All news in category "Threat and Trends Reports"

Russia and China Target Germany's Economy: Survey Findings

🔍 A representative Bitkom survey of 1,002 German companies finds nearly three in four report rising attacks, estimating combined damage at €289 billion. 87% of executives said their organization experienced at least one attack in the past 12 months; 28% now suspect foreign intelligence involvement. Respondents most often pointed to China and Russia (46% each). Insurers report AI-generated false claims, prompting firms and authorities to adopt more holistic, AI-assisted defenses.

Smart Cities Face Growing Cybersecurity Risks and Gaps

🏙️ Smart cities are expanding rapidly—69% of municipalities report strategic agendas and an estimated 83,000 sensors were deployed in 2024—significantly enlarging the attack surface. High-profile incidents (Dallas alarm hack, Washington, DC ransomware, Florida water-treatment manipulation, and Olsztyn transport disruption) show that networked devices can lead to both digital and physical harm. Experts from Accenture, Zebra Technologies, and S2GRUPO warn that legacy devices, fragmented governance, and IT/OT convergence demand zero-trust, segmentation, and coordinated incident response to reduce systemic risk.

IR Playbooks and Mental Health After Major Incidents

🛡️ Joe Marshall uses the VPN Filter investigation to illuminate the often-hidden personal cost of incident response. He recounts months of high-pressure analysis into a modular SOHO botnet attributed to APT28 that featured persistence and a potentially destructive kill switch, and describes how prolonged stress produced burnout, fractured relationships, and career impact. Marshall offers four practical mitigations — boundaries, peer support, unplugged self-care, and mandatory decompression — and underscores how a Cisco Talos Incident Response (IR) Retainer can ensure organizations respond decisively while protecting staff wellbeing.

Microsoft 365: Why Its Dominance Creates Major Risk

🔒 Microsoft 365 has become the central nervous system of modern business, and its market dominance has turned the platform into a lucrative target for attackers. With over 400 million paid seats and tightly integrated apps like Outlook, SharePoint, Teams and OneDrive, a single compromise can cascade across services. Organizations must close backup gaps, adopt zero trust, enforce MFA and deploy cross-application threat detection to reduce catastrophic exposure.

One in Three Android Apps Expose Sensitive Data to Attackers

🔒 The 2025 Zimperium Global Mobile Threat Report finds that one in three Android apps and more than half of iOS apps leak sensitive information through insecure APIs, and nearly half of apps contain hardcoded secrets such as API keys. Client-side weaknesses let attackers tamper with apps, intercept traffic and bypass perimeter defences. The report recommends API hardening and app attestation to ensure API calls originate from genuine, untampered apps.

Malware Distributed Through Trusted Gaming Resources

🎮 Several incidents show attackers distributing malware via trusted gaming channels, including a compromised Endgame Gear OP1w utility, infected early-access Steam titles, and malicious skins on the official Minecraft site. The Endgame Gear installer likely contained the XRed backdoor, while Steam cases involved infostealers such as Trojan.Win32.Lazzzy.gen that harvested cookies and credentials. Users suffered account takeovers and data loss; recommended defenses include up-to-date antivirus, cautious vetting of downloads, and using gaming security modes that minimize disruption.

Zscaler ThreatLabz: Global Ransomware Surge 2024–2025

🔒 Zscaler's annual ThreatLabz Ransomware Report (April 2024–April 2025) warns of a marked rise in extortion-focused attacks: incidents increased 146% year-over-year while exfiltrated data grew 92%. The vendor attributes this to a strategic shift from pure encryption to data theft and public shaming, with criminals using stolen files as leverage. Researchers also report that generative AI is increasingly incorporated into attackers' playbooks to enable more targeted and efficient campaigns. The U.S. accounted for half of all recorded attacks, Germany saw a nearly 75% rise and is the EU's most affected country, and the most-targeted sectors were manufacturing, technology and healthcare.

Protecting SMBs From Ransomware: Trends and Defenses

🔒 Small and medium-sized businesses are increasingly targeted by ransomware gangs that exploit weak defenses, offer Ransomware-as-a-Service, and adapt tactics with AI-driven tools. RaaS industrialization and discoveries like ESET's PromptLock demonstrate how attackers can scale reconnaissance, exploitation and social engineering. SMBs face double-extortion, DDoS and coercive pressures while repeat payments remain an issue despite a decline in aggregate crypto payouts. Practical defenses—Zero Trust, timely patching, reliable backups, EDR/MDR and tested incident response—can materially reduce risk.

AI Shifts Entry-Level Cyber Hiring Toward Soft Skills

🔍Teamwork, problem-solving and analytical thinking now outrank core technical skills in entry-level cybersecurity hiring, according to an ISC2 study of 929 hiring managers across the US, UK, Canada, Germany, India and Japan. The report finds AI is reshaping priorities: managers favour human strengths that AI can't duplicate while routine monitoring is increasingly automated. Experts warn that overreliance on certifications and broken entry pipelines exclude capable candidates, prompting vendors and employers to broaden recruitment through apprenticeships, neurodiverse hiring and outreach to career changers.

ICO Warns Schools: Students Fuel Insider Data Breaches

🔒 The UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) warns that pupils represent a significant insider threat in schools, reporting that 57% of education-sector data breach reports originate from students. In an analysis of 215 breach reports between January 2022 and August 2024, nearly a third of insider incidents involved stolen or guessed passwords, 97% of which were committed by students. The ICO highlights additional causes — weak data protection (23%), staff sending data to personal devices (20%), misconfigured access rights (17%), and deliberate bypassing of controls (5%) — and cites incidents where students accessed systems holding thousands of records. Practical recommendations include strong password hygiene, MFA, tightened access controls, prohibiting pupil use of staff devices, secure shared-device management, and better parental engagement.

