Vulnerability Management | 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...

Why reporting, delivery, and validation have become just as critical as testing itself Pentesting has undergone a fundamental shift over the last 5 years. While the core objective of identifying exploitable weaknesses remains the same, the way results are managed, delivered, and validated has become just as important as the testing itself. Security leaders no longer view penetration tests as one-off engagements that end with a PDF. They expect timely, actionable results that feed into their broader vulnerability management and remediation programs. For pentest teams, this shift has exposed a growing gap between how testing is performed and how outcomes are operationalized. Why Traditional Pentest Delivery Is Breaking Down Historically, pentest results have been delivered as static reports, often disconnected from vulnerability scanners, ticketing systems, and remediation workflows. This creates a challenge as the data becomes siloed from other security data and is not aligned int...

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...

AI-powered coding assistants now play a central role in modern software development. Developers use them to speed up tasks, reduce boilerplate snippets, and automate routine code generation. But with that speed comes a dangerous trade-off. The tools designed to accelerate innovation are degrading application security by embedding subtle yet serious vulnerabilities in software. Nearly  half of the code snippets generated by five AI models contained bugs that attackers could exploit, a study showed. A second study confirmed the risk, with nearly one-third of Python snippets and a quarter of JavaScript  snippets produced by GitHub Copilot having security flaws . The problem goes beyond flawed output. AI tools instill a false sense of confidence. Developers using AI assistance not only  wrote significantly less secure code than those who worked unaided, but they also believed their insecure code was safe, a clear sign of automation bias. The Dangerous Simplicity of AI-...

Many of the day-to-day digital operations of businesses, governments, and critical infrastructure have one thing in common: Microsoft. From the Microsoft Windows operating systems powering endpoints and servers, to Azure's rapidly growing cloud services, Microsoft's products are everywhere, making the company and its products attractive targets for threat actors seeking to exploit vulnerabilities at scale.  With more than 1.4 billion Windows users around the globe and the adoption of platforms like Microsoft 365, Active Directory, and Azure surging, a single exploitable vulnerability in a Microsoft product can open the door to privilege escalation, lateral movement, or ransomware deployments that impact tens of thousands of interconnected systems. Whether nation state or financially motivated, modern cyber-crime syndicates will consistently take the path of least resistance, and vulnerable assets are a reliable attack vector. For twelve years, the Microsoft Vulnerabilities Repor...

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 ...

After decades of frustration, downstream users are about to get laws and regulations passed to force upstream IoT manufacturers to produce more secure IoT devices. This seems like a good thing, however, we are about to see an enactment of how new laws and regulations work to the advantage of big companies and to the disadvantage of small companies, eventually driving the latter out of business. As presented by Ruchir Sharma in his excellent book [1] , regulations tend to favor large companies for two reasons: (1) large companies can afford the necessary resources to conform to the new laws and regulations and (2) large companies have the necessary resources to shape the new laws and regulations to favor themselves. Although these may be well-intentioned, initially, the eventual result is that smaller companies are forced out of business and only the large companies survive. Are we about to see this scenario play out for IoT device manufacturers? That is the subject of this paper. The...