All news in category "Threat and Trends Reports"

JackFix uses fake Windows update pop-ups to deliver stealers

⚠️ Cybersecurity researchers report a JackFix campaign that uses fake Windows Update pop-ups on cloned adult sites to trick users into running mshta.exe and PowerShell commands. According to Acronis and Huntress, the attack chain leverages obfuscation, privilege escalation and can deploy multiple stealers including Rhadamanthys, RedLine and Vidar. Organizations are advised to train users and consider disabling the Windows Run box via Group Policy or Registry changes to reduce risk.

Holiday Cyberthreat Surge 2025: What CISOs Must Know

🛡️ FortiGuard Labs' 2025 holiday analysis documents a marked increase in malicious infrastructure, credential theft, and targeted exploitation of e-commerce systems during the pre-holiday period. Attackers registered tens of thousands of holiday- and retail-themed domains and sold over 1.57 million account records from stealer logs, fueling credential stuffing and account takeover. The report highlights active exploitation of critical flaws in platforms such as Magento, Oracle EBS, and WooCommerce, and emphasizes urgent mitigations: patching, MFA, bot management, domain monitoring, and payment-page integrity checks to reduce fraud and protect customers.

The 2026 Tech Tsunami: AI, Quantum, and Web 4.0 Collide

🌐 Check Point's 2026 analysis warns that an unprecedented convergence of AI, quantum computing, and an immersive Web 4.0 will reshape digital risk. Autonomous systems and hyper-automation will blur boundaries between cloud, networks, and physical infrastructure, expanding attack surfaces and changing the nature of digital trust. The report calls for updated cryptography, enhanced detection, and cross-industry resilience planning.

AI and Deepfakes Drive Surge in Sophisticated Identity Fraud

🔍 Sumsub’s 2025 Identity Fraud Report finds that global identity fraud attempts fell slightly to 2.2%, but highly sophisticated attacks rose 180%. These multi-vector schemes combine synthetic identities, AI-driven deepfakes, layered social engineering, device tampering and cross-channel manipulation, making them far harder to detect. The report warns organisations to replace manual controls with real-time behavioural and telemetry analysis to counter this shift from quantity to quality in fraud.

Key SOC Challenges to Solve Now to Prepare for 2026

⚠️ 2026 will reshape SOC priorities as adversaries adopt AI to scale evasive attacks, creating urgent challenges across detection, triage, and proving business value. The piece identifies three critical problems: increasingly evasive threats, alert overload and analyst burnout, and the need to quantify ROI for security investments. It recommends interactive malware analysis to reveal full attack chains, real-time threat intelligence to enrich alerts and speed triage, and continuous, measurable intelligence (API/SDK-driven) to turn SOC activity into demonstrated business value.

Influencers Targeted by Cybercriminals: Account Risks

🔒 Social media influencers are increasingly attractive targets for cybercriminals who hijack trusted accounts to distribute scams, malware and fraudulent offers. Attackers use spearphishing, credential stuffing, brute-force attacks and SIM swapping, and AI is making those lures more convincing. Compromised accounts may be sold or used to push crypto and investment scams, exfiltrate follower data or extort victims. Practical defences include long, unique passwords, app-based 2FA, phishing awareness, device separation and up-to-date security software.

Seven Signs Your Cybersecurity Framework Needs Overhaul

🛡️ Organizations should rebuild security frameworks when they fail to sense environmental change, respond effectively to incidents, or support proactive risk management. Experts recommend a dynamic sensing-and-response capability, routine reviews (biannual heavy reviews with interim cursory checks), and deliberate integration of NIST baselines with industry-specific controls. Key warning signs include any breach, chronic alert overload, negative KRIs/KPIs, endpoint and AI gaps, and a compliance-only posture that ignores business risk. Rebuilds are also warranted after major business or regulatory shifts or when incremental fixes no longer suffice.

8 Effective Multicloud Security Tips and Best Practices

🔐 Multicloud adoption improves flexibility but introduces security and visibility risks unless managed centrally. Establish a central authority to define strategy, enforce policies and select cross-cloud tools, while implementing unified governance backed by identity management and automation. Treat every environment as a single trust boundary, enforce least privilege, and correlate telemetry for a unified detection-and-response posture. Limit access with short-lived sessions, recording and DLP to reduce attack surface and support auditability.

Ransomware Targets AWS S3 via Cloud Key Abuse Tactics

🔐 A Trend Micro report warns that ransomware groups are shifting from on-premises targets to cloud object storage, particularly AWS S3, by abusing integrated encryption and key management. Attackers probe configurations from AWS-managed KMS keys to customer-provided and external key stores to encrypt or irreversibly lock data. The report urges hardening S3 settings, enforcing least privilege, enabling versioning and Object Lock, and isolating backups.

Invisible Battles: Cybersecurity's Toll on Mental Health

🛡️ Cybersecurity work creates a relentless, always-on pressure that erodes mental health, driving sleep loss, anxiety and burnout. The piece outlines how constant alerts, moral responsibility for failures and siloed teams amplify errors and organizational risk. It calls for concrete changes—from individual boundaries and therapy to organizational psychological safety—and industry shifts such as integrating wellness into ISO and NIST frameworks.

