* [Blog](https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/blog) * [Palo Alto Networks](https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/blog/corporate/) * [AI and Cybersecurity](https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/blog/security-operations/category/ai-and-cybersecurity/) * When Security Becomes an ... # When Security Becomes an Afterthought [](https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.paloaltonetworks.com%2Fblog%2F2026%2F02%2Fwhen-security-becomes-an-afterthought%2F) [](https://twitter.com/share?text=When+Security+Becomes+an+Afterthought&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.paloaltonetworks.com%2Fblog%2F2026%2F02%2Fwhen-security-becomes-an-afterthought%2F) [](https://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?mini=true&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.paloaltonetworks.com%2Fblog%2F2026%2F02%2Fwhen-security-becomes-an-afterthought%2F&title=When+Security+Becomes+an+Afterthought&summary=&source=) [](https://www.paloaltonetworks.com//www.reddit.com/submit?url=https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/blog/2026/02/when-security-becomes-an-afterthought/&ts=markdown) \[\](mailto:?subject=When Security Becomes an Afterthought) Link copied By [Dena De Angelo](https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/blog/author/ddeangelo/?ts=markdown "Posts by Dena De Angelo") Feb 12, 2026 7 minutes [AI and Cybersecurity](https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/blog/security-operations/category/ai-and-cybersecurity/?ts=markdown) [AI Security](https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/blog/category/ai-security/?ts=markdown) [Interview](https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/blog/category/interview/?ts=markdown) [Must-Read Articles](https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/blog/security-operations/category/must-read-articles/?ts=markdown) [People of Palo Alto Networks](https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/blog/category/people-of-palo-alto-networks/?ts=markdown) [Points of View](https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/blog/category/points-of-view/?ts=markdown) [podcast](https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/blog/tag/podcast/?ts=markdown) [Threat Vector](https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/blog/tag/threat-vector/?ts=markdown) # Why AI's Biggest Risk Isn't Technical *This article is based on a conversation with Nikesh Arora on the 100th episode of the Threat Vector podcast.* ![David Moulton interviews Nikesh Arora](https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Nikesh-David-pod-230x85.png) David Moulton interviews Nikesh Arora on the Threat Vector podcast. "Most technologists think about technology, not about cybersecurity," Nikesh Arora says. "Cybersecurity is kind of like insurance. Let's go make great things happen, and let's make sure on the way we purchase insurance." Coming from the CEO of the world's largest cybersecurity company, it's the quiet part said out loud, and it explains why AI deployment is racing ahead while security scrambles to keep up. Earlier this year, Arora spoke with a CIO entirely focused on AI deployment challenges: building viable products, training models, measuring customer impact. Security never came up once. "If you're still going through the motion, trying to understand, 'Can I actually make this thing work?' You're not worried about security," Arora notes. The logic is brutal but consistent: Why secure something that might not even function? In the [Threat Vector podcast's 100th episode](https://thecyberwire.com/podcasts/threat-vector/100/notes) [milestone](https://thecyberwire.com/podcasts/threat-vector/100/notes), Arora speaks with host David Moulton: * Why the gap between innovation and security keeps widening. * How to read inflection points before they're obvious. * What separates organizations that prepare from those that scramble. ## **The Gap That Keeps Growing** The disconnect isn't new. It's the same psychology that makes airport security feel like overhead -- necessary friction that slows down what should be seamless. But with AI, the gap is widening at an unprecedented pace. Consider the infrastructure buildup happening right now. Nvidia has become a $4 trillion company selling chips that can't stay in stock. Hundreds of billions of dollars are flowing into AI-computer infrastructure. Cloud providers are buying out entire methane gas companies to power their data centers. Yet organizations are treating AI security as something to bolt on later. That same CIO told Arora: "We worked on some stuff ourselves, and we're just jerry-rigging some things to make sure this happens securely." Arora's response: > *Jerry rig* , *production* , and *security* don't work together as three terms. ## **Reading Signals Before They're Obvious** Arora has watched enough technology cycles to recognize the pattern. "You start seeing signs early, and then you look around, you don't see enough impact. You say, okay, maybe this is going to be just a passing shower. But you don't realize that over time this thing's getting more and more momentum." The signs around AI are adding up: * **Individual behavior has shifted.** Arora went from never talking to ChatGPT or Gemini to conducting 10-15 conversations daily. During a recent Tokyo trip, he used Gemini as his primary navigation tool, asking it to rank sumo wrestling shows for his kids rather than "trying to go read 14 websites and figure out what makes sense." * **The spend is massive and accelerating.** Not just chips, entire energy infrastructures are being rebuilt to support AI compute needs. * **Consumer and enterprise adoption are both surging.** From coding assistants to business analysis, use cases are expanding faster than security models can adapt. "This thing's going to change our life fundamentally," Arora tells Moulton. "We're not seeing it at scale in our customers just yet. That doesn't mean we can sit back and wait." Arora understands the risks involved in being late to new technology. > You have to not just anticipate where the trend is going. You have to prepare your organization and the resources to get there. Otherwise, the risk is that Silicon Valley will go fund those people who are thinking purely about the new world... and one of them's going to hit. Then you'll be two years behind with no organization, no resources deployed against it. ## **The Bets That Paid Off** When Arora joined Palo Alto Networks seven and a half years ago, he wrote two words on a piece of paper: cloud and AI. The company was a firewall business. Those two inflection points would require fundamental transformation, and, just as with AI now, being late was not an option. > If you don't get the network transformation right, 80% of our business will falter. That insight drove a strategic bet on moving from point products to platform thinking, consolidating security tools rather than adding to the sprawl. The platform approach wasn't about vendor consolidation for its own sake. It was about correlation. Unit 42® data shows that [70% of