Cloud security | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The AI gold rush is on. But without identity-first security, every deployment becomes an open door. Most organizations secure native AI like a web app, but it behaves more like a junior employee with root access and no manager. From Hype to High Stakes Generative AI has moved beyond the hype cycle. Enterprises are: Deploying LLM copilots to accelerate software development Automating customer service workflows with AI agents Integrating AI into financial operations and decision-making Whether building with open-source models or plugging into platforms like OpenAI or Anthropic, the goal is speed and scale. But what most teams miss is this: Every LLM access point or website is a new identity edge. And every integration adds risk unless identity and device posture are enforced. What Is the AI Build vs. Buy Dilemma? Most enterprises face a pivotal decision: Build : Create in-house agents tailored to internal systems and workflows Buy : Adopt commercial AI tools and SaaS integ...

Cloudflare on Tuesday said it mitigated 7.3 million distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks in the second quarter of 2025, a significant drop from 20.5 million DDoS attacks it fended off the previous quarter. "Overall, in Q2 2025, hyper-volumetric DDoS attacks skyrocketed," Omer Yoachimik and Jorge Pacheco said . "Cloudflare blocked over 6,500 hyper-volumetric DDoS attacks, an average of 71 per day." In Q1 2025, the company said an 18-day sustained campaign against its own and other critical infrastructure protected by Cloudflare was responsible for 13.5 million of the attacks observed during the time period. Cumulatively, Cloudflare has blocked nearly 28 million DDoS attacks, surpassing the number of attacks it mitigated in all of 2024. The notable of the attacks in Q2 2025 is a staggering DDoS attack that peaked at 7.3 terabits per second (Tbps) and 4.8 billion packets per second (Bpps) within a span of 45 seconds. Big traffic spikes like these make he...

Governmental organizations in Southeast Asia are the target of a new campaign that aims to collect sensitive information by means of a previously undocumented Windows backdoor dubbed HazyBeacon . The activity is being tracked by Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 under the moniker CL-STA-1020 , where "CL" stands for "cluster" and "STA" refers to "state-backed motivation." "The threat actors behind this cluster of activity have been collecting sensitive information from government agencies, including information about recent tariffs and trade disputes," security researcher Lior Rochberger said in a Monday analysis. Southeast Asia has increasingly become a focal point for cyber espionage due to its role in sensitive trade negotiations, military modernization, and strategic alignment in the U.S.–China power dynamic. Targeting government agencies in this region can provide valuable intelligence on foreign policy direction, infrastructure planni...

AI agents promise to automate everything from financial reconciliations to incident response. Yet every time an AI agent spins up a workflow, it has to authenticate somewhere; often with a high-privilege API key, OAuth token, or service account that defenders can't easily see. These "invisible" non-human identities (NHIs) now outnumber human accounts in most cloud environments, and they have become one of the ripest targets for attackers. Astrix's Field CTO Jonathan Sander put it bluntly in a recent Hacker News webinar : "One dangerous habit we've had for a long time is trusting application logic to act as the guardrails. That doesn't work when your AI agent is powered by LLMs that don't stop and think when they're about to do something wrong. They just do it." Why AI Agents Redefine Identity Risk Autonomy changes everything: An AI agent can chain multiple API calls and modify data without a human in the loop. If the underlying credential is exposed or overprivileged, each addit...

While phishing and ransomware dominate headlines, another critical risk quietly persists across most enterprises: exposed Git repositories leaking sensitive data. A risk that silently creates shadow access into core systems Git is the backbone of modern software development, hosting millions of repositories and serving thousands of organizations worldwide. Yet, amid the daily hustle of shipping code, developers may inadvertently leave behind API keys, tokens, or passwords in configuration files and code files, effectively handing attackers the keys to the kingdom. This isn't just about poor hygiene; it's a systemic and growing supply chain risk. As cyber threats become more sophisticated, so do compliance requirements. Security frameworks like NIS2, SOC2, and ISO 27001 now demand proof that software delivery pipelines are hardened and third-party risk is controlled. The message is clear: securing your Git repositories is no longer optional, it's essential. Below, we look at the ris...

