CMMC Compliance in the Age of AI
Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification 2.0 (CMMC 2.0) now requires federal contractors to prove how they protect Controlled Unclassified Information, moving beyond self‑attestation to verifiable evidence. The biggest readiness gap is a lack of comprehensive data‑scope awareness, often uncovering a larger CUI footprint and expanding compliance effort. Manual execution of administrative controls creates inconsistent records, prompting organizations to adopt automation for repeatable workflows and reliable evidence. When governed properly, AI can further accelerate compliance tasks while mitigating new risk vectors.
Weak at the Seams
The article argues that cyber risk is no longer a collection of isolated silos but a systemic threat amplified by digital transformation across healthcare, finance and manufacturing. While global security spending is projected to exceed $212 billion in 2025, the exposure...
Patch Windows Collapse as Time-to-Exploit Accelerates
Rapid7’s 2026 Threat Landscape Report shows confirmed exploitation of high‑ and critical‑severity vulnerabilities more than doubled, rising to 146 incidents in 2025 from 71 in 2024. The median time from public disclosure to inclusion in CISA’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities list...
Arelion Employs NETSCOUT Arbor DDoS Protection Products
Arelion, a Tier‑1 IP backbone provider serving 129 countries, has deepened its partnership with NETSCOUT to modernize its DDoS defense. After 16 years using Arbor Sightline and the Threat Mitigation System, Arelion added three NETSCOUT offerings—Sentinel, ATLAS Intelligence Feed, and...
6 Winter 2026 G2 Leader Badges Prove This DDoS Protection Stands Out
NETSCOUT’s Arbor Threat Mitigation System (TMS) captured five G2 leader badges for winter 2026, spanning enterprise DDoS protection, momentum, regional Asia, and web security categories. Its companion solution, Arbor Sightline, earned a leader badge in enterprise network management. The awards...
How Botnet-Driven DDoS Attacks Evolved in 2H 2025
In the second half of 2025, DDoS attacks remained numerically steady but grew dramatically in scale and sophistication. AI‑enhanced DDoS‑for‑hire services enabled even non‑technical actors to launch multiterabit floods, with IoT botnets such as TurboMirai reaching 30 Tbps and 4 gigapackets per...
5 Practical Steps to Strengthen Attack Resilience with Attack Surface Management
The article outlines how attack surface management (ASM) transforms raw visibility into measurable cyber resilience by continuously identifying and prioritizing exposure across all asset categories. It presents five practical steps: comprehensive surface identification, focusing on fast‑breaking attack vectors, moving from...
5 Steps to Strengthen Supply Chain Security and Improve Cyber Resilience
Supply chain attacks are increasingly bypassing traditional defenses, forcing organizations to treat vendor risk as a core cyber‑resilience issue. The article outlines five practical steps: mapping and prioritizing dependencies, continuously monitoring supplier security posture, tightening access controls, deploying unified telemetry...
5 Ways to Strengthen Identity Security and Improve Attack Resilience
Identity compromise is now the top vector for breaching corporate systems, rendering traditional firewalls and endpoint tools ineffective once valid credentials are used. The article outlines five actionable steps—mandatory MFA for privileged accounts, deployment of privileged access management (PAM), comprehensive...
Zero‑click Grafana AI Attack Can Enable Enterprise Data Exfiltration
Security researchers have uncovered GrafanaGhost, a chained exploit that leverages indirect prompt injection in Grafana’s AI dashboards to exfiltrate sensitive enterprise data without user authentication. The attack persists malicious prompts, tricks the AI model into generating outbound image requests, and...
Supply Chain Security Is Now a Board-Level Issue: Here’s What CSOs Need to Know
Supply chain security has moved from a niche technical issue to a board‑level priority, driven by stringent regulations like the European Cyber Resilience Act and U.S. EO 14028. Open‑source components now appear in 97% of commercial applications, with 86% harboring vulnerabilities,...
Escaping the COTS Trap
Enterprise cybersecurity teams have amassed large fleets of commercial off‑the‑shelf (COTS) tools, driving complexity, cost, and risk. While COTS promises rapid deployment and lower upfront spend, dependence creates structural lock‑in that hampers future changes and migration. The article highlights how...
