Cato Networks Accelerates CVE Mitigation to 45 Minutes, Setting New Industry Standard
Cato Networks has announced a significant advancement in cybersecurity, claiming a new world record for the mitigation of Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE). The company has reduced the time required to protect against newly disclosed vulnerabilities to just 45 minutes. This is a remarkable improvement over traditional CVE mitigation processes, which typically require weeks to transition from disclosure to protection. Cato’s innovative software architecture has previously shortened this timeline to mere hours, and with the introduction of new agentic threat research, the company is now able to help organizations respond to emerging exploits at machine speed.
The Limitations of Traditional Security Models
Traditional appliance-based security systems rely heavily on a slow, customer-operated patching cycle. In this model, vendors develop protections, customers receive updates, and teams must test these updates before thousands of distributed appliances can be upgraded or configured. This approach is increasingly inadequate in the face of rapidly evolving threats, particularly as the velocity of exploits accelerates in the current AI era.
Shlomo Kramer, co-founder and CEO of Cato Networks, emphasized the urgency of the situation, stating, “Attackers move in minutes. Appliance-centric security still moves in patch cycles.” He noted that Cato’s approach effectively bridges this gap by transforming new CVE intelligence into protections that are deployed globally across its cloud service, requiring no effort from customers. In today’s landscape, security architecture is not merely about efficiency; it has become a critical factor for survival.
The Impact of AI on CVE Disclosure
The rise of advanced AI models, such as Anthropic’s Claude Mythos and OpenAI’s ChatGPT-cyber, is significantly accelerating the scale and speed of CVE disclosures. According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), CVE submissions surged by 263% between 2020 and 2025, with submissions in the first quarter of 2026 nearly one-third higher than the same period the previous year.
In contrast, traditional patching methods are struggling to keep pace. Verizon’s 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report revealed that only about 54% of edge device vulnerabilities were fully remediated throughout the year, with a median remediation time of 32 days. This indicates that legacy security operations were not designed to handle the volume and velocity of threats characteristic of the AI era.
As a result, security teams are shifting their focus from merely reducing time-to-protect to minimizing time-to-exploit.
Cato’s Innovative Approach to CVE Mitigation
Cato Networks is uniquely positioned to address this challenge. The company has spent nearly a decade developing a CVE protection lifecycle that operates at cloud scale. Cato has been monitoring CVEs, creating protections, validating their effectiveness, and deploying updates automatically across the Cato Cloud with near-zero false positives. This established framework has now been enhanced with agentic CVE mitigation, which employs AI agents to expedite each step of the protection process.
The agentic CVE mitigation lifecycle operates under human supervision but minimizes human involvement in the following ways:
- Monitoring and triaging the publication of disclosed vulnerabilities from various sources
- Extracting Indicators of Compromise (IoCs) and reproducing exploits in a controlled lab environment
- Developing threat signatures based on Cato’s unique contextual language
- Testing and simulating threat signatures to eliminate false positives and potential disruptions
- Deploying threat signatures to the global Cato Cloud Platform
Cato’s cloud-native platform is designed for automatic updates, alleviating the burden of customer-operated patching across a distributed security infrastructure. This architecture integrates three essential components for effective agentic security operations: a network capable of detecting attacks, a platform for contextual correlation, and a cloud infrastructure for global enforcement of protections. This combination allows Cato to operationalize security at machine speed.
A Shift Towards Continuous Protection
Cato’s agentic CVE mitigation exemplifies a broader industry trend: the transition from manual, customer-operated workflows to continuous, machine-scale protection delivered through cloud-native platforms. By automating processes such as vulnerability analysis, exploit reproduction, protection generation, and validation, Cato has managed to reduce the time required for protection generation to as little as 45 minutes.
Elad Menahem, Senior Vice President of Research at Cato Networks, highlighted the significance of this advancement, stating, “The breakthrough here is not just speed. It’s that vulnerability response itself can now operate continuously and at machine scale.”
In an era where AI-driven threats are becoming increasingly sophisticated, reliance on traditional appliance patch cycles or manual operations is no longer viable. As attackers continue to move faster and the volume of CVEs escalates, the capability to provide global protection within minutes has become a fundamental requirement for cybersecurity.
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