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Security operations centers (SOCs) are under pressure from both sides: threats are growing more complex and frequent, while security budgets are no longer keeping pace. Today's security leaders are expected to reduce risk and deliver results without relying on larger teams or increased spending. At the same time, SOC inefficiencies are draining resources. Studies show that up to half of all alerts are false positives, with some reports citing false positive rates as high as 99 percent . This means highly trained analysts spend a disproportionate amount of time chasing down harmless activity, wasting effort, increasing fatigue, and raising the chance of missing real threats. In this environment, the business imperative is clear: maximize the impact of every analyst and every dollar by making security operations faster, smarter, and more focused. Enter the Agentic AI SOC Analyst The agentic AI SOC Analyst is a force multiplier that enables organizations to do more with the team an...

Threat intelligence firm GreyNoise is warning of a "notable surge" in scanning activity targeting Progress MOVEit Transfer systems starting May 27, 2025—suggesting that attackers may be preparing for another mass exploitation campaign or probing for unpatched systems. MOVEit Transfer is a popular managed file transfer solution used by businesses and government agencies to share sensitive data securely. Because it often handles high-value information, it has become a favorite target for attackers.  "Prior to this date, scanning was minimal — typically fewer than 10 IPs observed per day," the company said . "But on May 27, that number spiked to over 100 unique IPs, followed by 319 IPs on May 28." Since then, daily scanner IP volume has remained intermittently elevated between 200 to 300 IPs per day, GreyNoise added, stating it marks a "significant deviation" from usual behavior. As many as 682 unique IPs have been flagged in connection with th...

New research has uncovered continued risk from a known security weakness in Microsoft's Entra ID , potentially enabling malicious actors to achieve account takeovers in susceptible software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications. Identity security company Semperis, in an analysis of 104 SaaS applications, found nine of them to be vulnerable to Entra ID cross-tenant nOAuth abuse. First disclosed by Descope in June 2023, nOAuth refers to a weakness in how SaaS applications implement OpenID Connect ( OIDC ), which refers to an authentication layer built atop OAuth to verify a user's identity. The authentication implementation flaw essentially allows a bad actor to change the mail attribute in the Entra ID account to that of a victim's and take advantage of the app's "Log in with Microsoft" feature to hijack that account. The attack is trivial, but it also works because Entra ID permits users to have an unverified email address, opening the door to user imperson...

I had the honor of hosting the first episode of the Xposure Podcast live from Xposure Summit 2025. And I couldn't have asked for a better kickoff panel: three cybersecurity leaders who don't just talk security, they live it. Let me introduce them. Alex Delay , CISO at IDB Bank, knows what it means to defend a highly regulated environment. Ben Mead , Director of Cybersecurity at Avidity Biosciences, brings a forward-thinking security perspective that reflects the innovation behind Avidity's targeted RNA therapeutics. Last but not least, Michael Francess , Director of Cybersecurity Advanced Threat at Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, leads the charge in protecting the franchise. Each brought a unique vantage point to a common challenge: applying Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) to complex production environments. Gartner made waves in 2023 with a bold prediction: organizations that prioritize CTEM will be three times less likely to be breached by 2026. But here's the kicker -...

Cybersecurity researchers have detailed two novel methods that can be used to disrupt cryptocurrency mining botnets. The methods take advantage of the design of various common mining topologies in order to shut down the mining process , Akamai said in a new report published today. "We developed two techniques by leveraging the mining topologies and pool policies that enable us to reduce a cryptominer botnet's effectiveness to the point of completely shutting it down, which forces the attacker to make radical changes to their infrastructure or even abandon the entire campaign," security researcher Maor Dahan said . The techniques, the web infrastructure company said, hinge on exploiting the Stratum mining protocol such that it causes an attacker's mining proxy or wallet to be banned, effectively disrupting the operation. The first of the two approaches, dubbed bad shares, entails banning the mining proxy from the network, which, in turn, results in the shutdow...

It sure is a hard time to be a SOC analyst. Every day, they are expected to solve high-consequence problems with half the data and twice the pressure. Analysts are overwhelmed—not just by threats, but by the systems and processes in place that are meant to help them respond. Tooling is fragmented. Workflows are heavy. Context lives in five places, and alerts never slow down. What started as a fast-paced, high-impact role has, for many analysts, become a repetitive loop of alert triage and data wrangling that offers little room for strategy or growth.  Most SOC teams also run lean. Last year, our annual SANS SOC Survey found that a majority of SOCs only consist of just 2–10 full-time analysts , a number unchanged since the survey began tracking in 2017. Meanwhile, the scope of coverage has exploded, ranging from on-prem infrastructure to cloud environments, remote endpoints, SaaS platforms, and beyond. Compounded at scale, this has led to systemic burnout across SOC environment...

