forescout

Forescout found 22 internet-facing Rockwell Automation programmable logic controllers (PLCs) in cities hit by recent cyberattacks on US water utilities. Nineteen used the same mobile carrier network. Its August 3 scan counted 4,407 exposed Rockwell controllers worldwide, including 2,844 in the United States, but Forescout could not confirm any were compromised. That figure counts exposed controllers, not water utilities or confirmed victims. Forescout said the publicly described effects could be achieved without a vulnerability exploit: attackers changed IP addresses and set passwords on controllers that were already reachable, causing operators to lose visibility and, in some cases, control of connected equipment. Neither the government alerts nor Forescout's analysis explains how the attackers found, selected, or initially accessed their targets. Water and wastewater utilities in at least seven states have reported incidents since July 27, the FBI and EPA said in a July 30 public service announcement. The Hacker News found on August 6 that Forescout's post says the announcement confirmed at least 12 states, while the FBI page says seven. No agency has attributed the campaign. Whatever the final count, defenders can act now by taking the controllers off the public internet. Exposing EtherNet/IP on port 44818 creates an unauthenticated path that, depending on device configuration, lets an attacker identify a controller or write settings to it, Forescout said. Forescout found more than 70% of the US-based exposed controllers on large mobile carrier networks. The FBI and EPA recommend strong authentication, updates and logging for cellular modems, with remote access isolated through a private APN, VPN or similar architecture. A July 30 Censys snapshot found 4,148 exposed Rockwell/Allen-Bradley EtherNet/IP hosts, with Verizon Business, AT&T Mobility and T-Mobile USA accounting for 59%. The Censys and Forescout snapshots both exceed 4,100 hosts, but different platforms, queries and dates make the figures not directly comparable. Forescout's historical series hit a June 2026 low of 4,169, down 47% from 7,814 in March 2020; its August 3 snapshot was 4,407. MicroLogix 1400 devices made up 50% of Forescout's results and MicroLogix 1100 devices 8%. The FBI and EPA named both families. Forescout said 19 of the 22 controllers in affected cities ran firmware susceptible to CVE-2017-16740 (Rockwell CVSS score: 8.6). The flaw is a Modbus TCP buffer overflow affecting MicroLogix 1400 Series B and C running firmware 21.002 and earlier; Rockwell fixed it in revision 21.003. Exploitation requires Modbus TCP to be enabled, which Forescout could not verify on those hosts. Firmware updates address specific bugs but "do not make direct public exposure of PLCs acceptable," the researchers wrote. Rockwell discontinued the MicroLogix 1100 on April 30, 2022. Advisory SD1790 tells operators locked out by an attacker-set password how to reset a MicroLogix 1400 or 1100 to factory defaults and redownload a known-good project file. The notice carries no CVE because it is recovery guidance, not a vulnerability disclosure. That recovery path requires a current offline copy of the controller logic. The FBI said at least one victim found modified PLC project files after spotting ladder logic discrepancies across several sites. It also warned that similar third-party network setups may let attackers repeat successful compromises across customers sharing vulnerable configurations.

15 TP-Link Omada vulnerabilities let attackers hijack routers and intercept camera traffic TP-Link prints the serial number of an Omada router on its packaging and on a label attached to the device. Those numbers run in sequence, and feeding a guessed one to the Omada cloud service returns the matching device’s MAC address and model. Serials beginning 22460J500 appear to be ER605 routers, and serials beginning 224608100 appear to be the ER7206. Forescout’s Vedere Labs researchers built that into an attack chain, one of several they assembled from 15 vulnerabilities in Omada, TP-Link’s networking line for small and medium businesses. An attacker who never touches the target network can end up holding the administrator’s cloud controller password, the shared password every device at a site uses, and a VPN tunnel into the internal network. Anyone running Omada routers, switches or access points is exposed. So are owners of TP-Link gear from four other product lines, which trust the same broken certificate chain. TP-Link has published advisories and patches for most of the findings. It declined to issue CVE identifiers for four of them and rated the sequential serial number issues low severity. What zero-touch provisioning does Zero-touch provisioning, or ZTP, exists so a network team can unbox 150 access points and not configure them by hand. A new device comes online, finds a provisioning server called a controller, and receives its settings, credentials and firmware from it. In Omada, that controller can be a cloud service, a small appliance, or software on a virtual machine. Central control means central failure. Compromise a controller and you inherit every device it manages. Omada groups devices into sites, and each site uses one username and password shared by all of its members, so a single credential covers a whole cluster of gear. Controllers also sit in a privileged spot on the network, often with firewall exceptions, which makes abuse hard to spot. The Forescout report puts it in terms most defenders will recognize, describing the technique as “living off the land within network infrastructure.” The chain, from serial number to VPN tunnel Batch-query the cloud API for guessed serials and you have a list of MAC addresses belonging to devices that have not yet been adopted by a controller. The attacker then races the real device, spoofing only its MAC address and sending the opening adoption message ahead of it, resending every 60 seconds until the cloud answers. Vedere Labs found a high success rate in testing and estimated that working 1,000 MAC addresses at once needs roughly 17 requests per second. Answering the cloud’s authentication challenge takes no secret at all. A new device signs it with the factory credentials admin/admin, so the attacker signs the same way. The cloud replies with the device’s configuration: the site username in cleartext, the site password as an unsalted MD5 hash, and sometimes VPN keys. Cracking the hash is optional, because the Omada protocol accepts the hash itself as proof of identity. The impersonated device then reports its firmware version to the controller, and nothing sanitizes that string. Put JavaScript in it and it runs in the administrator’s browser. Vedere Labs used it to draw a fake session-expired login box over the Omada dashboard, sending the stolen password to an attacker-run server. From that account, the attacker configures VPN tunnels into the internal network. Once inside, a previously disclosed flaw, CVE-2025-7850, lets them run commands on Omada devices as root. One certificate chain, five product families The certificate work is the finding with the longest reach. Omada’s hardware and software controllers ship with a TLS certificate and private key baked into the software, and that key is what proves a controller is genuine. Pull it off one controller and you can convince client devices that your machine is theirs. Cloud connections do run an extra identity check, but swapping the controller’s hostname for its IP address skips it. The same chain of trust sits behind VIGI cameras, Festa routers, and the Tapo and Kasa smart home lines. One set of certificates, five product families. Scale is where the numbers matter and where they need care. Vedere Labs counts more than 1,800 Omada controllers reachable from the internet, and those are meant to be firewalled, so the figure describes misconfiguration, not normal deployment. Forescout counted 1.1 million Google Play downloads for the Omada and Omada Guard apps, and more than 70 million for the other affected TP-Link apps. Downloads are not accounts, and the researchers say only that several million active accounts are plausible. Many of those apps share one TP-Link cloud login, so a compromised Omada account may reach the linked VIGI camera deployment. Device passwords stored on the routers themselves are MD5 hashed without salt, then encrypted with AES-256 using a key written into the source code. The key is the string who are you?. 426 days, and some of it will not be patched Vedere Labs reported everything in June 2025 and published 426 days later. Two of the flaws cannot be fixed in firmware. On day 240, TP-Link said addressing the predictable serials and the enumeration issue would require changes to device manufacturing, packaging, factory workflows, and distributor logistics, and that remaining work might not finish before the third quarter of 2026. Patching controllers and mobile apps is the first job, using advisories. After that, stop reusing one password across devices during provisioning, change device credentials, turn on MFA for the TP-Link ID, and rotate any VPN keys that a controller may have handed out. Local interception is what most of these attacks depend on, so 802.1X with NAC, port security, dynamic ARP inspection, wireless client isolation and segmentation all cut the attack surface directly. Download: The ultimate guide to network operations management

Forescout brings PQC visibility to IT, OT, IoT, and IoMT environments Forescout has announced the launch of its Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) Readiness and Encryption Hygiene Dashboards. The new dashboards are designed to help organizations identify, prioritize, and manage quantum risk across information technology (IT), operational technology (OT), Internet of Things (IoT), and medical devices (IoMT) environments. As organizations face new pressures from regulators, auditors, and boards to demonstrate PQC awareness and progress, Forescout accelerated its development timeline to deliver operational security capabilities to understand and prioritize where quantum-unsafe encryption creates real exposure. “Organizations don’t just need new algorithms or upgraded platforms, they need clarity about where quantum-unsafe encryption creates exposure in their environments,” said Barry Mainz, CEO of Forescout. “The PQC readiness and encryption hygiene dashboards are designed to deliver that clarity, helping security leaders see, prioritize, and reduce quantum risk now, even as full migration progresses over time.” Quantum risk is pervasive New data from Forescout Research – Vedere Labs highlights the urgency of PQC readiness. The report shows that most of the internet remains unprepared for quantum threats, with nearly 90% of SSH servers not yet quantum-safe. Within enterprise environments, readiness is even more uneven, particularly across cyber-physical systems. While 50% of IT devices support PQC-capable SSH, adoption drops sharply across other environments: only 28% of IoT devices, 16% of OT devices, and 6% of IoMT devices. These gaps underscore a critical challenge: future migration deadlines are approaching, but the required work starts now. Governments and standards bodies are clear that organizations cannot wait until 2030 to begin. They must first inventory cryptographic usage, assess exposure, and understand where quantum risk is concentrated across their environments today. Making PQC exposure visible, measurable, and actionable Forescout’s PQC dashboards address this challenge by delivering continuous visibility into cryptographic usage and real-world risk across complex environments. Capabilities include: Quantum Encryption Assessment: Unified view of cryptographic posture across IT, OT, and IoT environments including quantum-safe scores, asset coverage, and PQC adoption. Assets with Weak Encryption: Maps encryption risk to specific assets, showing their protocol usage and operational importance. Assets with Protocol Risk: Distinguishes immediate hygiene gaps from future PQC risk. Traffic Encryption Analysis: Identifies concentrations of PQC-unsafe traffic across environments. PQC Vulnerable Risk Correlation: Connects encryption gaps with active threats and external exposure. These capabilities transform PQC from a compliance exercise into an operational security discipline, enabling organizations to move from visibility to prioritization to mitigation over time. Rather than stopping at cryptographic discovery or visualization, Forescout helps organizations understand what matters most and where they should take action first. Risk-driven assurance for quantum security Unlike tools that list ciphers, protocols, or static discovery findings, Forescout correlates quantum-unsafe encryption with asset criticality, exposure, and environment type, helping organizations identify the devices and communications that matter most. This reflects Forescout’s approach to quantum security: continuous discovery with risk-driven assurance. The dashboards enable security teams to operationalize PQC readiness by: Prioritizing remediation based on real-world impact, factoring in asset criticality and exposure Correlating cryptographic posture with environment context, including IT, OT, and cyber-physical systems Maintaining a continuous, real-time view of quantum readiness across the attack surface Translating visibility into action and risk reduction through Forescout’s See -> Understand -> Prioritize -> Act model The dashboards are powered by patented capabilities that detect actual negotiated quantum-unsafe encryption in live network traffic, allowing organizations to understand what is happening on the wire as opposed to relying on inferred configurations, expected settings, or policy assumptions. “Enterprise security teams are being asked to prove awareness, governance, and progress on post-quantum cryptography well before large-scale migration is feasible,” said Paul Kao, Chief Product Officer at Forescout. “Global guidance from governments and standards bodies consistently points to inventory and PQC exposure assessment as the first required steps. By delivering the PQC Readiness and Encryption Hygiene Dashboards, Forescout gives organizations a practical way to demonstrate exactly that – years before full PQC migration can realistically be completed.” Aligning security operations with regulatory and industry expectations Forescout’s launch aligns enterprise security with emerging regulatory and industry expectations, including guidance from the Group of Seven (G7) and the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), as well as national migration roadmaps that identify the 2030-2035 period as a critical window for the large-scale adoption of PQC. By focusing on unmanaged and hard-to-upgrade assets, where risk is most concentrated, Forescout helps organizations address the environments most likely to delay broader quantum readiness.

Security leaders must urgently accelerate transition plans to post-quantum cryptography (PQC) through more proactive inventorying, procurement and crypto-agility efforts, a leading security expert has argued. Speaking at Infosecurity Europe on June 3, Forescout VP of security intelligence, Rik Ferguson, warned that just 8% of SSH servers worldwide currently support PQC, up just two percentage points in a year. “The question is not ‘when does Q-day arrive?’,” he said. “It’s ‘will we be ready when that moment comes? Will we at least have started the journey?’” New research from EY this week revealed that 87% of business leaders expect quantum computing to disrupt their industry by 2030. Yet only 35% have made it a strategic priority for the next five years, with 59% believing it’s unlikely to mature enough until 2030. However, from a security perspective, the countdown to cryptographically relevant quantum computers (CRQCs) has already begun. The NSA was warning of harvest-now-decrypt-later (HNDL) attacks as far back as 2021, Ferguson said. He cited evidence from the Snowden leaks that the US – and therefore its adversaries – are already hoovering up encrypted data with a view to encrypting it later. The Muscular and Tempora programs, highly classified, joint surveillance programs in the UK and US, indicate this. While previous incidents involving massive redirection of internet traffic through China show Beijing is likely up to something similar, Ferguson claimed. Salt Typhoon's ongoing efforts may also involve stealing encrypted data to decrypt at a later date. “Some of the things that cause the biggest problems are the things that you don’t hear or can’t see coming,” he said. Although these HNDL schemes haven’t been confirmed, the “capability is documented and real,” Ferguson warned. Firms Must Plan for PQC Now Although only long-lived data is at risk from HNDL, PQC planning must start now, he said. A G7 Cyber Expert Group roadmap from January urged the same. Yet according to its timeline – strategy, inventory, planning, migration, testing and monitoring – the planning phase falls in 2028-29. That’s around the same timeframe that IBM promises to have its Starling fault-tolerant quantum computer up and running. With Q-day fast approaching, Ferguson urged action on three fronts: Inventory all assets that use encryption: what is on the network, what it runs and whether it can support PQC. Evolve a continuous, real-time approach to visibility Get cybersecurity concerns “injected into the procurement process," ensuring every purchase is evaluated through the lens of quantum readiness. The idea is that this works passively at scale without the need for a dedicated program Build out capability for crypto agility. This could be something like upgrading to TLS 1.3 which supports PQC. “It doesn’t mean you need to change the ciphers right now. It means you need to build the framework to have that ability in future,” said Ferguson.

