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Most enterprises assume their asset inventory is close enough to accurate. The evidence suggests otherwise. According to a survey of over 600 security leaders in the 2026 Axonius Actionability Report, only 45% of organizations consolidate their asset and exposure data into a single view, and every downstream security program inherits whatever the inventory gets wrong. Lumen Technologies , a telecommunications company with nearly a century of history, put this to the test. Geoff Krahn, Director of Product and Platform Security at Lumen, and his team used the Axonius asset intelligence platform to reconcile data from more than 40 disconnected systems into one trusted view. They uncovered 60 times more devices than they knew they had, then rebuilt their exposure management program on that foundation. Why asset inventories break down at enterprise scale Lumen's environment is an extreme case of a problem most security teams recognize. More than 40 independent IT and security to...

Microsoft has taken apart a destructive Windows backdoor it calls GigaWiper . What stands out is how it is built: not one tool but three older destructive programs bolted into one, offered as commands the operator can choose from. Each is a different way to break a machine: wipe the whole disk, overwrite the Windows drive, or run fake "ransomware" that scrambles files with a key it never saves. Because this is malware and not a single flaw, there is no patch to chase; GigaWiper is what an attacker runs after they are already inside, which makes early detection and clean, offline backups the real defense. The same malicious files show up in a second report under another name: BLUERABBIT , a backdoor Binary Defense flagged last month . Microsoft lists four hashes for the GigaWiper backdoor ; Binary Defense lists the same four for BLUERABBIT , and both command servers match. Binary Defense, citing Google's Threat Intelligence Group, ties the malware to a likely Ir...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new ransomware family called GodDamn that employs the PoisonX kernel driver to neutralize security software as part of its defense evasion strategy. According to a new report published by the Threat Hunter Team from Symantec, the ransomware was first publicly spotted in the wild on May 21, 2026. It's assessed to be a rebrand of the Beast ransomware, which, in turn, was an enhanced version of Monster , a Delphi-based ransomware that surfaced in March 2022. Broadcom's cybersecurity arm is tracing the developer behind these ransomware families under the moniker Hyadina. In one attack orchestrated by the ransomware operation in early June 2026, the threat actors are said to have leveraged AnyDesk for remote access and used a NirSoft-based credential harvesting toolkit before deploying the ransomware. The exact initial access vector is unknown. The credential harvester is designed to extract sensitive data from common web browsers, W...

Microsoft has released security updates for a Defender vulnerability known as RoguePlanet, nearly a month after details of the flaw became public. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-50656 (CVSS score: 7.8), is a privilege escalation issue in the Microsoft Malware Protection Engine ("mpengine.dll"), which provides scanning, detection, and cleaning capabilities for its antivirus and antispyware software. The issue has been remediated in Microsoft Malware Protection Engine version 1.1.26060.3008, along with defense-in-depth updates to harden unspecified security-related features.  RoguePlanet was first disclosed by a security researcher named Chaotic Eclipse (aka Nightmare-Eclipse), describing it as a race condition that could be abused to spawn a shell with SYSTEM-level privileges. This, in turn, grants the attacker the ability to run arbitrary code or perform unauthorized actions. The exploit has been found to work on systems running up-to-date versions of Wind...

Ask an AI coding agent to scan open-source code for security holes, and it might run the attacker's code on your own machine instead. That is the finding in a  proof-of-concept published Wednesday by the AI Now Institute, an attack it calls " Friendly Fire. " It works against Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex when either is running in an autonomous mode that approves its own commands. It hijacks the exact job these tools are sold for: checking untrusted third-party code for problems. Instead of catching the threat, the agent becomes the way in. Researchers Boyan Milanov and Heidy Khlaaf tested two setups, each a stock install with the autonomous mode switched on: Claude Code (CLI 2.1.116, 2.1.196, 2.1.198, 2.1.199) on Claude Sonnet 4.6, Sonnet 5, or Opus 4.8 OpenAI Codex (CLI 0.142.4) on GPT-5.5 Claude Code's "auto-mode" and Codex's "auto-review" use a classifier to run commands the agent judges safe, pausing ...

