The Hacker News | Expert Insights

For nearly two decades, offensive security has centered around the same basic ritual: schedule an annual or quarterly penetration test, brace for the findings, remediate what you can, and then repeat the next cycle next year. It's familiar, predictable, and built into every compliance framework. It's also fundamentally mismatched to the way modern infrastructure works and the way attackers operate.  Today's environments change too quickly for point-in-time testing to provide real assurance. Cloud deployments shift daily; CI/CD pipelines push new code constantly, and new assets appear abruptly. A penetration test conducted in November tells you almost nothing about your exposure in January.  This is where Continuous Penetration Testing (CPT) comes in. CPT doesn't just improve offensive security outcomes but reshapes the equation entirely. When organizations adopt continuous validation, they gain clearer visibility, shorter remediation cycles, and tangible, measurable ROI. ...

Employees are increasingly using personal AI tools, AI-powered extensions, and emerging agentic browsers to accelerate their work. But unlike sanctioned AI platforms, these tools operate inside the browser runtime, where neither CASBs, SWGs, EDRs, nor DLP solutions have visibility. This has quietly turned the browser into an unmanaged AI execution environment, giving way to a new threat known as shadow AI. Shadow AI isn't just the latest buzzword; it's a serious risk that leaves organizations vulnerable to data loss, cyberattacks, compliance violations, and more.  What is Shadow AI? Shadow AI refers to GenAI-powered tools, browser extensions, and browsers that workers use on their own, without any company vetting or guidance. Different from shadow IT, where unsanctioned apps or devices slip through the cracks, shadow AI lives directly in the browser.  For example, employees might use their personal Claude accounts to work with sensitive company data or work on important pr...

Insider threats are rising in both number and cost, forcing security teams to seek stronger cybersecurity solutions. At the same time, IT teams face more frequent audits and more complex data security requirements. Add to this a distributed workforce and third-party contractors, and it's clear why managing privileged access and monitoring user activity is so challenging.  Modern cybersecurity solutions must offer streamlined access management, complete oversight of user activity within your network, and a privacy-first approach to monitoring. This article offers practical tips on enhancing your cybersecurity strategy by addressing these three pillars. We'll also explore how Syteca's new release can help security leaders protect sensitive data, secure access, and improve audit readiness without IT overhead.  Monitoring User Activity while Preserving Their Privacy Keeping a close watch on user actions is critical for insider threat defense, but it raises a dilemma: "...

In cybersecurity, the old adage "trust but verify" emphasizes that granting trust should always be accompanied by oversight. Yet, with software-as-a-service (SaaS), organizations often stop at the "trust" part and never get around to the "verify." SaaS environments in 2025 run on implicit trust. Once a user or app is authenticated and given access, it's largely trusted indefinitely. Tokens issued to third-party apps rarely expire, integrations often get more permissions than they truly need, and automations execute with minimal human oversight. We talk about Zero Trust principles, but in practice, many SaaS platforms grant one-time approval and then assume all is well thereafter. The result is a growing security gap, where credentials and connections are implicitly trusted far beyond what's safe, creating fertile ground for breaches and abuse. Implicit Trust in the SaaS Ecosystem Every SaaS integration or API token represents an implicit trust relationship between your organizatio...

As SaaS ecosystems expand, not every user is human anymore. AI assistants, automation bots, integration services, and API tokens now perform countless actions across business cloud applications, often with the same or greater access privileges as employees. These non-human identities (NHIs) are silently driving productivity while introducing a new class of risk: unmonitored, long-lived, and often misunderstood access. These machine credentials (service accounts, API keys, OAuth tokens, etc.) are essential for automation and integrations, but their growth far outpaces the oversight and security controls applied to them. The result is a widening visibility gap. A lot of NHI types enjoy broad permissions within SaaS apps, sometimes more privileges than a human user, yet they rarely get the same scrutiny as employee accounts. Over-privilege is common: about one-third of SaaS app integrations have access to sensitive data that exceeds their needs. Let's examine a few notable data brea...

Browser extensions have evolved over the years into powerful productivity platforms to streamline workflows, integrate business tools, and optimize how work is done. Now in the age of AI, extensions are once again evolving to enable advanced automation and data-driven decision-making directly in the browser. And as these extensions continue to mature, so will the cyberattacks. Today's extension-based attacks do not discriminate; they target every traditional browser, including Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and more, as well as the new AI-powered browsers like ChatGPT's Atlas and Perplexity's Comet. They adapt to each environment's security nuances. Most enterprises assume that if they secure one browser, it's enough.  The reality is that cross-platform extension threats are becoming increasingly common, and organizations must take broader vigilance. In this article, you'll learn why leveraging a Secure Enterprise Browsing (SEB) platform is critical for organizations to keep up with tod...

Identity platforms are an organization's backbone of secure access. But what happens when you need to migrate from one identity provider to another? The stakes are high: downtime, broken integrations, compliance gaps, and user frustration. Yet, with the right strategy and preparation, these fears can be addressed head-on. Identity migration is intimidating If a migration is poorly planned and executed, it can mean lost productivity, frustrated customers, and a hit to your business' bottom line. Identity touches every corner of an organization, from HR systems to customer portals. Beyond downtime, migrations often expose brittle integrations, undocumented dependencies, and legacy technologies that no one wants to touch. Add compliance requirements (SOC2, HIPAA, DORA) and the pressure mounts. Even well-planned transitions can surface unexpected issues, edge cases, and broken processes. Why consider identity migration at all? Why migrate at all? Often, it's about cost savings, strea...

You invested in a new AI-SOC because you want your organization to be safe. You also don't want your SOC team to burn out from the flood of alerts they're receiving.  It's good at first. At deployment, the detections are lined up with your environment. Your SOC team reports it's going to be a learning curve, but it seems to be working. It's going well until a few months later, when it's not, at least not as well.  The problem is that the agent isn't processing alerts the way your team needs it to. It keeps flagging the CEO's logins as threats because it doesn't understand that he's traveling. It's also let a few real threats slip through the cracks. Threats that should have been easily caught. What's happening?  Pre-trained AI was built to recognize the familiar, and it does. It's trained on old data, old attack paths, and assumptions that made sense in the lab based on what's been observed before. What it can't do is understand the small, real-world details that an...