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Threat hunters have called attention to a new campaign as part of which bad actors masqueraded as fake IT support to deliver the Havoc command-and-control (C2) framework as a precursor to data exfiltration or ransomware attack. The intrusions, identified by Huntress last month across five partner organizations, involved the threat actors using email spam as lures, followed by a phone call from an IT desk that activates a layered malware delivery pipeline. "In one organization, the adversary moved from initial access to nine additional endpoints over the course of eleven hours, deploying a mix of custom Havoc Demon payloads and legitimate RMM tools for persistence, with the speed of lateral movement strongly suggesting the end goal was data exfiltration, ransomware, or both," researchers Michael Tigges, Anna Pham, and Bryan Masters said. It's worth noting that the modus operandi is consistent with email bombing and Microsoft Teams phishing attacks orchestrated by t...

Every CISO knows the uncomfortable truth about their Security Operations Center: the people most responsible for catching threats in real time are the people with the least experience. Tier 1 analysts sit at the front line of detection, and yet they are also the most vulnerable to the cognitive and organizational pressures that quietly erode SOC performance over time. The Paradox at the Gate: Why Tier 1 Carries the Weight but Lacks the Armor Tier 1 is the layer that processes the highest volume of alerts, performs initial triage, and determines what gets escalated. But it is built on a foundation that is structurally fragile. Entry-level analysts, high turnover rates, and relentless alert queues create conditions where even well-designed detection rules fail to translate into timely, accurate responses. The paradox is here:  Tier 1 performance defines SOC performance; But Tier 1 is often the least supported, least empowered, and most cognitively overloaded layer Tier 1 an...

The threat actor behind the recently disclosed artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted campaign targeting Fortinet FortiGate appliances leveraged an open-source, AI-native security testing platform called CyberStrikeAI to execute the attacks. The new findings come from Team Cymru, which detected its use following an analysis of the IP address ("212.11.64[.]250") that was used by the suspected Russian-speaking threat actor to conduct automated mass scanning for vulnerable appliances. CyberStrikeAI is an "open-source artificial intelligence (AI) offensive security tool (OST) developed by a China-based developer who we assess has some ties to the Chinese government," security researcher Will Thomas (aka @BushidoToken ) said . Details of the AI-powered activity came to light last month when Amazon Threat Intelligence said it detected the unknown attacker systematically targeting FortiGate devices using generative artificial intelligence (AI) services like Anthropic ...

The Rise of MCPs in the Enterprise The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is quickly becoming a practical way to push LLMs from “chat” into real work. By providing structured access to applications, APIs, and data, MCP enables prompt-driven AI agents that can retrieve information, take action, and automate end-to-end business workflows across the enterprise. This is already showing up in production through horizontal assistants and custom vertical agents. like Microsoft Copilot, ServiceNow, Zendesk bots, and Salesforce Agentforce, with custom and vertical agents moving fast behind them. This echoes the recent Gartner “Market Guide for Guardian Agents” report , where analysts note that the rapid enterprise adoption of these AI agents is significantly outpacing the maturity of the governance and policy controls required to manage them. We believe the primary disconnect is that these AI “colleagues” don’t look like humans. They don’t join or leave through HR They don’t submit access re...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new phishing suite called Starkiller that proxies legitimate login pages to bypass multi-factor authentication (MFA) protections. It's advertised as a cybercrime platform by a threat group calling itself Jinkusu, granting customers access to a dashboard that lets them select a brand to impersonate or enter a brand's real URL. It also lets users choose custom keywords like "login," "verify," "security," or "account," and integrates URL shorteners such as TinyURL to obscure the destination URL. "It launches a headless Chrome instance – a browser that operates without a visible window – inside a Docker container , loads the brand's real website, and acts as a reverse proxy between the target and the legitimate site," Abnormal researchers Callie Baron and Piotr Wojtyla said . "Recipients are served genuine page content directly through the attacker's infrastruc...

Microsoft on Monday warned of phishing campaigns that employ phishing emails and OAuth URL redirection mechanisms to bypass conventional phishing defenses implemented in email and browsers. The activity, the company said, targets government and public-sector organizations with the end goal of redirecting victims to attacker-controlled infrastructure without stealing their tokens. It described the phishing attacks as an identity-based threat that takes advantage of OAuth's standard, by-design behavior rather than exploiting software vulnerabilities or stealing credentials. "OAuth includes a legitimate feature that allows identity providers to redirect users to a specific landing page under certain conditions, typically in error scenarios or other defined flows," the Microsoft Defender Security Research Team said . "Attackers can abuse this native functionality by crafting URLs with popular identity providers, such as Entra ID or Google Workspace, that use manipu...