Researchers at  Wiz  found that a flaw in six popular AI coding assistants lets a booby-trapped code project quietly take control of a developer's computer. The assistant asks permission to edit one harmless-looking file, but the write lands on a sensitive one instead. The affected tools are Amazon Q Developer, Anthropic's Claude Code, Augment, Cursor, Google Antigravity, and Windsurf. Wiz calls the pattern GhostApproval and published it on July 8. Three of the six have shipped fixes, two have not, and Anthropic disputes that it is a bug. The most exposed are the tools that change files before you can weigh in. How the attack works The attack abuses an old Unix feature called a symbolic link , or symlink , that the assistants fail to check. A symlink quietly points to another file elsewhere on disk, so writing to it actually writes to the target. Wiz built a malicious repository with a symlink named project_settings.json that really points to the victim's ...

Sophos looked at a week of its own endpoint data and found that AI coding agents such as Claude Code, Cursor, and OpenAI Codex are setting off detection rules written to catch human intruders. The agents are not malicious. They just do a lot of things that, to a behavioral engine, look exactly like an attack. Decrypting browser credentials, listing what sits in Windows' credential store, pulling files down with built-in system tools, writing to the startup folder: these have long been high-signal to defenders. What has changed is who is generating it. On the machines Sophos watched, it was often a developer's AI assistant going about ordinary work. What set the alarms off The  analysis  draws on seven days of telemetry from June 2026, taken from Sophos's behavioral engine on Windows and counted by unique machines, not raw event volume. It is a narrow window on one vendor's fleet, not an industry census. Sophos's charts put credential access at 56.2 perc...

Researchers at  Shandong University  have shown a fast new way to pull data off computers that are cut off from every network. The technique, called  TrojPix , tweaks on-screen pixels in ways the eye cannot see, so that the video cable carrying them radiates a faint radio signal a nearby receiver can decode. But TrojPix works only once malware is already on the target machine, so it is a way for stolen data to get out, not a way in. In the researchers' tests, TrojPix hit a peak throughput of 8.1 Mbps and reached as far as 208 meters, the two measured separately rather than together. Most air-gap covert channels crawl along at bits or kilobits per second; at 8.1 megabits, roughly a megabyte a second, TrojPix could move a 100 MB file in under two minutes. That turns the threat from leaking a password into moving whole files while the monitor looks switched off. Real-world range is another matter: a receiver still has to fight through walls, shielding, and noise. Th...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a novel Java-based remote access trojan (RAT) called QuimaRAT that's capable of targeting Windows, Linux, and macOS environments. According to LevelBlue, the cross-platform malware is advertised under a malware-as-a-service (MaaS) model, costing anywhere between $150 for one month to $1,200 for lifetime access. Other subscription tiers include $300 for three months, $500 for six months, and $700 for twelve months. "Built around a modular architecture, the RAT supports dynamic capability expansion through encrypted plugins that can be delivered, loaded, unloaded, and updated directly from its command-and-control (C2) infrastructure," the cybersecurity company said in an analysis of the malware. The malware author also advertises a builder capable of generating multiple output formats, including JAR, EXE, APP, SH, BAT, and VBS, indicating an attempt to help prospective customers package the client tailored for different enviro...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a previously undocumented modular malware framework codenamed Avalon that's distributed by means of a multi-stage phishing chain capable of bypassing traditional security controls. Avalon combines credential collection, lateral movement, remote access, recovery disruption, and ransomware execution, bringing together diverse functions under one umbrella. The ransomware component has been internally named CrownX.  "The attack began with a spoofed legal document email directing recipients to a password protected archive on Proton Drive," Blackpoint Cyber researchers Nevan Beal and Sam Decker said . "Malicious content was embedded inside an ISO image rather than attached directly, reducing the likelihood of detection at the email layer." Should the email recipient interact with a document-themed Windows Shortcut ("Secure Document CA-283505.pdf.lnk") inside the mounted image, it triggers a staged malware s...

