Binance has confirmed a security breach thought to be the largest crypto heist in history, with more than $6.3 billion (£4.7 billion) stolen by hackers.

In a statement, the crypto exchange firm revealed around half of affected assets have been frozen in response to the incident. A significant portion still remains in the hands of cyber criminals, however, and Binance has pledged to “cover all losses”.

Initial findings from blockchain analytics firm TRM suggests Ethereum accounts for roughly $3.79 billion of the total stolen, with Bitcoin accounting for $1.47 billion.

At $6.3 billion, this makes the Binance hack the single largest cryptocurrency theft in history.

Research from Elliptic noted that this “dwarfs” the $1.46 billion stolen from Bybit during a February 2025 attack, which itself was more than twice that of any previous incident.

Who’s behind the Binance hack?

Cybersecurity researchers have attributed the attack to the TraderTraitor group, a North Korean state-sponsored hacker unit associated with the infamous Lazarus Group.

Rafe Pilling, senior director of threat research at Sophos, said the attack bears all the hallmarks of the TraderTraitor group. Sophos’ Counter-Threat Unit has been tracking the group since 2009 under the name NICKEL ALLEY.

“This incident is still in the initial ‘fog of war’ phase, and Binance will need to take time to fully investigate how this attack happened,” he said.

“Initial reports do align with the playbook of the group known as TraderTraitor, a North Korean state-sponsored cluster associated with previous cryptocurrency thefts,” he said.

TraderTraitor is believed to have been behind the aforementioned attack on Bybit last year. In an advisory shortly after the incident, the FBI attributed the attack to the group.

North Korean hacker groups have frequently targeted cryptocurrency exchanges in recent years, with the Lazarus Group in particular having successfully breached a series of firms.

The aim here is to enable the North Korean regime to circumvent economic sanctions and provide it with a steady flow of cash. It’s a tactic highlighted by security experts as far back as 2017, and one that has clearly proved successful given the steady volume of attacks since then.

How was Binance hacked?

Reports on how TraderTraitor gained access to Binance systems are murky right now, especially given the crypto exchange has changed its tune over the last 24 hours.

Initially, it was believed that the incident stemmed from a single compromised developer workstation – a finding detailed by Binance co-CEO Richard Teng in a post on LinkedIn.

“Our initial investigation suggests this security incident may have started with a compromised DevOps engineer's laptop. That gave an attacker access to a service container, where they submitted unauthorized withdrawal transactions,” he wrote.

“To be clear: the attacker did not simply use one engineer's permissions, and this was not a single ‘one-click’ action. It involved a more complex attack process. Our investigation has not attributed responsibility to any individual.”

According to Pilling, this tracks with previous attacks by the TraderTraitor group, who typically aim to compromise employee devices – particularly those used by developers and engineers with deep access to mission-critical systems.

This enables the threat group to “conduct reconnaissance and develop the technical attack,” he explained. “Then, in a relatively short space of time, they launch the attack using rapid, coordinated transactions to steal cryptocurrency from the victim organization.”

While there is a clear link between the group’s techniques and the initial statement from Binance, the company has since revealed a subsequent probe uncovered “additional points of breach”.

The crypto exchange is yet to provide any additional details on the attack.

“This was a complex attack, and we are doing all we can in coordination with law enforcement to resolve it. We are still gathering the facts, and will share more directly as we have them,” the company said in a post on X.

“Staggering in both its scale and potential consequences”

Cybersecurity experts across the globe have weighed in on the Binance hack over the last 24 hours, conveying shock at the scale of the incident.

Jamie Akhtar, CEO and co-founder of CyberSmart, described the incident as “staggering in both its scale and potential consequences”.

“Initial investigations suggest the attack may have begun with a compromised employee laptop, although further points of compromise have since been identified,” he said.

“The fact that cybercriminals were reportedly able to move billions in digital assets in a matter of minutes demonstrates just how devastating a successful attack can be.”

Chris Dimitriadis, chief global strategy officer at ISACA, said incidents such as these “affects trust in cryptocurrency as a whole”. Dimitriadis warned that the incident may prompt further attacks as threat groups look to capitalize on confusion among customers.

“High-profile incidents like this are often exploited by hackers on other platforms to trick users into taking immediate action that could compromise their crypto assets,” he said.

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Governments now face ransomware attacks more than once a day, according to research from Comparitech.

Research from the firm recorded a 47% increase from the second quarter of 2026 to the third quarter, with the number of attacks tracked rising from 90 to 132.

That works out to 1.4 attacks every day, with attacks also surging by 91% compared to the same period last year.

"It goes without saying that governments remain a focus for hackers because of the sheer amount of disruption these attacks can cause, both through system encryption and data theft," said Rebecca Moody, Head of Data Research at Comparitech.

"But what our Q3 report demonstrates is that, as ransomware attacks continue to increase in volume, it has never been more important for government entities to do what they can to mitigate these risks and have a worst-case-scenario plan in place."

The US was targeted with the most attacks, 41 of the total 132 recorded, an increase of 78%, followed by Germany – but ransomware hit governmental organizations across the world.

"No government entity, large or small, previously targeted or not, is immune," added Moody.

More ransomware disruption ahead

Some of the organizations affected faced severe downtime following attacks, according to Comparitech. The firm noted that the Angolan state telecommunications agency Unitel suffered three weeks of disruption after an attack.

The American city of Coweta took two weeks to restore services, while in Ayuntamiento de Collado Villalba, Spain, services were brought online after a week of 16-hour workdays.

Comparitech noted that the US county of Merrimack was able to avoid paying a ransom and dodged serious disruption "thanks to its regular backups."

"As part of their worst-case-scenario plan, government entities not only need to have a clear strategy in place for how they will deal with an attack (e.g. making sure there are regular backups in place to get systems back online as soon as possible), but they also need to assume that a data breach has occurred," Moody added.

High costs

The costs can also be high, the study warned. Beaver County Behaviour Health paid $175,000 to unknown hackers, with Comparitech saying the average ransom demand was more than half a million dollars.

Some authorities faced higher ransom demands. Anne Arundel County, for example, was hit with a demand for $2m, though such ransoms weren't paid. In that latter incident, attackers from Rhysida stole 2.6TB of data, some of it sensitive including medical information, social security numbers and payroll data.

As Comparitech noted in a blog post, it's the second ransomware incident to hit that US county in the last year and a half: "Official letters to those affected in the first attack from February 2025 have only just been sent in the last month."

Moody added that warnings to victims need to arrive in a timely manner to help avoid fraud.

"Hackers will have stolen data in the majority of cases, so issuing warnings to anyone involved promptly is essential to safeguarding this data," she said.

"Better to warn people straight away and retract this warning later on if data hasn't been stolen, than to avoid warning people until months after the attack when there's little they can do if their data has been floating around on the dark web for all that time."

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Data belonging to more than 40,000 employees at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been leaked online in a move cyber experts have described as a “severe operational failure”.

