Hello, stay ahead with CISO Brief 🚀

🔒 Vercel has disclosed an unauthorized access incident that affected a limited subset of customers and certain internal systems. The company says its public services remain operational while it investigates the incident with external incident response experts and law enforcement. Vercel is notifying impacted customers and urging them to review environment variables, enable the sensitive environment variable feature where available, and rotate secrets or tokens if there is any suspicion of exposure.

📧 Threat actors are exploiting Apple account-change notifications to deliver callback phishing within legitimate emails sent from Apple's infrastructure. They place scam text into the account's first and last name fields, then trigger a shipping-info update so Apple sends the altered notification. Because messages are sent from appleid@id.apple.com and pass SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, they appear authentic and can bypass filters, increasing the risk of successful callback scams.

🔍 NIST will stop providing severity scores and detailed enrichment for lower-priority CVEs beginning April 15, citing a surge in submissions that has overwhelmed its capacity. The National Vulnerability Database will continue to list all reported CVEs, but entries deemed low priority will keep only the severity assigned by the submitting CNA. NIST will only add detailed analysis for issues in CISA’s KEV, those affecting U.S. federal software, or critical software defined by EO 14028; organizations may request enrichment for low-priority entries via email to nvd@nist.gov.

⚠️ A critical remote code execution vulnerability has been disclosed in protobuf.js, the widely used JavaScript implementation of Google's Protocol Buffers, caused by unsafe dynamic code generation that concatenates schema-derived identifiers into functions. An attacker who can supply or influence schemas can inject arbitrary JavaScript into a generated Function() call, which executes when the crafted schema is processed. Maintainers and Endor Labs urge immediate upgrades to patched releases and recommend treating schema-loading as untrusted while auditing transitive dependencies.

🔧 A recent Microsoft Edge update introduced a code regression that breaks right-click paste in the Microsoft Teams desktop client, leaving the Paste option greyed out in chat context menus. Microsoft advises using keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V on Windows, Cmd+C/Cmd+V on macOS) as an immediate workaround. The company says it identified the cause in Edge and is rolling out a staged fix while monitoring telemetry.

🔒 NAKIVO has released Backup & Replication v11.2, introducing an automated real-time replication engine and expanded hypervisor support. The update delivers full compatibility with VMware vSphere 9 and Proxmox VE 9.0 (with 9.1 in scope), plus immutable backups, pre-recovery malware scanning, and air-gapped options to strengthen ransomware resilience. v11.2 also adopts OAuth 2.0 for email notifications and upgrades core platform components to improve stability and recovery speed.

🔐 Microsoft Defender Security Research outlines a human-operated intrusion playbook where attackers abuse cross-tenant Microsoft Teams collaboration to impersonate IT/helpdesk staff and socially engineer users into granting remote assistance. With user consent, adversaries gain interactive access via Quick Assist or similar tools, then execute attacker modules by side-loading them into trusted vendor-signed applications. The chain leverages native administrative protocols such as WinRM and commercial RMM tooling to move laterally and stage sensitive business data for exfiltration. Microsoft Defender provides correlated identity, endpoint, and collaboration telemetry to surface and disrupt this pathway.

🚨 Grinex, a Kyrgyzstan-incorporated cryptocurrency exchange sanctioned by the U.K. and the U.S., said it is suspending operations after reporting a $13.74 million theft it attributes to Western intelligence agencies. The company alleges the attack, which it says demonstrates unprecedented technical sophistication, stole over 1 billion rubles from user accounts on April 15, 2026. Blockchain investigators at Elliptic, TRM Labs, and Chainalysis report the funds were rapidly routed to TRON and Ethereum addresses and swapped into non‑freezable tokens, complicating asset recovery.

🔒 Fortinet FortiGuard Labs and Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 report that threat actors are exploiting a command injection flaw, CVE-2024-3721, in TBK DVR devices to deliver a Mirai-family loader tracked as Nexcorium. The loader installs architecture-specific binaries, establishes persistence via crontab and systemd, and uses hard-coded credential lists plus an exploit for CVE-2017-17215 to spread to Huawei HG532 devices. Unit 42 also observed automated scans targeting EoL TP-Link routers via CVE-2023-33538, though initial attempts were flawed and did not achieve compromise. Researchers warn that unpatched, unsupported IoT devices and default credentials continue to enable large-scale DDoS botnets and recommend replacing EoL hardware and removing default passwords.

