Самое надёжное хранилище годами выдавало предсказуемые пароли.

Маркировка обошлась бизнесу в 20 млрд рублей.

Открытая папка на сервере раскрыла атаки на 100+ стран.

Бэкдоры OctLurk и SilkLurk работают только в памяти компьютера и не оставляют следов на диске.

Да, нейросеть даёт правильные ответы. Но, возможно, по совершенно неправильным причинам.

SakDriver скрывает файлы, сетевые соединения и системную активность, поэтому заражённый компьютер может работать против пользователя тихо и долго

Новые инструменты сами связывают утечки, аккаунты, адреса и геолокацию, снижая порог для массовой травли.

Власти расширили перечень обязательного российского ПО.

Атака на водопроводные сети в 30 городах США едва не привела к затоплениям и отравлению воды.

Но на них действуют законы, которые нередко принимались без понимания специфики новой среды.

Джек Ма, китайский миллиардерВ 1995 году муниципальный совет Ханчжоу направляет Джека Ма на годовую стажировку в США по студенческому обмену.

Предав наследие наших предков, мы встали на путь саморазрушения — морального, интеллектуального, экономического и, в конечном итоге, биологического.

Но что реально происходит «под капотом» и в какую сторону склонится чаша весов «независимости» — для большинства стран это риски ИБ.

Выход из них далеко не всегда способствует достижению общих целей — технологического и инновационного развития с соблюдением регуляторных и конституционных требований.

Браузер — один из значимых векторов атакБыло бы преувеличением сказать, что количество атак на браузер и через него выросло в последние годы.

Другими словами, корпоративный браузер позволяет контролировать все потоки данных, которые через него проходят.

Крупнейшие игроки:Google Chrome Enterprise — самый известный корпоративный браузер.

Глобальные лидеры (специализированные решения):Island — стартап из США, создавший полноценный корпоративный браузер на основе Chromium.

Через пять лет фраза «используйте корпоративный браузер» будет звучать так же естественно, как сегодня «используйте корпоративную почту».

В нынешних условиях даже если бюджет на ИТ и ИБ формально не снижается, но и не растёт, это означает его фактическое снижение.

Так, на одной из сессий конференции IT IS conf, которая прошла совсем недавно, провели блиц-опрос посетителей, в ходе которого лишь один участник заявил, что в их компании расходы на ИБ в 2026 году выросли.

Возможно, влияет и то, что в ИБ только идёт процесс перехода управления от технических специалистов к менеджерам.

ИБ как часть общей системы защиты«В информационную безопасность действительно приходится вкладываться, защищаясь от того, что, возможно, никогда не произойдёт.

В целом же, по его мнению, инвестиции в ИБ являются расходами на поддержание устойчивости б…

Мы уже рассказывали читателям о возможностях «Публичного облака NGENIX», а в этом обзоре рассмотрим «Аттестованное публичное облако NGENIX» — аттестованную распределённую облачную платформу для защиты от DDoS и бот-атак.

Архитектура «Аттестованного публичного облака NGENIX»«Аттестованное публичное облако NGENIX» построено на концепции встроенной безопасности: реализация всех требований ИБ заложена на этапе проектирования (Security by Design).

Администрирование «Аттестованного публичного облака NGENIX» и управление пользователями осуществляется в клиентском портале NGENIX EdgeSec Multidesk, доступном через веб-интерфейс.

Подключение и техподдержкаТарифы «Аттестованного публичного облака» раз…

Среди российских решений можно назвать как экосистемные, так и самостоятельные продукты: MaxPatrol VM от Positive Technologies, R-Vision VM, ScanFactory VM, Vulns.io VM и др.

Первый вывод для Kaspersky VM – это желание снизить остроту проблем от хаотичности развития ИТ-инфраструктуры российских предприятий.

Отсутствие упоминания Kaspersky Security Center Web Console, скорее всего, объясняется ограничением первой версии Kaspersky VM.

Она может применяться как для Defensive, так и для Offensive Security.

Kaspersky VM и ИИНо вернёмся к теме Vulnerability Management и Kaspersky VM.

Делимся лучшими практиками построения резервного копирования, которое работает предсказуемо и не зависит от человека.

Причина обычно заключается не в отсутствии технологий, а в том, что процесс построен так, что ошибки становятся заметны только в момент восстановления.

Почему ручной процесс подводитПока резервное копирование держится на действиях конкретного человека, результат зависит от его занятости, внимательности и приоритетов.

В конце встраивается проверка восстановления — не как разовое мероприятие, а как часть регулярного расписания.

Вместе это и есть процесс, который держится на системе, а не на человеке.

Её разработчик — российская компания «Клауд Атлас», которая создаёт технологические решения для бизнеса и государственных организаций, разрабатывая решения для бизнеса и государственных организаций, включая средства защиты информации и корпоративных коммуникаций.

Благодаря широким возможностям Frisbee является не только заменой WhatsApp и Telegram для бизнеса, но и может использоваться как альтернатива Slack и Microsoft Teams.

Возможности использования платформыРассмотрим основные функциональные возможности платформы Frisbee в корпоративной среде.

Для удобства разделим их на две части: инструменты для пользователей (интересные большинству сотрудников) и инструменты для администраторов (наст…

Новый квадрант Gartner показывает, что подход к киберразведке смещается от аналитического к операционализированному.

На первый план выходят единые платформы, автоматизация и работа с внешними угрозами в общем контексте, а не разрозненные средства защиты.

Так, архитектура решений раннего предупреждения кибератак компании BI.ZONE объединяет портал BI.ZONE Threat Intelligence, платформы BI.ZONE Digital Risk Protection и BI.ZONE External Attack Surface Management.

Такой подход к управлению внешними угрозами соответствует требованиям, которые Gartner считает ключевыми для нового поколения CTI-решений.

Подход включает тесное взаимодействие команд BI.ZONE Digital Risk Protection, BI.ZONE Threat In…

Детально описываем Ideco NGFW, Kaspersky NGFW, PT NGFW, UserGate NGFW, Континент 4 и ViPNet Coordinator HW по 260 критериям сравнения.

Поэтому, когда из России ушли иностранные ИБ-вендоры и на рынке освободилось место, отечественные производители тут же устремились в сегмент NGFW.

Как бизнес выбирает NGFW в 2026 годуМожно сказать, что сейчас заказчики выбирают не столько межсетевой экран, сколько производителя межсетевого экрана.

Нет Нет(будет доступно в будущих версиях) Да Да Да Двунаправленная поддержка DSCP Нет(появится в версии 23, август 2026 г.)

Да Да Да Да Да Экспорт логов Да(Syslog, выгрузка CSV.

Это означает, что после получения действительных учётных данных, независимо от способа их компрометации, дальнейшее продвижение по сети становится почти гарантированным.

Если собрать это вместе, становится понятно: всё чаще первоначальное проникновение в инфраструктуру начинается не с запуска вредоносного кода, а с использования скомпрометированной учётной записи.

Знакомство с бойцамиКомпрометация учётной записи — это когда злоумышленник получает доступ к чужой учётной записи и начинает работать с ней так, будто он и есть её владелец.

И наоборот: вредоносная программа может применяться для хищения учётных данных и последующей компрометации аккаунтов.

После получения действующих учётных данн…

И в этот момент привычная схема, где разработка, эксплуатация и безопасность живут отдельно, начинает давать задержки и трения.

В этой точке логично появляется Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) как способ связать безопасность с разработкой и эксплуатацией так, чтобы риски контролировались внутри процесса, а не поверх него, и не замедляли работу команд.

Иногда значение платформы пытаются объяснить через связку Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) и Cloud Workload Protection Platform (CWPP).

Что такое CNAPP (источник: Venison Magazine)Смысл такой сборки не в количестве модулей, а в том, что они перестают жить разрозненно.

Карта мирового рынка CNAPPЧтобы помочь компаниям…

Риск возникает не в самом инструменте, а в том, кто его запустил, зачем и что он начал делать после запуска.

Такой мониторинг работает пассивно, на зеркалированном трафике, не ставит агенты на контроллеры и не нагружает критичные узлы.

Проблема не в том, что сигнатуры «больше не нужны»: против известного вредоноса они работают.

Проблема в том, что living-off-the-land проходит без файла, без хеша и без явной вредоносной нагрузки.

ВыводыСигнатурная защита остаётся важным элементом кибербезопасности, но в промышленных сетях она уже не способна закрыть весь спектр угроз.

Всё это не оставалось без внимания регуляторов.

Однако потенциал роста и в России, и в мире на ближайшие годы довольно высок: среднегодовой прирост в компании ожидают на уровне 12–14 % на ближайший период.

И в целом, насколько рискует вендор, пытаясь выйти в новый для себя сегмент, который, по большому счёту, уже занят?

Цена ошибки несоизмерима с прикладным ПО, и репутационный ущерб от одного массового сбоя в узком ИБ-сообществе догоняет вендора годами.

Однако у «Антивируса Касперского» были существенные преимущества, что и позволило ему занять место не только на российском, но и на внешних рынках.

Пользователю не сообщается что pre-trigger активен, какого он размера, и что запись уже идёт.

вообщем это я так, чтобы вы не забывали о том что выйдет 2/3 часть, новости есть тут.

Так что на актуальных прошивках Яндекс через этот логкат успешно соберет данные только о том, как забаговал сам Яндекс.

И самое ироничное: вы за это ещё и платите, покупая подписку «Яндекс Плюс».

О наболевшемЯндекс, если вы это читаете (а вы точно это читаете) - я провёл для васбесплатный публичный аудит!

Дело не в том, что кто-то «не подумал»Тут легко скатиться в обвинения: «ну это стажёры виноваты, не разобрались».

Логичное и понятное решение скопировать весь лог и кинуть в ИИ: «найди аномалии, покажи, где успешные логины, а где нет».

Инженер берёт running-config с Cisco, FortiGate, Palo Alto не важно какого устройства и отправляет в ИИ, чтобы быстро найти косяк в ACL или в маршрутизации.

И это не первый такой случай похожие истории уже были с Grok, Meta AI и ChatGPT.

И тут вопрос не в том, чтобы отказаться от нейросетей — это уже нереально и не нужно.

Бот может не загрузить рекламный скрипт, не дождаться аукциона, не отрисовать блок и не обеспечить видимость объявления.

И не об очередном ИИ-агенте, который честно подписался своим именем и методично читает сайт от первой страницы до последней.

Не все строки обязаны принадлежать одному исполняемому файлу: GSCAN - наше название поведенчески связанной кампании, а не хеш конкретной программы.

