All news with #ai security tag

Forrester: Microsoft Defender Delivers 242% ROI Over 3 Years

🔒 Microsoft’s latest Forrester TEI study found a 242% return on investment over three years for organizations using Microsoft Defender. The analysis attributes $17.8 million in total benefits and reports an average payback period of less than six months for a composite organization. Integrated with Microsoft Sentinel, Defender streamlines SecOps by consolidating tooling, lowering false positives, and accelerating response through automation and KQL-enabled detections. Customers cite improved visibility across hybrid and multicloud environments and reduced operational overhead.

Check Point Honors Top Asia Pacific Partners in 2025

🤝 Check Point Software Technologies recognised top-performing partners across Asia Pacific at its 2025 Partner Conference held 8-11 September at the JW Marriott Hanoi. Nearly 200 regional partners gathered to address rising AI-driven cyber threats, share best practices and strengthen go-to-market strategies. As a 100% partner-led organisation, Check Point celebrated channel excellence with awards that honoured innovation, collaboration and outstanding adoption of its unified security portfolio. The event reinforced the ecosystem’s central role in securing organizations across the region.

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.

How CISOs Can Build Effective AI Governance Programs

🛡️ AI's rapid enterprise adoption requires CISOs to replace inflexible bans with living governance that both protects data and accelerates innovation. The article outlines three practical components: gaining ground truth visibility with AI inventories, AIBOMs and model registries; aligning policies to the organization's speed so governance is executable; and making governance sustainable by provisioning secure tools and rewarding compliant behavior. It highlights SANS guidance and training to help operationalize these approaches.

Mind the Gap: TOCTOU Vulnerabilities in LLM-Enabled Agents

⚠️A new study, “Mind the Gap,” examines time-of-check to time-of-use (TOCTOU) flaws in LLM-enabled agents and introduces TOCTOU-Bench, a 66-task benchmark. The authors demonstrate practical attacks such as malicious configuration swaps and payload injection and evaluate defenses adapted from systems security. Their mitigations—prompt rewriting, state integrity monitoring, and tool-fusing—achieve up to 25% automated detection and materially reduce the attack window and executed vulnerabilities.

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.

Where CISOs Should See Splunk Go Next: AI & Resilience

🔍 At .Conf in Boston, Splunk and parent company Cisco positioned machine data as central to next‑generation AI incident response, arguing telemetry represents roughly 55% of global data growth. They stressed tighter integration of security and observability, a federated data model with new support for Snowflake, and standards work such as OpenTelemetry and the Open Cybersecurity Framework (OCSF). Splunk also previewed enhanced security operations capabilities — a premier Enterprise Security bundle, Detection Studio, and agentic AI features — while acknowledging customer concerns about costs, legacy positioning, and support.

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.

CrowdStrike Enhances GenAI Data Protection Across Platforms

🔒 CrowdStrike announces four new innovations in Falcon Data Protection to help organizations prevent GenAI-driven data leaks across endpoints, cloud, SaaS and AI tools. The updates include real-time GenAI protections that span browsers, local apps and shadow AI services, unified out-of-the-box detections, AI-powered classifications, and a consolidated Insider Risk dashboard. Beta and general availability windows span late 2025 through mid-2026, with cloud features prioritized earlier.

Blueprint for Building Safe and Secure AI Agents at Scale

🔒 Azure outlines a layered blueprint for building trustworthy, enterprise-grade AI agents. The post emphasizes identity, data protection, built-in controls, continuous evaluation, and monitoring to address risks like data leakage, prompt injection, and agent sprawl. Azure AI Foundry introduces Entra Agent ID, cross-prompt injection classifiers, risk and safety evaluations, and integrations with Microsoft Purview and Defender. Join Microsoft Secure on September 30 to learn about Foundry's newest capabilities.

Shai-Hulud Worm: Large npm Supply Chain Compromise

🪱 Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 is investigating an active supply chain attack in the npm ecosystem driven by a novel self-replicating worm tracked as "Shai-Hulud." The malware has compromised more than 180 packages, including high-impact libraries such as @ctrl/tinycolor, and automates credential theft, repository creation, and propagation across maintainers' packages. Unit 42 assesses with moderate confidence that an LLM assisted in authoring the malicious bash payload. Customers are protected through Cortex Cloud, Prisma Cloud, Cortex XDR and Advanced WildFire, and Unit 42 recommends immediate credential rotation, dependency audits, and enforcement of MFA.

