All news in category "Threat and Trends Reports"

Is the CISO Role Broken? Rethinking Security Leadership

🧭 The article argues that the modern CISO role has become unmanageable for many practitioners and often fails to deliver meaningful, long-term change. It traces causes to short tenures, technologist backgrounds, and siloed corporate governance, and advocates splitting responsibilities by creating a senior CSO focused on business protection while returning the CISO to a technical, execution-oriented remit. The author urges CISOs to rebuild trust through demonstrable delivery rather than constant demands, and suggests this structural change will improve governance, tenure, and recruitment.

Stopping Ransomware Before It Starts: Pre-Ransomware Insights

🔒Cisco Talos Incident Response (Talos IR) analyzed pre-ransomware engagements from January 2023 through June 2025 to determine which controls most often prevented ransomware deployment. Rapid engagement with incident responders and near-immediate action on EDR/MDR alerts were the two strongest correlates of stopping encryption. Talos found that aggressive blocking and quarantine settings, strict identity and privilege controls, improved logging, and early notifications from partners materially increased the chance of eviction before encryption. The guidance focuses on securing remote services, credential protection, application allowlisting, and network segmentation.

Onboarding Attacks: When Fake Hires Become Insider Threats

🔐 Attackers are increasingly bypassing email defenses by infiltrating organizations through the hiring process, as in the 'Jordan' example where a bogus hire gained broad access on day one. Remote recruiting, AI-generated profiles and deepfakes have turned identity into the new perimeter, undermining traditional vetting. Adopting zero standing privileges—with JIT/JEP, strict baselines and comprehensive auditing—and tools such as BeyondTrust Entitle can remove persistent access and automate time‑bound, auditable privilege grants.

Ten Security Leadership Missteps That Damage Careers

🔒 Security leaders must avoid career-limiting behaviors that erode trust and effectiveness. The article outlines 10 common missteps — from failing to align security with business priorities and remaining purely technical to drawing inflexible red lines and mishandling AI — that stall advancement. It stresses practical shifts: become a business partner, balance risk with speed, improve asset visibility, foster relationships, and rehearse incident response to maintain credibility.

Four-Step EASM Framework to Reduce External Cyber Risk

🔍 External Attack Surface Management (EASM) requires a continuous, automated approach to discover internet-facing assets, detect vulnerabilities and prioritize remediation. The article outlines a practical four-step process — identify and classify assets, risk detection, risk assessment, and prioritization and remediation — to reduce external cyber risk. A real-world Jenkins misconfiguration illustrates how shadow IT and configuration changes can expose sensitive data, and why centralized, recurrent EASM platforms that integrate with existing workflows and provide actionable guidance are essential. Effective defense combines fast MTTD from tools with responsive teams to achieve timely MTTR.

Practical Guide to Reducing Kids’ Digital Footprint

🔒 This practical guide helps parents reduce their children's digital footprint by identifying risky "hot spots"—from unsecured group chats and gaming voice channels to oversharing on social media, unsafe downloads, public Wi‑Fi and unvetted AI tools. It stresses open conversation over heavy-handed controls and recommends concrete measures: disable geolocation, vet links with anti‑phishing tools, use antivirus, a trusted VPN on public networks, and parental controls such as Kaspersky Safe Kids. The guide also encourages parents to watch and discuss online activity together and to teach habits like unique passwords and cautious AI use.

Latest Social Engineering Trends Targeting Enterprises

🛡️Social engineering remains the favoured vector as attackers combine psychological manipulation with accessible AI tools to target high-value corporate roles. Recent incidents show sophisticated pretexting, voice cloning and mass email flooding used to create urgency and extract funds or credentials. Fraudsters increasingly exploit collaboration platforms such as Microsoft Teams and legitimate utilities like Quick Assist to appear trustworthy and gain remote control. Organizations should harden collaboration settings, enforce conditional access and MFA, and reduce privilege scope to limit the blast radius of any compromise.

Sharp Rise in Cyberattacks on German Education Sector

🔒 Researchers at Check Point report a 56% year-over-year increase in cyberattacks against German educational institutions as the new school year begins, well above the global average. Analysts observed targeted phishing campaigns, including an August 2025 scheme that redirected victims to fake university and Outlook login pages to harvest credentials. To mitigate risk, experts recommend targeted phishing awareness training, mandatory multi-factor authentication (MFA), early detection of suspicious domains, regular system updates and deployment of modern threat-prevention solutions as part of a preventive, multi-layered security strategy.

Under Lock and Key: Strengthening Business Encryption

🔒 Encryption is a critical layer in modern data protection, safeguarding sensitive and business‑critical information both at rest and in transit. The article outlines key drivers — remote/hybrid work, explosive data growth, device loss, third‑party risks, ransomware and insider threats — that make encryption essential. It recommends robust algorithms such as AES-256, centralized management and solutions for disks, files, removable media and email, alongside minimal end‑user friction. The piece also warns that regulators and insurers increasingly expect strong encryption as part of compliance and underwriting.

61% of US Companies Hit by Insider Data Breaches in Two Years

📊 Nearly two-thirds (61%) of US firms experienced insider data breaches in the past two years, according to a new OPSWAT report conducted by the Ponemon Institute. Affected organizations reported an average of eight unauthorized file-access incidents and an average financial impact of $2.7m per organization. Respondents identified file storage and web file transfers as the riskiest environments for data loss. The study also found mixed approaches to generative AI—29% have banned it, 25% have formal policies, and 33% already include AI in file security strategies.

