All news in category "Threat and Trends Reports"

Scouting America Introduces Cybersecurity Merit Badge

🛡️ Scouting America (formerly Boy Scouts) has introduced a new cybersecurity merit badge that highlights digital safety, basic cyber hygiene, and introductory technical skills for youth. The announcement includes a well-designed badge image that has been picked up by mainstream coverage, drawing attention to how organizations are teaching online risk awareness. The author notes the image looks good and expresses a personal wish to earn the badge.

VirusTotal Success: SEQRITE APT Hunting Case Studies

🔎 SEQRITE's APT-Team describes how they used VirusTotal to pivot from isolated clues to comprehensive campaign mapping, tracking UNG0002, Silent Lynx, and DRAGONCLONE between May 2024 and May 2025. Their work combined malware configuration extraction, LNK metadata, code-sign certificate pivots, YARA and Sigma rules, and Livehunt queries to surface related samples and previously unreported implants. The post highlights practical hunting queries and pivots — public key and LNK-ID searches, submitter geofilters, and malware_config values — that enabled attribution and expanded detection across multiple Asian geographies.

CISOs' 2025 Priorities: Data, AI, and Simplification

🔒 CSO's 2025 Security Priorities Study finds security leaders are juggling expanding responsibilities while facing greater complexity in selecting the right tools. Seventy-six percent say solution selection is more complex and 57% had trouble finding incident root causes in the past year. Top focuses are protecting sensitive data, securing cloud systems, and simplifying IT infrastructure, with 73% now more likely to consider AI-enabled security. Many plan to rely on managed service providers and maintain level budgets while driving strategic AI and governance initiatives.

Ransomware Reality: High Confidence, Low Preparedness

⚠️ The CrowdStrike State of Ransomware Survey reveals a sizable gap between organizational confidence and actual ransomware readiness. Half of 1,100 security leaders say they are "very well prepared," yet 78% were attacked in the past year and fewer than 25% recovered within 24 hours. The report warns that AI-accelerated attacks deepen this gap and recommends AI-native detection and response such as Falcon to regain the advantage.

Inside the attack chain: Azure Blob Storage threats

🔐 Microsoft Threat Intelligence analyzes how attackers target Azure Blob Storage across the full attack chain, emphasizing risks from exposed containers, compromised keys and SAS tokens, and abuse of automation such as Event Grid and Azure Functions. The blog maps these behaviors to the MITRE ATT&CK framework and illustrates tactics including data poisoning, covert C2 via metadata, and replication-based distribution. Microsoft recommends applying zero trust principles, enforcing least privilege with Microsoft Entra RBAC/ABAC, and enabling Defender for Storage with malware scanning, CSPM, and sensitive data discovery to detect, contain, and remediate storage-focused threats.

Closing the Cybersecurity Skills Gap: New Pathways

🔐 Cyber Awareness Month highlights the persistent cybersecurity skills shortage and the opportunities it creates for new entrants and experienced professionals. The 2025 Cybersecurity Skills Gap Report documents a global shortfall of more than 4.7 million roles and identifies high demand for data, cloud, network and AI security expertise. Employers increasingly favor certifications (65%) over degrees, opening practical pathways for career changers, veterans, and adjacent IT or business professionals. Investing in upskilling, governance, and awareness programs can reduce breach risk and improve retention.

Cybersecurity Awareness Month 2025: Ransomware Resilience

🔒 ESET's Cybersecurity Awareness Month 2025 video, presented by Chief Security Evangelist Tony Anscombe, explains why ransomware continues to threaten organizations large and small. Citing Verizon's 2025 DBIR and a Coalition Inc. study, it notes that 44% of breaches involved ransomware and 40% of insured victims paid ransoms. The video outlines common intrusion vectors and practical steps — backups, patching, access controls and training — organizations should take to improve resilience.

Audit Microsoft 365 for Hidden Malicious OAuth Applications

🔍 Matt Kiely of Huntress Labs urges Microsoft 365 administrators to audit OAuth applications across their tenants and provides a pragmatic starting tool, Cazadora. The research shows both abused legitimate apps (Traitorware) and bespoke malicious apps (Stealthware) can persist for years and that Azure’s default user-consent model enables these abuses. Operators should check Enterprise Applications and Application Registrations for suspicious names, anomalous reply URLs (notably a localhost loopback with port 7823), and other anomalous attributes, then take remediation steps.

AI-Driven Social Engineering Tops ISACA Threats for 2026

⚠️A new ISACA report identifies AI-driven social engineering as the top cyber threat for 2026, cited by 63% of nearly 3,000 IT and security professionals. The 2026 Tech Trends and Priorities report, published 20 October 2025, shows AI concerns outpacing ransomware (54%) and supply chain attacks (35%), while only 13% of organizations feel very prepared to manage generative AI risks. ISACA urges organizations to adopt AI governance, strengthen compliance amid divergent US and EU approaches, and invest in talent, resilience and legacy modernization.

Weekly Recap: F5 Breach, Linux Rootkits, and Trends

🔒 This weekly recap highlights long-lived, stealthy intrusions and emerging tactics that are reshaping defender priorities. Chief among them, F5 disclosed a year-long breach involving the BRICKSTORM malware and stolen BIG-IP source material, while researchers uncovered new Linux rootkits such as LinkPro and campaigns abusing blockchain smart contracts for malware delivery. The report urges inventorying edge devices, prioritizing patches, and improving detection, baselining, and intelligence sharing.