Рабочие payload я, разумеется, приводить не буду: статья должна помогать закрыть дверь, а не служить инструкцией по изготовлению отмычки.

Если ранжировать не по громкости, а по ширине распределения, после США шли Россия, Германия, Сингапур, Великобритания, Франция и Китай.

Я собираю продукты с помощью ИИ — и на своём опыте понял одну вещь: самый дорогой факап в такой работе не в том, что нейросеть пишет плохой код.

ИИ не спорит, берёт первый вариант, который пришёл ему в голову, и пишет.

Ниже — что именно ИИ пропускает в платежах, как заставить его думать до того, как он начнёт писать, и пять уровней защиты, которые в итоге появились у меня в продукте.

ИИ регулярно так делает, если не поставить жёсткие рамки: он реализует то, что видно в интерфейсе, а не то, что происходит на сервере.

Собираю продукты с ИИ в студии Hikmah Labs.

Четыре утра, ты выслушаешь орущих директоров, а у конкурента на копеечном шареде сайт открывается.

Проводим диагностику и держим связь с профильными службами... Решение может потребовать некоторое время и не зависит от нас, поэтому не можем сориентировать по срокам.

И дальше:Недоступность затрагивает не всех и проявляется по-разному в зависимости от оператора связи, региона и браузера.

Что в итоге заработало: свой reverse-proxyПростое решение: отдельная VPS в российском облаке, на ней обычный nginx как обратный прокси.

Подробно — в разборе реального кейса и в статье про схему ограничений июня.

Если вы планируете поступать в 2026 году, сейчас самое время разобраться, как устроена программа, что входит в обучение и как проходит поступление.

После выпуска студенты получают диплом гособразца магистра НИЯУ МИФИ по направлению 10.04.01 «Информационная безопасность» и диплом о профпереподготовки от Яндекс Практикума по направлению «Кибербезопасность».

Как устроено обучение в онлайн-магистратуре «Кибербезопасность»Вот что важно знать о формате обучения:Полностью онлайн.

Выпускники получают диплом магистра НИЯУ МИФИ государственного образца по направлению 10.04.01 «Информационная безопасность» и диплом Яндекс Практикума о профессиональной переподготовке «Кибербезопасность».

После зачислен…

Ниже разбор: почему так, почему платный тариф это не лечит, и что мы в итоге написали сами.

Ничего не ломалось, оно никогда толком и не работало, просто на паре тестовых телефонов, которые всё время на связи, это было незаметно.

Разбираю каждую, потому что все три неочевидны и все три бьют именно по продакшену, а не по тестам.

429: лимит списывается не с вас, а с получателяДальше интереснее.

Мы его не отправляли, потому что ntfy на него не смотрит, а больше мы ничего и не пробовали.

На это указывают избыточные поясняющие комментарии:Логика пакетов🔹 Конкатенация URL C2 из нескольких констант.

Из занятного:Нагрузка версионируется и в коде называется token .

В релизах с токенами 106 и 116 есть изюминка, а именно вшитые публичный и приватный ключи GitLab:Мы не можем воспользоваться этими ключами: они относятся к приватному инстансу GitLab, развернутому в инфраструктуре злоумышленника.

Можно предположить, что в GitLab настроен CI/CD-пайплайн для обфускации кода и публикации стейджей.

Хотите автоматически проверять, попали ли эти и другие вредоносные пакеты в ваш контур?

В сегодняшней подборке книги как по анализу, так и по написанию малвари.

MalDev Academy CompleteБольшой модульный курс по разработке вредоносного ПО для Windows и offensive security, который ведёт читателя от базовых тем к продвинутым техникам.

Карточка книгиThe Android Malware HandbookРуководство по анализу и обнаружению вредоносных приложений для Android, написанное исследователями машинного обучения и специалистами, связанными с Android Security.

Книга построена вокруг практических задач: классификация малвари, упаковка и распаковка, песочницы и multi-AV-проверки, исследование доменов и IP-адресов, динамический анализ, декодирование и расшифровка данных, работа с DLL, отладка, kernel deb…

C 13 апреля по 10 мая был открыт приём заявок на стажировку Summ3r 0f h4ck 2026.

Шаги по эксплуатацииВ приложении существует функциональность получения информации о пользователях по их идентификатору userId с помощью GET-запроса /api/user?userId={userid} .

Электронные почты пользователей могут быть получены с помощью уязвимости из п.

Последовательность действий:Перечисление информации обо всех пользователях приложения с помощью баги 1, получение электронных почт пользователей.

Захват аккаунта произвольного пользователя с ролью User с помощью баги 2 через сброс пароля.

Ровно до момента, когда письма начинают тихо улетать в спам Mail.ru и Яндекса, а ты не понимаешь почему: код не менялся, ошибок нет, письма «отправлены».

Если получатель пересоберёт заголовки в другом порядке при проверке — подпись развалится, поэтому список и порядок должны совпадать на подписи и на проверке.

Я не сразу понял, что проблема в самом факте наличия двух записей, а не в их содержимом.

Точка с запятой разделяет теги в DKIM и DMARC, и на автомате её легко перенести в SPF, где она не работает.

Так что я показал архитектуру и грабли, а не отчёт о достигнутой доставляемости, которого пока нет и быть не может.

Разработчики Arch Linux временно запретили передачу «осиротевших» (orphaned) пакетов в Arch User Repository (AUR) новым мейнтейнерам.

Разработчики Arch Linux временно запретили передачу «осиротевших» (orphaned) пакетов в Arch User Repository (AUR) новым мейнтейнерам.

Решение было принято после захвата злоумышленниками нескольких пакетов, через которые хакеры в итоге распространили малварь.

Затем вредонос скачивает клиент Tor, маскирует его под процесс dbus-daemon и через него получает основной пейлоад из зоны .onion.

Один из пользователей Reddit, отслеживающий эту кампанию, утверждает, что злоумышленники уже успели скомпрометировать более 200 пакетов AUR.

Все опустошенные кошельки были одноключевыми (single-signature), и на каждом хранилось более 0,15 BTC.

При этом уязвимость устройства зависит не от даты его покупки, а от того, какая прошивка была установлена при первом создании кошелька.

В Block проследили происхождение проблемы до коммита от 1 марта 2021 года, вошедшего в прошивку версии 4.0.0, выпущенную в том же месяце.

По словам специалистов Block, они сообщили о своих находках в Coinkite, где подтвердили получение информации.

В Block и Coinkite называют анализ предварительным: в Block решили опубликовать результаты, не дожидаясь полного тестирования возможности эксплуатации уязвимости, поскольку атака шла в реальном времени.

Четвертый бумажный спецвыпуск «Хакера» покинул типографию, а значит, совсем скоро стартует рассылка заказов, и новый номер отправится к читателям.

Печатные спецвыпуски «Хакера» — это полноценные глянцевые журналы, содержащие 240 полос практических материалов, технических разборов, гайдов и исследований, к которым можно возвращаться даже годы спустя.

Получается долговечный справочник по кибербезопасности, который всегда под рукой и готов к работе в режиме реального времени.

Номер уже покинул типографию, и рассылка заказов начнется совсем скоро, так что забирай свой экземпляр, пока ссылка не превратилась в 404.

Тиражи остальных почти закончились на нашем складе ,и мы не планируем печатать доп…

При этом корпоративную инфраструктуру Stadler хакерам взломать не удалось, и производственные площадки компании продолжили работу в штатном режиме.

По словам представителей Stadler, злоумышленники сумели похитить только «техническую информацию» поставщика, а персональные данные не пострадали.

Также утечка не сказалась на работе и безопасности поездов и трамваев Stadler, которые эксплуатируются по всему миру.

В Stadler заявляют, что ответили злоумышленникам категорическим отказом и обратились в правоохранительные органы.

«Stadler ни при каких обстоятельствах не станет платить выкуп и не поддастся шантажу», — заявили представители производителя.

В OFAC ввели санкции против двух иранских морских компаний, чтобы пресечь попытки Ирана монетизировать Ормузский пролив с помощью схемы страхования судов с использованием биткоина.

По данным OFAC, эти структуры тесно связаны с Корпусом стражей исламской революции (КСИР).

Министр финансов США Скотт Бессент заявил, что режим отчаянно нуждается в деньгах на фоне обвала экономики и трехзначной инфляции.

Он подчеркнул, что Соединенные Штаты не позволят Ирану удерживать в заложниках мировую торговлю или использовать международное судоходство для финансирования терроризма, агрессии и репрессий со стороны КСИР.

Помимо страховой схемы, вчерашние санкции затронули и иранский «теневой флот», который, …

Церемония награждения состоится 9 сентября в Москве в рамках конференции IT Elements.

Организаторы конференции IT Elements 2026 открыли прием заявок на профессиональную премию «Инженерное искусство».

Церемония награждения состоится 9 сентября в Москве в рамках конференции IT Elements.

Ключевой принцип оценки — киберустойчивость, то есть способность системы выдерживать нагрузки, продолжать работу в условиях ограничений и быстро возвращаться в строй после сбоев и атак.

Подать заявку разрешается как за себя, так и за коллегу.

Представители Европола сообщили, что в июне и июле 2026 года правоохранительные органы выявили 4340 URL-адресов с «шокирующим контентом», связанным с The Com.

Информация об этих материалах была передана владельцам онлайн-платформ с требованием проверить и удалить связанный с The Com контент.

Специалисты стремились нарушить работу онлайн-инфраструктуры The Com, ограничить распространение информации, а также получить новые зацепки и улики для будущих расследований.

Как сообщает Европол, участники связываются друг с другом через множество каналов и закрытых чатов, занимаясь взломами, вымогательством, сваттингом и мошенничеством.

В Европоле заключают, что The Com является глобальной угрозой, ос…

Поэто­му мы при­нима­ем решения преж­де все­го исхо­дя из тех­ничес­ких кри­тери­ев, а не из стра­ха перед новыми инс­тру­мен­тами.

Вы­мога­тели пот­ребова­ли, что­бы пред­ста­вите­ли Coca-Cola начали перего­воры до кон­ца недели, а в про­тив­ном слу­чае обе­щали выложить укра­ден­ные дан­ные в откры­тый дос­туп.

Общие воп­росы, обсужде­ния и обра­щения за помощью по‑преж­нему сле­дует раз­мещать в Discord, на Reddit и в соци­аль­ных сетях.

Упо­мяну­тые «Цитадель», VAS Experts и «Нор­си‑Транс» попали под огра­ниче­ния как раз­работ­чики и пос­тавщи­ки обо­рудо­вания и ПО для СОРМ.