NVIDIA is urging customers to enable System-level Error Correction Codes (ECC) as a defense against a variant of a RowHammer attack demonstrated against its graphics processing units (GPUs). "Risk of successful exploitation from RowHammer attacks varies based on DRAM device, platform, design specification, and system settings," the GPU maker said in an advisory released this week. Dubbed GPUHammer , the attacks mark the first-ever RowHammer exploit demonstrated against NVIDIA's GPUs (e.g., NVIDIA A6000 GPU with GDDR6 Memory), causing malicious GPU users to tamper with other users' data by triggering bit flips in GPU memory. The most concerning consequence of this behavior, University of Toronto researchers found, is the degradation of an artificial intelligence (AI) model's accuracy from 80% to less than 1%. RowHammer is to modern DRAMs just like how Spectre and Meltdown are to contemporary CPUs. While both are hardware-level security vulnerabilities, Row...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a serious security issue that allows leaked Laravel APP_KEYs to be weaponized to gain remote code execution capabilities on hundreds of applications. "Laravel's APP_KEY, essential for encrypting sensitive data, is often leaked publicly (e.g., on GitHub)," GitGuardian said . "If attackers get access to this key, they can exploit a deserialization flaw to execute arbitrary code on the server – putting data and infrastructure at risk." The company, in collaboration with Synacktiv, said it was able to extract more than 260,000 APP_KEYs from GitHub from 2018 to May 30, 2025, identifying over 600 vulnerable Laravel applications in the process. GitGuardian said it observed over 10,000 unique APP_KEYs across GitHub, of which 400 APP_KEYs were validated as functional. APP_KEY is a random 32-byte encryption key that's generated during the installation of Laravel. Stored in the .env file of the application, it's used ...

The 2025 Data Risk Report : Enterprises face potentially serious data loss risks from AI-fueled tools. Adopting a unified, AI-driven approach to data security can help. As businesses increasingly rely on cloud-driven platforms and AI-powered tools to accelerate digital transformation, the stakes for safeguarding sensitive enterprise data have reached unprecedented levels. The Zscaler ThreatLabz 2025 Data Risk Report reveals how evolving technology landscapes are amplifying vulnerabilities, highlighting the critical need for a proactive and unified approach to data protection. Drawing on insights from more than 1.2 billion blocked transactions recorded by the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange between February and December 2024, this year's report paints a clear picture of the data security challenges that enterprises face. From the rise of data leakage through generative AI tools to the undiminished risks stemming from email, SaaS applications, and file-sharing services, the findings are b...

Everything feels secure—until one small thing slips through. Even strong systems can break if a simple check is missed or a trusted tool is misused. Most threats don't start with alarms—they sneak in through the little things we overlook. A tiny bug, a reused password, a quiet connection—that's all it takes. Staying safe isn't just about reacting fast. It's about catching these early signs before they blow up into real problems. That's why this week's updates matter. From stealthy tactics to unexpected entry points, the stories ahead reveal how quickly risk can spread—and what smart teams are doing to stay ahead. Dive in. ⚡ Threat of the Week U.S. Disrupts N. Korea IT Worker Scheme — Prosecutors said they uncovered the North Korean IT staff working at over 100 U.S. companies using fictitious or stolen identities and not only drawing salaries, but also stealing secret data and plundering virtual currency more than $900,000 in one incident targeting an unnamed blockchain company in ...

Threat actors are weaponizing exposed Java Debug Wire Protocol ( JDWP ) interfaces to obtain code execution capabilities and deploy cryptocurrency miners on compromised hosts. "The attacker used a modified version of XMRig with a hard-"coded configuration, allowing them to avoid suspicious command-line arguments that are often flagged by defenders," Wiz researchers Yaara Shriki and Gili Tikochinski said in a report published this week. "The payload used mining pool proxies to hide their cryptocurrency wallet address, thereby preventing investigators from pivoting on it." The cloud security firm, which is being acquired by Google Cloud, said it observed the activity against its honeypot servers running TeamCity, a popular continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) tool. JDWP is a communication protocol used in Java for debugging purposes. With JDWP, users can leverage a debugger to work in a different process, a Java application, on the same com...