WhatsApp Malware Campaign Uses Malicious VBS Files to Gain Persistent Access
Microsoft Defender has identified a WhatsApp‑based malware campaign that distributes malicious Visual Basic Script (VBS) files. The scripts employ social engineering and living‑off‑the‑land techniques, renaming legitimate Windows utilities to download additional payloads. Attackers host these payloads on trusted cloud services...
9 Ways CISOs Can Combat AI Hallucinations
AI hallucinations are undermining governance, risk and compliance (GRC) processes as generative tools begin making judgment calls on control effectiveness and incident handling. Security leaders warn that unchecked AI can produce convincing yet inaccurate assessments, leading to faulty risk scores...
The External Pressures Redefining Cybersecurity Risk
External pressures are reshaping cybersecurity risk, with third‑party breaches now accounting for over 35% of incidents. Geopolitical conflicts are spilling battle‑tested tactics into operational technology (OT) and IoT environments, raising safety and continuity stakes. Generative AI accelerates attacker capabilities while...
Why Kubernetes Controllers Are the Perfect Backdoor
Kubernetes controllers, the engine behind cluster self‑healing, are being weaponized as stealthy backdoors. Threat actors register rogue MutatingAdmissionWebhooks or custom controllers that watch for pod creation events and inject malicious sidecars, as seen in the Siloscape and Hildegard campaigns. Because...
Chained Vulnerabilities in Cisco Catalyst Switches Could Induce Denial-of-Service
Cisco disclosed four vulnerabilities in its widely deployed Catalyst 9300 series switches, two of which (CVE‑2026‑20114 and CVE‑2026‑20110) can be chained to elevate a low‑privilege Lobby Ambassador account into maintenance mode, effectively causing a denial‑of‑service outage. The chain requires only...
The Insider Threat Rises Again
Insider threats are resurging, with 42% of organizations reporting more malicious incidents and a similar rise in negligent cases, according to Mimecast’s State of Human Risk Report. The average cost per insider‑driven breach now tops $13.1 million, and 66% of security...
Reco Targets AI Agent Blind Spots with New Security Capability
Reco has launched a new capability called “Reco AI Agent Security” to give enterprises visibility and control over autonomous AI agents across their SaaS stack. The tool, available from March 18, expands Reco’s existing platform to cover agents such as Microsoft...
Can You Prove the Person on the Other Side Is Real?
The article warns that by 2026 synthetic identities and deepfake technology will outpace traditional AI automation in the estate‑and‑identity space. Generative models can create fully fabricated personas that pass routine checks, allowing fraudsters to hijack legacy or deceased accounts and...
ClickFix Treibt Neue Infostealer-Kampagnen An
Rapid7 uncovered a large‑scale ClickFix campaign that has compromised more than 250 WordPress sites in twelve countries since December 2025. The attackers serve a fake Cloudflare CAPTCHA which tricks visitors into executing obfuscated PowerShell commands that launch the DoubleDonut loader...
What It Takes to Win that CSO Role
Chief Security Officer (CSO) and Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) roles have shifted from technical gatekeepers to board‑level risk executives. Executives now oversee AI governance, regulatory compliance such as the EU AI Act, and must prove security can sustain business...
Hybrid Resilience: Designing Incident Response Across On-Prem, Cloud and SaaS without Losing Your Mind
Hybrid incident response demands more than tool consolidation; a shared incident language and unified command structure are essential. The author proposes a contract that standardizes severity, hypothesis, timeline, and communication cadence across on‑prem, cloud, and SaaS teams. Portable telemetry—user‑journey metrics,...
Storm-2561 Targets Enterprise VPN Users with SEO Poisoning, Fake Clients
Microsoft warned that the cyber‑crime group Storm‑2561 is hijacking search‑engine results to distribute trojanized VPN clients, stealing corporate credentials and covering its tracks. The campaign uses SEO poisoning to push spoofed download pages for popular VPN solutions, delivering digitally signed...
The Cyber Perimeter Was Never Dead. We Just Abandoned It.