В Huntress под­счи­тали, что в сред­нем на одно­го кли­ента Microsoft 365 при­ходит­ся 1964 неудач­ные попыт­ки…

В Минцифры предлагают обязать зарубежные сайты и приложения использовать только один способ авторизации российских пользователей — по номеру телефона.

Эта инициатива включена в проект третьего пакета антифрод-мер, и, по словам экспертов, отказ от ее выполнения может привести к блокировке множества сервисов.

Как сообщают «Ведомости», инициатива вошла в проект третьего пакета мер по борьбе с мошенничеством, и документ уже направили на обсуждение в профильные ведомства.

Согласно документу, для российских ресурсов продолжат действовать несколько вариантов авторизации: по номеру телефона, через «Госуслуги», Единую биометрическую систему или другую отечественную систему, которая отвечает требован…

Исследователи из компании Nebula Security раскрыли детали уязвимости CVE-2026-10702 в JIT-компиляторе Firefox.

Однако этот процесс работает в песочнице, поэтому сама по себе CVE-2026-10702 не предоставляла атакующему полного контроля над системой.

В Firefox ESR 140.12 проблемный код отсутствовал, а также в бюллетене Mozilla не упоминается ESR-ветка.

Однако эта операция могла изменить структуру объекта и освободить участок памяти, на который все еще ссылался JIT-компилятор.

Теперь JIT-компилятор учитывает, что она может менять состояние объекта, и не использует указатель повторно для уже освобожденной памяти.

Thermo Fisher Scientific has patched a flaw in select Applied Biosystems human identification software that could allow data files to be altered before analysis software loads them.

Thermo Fisher tracks the issue as CVE-2026-17583 and rates it High with a CVSS v4.0 score of 8.2.

Thermo Fisher credits Nathan Adams, Kevin Dyer and Laura Gaydosh Combs, together with the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, with identifying the issue and coordinating disclosure.

In its security bulletin, Thermo Fisher says the files can be modified before analysis software loads them.

Thermo Fisher says each has reached end of life and will receive no update.

N-able said attackers exploited an authentication bypass in N-central to gain remote administrative access and reach the customer systems managed through those servers.

N-central is the remote monitoring and management platform managed service providers and IT teams use to administer customer endpoints.

After compromising an N-central server, the attackers used Take Control to reach managed endpoints and registered Cloudflare tunnels as services on the devices.

Huntress said it did not observe the Cloudflare installation activity that N-able described in its original notification to affected customers.

For signs of unauthorized Take Control activity, Huntress recommended checking ui_access_…

Three high-severity security flaws have been disclosed in Hugging Face's Diffusers library that could allow crafted model repositories to stealthily execute arbitrary code on machines that load it, opening the artificial intelligence (AI) supply chain to security risk.

Setting it to "True" permits custom code execution, while "False" or omitting it blocks unverified code from running.

CVE-2026-44513 (CVSS score: 8.8) - A code injection vulnerability that allows arbitrary code to be loaded through the custom_pipeline flow from a Hub repository despite passing trust_remote_code=False (or omitting it).

Do not pass custom_pipeline= pointing at a Hub repository different from the primary pretrai…

An attacker drained 1,196 Bitcoin addresses in 41 minutes on July 30, taking 1,082.65 BTC worth about $70.2 million at the time.

Galaxy Research mapped the sweep and tied it to a firmware flaw in Coldcard, the Bitcoin-only hardware wallet made by Canadian firm Coinkite.

Block does not give one practical figure.

Coinkite lists Mk3 versions 4.0.1 through 4.1.9, fixed in 4.2.0, and does not name Mk2.

Block places both Mk2 and Mk3 versions 4.0.0 through 4.1.9 on the vulnerable path.

Adform detected the incident on July 27, 2026, removed the malicious code, notified affected clients, and reported it to authorities.

Adform says the code was not designed to install software or establish persistence and operated only while an affected page remained open.

Adform's notice identifies July 27 as the affected date; Kevin Beaumont says he saw malicious activity via Adform over the past week.

While the affected page remained open, one altered address at the point of payment could redirect a transfer.

It added in its incident notice that "Technical analysis indicates that such transmission may have been possible."

Adobe has released security updates to address a maximum-severity security flaw in Campaign Classic (ACC), its enterprise-focused marketing automation platform, that could result in arbitrary code execution.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-48449, carries a severity score of 10.0 on the CVSS scoring system.

It has been described as a case of incorrect authorization that could result in arbitrary code execution in the context of the current user without requiring any user interaction.

The update also resolves another high-severity flaw (CVE-2026-48448, CVSS score: 8.6) stemming from SQL injection that could pave the way for arbitrary file reads.

"This update addresses critical vulnerab…

A fake browser update served over hijacked hotel Wi-Fi has been used to deliver CornFlake, a remote access trojan (RAT) that can capture webcam images, microphone audio, and keystrokes, Microsoft said in its latest report.

On the compromised networks ReliaQuest investigated, the captive portal gateway also served as the DNS resolver assigned to connected devices.

They could then redirect a laptop's automatic connectivity check to a fake browser or operating system update.

Microsoft has observed the traffic manipulation since early May across hospitality networks in several countries, but it has not named a hotel, venue, or captive portal vendor.

Researchers advise travelers to use private c…

The attacks are characterized by the use of two new obfuscated backdoors the Russian cybersecurity company is tracking as OctLurk and SilkLurk, as well as a specialized utility codenamed LurkProxy to proxy network traffic.

The tool then establishes contact with a remote server ("154.196.162[.

LurkProxy, for its part, can function as a reverse proxy in two distinct modes, either as a SOCKS5 proxy or a transparent proxy.

At any given time, the malware can operate in only one mode to route network traffic through a target address.

"The emergence of the OctLurk and SilkLurk multi-plugin malware framework highlights how threat actors continuously refine their tactics to evade detection and maint…

Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a previously undocumented Go-based loader framework called HollowFrame and a Rust-based malware family tracked as Matryoshka.

Executing the file triggers a multi-stage chain that involves privilege escalation, weakening Microsoft Defender protections, and downloading additional payloads.

"Together, HollowFrame and Matryoshka gave the actor a persistent foothold for remote command execution, Active Directory reconnaissance, file transfer, and deployment of follow-on tooling," security researchers Nevan Beal and Sam Decker said.

"Across the chain, each stage reduced the amount of malicious behavior visible in the stage before it," Blackpoint noted.…

Researchers named the operation Fuyao and attributed it to Zhejiang Fengwo IoT Technology Co., Ltd., a mainland China company founded in 2019.

When a box detects an HDMI signal, it usually switches to relaying other people's traffic through the owner's broadband line as a SOCKS5 exit node.

Bitsight found the operation by registering an expired domain used as a factory backdoor and telemetry collector.

In one day, after filtering for devices carrying the Fuyao apps, the sinkhole received 65,957 reports from about 38,000 unique MAC addresses.

Across four test devices, Bitsight captured about 40 fraud tasks, 21 unique campaigns, and 166 unique modules.

Google on Thursday announced that it fixed a whopping 1,072 security bugs in Chrome versions 149 and 150, surpassing the total number of flaws the company fixed across the prior 23 milestones combined.

In its latest patch for Chrome 151, released Wednesday, the tech giant resolved 370 flaws, out of which 349 were reported by Google itself.

According to statistics shared by the U.S. National Vulnerabilities Database (NVD), 46,872 flaws have been recorded so far in 2026, nearing the 49,920 vulnerabilities reported for the entirety of 2025.

"Every security bug that reaches Chrome Stable, regardless of whether it was discovered internally or reported externally, is documented and disclosed publ…

Researchers at Sysdig have documented what they assess to be the first case of an end-to-end ransomware operation executed by an agentic threat actor.

What can organizations do to stop phantom squatting from harming their brands, and what other lessons do these incidents hold for defenders?

Watch Tony's video to find out and be sure to check out the June 2026 edition of his monthly security news roundup for more insights.

Before you go, learn about the first AI-powered ransomware, named PromptLock and discovered by ESET researchers last year.

To learn more about cutting-edge AI defense layers, read the AI at ESET white paper.

The screenshot may look convincing, but it doesn’t necessarily prove that the payment, booking or conversation is genuineSomeone sends you a screenshot showing that a payment has gone through.

Why screenshot aren’t proof on their ownA screenshot is ultimately just an image of what appeared on a screen.

Reassured, you send the item off, only to find out the screenshot was a fake and you’re not getting your money.

You receive a password reset code, then get a text message (maybe impersonating a friend) asking you to screenshot and send it.

This screenshot is fake (source: Reddit)Challenges for businessesFrom a business perspective, internal and customer-facing teams are often provided with sc…

UEFI shim bootloader and UEFI Secure BootTo understand the impact that such vulnerable shims can have on UEFI Secure Boot-protected systems, we need to understand how UEFI Secure Boot works, and how signed UEFI shim bootloaders extend the Secure Boot trust chain.

In this section we’ll look at UEFI Secure Boot basics, how UEFI shims extend the UEFI Secure Boot trust chain, and two shim-related features: Machine Owner Key (MOK) and Secure Boot Advanced Targeting (SBAT).

For anyone already familiar with the theory, we recommend jumping directly to the section Bypassing UEFI Secure Boot using old shims.

UEFI shim bootloader and Secure BootWith Linux distributions supporting UEFI Secure Boot, th…

A view of the H1 2026 threat landscape as seen by ESET telemetry and from the perspective of ESET threat detection and research experts.

The first half of 2026 shows how attackers continue to improve the efficiency and scalability of their operations.

In H1 2026, ESET analyzed nearly 900,000 AI skills – small functional components used by AI agents – and identified tens of thousands of suspicious and thousands of outright malicious instances.

ESET detections of this vector more than doubled between H2 2025 and H1 2026, indicating sustained activity and adaptation.

ESET Research has documented over 100 EDR killers used in the wild, with new variants appearing regularly.

Organizations are right to pay attention, especially because malicious use of AI makes old gaps a more urgent test of an organization’s cyber readiness.

AI and the basics“AI-powered malware” is cited as the top concern of global SMBs for the year ahead, according to the ESET SMB Cyber Readiness Index 2026.

Lack of security monitoring (22%): You might have plenty of security tools, but do you have a single, centralized place to collect, correlate and flag alerts?

Malicious email detection trend in 2025 (source: ESET Threat Report H2 2025)Tried-and-tested solutions to age-old threatsThis isn’t to say that SMBs should ignore AI-enabled threats.

True cyber readiness means being able to prevent,…

It's that time of month when ESET Chief Security Evangelist Tony Anscombe looks back at some of the top cybersecurity stories that made the news over the past 30 or so days and considers what they may mean for your own cyber-defenses.

