Cybersecurity and networking firm Fortinet is enhancing its products to meet evolving needs as AI grows in sophistication and scope.

“AI-driven security operations … had billing growth of 25% [in the second quarter], supported by over 20 AI-enabled solutions on our platform,” Ken Xie, founder, chairperson and chief executive of Fortinet, said on the company’s Q2 earnings call after market close on July 29.

“As organizations deploy and use AI tools throughout their operations, they realize they must modernize their security to handle the complex high-speed threat of the AI era,” he said.

To address the growing threat of AI, Fortinet launched FortiSOC, a cloud-delivered AI security operations center (SOC) platform, in June.

And the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company this week launched the FortiGate 1200G series with FortiSASE Outpost capability. The cloud-delivered security service allows customers to combine threat protection, connectivity and varied types of security into one system, which can be on-premises, at off-site facilities or in the cloud, according to a July 28 release.

This update strengthens Fortinet’s SASE Firewall product, which is a combination of firewall and secure access service edge (SASE) technologies.

“This new SASE Firewall addresses the fast-growing areas of SASE, AI and quantum,” Xie said.

FortiNet SASE Firewall business grew 34% to more than $2 billion in Q2, Xie said on the call. The product was developed in-house and integrates into a single operating system, FortiOS, he said.

BY THE NUMBERS: Fortinet reported in Q2:

• Revenue of $2 billion, up 25.6% year over year;
• Net income of $606 million, up 37.8% YoY; and
• Operating expenses of $954 million, up 11.3% YoY.

No mention of FortiBleed

The Q2 earnings call and report did not mention the June reports of bad actors targeting Fortinet devices in a credential-harvesting scheme. Others in the industry dubbed the incident “FortiBleed.”

“The activity involves threat actors reusing credentials from previous incidents and employing brute-force techniques against devices with weak password hygiene and no multifactor authentication,” Fortinet Chief Information Security Officer Carl Windsor said in a June 19 blog post. “Fortinet provided detailed guidance at the time of these [previous incidents] and we continue to strongly encourage all customers to ensure these remediation steps have been completed.”

“This is not a new Fortinet vulnerability and this activity is not related to any recent incident or advisory.”

Fortinet clients in the financial industry include:

• CaixaBank;
• CEC Bank;
• Deutsche Bank; and
• Southern Bank.

Shares of Fortinet (NASDAQ: FTNT) were up 0.67% from market open to $154.25 at market close today. The company has a market capitalization of $112.9 billion.

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