Fortinet fights quantum harvesting and shadow AI with new updates

Fortinet has unveiled a bevy of updates with an upgrade of its mainline operating system and additions to its security operations (SecOps) platform.

Announced at its Accelerate 2026 event, the security firm launched FortiOS 8.0, touting various AI, quantum, and secure access service edge (SASE) capabilities under the hood.

These include FortiView, a real-time visibility tool tracking shadow AI use in the enterprise. As explored by SDxCentral, shadow AI is the next-gen version of shadow IT, where unknown or unvetted AI tools are brought into an organization by employees.

Fortinet touts the FortiViews tool as an aid for security teams in tracking such shadowy tools, helping to reduce compliance exposure and drive safer AI adoption.

Elsewhere on the AI security front, the newest version of FortiOS includes AI-aware app control, allowing approved generative AI tools while preventing risky actions which can expose sensitive data.

FortiOS 8.0 also includes operability for model context protocol (MCP) and agent-to-agent (A2A) agentic standards, improved data loss prevention (DLP) with optical character recognition (OCR), and various AI agents spanning the Fortinet Security Fabric. These agents are designed to simplify troubleshooting and configuration for firewall and SD-WAN environments.

New SASE capabilities include a SASE Outpost feature that extends SASE enforcement closer to users and applications by deploying a SASE point of presence (PoP) in customer-controlled locations across distributed environments. Fortinet claimed users will be able to maintain local enforcement where needed without requiring separate stacks.

In addition, a multilayer data sovereignty model is included for granular control over regional log retention, as well as control-plane residency, sovereign PoPs, and fully sovereign deployments within client data centers.

The SASE services also offer unified SD-WAN bundles, including embedded overlay and underlay connectivity, centralized service management, reporting for improved availability and traffic optimization, and simplified support and procurement. Multipath IPsec tunnels are also available.

Finally, quantum gets a look in with the new OS, including quantum-proof SASE capabilities revealing threats hidden in encrypted traffic through enhanced SSL deep inspection with post-quantum cryptography (PQC) and hybrid key exchange. These come on top of quantum-safe cryptographic controls offering agentless VPN connectivity, deploying PQC certificates such as ML-DSA for key establishment and authentication.

Such tools highlight another next-generation threat in the form of harvest-now, decrypt-later attacks, which collect encrypted today in the present in anticipation of future quantum computers capable of breaking today’s cryptography standards.

Fortified SecOps

The Accelerate event also saw updates to the Fortinet Security Operations (SecOps) Platform.

Central to the release is FortiSOC, a cloud-native bundling of tools spanning analytics; security information and event management (SIEM); threat intelligence; and security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR).

Those tools also get the agentic touch, with AI automation of alert triage, investigation, and threat hunting. This uses MCP’s integration strengths to maintain shared context and execution continuity across detection, investigation, and response workflows within the SecOps suite.

Another agent is introduced to FortiEndpoint, with a single agentic tool covering areas such as SASE and zero-trust network access (ZTNA), while FortiGuard SOC-as-a-Service now includes third-party log sources for multivendor monitoring, network detection and response telemetry to aid detection fidelity, and cloud-native application telemetry for improved cloud visibility.

“As attackers weaponize AI to accelerate reconnaissance, exploit development, and social engineering, security operations must function with the same speed and coordination,” Fortinet CEO Ken Xie explained of the updates. “Fortinet is advancing a unified, AI-powered security operations platform that provides a scalable operating architecture across our defense framework, enabling organizations to build, extend, or optimize their SOC through a single architecture spanning self-managed, cloud, and managed deployments.”