All news in category "Threat and Trends Reports"

How Social Engineering Works — Unlocked 403 Podcast S2E6

🔍 In this episode of Unlocked 403, host Becks speaks with Alena Košinárová, a software engineer at ESET, to unpack the psychological tactics behind social engineering and why people fall for scams even when they know better. They discuss how public information and social media amplify attackers' effectiveness and outline practical measures to reduce exposure. The segment balances behavioral insight with clear, actionable defenses.

Modern Software Supply-Chain Attacks and Impact Today

🔒 Modern supply-chain incidents like the Chalk and Debug hijacks show that impact goes far beyond direct financial theft. Response teams worldwide paused work, scanned environments, and executed remediation efforts even though researchers at Socket Security traced the attackers' on-chain haul to roughly $600. The larger cost is operational disruption, repeated investigations, and erosion of trust across OSS ecosystems. Organizations must protect people, registries, and CI/CD pipelines to contain downstream contamination.

OAuth Device Code Phishing: Azure vs Google Compared

🔐 Matt Kiely of Huntress examines how the OAuth 2.0 device code flow enables phishing and highlights stark differences between Microsoft and Google. He walks through the device-code attack chain — generating a device code, social-engineering a user to enter it on a legitimate site, and polling the token endpoint to harvest access and refresh tokens. The analysis shows Azure’s implementation lets attackers control client_id and resource parameters to obtain powerful tokens, while Google’s implementation restricts device-code scopes and requires app controls that significantly limit abuse. Practical examples, cURL/Python snippets, and mitigation advice are included for defenders.

Cloudflare analysis confirms Turkmenistan IP changes

🔍 Cloudflare researchers revisited historic telemetry to assess reports that Turkmenistan experienced an unprecedented easing of IP address blocking in mid‑2024 and may have been testing a new firewall. Using Radar metrics, they observed a clear surge in HTTP requests beginning in mid‑June, alongside shifts in TCP reset and timeout patterns. These connection anomalies manifested at different stages of the TCP lifecycle across multiple autonomous systems, and while the data cannot provide attribution, the observed patterns are consistent with large‑scale filtering or firewall testing.

Weekly Recap: Lazarus Web3 Attacks and TEE.Fail Risks

🔐 This week's recap highlights a broad set of high‑impact threats, from a suspected China‑linked intrusion exploiting a critical Motex Lanscope flaw to deploy Gokcpdoor, to North Korean BlueNoroff campaigns targeting Web3 executives. Researchers disclosed TEE.fail, a low‑cost DDR5 side‑channel that can extract secrets from Intel and AMD TEEs. Also noted: human‑mimicking Android banking malware, WSL‑based ransomware tactics, and multiple high‑priority CVEs.

Continuous Exposure Management Transforms SOC Ops Today

🔍 SOC analysts are increasingly overwhelmed by alert volume and contextual blind spots that force extensive manual triage. Continuous exposure management brings environment-specific intelligence into existing EDR, SIEM, and SOAR workflows to prioritize assets, validate exploitability, and visualize attack paths. By correlating exposures with MITRE ATT&CK techniques and automating remediation workflows, teams reduce false positives, accelerate investigations, and harden detections over time.

BankBot-YNRK and DeliveryRAT: New Android Banking Threats

🔒 Cybersecurity researchers CYFIRMA and independent analyst F6 have disclosed two active Android trojans—BankBot‑YNRK and DeliveryRAT—that harvest financial and device data from compromised phones. BankBot‑YNRK impersonates an Indonesian government app, performs device fingerprinting and anti-emulation checks, abuses accessibility services to steal credentials and automate transactions, and communicates with a command server. DeliveryRAT, promoted via a Telegram bot, lures Russian users with fake delivery and marketplace apps and delivers malware-as-a-service variants that collect notifications, SMS and call logs and can hide their launchers. Users should avoid untrusted APKs, review permissions, and keep devices updated—Android 14 reduces some accessibility-based abuses.

Hacktivists Target Internet-Exposed Industrial Controls

⚠️ The Canadian Centre for Cyber Security warns hacktivists are increasingly exploiting internet-accessible industrial control systems (ICS), citing recent intrusions that affected a water utility, an oil and gas automated tank gauge (ATG), and a farm's grain-drying silo. Attackers manipulated pressure, fuel-gauge, and environmental controls, creating safety and service disruptions. The alert urges secure remote access via VPNs with MFA and inventories of OT assets. Provincial and municipal coordination is recommended to protect sectors lacking cybersecurity oversight.

Ground Zero: Five Critical Steps After a Cyberattack

🛡️ Rapid, methodical incident response is essential when you suspect unauthorized access. Activating a rehearsed IR plan and notifying a cross-functional incident team (including HR, PR, legal and executives) helps you quickly establish scope, preserve evidence and maintain chain of custody. Contain affected systems without destroying forensic data, protect offline backups, notify regulators, insurers and law enforcement, then proceed to eradication, recovery and hardening.

European Ransomware Leak-Site Victims Spike in 2025

🔒 CrowdStrike's 2025 European Threat Landscape Report found a 13% year-on-year rise in ransomware victims across Europe, with the UK hardest hit. The study, covering leak sites from September 2024 to August 2025, identified 1,380 victims and noted that since January 2024 more than 2,100 organisations were named on extortion sites, with 92% involving file encryption and data theft. The report highlights Akira and LockBit as the most active groups and warns of persistent big-game hunting, growing vishing campaigns and an emerging Violence-as-a-Service threat landscape.

