As AI Supercharges Hackers, Cybersecurity Stocks Split Into Platforms and Point Solutions

Attacks carried out by artificial intelligence (AI)-powered hackers jumped 89% last year. That’s not a “clickbait” headline you may see on X as you scroll. It’s also not from a company trying to sell you something. It’s CrowdStrike‘s (NASDAQ: CRWD) own threat report, built from what it actually sees defending real customers every day. It changes the calculus for everyone buying security software.

A hacker that never sleeps, never gets tired, and never needs a paycheck is a different kind of opponent. Suddenly, the question of whether to defend yourself with one connected system or company or a pile of separate tools is really urgent.

This week, it’s also a painful question for shareholders. CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks(NASDAQ: PANW) are both down more than 13% from their Oct. 6 record highs.Fortinet(NASDAQ: FTNT) has slid from its own recent peak, and Okta(NASDAQ: OKTA) dropped more than 7% so far this week.

This may be because the market got triggered by a report that OpenAI may buy a cybersecurity start-up and compete directly in the space. None of these companies lost a customer or a dollar of revenue over that news. What some of these companies lost is the benefit of the doubt that comes with trading at 100-plus times earnings after gaining over 100% in 2026 alone. That’s a valuation story, and it’s worth sitting with before buying any dip here.

Here’s how I’d sort seven cybersecurity-adjacent stocks into those that are actually consolidating a customer’s budget and those that are still selling one tool at a time. Note the honest caveat that this is a low-confidence call, aside from one name.

Platforms, with real receipts

This is where the platform side of the story actually has numbers behind it, not just a nice slide in an investor deck. CrowdStrike is the clearest case of this. Its Falcon Flex bundling program, basically a buy-now-add-later deal that lets customers pay once and pull new tools off the shelf as they need them, has grown its contracted value past $2 billion, more than doubling in a year. That’s real evidence customers are choosing to put more tools under one roof instead of just renewing what they already had. This is exactly the behavior you’d expect if AI-powered attacks are making a patchwork of disconnected tools feel riskier by the month.

Palo Alto Networks is leaning into the same bet, adding roughly 220 new “platformization” deals in a recent quarter, more than double the pace from two years earlier. Fortinet earns its spot through sheer scale. It already holds the top spot in network firewalls, and it’s using that footprint to cross-sell into newer categories.

Palo Alto Networks is getting way better at convincing existing customers to bundle more of its products together, instead of just buying one thing and walking away. Fortinet, meanwhile, already sells the firewall sitting at the edge of more company networks than almost anyone else. It’s using that foothold to pitch those same customers on newer security products once they’re already in the door.

Platforms with caveats

SentinelOne(NYSE: S), Cloudflare(NYSE: NET), and Zscaler(NASDAQ: ZS) all call themselves platforms, and each has a piece of evidence behind it, but the case is thinner than CrowdStrike’s. Cloudflare’s security business sits on top of a much bigger internet infrastructure company. Cloudflare calls itself a “connectivity cloud company” in its own filings. It has security (Zero Trust) as just one of three service lines alongside network and developer services, confirming it’s one slice of a bigger business, not the whole thing. SentinelOne is smaller and earlier in the bundling game. It has roughly $1.2 billion in annual recurring revenue, about one-fifth the size of CrowdStrike’s $5.84 billion, which is why it’s smaller.

Zscaler doesn’t sell you a pile of separate security products the way some of these other companies do. Instead, it routes a company’s internet traffic through its own cloud first, checking it for threats along the way, like a security checkpoint everything has to pass through before it reaches its destination. That’s a different approach than bundling tools together, which makes it hard to put this company in any basket. Zscaler doesn’t fit neatly into either the “platform” or “point solution” camp.

The point solution

Okta still does one job: verifying who’s logging in and what they’re allowed to touch. That job matters more as AI agents start needing their own logins and Okta isn’t really trying to be the whole security department. According to MarketBeat, Okta’s president, Eric Kelleher, says the question companies keep asking isn’t whether to use AI agents, but how to keep them in check. Okta’s pitch boils down to answering three things: where an agent lives, what it’s allowed to touch, and what it’s allowed to do.

Micah Zimmerman has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Cloudflare, CrowdStrike, Fortinet, Okta, and Zscaler. The Motley Fool recommends Palo Alto Networks. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.