All news in category “Threat and Trends Reports”

🔒 PwC’s 29th Global CEO Survey of 4,454 executives finds cyber risk among the top threats as CEOs lose confidence in short-term growth. Nearly a third (31%) see high or extreme exposure to potential financial loss from cyber attacks, and 84% plan enterprise-wide cybersecurity improvements. PwC recommends investing in data, processes and responsible AI to help preserve stakeholder trust.

🔍 Group-IB's January report argues that AI has created a new 'fifth wave' of cybercrime by turning advanced skills into inexpensive, scalable services that make attacks cheaper and faster. Analysts documented low-cost synthetic identity kits, deepfake-as-a-service subscriptions and biometric datasets sold for as little as $5, plus subscription dark LLMs. The firm highlights agentized phishing that automates lure creation, delivery and campaign adaptation and the rise of self-hosted dark LLMs used to generate scams, malware and exploit code.

🔒 Orphan accounts — abandoned human, service, and AI‑agent identities — create persistent, unseen access across applications, platforms, assets, and cloud consoles. These dormant accounts often evade traditional IAM and IGA tools due to integration gaps, unclear ownership, and proliferation of non‑human identities. Continuous identity audit using application telemetry and a unified audit trail can detect, flag, and automatically remediate or decommission orphaned accounts. Orchid positions its Identity Audit as connective evidence to inform IAM decisions.

🔐 Intruder's research scanned roughly 5 million web applications and identified over 42,000 exposed tokens across 334 secret types, revealing widespread leakage in front-end JavaScript bundles. The report shows how traditional path-and-regex scanners, many SAST tools, and some DAST deployments miss secrets introduced during build and deployment, especially in SPAs. High-impact findings included active GitHub/GitLab personal access tokens, project-management API keys, and hundreds of live webhooks; Intruder developed automated SPA secrets detection to close these gaps.

🔒 Modern security must treat identity as the perimeter rather than the network. As remote work and cloud adoption dissolved traditional edges, attackers increasingly target credentials — a trend underscored by reports from Verizon, Microsoft and Okta — making identity the primary attack surface. Organizations must adopt Zero Trust identity controls such as MFA, SSO, RBAC, PAM, device trust and continuous, adaptive monitoring, and treat identity lifecycle and privilege management as core infrastructure.

🔐 Two 2025 analyses by NordPass and Comparitech show that simple numeric strings like '123456' continue to dominate leaked password lists worldwide. Across 44 countries, 25% of the top 1,000 passwords are purely numeric, while predictable entries such as 'admin', '12345678' and '12345' remain widespread, including in the US and UK. Security advice is clear: change weak or reused passwords, use a reputable password manager, and enable two‑factor authentication or passkeys to reduce account takeover risk. Organizations should combine technical controls with user training to mitigate large‑scale exposure.

⚠️ Organizations should treat the Y2K38 'Epochalypse' as an actionable vulnerability with a fixed deadline: 19 January 2038 at 03:14:07 UTC. Caused by 32‑bit signed Unix epoch counters overflowing, it can roll devices back to 1901 and disrupt payments, medical equipment, industrial control, and certificate validation. Effective mitigation requires a comprehensive inventory, vendor coordination, isolated testing, and migration to 64‑bit time or replacement.

🔒 Resecurity researchers have identified a sophisticated backdoor called PDFSIDER, delivered via DLL side-loading from a trojanized, digitally signed PDF utility. The malware embeds the Botan crypto library and uses AES-256-GCM for an encrypted C2 channel, executing commands via cmd.exe entirely in memory and returning output over anonymous pipes. It performs anti-VM and debugger checks, exfiltrates data (including over DNS/53), and is assessed as targeted tradecraft that evades many AV and EDR products.

⚠️ Recent analysis highlights that major DevOps SaaS platforms (e.g., GitHub, Jira, Azure DevOps) experienced widespread incidents in 2024–2025, with critical outages and degraded-service hours increasing sharply year‑over‑year. The piece argues the Shared Responsibility model leaves customers ultimately accountable for their data, and that native provider backups often create single points of failure with limited restore flexibility. It recommends multi‑layered, immutable backups, cross‑restore capability, defined RTO/RPOs, and continuous recovery testing to reduce financial, operational, and compliance risk.

🔍 Organizational culture — not the tools — is the decisive factor in security outcomes. The piece identifies three interrelated layers: observable (policies, controls, visible behaviors), non-observable (beliefs, biases, risk perception) and implicit (unspoken norms and power dynamics) that together determine whether controls work in practice. It uses high-profile breaches and a deep dive into a mid-sized financial firm to show how misaligned incentives, leadership signals and psychological safety can nullify even well-built technical defenses, and prescribes culture audits, leadership modeling, integrated DevSecOps and incentive changes to effect durable improvement.