Aligning Security with Business Strategy: Practical Steps

🤝 Security leaders must move beyond a risk-only mindset to actively support business goals, as Jungheinrich CISO Tim Sattler demonstrates by joining his company’s AI center of excellence to advise on both risks and opportunities. Industry research shows significant gaps—only 13% of CISOs are consulted early on major strategic decisions and many struggle to articulate value beyond mitigation. Practical alignment means embedding security into initiatives, using business metrics to measure effectiveness, and prioritizing controls that enable growth rather than impede operations.

2025 European Threat Landscape: Extortion and State Activity

🔍 CrowdStrike’s 2025 European Threat Landscape Report reveals rising extortion and intensifying nation-state operations across Europe, with Big Game Hunting (BGH) actors naming roughly 2,100 Europe-based victims on more than 100 dedicated leak sites since January 1, 2024. The United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, France and Spain are most targeted, across sectors such as manufacturing, professional services, technology, industrials and retail. The report details an active cybercrime ecosystem — forums, encrypted apps and marketplaces — and notes enabling techniques like voice phishing and fake CAPTCHA lures, while geopolitical conflicts drive expanded Russian-, Chinese-, Iranian- and DPRK-linked operations.

Hunting BGP Zombies: Causes, Effects, and Mitigations

🧟 Cloudflare details 'BGP zombies' — routes that remain in the Default-Free Zone after a withdrawal due to path hunting, delayed processing, or MRAI timers. Through experiments and BYOIP on-demand tests, they show how more-specific withdrawals can trigger loops and long-lived reachability issues, often worse on IPv4. Cloudflare proposes graceful draining, a multi-step BYOIP failover using same-length native announcements, and vendor adoption of RFC9687 to reduce impact.

Why Password Controls Still Matter in Cybersecurity

🔒 In January 2024, Russian attackers bypassed layered defenses at Microsoft, underscoring that passwords remain a primary attack vector in complex IT environments. The article identifies frequent failure points such as forgotten legacy accounts and predictable user patterns, and recommends adaptive controls: advanced banned password lists, nuanced rotation policies, long memorable passphrases, and risk-based authentication. It also advises a staged rollout with user education, clear KPIs, and practical self-service resets, and highlights Specops Password Policy as a tool that scans Active Directory against billions of compromised passwords.

Large-Scale AWS Credential Abuse and SES Exploitation

🔐 Identity compromise is driving large-scale AWS abuse, with attackers leveraging stolen access keys to test accounts and weaponize Amazon SES for Business Email Compromise and invoice fraud. FortiGuard Labs attributes the reconnaissance layer to a campaign named TruffleNet that uses TruffleHog and automated AWS CLI/Boto3 requests to validate credentials and probe SES quotas. Fortinet recommends continuous monitoring, least-privilege access, MFA, and integrated detection via FortiCNAPP and related controls to detect and block these activities.

MSP Cybersecurity Readiness: Turn Security Into Growth

🔒 The Hacker News guide helps MSPs evaluate readiness to expand into advanced cybersecurity and compliance services. It highlights two essential dimensions — mindset and operational readiness — and provides a practical checklist covering service definition, staffing, tools, processes, sales capability, and financial planning. The guide reframes security as a business enabler rather than a technical checkbox.

The Unified Linkage Model: Reframing Cyber Risk in Practice

🔗The Unified Linkage Model (ULM) reframes cyber risk by focusing on the relationships — not just individual assets — that allow vulnerabilities and adversaries to propagate across systems. Drawing on the Okta 2023 support-credential compromise, the model highlights three structural linkage types: adjacency, inheritance and trustworthiness. ULM shifts analysis from topology or isolated CVE lists to the connective tissue that enables systemic exposure. Applied correctly, it clarifies prioritization, accelerates impact analysis and unifies threat and vulnerability data into actionable risk pathways.

Agent Session Smuggling Threatens Stateful A2A Systems

🔒 Unit42 researchers Jay Chen and Royce Lu describe agent session smuggling, a technique where a malicious AI agent exploits stateful A2A sessions to inject hidden, multi‑turn instructions into a victim agent. By hiding intermediate interactions in session history, an attacker can perform context poisoning, exfiltrate sensitive data, or trigger unauthorized tool actions while presenting only the expected final response to users. The authors present two PoCs (using Google's ADK) showing sensitive information leakage and unauthorized trades, and recommend layered defenses including human‑in‑the‑loop approvals, cryptographic AgentCards, and context‑grounding checks.

October 2025: Key Cybersecurity Stories and Guidance

🔒 As October 2025 concludes, ESET Chief Security Evangelist Tony Anscombe reviews the month’s most significant cybersecurity developments and what they mean for defenders. He highlights that Windows 10 reached end of support on October 14 and outlines practical options for affected users and organizations. He also warns about info‑stealing malware spread through TikTok videos posing as free activation guides and summarizes Microsoft’s report that Russia, China, Iran and North Korea are increasingly using AI in cyberattacks — alongside China’s accusation of an NSA operation targeting its National Time Service Center.

Surge in NFC Relay Malware Targeting European Cards

📱Zimperium reports a sharp rise in Android apps abusing Host Card Emulation (HCE) to steal contactless payment card data across Eastern Europe. Researchers observed over 760 malicious APKs and 70+ command-and-control servers that capture EMV fields, respond to POS APDU commands, or forward requests to remote servers. Variants include data exfiltration to Telegram, relay toolkits, 'ghost-tap' real-time HCE manipulation, and fake payment apps impersonating Google Pay and regional banks. Users are advised to avoid sideloading APKs, restrict NFC permissions, run Play Protect, and disable NFC when not in use.