A hacktivist group dubbed the ‘Department of Peace’ published the information on agents, which was then distributed online by transparency collective Distributed Denial of Secrets under a database codenamed ‘Icepick’.

As the database name suggests, a significant portion of employees exposed in the incident work for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection agencies.

Leaked employee details include names, job titles, email addresses, and phone numbers, as well as information on agents working on surveillance operations, undercover work, and other various activities.

In a statement, the DHS said it is “aware of a potential breach and is actively working to address the situation swiftly and effectively”.

The federal department added that it will provide more information in due course and will “work to ensure all [agents] are properly protected”.

Dray Agha, senior manager for tactical response at cybersecurity firm Huntress, said the incident is “a severe operational failure that places the physical safety of undercover personnel at direct risk”.

“Exfiltrating this directory data gives hostile actors a complete map of sensitive departments and their internal reporting structures,” Agha commented.

Compromised identity behind DHS breach

The hacktivist group behind the attack claims it gained access to DHS systems through Identity and Access Management (IAM) platform Okta, using exposed user credentials.

A spokesperson for Okta told ITPro: "We are aware of this report. Okta is secure, and we have no evidence our data or systems were compromised."

Graeme Stewart, head of public sector at Check Point, said the incident is a “stark reminder that identity is now the front door for attackers”.

“If the reports are right and the attackers got in by abusing a single sign-on system, then one compromised login was enough to reach the personnel records of tens of thousands of people,” he said.

Stewart echoed Agha’s comments on the nature of information exposed in the breach, warning that this poses a real-world threat for agents working across a range of departments.

“The most worrying part is not the volume of data but its nature. Job titles and contact details for people working in surveillance and undercover roles create a real-world safety risk, not just a privacy one,” he added.

“Exposed data like this also tends to fuel follow-on phishing and impersonation campaigns for months afterwards.”

Government workers in the crosshairs

The DHS data leak comes just weeks after a similar incident involving the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

As ITPro reported in September, the ShinyHunters threat group claimed responsibility for a breach at the law enforcement agency, stealing information on thousands of agents.

Compromised data included agent names, badge numbers, and even home addresses.

In a similar vein to the DHS breach, exposed information also included highly sensitive data on investigations into foreign intelligence and drug cartel activities.

Security experts told ITPro at the time this data could have severe real-world consequences if it fell into the wrong hands.

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Where does enterprise technology go at the end of its lifecycle? The answer, as it turns out for some, is sleepy Erskine. Just a 20-minute drive outside of Glasgow, Scotland, HPE’s Technology Renewal Centre (TRC) is where end-of-life technology and components get cleaned, wiped, and reused in other hardware, or recycled.

It is the main operational hub for HPE Financial Services (HPFS), the company’s financing and lifecycle management arm, which provides closed-loop solutions for its enterprise customers.

The 240,000 sq ft facility is all that remains of Silicon Glen, a local technology innovation hub that operated from the 1940s to the 1990s when American defense and electronics firms first expanded into Europe post-war.

First acquired by HPE in 2011, the facility processes 150 pallets and around 8,000–9,000 individual assets daily, running on a 90% wholesale and 10% certified pre-owned remarketing model. Alongside its similarly-sized sister site in Andover, Massachusetts, the TRCs are global centers of excellence, supported by around 40 local regional intake sites worldwide. Assets are returned to the facility as part of HPE’s IT Asset Disposition Services or at a customer’s end of lease, the latter of which makes up 56% of the assets returned.

This year to date, the TRCs have processed 3.7 million assets, two-thirds of those being servers and PCs, according to HPE. The company says 4.3 million assets were processed globally in 2025, with a mammoth 84% going on to be reused in some way, or refurbished and resold.

Built on a site with a rich manufacturing history – a former Compaq and HP manufacturing facility – the facility’s roots can still be seen within its operations, with almost 70% of workplace assets that come through its doors being HP branded.

The site started with a mere 40,000 sq ft and a fleet of 50 highly skilled employees, eventually growing to a 200-strong workforce, says Jackie Rafferty, TRC operations manager at HPE Financial Services, who himself has been with the facility for 39 years, as he delivers one of many facility tours HPE offers prospective customers.

“The reinvention of this site has been really impressive for decades,” says Matt Harris, SVP and managing director for UKIMEA at HPE, who also started his career at this very site 23 years ago. “It aligns quite well to the conversations we're having now as a major technology renewal center [which] are all around reinvention and a new lease of life”.

The AI boom and a shifting economy

HPE has found a new burgeoning market over the last five years, thanks in part to the increasing global demand for components – largely driven by the rapid investment in AI infrastructure and development. At the same time, tightening macroeconomic conditions are changing how businesses procure this highly sought-after hardware.

“Customers who previously bought cash are looking to buy and use financing,” says Maeve Culloty, president and CEO at HPFS, in her opening presentation before the tour. “HPFS has been financing GPUs for almost 10 years, but the renew market wasn't in existence [back then] and the value of residual [tech] wasn't very clear.”

“About five years ago, we started making major investments and helping our customers acquire GPU technology. What was unclear and uncertain at the time was can we carry a residual value or risk on that technology, and can we see a secondary market for those GPUs? If I were here three years ago, I would have struggled to answer that question…”

“The concern was that the market would have been flooded by the initial investment into H100s and H200s, and that they would come to the secondary market. Now it's super clear: there is a secondary market for GPUs… Our customers do want access and are very happy to take second-life GPUs.”

To meet this demand – and to answer EU and UK sovereign requirements – Culloty says HPE is currently building out its initial GPU capacity and testing infrastructure in Boston. In time, it hopes to bring those capabilities to Europe.

“As workloads move between GPUs and CPUs, we expect continued demand with regard to the performance of AI infrastructure and GPUs,” she notes.

Building trust in ‘Certified pre-owned’

Historically, the industry has had a complicated relationship with refurbished technology. While in theory it makes a great case in a circular economy and for cost-saving, operational stigmas persist, with many procurement teams hesitant to risk pre-owned tech for long-term investment, particularly when it comes to data hygiene.

Leading the tour through the facility’s 2.2m perimeter fence, Rafferty highlights that building trust is Erskine's true core product. “What we see today is data security gaining a bit of a competitive advantage,” he says.

Because of the confidential nature of the memory and storage components it works with, the facility takes every precaution to ensure safety and security. The TRC leverages its roots once again, testing all refurbished units using the exact same OEM-grade testing infrastructure used on Compaq’s original manufacturing lines and is ISO 27001 compliant.

This guarantees that pre-owned equipment meets factory performance standards. HPE notes that the facilities are fully licensed, consistent with HMG IA Standard No. 5 sanitization, and subject to regular audits.

“Everything you see here is appropriately subdivided with extensive cybersecurity because of the money involved in that. Everyone in the operation has been security cleared by the Ministry of Defense. So, we've got high-caliber, vetted staff with huge amounts of experience,” says Rafferty, whose passion for the facility and its workforce is palpable. “This is probably the most flexible staff I've ever had in the last 15 years.”

