Endpoint Security | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

How session cookie theft bypasses MFA — and what you can do about it When you check into a hotel, you show your ID at the front desk. The clerk verifies who you are, maybe checks a secondary piece of information, and hands you a key card. From that point on, that key card is what gets you into your room. It doesn't matter that you proved your identity at check-in. What matters is who has the key. Your applications work the same way. When a user logs into a web application — entering their password, completing an MFA challenge — the application issues them a session token, typically stored as a cookie in their browser. That token is their key card. Every subsequent request the user makes, the application checks for the token, not the credentials. If the token is valid, access is granted. And if someone steals that token? They get in, too. No username required. No password required. No MFA prompt. They simply ...

While working on the Transparent Tribe's vibeware research, we have encountered two distinct camps, the optimists and the skeptics. What makes the current dialogue unique is that both sides can be right at the same time. There is, however, a clear operational reason why we encounter "AI attacks" primarily on professional social media feeds rather than within our own telemetry logs. In this article, we analyze the factors explaining why Skynet is not here yet, and how, much like a shark, AI does not need to be innovative to be dangerous. LLM Architecture Bias LLMs are mathematically optimized to predict the most likely outcome, while hacking is the art of identifying the statistical anomaly. LLMs are designed to predict the most statistically probable next token. They are excellent at the average, but poor at the exceptional. A hacker, by contrast, is a practitioner of statistical anomaly, actively seeking the low-pro...

Vulnerability management is the continuous process of identifying, assessing, prioritizing, and addressing security weaknesses across systems, applications, and infrastructure. It extends beyond periodic scanning; it includes validating findings, understanding exposure in real-world environments, and tracking remediation over time. Effective vulnerability management combines asset visibility, vulnerability intelligence, and operational context to determine which flaws present actual risk rather than theoretical exposure. Modern IT environments further complicate the process of vulnerability management. Hybrid IT infrastructure, third-party dependencies, and internet-facing services increase the attack surface while generating large volumes of vulnerability data. Security teams must balance operational constraints, such as out-of-support legacy systems and uptime requirements, with the need to quickly reduce exposure. As a result, vulnerability management is no longer limited to coun...

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...

A 2024 Gartner® survey of 162 large enterprises shows organizations running an average of 45 cybersecurity tools. It's no surprise, then, that 52% of executives cite complexity as the biggest barrier to effective security operations. While mid-market organizations typically run fewer tools, smaller IT and security teams mean they often face equal—or greater—operational complexity. Why Security Platforms Emerged The industry's answer to tool sprawl has been the security platform: a consolidated approach designed to reduce complexity by replacing multiple point products. In principle, platforms promise tighter integration, improved visibility across the attack surface, better alert correlation, and faster response. Research supports this direction. The 2025 IBM Institute for Business Value report notes that organizations with higher security platform maturity identify and contain incidents more quickly. Consolidation Doesn't Always Equal a Platform Vendor consolidation is accelera...

The Perfect Recipe for Endpoint Security Calls for Privilege Control Today's most effective ransomware attacks don't require malware; they require a login. Modern threat actors don't need to break in. They can leverage legitimate identities and their privileges to gain a foothold, then continue to capitalize on them, moving laterally to probe for more opportunities and manipulate vulnerabilities and exploits to spread ransomware and spyware. A vulnerable identity or account tied to an endpoint can quickly become an attacker's ticket to your most valuable assets and controls.  With legitimate identities being used as the initial foothold in more attacks, we're seeing less 'anomalous' activity and far more seemingly normal actions performed by a trusted, privileged user. And attackers are keenly aware of how easily they can 'hide' behind these legitimate user accounts.  This is why Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) is really only one piece of the endpoint protection puzz...

Compliance is often treated as a paper exercise, something to tolerate, check off and forget. But in a threat landscape shaped by ransomware-as-a-service, AI-augmented phishing campaigns, and supply chain breaches, delaying compliance doesn't just create business and operational friction. It creates risk.  When compliance is layered late, organizations face mounting costs: duplicated controls, misaligned security priorities, reactive remediation efforts, and worst of all, security blind spots that attackers can exploit. Treating compliance as an afterthought is a gamble.  In this post, we highlight the real cost of sidelining compliance and why embedding compliance into your security strategy from the start is not just good hygiene, it's essential engineering.  Security and Compliance: Not Opposites, but Allies It's easy to think of security as "protecting" and compliance as "documenting". But that split is artificial. Frameworks like ISO/IEC 27001, NIST CSF, PCI ...

Identity Is the New Perimeter—And It's Fractured In 2025, identity isn't just a security issue—it's the battleground. And too many organizations are getting caught flat-footed. Organizations today must reckon with complex hybrid environments that contain interconnected endpoints, servers, cloud services, DevOps systems, identity infrastructure, and much more. And with enterprise systems no longer fitting neatly into a single network perimeter, the identities used to interact with these systems have become the new perimeter.  A strong cybersecurity foundation starts with clear visibility that puts risk in content. Identity security is no different. However, in practice, identity management systems are anything but centralized. Building IDs and access to physical offices are handled by one system. Logins to Windows machines are generally managed with Windows domains and Active Directory—but what about Macs and Linux machines? Companies use Okta, Ping Identity, or the equivalent ...