What lessons does the new CISA policy hold for organizations outside the agency's direct remit?

What else is there to know about threats facing ATGs or, indeed, many other critical infrastructure systems?

How can you stay safe from imposter fraud, and could the social media bans for children work?

Learn more from Tony's video and be sure to check out the May 2026 edition of Tony's monthly security news roundup for more insights.

With access to your email account, they can reset your passwords across multiple other accounts – perhaps intercepting one-time passcodes sent by your bank, social media, cloud storage or other online provider.

That could lay the groundwork for a convincing phishing email designed to impersonate a trusted organization you interact with.

A phishing attack on your corporate email account is often the first stage in a bigger data breach, extortion/ransomware or espionage attack.

They’re also using more sophisticated tools to improve the success rates of email phishing campaigns.

In this instance the scammers reportedly hijacked the email account of a high-level executive, before impersonating …

For these businesses, cyber resilience should be the direction of travel – that is, the ability to continue operating and recover even during a serious incident.

Cyber readiness is about putting in place the processes and controls to prevent, detect and respond to threats.

So, should confidence in cyber resilience posture be so high, especially if organizations are still getting hit multiple times?

The truth is that there’s no end state for cyber readiness or resilience.

If it’s serious about improving the cyber readiness of small businesses, the vendor community should step up.

Key points of this blogpost: Throughout 2025, Gamaredon exclusively targeted governmental and military institutions in Ukraine.

Continued data exfiltration and a new allianceThroughout 2025, Gamaredon stayed highly active and remained focused solely on Ukraine.

Notably, we uncovered that in early 2025, Gamaredon collaborated with Turla, another Russia-aligned threat actor also linked to the FSB; we documented our findings in our blogpost Gamaredon X Turla collab.

Figure 1 shows a chart of unique samples of HTA downloaders delivered per month in Gamaredon spearphishing campaigns.

Compared to 2024, we also saw a shift in how Gamaredon used these dead drops.

Key points of this blogpost: ESET took part in the coordinated, global Operation Endgame to disrupt Amadey and Stealc.

Our automated systems have been dissecting Amadey and Stealc samples and identifying the fields most relevant for large-scale tracking.

The largest Amadey botnet clusterOne cluster stands out as the largest, and it contributed nearly 34% of all processed Amadey samples.

Stealc affiliate clustering based on ESET telemetryConclusionFor global disruption operations such as Operation Endgame against Amadey and Stealc, long-term automated tracking of malware is necessary.

2026‑04‑09 Stealc C&C server.

The group distinguishes itself through a mature, operator-maintained set of endpoint detection and response (EDR) killers, i.e., tools for disrupting security software.

In this blogpost, we share our findings on Gentlemen’s suite of EDR killers gained through extensive research and corroborated by the recent leak.

Third‑party EDR killers (HexKiller, ThrottleBlood, and HavocKiller) are operationally integrated.

Rather than relying on affiliates to source their own EDR killers, Gentlemen operators actively develop and maintain a portfolio of EDR killers for affiliates.

It allows the Gentlemen operators to integrate abused drivers into their toolset very soon after an EDR killer PoC is disclos…

Of course, connecting production systems to enterprise networks delivers tangible benefits, but the security implications – that systems once safe were suddenly no longer so – arrived more quietly.

Start by mapping which systems in an environment are connected and have no security coverage, where IT and OT networks intersect, which segments are unmonitored, and which production systems have fallen outside any vendor support agreement.

Meanwhile, off-the-peg security tools often don’t efficiently meet the enterprise requirements in legacy OT systems that run on older hardware and outdated operating system versions.

The production systems running that version continue to operate for years, ac…

Key points of this blogpost: We discovered two previously undocumented Windows variants of FishMonger’s SprySOCKS backdoor.

Technical analysisIn this section, we provide a technical analysis of these new, Windows variants of FishMonger’s SprySOCKS backdoor.

Figure 3. klelam00007.bat setting up persistence for the SprySOCKS backdoor (newlines added for readability)Figure 4 depicts the execution chain of the SprySOCKS WIN_DRV variant.

It contained the SprySOCKS backdoor and the SprySOCKS loader.

6490B8E4AADE25A3EE2D A9A47F312DB2122470BC X1B5206BDC1 743DD.dat Win64/SprySOCKS.A Encrypted container of the encrypted WIN_DRV variant of SprySOCKS backdoor, encrypted SprySOCKS RawWNPF and SprySOCKS …

Instead, attackers get the victim to complete a legitimate authentication process – including two-factor authentication (2FA) – on a real Microsoft login page.

What makes EvilTokens dangerousThe OAuth device code flow was designed for devices that may be awkward to sign into directly, such as smart TVs or printers.

No document, invoice, email, or another platform should ask for a device code without a clear reason.

A real Microsoft page doesn’t automatically make a request safe.

Sometimes the attacker could ask them to enter a real code on a real page – but for the wrong device.

During this period, the Vietnam-aligned OceanLotus adopted a more selective approach to external operations while placing increasing emphasis on domestic espionage.

We identified two distinct campaigns involving the SPECTRALVIPER backdoor: a supply-chain attack targeting stock investors in Vietnam and a prolonged espionage operation against a Vietnamese infrastructure and transport construction company.

The domain resolved to the genuine IP address of the FireAnt update server, suggesting a supply-chain compromise scenario.

LTD 2025‑09‑20 SPECTRALVIPER C&C server.

]com IRT‑CHOOPALLC‑AP 2025‑09‑20 SPECTRALVIPER C&C server.

Earlier this year, a lead from WhatsApp prompted OpenAI to investigate and disrupt a Cambodia-based scam operation that used ChatGPT to support investment, romance, gambling, and law enforcement impersonation scams.

How the operation workedThe operation ran multiple scams at the same time, often combining elements from different schemes.

In interactions with targets, scammers relied on what the company describes as the “ping” (initial outreach), the “zing” (generating emotion), and the “sting” (extracting money).

(Source: OpenAI)The scammers used ChatGPT to translate messages and generate conversations with people on platforms including WhatsApp and Telegram.

The network also used OpenAI’s …

The system checks all three, filters out drivers Elastic already covers, and builds rules from the driver’s digital signature and file characteristics.

Automated YARA rule generation workflow (Source: Elastic Security Labs)Elastic Security Labs has published vulnerable driver coverage for years.

The library covers more than 800 known vulnerable drivers, and the number keeps growing.

The delay is the techniqueA vulnerable driver becomes public knowledge and attackers know about it the same day.

A driver flagged in one of the three feeds becomes a driver Elastic Defend recognizes, with no update or setting change on the customer side.

It finds structurally related variants, traces shared infrastructure, and searches your full history to identify every place the threat appeared.

Then it continues following the evidence across files, systems, and time until the full campaign comes into view, mapping the complete blast radius.

From there, we used Stairwell’s proprietary Variant Discovery technology to identify related files in our corpus.

A related variant isn’t simply any file that shares a few pieces of code.

The broader takeaway is that the malware sample published in a threat report is often just one visible piece of a much larger campaign.

SkillSpector is an open-source scanner from NVIDIA that reads an agent skill and tells you whether to install it.

The study behind the tool found skills that ship one are 2.12x more likely to be vulnerable.

SkillSpector batches a skill’s package list into one query to OSV.dev, gets back known CVEs, and caches the answer for an hour.

A pair of high-severity findings in a skill that ships a Python script crosses the do-not-install line on its own.

Must read:Subscribe to the Help Net Security ad-free monthly newsletter to stay informed on the essential open-source cybersecurity tools.

In this Help Net Security video, Mike Boyle, VP of Business Units at GMO GlobalSign, and Rahul Powar, CEO and founder of Red Sift, unpack the evolution of email security and why it matters for business trust.

With a combined 45+ years worth of experience in tech, they dissect email from the very beginning, before SPF, spam filtering and DMARC, up to today’s modern security standards.

The reveal why most organizations are still struggling with the basics, how NOT to deploy DMARC and how AI is accelerating the email attack game.

Guardio Mobile Security brings several protection features to iPhone and Android, allowing users to monitor exposed personal information, identify phishing attempts, and receive alerts about emerging threats from a single application.

After signing in or creating an account, users are guided through the onboarding process, which introduces the app’s security features and begins an initial assessment.

Identity monitoringThe first step is a scan for exposed personal information.

Guardio checks monitored email addresses against known data breaches and reports whether any credentials or personal details have been leaked.

Final thoughtsGuardio Mobile Security combines identity monitoring, phishi…

We could see cells interacting with each other, exchanging material and building skeletons.

And we could do that live on the ship, when usually it takes a couple of weeks of staining and mounting to see anything,” Osborn said.

The expedition discovered thirty-one new marine species in two weeks.

The article doesn’t say if any of them were new species of squid.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

On the IPI benchmark, Opus 5 improved over Opus 4.8, reducing the probability of an attacker succeeding within 15 attempts from 5.5% to 2.0%, and from 0.5% to 0.2% on 1 attempt.

It also improved on Sonnet 5 (5.9% at k=15) and Mythos 5 (2.6%), making it the most robust model evaluated.

The most robust non-Claude model was Muse Spark at 16.5% within 15 attempts—more than eight times Opus 5’s rate.

The other GPT 5.6 variants are less robust, at 30.4% (Terra) and 43.9% (Luna).

A single attempt against GPT 5.6 Sol succeeded 3.1% of the time, higher than the 2.0% an attacker achieved against Opus 5 after fifteen attempts.

Facial Recognition at Madison Square GardenLast month, the story broke (alternate link) that Madison Square Garden uses facial recognition software on everyone entering the facility, and—among other groups—flags activists that oppose using facial recognition.

Turns out that the system was shut off for Taylor Swift’s wedding.

Evan Greer—one of the people that MSG alerts on—comments:Ironically, Swift herself has reportedly used facial recognition at her own concerts to identify stalkers.

Whatever privacy measures Swift had in place for the wedding seems to have worked.

Posted on July 31, 2026 at 7:08 AM • 0 Comments

He’s being prosecuted for giving border officials a code that wiped his phone:The case centers on a feature included in GrapheneOS, a custom Android operating system that runs in place of the software on most modern Google Pixel devices.

Tunick’s attorneys confirmed GrapheneOS was running on his phone.

The software feature allows the device owner to set a passcode that deliberately wipes the contents of that device if entered instead of the user’s unlock passcode.

Tunick’s case also raises ongoing questions about what constitutional rights can be invoked at the border, which the U.S. government has long asserted is not U.S. soil until a person is authorized to enter.