Analyzing ClickFix: Why Browser Copy-Paste Attacks Rise

🔐 ClickFix attacks trick users into copying and executing malicious code from a webpage—often presented as a CAPTCHA or a prompt to 'fix' an error—so the payload runs locally without a download. Researchers link the technique to Interlock and multiple public breaches and note delivery has shifted from email to SEO poisoning and malvertising. The articles says clipboard copying via JavaScript and heavy obfuscation let these pages evade scanners, and that traditional EDR and DLP often miss the attack. Push Security recommends browser-based copy-and-paste detection to block attacks before the endpoint is reached.

2025 APJ eCrime Landscape: Emerging Threat Trends and Risks

🔒 The CrowdStrike 2025 APJ eCrime Landscape Report outlines a rapidly evolving criminal ecosystem across Asia Pacific and Japan, driven by regional marketplaces and increasingly automated ransomware. The report highlights active Chinese-language underground markets (Chang’an, FreeCity, Huione Guarantee) and the rise of AI-developed ransomware, with 763 APJ victims named on ransomware and dedicated leak sites between January 2024 and April 2025. It profiles local eCrime groups (the SPIDER cluster) and service providers such as Magical Cat and CDNCLOUD, and concludes with prioritized defenses for identity, cloud, and social-engineering resilience.

North Korean Actors Abuse Blockchains for Malware Delivery

🛡️ Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) reports that North Korean-linked UNC5342 is using a method called EtherHiding to deliver malware and facilitate cryptocurrency theft by embedding encrypted payloads in smart contracts on Ethereum and BNB Smart Chain. The technique turns immutable contracts into resilient, hard-to-takedown command-and-control infrastructure. Initial lures include fake recruiter messages, poisoned npm packages and malicious GitHub repositories; a JavaScript downloader named JADESNOW fetches and decrypts subsequent backdoors such as INVISIBLEFERRET.

Tracking HoldingHands Malware Expansion Across Asia

🔍 FortiGuard Labs observed a January 2025 campaign that began with Winos 4.0 infections in Taiwan and evolved into a cross‑regional HoldingHands operation affecting China, Taiwan, Japan, and Malaysia. The actor uses phishing PDFs, cloud-hosted and bespoke domains, and multi-stage loaders that leverage Windows Task Scheduler to evade detection. Shared infrastructure, reused code (including digital signatures and debug paths), and repeated JavaScript download scripts link disparate samples, and Fortinet provides detections, IOCs, and mitigation guidance.

Hidden SEO Links: Business Risks and How to Protect

🔍 Hidden blocks of links embedded on corporate websites can quietly erode search rankings and damage reputation by pointing to dubious domains such as pornography or gambling. Invisible to users but parsed by search engines and security tools, these links divert link equity and often trigger algorithmic penalties. Attackers inject them via compromised admin credentials, vulnerable CMS components, infected templates, or breached hosting. Regular updates, strict access controls, routine audits, backups, and mandatory 2FA help prevent and limit impact.

Significant Satellite Traffic Found Transmitted Unencrypted

⚠️Researchers used a commercial off-the-shelf satellite dish to perform the most comprehensive public study yet of geostationary satellite communications. They discovered a shockingly large volume of sensitive traffic—critical infrastructure telemetry, internal corporate and government communications, private voice calls and SMS, and consumer Internet streams such as in-flight Wi‑Fi—being broadcast unencrypted. Much of this data can be passively observed by anyone with a few hundred dollars of consumer-grade hardware, and a single transponder's footprint may cover up to 40% of the Earth's surface.

CISOs Urged to Accelerate Post-Quantum Cryptography Plans

🔐 Enterprises acknowledge that quantum computing threatens current public-key cryptography, yet progress toward post-quantum cryptography (PQC) is uneven and slow. A PwC report finds fewer than 10% prioritize PQC in budgets, only 3% have fully implemented leading measures, 29% are piloting, and 49% have not started. Financial services, government, telecom and cloud are moving faster, while manufacturing, healthcare and industrial sectors lag due to legacy systems, skills shortages, and standards uncertainty. Experts advise inventories, pilot programs, crypto agility, and investment before the 2030 deprecation deadline to avoid 'harvest now, decrypt later' risks.

Security Teams Must Deploy Anti-Infostealer Defenses Now

🔒 Infostealers are fuelling today’s ransomware wave and the resulting stealer logs are widely available on the dark web, sometimes for as little as $10. At ISACA Europe 2025, Tony Gee of 3B Data Security urged security teams to adopt targeted technical controls in addition to baseline measures like zero trust and network segmentation. He recommended six practical defenses — including regular password rotation, FIDO2-enabled MFA, forced authentication, shorter session tokens, cookie replay detection and impossible-travel monitoring — to reduce the usefulness of stolen credentials and session data.

Germany Is the EU's Top Target for Cyberattacks in 2025

🔒 The Microsoft Digital Defense Report 2025 finds Germany was the most targeted EU country in the first half of 2025, receiving 3.3% of global cyberattacks. Attackers are driven more by profit than espionage, with ransomware used in 52% of incidents and pure espionage accounting for 4%. The report highlights threats linked to Russia, China, North Korea and Iran and recommends MFA—which can block 99.9% of credential-based attacks.

CISO Role Expands: From Operator to Enterprise Risk Lead

🔒 The CISO role has evolved from a primarily technical post into a broad enterprise leadership responsibility. Foundry’s 2025 Security Priorities Study shows many security leaders now brief boards multiple times a month and oversee areas beyond cybersecurity, including risk, compliance, privacy, and AI oversight. This shift requires stronger strategic communication and executive influence in addition to operational expertise.