Millions of remote access RDP and VNC servers are exposed to the internet, and hundreds of them may provide access to industrial control systems (ICS) and other operational technology (OT), according to research by Forescout. RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) and VNC (Virtual Network Computing) are widely used for remote access, but they should not be exposed directly to the open internet without a secure gateway. A Shodan search shows roughly 1.8 million RDP and 1.6 million VNC servers exposed on the internet, a majority in China and the United States. Forescout has determined that the majority are honeypots, ISPs, and hosting providers, but its researchers still found 91,000 RDP and 29,000 VNC servers that could be linked to specific industries. A significant percentage of exposed servers is hosted by organizations in the retail, education, services, manufacturing, and healthcare sectors. An analysis showed that many of the exposed servers run Windows versions that reached end of life or end of support. More than 19,000 RDP servers are vulnerable to the old vulnerability named BlueKeep, which has been exploited by a wide range of threat actors. In addition, nearly 60,000 VNC servers do not have authentication enabled. One of the most concerning findings is that 670 of these VNC servers provide direct access to ICS/OT panels without authentication. Access to these cyber-physical systems (CPS) can be highly valuable to attackers, and the threat is not only theoretical. Forescout pointed out that Russia-linked hackers have been known to target OT systems via VNC, as warned by government agencies in December 2025. One Russia-linked group, known as Infrastructure Destruction Squad (IDS) and Dark Engine, recently shared a tool designed to scan for RDP, VNC, and OT-specific protocols. “On February 23, the group shared a video of a purportedly compromised groundwater pumping station in Israel that it said was found with this tool. On March 9, the group shared another example of the tool being run against a specific target set, including a VNC screenshot of a control system in Turkey,” Forescout said, adding, “Between these two posts, the group also advertised the sale of access to an exposed SCADA system in Czechia.” In addition to these attacks, the cybersecurity firm noted that profit-driven cybercriminals have been abusing RDP for ransomware deployment, and that the Redheberg botnet has infected nearly 40,000 exposed VNC servers since February. Organizations can mitigate these risks by using dedicated secure remote access solutions, including ones designed specifically for accessing sensitive CPS. Related: Serial-to-IP Converter Flaws Expose OT and Healthcare Systems to Hacking Related: ZionSiphon Malware Targets ICS in Water Facilities Related: CISA Warns of ScadaBR Vulnerability After Hacktivist ICS Attack Related: ICS Devices Bricked Following Russia-Linked Intrusion Into Polish Power Grid

Cybersecurity researchers have identified 22 new vulnerabilities in popular models of serial-to-IP converters from Lantronix and Silex that could be exploited to hijack susceptible devices and tamper with data exchanged by them. The vulnerabilities have been collectively codenamed BRIDGE:BREAK by Forescout Research Vedere Labs, which identified nearly 20,000 Serial-to-Ethernet converters exposed online globally. "Some of these vulnerabilities allow attackers to take full control of mission-critical devices connected via serial links," the cybersecurity company said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Serial-to-IP converters are hardware devices that enable users to remotely access, control, and manage any serial device over an IP network or the internet by "bridging" legacy applications and industrial control systems (ICS) that operate over TCP/IP. At a high level, as many as eight security flaws have been discovered in Lantronix products (EDS3000PS Series and EDS5000 Series) and 14 in Silex SD330-AC. These shortcomings fall under the following broad categories - Remote code execution - CVE-2026-32955, CVE-2026-32956, CVE-2026-32961, CVE-2025-67041, CVE-2025-67034, CVE-2025-67035, CVE-2025-67036, CVE-2025-67037, and CVE-2025-67038 Client-side code execution - CVE-2026-32963 Denial-of-service (DoS) - CVE-2026-32961, CVE-2015-5621, CVE-2024-24487 Authentication bypass - CVE-2026-32960, CVE-2025-67039 Device takeover - FSCT-2025-0021 (no CVE assigned), CVE-2026-32965, CVE-2025-70082 Firmware tampering - CVE-2026-32958 Configuration tampering - CVE-2026-32962, CVE-2026-32964 Information disclosure - CVE-2026-32959 Arbitrary file upload - CVE-2026-32957 Successful exploitation of the aforementioned flaws could allow attackers to disrupt serial communications with field assets, conduct lateral movement, and tamper with sensor values or modify actuator behavior. In a hypothetical attack scenario, a threat actor could gain initial access to a remote facility through an internet-exposed edge device, such as an industrial router or firewall, and then weaponize BRIDGE:BREAK vulnerabilities to compromise the serial-to-IP converter, and alter serial data moving to or from the IP network. Lantronix and Silex have released security updates to address the identified issues - Besides applying patches, users are advised to replace default credentials, avoid using weak passwords, segment networks to prevent bad actors from reaching vulnerable serial-to-IP converters or using them as jumping-off points to other critical assets, and ensure the devices are not exposed to the internet. "This research highlights weaknesses in serial-to-IP converters and the risks they can introduce in critical environments," Forescout said. "As these devices are increasingly deployed to connect legacy serial equipment to IP networks, vendors and end-users should treat their security implications as a core operational requirement."

Serial-to-IP converters are affected by potentially serious vulnerabilities that can expose operational technology (OT), healthcare, and other types of systems to remote attacks. Serial-to-IP converters, also known as serial device servers, are hardware devices that bridge legacy serial equipment to modern Ethernet/IP networks, allowing old industrial control systems (ICS) and other OT devices to communicate remotely. Researchers at network security and threat detection company Forescout Technologies have analyzed these devices and found numerous vulnerabilities that could be valuable to threat actors. Serial-to-IP converters are used in sectors such as industrial, telecoms, retail, healthcare, energy and utilities, and transportation. The devices are made by several major companies, including Moxa, Digi, Advantech, Perle, Lantronix, and Silex. Some of these vendors have reported deploying millions of devices, and a Shodan search shows nearly 20,000 internet-exposed systems worldwide. “Using open-source intelligence (OSINT), attackers can find details about some of these devices, including internal IP addresses, model and vendor names, and photographs from electrical substations, water treatment plants, and other critical infrastructure environments,” Forescout researchers explained. In addition to internet-exposed devices, attackers could target serial-to-IP converters on local networks, which can be compromised via vulnerabilities or misconfigurations in edge devices such as routers and firewalls. Forescout’s research, which focused on Silex and Lantronix devices, led to the discovery of 20 new vulnerabilities across the two vendors’ products, including weaknesses that can be exploited without authentication. The vulnerabilities, collectively tracked as BRIDGE:BREAK, can be exploited for OS command injection and remote code execution, firmware tampering, denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, and device takeovers. Some of the flaws can allow attackers to upload arbitrary files, bypass authentication, and obtain information. Forescout researchers showed the potential impact of these vulnerabilities in real-world environments. They demonstrated how an attacker could exploit the flaws to tamper with data, for instance, manipulating sensor readings in industrial and healthcare environments to conceal dangerous conditions that would normally require human intervention. In another scenario, the researchers described how an extortion group or a state-sponsored threat actor could cause a DoS condition in a healthcare environment by delivering malicious firmware to devices. “Once activated, the weaponized firmware could cause serial-to-IP converters to stop responding on the network. Potential impacts include: analyzers stop reporting results to laboratory information systems, creating processing backlogs; surgical lighting controllers become unresponsive to remote commands; infusion pump calibration and certification workflows are halted; telemetry from environmental sensors is interrupted; Patient monitors lose network connectivity,” the researchers explained. Lantronix and Silex have both been notified and they have released patches. The cybersecurity agency CISA recently published an advisory describing the Lantronix vulnerabilities. Silex has published an advisory on its own website. It’s important for organizations not to ignore the risks posed by the use of serial-to-IP converters, as these devices have been targeted in the wild. They were targeted by Russian hackers in the 2015 Ukraine energy attack and, more recently, in attacks targeting energy facilities in Poland. Forescout has published a report detailing the BRIDGE:BREAK vulnerabilities. *updated with link to the Forescout report Related: 1,000 Instantel Industrial Monitoring Devices Possibly Exposed to Hacking

While non-public frontier AI models, like Anthorpic’s Claude Mythos, have been shown to identify thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities across major operating systems, commercial models are also indicating progress in the discovery of software bugs. Forescout’s Vedere Labs found that just a year ago 55% of AI models failed basic vulnerability research and 93% failed exploit development tasks. Progress has been made however, and in 2026 the cybersecurity firm said all tested models’ complete vulnerability research tasks, and half can generate working exploits autonomously. As part of the research, 50 AI models were tested including commercial, open-source and underground. The most capable models Forescout tested – Claude Opus 4.6 and Kimi K2.5 – can now find and exploit vulnerabilities without complex prompts, making them accessible to inexperienced attackers. “These are widely available AI models exceeding human capability,” said Rik Ferguson, VP Security Intelligence at Forescout. However, he admitted this may not be at the scale, speed and quality of Mythos. During testing Forescout said that using single prompts, the RAPTOR agentic framework, and the firm’s own extensions, they discovered four new zero-day vulnerabilities in OpenNDS which is widely deployed. RAPTOR is an open-source, agentic AI framework designed for cybersecurity research, offense and defense. Ferguson explained that one of the vulnerabilities that was found was in code that Vedere Labs had already manually analyzed and had not identified. AI Lowers the Barrier to Discovering Unknown Vulnerabilities The commercial models performed best in Forescout’s testing, but they remain expensive, the firm admitted. Claude Opus 4.6 for example costs up to $25 per million output tokens. Meanwhile, open-source alternatives such as DeepSeek 3.2 can handle basic tasks at a fraction of the cost, with all test tasks costing less than $0.70. Claude Mythos by comparison will be available to participants at $25/$125 per million input/output tokens. Using different models based on task complexity and cost is emerging as a practical strategy for both defenders and attackers. Forescout noted, that if its research can uncover new vulnerabilities with open models, and large initiatives such as Project Glasswing can surface thousands of zero-days in critical software, organizations should assume their environments contain unknown vulnerabilities that AI will find, whether used by