“In the operations, we have 40 360-degree fisheye cameras in the area. There are infrared alarms and fire alarms across all the fence lines. There are vibration alarms – there's everything,” he explains.

“It's really a top-tier physical security install, really just to showcase to our customers that we are serious about data and willing to use professional equipment to maintain the standard.”

But beyond physical fences, the Erskine facility relies on a rigorous chain of custody to secure the customer's peace of mind. As David Connell, engineering manager at HPE, notes during the tour, the two most top-of-mind questions for customers are “data security, and the second one is data security”.

He explains that the moment a customer's equipment arrives at the dock door, it is registered using barcode scanners, instantly generating a receipt acknowledgment report so the customer has immediate visibility. These assets' serial numbers continue to trace chain of custody, repairs and modification, data sanitation records and the final disposition.

To date, HPE says it has securely sanitized 1.7 exabytes of data – that’s 1.6 million drives overwritten, equivalent to watching around 97 million years of HD movies.

But not every customer is convinced on paper. That’s why Rafferty believes in the power of bringing customers into the operation to see things for themselves. Indeed, the center hosts around 50 customer tours per year.

“Seeing is believing,” he says, adding that every tour they’ve completed has led to a new customer signing a contract with them. “That's where trust comes in… we want to deliver that to customers.”

Real-world value and the circular economy

When customers do sign on, they quickly find that this refurbished technology and flexible financing play a vital role in meeting corporate sustainability targets.

During his presentation, Karim Abu-Dahab, principal technologist, sustainable transformation at HPE, pointed out that “green IT” is often misunderstood by the industry. “Any gain in efficiency that our customers may have almost automatically translates into a gain in sustainability,” he explains.

“A while ago, when it came to IT, after I'm done with a server we just throw it away, right? Now this is not the case anymore,” he says. In fact, HPE estimates that over 8.4 million kg of waste has been kept from landfill – equivalent to the annual e-waste of over 1 million people.

Not only are companies able to support their environmental goals by avoiding landfills, they are also able to recover value from their returned assets, “and then the cycle goes on and on,” Abu-Dahab adds.

“Every year, HPFS hands back about $1 million a day to our customers in order to fund the next innovation,” says Culloty. “We look at both their leased and non-leased environments, and if there's value in that current infrastructure, we return it back to the customer.”

HPE says that through this value return system, $1.25 billion has been infused back into customer budgets between 2020 and 2025. Harris offers the example of Liverpool John Moores University as one customer making the most of this cash injection. He explains the university recently retired old assets and used the resulting money to increase their student hardship loan facilities.

This isn’t the only way HPE is proving refurbished technology can have serious business value. According to Culloty, HPFS’s 90/9 financing model “allows customers to acquire the technology today and pay a very low rate of financing while they deploy that product over a period of time”. With this system, a customer pays nothing in the first 90 days, and then pays one percent for the following nine months.

Rob Pickering, CTO at Tottenham Hotspur FC, is one of HPE’s customers who leveraged this flexibility to support the club's goal of reaching net-zero by 2040. Pickering says the club is currently two-thirds of the way through replacing 63 server rooms and eight data centers.

“From a footprint perspective, we're probably about 60% smaller... because the technologies have become more capable, so you get more cycles per rack effectively,” he says.

Rather than sending the old hardware to a landfill, the club is injecting it back into the secondary market to realize its remaining value and fund ongoing innovation. “Simply running equipment that's eight or nine years old is significantly more expensive than running the new equipment,” he adds.

Indeed, HPE estimates over the course of its operations that it has saved over 29M kWh of energy – enough to charge an EV 486,000 times.

“I think there's a world where we pay almost entirely for the new assets from the power savings… and then we can pay back some of that equipment that we're recycling.”

This is not only bringing down costs, but also directly contributing to the club’s sustainability goals. “It's a win-win-win,” he says.

“We want to be innovative, we want to be sustainable, we want to make sure we deliver the best experiences to our fans and HPE helps us do all of those in a way that's financially responsible and environmentally responsible.”

A new malware campaign uses fake AI apps with names like "GPT-6 Astra", "GPT-5.6 Sol", and "Claude Opus" to infect victims and mine cryptocurrency.

The campaign uses fake GitHub projects to impersonate the applications, and doesn't need phishing emails, as the fake download pages rank prominently in search results - probably through the use of SEO poisoning.

In an advisory, researchers at Check Point said the campaign, dubbed Yoba, uses real OpenAI and Anthropic software, with each download including a genuine, signed ChatGPT or Claude installer. The package looks legitimate, but when the real app runs, the malware runs along with it.

Importantly, neither ChatGPT and Claude nor OpenAI and Anthropic have themselves been compromised. Instead, the attackers abuse legitimate signed binaries and the credibility associated with the brands.

“The AI boom is creating a new opportunity for cybercriminals: they can attack the trust surrounding AI without ever attacking the AI itself," said Eli Smadja, head of research at Check Point Research.

"Yoba shows how search results, recognised brands and even legitimately signed software can be combined to make malicious downloads appear credible."

Duping users

Check Point said Yoba uses several checks designed to complicate automated analysis before moving on to its second stage.

YobaDropper verifies that it was launched by the expected Setup.exe, introduces a lengthy delay if this check fails, applies regional language checks, and requires administrator privileges to continue.

Once these checks have been carried out, YobaDropper deploys YobaLoader alongside a legitimate Windows executable and creates a scheduled task that enables the legitimate executable to sideload YobaLoader after system startup.

It uses trusted internet services – such as Telegram, Google’s DNS-over-HTTPS service, and Catbox – to retrieve payloads, reducing its dependence on traditional command-and-control infrastructure and making malicious communications harder to distinguish from normal activity.

In this particular campaign, the final payload was XMRig 6.26.0, which is used to mine cryptocurrency. However, Smadja said the campaign “should not be viewed simply as cryptomining malware”.

“YobaLoader is a generic loader capable of delivering different Windows executable or PowerShell payloads, meaning the same infection chain could potentially be used to distribute other malware."

The hackers behind the campaign appear to have Russian origins, operating primarily in the UTC-4 time zone, and deliberately avoiding infecting computers set up for Russian and other CIS languages.

To avoid infection, organizations should verify AI software at the source, restrict unauthorized applications and administrator privileges and inspect downloads and application behaviour, Check Point said.

"As adoption accelerates, users and organisations need to verify AI software at its source and apply prevention-first controls to unauthorised applications and endpoint behaviour," said Smadja.

"In the AI era, knowing where your software came from may become just as important as knowing what it does."

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Halloween is upon us, and October has already been full of IT horror stories. French supermarket fridges were filled with spoiled cheeses after internet-connected temperature controls were hacked. And another hyperscaler outage taking down banking services.

While they are different and unique incidents, both raise questions of reliability and safety. Could they have been avoided? Will they happen again? And what can we learn from them?