GhostAd: Hidden Google Play Adware Draining Devices

🔍 Check Point's Harmony Mobile Detection Team discovered a broad Android adware campaign on Google Play that operated as a persistent background advertising engine. Masquerading as benign utilities and emoji editors, the apps continued running after closure or reboot, quietly consuming battery and mobile data. The campaign, dubbed GhostAd, comprised at least 15 related apps, with five still available at discovery.

Why MDR Is the Essential Cybersecurity Service Now

🔧 Modern cyberdefense has outgrown simple antivirus and generalist IT skills. MDR combines advanced detection technologies with continuous human expertise to detect, triage, and remediate threats faster than most in‑house teams can. It delivers enterprise-grade visibility and rapid response at scale, closing skills and detection gaps while letting IT focus on business priorities. Adopting MDR is increasingly a strategic imperative for organisations of all sizes.

CISOs' Greatest Risk: Functional Leaders Quitting Now

⚠️ Functional security leaders are increasingly disengaging due to heavy workloads, limited autonomy, and stalled career progression, creating a direct resilience risk for CISOs and the broader enterprise. The piece cites ISACA data showing rising stress and widespread understaffing and includes perspectives from Carole Lee Hobson, Brandyn Fisher, and Monika Malik. Recommended actions include clear promotion rubrics and executive sponsorship, consolidated tooling with a quarterly kill-switch, and metrics tied to prevention and risk contribution.

AI-Driven GLP-1 Scams Hijacking European Authorities

⚠️ Criminal networks are exploiting shortages of GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro, using AI to generate convincing counterfeit websites, emails and documents that impersonate regulators and health services across Europe. They are hijacking the identities of the NHS, AEMPS, ANSM, BfArM and AIFA to market fake weight-loss products and harvest payments. Check Point Research documents the tactics, scale and public-safety implications of this rapidly evolving scam epidemic.

Browser Push Notifications Exploited by Matrix Push C2

🔔 BlackFrog has identified a new command-and-control platform, Matrix Push C2, that abuses browser push notifications to deliver phishing and malware. The campaign social-engineers users into allowing notifications and then issues realistic system-style alerts that redirect victims to malicious sites. Described as fileless, the technique leverages the browser notification channel rather than an initial executable. The platform includes a web dashboard with real-time client visibility, analytics and templates impersonating services like MetaMask, Netflix and PayPal.

Turning Threat Intelligence into Real Security Wins

🛡️ Modern SOCs drown in threat feeds; the problem is not data but converting it into repeatable decisions. The article lays out an operating model that makes CTI a business capability by centring work on Priority Intelligence Requirements (PIRs), engineering a single pipeline for collection, normalization and automated enrichment, and prioritizing behaviour‑first detections mapped to MITRE ATT&CK. It prescribes SOAR orchestration with human checkpoints, de‑duplication and scoring by relevance and visibility, and integration of intel into incident response and threat hunting. The result: measurable loss avoidance, reclaimed analyst capacity and executive reporting that drives concrete decisions.

Industrialization of Cybercrime: AI, Speed, Defense

🤖 FortiGuard Labs warns that by 2026 cybercrime will transition from ad hoc innovation to industrialized throughput, driven by AI, automation, and a mature supply chain. Attackers will automate reconnaissance, lateral movement, and data monetization, shrinking attack timelines from days to minutes. Defenders must adopt machine-speed operations, continuous threat exposure management, and identity-centric controls to compress detection and response. Global collaboration and targeted disruption will be essential to deter large-scale criminal infrastructure.

Why Cyber Insurance Fails When Security Hygiene Is Poor

⚠️ Cyber insurance has become a boardroom staple, but it often creates a false sense of protection. Policies limit financial exposure but are not a blank check: insurers increasingly require documented controls and may reduce, delay, or deny claims when basic security hygiene—patching, access controls, logging, MFA, or incident readiness—is lacking. Relying on coverage without fixing these foundational failures leaves organizations exposed to financial, operational, and reputational harm.

Ransomware Shifts Focus to AWS S3 Buckets and Keys

🔐 A Trend Micro analysis warns ransomware actors are increasingly targeting cloud storage by abusing AWS-native encryption and key management to render S3 data unrecoverable. Attackers probe buckets with disabled versioning or Object Lock, exploit wide write permissions, and weaponize SSE-KMS, SSE-C, BYOK and XKS to seize control of keys. Researchers recommend least-privilege IAM, enable versioning/Object Lock, isolate backups, and continuously monitor audit logs. An "assume breach" posture and short-lived credentials are urged to limit impact.

Differentiating NDR, EDR and XDR for Threat Response

🔍 This article explains key differences between NDR, EDR and XDR and why a combined approach strengthens defense. EDR monitors endpoints using agents to detect local anomalies and malware but can leave visibility gaps where agents cannot be deployed or are bypassed. NDR analyzes packet-level traffic in real time and provides retrospective forensics to trace lateral movement and assess breaches. XDR is a strategy unifying telemetry from multiple tools, but without network context it can create blind spots.