All news in category “Threat and Trends Reports”

📊 Check Point Research found that organizations in the Central US faced higher weekly cyber attack volumes through May 2026 compared with the national average. The region averaged about 1,552 attacks per week, rising to 1,612 in May versus a national 1,442. Energy, healthcare, and financial services drove the regional increases, with energy up 45% and healthcare the most targeted by volume.

🛡️ Enterprises are facing an invisible workforce: non-human identities (bots, service accounts, API keys, tokens, certificates) that now often outnumber humans. These ghost identities authenticate constantly across environments and, when unmanaged, accumulate privileges and risks. The industry has seen incidents where forgotten or third-party machine identities enabled widespread breaches, and a looming 2026 certificate-expiration wave threatens cascading outages. Organisations must prioritise governance—discovering NHIs, assigning ownership, auditing privileges, and addressing imminent certificate expirations—before tool selection.

🔎 This report details the discovery of a new macOS Tahoe 26 Biome stream, App.MenuItem, which records specific menu selections made by users across the OS. It explains the artifact's location at ~/Library/Biome/streams/restricted/App.MenuItem/local, the SEGB-encapsulated protobuf format, and recommended processing steps using ccl-segb. The article highlights how the stream reconstructs user intent and workflow, and notes limitations when menu text is non-descriptive.

🛡️ Cybersecurity researchers at Tenet Security disclosed a new attack class called Agentjacking that tricks AI coding agents into executing arbitrary code. The exploit leverages Sentry's public DSN and its MCP interaction to inject crafted error events, which agents like Claude Code and Cursor interpret as trusted resolution steps. Successful exploitation can expose sensitive data and run code with developers' privileges.

🔒 Darktrace research reveals that 84% of sports organizations — including teams, venues and event bodies — were targeted by cyber-attacks in the last year, with 57% hit multiple times. The report highlights threats to stadium operations, fan data and supply chains, noting elevated phishing and AI-enabled social engineering. Experts urge a behavioral security approach focused on human and AI behavior to reduce high-profile disruption risks.

🩺 The author argues that cybersecurity has operated like an emergency room—reactive and crisis-driven—while AI exposes the need for a preventative, continuous-health model. Current frameworks (NIST, MITRE) describe controls and adversaries but not organizational health; the proposed Clinical Cybersecurity Framework treats the enterprise as a living system with vital signs, continuous monitoring, and governance for new risks like AI. This shift reframes the CISO role toward reporting condition and building adaptive capacity.

🔒 The article explains the growing reality of “harvest now, decrypt later” attacks, where adversaries steal encrypted data today to decrypt later with quantum computers. It summarizes industry and government perspectives, noting that most organizations underprioritize the risk despite emerging standards like NIST’s 2024 post-quantum algorithms and EU transition roadmaps. The piece reviews mitigation options — PQC, QKD, and the need for cryptoagility — and highlights examples from Spain and financial institutions planning phased transitions.

🔍 Talos contrasts personal tech nostalgia with a sharp warning: AI-driven vulnerability discovery now outpaces human patching. The blog highlights how frontier models can autonomously find and exploit zero-days in minutes, collapsing the traditional vulnerability lifecycle. It urges organizations to move beyond patch-centric defenses and adopt a three-stage fallback model emphasizing prevention, detection, and resilience through controls like MFA, CIS benchmarks, segmentation, and behavioral EDR/XDR.

🛡️ Researchers at Graz University of Technology describe FROST, a novel side-channel technique that uses the browser's origin private file system (OPFS) to monitor SSD timing and infer user activity. A malicious webpage leveraging OPFS can repeatedly access storage, measuring micro-delays that reveal what apps or websites are active. The team demonstrated data transmission rates around 660–720 bits/s with ~90% accuracy and used AI to classify app and site fingerprints. Practical constraints — RAM caching, large file creation, and likely EDR/XDR detection — limit FROST to targeted attacks, but it highlights hardware-level blind spots in modern security.

🛡️This week’s briefing highlights a surge in polished, commodified cybercriminal tools and large-scale data exposures. Notable items include a public supply-chain attack toolkit, a $5,000/month RAT that clones browser profiles, and research showing AI agents can be induced to leak credentials. The roundup covers high-impact incidents, evolving malware-as-a-service offerings, targeted intrusion campaigns, and concerning platform privacy changes.