On this week's episode, ITPro news and analysis editor Ross Kelly joins Bobby and Scott to talk through the biggest stories of the month.

Highlights

"I'm very much of the opinion that some things don't need to be connected to the web. You don't need to have a sprawling IoT web in your home. That's just opening the doors to attackers."

"A lot of the time, when we talk about big hyperscaler outages, the first thing that comes to your head is US East 1. Because when something goes down across the Atlantic, a lot of the time in Europe there's an impact there."

Links

• French fridges hacked in country-wide supermarket attack
• Google Cloud outage explained

IT leaders are concerned that public key infrastructure (PKI) – one of the most widespread applications of cryptography today – will need to change significantly to support post-quantum cryptography (PQC).

Research from Sectico found that as organizations adapt to shorter SSL/TLS certificate lifespans and the operational demands they create, 78% of IT and security leaders believe that PKI will need to change too.

Organizations are making progress in assessing the systems that might be vulnerable to quantum attacks, up from 14% in 2025, the study found. Another 44% say their assessment is mostly complete.

Meanwhile, 83% have allocated budget to quantum-readiness initiatives over the next year. Of those, 93% expect PQC investment to increase over the next two to three years.

Post-quantum preparations accelerate

Last year, researchers said organizations were mostly preparing for shorter certificate lifespans and the future transition to PQC.

Now, though, both are becoming active operational priorities – priorities that mean a great deal of work across cryptographic discovery, automation, architecture, governance, and investment.

“Organizations have moved from asking whether they need to prepare for cryptographic change to confronting what that change actually requires,” said Nick France, CTO at Sectigo.

“PQC is not simply an algorithm swap, and shorter certificate lifespans are not simply a renewal problem. Both require organizations to rethink how they discover, manage, and adapt the cryptographic infrastructure they depend on, across both public and private PKI environments. That ability to execute continuously is what crypto agility looks like in practice.”

The report examines Merkle Tree Certificates (MTCs), a proposed certificate architecture under development by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), as one example of the architectural thinking underway.

Yet even among those familiar with the proposed MTC architecture, only 40% believe they clearly understand the changes their systems, processes, and environments would require to support it.

Certificate lifespans are getting shorter, with the maximum validity period for publicly trusted SSL/TLS certificates having fallen from 398 to 200 days in March, and scheduled to drop to 100 days in March 2027 and 47 days in March 2029.

This is already presenting problems, the study noted. While 62% report a complete, up-to-date inventory of public SSL/TLS certificates, more than double the 28% reported in 2025 say they are ‘very prepared’ for monthly renewals – largely because they already have automated systems in place.

Nearly three-quarters (73%) said they plan to increase certificate-management automation because of shorter lifespans, and 61% said they'd experienced a certificate-related outage or incident in the past 12 months.

“We’ve entered a time where organizations can no longer manage cryptography as static infrastructure, yet at the same time, we need to make cryptography itself boring again. As algorithms, standards and requirements change, organizations need to be able to adapt without turning every cryptographic transition into a major operational event," said France.

"The next stage in crypto agility is about turning awareness into repeatable, testable, and scalable operations through an approach built around continuous cryptographic discovery, risk prioritization, migration planning and governed change.”

NIST publishes quantum timeline guidance

The research comes after the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) released advice on the best approach and timelines for transitioning away from quantum-vulnerable algorithms to quantum-resistant standards.

"We lay out how certain encryption algorithms people are using today will get phased out,” said NIST mathematician Dustin Moody, who heads the PQC standardization project.

“It’s important to know how a given algorithm might be disallowed in federal systems after a certain date, for instance, or whether it will be allowed but at the user’s own risk. Factors like this can help an organization plan.”

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Every AI agent entering a customer environment becomes part of its digital workforce. It can hold credentials and make decisions, yet its identity may never appear in the processes used to govern employees.

That gap matters because agents are moving from controlled pilots into everyday operations. They are connecting to collaboration platforms and business-critical systems where they can send messages and alter records at machine speed. The permissions behind those actions often receive less scrutiny than those given to a new employee.

For Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and solution providers, this changes the customer conversation. Partners need to know what each agent can reach and who remains accountable for its actions.

Many customers will struggle to answer those questions because agents may have appeared through SaaS features or experiments run outside IT. This blurs ownership as a pilot grows, while its original access follows it into production. By the time an auditor starts asking questions, the business may depend on that workflow.

Security researchers recently demonstrated how GitHub Agentic Workflows could be manipulated into retrieving information from private repositories and publishing it in public comments. A routine issue became a route between untrusted input and protected information because the agent could access both.

The case should focus partners’ attention on the architecture around an agent. Every connected system can widen its reach and increase the potential impact if it is compromised or behaves unexpectedly.

Temporary access has a habit of becoming permanent

The route to over-privilege often begins with a reasonable decision. For example, a team wants to prove that an agent can deliver value, so it grants access through an existing service account or API key.

Problems emerge when that access outlives the assumptions behind it. The pilot enters production, yet its original token stays active. New tasks bring broader permissions, while ownership becomes harder to trace.

Traditional joiner, mover, and leaver processes offer little help. Employees have managers and defined roles, but agents may be created inside a SaaS platform, inherit their creator’s permissions, and remain active after that person changes position. Agents need lifecycle events of their own.

OWASP’s guidance for agentic applications identifies identity and privilege abuse as a major threat, covering the misuse of delegated permissions and inherited access. Autonomy gives these long-standing identity weaknesses a larger blast radius.

Our research, surveying 800 IT leaders across the UK and US, found that non-human identities outnumber employees in 83% of organizations. Only 21% have controls in place to govern them. Human oversight is also becoming less common, with a quarter of organizations requiring human review before high-risk AI actions, compared with 40% six months earlier.

These findings should prompt partners to reconsider where an AI project ends. Installing an agent marks the beginning of an access-management responsibility that may last for years.

Give every agent an owner and an expiry date

Partners can start by helping customers build an inventory of the agents operating across their environments. This should include the credentials each one uses and the systems within its reach. Every production agent needs a named business owner, with its purpose recorded in language the customer can understand.

A distinct identity should replace borrowed or shared credentials where the platform supports one. Permissions can then reflect the agent’s job instead of copying the access held by the employee who deployed it.

Least privilege also needs to account for actions. An invoice-processing agent may need to read documents and update selected fields. Changing supplier bank details belongs behind an approval gate. The same principle applies wherever an agent can make an irreversible decision or expose sensitive information.

Partners should plan for the moment when an agent moves outside its intended role. Customers need a tested way to suspend its identity and revoke access. Searching across disconnected systems during an incident is an expensive way to discover that no kill switch exists.

Access should also have a shelf life. Permissions that made sense during deployment may become redundant as workflows change. Reviews tied to the agent’s risk level can remove dormant access before it fades into the background.

In practice, this means helping customers discover their agents, register them with named owners, manage their access and govern their actions over time.

