Attack Surface | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Security teams have never had more telemetry. They have also never been more behind. In 2025, organizations faced an average of 1,968 cyber attacks per week , an 18% YoY increase, and nearly a 70% increase since 2023 . That's not just "more noise." It's a signal that attacker throughput is scaling faster than human response models can. At the same time, the attacker playbook shifted in ways that punish slow cycles. Social engineering moved beyond email into multi-channel, cross-platform operations, including new interaction-led techniques like ClickFix, which manipulates users into executing the attack themselves. ClickFix activity increased by roughly 500% and appeared in nearly half of documented malware campaigns. And while humans remain a primary target, attackers are finding even easier traction in unpatched, unmanaged, and inherited exposures. These gaps give adversaries durable footholds long before exposure remediation is implemented. Couple that with automation, and expo...

According to research by IBM, organizations use an average of 83 separate security solutions. It is hardly surprising that 52% of security professionals identify complexity as the biggest impediment to effective operations. For IT and security leaders in mid-market organizations, who know they have gaps in security coverage, this challenge can feel particularly difficult to solve. At Bitdefender , we see this challenge play out consistently across mid-market environments. Most organizations have the fundamentals in place, such as Endpoint Protection Platforms (EPP), email filtering, and patch management. However, many are not fully realizing the capabilities of these existing tools. This creates security gaps and, when combined with a lack of preventative exposure management controls, severely limits visibility across attack surfaces. Maximize Your ROI: Exploit Underused Tools Many mid-market organizations already have powerful Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) in place as part...

The past year has marked a decisive shift in the way Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks operate. DDoS used to mean, simply speaking, the overwhelming of targets with massive amounts of traffic. But now, DDoS attacks have evolved into precision-guided threats – and this transformation can be partly attributed to AI.  The acceleration is measurable. In the first quarter of 2025 alone, DDoS incidents surged by 358 percent compared to the same period in 2024, according to Cloudflare. Even more concerning, the proportion of attacks that caused actual production downtime rose by 53 percent. This is not just a spike. It is a sign that attackers are fundamentally changing how DDoS campaigns are planned, launched, and adapted in real time. The consequences are significant: organizations that rely on legacy DDoS defenses or irregular testing methods are finding themselves exposed, often without knowing it. How Attackers are Enhancing DDoS Attacks DDoS attacks historically reli...

What is Threat-Led Vulnerability Management? Threat-Led Vulnerability Management (TLVM) is a security approach that focuses on prioritizing and managing vulnerabilities based on the current threat landscape and the specific risks posed to an organization. Rather than treating all vulnerabilities equally, TLVM emphasizes understanding which vulnerabilities are most likely to be exploited by malicious actors, correlated with the configuration state and security posture of the organization's unique infrastructure and business processes. Why Now? The notion of adopting a Threat-Led Vulnerability Management (TLVM) approach has grown in popularity, particularly in the face of the escalating volume and sophistication of cyber threats, which are increasingly frequent and offer a lower cost attack alternative when supported by AI tools. The dynamic nature of the threat landscape requires organizations to stay agile in their vulnerability management processes, prioritizing efforts based on ...

Most IT security professionals would agree that the key ingredient for safeguarding networks is "reducing the attack surface." Fewer avenues for breaches mean reduced risk and fewer incidents for an enterprise: Hackers can't attack what they can't see. Reducing attack surface is the key to securing your network, applications, and—most importantly—your data. Calling all servers . . . The "attack surface" comprises the sum of all exposed points through various vectors that an attacker could target to compromise a computing device or network. You can group the attack vectors into three main categories: the channel (a listening TCP/UDP port), assets (which include applications, services, webpages, files, executables, etc.), and access (user credentials). Below is a breakdown of the various attack vector options available to attackers. The channel —typically an exposed-to-the-internet communications protocol like TCP or UDP—allows all entities on the internet to communicate with each ot...