All news in category “Threat and Trends Reports”

🔍 Organizations are facing a growing threat from applicants who pose as legitimate job seekers but are in fact operatives tied to overseas actor networks. Recent cases — including a July 2024 incident at KnowBe4 and longer running campaigns tracked as WageMole and DeceptiveDevelopment — show perpetrators use stolen identities, deepfakes and remote infrastructure to gain employment. The article outlines practical detection cues for recruitment teams and containment steps to limit insider risk.

🛡️ Herodotus is a newly observed Android malware family offered as a MaaS that deliberately mimics human input timing to evade behavior-based detection. Threat Fabric says operators likely linked to Brokewell are distributing a dropper via smishing targeting Italian and Brazilian users. The installer requests Accessibility access and uses deceptive overlays to hide permission flows while a built-in "humanizer" inserts randomized 0.3–3s delays between keystrokes to imitate human typing. Users should avoid sideloading APKs, enable Play Protect, and promptly review or revoke Accessibility permissions for unfamiliar apps.

🔒 A recent PPI survey of 50 banks and 53 insurers in Germany reports a sixfold rise in cyberattacks compared with 2021. Sixty-four percent of respondents now view cyberattacks as the sector's top challenge, ahead of digitization, credit quality and regulation. Firms cite low employee awareness and difficulty with real-time detection; malware installation and IT disruption are the most frequent attack types.

📡 The Resilience Risk Operations Center (ROC) reframes cyber defense by fusing technical, business and financial intelligence into a single operating environment. Rather than relying solely on a traditional SOC that reacts to alerts, the ROC prioritizes threats using actuarial and claims data to show potential financial impact and guide urgent decisions. Inspired by the US Air Force AOC, it co-locates multidisciplinary experts to anticipate attacks and accelerate response. Early use, including response to an April 2024 VPN zero-day, showed faster mitigation and reduced losses.

🛡️ Roughly 70% of senior security leaders say internal conflicts during a cyber crisis cause more disruption than the attack itself, according to the Cytactic 2025 State of Cyber Incident Response Management (CIRM) Report. The survey of 480 US cybersecurity executives highlights blurred authority, poor communication, and unrehearsed roles that delay response. Experts recommend demonstrating security's business value, reducing operational friction with passwordless controls, and aligning incentives with lines of business.

🔍 As organizations outsource more critical systems and security functions to managed service providers, the complexity and frequency of third-party incidents are rising — 47% of organizations reported a third-party breach in the 12 months to mid-2025. Security leaders must balance rigorous, standards-based assurance (for example ISO 27001 or SOC 2) with relationship-driven vetting that fosters transparency and shared responsibility. Experts from media company Advance, the University of Queensland and vendor advisors argue that questionnaires alone are insufficient: meaningful dialogue, selective disclosure (summaries of pen tests rather than full reports), contractual clarity, and AI-aware controls are all needed to assess and manage evolving risks.

🔒 Coveware reports ransomware payment rates have fallen to a record low — just 23% of victims paid in Q3 2025, continuing a multi-year decline from 28% in Q1 2024. Over 76% of incidents now involve data exfiltration, and theft-only cases see payments drop to 19%. Average and median ransoms fell to $377,000 and $140,000, respectively, as attackers pursue more targeted victims.

🚨 Europol has issued a Position Paper warning of a rising wave of caller ID spoofing, where criminals falsify numbers to impersonate banks, government bodies or relatives. The agency estimates global losses around €850m annually and reports spoofing now underpins roughly 64% of phone- and SMS-related fraud. Europol calls for harmonized technical standards, stronger cross-border cooperation and regulatory convergence to make spoofing harder to perpetrate and easier to investigate.

🔒 Intruder’s 2025 Exposure Management Index analyzes scans from over 3,000 small and midsize businesses to show defenders adapting under mounting pressure. High-severity vulnerabilities rose nearly 20% year‑on‑year, even as 89% of resolved critical flaws were remediated within 30 days (up from 75% in 2024). The report highlights AI-driven exploit development, growing attack surfaces from cloud, shadow IT and supply‑chain risk, and faster remediation at smaller firms.

📊 Cloudflare explains why measuring the Internet is uniquely difficult and how rigorous methodology, ethics, and clear representation make findings reliable. An internal February 2022 Lviv traffic spike illustrates how context and complementary data can prevent misclassification of benign events as attacks. The post contrasts active and passive techniques and direct versus indirect measurement, outlines a lifecycle of curation, modeling, and validation, and stresses low-impact, ethical approaches. It concludes by inviting collaboration and continued exploration of passive measurement methods.