The channel can make agent governance operational

Customers are adopting agents faster than many internal teams can catalogue them. Partners already understand their systems and identity environments, putting them in a strong position to close that visibility gap.

MSPs can add non-human identity discovery to security assessments and then build access reviews into managed services. Solution providers can design role-based policies before an agent reaches production. Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs) can bring agent activity into monitoring and response processes.

Partners should apply the same discipline to their own operations. An MSP’s internal agent may connect to tools with privileged access across customer accounts. Its permissions deserve as much scrutiny as those of an engineer with administrative rights.

Ultimately, AI adoption will continue because customers can see the productivity gains. Sustaining those gains depends on whether they can trust the access behind them.

Partners that make ownership visible and keep permissions aligned with purpose will offer something more valuable than an AI deployment, and that’s the confidence to put automation into production without surrendering control.

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has urged federal agencies to implement PHP (PHP Hypertext Preprocessor) patches after observing exploits in the wild.

CISA added the two vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) database on 26 October.

The agency has set a 29 October deadline for Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agencies to implement patches, adding that it “encourages all organizations” to follow suit where possible.

“CISA strongly urges organizations to immediately patch the recently disclosed critical vulnerabilities in PHP, CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619,” CISA said in its advisory.

“These vulnerabilities, known as “php2shell,” allow for unauthenticated remote code execution in PHP. The vulnerabilities affect all PHP installations serving web requests, including Apache with mod_php (Note: PHP considers this highest risk), PHP-FPM, php-cgi, FrankenPHP and LiteSpeed.”

With the deadline fast approaching, federal agencies will be required to update to PHP versions 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36 or 8.2.35.

PHP2Shell rocked the web

CISA’s advisory comes after the vulnerabilities sent the security industry, and indeed much of the web, into a frenzy last week.

PHP is a programming language used in web development and underpins up to 70% of websites globally.

On 20 October, maintainers of the language, The PHP Foundation, issued an advisory warning of an impending patch after the critical vulnerabilities were discovered by security researchers.

While the patch landed on Wednesday, the incident sparked widespread disruption and panic amidst reports that the vulnerabilities were being actively exploited.

As ITPro reported last week, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said the company saw “thousands of attempts to exploit it” in the hours before it was publicly announced.

“Across the Cloudflare network we saw thousands of attempts to exploit it,” he wrote in a post on X. “That jumped to tens of thousands in the 45 minutes post-announcement, hundreds of thousands within 2 hours, and millions now.”

CISA recommendations

In its advisory, CISA outlined a series of actions that organizations can take to limit exposure, including:

• Identify and inventory systems running any version of PHP across your organization. PHP is often a component of other software, and its prevalence may not be directly observable.
• Apply the patch immediately, prioritizing internet-facing systems.
• Organizations that cannot update immediately, or that continue to use PHP 8.1 or earlier unsupported versions, should take PHP-based systems offline until they can be patched or updated.
• A web application firewall may provide some protection until systems are updated or patched.
• Review the official PHP security advisory for guidance on patching.
• Monitor for suspicious activity, including PHP worker processes launching shells or downloading tools.

Ramy Rahman, senior principal solutions engineer at ArmorCode, said that although federal agencies might face a tight deadline, it’s certainly possible to meet this “with the right resources”.

“The biggest challenge will be the versions of PHP they’re running, and the dependencies tied to them,” he said.

“Administrators should prioritize upgrading to the patched versions of PHP, including 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36, or 8.2.35, depending on their release branch.

"The reality is that many organizations are likely running older, unsupported versions, which introduces the additional complexity of upgrading applications, addressing compatibility issues, or working with vendors to obtain supported fixes.”

For systems that cannot be patched immediately, Rahman said: “compensating controls need to be applied to reduce exposure”.

This includes disabling vulnerable functionalities, restricting access, and taking systems offline if they cannot be adequately protected. The latter of these was recommended by security agencies last week, including CERT-EU and the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC).

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Microsoft Teams will soon use AI to watch for phishing and other scams, the company has revealed.

In a post detailing new features on the roadmap earlier this month, the company said AI-powered anti-phishing tools will arrive in November. The new features follow a series of attacks in which Teams has been targeted by hackers to spread ransomware or otherwise gain access to company networks.

The aim, Microsoft said, is to use AI to better understand messaging conversations in Teams, in particular "first contact chats" with an outsider.

"Microsoft Teams is introducing AI-powered phishing detection that uses conversation context to identify phishing and social engineering in higher-risk messaging scenarios, primarily external first-contact chats," the post explains.

"Additional protection may apply in certain regions or scenarios," the post continues. "The capability is used only for security protection, and users may see warnings when suspicious activity is detected."

The new phishing detection capabilities will work in the background, spotting phishing, impersonation, and other social engineering techniques by looking for suspicious behavior and other indicators such as dodgy links or files.

Conversation context

The AI-powered tool will use conversation context, Microsoft said — which does mean it needs to look at messages in Teams. However, the tech giant said none of the content will be retained.

"This capability is used only for security protection and not for productivity, summarization, advertising, user monitoring, or other non-security purposes," Microsoft said in a post.

"Customer message content is not retained by the detection system for model training or other secondary uses."

The feature will be enabled automatically, rolling out over November and December, and are part of wider efforts to protect Teams as it increasingly becomes a target for phishing scams.

Rise in Teams phishing

Microsoft Teams has become a popular hunting ground for cyber criminals. Last year, Sophos spotted hackers attempting attacks via Teams by pretending to be tech support workers.

Months later the FBI and other authorities warned about the Scattered Spider hacking group abusing Teams and Slack to target employees.

In January, Check Point researchers warned Teams users to be on alert for scam guest invitations that attempted to trick users with false billing and subscription notifications that look as though they came from a genuine Microsoft user.

Just this week, Arctic Wolf Labs has spotted hackers using Microsoft Teams' feature that allows for external chat creation for impersonation scams or to send dodgy files, studying more than 400 incidents.

"Microsoft Teams ships with external access (federation) turned on by default, meaning any Teams user in another Microsoft 365 tenant can find, chat with, and call an organization’s employees, provided both tenants allow external access," Arctic Wolf noted in a post.

"This is the feature attackers most frequently abuse. This activity does not exploit any known Teams vulnerability; it abuses a legitimate, default-on collaboration capability."

These are the sorts of "first contact chats" that Microsoft is hoping to address with the new AI feature.

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Legacy systems and widespread human error are putting police and fire services in England and Wales at huge risk of cyber attacks, according to the policing and fire inspectorate.

A report from His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services (HMICFRS) noted that while there's been some improvement in cybersecurity over the last six years, it’s still not enough.

"The cyber threat to police forces and fire and rescue services is significant and expanding rapidly. A major cyberattack is not a hypothetical scenario and successful attacks have been disruptive, put the public at risk and were expensive to fix," said His Majesty’s inspector of constabulary Michelle Skeer.

“While there have been gradual improvements, many forces and services still need to urgently redouble their efforts to respond to the increased risk of cyber attacks."

