All news with #threat report tag

🔍 Mandiant's M-Trends 2026 report finds the high-tech sector overtook finance as the most targeted industry in 2025, accounting for 17% of incident response investigations. The report also records a global median dwell time increase to 14 days and highlights widespread adoption of the ClickFix social-engineering technique. Analysts observed a surge in vishing and a strategic ransomware shift toward deliberate recovery denial, with attackers specifically targeting backups, identity services and virtualization management planes.

🔒 Varonis today announced general availability of Varonis Atlas, an end-to-end AI security platform that discovers, assesses, tests, and enforces controls across AI systems and the data they access. The platform integrates AI inventory, AI-SPM, pentesting, runtime guardrails, monitoring, AIDR, and third-party risk into a single solution built on the Varonis Data Security Platform. Atlas emphasizes data-aware security, customer-owned telemetry, and compliance reporting to help enterprises govern AI at scale.

🔒 M-Trends 2026 synthesizes findings from over 500,000 hours of Mandiant incident response in 2025 to profile evolving adversary tactics, techniques, and procedures and highlight defender gaps. The report calls out rising median dwell time, a collapse in the hand-off window between initial access brokers and secondary operators, and a shift toward voice phishing and edge-device persistence. It concludes with prioritized recommendations to strengthen identity controls, isolate critical control planes, extend telemetry retention, and adopt behavior-based detection.

🔍 The Beers with Talos B team (Hazel, Bill, Joe and Dave) reviews the 2025 Talos Year in Review and highlights the most consequential cyber trends of the year. They discuss the rapid weaponization of newly disclosed vulnerabilities, widespread identity abuse, evolving ransomware tactics, and a notable rise in APT investigations. The conversation also addresses cyber activity tied to the situation in the Middle East and offers practical priorities for defenders heading into the coming year.

🔍 Cisco Talos’ 2025 Year in Review analyzes how adversaries increased the speed and scale of operations, creating sustained pressure on defenders. The report highlights three central themes: rapid exploitation of both newly disclosed and long-standing CVEs, attackers targeting the architecture of trust (identity and device controls), and deliberate focus on centralized systems and shared frameworks to amplify impact. Talos emphasizes prioritized mitigations—timely patching, stronger identity controls, and resilience for shared components—and directs readers to the full, ungated report for detailed telemetry and actionable guidance.

🔐 The FBI warns that Iranian-linked actors, including Handala and a state-associated Homeland Justice group, are using Telegram as command-and-control infrastructure in Windows malware campaigns. Attackers employ social engineering to install malware that exfiltrates screenshots and files from journalists, dissidents, and opposition groups worldwide. The alert followed the seizure of four clearnet domains and references prior disruptive operations such as Handala's attack on Stryker.

🔎 Behavioral analytics and threat intelligence combined to identify a suspected North Korea-linked fake IT worker within 10 days of hire. LevelBlue SpiderLabs and Cybereason XDR flagged geolocation anomalies, unmanaged device access, and use of Astrill VPN, triggering a high-severity alert and timely account revocation. Organizations should enforce EntraID Conditional Access, manage endpoints, and maintain software baselines to detect such insider threats.

🚨 Insider threats are rising again: the Mimecast State of Human Risk Report found 42% of organizations saw increases in both malicious and negligent insider incidents, with an average of six insider-driven incidents per month at an estimated cost of $13.1 million per incident. Two-thirds of surveyed IT leaders expect insider-related data loss to grow over the next 12 months. Experts warn the insider perimeter now includes contractors, fraudulent hires, and AI agents, and they recommend adaptive, behavior-driven controls, coordinated legal/HR response plans, and extending protections to nonhuman identities to reduce risk.

🔓 VoidStealer, an information stealer offered as MaaS since mid‑December 2025, uses a debugger-based technique to extract Chrome's v20_master_key directly from memory. The malware starts a suspended, hidden browser process, attaches as a debugger, and waits for the target chrome.dll to load before setting hardware breakpoints on an instruction that references the key. When the breakpoint triggers during startup decryption, VoidStealer reads the register pointer and uses ReadProcessMemory to capture the plaintext key without privilege escalation. Gen Digital reports this is the first infostealer observed in the wild using this approach.

🔒 U.S. agencies warn that threat actors aligned with Russian intelligence are conducting targeted social-engineering phishing campaigns to compromise commercial messaging apps such as Signal and WhatsApp. The attacks have led to unauthorized access to thousands of accounts and involve impersonation of support personnel to request SMS codes, verification PINs, or to deliver malicious QR links. Victims who provide codes can lose account control, while those who scan attacker-controlled QR codes may have past and future messages exposed. Authorities advise never sharing verification codes and regularly reviewing linked devices in app settings.