Hackers never sleep, so why should enterprise defenses? Threat actors prefer to target businesses during off-hours. That's when they can count on fewer security personnel monitoring systems, delaying response and remediation. When retail giant Marks & Spencer experienced a security event over Easter weekend, they were forced to shut down their online operations, which account for approximately a third of the retailer's clothing and home sales. As most staff are away during off-hours and holidays, it takes time to assemble an incident response team and initiate countermeasures. This gives attackers more time to move laterally within the network and wreak havoc before the security team reacts. While not every organization may be ready to staff an in-house team around the clock, building a 24/7 SOC remains one of the most robust and proactive ways to protect against off-hours attacks. In the rest of this post, we'll explore why 24/7 vigilance is so important, the challenges ...

Veeam has rolled out patches to contain a critical security flaw impacting its Backup & Replication software that could result in remote code execution under certain conditions. The security defect, tracked as CVE-2025-23121, carries a CVSS score of 9.9 out of a maximum of 10.0. "A vulnerability allowing remote code execution (RCE) on the Backup Server by an authenticated domain user," the company said in an advisory. CVE-2025-23121 impacts all earlier version 12 builds, including 12.3.1.1139. It has been addressed in version 12.3.2 (build 12.3.2.3617). Security researchers at CODE WHITE GmbH and watchTowr have been credited with discovering and reporting the vulnerability. Cybersecurity company Rapid7 noted that the update likely addresses concerns shared by CODE WHITE in late March 2025 that the patch put in place to plug a similar hole ( CVE-2025-23120 , CVSS score: 9.9) could be bypassed. Also addressed by Veeam is another flaw in the same product (CVE-2025...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Thursday disclosed that ransomware actors are targeting unpatched SimpleHelp Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) instances to compromise customers of an unnamed utility billing software provider. "This incident reflects a broader pattern of ransomware actors targeting organizations through unpatched versions of SimpleHelp RMM since January 2025," the agency said in an advisory. Earlier this year, SimpleHelp disclosed a set of flaws (CVE-2024-57727, CVE-2024-57728, and CVE-2024-57726) that could result in information disclosure, privilege escalation, and remote code execution. The vulnerabilities have since come under repeated exploitation in the wild, including by ransomware groups like DragonForce, to breach targets of interest. Last month, Sophos revealed that a Managed Service Provider's SimpleHelp deployed was accessed by the threat actor using these flaws, and then leveraged it to pivot t...

ConnectWise has disclosed that it's planning to rotate the digital code signing certificates used to sign ScreenConnect, ConnectWise Automate, and ConnectWise remote monitoring and management (RMM) executables due to security concerns. The company said it's doing so "due to concerns raised by a third-party researcher about how ScreenConnect handled certain configuration data in earlier versions." While the company did not publicly elaborate on the nature of the problem, it has shed more light in a non-public FAQ accessible only to its customers (and later shared on Reddit ) - The concern stems from ScreenConnect using the ability to store configuration data in an available area of the installer that is not signed but is part of the installer. We are using this ability to pass down configuration information for the connection (between the agent and server) such as the URL where the agent should call back without invalidating the signature. The unsigned area is u...

Threat intelligence firm GreyNoise has warned of a "coordinated brute-force activity" targeting Apache Tomcat Manager interfaces. The company said it observed a surge in brute-force and login attempts on June 5, 2025, an indication that they could be deliberate efforts to "identify and access exposed Tomcat services at scale." To that end, 295 unique IP addresses have been found to be engaged in brute-force attempts against Tomcat Manager on that date, with all of them classified as malicious. Over the past 24 hours, 188 unique IPs have been recorded, a majority of them located in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, and Singapore. In a similar vein, 298 unique IPs were observed conducting login attempts against Tomcat Manager instances. Of the 246 IP addresses flagged in the last 24 hours, all of them are categorized as malicious and originate from the same locations. Targets of these attempts include the United States, the Uni...

In today's security landscape, budgets are tight, attack surfaces are sprawling, and new threats emerge daily. Maintaining a strong security posture under these circumstances without a large team or budget can be a real challenge. Yet lean security models are not only possible - they can be highly effective. River Island, one of the UK's leading fashion retailers, offers a powerful case study on how to do more with less. As River Island's InfoSec Officer, Sunil Patel and his small team of three are responsible for securing over 200 stores, an e-commerce platform, a major distribution center, and head offices. With no headcount growth on the horizon, Sunil had to rethink how security could scale effectively. By adopting a lean security model, powered by Intruder's exposure management platform , the team was able to improve visibility, respond faster to threats, and empower others across the business to fix what matters most. Here are five key lessons from thei...

