Meta on Tuesday announced it’s adding Strict Account Settings on WhatsApp to secure certain users against advanced cyber attacks because of who they are and what they do. The feature, similar to Lockdown Mode in Apple iOS and Advanced Protection in Android, aims to protect individuals, such as journalists or public-facing figures, from sophisticated spyware by trading some functionality for

Indian government entities have been targeted in two campaigns undertaken by a threat actor that operates in Pakistan using previously undocumented tradecraft. The campaigns have been codenamed Gopher Strike and Sheet Attack by Zscaler ThreatLabz, which identified them in September 2025. “While these campaigns share some similarities with the Pakistan-linked Advanced Persistent Threat (APT)

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new campaign that combines ClickFix-style fake CAPTCHAs with a signed Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V) script to distribute an information stealer called Amatera. “Instead of launching PowerShell directly, the attacker uses this script to control how execution begins and to avoid more common, easily recognized execution paths,”

Cybersecurity teams increasingly want to move beyond looking at threats and vulnerabilities in isolation. Its not only about what could go wrong (vulnerabilities) or who might attack (threats), but where they intersect in your actual environment to create real, exploitable exposure. Which exposures truly matter? Can attackers exploit them? Are our defenses effective? Continuous Threat Exposure

A critical security flaw has been disclosed in GristCore, an open-source, self-hosted version of the Grist relational spreadsheet-database, that could result in remote code execution. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-24002 (CVSS score: 9.1), has been codenamed Cellbreak by Cyera Research Labs. “One malicious formula can turn a spreadsheet into a Remote Code Execution (RCE) beachhead,”

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a JScript-based command-and-control (C2) framework called PeckBirdy that has been put to use by China-aligned APT actors since 2023 to target multiple environments. The flexible framework has been put to use against Chinese gambling industries and malicious activities targeting Asian government entities and private organizations, according to Trend Micro

Microsoft on Monday issued out-of-band security patches for a high-severity Microsoft Office zero-day vulnerability exploited in attacks. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-21509, carries a CVSS score of 7.8 out of 10.0. It has been described as a security feature bypass in Microsoft Office. “Reliance on untrusted inputs in a security decision in Microsoft Office allows an unauthorized

A source trapped inside an industrial-scale scamming operation contacted me, determined to expose his captors crimesand then escape. This is his story.

A whistleblower trapped inside a pig butchering scam compound gave WIRED a vast trove of its internal materialsincluding 4,200 pages of messages that lay out its operations in unprecedented detail.

Kaspersky researchers analyze updated CoolClient backdoor and new tools and scripts used in HoneyMyte (aka Mustang Panda or Bronze President) APT campaigns, including three variants of a browser data stealer.

A federal judge ordered a new briefing due Wednesday on whether DHS is using armed raids to pressure Minnesota into abandoning its sanctuary policies, leaving ICE operations in place for now.

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered an ongoing campaign that’s targeting Indian users with a multi-stage backdoor as part of a suspected cyber espionage campaign. The activity, per the eSentire Threat Response Unit (TRU), involves using phishing emails impersonating the Income Tax Department of India to trick victims into downloading a malicious archive, ultimately granting the threat

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered two malicious Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VS Code) extensions that are advertised as artificial intelligence (AI)-powered coding assistants, but also harbor covert functionality to siphon developer data to China-based servers. The extensions, which have 1.5 million combined installs and are still available for download from the official Visual Studio

Security failures rarely arrive loudly. They slip in through trusted tools, half-fixed problems, and habits people stop questioning. This weeks recap shows that pattern clearly. Attackers are moving faster than defenses, mixing old tricks with new paths. Patched no longer means safe, and every day, software keeps becoming the entry point. What follows is a set of small but telling signals.

If theres a constant in cybersecurity, its that adversaries are always innovating. The rise of offensive AI is transforming attack strategies and making them harder to detect. Googles Threat Intelligence Group, recently reported on adversaries using Large Language Models (LLMs) to both conceal code and generate malicious scripts on the fly, letting malware shape-shift in real-time to evade

The cybercriminals in control of Kimwolf – a disruptive botnet that has infected more than 2 million devices – recently shared a screenshot indicating they’d compromised the control panel for Badbox 2.0, a vast China-based botnet powered by malicious software that comes pre-installed on many Android TV streaming boxes. Both the FBI and Google say they are hunting for the people behind Badbox 2.0, and thanks to bragging by the Kimwolf botmasters we may now have a much clearer idea about that.