According to the report, the biggest issue lies in continued dependence on legacy systems. Indeed, tech leaders in both services identified legacy dependence as their greater strategic cybersecurity risk.

Similarly, there are significant concerns about cybersecurity risks linked to third-party ICT suppliers, particularly where suppliers store or manage sensitive police data covering victims, safeguarding, intelligence, and ongoing investigations.

Gaps in training are also a lingering problem, the report noted, with poor security controls for staff joining, moving within, and leaving services. Elsewhere, researchers found poor password management and a lack of up-to-date security measures such as multi-factor authentication (MFA) were rampant.

Cyber resilience needs to improve

Inspectors warned that not enough is being done in terms of preparedness and resilience arrangements, with "unsatisfactory" arrangements for backing up and restoring ICT systems following a cyber attack.

All these issues are being made worse by a lack of commitment from leaders, with several senior police and fire leaders saying that they didn’t consider cybersecurity to be part of daily operational decision-making.

Unsurprisingly, HMICFRS wants to see changes and has made a series of recommendations.

These include making sure all police and fire services achieve baseline standards for cybersecurity capabilities, introducing robust external validation to check up on the services’ own assessments of cybersecurity capabilities, and improving the procurement and contract management of third-party IT suppliers.

It also wants improvements to the way government and policing cybersecurity leads collaborate, and wider use of the Police Digital Service’s National Management Centre, along with a similar national capability for services.

In terms of preparedness and resilience, the report noted that services require significant improvements on this front.

HMICFRS said police and fire services need to be capable of responding swiftly to a cyber attack and should improve learning and development for both security staff and senior leaders.

"Cybersecurity should be viewed as a core organizational priority and not solely a technical risk. Leaders need to prioritize and invest in their cybersecurity arrangements to improve their organization’s ability to prevent, detect, respond to and recover from attacks," said Skeer.

“The government’s program of police reform and local government reorganization could offer both sectors opportunities to improve and better co-ordinate the approach to cybersecurity. These opportunities to strengthen cybersecurity cannot be missed. Protecting systems and data is essential to protecting the public.”

Repeated warnings

The report from HMICFRS comes after the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) issued a stern warning to the Metropolitan Police Service earlier this month over security practices.

The data protection watchdog found that members of staff had uploaded data to an unauthorized third-party platform, putting highly sensitive information at huge risk.

Elsewhere across the UK, security capabilities have contributed to a number of incidents, most recently an attack on Dyfed-Powys Police earlier this month, which caused disruption to some non-emergency systems.

"We intend to carry out a reinspection in due course, to assess each sector’s progress in implementing these recommendations," she said. "Police and fire and rescue ICT systems need to become much more secure."

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Containers are no longer the new story. For most customers, containerization is already embedded in the way software is built and delivered.

More than half of organizations now use containers for most or all of their production applications, according to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. That means the challenge for partners is no longer persuading customers to adopt containers, but helping them ensure the way software is being developed today does not create security and governance problems later. Development teams are under pressure to move faster than ever. They are using more open-source components, pulling in code from multiple sources, and increasingly using AI to help write, test, and review software.

Docker's Latest State of Application Development Report found that 64% of developers were already using AI to support coding, documentation, and research.

None of that is a problem in itself. The risk arises when security and governance don't keep pace. Small compromises that seem reasonable at the time can gradually introduce bigger problems. A team takes a shortcut to hit a deadline. Someone pulls in a component that hasn't been properly checked. Neither looks particularly serious in isolation, but together they can leave customers exposed.

A bigger conversation

This is why the conversation is no longer just about containers. It is about how modern software is being built, where code and components are coming from, and what controls are in place around AI use.

AI is a good example of this. It's helping development teams move faster, but it's also changing the questions organizations need to ask. Where did that code come from? Has anyone reviewed it properly? And were your security policies written for the way development teams are working today, or for an approach that's already changed?

The issue does not stop with developers. Across the wider business, employees are starting to use AI tools to speed up everyday work, creating a broader governance challenge.

The question is not simply whether AI can improve productivity, but whether organizations have the guardrails and visibility to ensure it is being used safely. The rapid evolution of AI agents has only added to those concerns. If AI agents can act in ways their users did not expect, organisations need to think more carefully about runtime visibility, access boundaries and what happens if those systems step outside the rules they were meant to follow.

That is exactly where partners should be adding value.

Most customers will not ask how to reduce security debt or tighten AI governance. They will ask how to modernize applications, speed up development, or get more value from AI.

The opportunity for the channel is to help them achieve those goals without creating unnecessary risk at the same time. That starts with asking the right questions. These are not just technical questions. They are business questions because the impact of getting them wrong is operational, financial, and reputational. Partners don’t need to be software developers, but they do need to understand how software is being built and how AI is being used today.

Customers are looking for help to move quickly without losing control. In that environment, experience, judgement and the ability to ask the right questions are just as valuable as the technology itself.

The wider issue is trust. Modern applications depend on increasingly complex software supply chains, and AI adds another layer of uncertainty if businesses do not know what tools are being used, what data they can access, or how decisions are being made. Security cannot begin once something is already live. By then, many opportunities to prevent problems have already passed.

We know that customers will always want to move faster. That’s not going to change. The partners that stand out will not just be the ones recommending the latest tool. They’ll spot risks early, ask the questions their customers haven’t thought about yet, and help to build security and governance into the process from the start.

Sometimes that simply means asking a few awkward questions before anyone starts building. Those conversations may not always be comfortable, but they are far easier and less expensive than trying to fix problems once software is already live.

Five questions every partner should ask

• Where are your container images coming from, and who is verifying them?
• How much third-party or open-source code is making its way into production?
• Has AI changed the way developers write, review, or ship code?
• Are employees using AI tools outside development without clear guardrails in place?
• If an AI agent behaved unexpectedly, would you have the visibility to detect it quickly?

Ultimately, the partners that add the most value will be those who help customers move faster without losing control. As software development evolves and AI becomes more deeply embedded, that means identifying risks early and making security and governance part of the process from the outset.

Earlier this month, Japan’s government declared a cyber emergency. The move followed a series of cyber attacks against businesses and institutions across the country. Rail transport, internet services, retailers and even the police have been impacted, according to the Financial Times.

At one point, the Japanese financial services regulator even told banks not to accept driving licences as proof of identity for anyone opening new accounts.

The declaration by Japan’s NCHS cyber agency is unusual. Few countries have declared a cyber emergency, even if security services and regulators have warned of heightened threats.

The move came after rail operator JR East reported the loss of 1.67 million email addresses, and car rental company Times Car lost a large number of scans of its customers’ driving licences. In addition, cloud services operator IDC Frontier reported a ransomware attack. This, in turn, linked to the leak at JR East and other public sector bodies.

“Incidents like this highlight why supply chain attacks can be so disruptive,” Alexandra Rose, head of global affairs and policy at cybersecurity company Sophos told ITPro.

