Proofpoint has announced the launch of Active Exploits Protection, a new cyber security solution aimed at helping organisations defend against rapidly escalating AI-driven cyber threats by identifying vulnerabilities actively exploited in the wild and automatically deploying protections.
The company said traditional patch-based security models are struggling to keep pace. According to Proofpoint, the “patch cycle is no longer the security clock”, with some attacks beginning before vulnerabilities are formally reflected in public threat databases.
The new platform draws on telemetry from hundreds of millions of daily email interactions and a global network of more than 5,000 sensors, which have generated more than three million exploit-related alerts in 2026 alone.
Proofpoint said it has identified 12 actively exploited CVEs this year compared with eight currently listed in the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog.
Sumit Dhawan (pictured), chief executive officer of Proofpoint, said the speed of modern cyber threats had fundamentally altered how organisations must approach risk management.
“The speed at which threats are evolving has fundamentally changed the risk equation,” Dhawan said in a statement.
“It’s no longer enough to identify vulnerabilities. Organisations need to understand what attackers are exploiting in real time and reduce their exposure immediately.”
The company said Active Exploits Protection is designed to help security teams prioritise vulnerabilities based on observed attacker behaviour rather than theoretical severity scores, allowing organisations to focus remediation efforts on threats actively being weaponised.
Proofpoint said exploit intelligence can be translated into active protection in approximately 35 seconds, with network-wide propagation completed in under 18 minutes. The platform also integrates with existing security operations centre tools, vulnerability management systems, and automation workflows.
Vishal Salvi, global head of the cyber security service line at Cognizant, said organisations needed better visibility into real-world attacker behaviour as AI accelerated exploitation activity.
“With AI-accelerated threats exploiting vulnerabilities faster, enterprise security teams need a sharper view of what attackers are targeting,” Salvi said.
“Proofpoint’s Active Exploits Protection offers that focus, and Cognizant intends to help our clients operationalise it through our managed security and threat response services, so they can prioritise remediation where it matters most.”
Want to see more stories from trusted news sources?Make Cyber Daily a preferred news source on Google.
David Hollingworth
David Hollingworth has been writing about technology for over 20 years, and has worked for a range of print and online titles in his career. He is enjoying getting to grips with cyber security, especially when it lets him talk about Lego.