intelligence enrichment adds further context to help pre-empt adversary tactics.

FortiAI-Protect, meanwhile, focuses on advanced threat detection and contextual risk assessment. It enhances security intelligence services by monitoring the use of over 6,500 AI-related URLs and providing details such as training models, use cases and data geolocation.

The system applies zero-trust principles to block unauthorised or high-risk AI applications, giving administrators visibility and control over AI usage within their organisations. Fortinet also highlighted enhancements in malware detection through advanced machine learning and data analysis, as well as improvements in its intrusion prevention system (IPS) to identify new attack methods.

Organisations can further secure their AI systems using FortiAI-SecureAI, which defends AI infrastructure and cloud-native workloads across providers, safeguards models and intellectual property, and enforces access controls.

Data privacy also remains a core concern. Fortinet said FortiAI uses strict privacy measures to prevent data shared with its GenAI assistant from training the underlying language models. All queries are processed locally, ensuring sensitive information does not leave the organisation's network.

With the combined launch of FortiAI-Assist, FortiAI-Protect and FortiAI-SecureAI, Fortinet aims to support enterprises in securely adopting AI while keeping pace with the growing complexity of cyber threats.