🛡️ The actors behind the Trivy supply-chain compromise are now suspected of seeding a self-propagating worm called CanisterWorm, which uses an ICP canister (Internet Computer blockchain smart contract) as a decentralized dead drop for command-and-control. The chain abuses an npm postinstall hook to drop a Python backdoor and establishes persistence via a masquerading systemd user service that restarts automatically. A new variant harvests local npm tokens during postinstall and launches an automated propagation routine, turning compromised developers and CI pipelines into unwitting distributors.

🔍 Enterprises now sit directly in adversaries' collection paths: they may not be primary targets but their shared telecom, cloud, MSP, and identity dependencies are being exploited upstream. Commercial spyware like Predator and state‑aligned groups documented in Singapore's February 2026 telco breaches show how device and backbone compromises create persistent, upstream access. CISOs must assume provider compromise, demand attestation, harden session and identity layers, and shift detection to low‑noise, long‑duration intelligence operations.

🔒 Speagle is a newly identified malware that subverts the client and infrastructure of the legitimate document protection product Cobra DocGuard to harvest and exfiltrate sensitive information while masquerading as normal client-server traffic. Researchers at Symantec and Carbon Black (Broadcom) say the 32-bit .NET binary verifies the DocGuard installation, collects system and browser artefacts, and uses a compromised Cobra server for command-and-control and data theft. Tracked as Runningcrab, the activity appears narrowly targeted to environments running the security software and may stem from a supply-chain compromise; attribution remains unknown.

🚨 The U.S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control has sanctioned six individuals and two entities tied to a DPRK-run IT worker scheme that secured remote jobs, stole data, and funneled salaries back to North Korea to finance weapons programs. The operation—tracked as Coral Sleet/Jasper Sleet (also called PurpleDelta/Wagemole)—used stolen identities, fabricated personas, VPN services, and AI-enabled tools to conceal origins, launder funds, and deploy malware or extort victims. OFAC named Amnokgang Technology Development Company and several facilitators, currency converters, and account enablers; security firms and Microsoft warn the campaign leverages Astrill VPN, AI faceswaps, agentic LLM misuse, and offshore operations to maintain persistent, low-cost access.

🔒 The Interlock ransomware gang exploited a maximum-severity remote code execution flaw in Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center as a zero-day beginning January 26, 2026. Cisco released a patch for CVE-2026-20131 on March 4, warning it allowed unauthenticated attackers to execute arbitrary Java code as root on unpatched devices. Amazon's threat team reported Interlock had been exploiting the vulnerability for 36 days prior to public disclosure.

🔍 Rapid7's 2026 Global Threat Landscape Report finds AI and automation compressed the window between vulnerability disclosure and exploitation in 2025, turning what once unfolded over weeks into days or even minutes. The median time to inclusion on CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog fell from 8.5 days to five, and the mean dropped from 61 to 28.5 days. Confirmed exploitation of CVSS 7–10 flaws rose 105% YoY to 146 incidents, with deserialization, authentication bypass and memory corruption among the most targeted issues. Rapid7 urges CISOs to adopt pre-emptive security that reduces attack surface, prioritizes material risk and improves contextual detection and response.

🔎 In early 2026 Telegram intensified enforcement after the late‑2024 arrest of CEO Pavel Durov and a year of stricter moderation in 2025. Millions of channels were taken down, bans and automation grew, and platform transparency reached new highs. Despite these measures, cybercriminal ecosystems on Telegram have not shrunk; they have rapidly adapted through fragmentation, private groups, automated tooling and alternative hosting. Check Point's Exposure Management intelligence highlights these shifts and explains why takedowns have reduced visibility but not eliminated illicit activity.

🛡️ The 2026 Armis Cyberwarfare Report found that 54% of UK companies experienced nation-state attacks last year, up from 47% previously. Based on interviews with 1,900 IT decision-makers (including 500 in the UK) and Armis Labs data, the study highlights growing fear over AI-powered threats and the weakening deterrent effect of "mutually assured disruption." Respondents identified Russia, China and North Korea as the greatest risks.

🔒 The Pentera AI and Adversarial Testing Benchmark Report 2026, based on a survey of 300 US CISOs and senior security leaders, finds that most security teams lack the tools and skills to secure AI systems. 67% of respondents report limited visibility into AI usage, while half cite a lack of internal expertise. Organizations largely extend legacy security controls—75%—and only 11% use AI-specific tools.

🔒 Akamai’s 2025 State of the Internet report finds APIs have become the dominant attack surface, with an average of 258 API attacks per organization (up 113% year‑on‑year). The vendor reports 61% of attacks involved unauthorized workflows or abnormal behavior, signaling a shift towards behavior‑based exploitation. Top exploited issues included security misconfigurations, broken object property level authorization and broken authentication. Akamai also warns that agentic AI and automation are amplifying the risk of sensitive data exposure across APIs.