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Week in review: Infostealer dropped via FortiClient EMS flaw, exploited Trend Micro Apex One flaw

Here’s an overview of some of last week’s most interesting news, articles, interviews and videos: Coinflow CISO on crypto payments security under AI pressure Crypto payment firms sit near the top of the target list for advanced persistent threat groups, and the workload on their security leaders keeps growing. Malcolm Portelli, CISO at Coinflow, runs…

Cisco Live 2026 Preview: AI, Security, and Partner Changes

Ahead of its annual North American conference in Las Vegas, Cisco has spent the last few months rolling out a steady stream of AI-focused announcements touching nearly every corner of its business, from networking and cybersecurity to certifications and channel programs. Recent earnings report shows record revenue due to AI infrastructure demand The company’s latest…

Week in review: GitHub breached via poisoned VS Code extension, critical NGINX flaw exploited

Here’s an overview of some of last week’s most interesting news, articles, interviews and videos: TeamPCP breached GitHub’s internal codebase via poisoned VS Code extension Following TeamPCP’s claim that they’ve breached GitHub’s own private code repositories, the Microsoft-owned company launched an investigation and confirmed the compromise. Earbud sensors can authenticate users by their heartbeat, study…

Weekly Update 505

Well, that didn’t last long! Recording this on Saturday morning my time, I observed ShinyHunters having gone quiet since the massive haul that would have been the Instructure ransom. It was two weeks almost to the hour since I’d first heard rumour of payment being made, and I posited that groups like this often go…

EnterpriseClaw wants to bring governance to the OpenClaw era

Autonomous agent orchestration tool OpenClaw hit the scene last November and immediately went viral, but its dramatic flaws were exposed just as quickly. Still, it marked a pivotal step in the agentic AI era, and enterprises have been exploring ways to deploy fleets of autonomous agents safely and securely ever since. Automation Anywhere Tuesday rolled…

Attackers hit vulnerabilities hard last year, making exploits the top entry point for breaches

Attackers couldn’t get enough of the vulnerabilities at their disposal last year, making exploits the top initial access vector across more than 22,000 breaches Verizon analyzed in its latest Data Breach Investigations Report released Tuesday. The massive annual study uncovered a surge of exploited vulnerabilities during a one-year period ending in October 2025. Exploited defects…

Attackers are exploiting critical NGINX vulnerability (CVE-2026-42945)

A critical NGINX vulnerability (CVE-2026-42945) disclosed last week is being exploited by attackers, VulnCheck security researcher Patrick Garrity revealed on Saturday. The vulnerability, dubbed NGINX Rift, can be reliably exploited to trigger a denial-of-service condition and can potentially allow for unauthenticated remote code execution, all achievable by sending a specially crafted HTTP request to a…

Week in review: Cisco patches SD-WAN 0-day, unpatched Microsoft Exchange Server flaw exploited

Here’s an overview of some of last week’s most interesting news, articles, interviews and videos: Review: Foundations of Cybersecurity, 2nd edition Jason Andress has refreshed his introductory security text for No Starch Press. He writes in the introduction that the term security now extends past data center servers to cloud resources, mobile devices, the Internet…

Meet Fragnesia, the third Linux kernel vulnerability in a month

Linux admins reeling from handling last month’s CopyFail and last week’s Dirty Frag kernel vulnerabilities have a new headache to deal with: Fragnesia. “This is a significant vulnerability,” Robert Beggs, head of incident response firm DigitalDefence, told CSO. “It is bypassing traditional filesystem permissions that are present and enforced (for example, ‘file is owned by…

Week in review: cPanel vulnerability actively exploited, DigiCert breach, LinkedIn job scams

Here’s an overview of some of last week’s most interesting news, articles, interviews and videos: Your work apps are quietly handing 19 data points to someone Office work in 2026 relies on mobile apps used alongside personal tools like banking and messaging. Ten widely used workplace apps, including Gmail, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Slack, and Notion,…

Adaptive Security Leadership in an Expanding Threat Surface

Last week I joined fellow security leaders at CISO Inspire Summit North for a panel discussion on The Expanding Threat Surface: Adaptive Security Leadership for 2026 and Beyond. It was a timely discussion, because the challenge facing security leaders today is not simply more threats. It is more connections, more dependencies, and more complexity. Suppliers, SaaS, identities, automation…