And it will come as no surprise to you that my students regularly use AI to complete their writing assignments.

But if their entire career is going to include AI writing assistants, why shouldn’t they embrace their future?

The writing assignments I give my students are gym tasks, not work tasks.

We hired one regardless of whether we needed work writing or gym writing.

I know fiction writers who supported that poorly paying career with lucrative technical writing work.

In July, Hugging Face, a company that hosts much of the world’s AI software and open-source AI models, was hacked.

OpenAI was running the unreleased AI model through a benchmark that tests how well AI can successfully hack systems.

So it chained together stolen credentials and further unknown security exploits to hack the company’s network.

For example, the Chinese lab Moonshot recently warned that its latest AI model may have “excessive proactiveness” and “make unexpected decisions on the user’s behalf”.

The UK’s AI Security Institute has started tracking “cheating behavior in frontier model evaluations”.

Microsoft’s Secure Boot has had a serious vulnerability for most of its existence.

An industry-wide standard Microsoft invented to protect Windows, and later Linux, devices from firmware infections has been trivial to bypass for 13 of its 14 years of existence.

The discovery was made by researchers at security firm ESET after identifying 11 firmware images, at least one from 2013, that were known to be defective but remained signed by the software company anyway.

The images are known as shims, which were invented to extend Secure Boot to Linux devices and utility software.

The gaffe is the result of the failure by Microsoft, which oversees the signing of shims, to revoke the publicly availa…

There’s new benchmark measuring AI’s ability to perform mathematical cryptanalysis.

The benchmark: “CryptanalysisBench: Can LLMs do Cryptanalysis?” The idea is to benchmark the ability of LLMs to discover new mathematical cryptanalytic attacks against a series of historical algorithms.

Abstract: Cryptanalysis—the task of finding attacks against cryptographic schemes—its at the intersection of mathematical reasoning and cybersecurity, two areas where LLMs have advanced fastest.

Cryptanalysis represents both a clean testbed for frontier reasoning (as practical attacks can be automatically verified) and a domain with unusually high stakes, since the primitives under study underpin our digital …

Governments are switching, but I’m not sure it makes a difference:…some municipalities, including Denver, Colorado, are ditching their Flock arrays.

But keep in mind that if they’re only switching from Flock to another brand of license-plate readers, like Axon, it’s like a gambling addict trying to kick the habit by switching from FanDuel to DraftKings.

[…]Despite what you may read on the Flock website, Axon cameras are pretty effective when it comes to hoovering up personal details that can go far beyond your license plate numbers.

That means a municipality that opts for Axon cameras instead of Flock units won’t necessarily reduce the amount privacy its citizens lose through their use.

Yet another Israeli mass surveillance company:Made by Israeli surveillance company Cognyte, the tech simulates a mobile phone tower, which forces nearby phones to connect to it.

That enables cops to keep tabs on any phones in the vicinity ­ whether they’re owned by a suspect in a case or not.

Cognyte’s contract with the state of Texas reveals that the simulator, called FalcoNet, can be concealed within the vehicles, hidden in a backpack for on-foot missions or attached to a helicopter.

It’s the same technology as the infamous Stingray, one of the original cell-site simulators made by defense giant L3Harris.

About Bruce SchneierI am a public-interest technologist, working at the intersection of security, technology, and people.

I've been writing about security issues on my blog since 2004, and in my monthly newsletter since 1998.

I'm a fellow and lecturer at Harvard's Kennedy School, a board member of EFF, and the Chief of Security Architecture at Inrupt, Inc.

This personal website expresses the opinions of none of those organizations.

Contact Info

Beyond the AI model itself, what has changed is the harness: the ordinary code that wraps around an AI model, decides when and how to use the model, and controls access to tools like a browser, a low-level command line, or a financial API.

Genie behavior isn’t new.

If we get the measurement right, it enables things that aren’t possible today, like policies concerning AI behavior.

If an AI system betrays the reasonable meaning of an instruction, that’s the AI’s misbehavior, not the user’s.

Test a diverse array of skills, use cases, and tools, and give the AI system sparse, confusing, or overwhelming context.

Governments around the world have proposed, and in some cases enacted, laws limiting E2EE for law enforcement and national security purposes.

The Article proceeds in three parts tracking three rounds of the Going Dark Debate.

Round 3 addresses the current debate over E2EE, where no entity between sender and recipient can read the plaintext.

The Article’s first major contribution is identifying five technically distinct scenarios for how E2EE operates in practice, each with different implications for lawful access.

These scenarios reveal a substantial gap between the assumption that E2EE categorically blocks lawful access and the reality of how communications are sent and received.

About Bruce SchneierI am a public-interest technologist, working at the intersection of security, technology, and people.

I've been writing about security issues on my blog since 2004, and in my monthly newsletter since 1998.

I'm a fellow and lecturer at Harvard's Kennedy School, a board member of EFF, and the Chief of Security Architecture at Inrupt, Inc.

This personal website expresses the opinions of none of those organizations.

Contact Info

The home appliance giant LG Electronics USA said this week it plans to suspend any apps built for its smart TVs that turn one’s television into an always-on residential proxy node.

On July 2, we featured research by the security firm Spur that examined the prevalence of residential proxy software development kits (SDKs) in smart TV apps.

“A residential proxy network is not an intended use for LG smart TVs, and LG Electronics is working with developers to remove the residential proxy option from their apps on the webOS platform,” Taylor said.

In the case of LG and Samsung smart TVs, Spur found residential proxy SDKs bundled with everything from simple games like Pac-Man to screensavers and f…

Microsoft attributed the burgeoning patch counts to vulnerability discoveries aided by artificial intelligence.

Microsoft also addressed three zero-day flaws that are already being exploited in the wild.

As AI advances the state of vulnerability discovery and remediation, it is also making it easier for attackers to quickly devise working exploits for known software flaws.

Backing up your Windows system and/or data is always a good idea before applying operating system updates.

It’s not uncommon for security patches to introduce system stability issues, and those chances probably increase quite a bit with the gigantic patch count released today.

Experts say the gaps identified in the agency’s initial response provide important lessons that all security teams should absorb.

CISA also admitted it can do better when it comes to responding to security incident notifications from external parties.

Valadon’s company constantly scans public code repositories at GitHub and elsewhere for exposed secrets, automatically alerting the offending accounts of any apparent sensitive data exposures.

Valadon said the report validates the need to scan continuously — not just quarterly — for exposed secrets.

“Continuous monitoring of public GitHub surfaced it.

IRIS C2 says it is a company in McLean, Va. that sells offensive cybersecurity capabilities.

“Our business model is this,” reads a pinned post on top of the IRIS C2 account on X.

The website claims IRIS C2 is in the business of acquiring “zero-day exploits, individual primitives, partial chains, and full capabilities across all major platforms.

When approached with questions about IRIS C2, Burkman referred further inquiries to his longtime associate, 28-year-old Jacob Wohl.

In May, the author of the IRIS C2 account on X said that his girlfriend had no idea what he did for a living.

Benjamin Brundage is founder of the proxy tracking service Synthient, one of the companies that published evidence last month linking the Popa botnet to NetNut and Alarum Technologies.

Brundage said the domain seizures appear to have disrupted both the Popa botnet and the NetNut proxy network that rides on top of it.

“Google has high confidence that many popular residential proxy brands are in fact whitelabeling the NetNut botnet,” the GTIG report concludes.

What we have observed is that when faced with the degradation of their own botnet, proxy operators begin buying capacity from their competitors, effectively becoming a reseller.

More than a quarter of the apps made for Samsung’s Tizen o…

The duo were key members of a prolific cybercrime group known as Scattered Spider, and their guilty pleas came on the first day of what was expected to be a six-week trial.

In April 2026, 24-year-old British national and Scattered Spider member Tyler “Tylerb” Buchanan pleaded guilty to wire fraud conspiracy and aggravated identity theft for participating in the group’s SMS phishing spree in the summer of 2022.

The government said Buchanan, Jubair and others used the credentials harvested in that phishing campaign to steal at least $8 million in cryptocurrency from victims throughout the United States.

The U.S. Department of Justice says three alleged Scattered Spider defendants indicted alo…

This week, researchers from multiple security firms concluded that the Popa botnet is linked to NetNut, a “residential proxy” provider operated by the publicly-traded Israeli firm Alarum Technologies Ltd [NASDAQ: ALAR].

Qurium said that immediately after that disruption, several dozen new domains were registered to serve as controllers for the Popa botnet, but that one of those control domains was not new: ninjatech[.]io.

Jérôme Meyer, a security researcher at Nokia Deepfield, said the total population of devices participating in the Popa botnet may be far higher than Lumen’s estimates.

“Over 90% of our pharmaceutical and food & beverage customers have queried residential proxy indicators.

…

This post examines clues pointing to a real life identity for the administrator of The Gentlemen ransomware group.

Experts at the security firm Check Point Software have been closely covering exploits of The Gentlemen, a so-called “ransomware-as-a-service” (RaaS) offering that pays affiliates handsomely to help spread the group’s malware.

According to Check Point, the group targets Internet-facing devices (VPNs, firewalls) as their entry point, and once inside moves quickly to encrypt entire networks within hours.

Check Point says the administrator and primary operator of the ransomware group uses the nickname Zeta88 on the Russian-language cybercrime forums, and that this individual was pr…

Microsoft today released software updates to plug nearly 200 security holes across its Windows operating systems and supported software, a record number of fixes for the company’s monthly Patch Tuesday cycle.

“Some surveys put AI usage among security professionals generally at 90%, so it’s unsurprising that this volume of patches may be the norm,” Narang said.

Microsoft received heavily blowback on social media last month after it said in a blog post that it was considering taking legal action against the security researcher.

While 200 vulnerabilities may be a record for Patch Tuesday, the actual number of security flaws Microsoft addressed this month is far higher, said Rapid7’s Adam Barne…

On May 31, word began to spread on several Telegram instant message channels that Meta’s AI bot would happily add an email address to an existing account as part of the bot’s standard password reset flow.

Meta has not responded to requests for comment on the video’s claims, but the company reportedly did acknowledge the dormant Instagram account for the Obama White House was briefly compromised.

Meta’s solution was to deploy a conversational AI layer to handle common recovery workflows: relinking a lost email address, triggering a password reset, verifying account ownership.

Just like human customer support employees can be social engineered into providing unauthorized access to someone’s a…

But as KrebsOnSecurity observed in September 2025, those sanctions failed to target Stark’s remaining connection to the Internet — an Internet service provider based in the Netherlands called MIRhosting.