Lack of Board Access Drives CISO Job Dissatisfaction

🛡️ Cybersecurity leaders say board engagement is essential, but many CISOs—particularly in small and mid‑market organizations—report minimal or no access to full boards, according to a 2025 report from IANS and Artico Search. That lack of access strongly correlates with job dissatisfaction and short tenures. Experts recommend strengthening C‑suite relationships and framing cyber risk in business terms to secure board support.

From Summer Camp to Grind Season — Threat Source Recap

📰 This week’s Threat Source newsletter highlights three significant vulnerabilities Talos researchers uncovered and helped remediate: a Dell firmware persistence flaw (Revault), an Office for macOS permissions bypass, and router compromises that blend malicious traffic with legitimate ISP flows. The author, William Largent, also emphasizes mental health and recommends a paper on AI behavioral pathologies to help anticipate malicious or errant AI-driven activity. Top headlines include a 4.4M-record TransUnion breach, a Salesloft Drift AI token compromise, a Passwordstate high-severity fix, an Azure AD credential leak, and a WhatsApp zero-day. Watch the Talos Threat Perspective episode and read the Dell write-up for mitigation guidance.

Six Browser-Based Attack Techniques to Watch in 2025

🔒 This article outlines six browser-based attack techniques—phishing with reverse-proxy AitM kits, ClickFix/FileFix command-injection lures, malicious OAuth grants, rogue extensions, weaponized file downloads, and credential attacks exploiting MFA gaps—that security teams must prioritize in 2025. It explains why the browser has become the primary attack surface as users access hundreds of cloud apps, and why traditional email/network controls and endpoint defenses often miss these threats. The piece argues that effective detection requires real-time browser-level visibility and management across managed and unmanaged apps, highlighting Push Security as a vendor offering such capabilities.

Automotive Industry Raises Alarm Over Cyberattack Risks

🚗 A recent survey of 200 German automotive cybersecurity experts and IT decision-makers shows 75% of companies rate the threat from cyberattacks as high or very high. Respondents identified cloud security gaps (19.5%) and ransomware/malware (19%) as the leading concerns, while data breaches (16.5%), AI-based attack scenarios (14.5%) and connected-vehicle vulnerabilities (14%) followed. Fewer than half of firms (47%) express confidence in their defenses, and many plan investments in threat detection, AI-driven analytics and security training.

Secure-by-Default: Simple Defaults to Shrink Attack Surface

🔒 This article argues that adopting a security-by-default mindset—setting deny-by-default policies, enforcing MFA, and employing application Ringfencing™—can eliminate whole categories of risk early. Simple changes like disabling Office macros, removing local admin rights, and blocking outbound server traffic create a hardened environment attackers can’t easily penetrate. The author recommends pairing secure defaults with continuous patching and monitored EDR/MDR for comprehensive defense.

GhostRedirector: IIS SEO Fraud and Windows Backdoors

🕵️ ESET researchers uncovered GhostRedirector, a previously undocumented actor that compromised at least 65 Windows servers across Brazil, Thailand, Vietnam and other countries. The intrusions deployed a passive C++ backdoor, Rungan, and a native IIS module, Gamshen, to enable remote command execution and conduct SEO fraud that targets search-engine crawlers. Attackers also used public LPE exploits (EfsPotato, BadPotato) and PowerShell-based payloads; ESET attributes the activity to a China-aligned actor with medium confidence.

Healthcare slow to remediate serious flaws, average 58 days

🩺 Cobalt's State of Pentesting in Healthcare 2025 report shows healthcare organizations take far longer than peers to remediate serious vulnerabilities, leaving systems and patient data exposed. The firm, using a decade of internal pentest data and a survey of 500 US security leaders, found only 57% of serious findings are fixed and the median time to resolve is 58 days, with a 244-day half-life for serious issues. While business-critical assets often see fixes within days, Cobalt warns that prioritizing SLA-bound remediation lets other serious but non-critical flaws linger and accrue security debt, increasing ransomware and data-exfiltration risk.

Why XSS Still Matters: MSRC on a 25-Year Threat Landscape

🛡️ MSRC reports that Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) remains a persistent threat across legacy portals and modern single-page applications, with hundreds of cases triaged in the past year. Between July 2024 and July 2025, MSRC mitigated over 970 XSS cases and awarded more than $900,000 in bounties, spanning low-impact self-XSS to zero-click critical exploits. The post describes MSRC’s severity matrix that combines data classification and exploit conditions, outlines servicing scope and exclusion criteria, and publishes a practical submission checklist. Developers and researchers are encouraged to adopt context-aware encoding, Content Security Policy (CSP), and secure-by-default frameworks to reduce exposure.

They Know Where You Are: Geolocation Cyber Risks Evolving

📍 Geolocation data from smartphones, apps and IPs can be weaponized by threat actors to launch precise, geographically targeted attacks such as localized phishing and malware activation. These attacks can act as "floating zero days," remaining dormant until they reach a specific location, as seen with Stuxnet and modern campaigns like Astaroth. Organizations should adopt multilayered defenses — robust endpoint detection, decoys, location baselines and stronger multi-factor verification — to mitigate this evolving threat.

Zero Trust Implementation Remains a Major CISO Challenge

🔐According to an Accenture report, 88% of security leaders say they face significant difficulties implementing Zero Trust, and 80% cannot effectively protect cyber-physical systems. Other industry studies show mixed adoption—Gartner found 63% with full or partial strategies in 2024, while Entrust reports Germany lags at 53%. Experts point to divergent definitions, legacy systems, cultural resistance to the never trust, always verify model, poor visibility into data flows, and misaligned incentives as core obstacles; many argue the effort is strategic, lengthy, and requires top-down leadership.