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The Fragmented State of Modern Enterprise Identity Enterprise IAM is approaching a breaking point. As organizations scale, identity becomes increasingly fragmented across thousands of applications, decentralized teams, machine identities, and autonomous systems. The result is Identity Dark Matter: identity activity that sits outside the visibility of centralized IAM and beyond the reach of security teams. According to Orchid Security 's analysis , 46% of enterprise identity activity occurs outside centralized IAM visibility. In other words, nearly half of the enterprise identity surface may be operating unseen. This hidden layer includes unmanaged applications, local accounts, opaque authentication flows, and over-permissioned non-human identities. It is further amplified by disconnected tools, siloed ownership, and the rapid rise of Agentic AI. The consequence is a widening gap between what the security organizations think they have and the access that actually exists. Th...

AI-driven exploitation timelines are rapidly shrinking, and they are not going to stop shrinking. Vulnerabilities are being discovered, reproduced, and weaponized faster than ever in the history of enterprise security. As a result, the window between a vulnerability being disclosed and indiscriminate exploitation observed across the internet is now measured in hours, not days. The industry's main answer has largely been: patch faster. Regulators say it, boards expect it, and executives demand it. But for most enterprises, it is not a button defenders can press. Patching is a controlled process shaped by uptime requirements, stability testing, change windows, business approvals, compliance obligations, and the reality that production systems cannot be broken in the name of urgency. While patching is still essential, patching alone or even faster patching is no longer a complete answer to this "new normal" and influx of disclosed vulnerabilities. Anthropic's Proj...

Shadow AI used to mean employees pasting things they shouldn't into ChatGPT. It now means something bigger: employees building full applications with AI, wiring them into production systems, and publishing them on the open internet. Without Security or IT in the loop. The artifact moved from a prompt to a product. The risk surface moved with it. In The Shadow Builders report ( get it here ), a new category-level investigation covered in May by Axios, WIRED, and VentureBeat, Red Access identified more than 380,000 publicly accessible web assets across the leading vibe-coding platforms. Roughly 5,000 looked corporate. More than 2,000 of those held sensitive corporate, operational, or personal data - sitting on the open web, deployed without basic access controls, often granting admin access by default to anyone who reached the URL. Six continents. Every industry is examined. No exploitation required. Inside organizations, passing their audits while these exposures were live...

State of AI Usage Report 2026 ( full report here ) by LayerX Security reveals the extent of the enterprise AI visibility gap and why most organizations still don't understand where their AI exposure is actually coming from. The research shows that enterprise AI risk is not distributed evenly across users or platforms. Instead, it is heavily concentrated among a small group of AI power users and a handful of dominant AI platforms that drive the majority of enterprise AI activity and sensitive data exposure. At the same time, AI usage is rapidly fragmenting across personal accounts, AI browser extensions, embedded copilots, AI connectors, and secondary AI tools operating outside traditional visibility and governance controls. The result is a fragmented AI ecosystem that most organizations still cannot fully see or govern. While AI Is Everywhere in the Enterprise, Most Employees Are Casual The common perception is that "everyone uses AI now". The report paints a much ...

When an employee installs an AI writing assistant, connects a coding copilot to their IDE, or starts summarizing meetings with a new browser tool, they are doing exactly what a productive employee should do: finding faster ways to work. Across most organizations today, employees are running three to five AI tools on any given day. Most were never reviewed by IT. A significant portion connects to corporate data through OAuth tokens or browser sessions, giving them access to shared drives, emails, and internal documents the employee never specifically intended to expose. Security teams often have no visibility into any of it. This is the shadow AI gap, and it is widening fast. Most security tools were built to monitor email and network traffic flowing through the corporate network. A browser-based AI tool that connects to company data through a quick login approval bypasses those controls entirely, because it never passes through the corporate network at all. According to Gartner , ...

Microsoft has rolled out updates to fix a remote code execution vulnerability impacting SharePoint that could be exploited by bad actors in attacks without requiring any specialized conditions to be met. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-45659 , carries a CVSS score of 8.8. It has been assigned an important severity. "Deserialization of untrusted data in Microsoft Office SharePoint allows an authorized attacker to execute code over a network," Microsoft said in an advisory released last week. Microsoft noted that the vulnerability could be triggered by any authenticated attacker, and that it does not require administrator or other elevated privileges. "In a network-based attack, an authenticated attacker, who has a minimum of Site Member permissions (PR:L), could execute code remotely on the SharePoint Server," the Windows maker added. Microsoft credited a researcher named MEOW for discovering and reporting the flaw. Updates have been released for th...

New Industry Data Just Released Suggests Not. On May 19th, 2026, Orchid Security released the results of our Identity Gap: Snapshot 2026. Among the findings, "identity dark matter" (the unseen, unmanaged elements of identity) now overshadows the visible elements 57% vs. 43%. And it couldn't have occurred at a worse time, with enterprises embracing Agent AI with both arms (and unfortunately, as Orchid co-founder Robert Wiseman explains, more than one eye closed). 