Week in review: Claude Mythos finds 271 Firefox flaws, Vercel breach

Here’s an overview of some of last week’s most interesting news, articles, interviews and videos: SmokedMeat: Open-source tool shows what attackers do inside CI/CD pipelines Boost Security has released SmokedMeat, an open-source framework that runs attack chains against CI/CD infrastructure so engineering and security teams can see what an attacker would do in their specific…

No Exploit Needed: How Attackers Walk Through the Front Door via Identity-Based Attacks

The cybersecurity industry has spent the last several years chasing sophisticated threats like zero-days, supply chain compromises, and AI-generated exploits. However, the most reliable entry point for attackers still hasn’t changed: stolen credentials. Identity-based attacks remain a dominant initial access vector in breaches today. Attackers obtain valid credentials through credential stuffing

Week in review: Acrobat Reader flaw exploited, Claude Mythos offensive capabilities and limits

Here’s an overview of some of last week’s most interesting news, articles, interviews and videos: Bringing governance and visibility to machine and AI identities In this Help Net Security interview, Archit Lohokare, CEO of AppViewX, explains how the rise of AI marked a turning point where machine and AI agent identities began converging into a…

We’re only seeing the tip of the chip-smuggling iceberg

Last year, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang repeatedly denied that China was obtaining America’s most advanced chips. ‘There’s no evidence of any AI chip diversion,’ he said, dismissing such reports on another occasion as ‘tall tales.’ Federal prosecutors would beg to differ. They’ve charged six men over the past three weeks with smuggling billions of dollars’…

Scans for EncystPHP Webshell, (Mon, Apr 13th)

Last week, I wrote about attackers scanning for various webshells, hoping to find some that do not require authentication or others that use well-known credentials. But some attackers are paying attention and are deploying webshells with more difficult-to-guess credentials. Today, I noticed some scans for what appears to be the “EncystPHP” web shell. Fortinet wrote about…

Your MTTD Looks Great. Your Post-Alert Gap Doesn’t

Anthropic restricted its Mythos Preview model last week after it autonomously found and exploited zero-day vulnerabilities in every major operating system and browser. Palo Alto Networks’ Wendi Whitmorewarned that similar capabilities are weeks or months from proliferation. CrowdStrike’s 2026 Global Threat Report puts average eCrime breakout time at 29 minutes. Mandiant’s M-Trends 2026

Week in review: Windows zero-day exploit leaked, Patch Tuesday forecast

Here’s an overview of some of last week’s most interesting news, articles, interviews and videos: Cloudflare moves up its post-quantum deadline as researchers narrow the path to Q-Day Cloudflare announced it is targeting 2029 to complete post-quantum security across its entire product suite, including post-quantum authentication. The company is following a revised roadmap that Google…

Why is the timeline to quantum-proof everything constantly shrinking?

When Google announced last month it was moving up its own internal timeline for migrating to quantum-resistant forms of encryption, it started a broader conversation in the cybersecurity and cryptography communities: Just what was pushing one of the largest tech companies in the world to significantly accelerate its adoption of post-quantum protections for its systems,…

Week in review: Axios npm supply chain compromise, critical FortiClient EMS bugs exploited

Here’s an overview of some of last week’s most interesting news, articles, interviews and videos: Financial groups lay out a plan to fight AI identity attacks Generative AI tools have brought the cost of deepfake production low enough that criminals and state-sponsored actors now use them routinely against financial institutions. A joint paper from the…

Microsoft facing CMA probe of its business software portfolio

The regulatory body which last year accused Microsoft of inflating its office software’s license prices when it was run on rival cloud platforms to make those platforms less appealing, said Tuesday it will conduct a further investigation into the company’s entire business software ecosystem. The probe by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), scheduled…

The external pressures redefining cybersecurity risk

Over the last four years, I’ve watched organizations get blindsided by threats that originated in a third-party network. More than 35% of data breaches are caused by a compromised vendor or partner, not by any failure in the organization’s controls. While many organizations know that the biggest threats to their security come from forces entirely…