The North Korean threat actor known as Konni has been observed using PowerShell malware generated using artificial intelligence (AI) tools to target developers and engineering teams in the blockchain sector. The phishing campaign has targeted Japan, Australia, and India, highlighting the adversary’s expansion of the targeting scope beyond South Korea, Russia, Ukraine, and European nations, Check

Sexual deepfakes continue to get more sophisticated, capable, easy to access, and perilous for millions of women who are abused with the technology.

Within minutes of the shooting, the Trump administration and right-wing influencers began disparaged the man shot by a federal immigration officer on Saturday in Minneapolis.

A new federal filing from ICE demonstrates how commercial tools are increasingly being considered by the government for law enforcement and surveillance.

A new multi-stage phishing campaign has been observed targeting users in Russia with ransomware and a remote access trojan called Amnesia RAT. “The attack begins with social engineering lures delivered via business-themed documents crafted to appear routine and benign,” Fortinet FortiGuard Labs researcher Cara Lin said in a technical breakdown published this week. “These documents and

The Russian nation-state hacking group known as Sandworm has been attributed to what has been described as the “largest cyber attack” targeting Poland’s power system in the last week of December 2025. The attack was unsuccessful, the country’s energy minister, Milosz Motyka, said last week. “The command of the cyberspace forces has diagnosed in the last days of the year the strongest attack on

AI agents are accelerating how work gets done. They schedule meetings, access data, trigger workflows, write code, and take action in real time, pushing productivity beyond human speed across the enterprise. Then comes the moment every security team eventually hits: “Wait… who approved this?” Unlike users or applications, AI agents are often deployed quickly, shared broadly,

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Friday added a critical security flaw affecting Broadcom VMware vCenter Server that was patched in June 2024 to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2024-37079 (CVSS score: 9.8), which refers to a heap overflow in the

Plus: The FAA blocks drones over DHS operations, Microsoft admits it hands over Bitlocker encryption keys to the cops, and more.

The ruling in federal court in Minnesota lands as Immigration and Customs Enforcement faces scrutiny over an internal memo claiming judge-signed warrants arent needed to enter homes without consent.

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Thursday added four security flaws to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation in the wild. The list of vulnerabilities is as follows -

CVE-2025-68645 (CVSS score: 8.8) - A PHP remote file inclusion vulnerability in Synacor Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) that could allow a

Fortinet has officially confirmed that it’s working to completely plug a FortiCloud SSO authentication bypass vulnerability following reports of fresh exploitation activity on fully-patched firewalls. “In the last 24 hours, we have identified a number of cases where the exploit was to a device that had been fully upgraded to the latest release at the time of the attack, which suggested a new

US Customs and Border Protection is paying General Dynamics to create prototype quantum sensors, to be used with an AI database to detect fentanyl and other narcotics.

TikTok on Friday officially announced that it formed a joint venture that will allow the hugely popular video-sharing application to continue operating in the U.S. The new venture, named TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, has been established in compliance with the Executive Order signed by U.S. President Donald Trump in September 2025, the platform said. The new deal will see TikTok’s Chinese

The attack involved data-wiping malware that ESET researchers have now analyzed and named DynoWiper

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new dual-vector campaign that leverages stolen credentials to deploy legitimate Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) software for persistent remote access to compromised hosts. “Instead of deploying custom viruses, attackers are bypassing security perimeters by weaponizing the necessary IT tools that administrators trust,” KnowBe4 Threat

Microsoft has warned of a multistage adversaryinthemiddle (AitM) phishing and business email compromise (BEC) campaign targeting multiple organizations in the energy sector. “The campaign abused SharePoint filesharing services to deliver phishing payloads and relied on inbox rule creation to maintain persistence and evade user awareness,” the Microsoft Defender Security Research Team said.

This dream wish list for criminals includes millions of Gmail, Facebook, banking logins, and more. The researcher who discovered it suspects they were collected using infostealing malware.

