Huntress researchers identified a fake page impersonating the WatchGuard download portal that harvested VPN server addresses, usernames and passwords before offering the legitimate Mobile VPN with SSL installer. The investigation began after suspicious activity involving an administrator at a managed service provider (MSP), who found the …
Flashpoint's first monthly insider threat report, drawn from its Primary Source Collection (PSC), identified 9,787 insider-related posts across 1,216 channels and 1,778 authors in September 2026. Overall volume fell, but threat actors kept recruiting insiders and advertising insider access, mostly to enable fraud. Flashpoint counted 857 u…
Huntress argues that passkeys raise the bar for authentication but do not close the account lifecycle: attackers still target enrollment, recovery, compromised endpoints, alternative sign-in flows and social engineering. Huntress researchers tracked a device-code phishing campaign, EvilTokens, that hit 344 organizations across five countr…
CISA ran concurrent red team assessments at two organizations: Organization A (Government Services and Facilities) and Organization B (Water and Wastewater Systems). Both reached full domain compromise and accessed sensitive business systems (SBSs) and cloud resources. Organization A did not detect or contain the activity. Organization B …
Researcher Harsh Jaiswal of Hacktron describes using the AI-assisted Hacktron CLI with a custom "JDBC driver pack" to audit decompiled JDBC drivers during a bug bounty event. The audit surfaced multiple vulnerabilities across vendor drivers, earning $85,000 in bounties. The headline finding is in the Databricks JDBC driver, where an attac…
ESET Chief Security Evangelist Tony Anscombe reviews the main cybersecurity stories of August 2026 in a monthly video roundup. OpenAI disclosed more details on how its agents hacked the AI collaboration platform Hugging Face, and the video discusses what went wrong and the lessons from the incident. Iran-linked hackers are believed to hav…
ESET warns that QR-code phishing ("quishing") is a growing way to slip past corporate email security. According to the ESET Threat Report H1 2026, malicious QR codes were embedded in 11% of all phishing emails in the first half of 2026. The codes hide destination URLs from filters that cannot extract and inspect them, and they move the vi…
This ESET WeLiveSecurity article explains email bombing (also called form, list or subscription bombing) and cites a September report of a Virginia woman flooded with hundreds of emails in 24 hours. The flood hid a genuine bank alert about a fraudulent laptop purchase. Attackers use bots to sign a harvested email address up to many legiti…
Unit 42 published research showing that an attacker with root access on a compromised Kubernetes node can misuse SPIFFE/SPIRE workload attestation to impersonate co-located workloads and harvest their SVIDs. The attacker spoofs the Linux cgroup information the SPIRE agent uses to identify callers, so the agent issues a victim workload's i…
Unit 42 analyzed how AWS neutralizes publicly exposed IAM access keys by automatically attaching the AWSCompromisedKeyQuarantine managed policy, and how that policy has changed since its release on Aug. 11, 2020. The mechanism relies on the GitHub secret scanning partner program, which alerts AWS when long-term keys appear in public repos…
Episode 484 of the Smashing Security podcast, hosted by Graham Cluley with guest Danny Palmer, covers several security stories. The lead item is audio fingerprinting: a user named Matt found that an open AliExpress page, playing silent audio at zero volume, kept his multipoint Bluetooth headphones from switching to his phone. The episode …
Infoblox links the long-running Help TDS traffic distribution system, active since at least 2017, to the Russian-language affiliate program Hotejka, assessed with high confidence to be a rebrand of the traffic monetization operation ROI777. Help TDS supplies PHP templates and a malicious WordPress plugin that affiliates install on comprom…
Microsoft, working with industry partners and Japanese police, disrupted a Chinese-language phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) ecosystem centered on Yam Store, an underground marketplace tracked as Storm-3119. The phishing kits sold there were responsible for over a billion phishing emails and texts sent to more than 75,000 organizations since…
Huntress published an explainer on business email compromise (BEC), a targeted form of phishing in which attackers impersonate or take over trusted email accounts to redirect payments or steal credentials. The article cites roughly $55 billion in worldwide losses and a Huntress survey of 500+ US IT professionals, in which 36% of organizat…
F5 Labs honeynet telemetry shows overall hostile activity rising 55.5% month over month in June 2026, a return to the levels of the earlier-year spike. Highlighted is CVE-2024-44000, an unauthenticated account takeover flaw (CVSS 9.8, CWE-522) in the LiteSpeed Cache WordPress plugin, which rose by 1,128 to 2,603 attacks (8). Scanning is i…
ESET's WeLiveSecurity warns that AI and large language models (LLMs) now automate OSINT reconnaissance at machine speed. Profiling that once took a skilled attacker hours or days can be done by low-skill actors, so ordinary internet users are now economically viable fraud targets. Fraudsters can collect public information at scale, includ…
ESET analysis describes a two-pronged risk for small and mid-size businesses (SMBs): AI agents create new paths into business systems, while attackers use AI to add speed and scale to established threats. Between March and May 2026, ESET scanned almost 900,000 unique agent skills from popular repositories and found more than 25,000 suspic…
ESET analysis describes how modern phishing and social engineering have shed the classic tells (poor grammar, suspicious URLs, crude login pages) and increasingly target live sessions and authentication tokens rather than passwords. Cybercrime-as-a-service phishing kits and AI tooling lower the cost of tailored, rapport-building lures. Ac…
Check Point Research's Q3 2026 Brand Phishing Report finds Microsoft was the most impersonated brand, at 33% of all attempts (up from 23% in Q2) and roughly four times the share of any other brand. Apple, Google, LinkedIn and Amazon completed the top five, together accounting for more than half of attempts. Dropbox (up ten places to eight…
Authorities in North Macedonia have filed charges against the alleged administrator of OLVX, a cybercrime marketplace that sold stolen personal data, credentials and malicious tools from 2023 to 2025. The suspect is a 20-year-old North Macedonian national, identified only as "E.A.", and is charged with computer fraud, misuse of personal d…