The article argues that the network perimeter is not dead, but has been neglected as organizations focus on cloud‑native identities. Federal actions—FBI’s Winter SHIELD operation and CISA’s BOD 26‑02 directive—force a hard look at weak authentication, excessive privileges, and unsupported edge...
AWS Expands Security Hub for Multicloud Security Operations
Amazon Web Services has broadened AWS Security Hub into a centralized multicloud security operations platform. The enhanced service aggregates risk signals from AWS and third‑party tools, delivering near‑real‑time analytics, automated analysis, and prioritized insights across multiple cloud providers. New capabilities...
Threat Intelligence by ESET Is a Game Changer
ESET reports a mixed security outlook for India, with overall threat detections falling 12 % YoY while ransomware incidents jumped 70 % between late‑2024 and early‑2025. Phishing remains the most common attack vector, and AI‑driven deep‑fake and ransomware threats are intensifying. The...
The OT Security Time Bomb: Why Legacy Industrial Systems Are the Biggest Cyber Risk Nobody Wants to Fix
Legacy operational technology (OT) in energy and pharma plants still relies on outdated operating systems like Windows XP and insecure protocols such as Modbus, creating a hidden cyber‑risk. While IT teams adopt zero‑trust and AI‑driven defenses, OT environments remain unpatched...
OpenAI to Acquire Promptfoo to Strengthen AI Agent Security Testing
OpenAI announced it will acquire Promptfoo, an AI testing startup whose tools detect adversarial prompts, jailbreak attempts, and safety violations in large language model applications. Promptfoo’s technology, already deployed by more than a quarter of Fortune 500 firms, will be integrated...
When AI Safety Constrains Defenders More than Attackers
Security teams are encountering AI safety guardrails that block legitimate defensive tasks such as threat modeling, phishing simulations, and red‑team code generation. Research shows open‑weight models can be bypassed in multi‑turn attacks with success rates up to 93%, while enterprise‑approved...
Challenges and Projects for the CISO in 2026
CISOs face a 2026 threat landscape where AI‑driven attacks are faster, cheaper, and more credible, forcing a shift from prevention to rapid response. Experts warn that a growing internet monoculture and quantum decryption threats will magnify breach impact. Identity verification...
The 10-Hour Problem: How Visibility Gaps Are Burning Out the SOC
According to a Forrester Consulting study commissioned by NETSCOUT, 61% of SOC analysts spend more than ten hours each week in the analysis phase due to fragmented visibility. Inadequate network analysis and visibility (NAV) forces analysts to manually stitch logs...
Anthropic AI Ultimatums and IP Theft: The Unspoken Risk
Anthropic’s Claude AI is caught between a massive Chinese extraction campaign and a U.S. government ban that forces the model out of federal systems. China‑based firms generated over 16 million interactions to map Claude’s reasoning, tool use and coding abilities, while...
How to Know You’re a Real-Deal CSO — and Whether that Job Opening Truly Seeks One
Recruiters struggle to find genuine Chief Security Officers (CSOs) because the role now demands deep technical expertise, business acumen, and executive communication. Title inflation leads firms to hire or promote candidates who excel in architecture but lack governance, risk‑prioritization, and...
How CISOs Can Build a Resilient Workforce
Cybersecurity leaders face mounting workforce challenges as skill gaps, burnout, and unpredictable threat spikes strain limited budgets. CISOs like Stephen Ford and Jon France emphasize data‑driven staffing, AI‑augmented workflows, and early‑career pipelines to sustain teams. The 2025 ISC2 study shows...
Why Application Security Must Start at the Load Balancer
Application security should begin at the load balancer, not deeper in the stack. Organizations often treat load balancers solely as performance devices, leaving encryption, protocol hygiene, and abuse controls to downstream tools. This architectural gap lets attackers exploit weak TLS...
Boards Don’t Need Cyber Metrics — They Need Risk Signals
Security teams flood boards with counts of attacks, patches, and alerts, but executives need signals that translate those numbers into business risk. Experts argue that time‑based metrics like detection and containment speed, and financial exposure indicators, better reveal whether risk...
Fake Zoom Meeting Silently Installs Surveillance Software, Says Malwarebytes
Malwarebytes uncovered a new fake‑Zoom meeting scam that silently installs a covert build of the Teramind employee‑monitoring tool on Windows workstations. Victims are lured by a realistic Zoom waiting room, then an automatic “Update Available” countdown triggers a silent download...