As children turn to AI chatbots for answers, advice, and companionship, questions emerge about their safety, privacy, and emotional development

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new ransomware family called Osiris that targeted a major food service franchisee operator in Southeast Asia in November 2025. The attack leveraged a malicious driver called POORTRY as part of a known technique referred to as bring your own vulnerable driver (BYOVD) to disarm security software, the Symantec and Carbon Black Threat Hunter

A critical security flaw has been disclosed in the GNU InetUtils telnet daemon (telnetd) that went unnoticed for nearly 11 years. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-24061, is rated 9.8 out of 10.0 on the CVSS scoring system. It affects all versions of GNU InetUtils from version 1.9.3 up to and including version 2.7. “Telnetd in GNU Inetutils through 2.7 allows remote authentication bypass

Most of this weeks threats didnt rely on new tricks. They relied on familiar systems behaving exactly as designed, just in the wrong hands. Ordinary files, routine services, and trusted workflows were enough to open doors without forcing them. What stands out is how little friction attackers now need. Some activity focused on quiet reach and coverage, others on timing and reuse. The emphasis

The alleged risks of being publicly identified have not stopped DHS and ICE employees from creating profiles on LinkedIn, even as Kristi Noem threatens to treat revealing agents’ identities as a crime.

Security teams at agile, fast-growing companies often have the same mandate: secure the business without slowing it down. Most teams inherit a tech stack optimized for breakneck growth, not resilience. In these environments, the security team is the helpdesk, the compliance expert, and the incident response team all rolled into one. Securing the cloud office in this scenario is all about

A new malicious package discovered in the Python Package Index (PyPI) has been found to impersonate a popular library for symbolic mathematics to deploy malicious payloads, including a cryptocurrency miner, on Linux hosts. The package, named sympy-dev, mimics SymPy, replicating the latter’s project description verbatim in an attempt to deceive unsuspecting users into thinking that they are

A new security flaw in SmarterTools SmarterMail email software has come under active exploitation in the wild, two days after the release of a patch. The vulnerability, which currently does not have a CVE identifier, is tracked by watchTowr Labs as WT-2026-0001. It was patched by SmarterTools on January 15, 2026, with Build 9511, following responsible disclosure by the exposure management

Cybersecurity company Arctic Wolf has warned of a “new cluster of automated malicious activity” that involves unauthorized firewall configuration changes on Fortinet FortiGate devices. The activity, it said, commenced on January 15, 2026, adding it shares similarities with a December 2025 campaign in which malicious SSO logins on FortiGate appliances were recorded against the admin account from

Heres how the most common scams targeting Apple Pay users work and what you can do to stay one step ahead

Cisco has released fresh patches to address what it described as a “critical” security vulnerability impacting multiple Unified Communications (CM) products and Webex Calling Dedicated Instance that it has been actively exploited as a zero-day in the wild. The vulnerability, CVE-2026-20045 (CVSS score: 8.2), could permit an unauthenticated remote attacker to execute arbitrary commands on the

As many as 3,136 individual IP addresses linked to likely targets of the Contagious Interview activity have been identified, with the campaign claiming 20 potential victim organizations spanning artificial intelligence (AI), cryptocurrency, financial services, IT services, marketing, and software development sectors in Europe, South Asia, the Middle East, and Central America. The new findings

Zoom and GitLab have released security updates to resolve a number of security vulnerabilities that could result in denial-of-service (DoS) and remote code execution. The most severe of the lot is a critical security flaw impacting Zoom Node Multimedia Routers (MMRs) that could permit a meeting participant to conduct remote code execution attacks. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-22844

A new EPIC report says data brokers, ad-tech surveillance, and ICE enforcement are among the factors leading to a health privacy crisis that is eroding trust and deterring people from seeking care.

Every managed security provider is chasing the same problem in 2026 too many alerts, too few analysts, and clients demanding CISO-level protection at SMB budgets. The truth? Most MSSPs are running harder, not smarter. And its breaking their margins. Thats where the quiet revolution is happening: AI isnt just writing reports or surfacing risks its rebuilding how security services are

Gartner doesnt create new categories lightly. Generally speaking, a new acronym only emerges when the industry’s collective “to-do list” has become mathematically impossible to complete. And so it seems that the introduction of the Exposure Assessment Platforms (EAP) category is a formal admission that traditional Vulnerability Management (VM) is no longer a viable way to secure a modern

Security vulnerabilities were uncovered in the popular open-source artificial intelligence (AI) framework Chainlit that could allow attackers to steal sensitive data, which may allow for lateral movement within a susceptible organization. Zafran Security said the high-severity flaws, collectively dubbed ChainLeak, could be abused to leak cloud environment API keys and steal sensitive files, or

The recently discovered sophisticated Linux malware framework known as VoidLink is assessed to have been developed by a single person with assistance from an artificial intelligence (AI) model. That’s according to new findings from Check Point Research, which identified operational security blunders by malware’s author that provided clues to its developmental origins. The latest insight makes