Week in review: NIST updates DNS security guidance, compromised LiteLLM PyPI packages

Here’s an overview of some of last week’s most interesting news, articles, interviews and videos: NIST updates its DNS security guidance for the first time in over a decade DNS infrastructure underpins nearly every network connection an organization makes, yet security configurations for it have gone largely unrevised at the federal guidance level for more…

AI regulations are already out of date — IT leaders need to think ahead

Most AI regulations passed in the last few years are already irrelevant, but enterprises should think ahead with rudimentary governance plans for quicker compliance, said legal experts in two panel discussions at Nvidia’s GTC trade show last week. Current AI regulations target frontier models, high-risk models, and transparency. They typically focus on LLMs and the…

Apple goes global with key MDM tools and services for business

As it steadily grows its share in business markets, Apple has at last introduced its very useful collection of services for small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs), Apple Business Essentials, outside the US; except it’s not called Apple Business Essentials, and much of it will be free. First introduced November 2021 following the company’s acquisition of Fleetsmith, Business Essentials is…

Why US companies must be ready for quantum by 2030: A practical roadmap

Last year, I asked a room of infrastructure, identity and application leaders a simple question: “Where in our environment do we rely on RSA or elliptic curve cryptography?” The first answers were the usual suspects: TLS on the edge, our VPN and the certificates on laptops. Then we pulled up a dependency map and the…

Week in review: ScreenConnect servers open to attack, exploited Microsoft SharePoint flaw

Here’s an overview of some of last week’s most interesting news, articles, interviews and videos: What smart factories keep getting wrong about cybersecurity In this Help Net Security interview, Packsize CSO Troy Rydman breaks down the biggest vulnerabilities in smart factory environments today, from IoT devices and legacy systems to human error. He explains how…

Are nations ready to be the cybersecurity insurers of last resort?

A senior member of the Cyber Monitoring Center (CMC), an organization formed last year to monitor, define and classify cyber events impacting UK organizations, this week questioned whether a £1.5 billion (about $2 billion) government loan guarantee provided to Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) should have happened in the first place. Speaking at an event hosted…

Armis Research Reveals Australia Experiencing the Highest Volume of Cyberwarfare Attacks of Any Country Globally

GUEST RESEARCH: A rising number (72%, up from 56% last year) of Australian respondents have had to report an act of cyberwarfare to authorities, the most of any country surveyed for this report 77% of Australian IT professionals believe the ability of nation-states to harness AI for cyber operations will widen the gap between attackers…

Week in review: AiTM phishing kit used to hijack AWS accounts, year-long malware campaign targets HR

Here’s an overview of some of last week’s most interesting news, articles, interviews and videos: Turning expertise into opportunity for women in cybersecurity Speaker diversity in cybersecurity has been a talking point for over a decade, with panels, pledges, and dedicated conference tracks failing to produce change. Stages still skew heavily male, even as women…

Encrypted Client Hello: Ready for Prime Time?, (Mon, Mar 9th)

Last week, two related RFCs were published:  RFC 9848: Bootstrapping TLS Encrypted ClientHello with DNS Service Bindings RFC 9849: TLS Encrypted Client Hello These TLS extensions have been discussed quite a bit already, and Cloudflare, one of the early implementers and proponents, has been in use for a while. Amidst an increased concern about threats to privacy…

Week in review: Weaponized OAuth redirection logic delivers malware, Patch Tuesday forecast

Here’s an overview of some of last week’s most interesting news, articles, interviews and videos: BlacksmithAI: Open-source AI-powered penetration testing framework BlacksmithAI is an open-source penetration testing framework that uses multiple AI agents to execute different stages of a security assessment lifecycle. BlacksmithAI runs as a hierarchical system in which an orchestrator coordinates task execution…

Zero-day exploits hit enterprises faster and harder

Google tracked 90 vulnerabilities exploited as zero-days last year, with Chinese cyberespionage groups doubling their count from 2024 and commercial surveillance vendors overtaking state-sponsored hackers for the first time. Nearly half of the recorded zero-days targeted enterprise technologies such as security appliances, VPNs, networking devices, and enterprise software platforms. “Increased exploitation of security and networking…