Week in review: NIST updates DNS security guidance, compromised LiteLLM PyPI packages Here’s an overview of some of last week’s most interesting news, articles, interviews and videos: NIST updates its DNS security guidance for the first time in over a decade DNS infrastructure underpins nearly every network connection an organization makes, yet security configurations for it have gone largely unrevised at the federal guidance level for more than twelve years. NIST published SP 800-81r3, the Secure Domain Name System Deployment Guide, superseding a version that dates to 2013. The document covers three main areas: using DNS as an active security control, securing the DNS protocol itself, and protecting the servers and infrastructure that run DNS services. Attackers are exploiting RCE vulnerability in BIG-IP APM systems (CVE-2025-53521) A critical unauthenticated remote code execution vulnerability (CVE-2025-53521) in F5’s BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) solution is under active exploitation, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency warned on Friday. Your AI agents are moving sensitive data. Do you know where? In this Help Net Security interview, Gidi Cohen, CEO at Bonfy.AI, addresses what he sees as the most pressing gap in AI agent security: data-layer risk. While the industry focuses on prompt injection and model behavior, Cohen argues the deeper threat is autonomous AI agents operating across systems with no visibility into what data they access, combine, or expose. Quantum threats are already active and the defense response remains fragmented Enterprises are moving toward post-quantum security at uneven speeds, and the gap between organizations that have built crypto-agility into their infrastructure and those that have adopted the label without the underlying capability is widening. Dr. Tan Teik Guan, CEO of Singapore-based cybersecurity company pQCee, draws a sharp line between the two. Crypto-agility, in his view, requires more than support for multiple algorithms or protocol-level negotiation. Measuring security performance in real-time, not once a quarter Most organizations have invested heavily in security products over the past decade. The assumption embedded in that spending is that more tools equal better protection. Tim Nan, CEO of digiDations, says that assumption is the most persistent misconception he encounters when working with security leaders across industries. NVIDIA puts GPU orchestration in community hands GPU-accelerated AI workloads now run on Kubernetes in the large majority of enterprise environments. Managing those workloads at scale has required specialized tooling that, until now, remained under vendor control. NVIDIA moved to change that at KubeCon Europe in Amsterdam this week, donating its Dynamic Resource Allocation (DRA) Driver for GPUs to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). TeamPCP strikes again: Backdoored Telnyx PyPI package delivers malware TeamPCP continues is supply chain compromise rampage, with telnyx on PyPI being the latest maliciously modified package. The AI safety conversation is focused on the wrong layer Organizations have spent years accumulating fragmented identity systems: too many roles, too many credentials, too many disconnected tools. For a workforce of humans, that fragmentation was manageable. Humans log in, log out, and make decisions slowly enough that gaps in control rarely turned into immediate incidents. AI agents operate differently. Training an AI agent to attack LLM applications like a real adversary Most enterprise software development teams now ship AI-powered applications faster than traditional penetration testing can keep up with. A security team with 500 applications may test each one once a year, or less. In the time between tests, the underlying models, integrations, and behaviors can change, with no corresponding security review. Novee launched a product it calls AI Red Teaming for LLM Applications, an AI pentesting agent built specifically to probe LLM-powered software. Your facilities run on fragile supply chains and nobody wants to admit it In this Help Net Security interview, Christa Dodoo, Global Chair at IFMA, discusses how facility managers are managing supply chain risk in critical building systems. She explains how sourcing, localized redundancy, and flexible infrastructure design are being integrated into resilience planning. A nearly undetectable LLM attack needs only a handful of poisoned samples Prompt engineering has become a standard part of how large language models are deployed in production, and it introduces an attack surface most organizations have not yet addressed. Researchers have developed and tested a prompt-based backdoor attack method, called ProAttack, that achieves attack success rates approaching 100% on multiple text classification benchmarks without altering sample labels or injecting external trigger words. AI SOC vendors are selling a future that production deployments haven’t reached yet Vendors selling AI-powered security operations platforms have built their pitches around a consistent set of promises: autonomous threat investigation, dramatic reductions in analyst workload, and an accelerating path toward humanless operations. Practitioners buying and deploying those platforms describe something different. Top product launches at RSAC 2026 RSAC 2026 showcased a wave of innovation, with vendors unveiling technologies poised to redefine cybersecurity. From AI-powered defense to breakthroughs in identity protection, this year’s conference delivered a glimpse into the future. Here are the most interesting products that caught our attention, and could shape what’s next. Oracle issues emergency fix for pre-auth RCE in Identity Manager (CVE-2026-21992) Oracle has released an out-of-band patch for a critical and easily exploitable vulnerability (CVE-2026-21992) in Oracle Identity Manager and Oracle Web Services Manager. The company did not say whether the vulnerability has been exploited as a zero-day, but has urged customers to apply the updates or provided mitigations as soon as possible. GitHub-hosted malware campaign uses split payload to evade detection A large-scale malware delivery campaign has been targeting developers, gamers, and general users through fake tools hosted on GitHub, Netskope researchers have warned. These “lures” are highly polished and appear legitimate, occasionally mimicking real projects, thus making them difficult to distinguish from safe software. Critical NetScaler ADC, Gateway flaw may soon be exploited (CVE-2026-3055) Citrix has fixed two vulnerabilities in NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway, with the more serious flaw (CVE-2026-3055) potentially allowing attackers to extract active session tokens from the memory of affected devices. LiteLLM PyPI packages compromised in expanding TeamPCP supply chain attacks A slew of supply chain attacks against popular open source tools and packages appears to have been orchestrated by TeamPCP, a cybercriminal group that rose to prominence in late 2025. The latest victim of the group is BerryAI’s popular LiteLLM library, a unified interface that makes it easier for apps to switch between various LLMs: on March 24, TeamPCP uploaded two compromised versions (1.82.7 and 1.82.8) on PyPI that included a credential stealer and a malware dropper. Researchers release tool to detect stealthy BPFDoor implants in critical infrastructure networks Telecommunications providers around the world have been dealing with the burrowing efforts of the China-linked APTs for many years now. To help them identify hard-to-detect implants used by the China-based group dubbed Red Menshen, Rapid7 researchers have released a scanning script. CISA sounds alarm on Langflow RCE, Trivy supply chain compromise after rapid exploitation The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has added two new vulnerabilities to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog: CVE-2026-33017, a recently disclosed code injection vulnerability in Langflow, an open-source framework for building AI agents and workflows, and CVE-2026-33634, an embedded malicious code vulnerability in Aqua Security’s Trivy security scanner. Product showcase: Cross-platform and third-party endpoint patching with Action1 Keeping endpoints patched is one of the more annoying chores in IT operations. Action1 is a cloud-based autonomous endpoint management platform that addresses this challenge head-on, covering third-party apps and OS updates (Windows, macOS, and now Linux) from a single, centralized console. You don’t have to choose between BAS or automated pentesting, you shouldn’t There’s a debate making the rounds in security circles that sounds reasonable on the surface but falls apart under operational scrutiny: Which is better, breach and attack simulation (BAS) or automated penetration testing (APT)? Security vendors have stoked this debate for obvious reasons, with some even explicitly arguing that automated pentesting should replace BAS entirely. But for practitioners responsible for defending an organization, this framing is the problem. It represents a coverage regression disguised as simplification. Why your phishing simulations aren’t building a security culture Security culture isn’t built by phishing simulations. In this Help Net Security video, Dan Potter, VP of Cyber Resilience at Immersive, argues that annual training videos and quarterly phishing tests happen in calm, controlled settings that tell us nothing about how people perform when a real incident hits. Russian hackers go after high-value targets through Signal Russian intelligence-linked hackers are targeting commercial messaging platforms, with Signal a primary focus, the FBI and CISA warn. The campaign is aimed at individuals of intelligence interest, including government personnel, journalists, and others with access to sensitive communications. The devices winning the race to get hacked in 2026 Enterprise networks keep adding connected devices, expanding the attack surface as threat actors target a wider range of systems, many of which are difficult to inventory, secure, and patch consistently. Forescout’s 2026 Riskiest Devices research maps that shift in IT, IoT, OT, and IoMT environments, with 11 new riskiest asset types entering the list this year. GitHub just made it much harder to ship a vulnerable pull request GitHub is expanding its application security capabilities with AI-powered security detections designed to identify risks earlier in the development process, with public preview planned for early Q2. The update is intended to improve code scanning, secret detection, and dependency analysis within repositories hosted on the platform. 32% of top-exploited vulnerabilities are over a decade old Exploitation timelines continued to compress in enterprise environments, with newly disclosed flaws reaching active use almost immediately and older weaknesses remaining active years after disclosure. Findings from Cisco Talos’ 2025 Year in Review show how attackers combined rapid weaponization with long-term exposure spanning infrastructure, identity systems, and user workflows. Russian initial access broker helped ransomware gangs extort millions, sentenced to 81 months A Russian citizen, Aleksei Volkov, was sentenced to 81 months in prison for helping ransomware groups carry out attacks causing over $9 million in actual losses and over $24 million in intended losses, after being arrested in Italy and extradited to the United States where he pleaded guilty. Uncle Sam closes the door on all new foreign-made routers The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has imposed a ban on all new routers manufactured overseas being imported into and sold within the United States. The move follows a determination by a White House-led interagency group that consumer-grade routers produced outside the United States pose what officials described as an “unacceptable risk” to national security and public safety. Anthropic trims action approval loop, lets Claude Code make the call Auto mode is a new permissions feature in the Claude Code system that allows the AI to make approval decisions on a user’s behalf while safeguards review actions before execution. The feature is available on Team plans and requires administrator approval before use, with support for Enterprise and API users expected soon. Gemini picks up criminal activity buried in dark web noise To help teams make faster and more accurate decisions on emerging threats, Google has introduced a dark web intelligence capability in Google Threat Intelligence. Powered by Gemini, the feature analyzes millions of dark web events each day and surfaces threats relevant to an organization’s operations. Botnet operator behind $14 million in ransomware extortion payments gets 24 months behind bars A Russian national has been sentenced to 24 months in prison after admitting he managed a botnet used to launch ransomware attacks against dozens of U.S. companies. The judge also imposed a $100,000 fine and ordered him to forfeit $1.6 million linked to the scheme. Google races to secure encryption before quantum threats arrive Google is preparing for the quantum era, a turning point in digital security, with a 2029 timeline for post-quantum cryptography (PQC) migration. Security professionals warn that current encryption could be broken by large-scale quantum computers in the coming years. This risk is already relevant due to store-now-decrypt-later attacks. Mission to smuggle $170 million worth of AI tech to China collapsed for three men Three individuals, Stanley Yi Zheng, Matthew Kelly, and Tommy Shad English, have been charged with conspiracy to commit smuggling and export control violations after allegedly attempting to procure millions of dollars’ worth of restricted computer chips from a California-based hardware company. Second RedLine infostealer operator ends up in US custody Hambardzum Minasyan, an Armenian man extradited to the United States, is accused of conspiring with others to develop and operate the RedLine infostealer malware used to steal sensitive data, including login credentials, from victims’ computers. Ajax data breach exposed season tickets, supporter bans open to tampering AFC Ajax, the Dutch football club from Amsterdam, disclosed that an unknown hacker gained access to parts of its IT systems and obtained the email addresses of a few hundred people. The hack exploited vulnerabilities in Ajax’s app and website, including exposed APIs and shared access keys. Plumber: Open-source scanner of GitLab CI/CD pipelines for compliance gaps GitLab CI/CD pipelines often accumulate configuration decisions that drift from security baselines over time. Container images get pinned to mutable tags, branches lose protection settings, and required templates go missing. An open-source tool called Plumber automates the detection of those conditions by scanning pipeline configuration and repository settings directly. Attackers are handing off access in 22 seconds, Mandiant finds Exploits remain the leading entry point for attackers for the sixth consecutive year, according to Mandiant’s M-Trends 2026 report, which draws on more than 500,000 hours of incident response work conducted in 2025. The data shows attackers speeding up their internal hand-offs, shifting away from email phishing, and targeting backup and virtualization infrastructure with greater precision. Microsoft details AI prompt abuse techniques targeting AI assistants Prompt abuse occurs when crafted inputs manipulate an AI system into producing unintended behavior, such as attempting to access sensitive information or overriding built-in safety instructions. Prompt injection is also recognized as one of the top risks in the 2025 OWASP guidance for LLM applications. Kali Linux 2026.1 ships BackTrack mode, eight new tools, and a kernel upgrade to 6.18 Penetration testers running Kali Linux have a new release to work with. Version 2026.1 delivers the annual theme refresh, a new BackTrack-inspired mode in kali-undercover, eight tools added to the network repositories, a kernel bump to 6.18, and several Kali NetHunter changes. Your security stack looks fine from the dashboard and that’s the problem One in five enterprise endpoints is operating outside a protected and enforceable state on any given day, according to device telemetry collected across tens of millions of corporate PCs. That figure, drawn from Absolute Security’s 2026 Resilience Risk Index, has barely moved in a year, even as organizations continue to add security tools and increase spending. Google’s TurboQuant cuts AI memory use without losing accuracy Large language models carry a persistent scaling problem. As context windows grow, the memory required to store key-value (KV) caches expands proportionally, consuming GPU memory and slowing inference. A team at Google Research has developed three compression algorithms: TurboQuant, PolarQuant, and Quantized Johnson-Lindenstrauss (QJL). All three are designed to compress those caches aggressively without degrading model output quality. Microsoft hands Entra ID users new option for MFA Organizations rely on MFA to enforce identity checks before granting access to systems and services. Microsoft has made external MFA generally available in Microsoft Entra ID, expanding support for third-party identity providers. External MFA supports organizations that use third-party MFA solutions to meet regulatory or business requirements, handle scenarios such as mergers and acquisitions, or maintain a consistent MFA approach within Microsoft Entra ID. Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 8.2 ships with confidential computing support, XFS live repair Many enterprise Linux deployments rely on hardware-level memory isolation to protect sensitive workloads from co-tenants and compromised hypervisors. Oracle’s Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 8.2 (UEK 8.2) extends that capability on Oracle Linux with support for Intel Trust Domain Extensions, along with a set of file system and memory management changes intended to reduce downtime and improve diagnostic visibility. Who owns AI agent access? At most companies, nobody knows AI agents are operating across production enterprise environments at scale, and the identity infrastructure managing their access has not kept up with their deployment. A January 2026 survey of 228 IT and security professionals, conducted by the Cloud Security Alliance, finds that the majority of organizations have AI agents active in core systems, with fragmented ownership of how those agents authenticate and what they can access. Reddit declares war on bad bot activity Reddit is introducing changes to support interactions between people. The company is taking a bottom-up approach to help users understand when they are engaging with another person unless an account is labeled otherwise. Reddit plans to verify that users are human without requiring disclosure of real-world identity. GitHub jumps on the bandwagon and will use your data to train AI GitHub updated how it uses data to improve AI-powered coding assistance. Starting April 24, interaction data from Copilot Free, Pro, and Pro+ users may be used to train and improve GitHub’s models unless users opt out. Copilot Business and Copilot Enterprise users are not included in this change. Tails 7.6 ships automatic Tor bridge retrieval and a new password manager Tails 7.6 is out, and for users operating on networks that block Tor, the most consequential addition is built-in bridge retrieval. The Tor Connection assistant can now detect when a direct connection to Tor is restricted and automatically request bridges suited to the user’s region. The request goes through the Tor Project’s Moat API, and the connection to that API is disguised via domain fronting, making it appear as traffic to an ordinary website. Make OpenAI’s models misbehave and earn a reward OpenAI’s public Safety Bug Bounty program focuses on AI abuse and safety risks across its products. The goal is to support safe and secure systems and reduce the risk of misuse that could lead to harm. This program complements the Security Bug Bounty. It accepts reports of abuse and safety risks that do not meet the criteria for a security vulnerability. AI frenzy feeds credential chaos, secrets leak through code, tools, and infrastructure Code keeps moving through pipelines, and credentials continue to surface alongside it. GitGuardian’s State of Secrets Sprawl 2026 puts the count at 28.65 million new hardcoded secrets in public GitHub commits in 2025, extending a multi-year rise in exposed access keys, tokens, and passwords. Cybersecurity jobs available right now: March 24, 2026 We’ve scoured the market to bring you a selection of roles that span various skill levels within the cybersecurity field. Check out this weekly selection of cybersecurity jobs available right now.