Generative AI is changing how businesses work, learn, and innovate. But beneath the surface, something dangerous is happening. AI agents and custom GenAI workflows are creating new, hidden ways for sensitive enterprise data to leak —and most teams don't even realize it. If you're building, deploying, or managing AI systems, now is the time to ask: Are your AI agents exposing confidential data without your knowledge? Most GenAI models don't intentionally leak data. But here's the problem: these agents are often plugged into corporate systems—pulling from SharePoint, Google Drive, S3 buckets, and internal tools to give smart answers. And that's where the risks begin. Without tight access controls, governance policies, and oversight, a well-meaning AI can accidentally expose sensitive information to the wrong users—or worse, to the internet. Imagine a chatbot revealing internal salary data. Or an assistant surfacing unreleased product designs during a casual query. This isn't hypot...

If you're evaluating AI-powered SOC platforms, you've likely seen bold claims: faster triage, smarter remediation, and less noise. But under the hood, not all AI is created equal. Many solutions rely on pre-trained AI models that are hardwired for a handful of specific use cases. While that might work for yesterday's SOC, today's reality is different. Modern security operations teams face a sprawling and ever-changing landscape of alerts. From cloud to endpoint, identity to OT, insider threats to phishing, network to DLP, and so many more, the list goes on and is continuously growing. CISOs and SOC managers are rightly skeptical. Can this AI actually handle all of my alerts, or is it just another rules engine in disguise? In this post, we'll examine the divide between two types of AI SOC platforms. Those built on adaptive AI, which learns to triage and respond to any alert type, and those that rely on pre-trained AI, limited to handling predefined use cases only. Understanding t...

Identity-based attacks are on the rise. Attacks in which malicious actors assume the identity of an entity to easily gain access to resources and sensitive data have been increasing in number and frequency over the last few years. Some recent reports estimate that 83% of attacks involve compromised secrets . According to reports such as the Verizon DBIR , attackers are more commonly using stolen credentials to gain their initial foothold, rather than exploiting a vulnerability or misconfiguration. Attackers are not just after human identities that they can assume, though. More commonly, they are after Non-Human Identities (NHIs), which outnumber human identities in the enterprise by at least 50 to one . Unlike humans, machines have no good way to achieve multi-factor authentication, and we, for the most part, have been relying on credentials alone, in the form of API keys, bearer tokens, and JWTs.  Traditionally, identity and access management (IAM) has been built on the idea of...

Ever wonder what happens when attackers don't break the rules—they just follow them better than we do? When systems work exactly as they're built to, but that "by design" behavior quietly opens the door to risk? This week brings stories that make you stop and rethink what's truly under control. It's not always about a broken firewall or missed patch—it's about the small choices, default settings, and shortcuts that feel harmless until they're not. The real surprise? Sometimes the threat doesn't come from outside—it's baked right into how things are set up. Dive in to see what's quietly shaping today's security challenges. ⚡ Threat of the Week FBI Warns of Scattered Spider's on Airlines — The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has warned of a new set of attacks mounted by the notorious cybercrime group Scattered Spider targeting the airline sector using sophisticated social engineering techniques to obtain initial access. Cybersecurity vendors Palo Alto Networks Unit 4...

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has revealed that it has observed the notorious cybercrime group Scattered Spider broadening its targeting footprint to strike the airline sector. To that end, the agency said it's actively working with aviation and industry partners to combat the activity and help victims. "These actors rely on social engineering techniques, often impersonating employees or contractors to deceive IT help desks into granting access," the FBI said in a post on X. "These techniques frequently involve methods to bypass multi-factor authentication (MFA), such as convincing help desk services to add unauthorized MFA devices to compromised accounts." Scattered Spider attacks are also known to target third-party IT providers to obtain access to large organizations, putting trusted vendors and contractors at risk of potential attacks. The attacks typically pave the way for data theft, extortion, and ransomware. In a statement shared ...