Week in review: Self-spreading npm malware hits developers, Cisco SD-WAN 0-day exploited since 2023

Here’s an overview of some of last week’s most interesting news, articles, interviews and videos: Identity verification systems are struggling with synthetic fraud Fake and expired IDs keep showing up in routine customer transactions, from alcohol purchases to credit card applications. The problem shows up most often in industries that depend on fast onboarding and…

The farmers and the mercenaries: Rethinking the ‘human layer’ in security

There’s a phrase that’s become gospel in cybersecurity: “Employees are the last line of defense.” We’ve built an entire industry around it. Billions of dollars in security awareness programs, mandatory simulations and user-reporting workflows across endpoints, applications and collaboration tools. All predicated on a premise that sounds reasonable until you examine what we’re actually asking.…

Week in review: Firmware-level Android backdoor found on tablets, Dell zero-day exploited since 2024

Here’s an overview of some of last week’s most interesting news, articles, interviews and videos: Security at AI speed: The new CISO reality The CISO role has changed significantly over the past decade, but according to John White, EMEA Field CISO, Torq, the most disruptive shift is accountability driven by agentic AI. In this Help…

Week in review: Exploited newly patched BeyondTrust RCE, United Airlines CISO on building resilience

Here’s an overview of some of last week’s most interesting news, articles, interviews and videos: United Airlines CISO on building resilience when disruption is inevitable In this Help Net Security interview, Deneen DeFiore, VP and CISO at United Airlines, explains how the company approaches modernization without compromising safety-critical environments, why resilience and continuity matter as…

The democratization of AI data poisoning and how to protect your organization

Smart organizations have spent the last three years protecting their AI tools from skilled prompt injection-style attacks. The assumption has been that poisoning the foundational model, the real brains behind AI systems, requires technical expertise, privileged access, or a coordinated threat group. That assumption no longer holds, and it marks a significant shift in how…

Apple fixes zero-day flaw exploited in targeted attacks (CVE-2026-20700)

Apple has released fixes for a zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2026-20700) exploited in targeted attacks last year. CVE-2026-20700 is a memory corruption issue in dyld, the Dynamic Link Editor component of Apple’s operating systems, and may allow attackers with memory write capability to execute arbitrary code. “Apple is aware of a report that this issue may have…

Global Group ransomware gang running new campaign using Windows shortcut files

When Microsoft patched a vulnerability last summer that allowed threat actors to use Windows’ shortcut (.lnk) files in exploits, defenders might have hoped use of this tactic would decline. They were wrong. According to researchers at Forcepoint, a new high-volume phishing campaign spreading the Global Group ransomware has been detected that hopes to sucker employees…

Warlock Ransomware Breaches SmarterTools Through Unpatched SmarterMail Server

SmarterTools confirmed last week that the Warlock (aka Storm-2603) ransomware gang breached its network by exploiting an unpatched SmarterMail instance. The incident took place on January 29, 2026, when a mail server that was not updated to the latest version was compromised, the company’s Chief Commercial Officer, Derek Curtis, said. “Prior to the breach, we…

How the EU’s trade ‘bazooka’ could hit the US tech sector

When the Trump Administration threatened tariffs last month against countries looking to block any plan to annex Greenland, European leaders debated responding with the region’s trade “bazooka” – a retaliation mechanism that could target US tech firms selling into the European Union.  The anti-coercion instrument, introduced in 2023 and so far unused, is designed to deter…

Intel’s Fab Moves in Europe Could Change Chip Industry

For much of the last two decades, the microprocessor market has been defined by companies divorcing themselves from manufacturing to focus solely on design and sales. But since the pandemic, and now the war in Ukraine, it has become clear that this business model puts too much manufacturing capacity in Asia and creates huge supply…

Intel’s Fab Moves in Europe Could Change Chip Industry

For much of the last two decades, the microprocessor market has been defined by companies divorcing themselves from manufacturing to focus solely on design and sales. But since the pandemic, and now the war in Ukraine, it has become clear that this business model puts too much manufacturing capacity in Asia and creates huge supply…