A Brazilian banking trojan called Ousaban is going after Windows users who bank in Spain and Portugal.  Fortinet's FortiGuard Labs  identified the campaign in May 2026. It opens with a phishing PDF disguised as a corrupted file, checks that the visitor is really in Spain or Portugal, and hides its real payload inside an image. The goal is the usual one: steal banking logins and take over accounts. Ousaban sits quietly on a Windows PC and waits for the user to open a banking site. When a target bank loads, it can capture screenshots and keystrokes, tamper with the clipboard, show fake messages, and give the attacker remote control. Together, those are the tools for hijacking a live banking session and taking over an account. Ousaban watches for more than two dozen banks across the two countries, among them Banco Santander, BBVA, CaixaBank, Bankinter, and Caixa Geral de Depósitos. How the attack works It starts with a phishing PDF disguised as a corrupted file. Th...

Microsoft has formally disclosed that it's working to release a patch to address a Defender zero-day codenamed RoguePlanet . The vulnerability has now been assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2026-50656 (CVSS score: 7.8), with the tech giant describing it as a privilege escalation flaw. "Microsoft is aware of an elevation of privilege in the Microsoft Malware Protection Engine in Microsoft Defender, publicly referred to as 'RoguePlanet,'" the company said. "We are working to provide a high-quality security update that addresses this vulnerability."  The development comes nearly a week after a security researcher named Chaotic Eclipse (aka Nightmare-Eclipse) released RoguePlanet, calling the exploit a case of a race condition that grants attackers a shell with SYSTEM-level privileges. "The exploit is a race condition, so it's a hit or miss," the researcher noted. "I have managed to get a 100% success rate on some machines while it...

For most of the past decade, managed detection and response was the answer to a real problem. Security teams couldn't staff around the clock, couldn't hire enough analysts, and needed someone else to handle the alert queue. MDR stepped in. It worked well enough. Until now. The threat landscape has changed faster than the MDR model can adapt. Attackers are using AI to move faster, generate more convincing phishing at scale, automate reconnaissance, and create malware variants that evade signature-based detection. The attack surface has expanded from endpoint to cloud, identity, and network simultaneously. And yet MDR is still doing what it always did. Routing alerts to human analysts who triage what they can, in the order they can get to it. That is no longer enough. The data we share below proves it and security leaders might consider exploring whether they have outgrown their MDR . MDR's 24/7 promise doesn't cover 60% of your alerts MDR promised 24/7 human cov...

Most organizations now recognize that endpoint protection alone is no longer sufficient. That's why adoption of endpoint detection and response (EDR) has accelerated rapidly in recent years. Organizations understand that modern attacks move faster, evade traditional prevention controls, and require continuous visibility into suspicious activity across the environment. But owning EDR capabilities does not automatically create operational cyber resilience. Many mid-sized organizations have invested in advanced endpoint security platforms and now have access to valuable detection and response functionality. Yet despite this investment, they often struggle to fully operationalize these capabilities. Lean security teams remain overwhelmed by alert volumes, investigations take too long, and response capacity is stretched thin. As threats become faster, more AI-enabled, and increasingly abuse legitimate tools to evade detection, organizations are realizing an important truth: vis...

A new cyber espionage campaign codenamed Operation Dragon Weave has been observed targeting officials and citizens in the Czech Republic and Taiwan to deliver an AdaptixC2 agent. According to Seqrite Labs, targets of the campaign include government, research, academic, technology, and financial services sectors. The activity entails distributing spear-phishing emails containing ZIP attachments to trigger an infection chain that uses a Rust loader to drop the final payload for data exfiltration and remote control. "When extracted, the archive contains multiple files that appear legitimate but are actually part of a structured infection chain designed to execute malicious payloads in the background," security researcher Priya Patel said . The attack chain uses two different pathways to launch the final-stage malware. One infection sequence begins when the recipient of the ZIP archive opens a malicious Windows Shortcut (LNK) file that masquerades as a PDF document. This...