📡 This week Cloudflare Research publishes a series of posts revealing methods and findings that advance a more measurable, resilient, and transparent Internet. The series explores Internet measurement fundamentals, resilience frameworks, post-quantum deployment, and networking innovations, with deep dives into products such as Cloudflare Radar and experiments like Merkle Tree Certificates. Expect practical analysis, IETF-aligned protocol discussion, and real-world deployment considerations.

🔍 During a 2022 internship at Cloudflare, Ram Sundara Raman examined whether connection tampering by network middleboxes can be detected using only passive production data. He sampled one in 10,000 TCP connections and logged the first ten inbound packets, then developed 19 tampering signatures while confronting scale, noisy telemetry, and limited ground truth. The work exposed practical limits of passive observation and the care required to interpret packet-level signals, and its outputs are published on Cloudflare Radar.

🔎 Operating from Jakarta, First Wap markets a covert phone-tracking system called Altamides that leverages the legacy telecom protocol SS7 to locate subscribers in real time. Unlike device-targeting spyware such as Pegasus, Altamides requires no malicious link or implant and leaves minimal forensic traces on phones. Reporting from Mother Jones and Lighthouse Reports traces how permissive export rules and a global client network have allowed this capability to spread.

💷 The UK saw a 17% annual rise in consumer fraud cases in H1 2025, with total losses of £629m across 2.1 million incidents, according to UK Finance’s Half Year Fraud Report 2025. Authorized push payment (APP) losses increased 12% despite an 8% decline in APP case numbers, driven largely by investment and romance scams originating on social media. Card-not-present activity pushed card losses to £299m, and criminals are increasingly using social engineering and compromised OTPs to scale attacks.

🛡️ Managed detection and response (MDR) helps managed service providers (MSPs) overcome talent shortages, alert overload and rapidly evolving threats by outsourcing 24/7 SOC monitoring, behavioral detection, threat hunting and automated incident response. MDR can open recurring revenue streams, strengthen customer relationships and meet cyberinsurance conditions, while intelligent prioritization and GenAI-assisted playbooks reduce operational strain and false positives. Choosing a partner with proven threat intelligence, continuous operations and a human-plus-machine approach is critical.

🔒 Security leaders face a rapidly evolving threat landscape driven by AI, constrained budgets, talent shortages, and a vastly expanded attack surface. Many organizations rushed into AI adoption before security controls matured, and CISOs report growing involvement in AI governance and implementation even while attackers leverage AI to compress time-to-compromise. Data protection, employee susceptibility to sophisticated scams, quantum readiness, and board alignment emerge as immediate priorities that require clearer risk-based decisions and frequent simulation exercises.

🔍 Cisco Talos details widespread Qilin ransomware operations observed in late 2025, highlighting persistent leak-site activity and sustained victim publication. The analysis links many intrusions to exposed administrative credentials and unprotected remote access, with manufacturing, professional services, and wholesale trade heavily affected. Talos documents abuse of open-source exfiltration tools (notably Cyberduck), dual-encryptor deployment patterns, credential harvesting with mimikatz and SharpDecryptPwd, and numerous defense-evasion techniques, recommending layered controls such as MFA, credential monitoring, and hardened backups.

🛡️ Attackers have compiled the open-source RedTiger red-team tool into a Windows infostealer that harvests Discord account tokens, payment details, browser credentials, crypto wallet files, and game data. The malware injects JavaScript into Discord's client to capture logins, purchases, and password changes, archives stolen data, and uploads it to GoFile. Users should revoke tokens, change passwords, reinstall Discord from the official site, clear browser data, and enable MFA.

🔍 AzureHound is an open-source Go-based enumeration tool designed for cloud discovery and red-team assessments that threat actors also misuse to map Entra ID and Azure resources. Unit 42 outlines how adversaries leverage Microsoft Graph and Azure REST APIs to enumerate users, groups, roles, storage and services and to identify privilege escalation paths. The report highlights observable artifacts such as the user-agent azurehound/ and discusses detection opportunities in Microsoft Graph, Entra ID sign-in logs and Cortex XQL hunts. Practical mitigations include phishing-resistant MFA, Conditional Access Policies, token binding and broad endpoint and cloud visibility.

🔍 The Unit 42 2025 Incident Response analysis explains that attackers exploit complexity, visibility gaps and excessive trust to succeed against organizations of all sizes. The report notes almost a third of incidents were cloud-related, IAM failures appeared in 41% of cases and attackers often moved within an hour, causing outsized disruption and cost. The recommended response is to consolidate telemetry into an integrated platform like Cortex, extend protection into cloud with Cortex Cloud, secure browser activity with Prisma Browser, and engage Unit 42 for advisory and retainer services.