MIRhosting is operated by Andrey Nesterenko, a 39-year-old Russian native who runs the business out of the Netherlands.

And as our September 2025 report showed, WorkTitans was controlled by Nesterenko and a 57-year-old from Amsterdam named Youssef Zinad.

On top of that, WorkTitans was getting connectivity to the larger Internet solely through MIRhosting, where Zinad had worked previously.

“The transition to the.hosting was not intended to evade sanctions,” Nesterenko wrote.

The inquiry comes as CISA is still struggling to contain the breach and invalidate the leaked credentials.

Experts who reviewed the exposed secrets said the commit logs for the code repository showed the CISA contractor disabled GitHub’s built-in protection against publishing sensitive credentials in public repos.

CISA acknowledged the leak but has not responded to questions about the duration of the data exposure.

TruffleHog does this by monitoring a live feed that GitHub publishes which includes a record of all commits and changes to public code repositories.

In practical terms, it is likely that cybercrime groups or foreign adversaries also noticed the publication of these CISA secrets, …

A criminal complaint unsealed today in an Alaska district court charges Jacob Butler, a.k.a.

“Dort,” of Ottawa, Canada with operating the Kimwolf DDoS botnet.

“KimWolf was tied to DDoS attacks which were measured at nearly 30 Terabits per second, a record in recorded DDoS attack volume,” the Justice Department statement reads.

Synthient was among many technology companies thanked by the Justice Department today, and Synthient’s founder Ben Brundage told KrebsOnSecurity he’s relieved Butler is in custody.

The DOJ said at least one of those services collaborated with Butler’s Kimwolf botnet.

Until this past weekend, a contractor for the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) maintained a public GitHub repository that exposed credentials to several highly privileged AWS GovCloud accounts and a large number of internal CISA systems.

Another file exposed in their public GitHub repository — “AWS-Workspace-Firefox-Passwords.csv” — listed plaintext usernames and passwords for dozens of internal CISA systems.

“The available Git metadata alone does not prove which endpoint or device was used.”Caturegli said he validated that the exposed credentials could authenticate to three AWS GovCloud accounts at a high privilege level.

CISA has not responded to questions about the p…

According to the newly-published study, phishing and social engineering are becoming more expensive to recover from, trickier to detect, and increasingly augmented by artificial intelligence. Read more in my article on the Fortra blog.

For years, North Korea's state-trained hackers have been one of the world's most prolific robbers of banks - stealing huge sums of money from foreign financial instituions, draining cryptocurrency exchanges of billions, and funnelling the proceeds into the country's weapons programme.

But now, in a remarkable twist, some of the same elite hackers appear to have decided to rob their own government instead.

The ringleaders of the group are said to be discharged veterans from a cyber operations unit under North Korea's Reconnaissance and Intelligence General Bureau.

In short, the hackers are accused of building a mini version of the same kind of money-laundering infrastructure North Korea depl…

Smashing Security, Episode 478: This Job Interview Could Destroy Your Company, with Graham Cluley and special guest Paul Ducklin.

And all the time you're going through this process, bad news, they really were recording video of you.

Obviously, you can understand that CAR want to know, does your car actually have one of these in all likelihood?

And give it to them and then they tell you whether they think you're at risk.

I don't know.

The AI models involved were OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol and a more capable, as-yet-unreleased model.

The intention of OpenAI's researchers was to get a clear picture of what the AI models were capable of achieving if not constrained.

American AI safety guardrails forced a US company to turn to a Chinese AI model for help.

Hugging Face's CEO Clément Delangue is quoted in OpenAI's blog post, calling on the AI industry to work more collaboratively.

It is clear that advanced AI models are remarkably capable of discovering and exploiting ways to attack real-world systems.

How 14 orders of Chicken McNuggets helped nail a suspected Russian hacker with Graham Cluley and special guest James Ball.

I had a vindaloo, Graham Cluley, and I don't think it ever touched capsicum.

Yeah, I think you're right.

If you use Suno music, people say, you know, you're killing music.

I don't know much about Shai Hulud.

Ukraine's computer emergency response team, CERT-UA, has warned that Russian hackers are using fake CAPTCHA checks to trick people into compromising their own PCs.

The Kremlin-backed Sandworm hacking group is reportedly leveraging fake CAPTCHA checks on compromised websites that persuade users to execute a PowerShell command on their computers - tricking them into running malicious code.

The latest attacks begin when a user visits a compromised webpage, where they're greeted by a fake CAPTCHA claiming they need to complete an extra step to prove that they are human.

Instead, the fake CAPTCHA instructs the user to copy and paste a PowerShell command into their Windows computer.

They are a pr…

Someone gets hold of your locked Android phone and, despite not knowing your security PIN, they can send messages via SMS or WhatsApp pretending to come from you.

It is clear that Google has patched Gemini lock screen issues before, but security researchers keep finding new ways through.

The latest vulnerability is different from the previous similar Gemini-based Android lock screen bypass bugs that have been plaguing the operating system since September 2025.

To do that:Open the Gemini app, tap your profile picture, go to Settings, and select "Gemini on lock screen."

Every new capability Gemini is given at the lock screen is also a new potential attack surface.

The Anubis ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operation has hit some healthcare organisations hard - but they are not the only ones at risk. Read more in my article on the Fortra blog.

That is a really, really busy street potentially.

I don't know what the difference is between a tuk-tuk and a rickshaw.

I don't know.

Yeah, it's got to be a Bluetooth transmitter from the battery, and within the battery there's an operating system or something that'll need updating.

It's really, really great.

When a company falls victim to a ransomware attack, it is not uncommon for it to turn to experts for help.

Specialist ransomware negotiation firms handle communications with criminal gangs on a victim's behalf.

41-year-old Martino worked as a ransomware negotiator for DigitalMint, an incident response company based in Chicago.

The ransomware victim, a hospitality company, ultimately paid out nearly US $16.5 million.

The company has since changed the way its negotiators communicate with ransomware gangs, and is working with the Department of Homeland Security to establish a registry for the currently highly-unregulated world of ransomware negotiation.

Have you received an email from a recruiter at Adobe, Netflix, or OpenAI offering you an exciting new marketing role?

Security experts have uncovered a phishing campaign which impersonates over 30 well-known brands in fake job interviews designed to steal Google account passwords.

When victims click on "Continue with Google," a pop-up appears that looks like a legitimate Google authentication dialog.

In the past the FBI has warned the public about scammers using fake job ads to steal money and personal information from applicants.

Earlier this year, Hot for Security published a guide explaining how many fake recruiter scams work, and how to avoid them.

These stories appear different, but they're actually telling the same story.

I'm going to flag, I'm going to flag the point that I made earlier is that operational security isn't always there.

I know how to do this because it's done it for me, but I don't actually know how to apply it logically.

And when the technology you're relying on to protect you, and in some people's case it is protecting their life, and you're not doing it to the best of your ability, that's, that's really, really disappointing.

But I guess for now, all eyes are on Apple and how they're going to respond to this, albeit 13 months later.

Two young men have been arrested in the Netherlands on suspicion of running a phishing operation that harvested the credit card details of unsuspecting victims.

According to a police press release, victims were duped into entering their payment card details on bogus phishing websites.

Investigators believe the arrested men, who have not been named, did not just misuse the stolen payment card details themselves, but also passed them on to other fraudsters.

Card payment fraud was found to be the single most common category, with over half a million fraudulent transactions (up more than a quarter on the year before).

In 2024, just 1% of Dutch fraud victims recovered their money, and while arou…

Who Are The Gentlemen?

Despite the impeccably polite name, there is nothing polite or refined about this particular gang of cybercriminals. Read more in my article on the Fortra blog.

And I'm going to be looking at whether you're wise to take a gamble with your security on Polymarket.

Right, well, I want to tell you about a company that's built its entire brand on being really, really good at predicting the future.

They've actually done it really, really well.

So it's The Summer Portraits by— remind me who it's by again, 'cause I'm going to butcher his name.

It's really, really good.

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Their recommendations for securing the AI era rely heavily on establishing strict asset inventory and preventing lateral movement—which are, at their core, fundamental Zero Trust principles.

The Three Core Principles of Zero Trust for AIFounded in three core principles, a robust Zero Trust architecture requires us to execute the following phases comprehensively.

Achieving the Architectural VisionThe above may all sound like pipedream, as most organisations struggle with Zero Trust programs and undelivered microsegmentation projects.

Ultimately AI driven platform approach is what makes Zero Trust achievable for the frontier AI era.

This is exactly why achieving a Zero Trust Architecture for …

This provides an opportunity for defenders: if we assume our controls will fail at some point, we can build a much more resilient architecture.

When you assume the current layer will eventually be bypassed, you start designing the next layer proactively instead of reactively.

Defenders need to advance their controls by mapping them to the adversaries’ capabilities then assume that control will fail.

Map your controls to the attack chain.

Call to Action:If you haven’t watched the full video yet, go check it out: Assuming Failure Provides Better Defensive Outcomes (bonus elements around SOC of the Future and business context).

Consequently, the approach shifts toward a logically air-gapped architecture based on a full-stack governance model, which replaces physical barriers with a robust, software-defined cryptographic perimeter.

This “Logically Air-Gapped” governance model reaches its full operational potential through the implementation of “Live Protect.” As a runtime security module, Live Protect elevates protection from the configuration plane to that of dynamic execution.

Reference ArchitectureDigital autonomy is thus exercised by shifting network and security control into the operating system kernel.

Cisco integrates the execution power of Isovalent with the governance of Cisco Secure Workload to offer a un…

That is why we are introducing Firewall Migration Manager by Cisco, an enterprise-ready product built for that reality.

What Is Firewall Migration Manager?

Firewall Migration Manager is a dedicated migration application that you run in your own environment.

How Firewall Migration Manager WorksThe migration process follows a clear, guided workflow.

Intelligent, integrated migration: Firewall Migration Manager will also come to Cisco Cloud Control, and AI will play an increasing role in guiding teams before and during migration.

In independent testing with NetSecOPEN, the Cisco Secure Firewall 6160 delivered AI-scale inspected throughput beyond what the tools built to measure it could register, all while blocking 100% of tested threats.

These results are specific to Cisco Secure Firewall 6160, but the software capabilities behind Cisco Firewall, including advanced threat protection and high-performance inspection, extend across Cisco Firewall form factors in the cloud, virtually, and on-premises, from campus to data center.

Performance passed the previous benchmark by 5XInspection was turned on, and the test tools built to measure throughput hit their limit before the 6160 firewall did.