🔒 A Nardello & Co. survey of 250 senior leaders at UK enterprises (turnover ≥£250m) finds cyber-related breaches are the top risk for 2026: 58% ranked them highest and around three-quarters doubt their ability to manage such incidents. About 20% reported a breach in the past two years. Compliance (37%) and financial crime (30%) are rising concerns amid stronger enforcement, including the UK's new Failure to Prevent Fraud offense. The report also flags readiness gaps: only 44% conduct pre‑hire screening, 48% provide anonymous whistleblowing and 59% deliver regular compliance training.

🔒 As CISOs prepare for 2026, seven pragmatic projects can strengthen defenses against evolving threats. Priorities include transforming identity and access to cover human and non-human agents and reinforcing email security. Organizations should leverage AI for vulnerability discovery and security automation, enforce enterprise AI governance, adopt a zero-trust-by-default posture, and unify data governance to reduce shadow data and compliance gaps.

🔍 Cybersecurity researchers disclosed an XSS vulnerability in the web-based control panel used by operators of the StealC information stealer. By exploiting it they collected system fingerprints, monitored active sessions, and stole session cookies from the infrastructure itself, according to CyberArk researcher Ari Novick. The panel's leaked source code and the stealer's distribution through the YouTube Ghost Network and other lures amplified the operational insights researchers gained. Full technical details were withheld to avoid enabling copycats.

🛡️ Expel researchers report that the JavaScript loader GootLoader is using deliberately malformed ZIP archives — concatenating 500–1,000 archives and truncating the EOCD — to evade analysis while remaining extractable by the default Windows unarchiver. The technique, described as hashbusting, ensures each archive is unique and frustrates automated tooling like WinRAR or 7-Zip. Distribution relies on SEO poisoning and malvertising, and the payload executes via wscript.exe, establishing persistence and launching PowerShell activity. Recommended mitigations include blocking wscript.exe/cscript.exe for downloaded content and configuring Group Policy to open .js in Notepad by default.

🔒 Brand impersonation—fake websites, domains, emails, ads, and social pages—is an increasingly common tactic used to harvest credentials, steal payments, distribute malware, and defraud customers and partners. Attackers exploit lookalike domains, SEO and paid ads, and phishing messages to lure victims; even imperfect forgeries can inflict financial, operational, and reputational harm. Organisations should monitor clones, maintain a visible trust centre, pursue rapid takedowns, block malicious domains internally, and coordinate legal, IT, and communications teams for fast response.

🔐 The World Economic Forum's Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2026 finds that advances in AI, geopolitical fragmentation and complex supply chains are intensifying cyber risk. Respondents named AI the top driver of change (94%) and reported rising AI-related vulnerabilities (87%), while confidence in national preparedness continued to fall. The report urges security-by-design, strong governance, and retained human oversight as organizations scale AI defenses. Notably, 64% now assess AI tools before deployment and 77% have deployed AI in security operations, though skills gaps and trust remain major obstacles.

🔐 eSentire's 2025 Year in Review (published 15 Jan 2026) documents a 389% year‑over‑year surge in account compromises, which accounted for 55% of observed attacks. Credential access comprised 75% of malicious activity, with Microsoft 365 accounts heavily targeted and two‑thirds of compromises used for account takeovers. Phishing‑as‑a‑service (PhaaS) kits — including Tycoon2FA, FlowerStorm and EvilProxy — fueled many Business Email Compromise operations, while malware represented 25% of threats, down slightly from 2024.

🔒Most people underestimate how much personal data is publicly available online. Exposed details — names, past addresses, phone numbers, family ties, and old usernames — make individuals easy targets for doxxing, scams, and stalking. The article advises removing data from people-search sites and directories, either manually or by using a data removal service such as Incogni, which automates searches and sends deletion requests. An Unlimited plan lets you submit custom removal links for broader coverage.

🔒 LinkedIn's vast professional network provides abundant intelligence that threat actors exploit to support spear-phishing, business email compromise and direct recruitment efforts. Profiles and connections help attackers craft highly credible lures, while messages sent within the platform can bypass corporate email controls. To reduce risk, users should limit public detail, enable MFA, maintain patched devices and complete targeted security awareness training focused on fake profiles and malicious DMs.

⚠️ Economic pressures, mass layoffs, and rapid AI adoption have pushed insider risk to multi-year highs. In 2025 tech companies announced roughly 245,000 job cuts while US employers logged more than 1.17 million cuts, fueling resentment, negligence, and opportunistic exfiltration. Autonomous AI agents — highlighted by Palo Alto Networks — expand the attack surface, introducing risks like goal hijacking, prompt injection, and shadow deployments that require urgent governance and monitoring.