Google on Monday disclosed that a high-severity security flaw impacting an open-source Qualcomm component used in Android devices has been exploited in the wild. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-21385 (CVSS score: 7.8), a buffer over-read in the Graphics component. "Memory corruption when adding user-supplied data without checking available buffer space," Qualcomm said in an advisory, describing it as an integer overflow. The chipmaker said the flaw was reported to it through Google's Android Security team on December 18, 2025. Customers were notified of the security defect on February 2, 2026. There are currently no details on how the vulnerability is being exploited in the wild. However, Google acknowledged in its monthly Android security bulletin that "there are indications that CVE-2026-21385 may be under limited, targeted exploitation." Google's March 2026 update contains patches for a total of 129 vulnerabilities, including a critica...

The threat activity cluster known as SloppyLemming has been attributed to a fresh set of attacks targeting government entities and critical infrastructure operators in Pakistan and Bangladesh. The activity, per Arctic Wolf, took place between January 2025 and January 2026. It involves the use of two distinct attack chains to deliver malware families tracked as BurrowShell and a Rust-based keylogger.  "The use of the Rust programming language represents a notable evolution in SloppyLemming’s tooling, as prior reporting documented the actor using only traditional compiled languages and borrowed adversary simulation frameworks such as Cobalt Strike, Havoc, and the custom NekroWire RAT," the cybersecurity company said in a report shared with The Hacker News. SloppyLemming is the moniker assigned to a threat actor that's known to target government, law enforcement, energy, telecommunications, and technology entities in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and China since ...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a now-patched security flaw in Google Chrome that could have permitted attackers to escalate privileges and gain access to local files on the system. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-0628 (CVSS score: 8.8), has been described as a case of insufficient policy enforcement in the WebView tag. It was patched by Google in early January 2026 in version 143.0.7499.192/.193 for Windows/Mac and 143.0.7499.192 for Linux. "Insufficient policy enforcement in WebView tag in Google Chrome prior to 143.0.7499.192 allowed an attacker who convinced a user to install a malicious extension to inject scripts or HTML into a privileged page via a crafted Chrome extension," according to a description on the NIST National Vulnerability Database (NVD). Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 researcher Gal Weizman, who discovered and reported the flaw on November 23, 2025, said the issue could have permitted malicious extensions with basic permissi...

Google has announced a new program in its Chrome browser to ensure that HTTPS certificates are secure against the future risk posed by quantum computers . "To ensure the scalability and efficiency of the ecosystem, Chrome has no immediate plan to add traditional X.509 certificates containing post-quantum cryptography to the Chrome Root Store ," the Chrome Secure Web and Networking Team said . "Instead, Chrome, in collaboration with other partners, is developing an evolution of HTTPS certificates based on Merkle Tree Certificates (MTCs), currently in development in the PLANTS working group." As Cloudflare explains, MTC is a proposal for the next generation of the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) used to secure the internet that aims to reduce the number of public keys and signatures in the TLS handshake to the bare minimum required. Under this model, a Certification Authority (CA) signs a single 'Tree Head' representing potentially millions of certi...

This week is not about one big event. It shows where things are moving. Network systems, cloud setups, AI tools, and common apps are all being pushed in different ways. Small gaps in access control, exposed keys, and normal features are being used as entry points. The pattern becomes clear only when you see everything together. Faster scans, smarter misuse of trusted services, and steady targeting of high-value sectors. Each story adds context. Reading them all gives a fuller picture of how today’s threat landscape is evolving. ⚡ Threat of the Week Cisco SD-WAN Zero-Day Exploited — A newly disclosed maximum-severity security flaw in Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Controller (formerly vSmart) and Catalyst SD-WAN Manager (formerly vManage) has come under active exploitation in the wild as part of malicious activity that dates back to 2023. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-20127 (CVSS score: 10.0), allows an unauthenticated remote attacker to bypass authentication and obtain administr...

Most SaaS teams remember the day their user traffic started growing fast. Few notice the day bots started targeting them. On paper, everything looks great: more sign-ups, more sessions, more API calls. But in reality, something feels off: Sign-ups increase, but users aren’t activating. Server costs rise faster than revenue. Logs are filled with repeated requests from strange user agents. If this sounds familiar, it’s not just a sign of popularity. Your app is under constant automated attack, even if no ransom emails have arrived. Your load balancer sees traffic. Your product team sees “growth”. Your database sees pain. This is where a WAF like SafeLine fits in. SafeLine is a self-hosted web application firewall (WAF) that sits in front of your app and inspects every HTTP request before it reaches your code.  It does not just look for broken packets or known bad IPs. It watches how traffic behaves: what it sends, how fast, in what patterns, and against which endpoints. ...