Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

The browser is the operating environment for modern work — it’s where employees access email, SaaS applications, collaboration tools, HR systems, finance platforms, customer data, developer resources and AI services. All of this activity makes the browser a high-value target for attackers because it sits between users, identities, applications, and sensitive enterprise data.

Identities, permissions, exposed resources, and sensitive data can all contribute to risk regardless of whether they reside in AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud. However, security teams often encounter uneven visibility and coverage across disparate cloud environments, and face difficulty in consistently understanding risk across a multi-cloud estate.

As organizations rush to deploy AI agents across enterprises to handle HR cases, write and execute code, and manage customer interactions, they very often need to grant them access to sensitive systems and data.

Organizations are struggling to detect, investigate, and contain cloud threats before adversaries achieve their goals. The new CrowdStrike State of Cloud Detection and Response (CDR) Survey highlights the primary challenges they face: Together, these challenges are creating opportunities for threat actors to successfully breach cloud environments.

Sharing applications with the world is no easy task. Developers struggle to ensure compatibility across different platforms, vendors continually search for new channels to showcase and distribute their software, and users often encounter hurdles when installing and updating the applications. To help solve this challenge, Microsoft offers multiple solutions including its Microsoft Store, the native Windows Installer component (.msi packages), and a lesser-known but powerful option: ClickOnce technology.

Following our deep dive into the internals of ClickOnce application deployment in Part 1 of this two-part blog series, let’s focus on the security implications of this technology. In this blog, we examine how threat actors can weaponize ClickOnce features, and we reveal what we believe to be a new abuse that security teams need to be aware of.

Adversaries are using AI to attack with unprecedented speed and precision. This trend, coupled with the rapidly growing use of agentic AI, means it is now necessary to use AI to protect and defend the modern tech stack. It is timely that on June 2, 2026, President Trump signed Executive Order 14409 on Promoting Advanced Artificial Intelligence Innovation and Security. At a high level, this EO validates that security is fundamental to reaping the benefits of AI.

Frontier AI is poised to change cybersecurity faster than most organizations can adapt. It’s accelerating vulnerability discovery, which puts new pressure on security teams to handle more vulnerabilities, in less time, with workflows built for much slower technology. The primary challenge of the frontier AI era is not the increase in vulnerabilities. It’s understanding which exposures are most critical and how to address them before adversaries target them.

Identity security has long been built around a simple premise: Authenticate a user, grant access, and trust that decision until their next login. While for many this model worked well enough when identities were primarily human and access patterns were predictable, that’s no longer the case for humans and definitely not the case for AI agents.

Across enterprises, a familiar pattern is emerging. A business unit identifies an AI tool with a clear upside in productivity or revenue. Their proposal moves into procurement. Security raises concerns, and the legal team asks new questions about the tool. Compliance starts hesitating and the momentum slows. Finally, the project stalls. This friction is not due to resistance to innovation. It reflects a deeper structural issue: Most enterprise governance models were not designed for AI.

We're proud to announce that Frost & Sullivan has named CrowdStrike a Leader for the second consecutive time in the 2026 Frost Radar: Cloud and Application Runtime Security (CARS). Building on last year's recognition, CrowdStrike scored highest on both the Growth and Innovation indices.

CrowdStrike has joined the OpenID Foundation as a Sustaining Corporate Member, its highest level of membership, and is also now a member of IDPro. Together, these commitments reflect a focused effort to help shape the future of identity-first security through both standards leadership and real-world deployment and a shift beyond static authentication toward more dynamic, interoperable, and effective identity security.

Modern adversaries are accelerating attacks across identities, endpoints, cloud environments, and SaaS applications, often moving faster than security teams can respond. Identity has become a primary attack vector as attackers leverage credential abuse to evade detection and expand their foothold. Stopping today’s threats requires visibility and context across every domain to accurately assess risk before adversaries can move laterally.

AI is moving from experimentation to execution. What started as copilots is quickly evolving into autonomous AI agents that can make decisions, execute tasks, and operate across enterprise environments. As organizations accelerate adoption of agentic AI, they’re expanding their attack surface in ways traditional security models weren’t built to handle.

As organizations accelerate adoption of AI systems, the scope of data security has dramatically expanded. Sensitive data is no longer simply stored. It is continuously accessed, transformed, and moved across cloud services, APIs, and AI pipelines. For use cases from model training to inference, AI systems depend on dynamic data flows that introduce new and often unseen risks.

AI is reshaping the modern workplace. From automating tasks to generating in-depth research in seconds, AI tools are enhancing productivity at a lightning pace. GenAI assistants, agentic browsers, and automation platforms are everyday tools that employees are interweaving into their daily workflows. However, with this powerful new capability comes the serious risk of data loss.

Security teams face a new imperative: act fast, or risk losing the vulnerability battle. The average enterprise faces thousands of vulnerabilities across a sprawling hybrid attack surface. Adversaries are using AI to discover and exploit weaknesses independently, at machine speed, making traditional disclosure timelines increasingly irrelevant. Scan-and-ticket workflows weren't built for this reality, and neither are the teams asked to execute them with finite headcount and growing board-level scrutiny.

Agentic AI is rewriting the rules of enterprise risk, operating across distributed systems at a speed and scale that most security architectures weren’t designed to handle.

CrowdStrike is introducing AI Discovery and Governance for CrowdStrike Falcon for IT, a new capability that helps organizations identify, assess, and govern AI technologies across enterprise environments. Enterprise IT infrastructure is the control plane for modern organizations. It determines how systems communicate, how identities authenticate, and how workloads execute across endpoints, servers, and clouds. This foundation supports the rapid implementation of AI across businesses.