As hundreds of vendors descend on San Francisco for the RSAC 2026 Conference, the sheer volume of news can be overwhelming. To help you navigate the noise, SecurityWeek is providing a daily digest of the most significant announcements. Below is our curated roundup of essential product and service updates, along with reports from the first day of the event. A roundup of announcements from the days leading up to the conference is also available. Acalvio has released 360 Deception, a cyber deception framework designed to break AI-driven attack automation. By incorporating 360 Deception into their existing tech stack, organizations will be able to disrupt AI-driven threat campaigns and expose malicious intent before compromise occurs. 360 Deception makes cyber defense dynamic and extends it to real assets. The platform creates a high-uncertainty environment that exposes attackers early by disrupting the stable ground truth that automated attack tools depend on. Application security startup Apiiro announced that it is expanding the power of its AI coding security agent, Guardian Agent, with a new capability to identify security and compliance risks before code is ever written, called AI Threat Modeling. Apiiro AI Threat Modeling generates architecture-aware threat models from specs and tickets, enabling teams to identify and fix risks before code is written. By identifying risks earlier, teams can reduce rework, avoid late-stage delays, and keep development moving without adding new security bottlenecks. Arctic Wolf announces new Aurora platform and agentic SOC Arctic Wolf announced the availability of the new Aurora Superintelligence Platform, designed to accelerate the adoption of AI across cybersecurity. Built on a transformative agentic framework called the Swarm of Experts, the platform helps IT and security teams rapidly and confidently adopt Agentic AI to solve the trust and reliability challenges that have slowed adoption in cybersecurity. Arctic Wolf also announced the availability of the new Aurora Agentic SOC. Built on the Aurora Superintelligence Platform, the Aurora Agentic SOC combines Arctic Wolf’s Concierge Experience with turnkey agentic AI. Arctic Wolf also announced a partnership with cloud security firm Wiz to deliver a new integration between Wiz solutions and the Aurora Superintelligence Platform. ArmorCode, in partnership with the Purple Book Community, released The State of AI Risk Management 2026, highlighting a growing “confidence gap” between perceived AI security readiness and actual operational risk. Based on a survey of more than 650 cybersecurity leaders, the report reveals that while 90% of organizations claim visibility into their AI footprint, 59% admit or suspect shadow AI is operating outside of governance processes. At the same time, 70% report vulnerabilities introduced by AI-generated code already making their way into production environments. Astrix has expanded its platform with a four-method AI agent discovery architecture and a real-time policy engine designed to give security teams full visibility and control over AI agents running across the enterprise. Discovery is handled through four complementary approaches: direct integrations with AI platforms, non-human identity fingerprinting to surface shadow agents authenticating via credentials, telemetry ingested from existing endpoint and network sensors, and a bring-your-own-service option for homegrown or non-standard deployments. A new Agent Policies feature lets security teams define allow, flag, and block rules scoped by user, department, platform, and resource type, evaluated before an agent action executes. BeyondTrust has expanded capabilities across its Pathfinder Platform to deliver a unified approach to securing AI agent coworkers that operate alongside users, as well as autonomous AI workloads executing at scale across cloud and SaaS environments. New capabilities include endpoint privilege enforcement for AI coworkers, AI agent discovery and risk analysis, and secrets management for autonomous agents. The company also announced new threat research from BeyondTrust Phantom Labs, which found that the majority of enterprises are running shadow AI agents with privileged access that security teams cannot see or govern. Black Duck has announced the general availability of Black Duck Signal, an application security solution designed to secure AI-generated code and agentic development workflows. Signal delivers AI-native security designed to reason, validate, and remediate risk at the speed and scale of modern development. Built on an agentic architecture powered by multiple best-in-class LLMs and enhanced by Black Duck’s Context AI, Signal brings contextual security reasoning directly into development workflows. Broadcom has announced Symantec CBX (Carbon Black XDR), a cloud-based platform that merges capabilities from its Symantec and Carbon Black product lines into a single XDR solution. The platform combines Symantec’s prevention, Adaptive Protection, data security, Cloud SWG, and Incident Prediction features with Carbon Black’s EDR technology, providing coverage across endpoints, networks, and data. CBX uses AI to correlate signals across those attack surfaces into high-confidence incidents, and includes an Incident Prediction capability that attempts to forecast an attacker’s next four to five moves. Symantec CBX is expected to be available later this year. Cloud Security Alliance launches CSAI Foundation The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) has established CSAI, a dedicated 501(c)3 non-profit foundation focused exclusively on AI security and safety, with a stated mission of securing the agentic control plane (covering identity, authorization, orchestration, runtime behavior, and trust assurance for autonomous AI agent ecosystems). CSAI builds on CSA’s existing AI Safety Initiative and will operate six programs: an AI Risk Observatory for threat intelligence and CVE tracking specific to agentic AI; best practices guidance covering identity-first controls, runtime authorization, and privilege governance for non-human actors; education and credentialing including three new TAISE certification tracks; a CxO collaboration program for enterprise security executives; and a global assurance program. Cisco has introduced agent discovery in Identity Intelligence, agentic IAM capabilities in Duo, and Model Context Protocol policy enforcement with adaptive risk protection in Secure Access. These features enable registration of agents mapped to human owners, fine-grained task-based permissions, and routing of tool traffic through an MCP gateway for full visibility and governance. Cisco also released ‘AI Defense: Explorer Edition’ for self-serve red teaming of models and applications, including dynamic adversarial testing against prompt injection and jailbreaks. In addition, the company launched the open-source DefenseClaw framework for automated scanning, inventory, and sandboxing of agent skills and assets, as well as an Agent Runtime SDK for embedding policy enforcement at build time across major frameworks. Commvault announced an expanded integration with Microsoft Security to better connect threat detection with trusted recovery. The new integration uses Microsoft Sentinel, Microsoft Security Copilot, and the Commvault Cloud platform to streamline resilience operations and enable real-time data insights, helping organizations move quickly from identifying a threat to validating and restoring clean data faster with greater confidence. ConductorOne announced its AI Access Management product extension, a unified control plane for managing access to AI tools, agents, and MCP connections across the enterprise. The platform enables organizations to accelerate AI adoption while maintaining full visibility, policy enforcement, and compliance. Cribl has introduced background detection for Cribl Guard, an AI-driven capability that continuously scans in-flight logs, traces, and events to identify previously unknown patterns of PII, secrets, and regulated data. The detection model runs entirely within Cribl Workers, meaning sensitive data is analyzed inside the customer’s own infrastructure rather than being sent to an external service. When a new pattern is detected, findings are surfaced in the Cribl interface with full event context, and security teams can convert a finding into an active Guard rule in a single action. CrowdStrike announced new platform innovations that extend AI agent discovery, shadow AI governance, and runtime threat detection directly from the endpoint – the point of AI execution – to every surface where AI agents operate across SaaS, browser, and cloud environments. CrowdStrike also announced that its Falcon Next-Gen SIEM now ingests and correlates Microsoft Defender for Endpoint telemetry, enabling Microsoft endpoint customers to modernize security operations without deploying additional sensors. CrowdStrike also unveiled native Falcon Onum real-time data pipelines, federated search across third-party data stores, third-party intelligence integration, and its Query Translation Agent. CyberProof announced the availability of CyberProof Defense Center (CDC) Reveal360, a centralized visibility hub that delivers continuous insights into enterprise security posture, service performance, and operational outcomes to help teams understand what their security program is delivering. CDC Reveal360 brings together threat, defense, exposure, and asset estate data from across cloud and security ecosystems into configurable, persona-aligned workspaces that evolve as the environment changes. Dataminr launched Dataminr for Cyber Defense, an agentic AI solution designed to move the SOC from reactive triage to predictive intelligence. By fusing internal telemetry with external signals, the solution autonomously investigates and financially quantifies risk. Dropzone AI has introduced AI Threat Hunter, a new autonomous agent designed to continuously and proactively search for security threats across an organization’s environment without increasing workload. The tool automates complex threat hunting processes, analyzing large datasets, investigating anomalies, and integrating across security platforms. By reducing the time needed to conduct investigations, the AI Threat Hunter expands SOC capabilities, allowing human analysts to focus on higher-value strategic work while improving overall security visibility and response. Fenix24 has debuted Argos99, its asset intelligence and resiliency platform, now available as a standalone SaaS offering. Originally developed by Fenix24’s recovery teams during real-world breach restoration efforts, Argos99 ingests and correlates telemetry from more than 60 cloud and on-prem data sources to deliver real-time visibility into an organization’s assets, how they operate, and how they depend on one another. Argos99 was built from hundreds of real-world incident response engagements to address that exact problem. The platform was reverse engineered by the Fenix24 team using insights gained from breach restoration efforts to both dramatically accelerate ransomware recovery and provide critical resiliency intelligence for organizations who want to invest in their cyber resiliency in advance of an attack. Flashpoint is announcing three new capabilities designed to connect threat intelligence more directly to asset risk and operational workflows. The first is a threat-informed External Attack Surface Management (EASM) module that continuously discovers internet-facing assets and automatically maps them to Flashpoint’s vulnerability intelligence. The second is an in-platform Priority Intelligence Requirements (PIRs) feature that lets teams formally tie alerts, investigations, and reporting to defined business risk priorities. The third is a new anonymous browser within Flashpoint Managed Attribution that provides an isolated environment for investigating underground forums, suspicious links, and threat actor activity. Forcepoint and F5 announced a new alliance to help enterprises secure AI across its lifecycle—from foundational data discovery and classification through runtime protection and continuous assurance. Forcepoint’s AI-native Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) data discovery and classification capabilities combined with F5 AI Red Team and F5 AI Guardrails functionality in the F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform (ADSP) will provide runtime protections for AI applications, APIs, models, and agents help organizations operationalize AI safely while maintaining control and visibility over sensitive enterprise data. Forescout unveils network segmentation capabilities and publishes report Now available within the Forescout 4D Platform, Forescout’s new agentless, cloud-native network segmentation capabilities help organizations model and validate zones based on device identity, function, behavior, and risk. Forescout also published its 2026 Riskiest Connected Devices Report, which shows that network infrastructure now surpasses traditional endpoints in overall risk. Among the topline findings, financial services now has the highest average device risk of any industry — more than three times that observed in retail and significantly higher than government and healthcare. Geordie AI has released a new solution for managing AI agent risk through context engineering. Geordie’s new remediation suite, named Beam, assesses risk and continuously feeds mitigation back to the agent using context-based controls. Google Cloud is debuting a suite of AI-powered security innovations designed to transition organizations toward an ‘Agentic SOC’. These updates integrate frontline threat intelligence directly into autonomous AI agents to automate complex investigation and response tasks. Illumio is delivering new enhancements to Illumio Insights to expand how lateral movement risk is exposed and mitigated, anchored by the introduction of Network Posture. By further enriching its AI security graph, Illumio now delivers system-wide, real-time visibility across hybrid, multi-cloud, and OT environments, surfacing end-to-end attack paths and showing where risk must be prioritized and mitigated. Intel 471’s Cyber Threat Exposure Bundle brings together three core capabilities (Attack Surface Exposure, Third-Party Exposure and Brand Exposure) into a single, intelligence-driven solution on the Verity471 platform. With this unified approach, security teams can close visibility gaps across complex external environments and turn high-fidelity threat intelligence into clearly prioritized remediation actions. The solution continuously discovers internet-facing assets, monitors vendors, detects brand impersonation and applies intelligence-led prioritization by enabling streamlined remediation and more proactive threat management. Keeper Security has officially launched KeeperDB, a new vault-embedded database access capability that enables secure, policy-controlled database interactions directly from the Keeper Vault. KeeperDB enables developers, database administrators and security teams to work with sensitive data through a unified interface that simplifies workflows while maintaining strict access governance. KeeperDB broadens KeeperPAM with a vault-native interface that unifies database session management within the zero-trust and zero-knowledge platform. By embedding database access directly into the Vault, KeeperDB helps reduce credential sprawl, standardize database access workflows and strengthen audit readiness across cloud and on-prem environments. Kiteworks has released Compliant AI, a governance layer that enforces attribute-based access control (ABAC), FIPS 140-3 validated encryption, and tamper-evident audit logging on every AI agent interaction with regulated data, independent of the underlying model, prompt, or agent framework. Controls are applied at the data access layer via four checkpoints: agent authentication, ABAC policy evaluation at the operation level, FIPS 140-3 encryption in transit and at rest, and full audit logging fed directly into the organization’s SIEM. The product ships with three Governed Agent Assists: a Folder Operations Assist for navigating and managing folder hierarchies, a File Management Assist for handling the full data lifecycle in line with retention and disposal requirements, and a Forms Creation Assist for generating governed data collection forms from natural language. Lumu announced new capabilities to its flagship NDR solution. Lumu Defender now extends Continuous Compromise Assessment beyond the network to include endpoints, cloud environments, and user behaviors. Lumu continuously confirms whether an organization is compromised by observing live network activity and validating it against known malicious infrastructure. By linking confirmed malicious communications to identities, endpoints, cloud services, and email, Lumu delivers real-time Continuous Compromise Assessment across the environment. NVIDIA has explained how the new NVIDIA OpenShell runtime is being built to provide tools for controlling autonomous agents in an infrastructure policy layer, adding security in the environment, rather than the model or application layer. Currently in early preview, the OpenShell runtime is being developed as organizations are rapidly defining their strategies for long-running AI agents such as OpenClaw. Instead of relying on behavioral prompts, OpenShell enforces constraints on the environment the agent runs in, so security policies are out of reach of the agent — they’re applied at the system level. Operant AI releases Agent ScopeGuard and launches partnership program Operant AI has released Agent ScopeGuard, a new capability within its Agent Protector product that enforces operational boundaries for AI agents at runtime, blocking out-of-scope actions before they execute. ScopeGuard enforces boundaries at the infrastructure level using GPU-accelerated processing, evaluating every agent action against a defined policy in real time. Security teams can configure per-agent scope policies specifying which data sources, APIs, workflows, and data types each agent is authorized to access or modify. Operant AI also launched an AI Infrastructure Ecosystem Partnership Program, through which the company will integrate its runtime security capabilities directly into the inference stacks of AI infrastructure providers. OmniTrust (formerly Integrity Security Services) has officially launched as an independent entity and unveiled its Trust Lifecycle Management (TLM) platform. The platform unifies device lifecycle management, identity lifecycle management, and TrustAI, a framework for the identity, authorization, and monitoring of autonomous AI models and agents. New global research from OpenText and the Ponemon Institute — titled “Managing Risks and Optimizing the Value of AI, GenAI & Agentic AI” — found that while more than half of organizations have fully or partially deployed gen-AI, fewer than one in five have reached AI maturity (defined as fully deployed AI in cybersecurity with security risks assessed). In addition, fewer than half have a risk-based governance strategy in place to manage what they have already built. Palo Alto Networks introduces new security innovations Palo Alto Networks introduced a new set of security innovations designed to help enterprises safely deploy agentic AI and scale AI‑driven workflows. The company announced Prisma Browser for Business, an AI‑enabled workspace for small businesses that lets teams safely use apps and AI tools from any device while blocking AI‑driven threats; Prisma AIRS 3.0, a new platform designed to secure the full agentic AI lifecycle; Agentic SASE enhancements to Prisma SASE; and Next-Generation Trust Security (NGTS) capabilities to automate certificate lifecycle management and support post-quantum readiness. Qualys has introduced Agent Val into its Enterprise TruRisk Management platform. The new agentic AI layer uses TruConfirm to safely validate exploitability of high-risk exposures directly in production environments, incorporating business context and asset criticality. It then feeds confirmed results back into the platform to prioritize remediation and apply mitigations such as isolation when patching is not possible. After mitigation, Agent Val re-validates to confirm the exploit path is closed. RapidFort has partnered with Nutanix to integrate its software supply chain security capabilities into the Nutanix Kubernetes Platform, enabling enterprises to run secure, compliant Kubernetes environments without slowing development. The combined solution delivers hardened, near-zero CVE container images and automated vulnerability remediation, helping organizations reduce risk while maintaining speed across hybrid and multicloud environments. By extending security across the entire software lifecycle, the partnership allows enterprises to proactively manage vulnerabilities, strengthen compliance, and safely support modern workloads such as AI and generative AI at scale. RSA has added a deploy-anywhere capability to its ID Plus identity and access management platform. The sovereign deployment supports private cloud, multi-cloud, on-premises, and air-gapped environments while delivering unified authentication, SSO, access control, and identity governance. It provides end-to-end phishing-resistant passwordless authentication with offline options, along with RSA Mobile Lock, Risk AI, and Help Desk Live Verify to counter advanced threats and bypass attacks. Rubrik announced its Semantic AI Governance Engine (SAGE), a real-time AI governance engine that enables safe, scalable AI agent deployment with semantic policy interpretation and integrated remediation. SAGE removes the AI agent governance bottleneck by enabling real-time, intent-based control at scale. The company also announced a new integration that combines Microsoft’s identity threat detection with Rubrik’s automated identity rollback and recovery capabilities, helping organizations respond faster to identity-based attacks. SandboxAQ, the $5.75 billion Google spinoff focused on AI and quantum, announced new capabilities on its AQtive Guard platform. These newly added capabilities are designed to help organizations identify and track AI systems in use, apply guardrails, and reduce risks (such as prompt injection, data leakage, and unintended system actions) as these systems become part of day-to-day workflows. SentinelOne launched a new set of AI security capabilities focused on two fronts: securing AI and using AI to automate investigations and response. The updates include giving enterprises visibility and control over autonomous agents, AI red teaming, and one-click, agentic investigations that can analyze threats and trigger remediation in real time. SentinelOne also introduced these capabilities for on-prem and air-gapped environments, enabling highly regulated organizations to adopt AI-driven security. Snyk has unveiled Snyk Agent Security, a new solution designed to secure autonomous AI agents from development through production. The suite addresses shadow AI risks by providing automated discovery, risk intelligence, and policy enforcement within the developer workflow. Key features include the general availability of Evo AI-SPM and new red-teaming tools to protect AI-native applications against prompt injection and data leakage. SOCRadar launched its new AI Agent Marketplace, an integrated hub where organizations can browse, purchase, and deploy specialized autonomous AI agents tailored for specific cybersecurity tasks and use cases in the SOCRadar Extended Threat Intelligence Platform. This includes phishing detection, brand abuse protection, and dark web monitoring. SOCRadar also introduced Identity and Access Intelligence capabilities to its Extended Threat Intelligence Platform to bridge the gap between internal identity security and external exposure. The new capabilities are designed to secure identity blind spots such as credential exposures detected in third-party SaaS environments, dark web marketplaces, and collaboration platforms. Spektion has expanded its platform to perform continuous runtime exposure management. It collects six categories of execution data, including execution state, privilege level, network exposure, blast radius, embedded component vulnerabilities, and pre-CVE weakness patterns, then ranks all exposures by observed exploitability in the specific environment. The platform provides visibility into AI agents, MCP servers, AI-generated executables, custom applications, and embedded libraries that lack CVE coverage, while filtering out non-executing vulnerable software. It also enables early identification of zero-day exploit patterns. Sublime Security announced the general availability of its Autonomous Detection Engineer (ADÉ), an end-to-end AI agent that detects threats and automatically creates or improves detection coverage. ADÉ can run end-to-end without analyst intervention – from picking up a newly reported threat to generating and accepting a high-confidence detection. Other new features include full coverage for spam and graymail, increased transparency, and detection labels. Sysdig has launched runtime security for AI coding agents, enabling organizations to safely adopt autonomous development tools. Sysdig provides the real-time visibility organizations need to monitor agent behavior and identify risky activity across cloud and development environments. Sysdig’s purpose-built runtime detections for AI coding agents help organizations safely adopt agentic tools by identifying risky or suspicious behaviors, such as the installation of new AI coding agents, attempts to open sensitive files or bypass unauthorized credential access, risky command-line arguments that weaken safeguards, and dangerous activity, including reverse shells, binary tampering, and persistence mechanisms. Torq released Agentic Builder, an extension of its AI SOC Platform designed to transform natural language descriptions of security goals into production-grade AI agents and workflows. By shifting the ‘cognitive load’ of engineering from humans to machines, the tool allows security teams to automate complex tasks, including alert triage, investigation, and response. The platform further ensures operational reliability by using the Torq Socrates orchestrator to test, validate, and continuously auto-calibrate these agents against real-world data and evolving threats. Upwind has developed a three-stage pipeline for real-time identification and blocking of malicious prompts sent to large language models. A lightweight classifier first filters incoming traffic to detect LLM-bound requests in under one millisecond with 99.88% accuracy. Identified prompts then undergo semantic analysis using the Nvidia nv-embedcode-7b-v1 model via NIM microservices, achieving 94.53% detection accuracy for prompt injections and indirect jailbreaks in under 0.1 milliseconds. High-risk or uncertain cases escalate selectively to the NVIDIA Nemotron-3-Nano-30B model with NeMo Guardrails for final validation, delivering overall precision near 95% while preserving sub-millisecond end-to-end latency and low cost at production scale. Versa announced early access for Versa Secure Enterprise Browser, a browser-native security capability integrated into the VersaONE Universal SASE Platform that enforces identity-aware, posture-aware, and data-aware policies directly within the browser session. Built on Chromium, it protects employees accessing SaaS, web, and AI applications by governing actions such as file uploads, data copying, and AI tool usage. Versa has also announced a new cloud-delivered capability that extends SSE to inspect and secure inbound internet traffic, collaboration with Intel for AI-driven security, networking, and analytics, and integration between Versa Secure SD-WAN and Zscaler Internet Access. Vorlon has released ‘The Agentic Ecosystem Security Gap: 2026 CISO Report’, a survey of 500 US security leaders that surfaces a troubling contradiction at the heart of enterprise security. Organizations are more confident, more tooled, and more breached than ever, with 99.4% reporting at least one SaaS or AI ecosystem incident in 2025 despite widespread claims of strong or comprehensive protection. The report points to a gap in security architecture, where existing tools lack visibility into the runtime layer of AI agents, integrations, and data movement across the ecosystem. Wiz unveils AI Application Protection Platform and Red Agent Wiz (now part of Google Cloud) launched its AI Application Protection Platform (AI-APP) to secure every layer of AI applications (infrastructure, data, access, models, agents, and applications) from code to runtime. Wiz AI-APP brings together visibility, risk analysis, and runtime protection into a single, graph-powered platform. Wiz also unveiled Red Agent, an AI-powered attacker that acts as a sophisticated security researcher, but with AI speed and scale. Zenity announces AI agent security and OpenClaw security framework Zenity announced two product updates focused on securing AI agents: a new continuous, contextual security model designed to track how risk evolves across agent interactions, and an open-source security framework for OpenClaw that lets developers inspect prompts, evaluate tool use, and analyze outputs before execution.