What Does Business Email Compromise Look Like?
Business email compromise (BEC) continues to surge, costing $2.7 billion in 2022—a 12.5% increase over the prior year. Attackers masquerade as CEOs, HR staff, or trusted vendors, using deep reconnaissance, AI‑generated voice cloning, fake invoices, QR codes, and conversation hijacking to...
What Are the Types of Ransomware Attacks?
Ransomware has evolved into a multi‑strain ecosystem, ranging from classic crypto ransomware that encrypts data to double‑extortion variants that also threaten public leaks. Newer models such as encryption‑less, locker, scareware, and Ransomware‑as‑a‑Service (RaaS) broaden the attack surface and lower the...
US Dominance of Agentic AI at the Heart of New NIST Initiative
The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has launched the AI Agent Standards Initiative under the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) to develop industry‑led standards for autonomous AI agents. The effort aims to cement U.S. leadership,...
A New Approach for GenAI Risk Protection
Generative AI’s rapid consumer adoption has exposed enterprises to data leakage risks, prompting security teams to reassess protection strategies. Traditional DLP solutions are expensive and cumbersome, limiting their use to large organizations. Two viable paths emerge: purchasing enterprise‑grade GenAI licenses...
The New Paradigm for Raising up Secure Software Engineers
AI‑assisted coding is set to dominate enterprise development, with Gartner projecting 90% of engineers using AI assistants by 2028. As AI automates line‑level vulnerability detection, security teams face a surge in code volume and reduced review windows. This forces a...
Cyber Attacks Enabled by Basic Failings, Palo Alto Analysis Finds
Palo Alto Networks’ 2026 Global Incident Response Report shows cyber‑attack timelines have collapsed, with the fastest breaches moving from initial access to data exfiltration in just 72 minutes, down from nearly five hours in 2024. The acceleration is largely driven...
Leaky Chrome Extensions with 37M Installs Caught Divulging Your Browsing History
Security researcher Q Continuum identified 287 Chrome extensions that secretly transmit users' browsing histories, affecting an estimated 37 million installations worldwide. The extensions span categories such as VPNs, productivity utilities, and shopping add‑ons, and many request broad host permissions that enable...
10 Years Later, Bangladesh Bank Cyberheist Still Offers Cyber-Resiliency Lessons
A decade after the Bangladesh Bank heist, the 2016 cyberattack that attempted to steal $951 million via the SWIFT network remains a benchmark for nation‑state hacking. Attackers used spear‑phishing malware to obtain valid SWIFT credentials, executing 35 fraudulent payment orders, of...
CISOs Must Separate Signal From Noise as CVE Volume Soars
The FIRST forecast predicts 2026 will see roughly 59,000 CVEs, with extreme scenarios approaching 118,000, far exceeding the 48,000 reported in 2025. The surge stems from more CVE Numbering Authorities, expanded bug‑bounty programs, and AI‑driven discovery, not a sudden drop...
Windows Shortcut Weaponized in Phorpiex-Linked Ransomware Campaign
Forcepoint X‑Labs uncovered a Phorpiex‑driven phishing campaign that weaponizes Windows shortcut (LNK) files to deliver Global Group ransomware. The emails use a double‑extension lure such as "Document.doc.lnk" and hide the true file type behind Windows’ default extension hiding. Once opened,...
Single Prompt Breaks AI Safety in 15 Major Language Models
Microsoft researchers uncovered a novel attack called GRP‑Obliteration that uses a single benign‑sounding prompt to strip safety guardrails from 15 major language and image models. By hijacking the Group Relative Policy Optimization training loop, the method rewards harmful completions, driving...
Never Settle: How CISOs Can Go Beyond Compliance Standards to Better Protect Their Organizations
CISOs are urged to move past traditional compliance checklists and adopt a risk‑first strategy that anticipates emerging threats such as AI‑driven attacks, third‑party vulnerabilities, and future quantum risks. While standards like HIPAA, SOC 2, and ISO 27001 provide a useful baseline, they...