“An attacker doesn't need to compromise a bunch of organizations individually in order to have a widespread impact. They gain access to a single organization and then can move through interconnected systems or disrupt services that many other organizations depend on. We’ve seen the downstream consequences extending beyond the initial victim time and time again, affecting operations, customers, and more.”

Big in Japan?

Japan, though, is not generally viewed as more exposed to cyber attack than other advanced economies, experts say. But the country is certainly seeing an increase in the seriousness of attacks, if not their frequency. There is also evidence that some businesses, at least, were less well prepared.

“I think it’s a response to the increasing severity of attacks they are seeing,” Rob Demain, founder of security firm e2e-assure, told ITPro. “One of the key ones was the platform IDC Frontier that was taken offline. I think it’s a trend of more impactful cyber attacks being seen, and trying to move quicker and keep pace.”

The Japanese government also moved to bring in active cyber defense (ACD), where police and other organizations can go after attackers, taking down servers and, hopefully, neutralizing attacks. Japan is also considering wider changes to its cybersecurity strategy, after lawmakers recently called to strengthen its use of AI for cyber defense.

But publicly announcing a cyber emergency brings its own risks, not least that businesses may rely on government intervention instead of taking proactive measures themselves. And useful advice could be lost in increased noise.

“How many times can you cry ‘cyber emergency’ before people stop worrying about it?” asks Demain. “But I don’t think there has been anything similar in Japan. So I think if you hear that message, you are going to take notice… You need to make sure everyone’s taking this seriously, and that was just one method to get the message out.”

Not everyone is convinced, however.

“A cyber emergency declaration has value if it changes the response, not just the rhetoric,” cautions Nazir Esmail, chief autonomous enterprise officer at Sapiens, a business that develops software primarily for the insurance industry.

“CISOs are well versed in threat vectors and don’t need additional warnings that threats are on the rise. What would be useful to CISOs and the security community in general, is faster access to actionable intelligence. In addition, if attacks threaten critical services or infrastructure, a coordinated incident response effort and a clear escalation mechanism are essential to contain the impact and accelerate recovery,” he told ITPro.

Actions, not words

This poses the question of whether declaring an emergency has a practical value for enterprises, and the wider security community. If it brings additional assistance or funding, then CISOs would no doubt welcome it. And government positioning can help security leaders to promote security to the board.

As Charl van der Walt, head of security research at Orange Cyberdefense points out, a full state of emergency can unlock new resources. This, he recalls, happened in Costa Rica in 2022, when the country declared a state of national emergency following a series of ransomware attacks against public sector bodies. But Japan’s cyber emergency stops short of that.

“The Japanese story seems to me to be a bit of a knee jerk response to a series of incidents that happened online,” he told ITPro. “The latest one was an attack against an infrastructure as a service provider. They have about 500 businesses that depend on them, and so the impact on them cascaded through the whole ecosystem.”

Van der Walt likens the incident to a similar attack on a shared software platform in South Korea, which also impacted a large number of businesses. But, he adds, we see fewer public data leaks in Japan than the size of the economy would suggest. “One reason may be that Japanese businesses are just paying [the ransom] before there’s any leaks,” he suggests.

We also do not know what the Japanese government’s, or indeed any government’s, playbook is for a cyber emergency, and for good reason. Given cyber attacks are increasingly part of grey zone conflict or hybrid warfare, governments will want to keep potential adversaries guessing.

“There’s two facets to think about,” says van der Walt. “One is the signalling effect to the adversary, and that’s really an issue for diplomacy and international humanitarian law. How do you keep your adversaries in check? How do you keep them constrained? Signalling is a big part of that.”

The other is the impact on the wider population, and overall cyber awareness. CISOs stand to benefit, at least indirectly, if employees, customers and other stakeholders have a better understanding of cyber risk.

“You also need to signal to your populace. You need to maintain the health, the sense of confidence, and the trust that your economy and society have,” he says. “I don’t know Japan’s playbook and I don't know their rationale. But I would think this needs to be done very, very cautiously.”

As an organization, ISACA is well-versed in and has a long history of helping its members stay up to date with the latest developments in IT security, governance, and risk.

But the pace of change, particularly in the AI era, can be unrelenting. Indeed, at this year’s ISACA Europe conference held earlier this month in Munich, Germany, there was a clear sense that changes in the technology landscape are putting more pressure on the association’s membership to stay current.

ISACA oversees a range of professional certifications, including CISA and CISM, and attending conference sessions helps attendees earn CPE credits that go towards maintaining these certifications. Sessions covered at this year’s ISACA Europe Conference 2026 covered everything ranging from cross-border data privacy, operational technology and proving security ROI, to supply chain resilience, ransomware prevention and digital sovereignty. While the topics were varied, they shared a common theme. Indeed, across almost all of them, the looming specter of AI was a constant presence.

Professionals in the field are concerned about how this technology will impact their day-to-day responsibilities, and ISACA is having to adapt its own processes in order to support them. As well as speeding up the pace at which it updates its certifications and training, the association has put forward several amendments to its bylaws, including lowering the quorum for member votes, moving its legal home to Washington, DC, and moving to staggered three-year board terms.

Responding to changing member needs

Speaking at the opening session in Munich, ISACA board chair Massimo Migliuolo said the proposals give ISACA “the governance agility to respond faster to the needs of members wherever they are in the world”.

That speed is more in demand than ever. AI is impacting the industry so dramatically that not only is it difficult for professionals to keep their skills current, but it's also reshaping roles faster than they can be defined. On top of that, it's resulting in regulatory scrambles as authorities scramble to catch up.

The shift is most evident in how often IT professionals are now feeling the need to update their credentials, according to ISACA CEO Erik Prusch.

“[Previously] you got certified, and maybe five years later or six years later, you might be getting your second certification as you’re escalating through an organization,” he says.

“Now it’s much more current, and everybody’s having to stay not only trained and keep their current certifications up to date, but also bring in new technology.”

AI was inescapable across the conference. Although plenty of sessions on the agenda focused on practical, iterative work - including previews of ISACA’s updated COBIT governance framework, GRC automation, NIS2 and DORA - nearly half of the agenda touched on AI in some capacity, including keynote sessions on the first two days.

As one might expect from an audience of security and risk professionals, the response to AI wasn't entirely enthusiastic, but fears around losing their jobs to AI have largely waned.

“Even 18 months ago, there was that threat of ‘AI is going to eliminate all roles’,” says Tara Wisniewski, senior vice president of advocacy at ISACA.

“I think we’re all kind of moving away from that, but it is going to significantly change roles.”

AI through a security lens

Instead, practitioners appear to have transitioned to more immediate practical concerns, including how the rollout of these systems is affecting their security, risk, and governance posture. In her keynote, cybersecurity advisor and former CISO Monica Verma took aim at the more apocalyptic predictions about AI, calling that narrative “extremely dangerous”.

“It takes away from the actual real AI and cybersecurity risks that we do have today,” she says.