The devices winning the race to get hacked in 2026 Enterprise networks keep adding connected devices, expanding the attack surface as threat actors target a wider range of systems, many of which are difficult to inventory, secure, and patch consistently. (Source: Forescout) Forescout’s 2026 Riskiest Devices research maps that shift in IT, IoT, OT, and IoMT environments, with 11 new riskiest asset types entering the list this year. That is the second-largest year-over-year increase on record, and two of the new entries moved straight into the top five riskiest IT assets: serial-to-IP-converters and workstations. Device risk spans IT, IoT, OT, and IoMT environments The highest-risk IT category remains the router. Forescout also highlights an average of 32 vulnerabilities per router/switch. The 2026 IT top five are router, serial-to-IP converter, workstation, firewall, and domain controller. This ranking keeps core network and administrative systems central to enterprise device risk, with access, traffic control, and identity systems grouped together. The IoT list stays rooted in operational devices that sit close to daily business activity. The top five IoT categories are VoIP system, printer, time clock, network video recorder (NVR), and RFID reader. In OT, the list is power distribution unit (PDU), physical address control system, uninterruptible power supply (UPS), I/O module, and BACnet router. In IoMT, the top five are medication dispensing system, medical image printer, DICOM gateway, MRI scanner, and healthcare workstation. Imaging devices lead the IoMT category overall. The 2026 list includes 20 device types spanning the four domains. Financial services and government lead device risk levels Financial services records the highest average device risk in 2026, followed by government and healthcare. Average device risk in financial services is more than three times that of retail, and government risk is more than double manufacturing. These gaps place both sectors at the top of the industry range. Embedded firmware and networking operating systems, grouped as “special operating systems,” appear in government at 72%, retail at 61%, and healthcare at 56%. These systems outnumber mobile operating systems in the dataset and include version tracking limitations, limited automatic patching, and a large share of outdated or unsupported firmware. Legacy Windows systems remain widely deployed. Retail stands at 39%, healthcare at 35%, and financial services at 29%. These shares increased after the end of support for Windows 10. In all five industries included in the comparison, more than half of non-legacy Windows devices previously ran Windows 10, leaving a significant portion tied to a recent support transition. Secure Shell (SSH) is now the second most common protocol, with increased exposure in every industry except retail. Telnet usage increased in financial services, healthcare, and manufacturing, with slight declines in government and retail. Financial services rose from 3% to 12%, manufacturing from 5% to 12%, and healthcare from 6% to 8%. “The attack surface in modern organizations spans IT, IoT, and OT, with the Internet of Medical Things adding complexity in healthcare. Focusing security efforts on a single domain is no longer sufficient: attackers exploit weaknesses across multiple environments and pivot between them,” researchers warn.

Infosecurity Europe has unveiled a major line-up of keynote speakers for its 2026 conference program, bringing together prominent figures from the military, global cybersecurity, elite sport and intelligence communities. The event will run from 2–4 June at ExCeL London. Industry Visionary Shlomo Kramer and Former FBI Leader Cynthia Kaiser Lead Tuesday Line-Up Tuesday’s keynote program is set to be a standout moment at Infosecurity Europe 2026, spotlighting two of the industry’s most influential voices. Cybersecurity pioneer Shlomo Kramer, founder and investor behind companies including Check Point, Palo Alto Networks, Imperva, Cato Networks and Sumo Logic, will speak on Tuesday 2 June. Kramer will share his perspective on the technology trends, investment patterns and innovation cycles shaping the next era of cybersecurity. He will also serve as a judge in the cyber start-up competition, highlighting emerging innovation and rising cyber entrepreneurs. Also taking the stage on Tuesday 2 June, Cynthia Kaiser, former Deputy Assistant Director of the FBI’s Cyber Division and now leading ransomware research at Halcyon, will deliver rare insights into the cybercriminal economy. Kaiser will discuss how intelligence drawn from the dark web and wider criminal networks can help organizations anticipate evolving ransomware tactics and threat actor behavior. Women in Cybersecurity Marks its 10th Anniversary The 2026 event will also celebrate the 10th edition of Women in Cybersecurity event, hosted on Wednesday 3 June at 15:00 on the Keynote Stage. England Rugby World Cup winner and former elite athlete Maggie Alphonsi will open the session with a keynote exploring what elite sport can teach cybersecurity professionals about leadership, high‑performance cultures and developing a winning mindset. Alphonsi will share lessons on confidence, resilience and pushing beyond perceived limits. Cynthia Kaiser will return to join the Women in Cybersecurity panel, contributing her expertise on leadership, representation and the evolving role of women across the industry. Jason Fox to Open Thursday’s Keynote Program Former Special Boat Service (SBS) Sergeant and SAS: Who Dares Wins star Jason Fox will headline the Keynote Stage on Thursday 4 June (10:05–10:45). Drawing on his career in UK Special Forces, Fox will outline how the principles underpinning elite military teams can be applied to cyber resilience, decision‑making and leadership under pressure. His session will offer practical mental models to help security teams maintain focus, build trust and perform effectively in complex, high‑stakes environments. Deep Dives into AI-Driven Cloud Threats and Post-Quantum Security A series of technical sessions across Tuesday and Wednesday will provide deeper insight into emerging threat trends. On Tuesday 2 June (13:50–14:20), Ron Leizrowice, AI Researcher at Wiz, will present “The Infosec Big Fat Cloud Update of the Year.” The session will examine how rapid AI adoption is reshaping the cloud threat landscape, accelerating exploitation windows and expanding attack surfaces across control planes, identities and automated workflows. Leizrowice will outline techniques to reduce AI‑driven attack paths while enabling secure, rapid development. On Wednesday 3 June (11:00–11:35), Rik Ferguson, Vice President of Security Intelligence at Forescout and Infosecurity Hall of Fame inductee, will deliver “Quantum is still far off, we can wait – can’t we?”. Ferguson will highlight why organizations must begin preparing now for post‑quantum cryptography, discussing risks linked to crypto‑fragile components and offering practical steps to reduce long‑term cryptographic exposure. Registration Registration for Infosecurity Europe 2026 open and is free until 5 May, after which entry will cost £49, including access to the exhibition floor and all theatre sessions.

Forescout replaces manual audits with automated, always-on compliance validation Forescout Technologies has announced Automated Security Controls Assessment, a new Forescout 4D Platform capability that continuously evaluates trust, control effectiveness and compliance posture across an organization’s attack surface. Replacing manual, static and error-prone spreadsheet-driven audits with real-time, automated evidence-based collection and reporting, the Automated Security Controls Assessment feature gives security and governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) teams immediate visibility into control effectiveness and compliance posture as it exists. This enables continuous verification rather than point in time validation, setting a new standard for real-time compliance assurance that reduces audit risk, eliminates blind spots, and accelerates proof of compliance. Powered by real-time device intelligence across all IT, OT, IoT, and IoMT assets, the Automated Security Controls Assessment uniquely delivers continuous, always-on visibility into an organization’s compliance with the Center for Internet Security (CIS) Benchmarks, based on real-time asset posture and context, giving organizations a practical, standards-based starting point for continuous assurance. Additional compliance frameworks will be supported over time, enabling organizations, especially those in highly regulated sectors such as government, financial services, healthcare, and critical infrastructure, to continuously demonstrate compliance as assets, identities, and regulatory requirements evolve. Too many organizations still rely on periodic scans, ad-hoc evidence collection, and spreadsheets to prove and maintain compliance, along with traditional GRC tools that can only provide point-in-time scans and manual population from disparate systems. As a result, these methods lag behind reality and leave organizations exposed to gaps between audit results and actual risk. Forescout’s Automated Security Controls Assessment transforms compliance from a resource-intensive, reactive process into continuous operational security powered by live device and identity-aware telemetry and unified real-time reporting. “Security controls are only as strong as your methodology and how continuously you evaluate them,” said Paul Kao, Chief Product Officer, Forescout. “Forescout’s Automated Security Controls Assessment provides continuous and automated assurance across every device, whether managed or unmanaged, based on real-time asset visibility. This helps organizations reduce both cost and complexity. GRC teams can eliminate up to 80% of the time and effort required to prepare for audits by replacing manual, spreadsheet-based tasks with our automated approach. With this launch, we are aligning compliance with real-world risk and giving teams the clarity and speed they need to operate compliance at scale,” Kao continued. Key benefits and unique differentiators include: Always-on audit-readiness: Continuously maintains audit‑ready evidence to eliminate manual preparation and reduce the time, cost, and disruption of audits. Immediate compliance risk identification: Automatically highlights control gaps and non‑compliant assets in real-time, enabling teams to prioritize remediation efforts. Executive‑level compliance visibility: Delivers a single, centralized view of control coverage and status, replacing fragmented tools with real‑time insight into compliance posture and risk. Complete asset coverage: Extends compliance assessment across all assets—including unmanaged and unknown devices—to eliminate blind spots and reduce exposure to hidden risk. Streamlined attestation management: Unifies automated and manual attestations in a single workflow, removing operational friction and accelerating audit and compliance reporting. Powered by real-time device intelligence across all IT, OT, IoT and IoMT assets, the Automated Security Controls Assessment delivers continuous, automated visibility into an organization’s security posture based on live asset context. By replacing point‑in‑time assessments with always‑on validation, it enables security and compliance teams to immediately understand where controls are working, where gaps exist, and how risk is changing without the time, cost, or disruption associated with traditional audits.

Kai on Tuesday emerged from stealth mode with $125 million in funding for an AI-powered platform that aims to bridge IT and OT cybersecurity. The investment, raised over seed and Series A funding rounds, comes from Evolution Equity Partners, N47, and other investors. The funding will be used for R&D, scaling the company’s platform, and accelerating go-to-market efforts. San Jose, CA-based Kai was founded by Galina Antova (CEO) and Damiano Bolzoni (CTO). Antova (a former SecurityWeek contributor) previously co-founded OT security giant Claroty, while Bolzoni co-founded SecurityMatters, an OT security firm that was acquired by Forescout Technologies in 2018. The company says its platform leverages AI to autonomously and continuously perform critical cybersecurity tasks across IT and OT environments. The platform provides a wide range of capabilities, including for threat detection, application and identity security, threat modeling, cyber asset enrichment, risk profiling, vulnerability management, shadow IT/OT discovery, threat intelligence distillation, regulatory compliance automation, and log optimization. “My co-founder Dr. Damiano Bolzoni and I spent years helping converge IT and OT security. Two worlds that everyone said couldn’t be unified. With Kai, we’re doing it again, at a larger scale: dissolving the walls between security, engineering, and IT entirely,” said Antova. Related: Escape Raises $18 Million to Automate Pentesting Related: Cylake Raises $45 Million to Secure Organizations Barred From Cloud Related: Gambit Security Emerges From Stealth With $61 Million in Funding

Forescout VistaroAI replaces prompt engineering with role-based AI automation Forescout introduced Forescout VistaroAI, which thinks like a security expert instead of a chatbot. It eliminates the need for prompt engineering by delivering role-based automation with human-in-the-loop control, resulting in faster, more accurate risk decisions and an improved user experience compared to prompt-driven AI assistants. Forescout VistaroAI provides users with a personalized view of the tasks that require attention, prioritized based on that organization’s environment and packaged with the context needed to act. Instead of chasing signals across multiple tools, teams can quickly understand what shifted in their environment overnight, why it matters, and which remediation actions to take first. Forescout VistaroAI is the skills-based agentic AI solution specifically designed for the cybersecurity industry. VistaroAI autonomously and continuously analyzes changes, surfacing root causes, identifying potential impact, and delivering contextualized risk assessment and prioritization. VistaroAI enables security teams to move from the defense to the offense by turning continuous environmental change into organized, role-specific work with clear next steps. Key customer benefits and capabilities include: More context equals faster actions: Role-based landing pages organize work into prioritized daily tasks with clear next steps Immediate clarity on change: Forescout VistaroAI continuously surfaces what changed, new assets, shifting risks, and emerging threats Actionable context, not more alerts: Visual and narrative explanations highlight impact, root cause, and recommended actions One-click deeper investigations: Operators can drill deeper to understand the root cause of risk score changes, or review a full list of devices impacted by newly published KEVs, continuing investigative actions until they are confident in the correct response Human-in-the-loop control: Teams can review, approve, and execute actions with full governance and oversight “Most AI tools assume security teams will adapt to the AI – learning prompts, crafting queries, and translating intent into the right inputs,” said Barry Mainz, CEO, Forescout. “VistaroAI flips that model: we’ve encoded agent-based skills with guardrails to handle the complexity behind the scenes and paired them with role-based personas that deliver recommendations and next steps aligned to real needs and responsibilities. Value is delivered on day one, and security teams experience real relief, while maximizing their output,” Mainz added. Behind the scenes, VistaroAI operates as a closed loop within the customer environment and integrates Forescout 4D Platform telemetry and intelligence from Forescout Research – Vedere Labs. It combines deep asset intelligence, policy, operational context and real-world threat and vulnerability intelligence to deliver high-fidelity recommendations, without requiring users to become prompt engineers. Recommendations and workflows are tailored to the user, and roles available today include network operator, network security analyst, security manager, security operations center (SOC) analyst, biomedical engineer, and compliance officer. “In 2025, we saw the peak of inflated expectations for AI in cybersecurity – AI promised relief, but most solutions focused on making individual tools smarter, while leaving the work itself just as fragmented and manual,” said Justin Foster, CTO, Forescout. “Forescout’s new agentic VistaroAI marks a shift away from AI as simply a collection of smarter features toward AI as an integrated system built around how security work actually happens. It is designed to change the experience of the work and guide the day-to-day actions that make a meaningful difference in an organization’s security posture and bottom line,” Foster concluded.

SecurityWeek’s cybersecurity news roundup provides a concise compilation of noteworthy stories that might have slipped under the radar. We provide a valuable summary of stories that may not warrant an entire article, but are nonetheless important for a comprehensive understanding of the cybersecurity landscape. Each week, we curate and present a collection of noteworthy developments, ranging from the latest vulnerability discoveries and emerging attack techniques to significant policy changes and industry reports. Here are this week’s stories: Axonius reduces workforce and transitions leadership Axonius has laid off approximately 40 employees, representing less than 4% of its global staff, with the majority of cuts in marketing and sales. Co-founder Dean Sysman has stepped down from his role as CEO to become executive chairman, with company president Joe Diamond appointed as interim CEO. The workforce adjustment aims to refine the company’s organizational structure and improve operational efficiency as it prepares for a potential IPO. European Parliament disables AI features on official devices The European Parliament has disabled built-in AI features on work-issued devices, such as corporate tablets used by lawmakers and their staff, due to concerns over cybersecurity and data protection. The IT department determined that certain AI capabilities send data to external cloud services for processing, making it impossible to fully guarantee the security of potentially sensitive information. HackerOne revises policy language following concerns over data usage for AI Bug bounty hunters raised questions on social media about whether HackerOne was using their submitted vulnerability reports to train AI models, particularly in connection with the company’s recent Agentic PTaaS platform and its AI system called Hai. In response, HackerOne CEO Kara Sprague stated that the platform does not train generative AI models — internally or via third parties — on researcher submissions or customer confidential data, and that such data is not used to train, fine-tune, or improve generative AI models. The company is updating the language in its Terms and Conditions to more clearly reflect these practices and eliminate potential ambiguity, while emphasizing that its AI tools are intended to complement rather than replace researchers’ work. Sensitive attendee data exposed from Abu Dhabi investment conference A data leak linked to Abu Dhabi Finance Week, held in December, resulted in more than 700 passport scans and state identity card documents being left publicly accessible on an unprotected cloud storage server. The exposed information affected hundreds of high-profile attendees, including politicians and business leaders. The vulnerability, attributed by organizers to a third-party vendor, was identified by a security researcher and promptly secured. Interpol-led cybercrime crackdown in Africa A large-scale multinational operation coordinated by Interpol across multiple African countries has led to the arrest of 651 individuals suspected of involvement in various online scams, including romance fraud, investment fraud, and business email compromise schemes. Authorities recovered approximately $4.3 million in assets believed to be linked to these criminal activities, along with the seizure of electronic devices, vehicles, and other items used in the operations. The effort targeted organized cybercrime networks operating from the continent and aimed to disrupt scam infrastructure. Misconfigured Elasticsearch databases leak tens of millions of sensitive records online SOCRadar’s monitoring service discovered three publicly accessible Elasticsearch instances that lacked proper authentication, exposing over 43 million records in total. The leaked data included large volumes of valid credentials, credit card details, personal information such as names and contact details, infostealer logs with system and payment information, and various customer transaction records. Security researchers analyzed the instances, notified relevant parties, and some of the exposed data was subsequently removed or restricted. University of Mississippi Medical Center shuts down clinics due to ransomware The University of Mississippi Medical Center (UMMC) experienced a ransomware attack that disrupted many of its IT systems, including blocking access to the Epic electronic medical records system. As a result, all clinic locations across Mississippi were closed, with outpatient appointments, ambulatory surgeries, procedures, and imaging services canceled and set to be rescheduled. Hospital and emergency services continued to operate using manual downtime procedures, with no reported impact on inpatient care or equipment functionality. Record ICS vulnerabilities in 2025 Forescout research shows that 2025 recorded a high of 508 ICS advisories from CISA, covering 2,155 vulnerabilities across various products and vendors, marking the first year exceeding 500 advisories. The average severity rose significantly, with a CVSS score of 8.07 and 82% of advisories classified as high or critical. Many vulnerabilities published directly by vendors in 2025 lacked corresponding CISA advisories, creating visibility gaps. Nigerian national sentenced to prison in US A 37-year-old Nigerian man named Matthew A. Akande, who was living in Mexico, was sentenced to eight years in prison in the US for his involvement in a multi-year operation that involved unauthorized access to the computer networks of tax preparation firms in Massachusetts. He and co-conspirators used stolen personally identifiable information to file over 1,000 fraudulent tax returns, resulting in more than $1.3 million in fraudulent refunds obtained from the US government. Akande was ordered to pay approximately $1.4 million in restitution. He was extradited to the United States after his arrest in the United Kingdom. Google strengthens protections across Play Store and Android ecosystem Google prevented more than 1.75 million policy-violating apps from being published on Google Play and banned over 80,000 developer accounts attempting to distribute harmful applications during 2025. The company integrated generative AI into the review process for better detection of malicious patterns, blocked excessive data access in over 255,000 apps, and stopped 160 million spam ratings and reviews. Google Play Protect last year expanded its scanning to over 350 billion Android apps daily, and identified more than 27 million new malicious apps from outside sources. Related: In Other News: Record DDoS, Epstein’s Hacker, ESET Product Vulnerabilities

