Risk Management | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

We recently worked with an organization that had invested heavily in advanced security tooling, including AI-driven detection and monitoring capabilities. From a technical perspective, the environment appeared mature: alerts were firing, dashboards were populated, and risks were clearly identified.  Yet progress had stalled.  The security team and IT disagreed on ownership. Business leadership perceived cyber risk as "under control," while the security team felt increasingly exposed and unheard. AI surfaced the signals, but no one could agree on what to do with them.  The turning point did not come from additional tooling or deeper analysis. It came from reframing the conversation.  By aligning stakeholders around clear business impact, contextualizing the findings against industry peers, and translating technical gaps into credible, board-level risk narratives that reinforced the internal security team's concerns rather than questioning their judgment, decisions were finally ma...

As identity-based attacks continue to rise, the most damaging breaches increasingly begin with valid credentials rather than vulnerability exploits. That's why identity resilience will define the maturity of your cybersecurity in 2026.  A unified identity defense layer, combining privileged access management (PAM) with identity threat detection and response (ITDR), is emerging as the foundation of that resilience. This article explores why integrating these capabilities into your security strategy is no longer optional and how, together, they form the backbone of modern organizational security. The shift to identity-centric security Traditional PAM solutions that allow you to safely authenticate users are no longer enough to protect your business against modern threats. Instead of breaking through technical barriers, threat actors are now using compromised credentials to sign in as legitimate users. According to IBM's X-Force 2025 Threat Intelligence Index, identity-driven intr...

In most security operations centers, CVSS quietly dictates remediation priorities. Dashboards are sorted by severity. "Critical" vulnerabilities float to the top. Quarterly summaries celebrate how many 9.0+ findings were closed. On paper, it looks rational. In practice, it's often wrong. CVSS was designed to standardize how vulnerabilities are scored. Its origins and main purpose have been to measure technical severity, including exploit complexity, required privileges, impact on confidentiality, integrity, and availability. It provides a shared language. But where it has perpetually struggled is measuring context within, like whether the asset is internet-facing, how critical it is to the business, and whether attackers are actively exploiting the vulnerability. And context is where real risk lives. How Abstract Scores Turn Vulnerability Management Into "Severity Theater" A vulnerability scored 9.8 in a non-production environment with no external access may demand immediate atten...

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 proliferation of AI agents in the enterprise has moved from theoretical to practical at a remarkable pace. These agents, whether developed internally or licensed, are increasingly integrated into core business workflows. While they promise substantial gains in automation and productivity, they also introduce a new and complex class of security risks that demand immediate attention.  The core challenge is not whether to adopt AI agents, but how to govern them effectively. A disciplined approach to balancing innovation with security is essential for any organization looking to leverage AI without exposing itself to unacceptable risk.  Recent research highlights the urgency of this issue. A comprehensive study found that 82% of companies are already using AI agents, with 53% acknowledging they access sensitive information daily . This rapid adoption, often occurring without adequate oversight, creates significant vulnerabilities. The imperative is clear: organizations must...

For decades, organizations operated under the assumption that vulnerability management could be slotted into predictable maintenance windows. Monthly patch cycles, quarterly review periods, and planned outages became the standard rhythm of IT operations. Yet, in today's environment, where exploit code emerges within hours of a disclosure and attackers weaponize vulnerabilities on an industrial scale, those rhythms are dangerously outdated. The modern reality is that continuous patch management and end-to-end vulnerability lifecycle governance are no longer aspirational, they are the bare minimum. Security must be measured not by the comfort of predictability, but by the ability to remediate as close to real time as possible. The Problem with Periodic Maintenance Windows Exploitation Outpaces Response: exploits are increasingly released at or before vendor patch availability. A monthly or even bi-weekly patch cadence leaves systems exposed during the critical first days when atta...

Cybersecurity is undergoing a necessary transformation from reacting to threats as they arise to proactively anticipating and addressing them through Threat-Informed Defense (TID) . This shift emphasizes operational discipline over accumulating more tools. It involves using threat intelligence to streamline existing technologies, enhance the quality of security signals, and focus efforts on the threats most relevant to each organization. The goal is to continuously identify and close security gaps by combining insights from external threat data with internal defense capabilities. How do you put TID into practice? The team at  Filigran has broken down the TID framework into a six-stage pipeline to develop actionable chunks for cybersecurity leaders. In this article, we share the details so that your security teams can leverage it too to support TID. What is Threat-Informed Defense? First advocated by  MITRE , Threat-Informed Defense (TID) leverages MITRE ATT&CK framewo...

Enterprises are spending more than ever on DDoS defense, but despite the increased investment, organizations are still suffering damaging downtime. MazeBolt's new DDoS Defense survey , produced in collaboration with Global Surveyz, quizzed 300 CISOs and security directors across the US and Europe, and uncovered some surprising perspectives. The following is a sneak preview from the report. Inside the Survey MazeBolt surveyed senior security leaders at banking, financial services, and insurance companies with between 500 and 25,000 employees and annual revenues of at least $250 million. These are organizations where business continuity is critical and where a single outage can cause severe financial and reputational damage. Attacks Keep Coming – and They're Costly Respondents reported an average of 3.85 damaging DDoS incidents in the past year. 60% said they suffered between 2 and 5 such attacks. Larger companies faced the most serious consequences, with enterprises of more than 1...