FileFix Campaign Uses Steganography and Multistage Payloads

🛡️ Acronis researchers have uncovered a rare FileFix campaign that hides a second-stage PowerShell script and encrypted executables inside JPG images using steganography. Attackers employ multilingual, heavily minified phishing pages that mimic a Meta support flow and trick victims into pasting a payload into file upload address bars. An obfuscated PowerShell one-liner downloads images from Bitbucket, extracts and decrypts components, and executes a Go-based loader that deploys StealC. Organizations should combine user training with process blocking and monitoring to mitigate this evolving threat.

Evolving ClickFix Variants Lead to MetaStealer Deployments

🔍 Huntress analysts observed an uptick in attacks that combine classic ClickFix social engineering with more advanced deployment techniques over the past fifteen business days. A fake AnyDesk installer used a Cloudflare Turnstile lure that opened Windows File Explorer via the search-ms protocol to deliver an LNK payload disguised as a PDF and install an MSI that dropped MetaStealer. Separately, operators deployed Cephalus ransomware using DLL sideloading through the legitimate SentinelOne host binary, illustrating evolving tradecraft that mixes manual user interaction and technical evasion.

Quarter of UK and US Firms Hit by Data Poisoning Attacks

🛡️ New IO research reports that 26% of surveyed UK and US organisations have experienced data poisoning, and 37% observe employees using generative AI tools without permission. The third annual State of Information Security Report highlights rising concern around AI-generated phishing, misinformation, deepfakes and shadow AI. Despite the risks, most respondents say they feel prepared and are adopting acceptable use policies to curb unsanctioned tool use.

Myth Busting: Why 'Innocent Clicks' Don't Exist Today

🔒 Visiting a suspicious link or scanning an unknown QR code can be risky even if you refrain from entering data or interacting further. Modern webpages can trigger drive-by downloads, exploit browser or plugin vulnerabilities via embedded JavaScript, or silently harvest device and browser metadata to build a digital fingerprint. The piece advises keeping devices patched, avoiding unknown links or QR codes, inspecting URLs and using unshortening and reputation services to vet destinations before proceeding.

From Prevention to Rapid Response: The New CISO Era

🔒 CISOs are shifting from an all-or-nothing prevention model to a containment-first strategy that assumes breaches will occur. Organizations are investing in sharper visibility, automation and precise network segmentation to stop lateral movement and reduce blast radius. Modern zero trust implementations enforce context-aware, least-privilege access across hybrid environments, enabling faster detection and automated response while preserving user experience. In sectors such as fintech, CISOs must also balance strong background security with seamless interfaces and user education to sustain trust.

HMRC Tax Refund Phishing Reports Decline Sharply in 2025

📉 Bridewell's analysis of FOI data shows a marked fall in HMRC-impersonation phishing reports in the first half of 2025, with 41,202 incidents versus 102,226 in 2024 and 152,995 in 2023. Email-based attacks drove most of the decline while SMS phishing rose. The firm warns AI-enhanced social engineering is increasing and advises users to pause, avoid suspicious links and verify communications via official channels.

API Attacks Surge: 40,000 Incidents in H1 2025 Report

🔒 Thales' Imperva analysed telemetry from over 4,000 environments and reported about 40,000 API incidents in H1 2025, finding APIs now attract 44% of advanced bot traffic. Key findings included a 40% rise in credential-stuffing and account-takeover attempts against APIs without adaptive MFA, plus data scraping (31%) and coupon/payment fraud (26%). Financial services, telecoms and travel were among the most targeted sectors, and Thales warned the pace and sophistication of attacks will continue to increase.

Marine Corps Cuts ATO Delays with DevOps and Agile

🚀 Operation StormBreaker transformed how Marine Corps Community Services (MCCS) develops and authorizes IT. By creating a Marine Corps–authorized landing zone in AWS and pairing it with the Department of the Navy’s RAISE platform, MCCS implemented CI/CD pipelines and automated security checks to push security left. The result: ATOs that once took 18 months can now be granted in a day, saving roughly $1M per system and improving digital services for Marines and families.

VoidProxy Phishing Framework Bypasses MFA for SSO Logins

🔒 Okta threat researchers have identified a Phishing-as-a-Service called VoidProxy that leverages Adversary-in-the-Middle techniques to capture usernames, passwords, MFA codes and session cookies from Microsoft, Google and several SSO providers. The service uses compromised email service provider accounts, URL shorteners, Cloudflare Workers and disposable domains to evade detection and takedown. Victim credentials and session tokens are proxied to legitimate services, allowing attackers to reuse valid session cookies. Okta warns legacy methods such as SMS and OTP are especially vulnerable to this attack.

Browser-Based Attacks: Six Threats Security Teams Must Know

🔒 Browser-targeted attacks are rising as adversaries treat the browser as the primary access point to cloud services and corporate data. The article defines browser-based attacks and enumerates six high-risk techniques: credential and session phishing, ClickFix-style copy-and-paste exploits, malicious OAuth consent flows, rogue extensions, malicious file delivery, and credential reuse where MFA gaps exist. These vectors are effective because modern work happens in decentralized SaaS environments and across many delivery channels, making traditional email- and network-centric defenses less reliable. The piece highlights visibility gaps for security teams and points to vendor platforms such as Push Security that claim to provide in-browser detection and remediation for AiTM phishing, OAuth abuse, and session hijacking.