🔒 A global ISC2 study of nearly 1,000 enterprise security leaders finds training budgets have risen but staff lack time to complete upskilling. AI is the top emerging skill organizations are addressing, yet practical barriers—competing workloads, outdated content, and trainer shortages—limit participation. Leaders urge protected, scheduled learning time and managerial support to make training effective.

🔍 Insurers report a marked increase in extortion-only incidents where attackers rely on data theft rather than encryption. Resilience found that 65% of extortion claims in H2 2025 did not involve encryption, and data theft accounted for 87% of ransomware claims by year-end. The report warns that paying for data suppression is unreliable, with 30–40% of paid cases still resulting in leaks, and recommends prevention, tabletop exercises, and pre-incident legal and response retainers.

🔎 AI agent skills can install third-party capabilities with privileged access, yet registries lack automated audits. Palo Alto Networks introduces Behavioral Integrity Verification (BIV), which compares declared metadata, executable code and natural-language instructions to detect mismatches. Applied to the OpenClaw registry, BIV found widespread deviations and identified multi-stage attack chains that enable credential theft, RCE and exfiltration. The report recommends inventorying skills and requiring pre-install behavioral checks.

🛡️ Researchers describe a new "agentjacking" attack that tricks AI coding agents into executing arbitrary code by injecting malicious instructions into Sentry error events. Tenet Security says the flaw leverages Sentry DSNs — public, write-only credentials — to post crafted markdown that appears as legitimate remediation guidance. Agents retrieving unresolved errors via MCP render the injected content as trusted and may execute the embedded commands with developer privileges. The report confirmed high exploitability across popular agents and thousands of exposed DSNs.

🔒 Phishing operators increasingly buy or hijack aged legitimate domains to bypass enterprise email filters that weight domain age heavily. The author documents a Sneaky2FA campaign using a decade-old domain takeover revealed via certificate transparency logs, illustrating gaps in reputation scoring. Detection should include hosting-pattern stability, subdomain wordlist anomaly, and CT log monitoring to catch these rapid repurposings.

🎙️ Smashing Security episode 471 features Graham Cluley with guest James Ball discussing recent AI-related cybersecurity stories. They explore Meta AI mishaps that exposed passwords and an adaptive AI worm developed by University of Toronto researchers. The episode also touches on worms' history, the WannaCry aftermath, and the shifting legal and practical impacts of AI in cyber defense and offense.

🔒 Menlo Security's 2026 Browser Threat Report warns that many cybersecurity products fail to detect browser-based attacks. Based on telemetry from millions of enterprise browser sessions between January and March 2026, the research found one in five phishing attacks targeting enterprise browser users went undetected by legacy tools. The report highlights that modern enterprise activity increasingly occurs inside browsers, creating blind spots for products not built for the browser session layer. Menlo urges organizations to govern the browser session layer to better protect users and AI agents.

🔍 The Identity Theft Resource Center's 2026 Trends in Identity Report, based on over 6,000 reports from April 1, 2025 to March 31, 2026, shows nearly 26% of victims experienced two or more concurrent identity incidents. Unauthorized device/PC access rose sharply to 27% of compromises and is now the primary threat for adults aged 35–64. Account takeovers made up 50% of misuse cases, while recovery rates dropped significantly when financial loss occurred. Experts warn that compromised devices enable broader attacks and call for testing and automation to improve incident response.

🔒 The ESET SMB Cyber Readiness Index 2026 finds 45% of small and medium businesses experienced a cyber-incident in the past year, yet confidence in resilience often rises among repeat victims. The report highlights common root causes—phishing, unpatched vulnerabilities, monitoring gaps and weak passwords—and notes a mismatch between headline-driven fears like AI malware and the mundane vectors attackers exploit. Preparation, clear decision authority, and disciplined reduction of attack surface are critical to withstand incidents.

🔍 Cloud logging services like AWS CloudTrail and Google Cloud Logging offer essential visibility into cloud activity but are also high-value targets for attackers. This article examines two primary attack goals—defense evasion and establishing continuous visibility—and demonstrates methods attackers use to disrupt or exfiltrate logs. It outlines practical attack techniques such as stopping logging, deleting storage or routers, abusing encryption keys, and log poisoning, and highlights detection and mitigation approaches.