CISA has confirmed that ransomware gangs have begun exploiting two recently patched SonicWall SMA1000 vulnerabilities, including a maximum-severity server-side request forgery (SSRF) flaw. For defenders, the ransomware lifecycle — initial access, lateral movement, exfiltration, and encryption — offers multiple points where early intervention can prevent a full-scale incident. Security teams should review their detection rules, keep threat-intelligence feeds current, and validate that incident-response runbooks are tested before an incident occurs.
AI is making phishing, credential theft, and social engineering faster and more efficient, while traditional trust signals such as passwords, MFA, IP reputation, and geolocation become easier to bypass. Specops explains why organizations are increasingly adding device trust to their Zero Trust strategies. Security research like this is a reminder that visibility into endpoints, identity, and network traffic remains the foundation of any effective defense program. Beyond patching, organizations should inventory exposed services, disable unused functionality, and require multi-factor authentication wherever it can be deployed.
A seller claims to offer Israel’s 2026 population registry, but checks show the 9.2 million records are authentic data dating back to 2005. A vendor on a well-known leak forum claims to have breached Israel’s Population and Immigration Authority and is selling the entire national registry, 9.2 million records covering essentially the whole country. Ransomnews […] The reporting underscores the importance of treating third-party software and infrastructure as part of your own attack surface, since trust in a vendor is only as strong as the vendor’s own security posture. Beyond patching, organizations should inventory exposed services, disable unused functionality, and require multi-factor authentication wherever it can be deployed.
North Korea's state hackers are no longer content to type prompts into public chatbots. One of the country's main espionage groups has begun running artificial intelligence (AI) offline on its own servers, connecting document-search tools to files in its possession, and collecting the software parts needed to build AI into its malware. South Korean security firm Genians says it uncovered the The incident highlights how adversaries continue to evolve their tradecraft, combining increasingly accessible tooling with targeted social engineering to slip past traditional perimeter defenses. Finally, maintain offline, tested backups and a clear communication plan so that business continuity decisions are made ahead of time rather than under pressure.
North Korea's state hackers are no longer content to type prompts into public chatbots. One of the country's main espionage groups has begun running artificial intelligence (AI) offline on its own servers, connecting document-search tools to files in its possession, and collecting the software parts needed to build AI into its malware. South Korean security firm Genians says it uncovered the setup after months of tracking and log analysis on infrastructure tied to Kimsuky, a hacking unit under North Korea's Reconnaissance General Bureau. Genians found no evidence that the group had trained an AI model of its own, and the firm does not offer that as reassurance. It describes an actor in a "research and knowledge acquisition" stage, assembling and testing existing tools rather than making new models, with the apparent aim of folding AI through the operation, from writing malware to analyzing data.
A member of "The Com," a loose-knit online cybercrime collective that targets children and teenagers, has been sentenced to two years in prison for blackmail and sextortion offenses against nearly 120 victims worldwide. The reporting underscores the importance of treating third-party software and infrastructure as part of your own attack surface, since trust in a vendor is only as strong as the vendor’s own security posture. Finally, maintain offline, tested backups and a clear communication plan so that business continuity decisions are made ahead of time rather than under pressure.
AI is helping development teams produce far more code, far faster. But security teams still have to review vulnerabilities, manage dependencies, prioritize fixes, and control risk at human speed. When software output jumps 10 to 50 times, the problem is no longer just finding vulnerabilities. It is keeping security from becoming the bottleneck, or worse, losing control of what gets shipped. In our latest webinar with Chainguard experts, “The True Cost of Building at Machine Speed,” you can now watch how security teams can keep AI-driven development fast without letting risk scale with it. For years, application security followed a familiar cycle: developers wrote code, scanners found problems, security teams prioritized them, and engineers fixed what mattered most. If teams can suddenly create many times more code, security can also end up with many more components, dependencies, findings, and fixes to manage. More scanning alone does not solve that. It can simply create a larger backlog.
Three separate research efforts last week demonstrated ways to defeat passkey protections without breaking the cryptography they rest on. Passkeys are designed to replace reusable passwords and resist phishing. The attacks instead reused signed authentication material that Windows had exposed, abused a cloud-synced passkey system from malware already on the victim's machine, and used a Because attacks of this type can go unnoticed for extended periods, the window between initial compromise and detection is often the deciding factor in the eventual impact. Security teams should review their detection rules, keep threat-intelligence feeds current, and validate that incident-response runbooks are tested before an incident occurs.
Three separate research efforts last week demonstrated ways to defeat passkey protections without breaking the cryptography they rest on. Passkeys are designed to replace reusable passwords and resist phishing. The attacks instead reused signed authentication material that Windows had exposed, abused a cloud-synced passkey system from malware already on the victim's machine, and used a Windows Hello for Business key from a compromised user session without a fresh PIN or biometric check. None cracked the math. The impact is not the same in all three cases. The fixes and mitigations differ too. Microsoft's Windows logging vulnerability, CVE-2026-34348, has a vendor CVSS score of 6.5 and a Microsoft security update. Microsoft told The Hacker News that it has also applied mitigations for the reported issue involving passkey relay assertions.
LexisNexis took its Diligence, Metabase API, and Newsdesk services offline as part of its response to unusual activity on servers hosted and managed by an unnamed third-party vendor. This development is consistent with broader industry trends, where threat actors increasingly reuse proven techniques and commodity tooling rather than investing in novel malware. Security teams should review their detection rules, keep threat-intelligence feeds current, and validate that incident-response runbooks are tested before an incident occurs.
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