⚠️ Maintainers of Thymeleaf released a patch addressing a critical Server-Side Template Injection (SSTI) vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-40478, that allows unauthenticated attackers to execute expressions and run code. The flaw bypasses Thymeleaf’s sandbox protections by exploiting control characters in expressions and improper class restrictions. All versions prior to 3.1.4.RELEASE are affected, there is no workaround, and organizations should upgrade immediately.

⚠️ Cisco issued an IOS XE library update that causes a specific log file on many Catalyst and Wi‑Fi 6 access points to grow by about 5MB per day, potentially filling flash and preventing future firmware upgrades. Administrators should run Cisco’s WLANPoller tool or manually inspect the boot partition with show boot and perform mandatory prechecks close to maintenance windows. If flash is already exhausted an AP may require reboot, manual cleanup, vendor emergency script, or physical intervention to avoid being bricked.

🚀 AWS has launched EC2 High Memory U7i instances — u7i-8tb.112xlarge and u7i-12tb.224xlarge — in the Asia Pacific (Singapore) region. These 7th-generation instances use custom fourth-generation Intel Xeon Scalable (Sapphire Rapids) processors and provide 8TiB or 12TiB of DDR5 memory with 448 and 896 vCPUs respectively. They support up to 100 Gbps for Amazon EBS and network bandwidth and include ENA Express, targeting mission-critical in-memory databases such as SAP HANA, Oracle, and SQL Server.

🆕 Amazon SageMaker HyperPod now supports flexible instance groups, allowing multiple instance types and multiple subnets within a single instance group. Using a new InstanceRequirements parameter, HyperPod provisions the highest-priority instance type first and automatically falls back to lower-priority types when capacity is unavailable. The feature integrates with Karpenter autoscaling and can be created via the CreateCluster/UpdateCluster APIs, AWS CLI, or the Management Console.

🛡️ Researchers report the Payouts King ransomware is leveraging QEMU as a covert reverse SSH backdoor, running hidden Alpine Linux VMs to execute tools and bypass host security. Operators create a scheduled task named TPMProfiler to launch the VM as SYSTEM, use virtual disks disguised as benign files, and forward ports for remote access. The campaign—linked to STAC4713 and observed alongside a separate STAC3725 activity exploiting CitrixBleed 2—employs credential theft, robust obfuscation, and AES-256/RSA-4096 encryption. Sophos recommends hunting for unauthorized QEMU installs, suspicious SYSTEM tasks, and unusual SSH tunnels.

🔐 Palo Alto Networks today announced the Frontier AI Alliance with Accenture, Deloitte, IBM, NTT DATA and PwC to accelerate enterprise defenses against emergent frontier AI models. The alliance integrates Unit 42® Frontier AI Defense with partner implementation and remediation capabilities to deliver a validated AI Defense Blueprint and rapid exposure analysis. Together they offer on‑demand expertise and operational support to achieve accelerated immunity and resilience at machine speed, shortening hardening timelines from years to weeks.

🔁 Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) now automatically discovers and caches OCI referrers — including image signatures, SBOMs, and attestations — from upstream registries for repositories configured with pull through cache. Previously, referrers had to be listed and fetched manually because ECR would not return or sync them for cached repositories. With this change, referrers API requests reach upstream and automatically cache related artifacts, enabling end-to-end signature verification, SBOM discovery, and attestation retrieval without client-side workarounds. The feature is available today in all Regions where Amazon ECR pull through cache is supported.

📺 This joint analysis from Google Cloud product leadership and industry analyst Dan Rayburn outlines evolving requirements for modern streaming delivery. It emphasizes that beyond raw capacity, platforms must deliver architectural flexibility, predictable pricing, and broadcast-grade operational visibility. The authors cite practical updates—flexible shielding in regions, origin compatibility fixes such as HEAD request support and larger 25MiB segments, multi-part range requests—and the move toward monthly savings plans to stabilize costs. They urge technical leaders to explore modern edge architectures and proactive monitoring to ensure reliable, cost-effective live streaming.

🔎 AWS Deadline Cloud now includes an AI-powered troubleshooting assistant that analyzes failed render jobs to diagnose root causes and recommend fixes. The assistant examines logs and metrics for issues like missing assets, software errors, configuration mismatches, and resource constraints, drawing on a pre-trained knowledge base covering Deadline Cloud and popular DCC apps. It runs inside your AWS account via Amazon Bedrock and is available in all regions that support Deadline Cloud.