In previous NetSecOPEN testi…

We innovated by giving the Agentic SOC access to Endace’s always-on, full packet capture, and asked the agent to assess a potential SharpHound Recon attack that we had seen while threat hunting.

This blog explores how we built the integrations and how AI helped us with our threat hunt and threat assessment.

Agentic AI Massively Speeds our AnalysisAt this point, we decided to use Agentic AI capabilities to investigate and assess this potential threat.

ConclusionThe Agentic SOC, blending Agentic AI built into Endace’s products with custom agentic tools, is a massive boost to productivity and security.

AcknowledgementsOur thanks go to the Cisco SOC team led by @Jessica Oppenheimer and @Ivan Be…

Having spent time in the Cisco Live Americas 2026 SOC, one thing became abundantly clear:The way SOCs operate today is fundamentally different from even a few years ago.

Instead of spending time gathering information, analysts could spend more time understanding what the information actually meant.

Just as spreadsheets empowered business users decades ago, AI-assisted coding is beginning to empower security analysts today.

At Cisco Live, AI was already present throughout the workflow:Incident summaries generated automatically within XDR.

And based on what I saw at Cisco Live 2026, that future has already arrived.

The new SOC analysts were great at finding evidence, helped with triage and correlation by the AI agents in the SOC architecture.

With the advancements in Cloud Control, our new SOC Analysts can validate their hypothesis.

They had the ability to investigate the incident and find the root cause found in Splunk Security and Endace.

Instant Attack VerificationIn each Incident, the SOC Analysts is given an AI generated Summary stitching all the relevant logs from all the sources that are related to the objects in question.

Check out the blogs by the engineers who worked inside the SOC at Las Vegas:

At Cisco Live AMER 2026 in Las Vegas, my work with the Cisco Event SOC centered on one outcome that makes these deployments valuable beyond the event itself: Education.

The SOC protects the conference, but it also turns live operations into a learning environment through SOC tours, Cisco Live sessions, training inside the SOC, and conversations in the World of Solutions.

Bringing live SOC lessons into the classroomEducation also happened in the sessions I delivered at Cisco Live.

Cisco Live AMER 2026 reinforced that the SOC is one of the best classrooms we have because it teaches through real operations.

For a deeper look at the model behind these deployments, read the Cisco Event SOCs: A R…

Inside the Cisco Live SOCAt Cisco Live AMER, the Security Operations Center (SOC) is more than a demo environment.

For a broader look at how the Cisco Live SOC operates, read this overview.

Another part was spent in the SOC, working real investigations with XDR, Splunk Enterprise Security, firewall events, DNS telemetry, packet data, and AI assistance.

AI can help a product manager become useful faster in a live SOC.

That is the bar I want us to continue building toward as we build Cisco XDR and Splunk Security.

As part of the Cisco XDR (Extended Detection and Response) product engineering group, a few of us got exactly that chance.

Every product had a part to play for a network as traffic-heavy as Cisco Live.

(PS : Flaunting the SOC T-shirts was fun)AcknowledgementsA heartfelt thank you to Cisco and the entire SOC team — you are all amazing.

To the Cisco XDR , Splunk , Secure Access , and Secure Firewall engineering teams.

Check out the other blogs from our team at the Cisco Live Americas 2026 SOC at Las Vegas:

We built an Experience Score model on Cisco and Splunk infrastructure and watched it run against real traffic, at real scale, in real time.

The result was a working model for how leaders measure what customers feel, act before friction surfaces, and tie operational decisions to revenue and trust.

At Cisco Live, the Experience Score model organized that architecture around four questions business and technology leaders can answer together.

The composite Experience Score tells a leader whether the experience is healthy enough to protect the moments the business depends on.

From Cisco Live to LA28Cisco Live was a rehearsal for larger exposure surfaces, where digital experience, revenue, brand …

And we kept thinking the same engineer thought: this flow is so consistent… could an agentic agent do the first 90%?

It was a great experiment — and a glimpse of a fully self-hosted agentic SOC — but for the event we pivoted to Claude Opus 4.8 running through Claude Code.

The division of labor we landed on: Tier-1 agentic SOC was already handled beautifully by the AI features in our own products — XDR’s Agentic Attack Storyboard and Splunk’s Triage Agent.

What does an agentic SOC actually need?

The MCP servers — an Endace MCP for packet capture/decode and a Splunk MCP for running queries.

Building on the Cisco Live EMEA SOC, Cisco Live Americas placed the Security Operations Center (SOC) and Network Operations Center (NOC) at the center of the World of Solutions, demonstrating the power of Cisco in bringing Networking, Security and Observability together.

The Cisco Live Americas Agentic SOC architecture shows how a “One Cisco” approach brings different security tools together to eliminate data silos, in close partnership with the NOC.

The SOC at Cisco Live was set up in just two days, thanks to lessons learned and continuous evolution.

For Cisco Live AMER, we treated agentic AI as an auditable review layer across the SOC, not as a replacement for analysts.

Agentic SOC: Incid…

Microsoft Threat Intelligence has also identified active traffic manipulation attacks leading to the delivery of malware on impacted systems.

Microsoft Threat Intelligence would like to thank our partners at Anthropic and OpenAI for their collaboration and support during this investigation.

Storm-2945 and Midnight BlizzardMicrosoft Threat Intelligence assesses that Storm-2945 is an operational sub-cluster of Midnight Blizzard based on distinctive technical and operational overlaps.

For additional details on Midnight Blizzard-related device code phishing techniques, see: Storm-2372 conducts device code phishing campaign.

To hear stories and insights from the Microsoft Threat Intelligence com…

Microsoft Defender Experts services are also expanding: Microsoft Defender Experts Threat Intelligence delivers human-led, curated insight into the cyberthreats most relevant to each organization, and Microsoft Defender Experts MDR extends expert-run detection and response beyond the Microsoft estate into third-party and multicloud signals through Microsoft Sentinel.

Together, the Insider Risk Management alert experience and Data Security Triage Agent help security teams investigate faster and with greater confidence.

In the Loop posts are your reliable source of what’s new across Microsoft Security and what it means for your security strategy.

To learn more about Microsoft Security solutio…

That starts with asking better questions—the kind that help organizations turn intelligence into action and trust into a foundation for progress.

But better security does not start with more information.

Understanding those connections is what allows security teams to use platforms, AI, and automation to make better decisions under real-world conditions.

Better analysis can surface more insights, but better decisions still depend on understanding what matters most and applying the right context.

Better security starts with better questions, and with the clarity to act on them.

The approaches built for a world of human actors cannot keep pace with a world of AI, agents and machine-speed attacks.

Microsoft transforms its breadth of visibility, threat intelligence and security expertise into a security context that connects security data, knowledge and semantics across the digital estate.

By grounding every interaction in this rich security context, Project Perception improves the accuracy and consistency of reasoning while reducing the time, compute and cost required to operate at scale.

Our security researchers continuously assess models against real-world security workflows, enabling us to match each task with the model that delivers the best outcome.

Tags: AI, P…

Microsoft’s AI Red Team has observed that meaningful testing of advanced AI systems- and models similarly requires broader participation from researchers and practitioners who operate outside traditional corporate security boundaries.

To address that gap, today we are announcing the External Red Team Alliance (EXTRA), a formalized global extension of Microsoft’s AI Red Team designed to support and encourage external expertise to advance AI safety and security testing.

Building a global allianceEXTRA is a two-part initiative focused on expanding AI safety research and strengthening external collaboration.

The first component supports a global academic network focused on advancing AI safety a…

Microsoft’s AI Red Team has observed that meaningful testing of advanced AI systems- and models similarly requires broader participation from researchers and practitioners who operate outside traditional corporate security boundaries.

To address that gap, today we are announcing the External Red Team Alliance (EXTRA), a formalized global extension of Microsoft’s AI Red Team designed to support and encourage external expertise to advance AI safety and security testing.

Building a global allianceEXTRA is a two-part initiative focused on expanding AI safety research and strengthening external collaboration.

The first component supports a global academic network focused on advancing AI safety a…

Phishing volume linked to the platform fell 92% from pre-disruption averages, including QR code phishing and CAPTCHA-gated phishing both declining from their March highs.

Q2 AiTM token compromise April phishing campaign tactics, detections, and mitigations ›This blog provides a view of email threat activity across the second quarter of 2026, highlighting key trends in phishing techniques, payload delivery, and threat actor behavior observed by Microsoft Threat Intelligence.

email threat landscape Q1 trends that shaped Q2 activity ›Figure 1.

Trend of QR code phishing attacks by weekly volume (January 2026–June 2026)The delivery methods used in QR code attacks shifted notably during Q2.

To he…

Phishing volume linked to the platform fell 92% from pre-disruption averages, including QR code phishing and CAPTCHA-gated phishing both declining from their March highs.

Q2 AiTM token compromise April phishing campaign tactics, detections, and mitigations ›This blog provides a view of email threat activity across the second quarter of 2026, highlighting key trends in phishing techniques, payload delivery, and threat actor behavior observed by Microsoft Threat Intelligence.

email threat landscape Q1 trends that shaped Q2 activity ›Figure 1.

Trend of QR code phishing attacks by weekly volume (January 2026–June 2026)The delivery methods used in QR code attacks shifted notably during Q2.

To he…

That experience continues to shape how we design Defender Experts Cybersecurity Incident Response—and how we work with partners like AXA XL.

Incident response must extend beyond technologyAs a global insurance provider, AXA XL plays a critical role in helping organizations navigate cyber risk and response.

AXA XL’s strategic partnerships with cyber incident response providers underscore our commitment to expertise, preparedness, and resilience.

Incident response engineered for high-stakes moments—and the readiness behind themWhat differentiates Microsoft Defender Experts Cybersecurity Incident Response is not only its deep technical expertise, but its direct connection to Microsoft engineer…

Follow the research in the Black Hat BriefingsMicrosoft Security researchers will also present peer-reviewed technical research in the Black Hat Briefings.

Visit booth #2144 for research, community, and hands-on defenseThis year we are transforming the Microsoft Security booth into a community center.

Partner presenceAt Black Hat 2026, the Microsoft booth will feature 13 partners from the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association (MISA) who will showcase solutions built with Microsoft Security technology.

Skill up before and after Black HatYou do not need to be in Las Vegas to take part in the broader Microsoft Security Black Hat experience.

The Microsoft Black Hat Skilling Challenge begin…

From late April 2026 to mid-June 2026, Microsoft Defender Experts observed increased ACR Stealer activity across customer environments.

Security teams should prioritize monitoring for ClickFix lures, suspicious WebDAV activity, obfuscated PowerShell execution, and attempts to access browser credential stores.