The number of industrial control system (ICS) security advisories published in 2025 topped 500 for the first time since records began, with the severity of vulnerabilities also increasing, according to Forescout. The security vendor revealed the findings in its new report, ICS Cybersecurity in 2026: Vulnerabilities and the Path Forward. It said there were a total of 2155 CVEs published across 508 ICS advisories last year. That’s an increase from 103 CVEs across 67 advisories in 2011 – when records began. The average CVSS score of advisories climbed from 6.44 in 2010 to above 8.0 in 2024 and 2025. According to the report, the most affected asset types last year, in order, were: Purdue Level 1 devices: eg, field controllers, RTUs, PLCs and IEDs Purdue Level 3 operation systems: eg, MES, PLM, EMS and others Purdue Level 2 control systems: eg, DCS, SCADA and BMS Industrial network infrastructure like routers and switches Critical manufacturing and energy were the top two most affected industries, with transportation jumping three places from the previous year to third and healthcare moving up four places to fourth. A CISA-Shaped Gap in Reporting More concerning for operators of industrial and operational technology is a growing gap in threat visibility. CISA/ICS-CERT has been “the authoritative source” about vulnerabilities in this field since the ICS Advisory (ICSA) program was started in 2010, Forescout noted. However, according to the open source ICS advisory project, a growing number of vulnerabilities don’t have an associated ICSA published by CISA. “On January 10, 2023 CISA announced they would stop publishing updates on advisories affecting Siemens products, and instead, will be redirecting users to Siemens’ ProductCERT for the latest updates,” Forescout explained. “This shows the need for vulnerability information beyond CISA. Yet, the situation is not restricted to Siemens and not limited to updates only.” In fact, according to the ICS advisory project, only 22% of vulnerabilities last year had an associated ICSA published by CISA – down from 58% in 2024 and 40% in 2023. “There were vulnerabilities without an associated ICSA published by 134 vendors in 2025. Clearly, there a fair amount of OT/ICS risk that is not tracked by ICSAs,” said the report. “Vulnerabilities without an ICSA are no less important than those with a dedicated advisory from CISA. In fact, 61% of vulnerabilities in 2025 without an ICSA had a high or critical severity. And like those vulnerabilities tracked by CISA, these mostly affected the manufacturing and energy sectors.” A Call to Action The security vendor called for a combination of “regulatory pressure, industry collaboration, and vendor accountability” to address the challenges of vulnerability management in OT/ICS environments. “Increased transparency about patch timelines, dedicated resources for vulnerability management, and stronger incentives for rapid response could help accelerate the process across the sector,” it concluded. “Additionally, fostering a culture of proactive security, rather than reactive fixes, would benefit vendors and asset owners."

Infosec products of the month: November 2025 Here’s a look at the most interesting products from the past month, featuring releases from: 1touch.io, Action1, Barracuda Networks, Bedrock Data, Bitdefender, Cyware, Firewalla, Forescout, Immersive, Kentik, Komodor, Minimus, Nokod Security, and Synack. Action1 addresses Intune gaps with patching and risk-based vulnerability prioritization Action1 announced new integrations that extend Microsoft Intune with advanced patching and vulnerability management. The enhancements close security and compliance gaps in Intune by adding comprehensive third-party application patching, risk-based vulnerability prioritization, and real-time visibility across Windows, macOS, and Linux. Bitdefender GravityZone Security Data Lake unifies telemetry from multiple tools Security Data Lake empowers both in-house security teams and Bitdefender MDR analysts to instantly search recent and historical data, correlate external telemetry with native GravityZone signals, and add context that improves detection accuracy and speeds response across the business. 1touch.io Kontxtual provides LLM-driven control over sensitive data 1touch.io unveils Kontxtual, an AI-driven data platform engineered for the AI era. Built to accelerate enterprise innovation without compromising control, Kontxtual harnesses the power of AI and LLMs to deliver real-time data, identity, usage, and risk insights, assuring sovereignty and security throughout the entire AI lifecycle. Barracuda Assistant accelerates security operations Barracuda Assistant accelerates threat response by reducing investigation time, cutting costly errors and streamlining workflows. It eliminates disruptive context switching, allowing security teams to transition effortlessly between vulnerability assessments, incident reviews and more. With these efficiencies, teams can focus on high-impact, strategic priorities. Bedrock Data expands platform with AI governance and natural-language policy enforcement Bedrock Data announced Bedrock Data ArgusAI and Natural Language Policy. ArgusAI is a new product that expands the company’s capabilities into artificial intelligence governance. It allows enterprises to understand what data their AI models and agents access during training and inference, and evaluates whether existing guardrails prevent sensitive data leakage. Cyware enhances cyber defense with AI Fabric merging generative and agentic AI Cyware Quarterback AI receives a major upgrade, described as an AI Fabric that weaves together a set of generative, agentic and in-product AI capabilities designed to accelerate threat intelligence and security operations workflows. Firewalla unveils MSP 2.9 to simplify multi-device network management Firewalla has announced the release of MSP 2.9, the latest update to its Managed Security Portal (MSP). The update is now available to all MSP Early Access users. Firewalla MSP is a web-based platform designed for security and infosec professionals to manage multiple Firewalla devices. Version 2.9 introduces new features and improvements to simplify network management, enhance security, and give IT teams greater control. Forescout eyeSentry platform delivers continuous, cloud-based exposure management eyeSentry continuously discovers, contextualizes, and prioritizes risk across every connected device, managed or unmanaged. By pinpointing their most critical risks early and often, security teams can act decisively before threats escalate, all from the convenience of the cloud. Immersive unveils Dynamic Threat Range to transform cyber readiness testing Immersive announced the general availability of Dynamic Threat Range, a new capability within its Immersive One platform that transforms how organizations validate and improve cyber readiness. Kentik AI Advisor brings intelligence and automation to network design and operations Kentik has launched the Kentik AI Advisor, an agentic AI solution that understands enterprise and service provider networks, thinks critically, and offers guidance for designing, operating, and protecting infrastructure at scale. Komodor’s self-healing capabilities remediate issues with or without a human in the loop Komodor released autonomous self-healing and cost optimization capabilities that simplify operations for SRE, DevOps, and Platform teams managing large-scale Kubernetes environments. Minimus debuts Image Creator for building secure, hardened container images Minimus announced the general availability of Image Creator, a new feature that empowers customers to build their own hardened container images, fully powered and secured by Minimus’ container security software and software supply chain security technology. Nokod Security launches Adaptive Agent Security to protect AI agents across the entire ADLC Nokod Security announced the launch of Adaptive Agent Security, a solution that delivers real-time visibility, governance, and protection from threats across the Agent Development Lifecycle (ADLC). Synack unveils Sara Pentest to accelerate scalable AI-driven penetration testing Synack has announced Sara Pentest, a new agentic AI product built on the Synack Autonomous Red Agent (Sara) architecture. Sara Pentest performs penetration testing on hosts and web applications, speeding up vulnerability detection and remediation and reducing the window of exposure from months to days. Organizations gain better overall test coverage and can meet the threat from AI-powered adversaries using open source agents to speed up their own offensive security operations.

Week in review: Cisco fixes critical UCCX flaws, November 2025 Patch Tuesday forecast Here’s an overview of some of last week’s most interesting news, articles, interviews and videos: Securing real-time payments without slowing them down In this Help Net Security interview, Arun Singh, CISO at Tyro, discusses what it takes to secure real-time payments without slowing them down. He explains how analytics, authentication, and better industry cooperation can help stay ahead of fraud. Singh also touches on how digital identity and accountability are transforming how trust is built in payments. Heisenberg: Open-source software supply chain health check tool Heisenberg is an open-source tool that checks the health of a software supply chain. It analyzes dependencies using data from deps.dev, Software Bills of Materials (SBOMs), and external advisories to measure package health, detect risks, and generate reports for individual dependencies or entire projects. A new way to think about zero trust for workloads Static credentials have been a weak point in cloud security for years. A new paper by researchers from SentinelOne takes direct aim at that issue with a practical model for authenticating workloads without long-lived secrets. Instead of relying on static keys, the team proposes using temporary, verifiable tokens that expire within minutes. How nations build and defend their cyberspace capabilities In this Help Net Security interview, Dr. Bernhards Blumbergs, Lead Cyber Security Expert at CERT.LV, discusses how cyberspace has become an integral part of national and military operations. He explains how countries develop capabilities to act and defend in this domain, often in coordination with activities in other areas of conflict. AI can flag the risk, but only humans can close the loop In this Help Net Security interview, Dilek Çilingir, Global Forensic & Integrity Services Leader at EY, discusses how AI is transforming third-party assessments and due diligence. She explains how machine learning and behavioral analytics help organizations detect risks earlier, improve compliance, and strengthen accountability. PortGPT: How researchers taught an AI to backport security patches automatically Keeping older software versions secure often means backporting patches from newer releases. It is a routine but tedious job, especially for large open-source projects such as the Linux kernel. A new research effort has built a tool that uses a large language model to do that work automatically. OpenGuardrails: A new open-source model aims to make AI safer for real-world use When you ask a large language model to summarize a policy or write code, you probably assume it will behave safely. But what happens when someone tries to trick it into leaking data or generating harmful content? That question is driving a wave of research into AI guardrails, and a new open-source project called OpenGuardrails is taking a bold step in that direction. What keeps phishing training from fading over time When employees stop falling for phishing emails, it is rarely luck. A new study shows that steady, mandatory phishing training can cut risky behavior over time. After one year of continuous simulations and follow-up lessons, employees were half as likely to take the bait. Metrics don’t lie, but they can be misleading when they only tell IT’s side of the story In this Help Net Security interview, Rik Mistry, Managing Partner at Interval Group, discusses how to align IT strategy with business goals. He explains how security, governance, and orchestration shape IT operations and why early collaboration between IT and security leaders leads to better outcomes. Mistry also shares his perspective on automation and emerging technologies. Cyber-espionage campaign mirroring Sandworm TTPs hit Russian and Belarusian military A spear-phishing campaign aimed to compromise Russian and Belarusian military personnel by using military-themed documents as a lure has been flagged by Cyble and Seqrite security researchers. The goal of the campaign is to get targets to download and open a booby-trapped LNK file masquerading as a PDF, ultimately leading to a complete system compromise. Former ransomware negotiators allegedly targeted US firms with ALPHV/BlackCat ransomware A ransomware negotiator and an incident response manager have been indicted in Florida for allegedly conspiring to deploy the ALPHV/BlackCat ransomware against multiple US companies and extorting nearly $1.3 million from one of the victims. Cybercriminals exploit RMM tools to steal real-world cargo Cybercriminals are compromising logistics and trucking companies by tricking them into installing remote monitoring and management (RMM) tools, Proofpoint researchers warned. Critical Control Web Panel vulnerability is actively exploited (CVE-2025-48703) On Tuesday, CISA added two vulnerabilities to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog: CVE-2025-11371, which affects Gladinet’s CentreStack and Triofox file-sharing and remote access platforms, and CVE-2025-48703, a vulnerability in Control Web Panel (CWP), a web hosting control panel designed for managing servers running CentOS or CentOS-based distributions. Google uncovers malware using LLMs to operate and evade detection PromptLock, the AI-powered proof-of-concept ransomware developed by researchers at NYU Tandon and initially mistaken for an active threat by ESET, is no longer an isolated example: Google’s latest report shows attackers are now creating and deploying other malware that leverages LLMs to operate and evade security systems. SonicWall cloud backup hack was the work of a state actor Incident responders from Mandiant have wrapped up their investigation into the SonicWall cloud backup service hack, and the verdict is in: the culprit is a state-sponsored threat actor (though the specific nation wasn’t disclosed). Cisco fixes critical UCCX flaws, patch ASAP! (CVE-2025-20358, CVE-2025-20354) Cisco has fixed two critical vulnerabilities (CVE-2025-20358, CVE-2025-20354) affecting Unified Contact Center Express (UCCX), which may allow attackers to bypass authentication, compromise vulnerable installations, and elevate privileges to root. Attackers upgrade ClickFix with tricks used by online stores Attackers have taken the ClickFix technique further, with pages borrowing tricks from online sellers to pressure victims into performing the steps that will lead to a malware infection. Uncovering the risks of unmanaged identities Every organization manages thousands of identities, from admins and developers to service accounts and AI agents. But many of these identities operate in the shadows, untracked and unprotected. These unmanaged identities quietly expand your attack surface, weaken compliance, and threaten business continuity, posing significant risk. So, how can you uncover, secure, and manage what you can’t see? November 2025 Patch Tuesday forecast: Windows Exchange Server EOL? October 2025 Patch Tuesday was one for the record books in so many ways. There was a big push by Microsoft to fix as many open vulnerabilities as possible in products that were reaching end-of-life (EOL). This included 116 CVEs addressed in Windows 10 and an astronomical 134 CVEs addressed in Windows 11, because don’t forget Windows 11 22H2 Enterprise and Education editions also reached EOL. Cybercriminals have built a business on YouTube’s blind spots The days when YouTube was just a place for funny clips and music videos are behind us. With 2.53 billion active users, it has become a space where entertainment, information, and deception coexist. European authorities dismantle €600 million crypto scam network Nine people have been arrested in a coordinated international operation targeting a large cryptocurrency money laundering network that defrauded victims of more than €600 million. The operation was led by Eurojust, the EU’s judicial cooperation agency, which brought together investigators and prosecutors from France, Belgium, Cyprus, Spain and Germany. Connected homes: Is bystander privacy anyone’s responsibility? Smart doorbells, connected cameras, and home monitoring systems have become common sights on doorsteps and living rooms. They promise safety and convenience, but they also raise a problem. These devices record more than their owners. They capture neighbors, visitors, and anyone passing by. 18 arrested in €300 million global credit card fraud scheme A coordinated international operation has led to 18 arrests in a massive credit card fraud case worth at least €300 million. The effort, led by Eurojust, targeted a network of suspects accused of running fake online subscription services for dating, pornography, and streaming sites. Among those detained were five executives from four German payment service providers. Enterprises are losing track of the devices inside their networks Security teams are often surprised when they discover the range and number of devices connected to their networks. The total goes far beyond what appears in agent-based telemetry or old manual asset inventories. Deepfakes, fraud, and the fight for trust online In this Help Net Security video, Michael Engle, Chief Strategy Officer at 1Kosmos, explains how deepfakes are changing online identity verification. He describes how fake IDs and synthetic identities are being used for account signups and takeovers. What shadow AI means for your company’s security In this Help Net Security video, Peled Eldan, Head of Research at XM Cyber, explains the hidden risks of shadow AI. He describes how employees often use unapproved AI tools at work to save time or solve problems, even when approved tools are available. This behavior, though common, can lead to serious issues such as data leaks, compliance violations, and security blind spots. Europe’s phone networks are drowning in fake calls Caller ID spoofing has become one of Europe’s most persistent enablers of cyber fraud. A new position paper from Europol warns that manipulated phone identities now drive much of the continent’s financial and social engineering crime, making it difficult for law enforcement to track perpetrators. The agency estimates global losses at around EUR 850 million a year, with phone and text-based fraud accounting for roughly two thirds of reported scam cases. Employees keep finding new ways around company access controls AI, SaaS, and personal devices are changing how people get work done, but the tools that protect company systems have not kept up, according to 1Password. Tools like SSO, MDM, and IAM no longer align with how employees and AI agents access data. Financial services can’t shake security debt In financial services, application security risk is becoming a long game. Fewer flaws appear in new code, but old ones linger longer, creating a kind of software “interest” that keeps growing, according to Veracode’s 2025 State of Software Security report. Google says 2026 will be the year AI supercharges cybercrime Security leaders are staring down a year of major change. In its Cybersecurity Forecast 2026, Google paints a picture of a threat landscape transformed by AI, supercharged cybercrime, and increasingly aggressive nation-state operations. Attackers are moving faster, scaling their operations with automation. VulnRisk: Open-source vulnerability risk assessment platform VulnRisk is an open-source platform for vulnerability risk assessment. It goes beyond basic CVSS scoring by adding context-aware analysis that reduces noise and highlights what matters. The tool is free to use and designed for local development and testing. Retailers are learning to say no to ransom demands Ransomware remains one of the biggest operational risks for retailers, but the latest data shows a shift in how these attacks unfold. Fewer incidents now lead to data encryption, recovery costs have dropped, and businesses are bouncing back faster. Yet attackers are demanding more money, and security teams are feeling the strain. Humans built the problem, AI just scaled it Information moves across cloud platforms, personal devices, and AI tools, often faster than security teams can track it. Proofpoint’s 2025 Data Security Landscape report shows that most organizations faced data loss last year, usually caused by their own people. With AI agents part of daily operations, security leaders are confronting risks that come from users and from the systems acting on their behalf. Russia-linked hackers intensify attacks as global APT activity shifts State-aligned hacking groups have spent the past six months ramping up espionage, sabotage, and cybercrime campaigns across multiple regions, according to ESET’s APT Activity Report covering April through September 2025. The research highlights how operations linked to Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea have evolved in scope and technique, showing that nation-state activity remains a constant source of disruption. Hospitals are running out of excuses for weak cyber hygiene Healthcare leaders continue to treat cybersecurity as a technical safeguard instead of a strategic business function, according to the 2025 US Healthcare Cyber Resilience Survey by EY. The study, based on responses from 100 healthcare executives, outlines six areas where hospitals and health systems must act to close resilience gaps that threaten patient care and operations. Old privacy laws create new risks for businesses Businesses are increasingly being pulled into lawsuits over how they collect and share user data online. What was once the domain of large tech firms is now a widespread legal risk for companies of all sizes. The latest analysis from cyber insurer Coalition shows that outdated privacy laws are driving a surge in web privacy claims, with small and midsize businesses now common targets. Product showcase: Cogent Community democratizes vulnerability intelligence with agentic AI Teams are buried under overlapping feeds, inconsistent formats, and fragmented context. Even with advanced tools, analyzing raw intelligence into prioritized, evidence-based action remains one of the hardest problems in modern security operations. Cogent Security addresses this problem head-on with its industry-first AI taskforce for vulnerability management. And with its newly introduced Cogent Community, the company is now delivering an open-access, free-to-use tool that helps security teams operationalize vulnerability intelligence. Cybersecurity jobs available right now: November 4, 2025 We’ve scoured the market to bring you a selection of roles that span various skill levels within the cybersecurity field. Check out this weekly selection of cybersecurity jobs available right now. New infosec products of the week: November 7, 2025 Here’s a look at the most interesting products from the past week, featuring releases from 1touch.io, Barracuda Networks, Bitdefender, Forescout, and Komodor.