TA558 Deploys AI-Generated Scripts to Install Venom RAT

⚠️Kaspersky tracked TA558, operating under the cluster known as RevengeHotels, using AI-generated JavaScript and PowerShell loaders in summer 2025 to deliver Venom RAT to hotels in Brazil and Spanish-speaking markets. Phishing emails in Portuguese and Spanish used reservation and job-application lures to coax users into running a WScript payload that chains to a PowerShell downloader fetching 'cargajecerrr.txt' and subsequent loaders. The Venom RAT, based on Quasar, includes data-stealing, reverse-proxy, persistence and aggressive anti-kill features aimed at harvesting payment card data from hotel systems and OTAs.

Securing Remote MCP Servers on Google Cloud Platform

🔒 A centralized proxy architecture on Google Cloud can secure remote Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers by intercepting tool calls and enforcing consistent policies across deployments. Author Lanre Ogunmola outlines five core MCP risks — unauthorized tool exposure, session hijacking, tool shadowing, token/theft and authentication bypass — and recommends an MCP proxy (Cloud Run, GKE, or Apigee) integrated with Cloud Armor, Secret Manager, and identity services for access control, secret scanning, and monitoring. The post emphasizes layered defenses including Model Armor for prompt/response screening and centralized logging to reduce blind spots and operational overhead.

New LLM Attack Vectors and Practical Security Steps

🔐This article reviews emerging attack vectors against large language model assistants demonstrated in 2025, highlighting research from Black Hat and other teams. Researchers showed how prompt injections or so‑called promptware — hidden instructions embedded in calendar invites, emails, images, or audio — can coerce assistants like Gemini, Copilot, and Claude into leaking data or performing unauthorized actions. Practical mitigations include early threat modeling, role‑based access for agents, mandatory human confirmation for high‑risk operations, vendor audits, and role‑specific employee training.

Check Point Acquires Lakera to Build AI Security Stack

🔐 Check Point has agreed to acquire Lakera, an AI-native security platform focused on protecting agentic AI and LLM-based deployments, in a deal expected to close in Q4 2025 for an undisclosed sum. Lakera’s Gandalf adversarial engine reportedly leverages over 80 million attack patterns and delivers detection rates above 98% with sub-50ms latency and low false positives. Check Point will embed Lakera into the Infinity architecture, initially integrating into CloudGuard WAF and GenAI Protect, offering near-immediate, API-based protection as an add-on for existing customers.

Satisfaction Analysis for Untagged Chatbot Conversations

🔎 This article examines methods to infer user satisfaction from untagged chatbot conversations by combining linguistic and behavioral signals. It argues that conventional metrics such as accuracy and completion rates often miss subtle indicators of user sentiment, and recommends unsupervised and weakly supervised NLP techniques to surface those signals. The post highlights practical considerations including privacy-preserving aggregation, deployment complexity, and the potential business benefit of reducing churn and improving customer experience through targeted dialog improvements.

California Modernizes Public Services with Google Cloud

🚀 California is partnering with Google Cloud to modernize state and local services by applying AI, security, and infrastructure solutions. Agencies such as Covered California use Document AI, Assured Workloads, and AI-driven security to speed eligibility decisions and protect sensitive data. Universities including UCR and Caltech are using Vertex AI and AI-optimized HPC for research acceleration. Workspace, Gemini, and Agentspace are cited as productivity and information-management enablers.

Securing AI: End-to-End Protection with Prisma AIRS

🔒Prisma AIRS offers unified, AI-native security across the full AI lifecycle, from model development and training to deployment and runtime monitoring. The platform focuses on five core capabilities—model scanning, posture management, AI red teaming, runtime security and agent protection—to detect and mitigate threats such as prompt injection, data poisoning and tool misuse. By consolidating workflows and sharing intelligence across Prisma, it aims to simplify operations, accelerate remediation and reduce total cost of ownership so organizations can deploy bravely.

Preparing Organizations for the AI and Quantum Threat

🔒 This upcoming 60‑minute webinar examines how quantum computing and AI are jointly reshaping cybersecurity and accelerating new attack vectors. Top experts will cut through the hype to explain quantum-safe cryptography, practical defenses against AI-driven phishing and "harvest now, decrypt later" risks, and industry-specific controls for finance, healthcare, and critical infrastructure. Attendees will leave with a concrete roadmap for assessment, deployment, and ongoing resilience. Seats are limited.

Microsoft Disrupts RaccoonO365 Phishing Kit Network

🛡️ Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit says it has dismantled the infrastructure behind RaccoonO365, seizing 338 malicious websites tied to the Storm-2246 phishing kit. The DCU, acting under a court order from the Southern District of New York, identified Nigeria-based operator Joshua Ogundipe and disrupted a Telegram-based subscription service with roughly 850 members. Microsoft says the service, launched July 2024, enabled the theft of thousands of Microsoft365 credentials, included tools to bypass MFA, and recently promoted an AI-powered feature to scale attacks.