The threat actor known as Rare Werewolf (formerly Rare Wolf) has been linked to a series of cyber attacks targeting Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries. "A distinctive feature of this threat is that the attackers favor using legitimate third-party software over developing their own malicious binaries," Kaspersky said . "The malicious functionality of the campaign described in this article is implemented through command files and PowerShell scripts." The intent of the attacks is to establish remote access to compromised hosts, and siphon credentials, and deploy the XMRig cryptocurrency miner. The activity impacted hundreds of Russian users spanning industrial enterprises and engineering schools, with a smaller number of infections also recorded in Belarus and Kazakhstan. Rare Werewolf , also known by the names Librarian Ghouls and Rezet, is the moniker assigned to an advanced persistent threat (APT) group that has a track record of...

The threat actor known as Bitter has been assessed to be a state-backed hacking group that's tasked with gathering intelligence that aligns with the interests of the Indian government. That's according to new findings jointly published by Proofpoint and Threatray in an exhaustive two-part analysis. "Their diverse toolset shows consistent coding patterns across malware families, particularly in system information gathering and string obfuscation," researchers Abdallah Elshinbary, Jonas Wagner, Nick Attfield, and Konstantin Klinger said. Bitter, also known as APT-C-08, APT-Q-37, Hazy Tiger, Orange Yali, T-APT-17, and TA397, has a history of focusing primarily on South Asian entities , with select intrusions also targeting China, Saudi Arabia, and South America. In December 2024, evidence emerged of the threat actor's targeting of Turkey using malware families such as WmRAT and MiyaRAT, indicating a gradual geographical expansion. Stating that Bitter fr...

Security teams face growing demands with more tools, more data, and higher expectations than ever. Boards approve large security budgets, yet still ask the same question: what is the business getting in return? CISOs respond with reports on controls and vulnerability counts – but executives want to understand risk in terms of financial exposure, operational impact, and avoiding loss. The disconnect has become difficult to ignore. The average cost of a breach has reached $4.88 million, according to recent IBM data . That figure reflects not just incident response but also downtime, lost productivity, customer attrition, and the extended effort required to restore operations and trust. The fallout is rarely confined to security. Security leaders need a model that brings those consequences into view before they surface. A Business Value Assessment (BVA) offers that model. It links exposures to cost, prioritization to return, and prevention to tangible value. This article will explain ...

ConnectWise, the developer of remote access and support software ScreenConnect, has disclosed that it was the victim of a cyber attack that it said was likely perpetrated by a nation-state threat actor. "ConnectWise recently learned of suspicious activity within our environment that we believe was tied to a sophisticated nation-state actor, which affected a very small number of ScreenConnect customers," the company said in a brief advisory on May 28, 2025. The company said it has engaged the services of Google Mandiant to conduct a forensic probe into the incident and that it has notified all affected customers. The incident was first reported by CRN. However, it did not reveal the exact number of customers who were impacted by the hack, when it happened, or the identity of the threat actor behind it. It's worth noting that the company, in late April 2025, patched CVE-2025-3935 (CVSS score: 8.1), a high-severity vulnerability in ScreenConnect versions 25.2.3 and ea...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Thursday revealed that Commvault is monitoring cyber threat activity targeting applications hosted in their Microsoft Azure cloud environment. "Threat actors may have accessed client secrets for Commvault's (Metallic) Microsoft 365 (M365) backup software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, hosted in Azure," the agency said . "This provided the threat actors with unauthorized access to Commvault's customers' M365 environments that have application secrets stored by Commvault." CISA further noted that the activity may be part of a broader campaign targeting various software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers' cloud infrastructures with default configurations and elevated permissions. The advisory comes weeks after Commvault revealed that Microsoft notified the company in February 2025 of unauthorized activity by a nation-state threat actor within its Azure environment. The incident led to th...

Modern apps move fast—faster than most security teams can keep up. As businesses rush to build in the cloud, security often lags behind. Teams scan code in isolation, react late to cloud threats, and monitor SOC alerts only after damage is done. Attackers don't wait. They exploit vulnerabilities within hours. Yet most organizations take days to respond to critical cloud alerts. That delay isn't just risky—it's an open door. The problem? Security is split across silos. DevSecOps, CloudSec, and SOC teams all work separately. Their tools don't talk. Their data doesn't sync. And in those gaps, 80% of cloud exposures slip through—exploitable, avoidable, and often invisible until it's too late. This free webinar ," Breaking Down Security Silos: Why Application Security Must Span from Code to Cloud to SOC ," shows you how to fix that. Join Ory Segal, Technical Evangelist at Cortex Cloud (Palo Alto Networks), and discover a practical approach to securing your apps from code to cl...