Microsoft Defender XDR detectionsMicrosoft Defender XDR customers can refer to the list of applicable detections below.

]art Payload hosting siteReferencesLearn moreFor the latest security research from the Microsoft Threat Intelligence community, check out the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Blog.

To hear stories and insights from the Microsoft Threat Intelligence community about the ev…

From late April 2026 to mid-June 2026, Microsoft Defender Experts observed increased ACR Stealer activity across customer environments.

Security teams should prioritize monitoring for ClickFix lures, suspicious WebDAV activity, obfuscated PowerShell execution, and attempts to access browser credential stores.

Microsoft Defender XDR detectionsMicrosoft Defender XDR customers can refer to the list of applicable detections below.

]art Payload hosting siteReferencesLearn moreFor the latest security research from the Microsoft Threat Intelligence community, check out the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Blog.

To hear stories and insights from the Microsoft Threat Intelligence community about the ev…

When an agent operates without a managed identity and least-privilege role-based access controls (RBAC), it can access or modify sensitive data beyond intended permissions if controls are not properly configured.

Organizations are deploying agentic capabilities (multi-step automation, delegated actions, tool use) faster than their identity and authorization models are evolving to safely constrain them.

The right mental model is to treat every agent as a first-class principal: give it a lifecycle-managed identity, assign explicit roles, scope its permissions tightly, and scope tool usage to a preconfigured tools manifest or configuration.

In the next 30–90 days, inventory your agent identiti…

When an agent operates without a managed identity and least-privilege role-based access controls (RBAC), it can access or modify sensitive data beyond intended permissions if controls are not properly configured.

Organizations are deploying agentic capabilities (multi-step automation, delegated actions, tool use) faster than their identity and authorization models are evolving to safely constrain them.

The right mental model is to treat every agent as a first-class principal: give it a lifecycle-managed identity, assign explicit roles, scope its permissions tightly, and scope tool usage to a preconfigured tools manifest or configuration.

In the next 30–90 days, inventory your agent identiti…

On July 14, 2026, Microsoft Threat Intelligence identified a coordinated supply chain compromise of the @asyncapi npm organization, a widely used set of packages for the AsyncAPI specification and code generation.

Ensure that Microsoft Defender Antivirus cloud-delivered protection, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint telemetry, and Microsoft Defender XDR investigation workflows are enabled across developer and CI assets.

Some promptbooks require access to Microsoft Defender XDR, Microsoft Sentinel, or related Microsoft security plugins.

Learn moreFor the latest security research from the Microsoft Threat Intelligence community, check out the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Blog.

To hear stories a…

Here, threat actors may simply seed prompt injections on websites in hope of corrupting AI systems that browse them.

Early experiments revealed a significant volume of "benign" prompt injection text, which illustrates the complexity of distinguishing between functional threats and harmless content.

Many prompt injections were found in research papers, educational blog posts, or security articles discussing this very topic.

(Source: GitHub/swisskyrepo)When searching for prompt injections naively, the majority of detections are benign content – false positives in our case.

Malicious: ExfiltrationWe were able to observe a small number of prompt injections that aim at theft of data.

Recognizing the risks associated within the complex modem firmware, Pixel 9 shipped with mitigations against a range of memory-safety vulnerabilities.

Following our previous discussion on "Deploying Rust in Existing Firmware Codebases", this post shares a concrete application: integrating a memory-safe Rust DNS(Domain Name System) parser into the modem firmware.

Hook-up Rust to modem firmwareBefore building the Rust DNS library, we defined several Rust unit tests to cover basic arithmetic, dynamic allocations, and FFI to verify the integration of Rust with the existing modem firmware code base.

Pixel modem firmware already has a well-tested and specialized global memory allocation system to…

This project represents a significant step forward in our ongoing efforts to combat session theft, which remains a prevalent threat in the modern security landscape.

Session theft typically occurs when a user inadvertently downloads malware onto their device.

Once active, the malware can silently extract existing session cookies from the browser or wait for the user to log in to new accounts, before exfiltrating these tokens to an attacker-controlled server.

How DBSC WorksDBSC protects against session theft by cryptographically binding authentication sessions to a specific device.

The issuance of new short-lived session cookies is contingent upon Chrome proving possession of the correspondi…

Staying ahead of the latest indirect prompt injection attacks is critical to our mission of securing Workspace with Gemini.

In our previous blog “Mitigating prompt injection attacks with a layered defense strategy”, we reviewed the layered architecture of our IPI defenses.

Synthetic data generationAfter we discover, curate, and catalog new attacks, we use Simula to generate synthetic data expanding these new attacks.

We partition the synthetic data described above into separate training and validation sets to ensure performance is evaluated against held-out examples.

This process leverages the newly generated synthetic attack data described on this blog, to create a robust, end-to-end evalu…

2025 marked a special year in the history of vulnerability rewards and bug bounty programs at Google: our 15th anniversary 🎉🎉🎉!

Coming back to 2025 specifically, our VRP once again confirmed the ongoing value of engaging with the external security research community to make Google and its products safer.

Vulnerability Reward Program 2025 in NumbersWant to learn more about who’s reporting to the VRP?

Tip: Want to be informed of new developments and events around our Vulnerability Reward Program?

Follow the Google VRP channel on X to stay in the loop and be sure to check out the Security Engineering blog, which covers topics ranging from VRP updates to security practices and vulnerability des…

To stay ahead of the curve, the technology industry must undertake a proactive, multi-year migration to Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC).

To bring these critical protections to the wider developer community with minimal friction, the transition will be supported through Play App Signing.

Play App Signing leverages Google Cloud KMS, which helps ensure industry-leading compliance standards, to secure signing keys.

Empower Developers : The inclusion of ML-DSA support within Android Keystore and Play App Signing allows developers to safeguard their users and application.

: The inclusion of ML-DSA support within Android Keystore and Play App Signing allows developers to safeguard their users and …

Today we're announcing a new program in Chrome to make HTTPS certificates secure against quantum computers.

Instead, Chrome, in collaboration with other partners, is developing an evolution of HTTPS certificates based on Merkle Tree Certificates (MTCs), currently in development in the PLANTS working group.

Since MTC technology shares significant architectural similarities with CT, these operators are uniquely qualified to ensure MTCs are able to get off the ground quickly and successfully.

The Chrome Quantum-resistant Root Program will operate alongside our existing Chrome Root Program to ensure a risk-managed transition that maintains the highest levels of security for all users.

First, we…

For Majik, Scam Detection was the intervention he needed: “The warning is what made me pause and avoid a bad situation”.

As scammers evolve their tactics and create more convincing and personalized threats, we’re using the best of Google AI to stay one step ahead.

Expanding Scam Detection for Calls to Samsung DevicesTo help protect you during phone calls, Scam Detection alerts you if a caller uses speech patterns commonly associated with fraud.

Scam Detection for phone calls on Google Pixel devices is available in the U.S., Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, and the UK.

Powered by Gemini’s on-device model, Scam Detection provides intelligent protection against scam calls while ensuring that…

Upgrading Google Play’s AI-powered, multi-layered user protectionsWe’ve seen a clear impact from these safety efforts on Google Play.

As Android’s built-in defense against malware and unwanted software, Google Play Protect now scans over 350 billion Android apps daily.

This proactive protection constantly checks both Play apps and those from other sources to ensure they are not potentially harmful.

Looking aheadOur top priority remains making Google Play and Android the most trusted app ecosystems for everyone.

Thank you for being part of the Google Play and Android community as we work together to build a safer app ecosystem.

That’s why we're committed to providing multi-layered defenses that help protect you before, during, and after a theft attempt.

Today, we're announcing a powerful set of theft protection feature updates that build on our existing protections, designed to give you greater peace of mind by making your device a much harder target for criminals.

These updates are now available for Android devices running Android 16+.

More User Control for Failed Authentications: In Android 15, we launched Failed Authentication Lock, a feature that automatically locks the device's screen after excessive failed authentication attempts.

This feature is now getting a new dedicated enable/disable toggle in settings,…

These initiatives, driven by Ballots SC-080, SC-090, and SC-091, will sunset 11 legacy methods for Domain Control Validation.

What’s Domain Control Validation?

Domain Control Validation is a security-critical process designed to ensure certificates are only issued to the legitimate domain operator.

Sunsetted methods relying on email:Sunsetted methods relying on phone:Sunsetted method relying on a reverse lookup:For everyday users, these changes are invisible - and that’s the point.

These changes push the ecosystem toward standardized (e.g., ACME), modern, and auditable Domain Control Validation methods.

Partnership with ArmOur goal is to raise the bar on GPU security, ensuring the Mali GPU driver and firmware remain highly resilient against potential threats.

We partnered with Arm to conduct an analysis of the Mali driver, used on approximately 45% of Android devices.

This approach allowed us to roll out the new security policy broadly while minimizing the impact on developers.

This effort spans across Android and Android OEMs, and required close collaboration with Arm.

The Android security team is committed to collaborating with ecosystem partners to drive broader adoption of this approach to help harden the GPU.

We built on Gemini's existing protections and agent security principles and have implemented several new layers for Chrome.

To further bolster model alignment beyond spotlighting, we’re introducing the User Alignment Critic — a separate model built with Gemini that acts as a high-trust system component.

A flow chart that depicts the User Alignment Critic: a trusted component that vets each action before it reaches the browser.

The User Alignment Critic runs after the planning is complete to double-check each proposed action.

Looking forwardThe upcoming introduction of agentic capabilities in Chrome brings new demands for browser security, and we've approached this challenge with the same ri…

Android uses the best of Google AI and our advanced security expertise to tackle mobile scams from every angle.

Over the last few years, we’ve launched industry-leading features to detect scams and protect users across phone calls, text messages and messaging app chat notifications.

To help combat these types of financial scams, we launched a pilot earlier this year in the UK focused on in-call protections for financial apps.

The UK pilot of Android’s in-call scam protections has already helped thousands of users end calls that could have cost them a significant amount of money.

We’ve also started to pilot this protection with more app types, including peer-to-peer (P2P) payment apps.

Secure by DesignWe built Quick Share’s interoperability support for AirDrop with the same rigorous security standards that we apply to all Google products.

Secure Sharing Channel: The communication channel itself is hardened by our use of Rust to develop this feature.

On Android, security is built in at every layer.

On Android, security is built in at every layer.

Secure Sharing Using AirDrop's "Everyone" ModeTo ensure a seamless experience for both Android and iOS users, Quick Share currently works with AirDrop's "Everyone for 10 minutes" mode.