Cortex Advanced Email Security – Built for Today’s AI Threats

The rise of generative AI (GenAI) has dramatically transformed the threat landscape, making email a prime target for increasingly sophisticated attacks once again. Phishing remains the leading initial access vector, with business email compromise (BEC) being the most common incident type, according to the 2025 Unit 42 Global Incident Response Report. GenAI empowers attackers to craft flawless, highly personalized phishing emails that bypass traditional security controls, often mimicking known individuals and creating urgent, authentic-feeling messages in any language. These AI-generated attacks are scalable, efficient, and evade signature-based filters because they often lack malicious payloads and are designed to be unique.

Legacy email security solutions, such as secure email gateways (SEGs) and integrated cloud email security (ICES), are ill-equipped to handle these modern threats. They primarily rely on static rules, signatures, and isolated analysis of email content, missing the broader context of multi-stage attacks. This siloed approach leaves security teams blind to the full attack chain, generating alert fatigue and slow response times due to manual investigations for advanced threats. Consequently, threats can spread quickly, leaving organizations vulnerable to AI-powered social engineering attempts that easily slip through legacy defenses.

Introducing Cortex Advanced Email Security

Palo Alto Networks Cortex Advanced Email Security, now generally available, is built to address these challenges. It's not just another email security solution; it's a critical piece of an AI-driven security platform designed for modern security operations (SecOps) teams.

Cortex Advanced Email Security empowers your security teams to:

• Understand true email intent with GenAI: Outsmart sophisticated phishing attacks by using large language models (LLMs), behavioral analytics, and user profiling to analyze not only the content but also the underlying intent of communications. This includes LLM-driven sentiment and content analysis, indicators of compromise (IOC) matching, and risk scoring. It also performs deep content inspection of URLs and attachments with URL filtering & WildFire.
• Accelerate response with cross-domain data: Reduce detection and response times by correlating rich data from email, identity, endpoints, and your network for a full attack path analysis. It also provides crucial context on related activities, affected systems, devices, and users, along with a causality chain of user behavior and processes involved
• Stop threats with industry-leading automation: Neutralize attacks quickly with industry-leading automation. This includes the near real-time removal and quarantine of malicious messages, automated disabling of compromised accounts, and isolation of affected endpoints. Our natively integrated, industry-leading security automation handles virtually all responses, offering guidance for any remaining actions.

Working as part of the broader Cortex XSIAM platform, the Advanced Email Security module helps support full lifecycle protection, from detection to root cause analysis and remediation. SOC teams benefit from a unified security hub that includes email alerts in addition to alerts from other Cortex solutions. These alerts can be scored through risk evaluations and triaged appropriately.

The result: a sharper edge for the email-aware SecOps team.

Comprehensive Protection for Evolving Threats

Cortex Advanced Email Security is built with cutting-edge AI models to detect and mitigate modern threat tactics, ensuring your organization is protected against a wide array of advanced email-based threats, such as:

• Business email compromise : Leverages advanced AI models to learn the normal communication patterns for each user, enabling the flagging of suspicious anomalies such as a CEO emailing someone in finance from a personal Gmail account rather than their organizational one.
• Defense evasion techniques: Identifies sophisticated evasion tactics, including unique social engineering attempts that often bypass static detection. This capability helps overcome attacks designed to be slightly different to avoid signature-based filters.
• Account takeovers (ATO): Flags deviations in typical user behavior. This module integrates with identity tools to detect suspicious logins, flags impossible travelers, and correlates endpoint anomalies like malware on the user's machine. It also monitors if a compromised account starts targeting others internally for the purposes of lateral movement.
• Financial fraud: This method detects financial fraud by using AI models to analyze email intent and identify signs of emotional manipulation, such as rushing the recipient into action. By understanding typical financial communication behaviors, it flags unusual financial requests, changes in bank account details, and abnormal vendor communication patterns.

Stop Email Attacks Before Impact

Phishing isn't a standalone tactic; it's the initial access vector for a bigger, more destructive goal, whether that be data theft, financial fraud, ransomware attack, or a zero-day threat.

By embedding email protection into the Cortex platform, Palo Alto Networks is changing the way teams defend the inbox and everything beyond. This is just another way we're leveraging defensive AI to protect organizations and empower security teams to defend at machine speed.

Ready to move beyond traditional email security? Explore how Cortex Advanced Email Security's defensive AI stops threats that bypass legacy solutions.