New infosec products of the week: November 7, 2025 Here’s a look at the most interesting products from the past week, featuring releases from 1touch.io, Barracuda Networks, Bitdefender, Forescout, and Komodor. Bitdefender GravityZone Security Data Lake unifies telemetry from multiple tools Security Data Lake empowers both in-house security teams and Bitdefender MDR analysts to instantly search recent and historical data, correlate external telemetry with native GravityZone signals, and add context that improves detection accuracy and speeds response across the business. Forescout eyeSentry platform delivers continuous, cloud-based exposure management eyeSentry continuously discovers, contextualizes, and prioritizes risk across every connected device, managed or unmanaged. By pinpointing their most critical risks early and often, security teams can act decisively before threats escalate, all from the convenience of the cloud. Barracuda Assistant accelerates security operations Barracuda Assistant accelerates threat response by reducing investigation time, cutting costly errors and streamlining workflows. It eliminates disruptive context switching, allowing security teams to transition effortlessly between vulnerability assessments, incident reviews and more. With these efficiencies, teams can focus on high-impact, strategic priorities. Komodor’s self-healing capabilities remediate issues with or without a human in the loop Komodor released autonomous self-healing and cost optimization capabilities that simplify operations for SRE, DevOps, and Platform teams managing large-scale Kubernetes environments. 1touch.io Kontxtual provides LLM-driven control over sensitive data 1touch.io unveils Kontxtual, an AI-driven data platform engineered for the AI era. Built to accelerate enterprise innovation without compromising control, Kontxtual harnesses the power of AI and LLMs to deliver real-time data, identity, usage, and risk insights, assuring sovereignty and security throughout the entire AI lifecycle.

Forescout eyeSentry platform delivers continuous, cloud-based exposure management Forescout has announced the launch of eyeSentry, a cloud-native exposure management solution that redefines how enterprises identify and mitigate hidden risks across IT, IoT, and IoMT environments. As hybrid and cloud environments expand, vulnerability management, static scans and point-in-time assessments, can’t keep up with dynamic, device, rich networks. Attackers are exploiting unmanaged devices, like IP cameras and edge systems, as stealth entry points for lateral movement. In fact, a new report from Forescout Research – Vedere Labs, “An X-ray of Modern Networks: Understanding and Mitigating IoT Security Risks,” found that 65% of connected assets across organizations are no longer traditional IT devices like VoIP phones, printers, and even physical access control systems, creating blind spots that static scanning often misses. eyeSentry continuously discovers, contextualizes, and prioritizes risk across every connected device, managed or unmanaged. By pinpointing their most critical risks early and often, security teams can act decisively before threats escalate, all from the convenience of the cloud. Each mitigation cycle strengthens resilience, learning from each resolved exposure, refining priorities, and improving detection and response over time. “With eyeSentry, we’re redefining how enterprises confront hidden risk,” said Barry Mainz, CEO of Forescout. “When unseen devices become attack vectors, the stakes aren’t just data—they’re operational continuity and trust. For over two decades, Forescout has set the standard in device intelligence, and now we’re bringing that expertise to the cloud, giving organizations the visibility and context they need to stay ahead of adversaries, including nation-state actors.” Unified visibility and intelligence Forescout eyeSentry delivers a unified exposure management solution that combines asset visibility and risk reduction in one platform. Key features include: Cloud-native deployment: Operates from the cloud to streamline rollout across distributed environments, without the maintenance demands of on-premises tools—ideal for large enterprises with many sites in sectors like healthcare, finance, and retail. Active and passive asset discovery: Combines real-time active scanning with passive monitoring to build a complete, contextualized view of every connected device—managed or unmanaged, agented or un-agentable. Deeper visibility and precision: This dual-scan approach uncovers blind spots that traditional platforms miss, giving security teams the most complete picture of asset behavior, posture, and risk. Powered by Vedere Labs threat intelligence: The same threat research that drives Forescout’s 4D Platform can be fed into eyeSentry, correlating device data with exploits and business impact for proactive defense. Mitigating IoT security risks Forescout also released its latest report, “An X-ray of Modern Networks: Understanding and Mitigating IoT Security Risks,” accentuating why exposure management is essential in hybrid networks. Vedere Labs analyzed 10 million devices across 700 organizations and found that 65% of connected assets are no longer traditional IT, creating massive blind spots for security teams. The study documents extreme device diversity, 380 device functions, 5,653 vendors, and 3,200 OS versions, and shows critical sectors are heavily exposed (54% of financial services assets were non-IT, while healthcare and oil, gas & mining were at 45% and 40%, respectively). These findings explain a wave of real-world incidents, from attackers turning building sensors into listening devices to ransomware groups weaponizing IP cameras to evade endpoint detection and response, by exposing how unmanaged devices create stealthy pivot points across networks. Point-in-time scans and agent-based tools cannot see or prioritize this diversity, enterprises need continuous, contextual visibility, and risk-based remediation, precisely what eyeSentry delivers, turning broad device intelligence into prioritized, actionable controls.

Betti RHC, la prima graphic novel al mondo dedicata alla cybersecurity awareness, ha finalmente il suo sito ufficiale. Uno spazio tutto suo dove scoprire il progetto, sfogliare le copertine degli episodi e immergersi nel mondo di Betti: la giovane laureanda in informatica che, dopo la morte misteriosa del padre, si trasforma nell'hacker più potente del mondo. Una storia avvincente che, episodio dopo episodio, affronta una minaccia digitale diversa — dal phishing al ransomware, fino al cyberbullismo — e insegna a riconoscerla e a difendersi, senza che sembri mai una lezione. Sul sito trovate tutto ciò che rende Betti un progetto diverso dal solito: la sua filosofia, le anteprime delle tavole e il racconto di come nasce ogni volume. Perché dietro Betti RHC c'è solo lavoro umano: ogni tavola è disegnata interamente a mano dagli artisti del Gruppo Arte di Red Hot Cyber, senza alcun uso di intelligenza artificiale. E a garantire che ogni storia sia realistica e tecnicamente corretta c'è la supervisione degli hacker etici del gruppo HackerHood, che mantengono il racconto fedele al mondo reale della sicurezza informatica. C'è spazio anche per le aziende, che possono usare Betti come strumento di awareness diverso dai soliti corsi: acquistare i volumi, personalizzarli con il proprio brand o sponsorizzare nuovi episodi. E come primo regalo, l'episodio "Byte the Silence", dedicato al cyberbullismo, è scaricabile gratuitamente per uso personale. Perché la miglior difesa, in fondo, è una bella storia. 👉 Scopri tutto su https://betti.redhotcyber.com/

Researchers at Forescout’s Vedere Labs have discovered two new vulnerabilities in TP-Link’s Omada and Festa VPN routers that could allow threat actors to perform command injection and unauthorized root access. These flaws, tracked as CVE-2025-7850 and CVE-2025-7851, are respectively considered critical (CVSS 4.0 of 9.3) and high-severity (CVSS 4.0 of 8.7). According to a Vedere Labs report published on October 23, these vulnerabilities come from what the researchers described as an incomplete fix of CVE-2024-21827 by TP-Link in 2024 which left debug functionality accessible, meaning that partial remediation created alternate attack paths. After rooting a TP-Link Omada ER605v2 router, they discovered that the patch addressed CVE-2024-21827, but left two serious caveats: The same private key used across multiple devices was required for both root access and firmware signing The old “debug code” remained, which meant that if an attacker could create the “image_type_debug” file via another vulnerability or hidden feature, the original root login path could still be exploitable This issue was reported to TP-Link, which assigned it CVE-2025-7851, as a flaw that allows unauthorized root access to some Omada and Festa VPN routers through residual debug code. “However, CVE-2025-7851 alone was insufficient for us to root the ER605v2 directly: we didn’t have the private key and the “image_type_debug” file was not present in the public firmware,” the Vedere Labs researchers wrote. They analyzed the use of LuCI, a Lua-based framework for configuring devices via the web UI or other interfaces, by many TP-Link products with “a history of vulnerabilities.” The researchers quickly found that the WireGuard VPN settings in the Web UI of the ER605v2 router exposed a private-key field that was not properly sanitized, allowing an authenticated user to inject arbitrary OS commands that the device executes with root privileges. This vulnerability was also reported to TP-Link, which assigned it CVE-2025-7850. Additionally, the researchers’ analysis revealed that CVE-2025-7850 can be exploited without credentials in certain deployments, with potential exploit scenarios beyond initial local exploitation. The patches for these two vulnerabilities have now been released by TP-Link. Vedere Labs recommended users to apply TP-Link’s firmware patches immediately and to add further security controls, including the following: Deploying web application firewalls before management interfaces and blocking command injection and web-based attacks Disabling remote administration where feasible Logging all admin sessions and router traffic and looking out for anomalies and exploitation indicators Reviewing vendor support mechanisms on TP-Link devices

Pro-Russian hackers caught bragging about attack on fake water utility A pro-Russian hacker group has been caught boasting about a cyberattack that unfolded entirely inside a decoy system set up by researchers. The relatively new group, known as TwoNet, claimed in September that it had disrupted a Dutch water facility by hacking into its control systems. In reality, the hackers had infiltrated a honeypot — a decoy network designed by cybersecurity firm Forescout to lure attackers and study their behavior. According to the company, the threat actor, using the alias Barlati, defaced the login page with an message reading “HACKED BY BARLATI, FUCK.” The attacker also changed configuration settings and disabled alarms — actions that, if carried out on a real system, could have disrupted operations. Forescout said the incident illustrates how inexperienced hacktivists are increasingly trying to breach operational technology (OT) and industrial control systems (ICS) — the computer systems that manage equipment in critical infrastructure such as power plants and water utilities — often without fully understanding what they are attacking. “Groups moving from DDoS/defacement to OT/ICS often misread targets, trip over honeypots, or overclaim. That doesn’t make them harmless; it shows where they are headed,” researchers said. The honeypot incident also highlights how hacktivists increasingly blur the line between propaganda and genuine cyber operations, inflating their capabilities to gain visibility. TwoNet, which emerged in early 2025, initially launched distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks before attempting more sophisticated intrusions targeting systems that control and monitor industrial equipment — a category known as SCADA — in countries it considers hostile to Russia. It is unclear if any of its claimed attacks actually occurred. The group announced its shutdown in late September — a reminder of the short life cycle of many hacktivist outfits, which often rebrand, merge, or resurface under new names, Forescout said. Industrial systems in the crosshairs TwoNet’s claims echo similar boasts by other pro-Russian groups that have allegedly targeted critical infrastructure. In recent months, groups such as CyberTroops and OverFlame have claimed to compromise control interfaces at solar and hydroelectric facilities across Europe. Forescout researchers said their honeypots routinely attract attacks from Russia and Iran, but this was the first time a named group had publicly claimed to have breached one of their decoy systems. While the TwoNet incident caused no harm, some hacktivist operations have had real-world consequences. In late 2023, the Russian government-aligned group known as the Cyber Army of Russia Reborn (CARR) claimed to have attacked the industrial control systems of multiple U.S. and European critical infrastructure targets. In January 2024, the group took responsibility for overflowing water storage tanks in Texas, leading to the loss of tens of thousands of gallons of water. CARR also claimed to have compromised the SCADA system of a U.S. energy company, gaining control over alarms and pumps for its tanks. In June, the U.S. State Department accused Iranians allegedly affiliated with a group known as CyberAv3ngers of targeting critical infrastructure with malware designed to compromise industrial control systems. “Utilities, especially in the water and power sectors, remain key targets,” Forescout said. “Our water-utility honeypot and affiliates’ solar claims mirror broader exposure in utility environments where security budgets, awareness, or accountability lag.” Daryna Antoniuk is a reporter for Recorded Future News based in Ukraine. She writes about cybersecurity startups, cyberattacks in Eastern Europe and the state of the cyberwar between Ukraine and Russia. She previously was a tech reporter for Forbes Ukraine. Her work has also been published at Sifted, The Kyiv Independent and The Kyiv Post.