The North Korean state-sponsored threat actor known as Kimsuky (aka Velvet Chollima) has been attributed to a fresh set of cyber attacks targeting South Korean military and corporate entities through March and April 2026. "Kimsuky employed a range of tailored social engineering tactics, such as spoofing security software installation pages and crafting a fake Webex meeting page that leveraged a legitimate meeting schedule," ENKI said in an analysis published this week. The attacks have been found to deliver a variant of a known malware family dubbed HTTPSpy by disguising it as installers from South Korean security software, a tactic the threat actor has consistently adopted since 2023. In the latest campaign observed in March 2026, the adversary has been found to propagate malicious payloads through a bogus web page impersonating the security software installation page of a South Korean B2B messaging service. Given the nature of the lure, it's suspected that...

Threat actors are continuing to exploit a critical, now-patched security flaw impacting FortiClient Endpoint Management Server (EMS) deployments to deliver a credential-stealing malware family dubbed EKZ Infostealer. "The campaign abused trusted endpoint management infrastructure to deliver malware across managed endpoints," Arctic Wolf said . "Threat actors disguised the credential stealer payload as a Fortinet endpoint update, silently executing the malicious executable through PowerShell." The activity, observed by the cybersecurity company in May 2026, involves the exploitation of CVE-2026-35616 (CVSS score: 9.1), a critical pre-authentication API access bypass leading to privilege escalation. The issue was addressed by Fortinet in FortiClient EMS 7.4.7 and later. A successful compromise is followed by the threat actor taking steps to modify configurations to defer firmware upgrade reminders, as well as modifying a Remote Access Profile configuration and...

Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a cross-platform malware called RemotePE that has been put to use by the North Korea-linked Lazarus Group in attacks targeting financial and cryptocurrency organizations. RemotePE, per NCC Group subsidiary Fox-IT, is part of a multi-stage attack chain that involves two loaders tracked as DPAPILoader and RemotePELoader. "DPAPILoader decrypts and loads RemotePELoader from disk using the Windows Data Protection API ( DPAPI )," security researchers Yun Zheng Hu and Mick Koomen said . "RemotePELoader beacons to a C2 server and waits until it receives the next stage: RemotePE, a RAT executed entirely in memory and never written to disk, leaving no filesystem artifacts." RemotePE was first highlighted by the security vendor in September 2025 in connection with an attack targeting an unnamed organization in the decentralized finance (DeFi) sector, leading to the deployment of three malware families, including PondRAT, Th...

In Your Biggest Security Risk Isn't Malware — It's What You Already Trust , we made a simple argument: the most dangerous activity inside most organizations no longer looks like an attack. It looks like administration. PowerShell, WMIC, netsh, Certutil, MSBuild — the same trusted utilities your IT team uses every day are also the preferred toolkit of modern threat actors. Bitdefender's analysis of 700,000 high-severity incidents found legitimate-tool abuse in 84% of them . The reaction we heard most was a fair one: We know. So what do we actually do about it? That's what Bitdefender's complimentary Internal Attack Surface Assessment   is built to answer. It's a 45-day, low-effort engagement available to organizations with 250 or more employees that turns the abstract problem of "living off the land" into a specific, prioritized list of users, endpoints, and tools you can safely take away from attackers without breaking the business. Why This, Why ...

The dark secret of enterprise security operations is that defenders have quietly institutionalized the practice of not looking. This is not just anecdotal, but rather backed by a recent report investigating more than 25 million security alerts, including informational and low-severity, across live enterprise environments.  The dataset behind these findings includes 10 million monitored endpoints and identities, 82,000 forensic endpoint investigations including live memory scans, 180 million files analyzed, and telemetry from 7 million IP addresses, 3 million domains and URLs, and over 550,000 phishing emails. The patterns that emerge from this data tell a consistent story. Threat actors are exploiting the predictable gaps created by constrained, severity-based security operations, and they are doing it systematically. Understanding where those gaps actually live requires looking at the full alert picture, starting with the category most teams have been conditioned to ignore. Th...