incidents now span three or more attack surfaces](https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/resources/research/unit-42-incident-response-report?ts=markdown). When attacks move across endpoints, networks, cloud services and applications simultaneously, fragmented security creates gaps that attackers exploit ruthlessly. > Today we have coverage for 80 plus percent of the industry, which means our customers can come talk to us about a myriad of problems, and we can actually cross-correlate across all the different things we do. With AI deployments touching every part of the technology stack, that cross-correlation becomes essential. Data flows between training environments and production systems. Models access APIs across cloud and on premises infrastructure. Applications consume AI services from multiple providers. Security that can't see and correlate across that entire landscape will miss the threats that matter most. ## **First Principles Over Tradition** What drives Arora's ability to spot inflection points isn't just pattern recognition, it's his refusal to accept how things have always been done. His pet peeve: "Somebody said, well, this is how we've traditionally done it." The response reveals his approach: "You use the word traditional. I use the historical context saying, yeah, sure, they used to dig fields with picks and shovels, and now they use tractors." This thinking drove Palo Alto Networks to reimagine SOC performance. The industry accepted four days as the normal time to detect and remediate security incidents. Arora called that unacceptable. "We need to get it to be real time." The result was a fundamentally different architecture that analyzes data as it arrives rather than waiting for problems to appear, enabling 1-minute detection and response instead of four days. > Traditionally, SOCs would analyze the problem when the problem appeared. We said forget it. We're going to analyze everything to see if there's a problem. That architecture fundamentally transformed what we do compared to everybody else in the market. The same first-principles approach needs to apply to AI security. Organizations can't simply extend existing security models and hope they work. ## **What Comes Next** With ransomware attacks now completing in[as little as 25 minutes](https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/resources/research/unit-42-incident-response-report?ts=markdown) (100 times faster than just three years ago, according to Unit 42 research) reactive security simply can't keep pace. Organizations need security that thinks and responds at machine speed, built into AI deployments from day one. "AI has become the biggest inflection point in current technology," Arora observes. Organizations are too busy deploying to worry about security. That's human nature. But it's also the moment when security teams need to stay in lockstep. The question isn't whether to secure AI, it's whether security will be designed in or bolted on. The former takes strategic thinking now. The latter takes crisis management later. > Our job at Palo Alto and our industry is to make sure as they go build these experimental ideas into real production capability that we're staying in lockstep with them and saying, 'Oh, by the way, here's something that can secure what you just built in a way that is not gonna get you into trouble.' [**Listen to the full conversation**](https://thecyberwire.com/podcasts/threat-vector/100/notes)**between Nikesh Arora and David Moulton, senior director of thought leadership for Cortex^®^ and Unit 42, on the 100th episode of Threat Vector.** *** ** * ** *** ## Related Blogs ### [AI and Cybersecurity](https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/blog/security-operations/category/ai-and-cybersecurity/?ts=markdown), [Interview](https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/blog/category/interview/?ts=markdown), [Points of View](https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/blog/category/points-of-view/?ts=markdown) [#### Our CIO on Why Security Must Be Built Into AI from Day One](https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/blog/2025/11/cio-why-security-must-be-built-into-ai/) ### [Points of View](https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/blog/category/points-of-view/?ts=markdown), [Predictions](https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/blog/category/predictions/?ts=markdown) [#### The Challenge of Cybersecurity Frenemies and Collaboration](https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/blog/2025/08/cybersecurity-frenemies-collaboration/) ### [AI Security](https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/blog/category/ai-security/?ts=markdown), [Interview](https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/blog/category/interview/?ts=markdown) [#### Security by Design --- UX and AI in Modern Cybersecurity](https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/blog/2025/07/security-by-design-ux-ai-modern-cybersecurity/) ### [AI Security](https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/blog/category/ai-security/?ts=markdown), [Must-Read Articles](https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/blog/security-operations/category/must-read-articles/?ts=markdown), [News and Events](https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/blog/security-operations/category/news-and-events/?ts=markdown), [Points of View](https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/blog/category/points-of-view/?ts=markdown) [#### Global Reach --- The New Scale of Chinese Cyberthreats](https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/blog/2025/06/new-scale-chinese-cyberthreats/) ### [AI and Cybersecurity](https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/blog/security-operations/category/ai-and-cybersecurity/?ts=markdown), [AI Security](https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/blog/category/ai-security/?ts=markdown), [Interview](https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/blog/category/interview/?ts=markdown), [Points of View](https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/blog/category/points-of-view/?ts=markdown) [#### Baby Tigers Bite --- The Hidden Risks of Scaling AI Too Fast](https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/blog/2025/06/hidden-risks-scaling-ai-too-fast/) ### [AI and Cybersecurity](https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/blog/security-operations/category/ai-and-cybersecurity/?ts=markdown), [AI Security](https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/blog/category/ai-security/?ts=markdown), [Must-Read Articles](https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/blog/security-operations/category/must-read-articles/?ts=markdown), [Points of View](https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/blog/category/points-of-view/?ts=markdown) [#### What the Alien Franchise Taught Me About Cybersecurity](https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/blog/2026/01/alien-franchise-taught-cybersecurity/) ### Subscribe to the Blog! 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