A Russia-aligned hacktivist gang has been tricked into targeting a honeypot disguised as a water treatment utility, cybersecurity company Forescout has revealed. The gang, TwoNet, claimed responsibility for an attack on the water treatment utility, believing they had conducted a real hack, on its Telegram channel. The group logged into the honeypot’s human-machine interface (HMI) for a range of purposes, including defacement, process disruption, manipulation and evasion. TwoNet used default credentials for initial access, and exploited weaknesses in the industrial honeypot to carry out these activities. The researchers said the attack mirrors the tactics used by other hacktivist groups that have shifted from DDoS and defacement towards targeting operational technology (OT) and industrial control system (ICS) operations. Honeypots are decoy systems deliberately exposed to the internet to lure attackers and capture their tactics. Forescout noted it is the first time a threat actor has publicly claimed an attack that has occurred on one of its honeypots. TwoNet Hacktivist Group TwoNet first appeared on a Telegram channel in January 2025, initially focusing on DDoS attacks leveraging the MegaMedusa Machine malware. In September, the group launched a new Telegram channel to claim activity, with a separate account rotating invite links to resist takedown. Messages on this channel indicate the group has shifted from pure DDoS to a broader mix of activity, including OT/ICS targeting. A message posted in an affiliated group, CyberTroops, stated that TwoNet was ceasing operations on September 30. The researchers said this activity is part of a broader trend in the hacktivist ecosystem, where there are regular formations of alliances and rebrands. “This underscores the ephemeral nature of the ecosystem where channels and groups are short-lived, while operators typically persist by rebranding, shifting alliances, joining other groups, learning new techniques or targeting other organizations,” Forescout noted. Analysis of Honeypot Attack The attack on the Forescout honeypot occurred just after TwoNet launched its new Telegram channel in September. The intrusion came from an IP address linked to a German hosting provider. No prior malicious activity was linked to the address. The attacker appeared to use the Firefox browser on the Linux operating system. They initially logged into the honeypot’s HMI using the default credentials admin/admin. The threat actor then attempted database enumeration, successfully extracting schema information with a second set of queries. The researchers believe these queries were entered directly through the HMI web interface. Next, the attacker created a new user account ‘BARLATI’, which was used to log in to the HMI over a period of around 20 hours. During that window, they conducted four actions: Defacement: Exploitation of the vulnerability CVE-2021-26829 to change the HMI login page description to: [ alert("HACKED BY BARLATI, FUCK") Process disruption: Deletion of connected PLCs as data sources, disabling real-time updates Manipulation: Changing PLC setpoints via the HMI Evasion: Modification of system settings to disable logs and alarms “The attacker did not attempt privilege escalation or exploitation of the underlying host, focusing exclusively on the web application layer of the HMI,” the researchers wrote in the Forescout report published on October 9. Security Recommendations for OT Operators The researchers set out a range of recommendations for security teams to mitigate the tactics used in the TwoNet honeypot attack. These include: Remove OT systems from direct internet exposure Use lots of segmentation Require authentication on all IoT/OT admin interfaces Disable anonymous/default accounts and enforce strong, unique credentials Deploy deep packet inspection (DPI) that creates alerts for: exploitation, password guessing, unauthorized writes and changes in HMI Monitor for devices used in distributed attacks, such as cameras and routers, and for unusual traffic from OT segments They added that the case demonstrates that threat actors’ claims should be treated with caution. “Hacktivist channels blend genuine incidents with exaggeration. Monitoring still yields value: intent, tooling, target selection, and emerging alliances,” the researchers advised.

Data from over 485,000 participants in a cervical cancer screening program has been stolen by threat actors after they gained unauthorized access to a third-party laboratory, according to the Dutch authorities. The attack took place at the Clinical Diagnostics NMDL laboratory in Rijswijk, not far from Rotterdam, between July 3-6. However, the laboratory, a subsidiary of Eurofins Scientific, did not inform the authorities until August 6, according to a news release published yesterday by the Dutch Population Screening Association (BDO). Among the stolen information are thought to be names, addresses, dates of birth, citizen service numbers (BSN), possible test results and the names of participants’ healthcare providers, the BDO said. Email addresses and phone numbers for a smaller number of victims were also taken. The BDO has suspended services at the lab temporarily while it carries out an independent investigation of the IT security systems there. It said that citizens can continue to participate in the screening program as a different lab will be used to process results. However, the BDO warned victims of the potential for follow-on fraud if the threat actors sell or release the stolen information. Those impacted by the breach are currently being notified by the Dutch authorities. “We are deeply shocked by this data breach, and we understand that participants who participated in population screening through us are also very shocked. I would like to express to them our deepest regret that this has happened,” said BDO chair, Elza den Hertog. “Participating in the cervical cancer screening program is already a stressful experience for many participants. And now you're being told that your personal data may have been leaked as well.” The Weakest Link However, the breach may be even worse than first thought, with some local reports suggesting that the hackers also obtained the personal and medical information of other patients who used the lab over the past three years. As much as 300GB may have been taken. Forescout VP of security intelligence, Rik Ferguson, argued that the incident highlights how a single weak link can have a big impact on a large number of victims. “Attackers look for the unmanaged and the unmonitored. If you can’t see it, you can’t secure it, and you can’t contain it when it’s breached,” he said. “This isn’t about patching faster or buying another point product; it’s about building a security posture based on clear visibility and control.”

Week in review: SonicWall firewalls targeted in ransomware attacks, Black Hat USA 2025 Here’s an overview of some of last week’s most interesting news, articles, interviews and videos: Black Hat USA 2025 Black Hat USA 2025 took place at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas. Explore related news, photos, product releases, and more. AIBOMs are the new SBOMs: The missing link in AI risk management In this Help Net Security interview, Marc Frankel, CEO at Manifest Cyber, discusses how overlooked AI-specific risks, like poisoned training data and shadow AI, can lead to security issues that conventional tools fail to detect. He explains how AI Bills of Materials (AIBOMs) extend SBOMs to provide transparency into datasets, model weights, and third-party integrations, improving governance and incident response. Security tooling pitfalls for small teams: Cost, complexity, and low ROI In this Help Net Security interview, Aayush Choudhury, CEO at Scrut Automation, discusses why many security tools built for large enterprises don’t work well for leaner, cloud-native teams. He explains how simplicity, integration, and automation are key for SMBs with limited resources. Beyond PQC: Building adaptive security programs for the unknown In this Help Net Security interview, Jordan Avnaim, CISO at Entrust, discusses how to communicate the quantum computing threat to executive teams using a risk-based approach. He explains why post-quantum cryptography (PQC) is an urgent and long-term priority. SonicWall firewalls targeted in ransomware attacks, possibly via zero-day Attackers wielding the Akira ransomware and possibly a zero-day exploit have been spotted targeting SonicWall firewalls since July 15, 2025. Project Ire: Microsoft’s autonomous malware detection AI agent Microsoft is working on a AI agent whose main goal is autonomous malware detection and the prototype – dubbed Project Ire – is showing great potential, the company has announced on Tuesday. Millions of Dell laptops could be persistently backdoored in ReVault attacks A set of firmware vulnerabilities affecting 100+ Dell laptop models widely used in government settings and by the cybersecurity industry could allow attackers to achieve persistent access even across Windows reinstalls, Cisco Talos researchers have discovered. Trend Micro Apex One flaws exploted in the wild (CVE-2025-54948, CVE-2025-54987) Unauthenticated command injection vulnerabilities (CVE-2025-54948, CVE-2025-54987) affecting the on-premise version of Trend Micro’s Apex One endpoint security platform are being probed by attackers, the company has warned on Wednesday. Adobe patches critical Adobe Experience Manager Forms vulnerabilities with public PoC Adobe has released an emergency security update for Adobe Experience Manager Forms on Java Enterprise Edition (JEE), which fix two critical vulnerabilities (CVE-2025-54253, CVE-2025-54254) with a publicly available proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit. Microsoft urges admins to plug severe Exchange security hole (CVE-2025-53786) The privilege escalation can be performed by exploiting CVE-2025-53786, a newly disclosed vulnerability that stems from Exchange Server and Exchange Online sharing the same service principal – i.e., the Office 365 Exchange Online application – in hybrid configurations. (The app is used to authenticate and secure the communication between Exchange Server and Exchange Online.) Cybersecurity and the development of software-defined vehicles In many automotive companies, the same systems-engineering teams are responsible for both safety and security. As a result, cybersecurity is treated as a subset of safety, undergirded by an implicit assumption: “If it’s safe, it must be secure.” What GPT‑5 means for IT teams, devs, and the future of AI at work OpenAI has released GPT‑5, the newest version of its large language model. It’s now available to developers and ChatGPT users, and it brings some real changes to how AI can be used in business and IT environments. August 2025 Patch Tuesday forecast: Try, try again July started slow with a calm Patch Tuesday, addressing 130 CVEs but only one publicly disclosed, so risk was low. Then two SharePoint CVEs were exploited, heating things up with hotfixes late in the month. Add security issues in Microsoft Exchange and major Google and Apple updates, and July ended very active. Open-source password recovery utility Hashcat 7.0.0 released Hashcat is an open-source password recovery tool that supports five attack modes and more than 300 highly optimized hashing algorithms. It runs on CPUs, GPUs, and other hardware accelerators across Linux, Windows, and macOS, and includes features for distributed password cracking at scale. BloodHound 8.0 debuts with major upgrades in attack path management SpecterOps has released BloodHound 8.0, the latest iteration of its open-source attack path management platform, featuring major enhancements and expanded capabilities. Open-source server management platform Proxmox VE 9.0 released Proxmox Virtual Environment (VE) 9.0 introduces advancements in both storage and networking capabilities, addressing critical enterprise demands. AI in the SOC: Game-changer or more noise? In this Help Net Security video, Kev Marriott, Senior Manager of Cyber at Immersive Labs, explores the challenges and opportunities of integrating AI into Security Operations Centers (SOCs). Third-party partners or ticking time bombs? In this Help Net Security video, Ngaire Elizabeth Guzzetti, Technical Director Supply Chain at CyXcel, discusses why a third of U.S. organizations don’t trust third-party vendors to manage critical risks and what that means for supply chain security. What’s keeping risk leaders up at night? AI, tariffs, and cost cuts Enterprise risk leaders are most concerned about rising tariffs and trade tensions heading into the second half of 2025, according to a new report from Gartner. The firm’s second-quarter Emerging Risk Report, based on a survey of 223 senior risk, audit, and compliance executives, ranks the escalating trade war as the top emerging risk, up from third in the first quarter. The surprising truth about identity security confidence Organizations most confident in their identity security are often the least prepared, according to a new report from BeyondID. The study reveals a troubling gap between what organizations believe about their identity security programs and how they actually behave. Surprisingly, those expressing the highest confidence are adopting fewer best practices than their more cautious peers. Average global data breach cost now $4.44 million IBM released its Cost of a Data Breach Report, which revealed AI adoption is greatly outpacing AI security and governance. While the overall number of organizations experiencing an AI-related breach is a small representation of the researched population, this is the first time security, governance and access controls for AI have been studied in this report, which suggests AI is already an easy, high value target. Ransomware groups shift to quadruple extortion to maximize pressure Threat actors are using a new quadruple extortion tactic in ransomware campaigns, while double extortion remains the most common approach, according to Akamai. Your employees uploaded over a gig of files to GenAI tools last quarter In Q2 2025, Harmonic reviewed 1 million GenAI prompts and 20,000 uploaded files across more than 300 GenAI and AI-powered SaaS apps, and the findings confirm that sensitive data is being exposed through GenAI tools, something many security leaders fear but find difficult to measure. Why 90% of cyber leaders are feeling the heat 90% of cyber leaders find managing cyber risks harder today than five years ago, mainly due to the explosion of AI and expanding attack surfaces, according to BitSight. These threats are also fueling high rates of burnout, with 47% of cybersecurity and cyber risk professionals reporting exhaustion. CISOs say they’re prepared, their data says otherwise A new Axonius report, based on a survey of 500 U.S.-based IT and security leaders, shows a disconnect between perceived readiness and actual performance in vulnerability and exposure management. While 90% of respondents said their organization is prepared to act when a threat is found, only 25% said they trust the data in their security tools. Ransomware is up, zero-days are booming, and your IP camera might be next Cyber attackers are finding new ways in through the overlooked and unconventional network corners. Forescout’s 2025H1 Threat Review reveals a surge in advanced tactics, with zero-day exploits up 46 percent and ransomware attacks averaging 20 per day. Energy companies are blind to thousands of exposed services Many of America’s largest energy providers are exposed to known and exploitable vulnerabilities, and most security teams may not even see them, according to a new report from SixMap. AI can write your code, but nearly half of it may be insecure While GenAI excels at producing functional code, it introduces security vulnerabilities in 45 percent of cases, according to Veracode’s 2025 GenAI Code Security Report, which analyzed code produced by over 100 LLMs across 80 real-world coding tasks. Cybercriminals are getting personal, and it’s working Cybercriminals are deploying unidentifiable phishing kits (58% of phishing sites) to propagate malicious campaigns at scale, indicating a trend towards custom-made or obfuscated deployments, according to VIPRE Security. Fraud controls don’t guarantee consumer trust Over a third of companies say they are using AI, including generative AI, to fight fraud, according to Experian. As fraud threats become more complex, companies are accelerating their investments with over half adopting new analytics and building AI models to enhance customer decision-making. From fake CAPTCHAs to RATs: Inside 2025’s cyber deception threat trends Cybercriminals are getting better at lying. That’s the takeaway from a new LevelBlue report, which outlines how attackers are using social engineering and legitimate tools to quietly move through environments before they’re caught. Back to basics webinar: The ecosystem of CIS Security best practices Watch this on-demand webinar to understand how you can use an ecosystem of security best practices built by the Center for Internet Security (CIS) to support this mission. Cybersecurity jobs available right now: August 5, 2025 We’ve scoured the market to bring you a selection of roles that span various skill levels within the cybersecurity field. Check out this weekly selection of cybersecurity jobs available right now. New infosec products of the week: August 8, 2025 Here’s a look at the most interesting products from the past week, featuring releases from Black Kite, Descope, Elastic, ExtraHop, LastPass, and Riverbed.

Zero day exploitation surged by 46% year-over-year in the first six months of 2025, according to the Forescout Research – Vedere Labs H1 2025 Threat Review. Products from 27 vendors were found to be impacted by zero days, with Microsoft making up around a third (30%). Google products experienced the second highest volume of zero day exploits, at 11%, followed by Apple (8%), Ivanti (6%), Qualcomm (5%) and VMware (5%). A total of 23,583 vulnerabilities were published in the first half of 2025, averaging 130 new CVEs per day or 3930 per month. This represents a 15% increase compared to the same period in 2024. Additionally, 132 CVEs were added to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog in H1 2025, an 80% year-over-year rise. Of these, 47% were originally published before 2025, many of which targeted perimeter infrastructure. Six impacted end of life products, meaning no patches are available for this equipment. Ransomware Actors Target Non-Traditional Equipment The Forescout report, published on August 4 during Black Hat USA, found that ransomware actors increasingly targeted non-traditional equipment, such as edge devices, IP cameras and Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) servers. This approach is designed to bypass defenses, as such devices often lack endpoint detection and response (EDR). These devices are then used as footholds to enable lateral movement across IT, OT and IoT environments. One example of this tactic highlighted by the researchers was the deployment of Akira ransomware to Windows endpoints via a compromised IP camera in March 2025. Another was the VanHelsing group introducing a multi-platform encryptor that includes support for BSD UNIX. “We expect both asset types – IP cameras and BSD systems – to be increasingly targeted in the near future,” the researchers noted. “BSD, while niche, is gaining attention from ransomware operators.” The study also found that ransomware attacks grew 36% year-over-year, with 3649 documented attacks in H1 2025. Ransomware victims were recorded in 112 countries over the six-month period, a 9% increase from the 103 countries impacted in H1 2024. Nation State and Hacktivist Gangs Prevalent Forescout observed 137 threat actors undertake notable activity in H1 2025. Of these, 51% were attributed as financially motivated cybercriminals, 40% state-sponsored actors and 9% hacktivists. China was the country of origin for the highest proportion of these threat actors, at 33. This was followed by Russia (22 groups), Iran (eight), Turkey (four) and Brazil (three). The country of origin was unknown for 45 of the active tracked groups. The researchers also highlighted the blurred lines between hacktivists and nation-state groups, with Iran-aligned hacktivist groups heavily targeting critical OT environments. Daniel dos Santos, head of research at Forescout, commented: “What we’re seeing from Iranian-aligned groups is a shift toward more aggressive, state-influenced disruption tactics masked as activism. As geopolitical tensions escalate, these actors are becoming faster, louder and harder to attribute, and that makes their threat even more urgent for defenders to address.”