For nearly 20 years, we at The Hacker News have mostly told scary stories about cyberspace — big hacks, broken systems, and new threats. But behind every headline, there’s a quieter, better story. It’s the story of leaders making tough calls under pressure, teams building smarter defenses, and security products that keep hunting threats 24/7 — even when it’s hard. Most of the time, this work is invisible. When everything goes perfectly, nothing happens. The world just stays safe, and no one notices. Today, we want the world to notice. Introducing the CyberStars Awards 2026 We are launching the  Cybersecurity Stars Awards 2026 , a global program that recognizes excellence across the cybersecurity industry and highlights outstanding work that often goes unnoticed. Submissions are now open, and companies, products, and professionals can apply via the official awards portal: https://awards.thehackernews.com/ We don’t just want to report the news anymore. We want to recognize t...

Analysts recently confirmed what identity security teams have quietly feared: AI agents are being deployed faster than enterprises can govern them. In their inaugural Market Guide for Guardian Agents, Gartner states that “enterprise adoption of AI agents is accelerating, outpacing maturity of governance policy controls.” Enterprise leaders can request access to the Gartner Market Guide for Guardian Agents , available complimentary from Orchid Security. The challenge is not simply one of tooling. It is a structural gap in how identity has been managed over the past decades. Traditional identity and access management were designed for human users to log in and out of systems. AI agents operate differently — they run continuously, span multiple applications, acquire permissions opportunistically, and generate activity at machine speed. The result is yet another form of what Orchid Security calls "identity dark matter": an invisible and unmanaged layer of identity activity op...

Every AI tool, workflow automation, and productivity app your employees connected to Google or Microsoft this year left something behind: a persistent OAuth token with no expiration date, no automatic cleanup, and in most organizations, no one watching it. Your perimeter controls don't see it. Your MFA doesn't stop it. And when an attacker gets hold of one, they don't need a password. OAuth grants don't expire when employees leave. They don't reset when passwords change. And in most organizations, nobody is watching them. The model made sense when a handful of IT-approved apps needed calendar access. It doesn't hold up when every employee is independently wiring AI tools, workflow automations, and productivity apps directly into their Google or Microsoft environment — each one receiving a persistent, scoped token with no automatic expiration and no centralized visibility. That's not a misconfiguration. It's how OAuth is designed to work. The gap is t...

Cybersecurity company Trellix has announced that it suffered a breach that enabled unauthorized access to a "portion" of its source code. It said it "recently identified" the compromise of its source code repository and that it began working with "leading forensic experts" to resolve the matter immediately. It also said it has notified law enforcement of the matter. Trellix did not disclose the exact nature of the data that may have been accessed by the attackers. However, it pointed out that there are no indications that its source code has been affected or exploited. "Based on our investigation to date, we have found no evidence that our source code release or distribution process was affected, or that our source code has been exploited," the company added.  The company did not share any details about who may be behind the incident, and for how long the attackers had access to its systems. Trellix noted that additional information will b...

Intro A sophisticated, high-resilience malicious campaign was identified by Atos Threat Research Center (TRC) in March 2026. This operation specifically targets the high-privilege professional accounts of enterprise administrators, DevOps engineers, and security analysts by impersonating administrative utilities they rely on for daily operations. By integrating Search Engine Order (SEO) poisoning , a dual-stage GitHub distribution architecture , and decentralized blockchain-based command-and-control (C2) resolving, Threat Actors have established a highly resilient delivery and persistence mechanism. Creative Distribution via GitHub Facades The campaign utilizes a multi-layered delivery chain designed to evade platform-level takedowns and maintain a high search engine ranking. The attack begins with SEO poisoning on various search engines, including Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, and Yandex. That ensures that malicious results for niche IT terms rank at the top of search ...

When patching isn’t fast enough, NDR helps contain the next era of threats. If you’ve been tracking advancements in AI, you know the exploit window, the short buffer that organizations relied on to patch and protect after a vulnerability disclosure, is closing fast. Anthropic’s new model, Claude Mythos , and its Project Glasswing , showed that finding exploitable vulnerabilities and subtle cracks in your defenses in operating systems and browsers — work that once took experts weeks — can now be done in minutes with AI. As a result, the patch window of opportunity is now near-zero . The situation is so critical that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell recently convened an urgent meeting with the CEOs of major U.S. financial institutions to discuss the implied risks. The takeaway was straightforward: surging AI capabilities have upended risk profiles, with profound implications for institutional stability and integrity across industries.  ...

Anthropic’s Claude Mythos Preview has dominated security discussions since its April 7 announcement. Early reporting describes a powerful cybersecurity-focused AI system capable of identifying vulnerabilities at scale and raising serious questions about how quickly organizations can validate, prioritize, and remediate what it finds. The debate that followed has mostly focused on the right questions: Is this a step-change or an incremental advance? Does restricting access to Microsoft, Apple, AWS, and JPMorgan actually reduce risk, or does it just concentrate defensive advantage among the already-well-defended? What happens when adversaries—state actors, criminal enterprises—build equivalent capability? These are important. But there's a quieter operational problem that's getting less airtime, and it's the one that will actually determine whether most organizations survive this shift.  The Discovery-to-Remediation Gap The Mythos announcement, and the broader AI security...