“[The ones] that are already present, that are already imminent, that you and your organizations need to be thinking about right now. There is no time to waste.”

ISACA is tapping into this need for clarity with three dedicated AI credentials (with a fourth in development), as well as integrating AI aspects into CISA and CISM. Prusch says demand is partly being driven by AI work landing on existing roles, with established professionals increasingly asked to pick up elements of AI management on an ad-hoc basis. An IT audit manager, for example, might become an IT and AI audit manager.

“I think everybody within our domains, their roles have changed to some degree,” he says.

“It just hasn’t been structured or formalized as yet. They’ve just taken on more responsibility, and there’s no other place for them to go.”

However, while ISACA members aren't worried about the immediate future of their own roles, AI has affected some jobs. In particular, AI has been blamed for a reduction in available junior and entry-level roles, and senior practitioners are concerned that this will exacerbate the industry’s existing pipeline problems. As Migliuolo noted during the event’s opening address, ENISA estimates that more than 300,000 cybersecurity positions are unfilled across the EU.

“What the hell is a 23-year-old [to do]? How are they going to get that experience?” says Wisniewski. “I fear that the gap is going to get a little bit bigger, to be honest… We’ll even see things like, ‘it’s an entry-level position, but three years’ work experience is required’. That’s a mismatch.”

A multi-pronged approach

ISACA is trying to tackle the problem from both ends. Prusch says it now tracks new roles as they emerge, to shrink the lag before training for them exists, and on the policy side, Wisniewski says workforce development is “the drum we beat every day”.

In the UK, the organization has proposed amendments to the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill to clarify its skills requirements, and more broadly it presses policymakers to consider the talent pipeline whenever they regulate, since meeting any new rules requires “a qualified workforce”.

Even the lawmakers are struggling to stay ahead of the changes, Wisniewski adds, explaining that “there are very few policymakers that actually have any technical depth”. The EU’s AI Act is among the most comprehensive AI laws in the world, but the bloc is already discussing revisions because, she says, the technology hasn’t developed the way Brussels expected, and other countries are even further behind in their journey towards AI regulation.

Meanwhile, as governments continue to argue over the best way to design and implement AI safeguards, organizations are already struggling to comply with existing rules.

“European organizations are navigating an increasingly complex regulatory and threat environment,” Migliuolo noted.

“…Through the EU AI Act and NIS2, DORA, CRA and other emerging regulations, I think Europe is setting a very good standard… The challenge in this transition is how we are going to do the implementation.”

That transition is proving slow. Despite the deadlines for NIS2 and DORA compliance having passed well over a year ago, conference delegates were still attending sessions framed around working out how to demonstrate compliance. While large multinationals with deep budgets are ahead of this curve, it’s a different story further down the market, according to Wisniewski.

“It’s still early days, especially for smaller organizations, because that’s where you see stress in the system,” she says, adding that compliance costs can squeeze other budgets.

“When the compliance burden gets too intense, the budget has to come from somewhere… Is it taking away from a training budget?”

With legislation struggling to keep up, Wisniewski believes professional bodies may end up filling part of the gap themselves, acting as de facto regulators by establishing industry-wide standards. That’s one of the reasons ISACA is investing in a more substantial advocacy program, she says; the association also wants a seat at the table in emerging debates, such as whether cybersecurity should become a licensed profession.

None of this is new territory for ISACA, though; helping professionals make sense of unfamiliar technology and shifting rules is what the association was set up to do. The difference now is how little time there is to do it. By the time one change has been absorbed, the next is already on the horizon - such as quantum, which Wisniewski expects to feature alongside AI at next year’s event.

That’s what makes the bylaw vote more significant than its modest contents might suggest. Whether it’s through its training, its advocacy, or the standards it sets, ISACA’s influence depends on keeping pace with the profession it serves. To shoulder those responsibilities, the association needs to be able to move at the same speed as the technology it hopes to help govern.

“This is not your typical kind of acceleration path [for] adoption of new technology,” Prusch says, emphasizing that the industry as a whole has a difficult task ahead of it.

“We’re not talking about two decades ago, when we had maybe 10 years to develop the infrastructure. We are already behind.”

“The reality is,” he says, “we’ve got to do this faster.”

Part of the mighty Thales cybersecurity division, the Imperva WAF (web application firewall) solutions stand out from the competition as they support multiple deployment scenarios and are designed to be up and running in minutes. It looks to have every angle covered, as Imperva WAF is available as a SaaS-based service, can be hosted locally on customer equipment, virtualized on a choice of cloud and on-premises hypervisors, or delivered as a dedicated and hardened turnkey gateway appliance.

It offers an extensive range of security features, with many implemented as modules. Along with out-of-the-box website protection, options include advanced bot protection, API security, L3/4/7 DDoS protection, client-side protection, and attack analytics.

In this review, we tested the Imperva Cloud WAF solution, which is hosted on the Imperva globally distributed content delivery network (CDN) and protects any public-facing website along with its associated applications and APIs. At its foundation, Imperva Cloud WAF functions as a secure reverse proxy that intercepts and inspects all web traffic, but there's a lot more going on in the background as the CDN employs a global network of data centres to host these services.

Called points of presence (PoPs), Imperva Cloud WAF defaults to making all of them available to protect your websites but automatically uses the nearest one to a user for request handling. Typical benefits are website performance optimisation, reduced latency, intelligent caching, and integrated load balancing with Anycast routing providing automated failover between PoPs without requiring any changes to DNS resolution.

Thales Imperva Cloud WAF review: Simple deployment

To get the most realistic experience, we deployed Imperva Cloud WAF in a live environment and used it to protect three active websites. No limited simulations here, as all threats detected would be genuine and in real time.

From our account portal, we added the websites using their full domain names and chose to have Imperva manage all SSL certificates. Sensibly, Imperva requires you to prove you own the domains before it will issue site SSL/TLS certificates, and we used the automatically generated record name and CNAME record value to update our hosting provider's DNS services.

Once domain ownership had been validated, we added the A records provided to route website traffic through Imperva's servers. A validation process confirmed traffic was being correctly routed, and a quick glance at the portal's configuration posture status panel showed green lights for SSL certificates, DDoS and WAF settings, plus DNS configuration confirming that all traffic to our websites was going through Imperva's servers.

Protection is instant, as a default policy is created, applied to all websites, and set to block malicious visitors and requests. You can easily create your own custom policies and assign them to specific websites, with each one containing rules for cross-site scripting (XSS), illegal resource access, remote file inclusion, and SQL injection.

Thales Imperva Cloud WAF review: Attack alert

The cloud portal provided a wealth of information about our security posture, and we were alarmed to see that from the moment Cloud WAF had been activated, our websites were constantly under attack. Within a day, it had reported on illegal resource access, XSS, bad bot, DDoS bot, SQL injection, and remote file inclusion attacks from multiple countries.

During our extended testing period, we saw many thousands of attacks, but Cloud WAF cut cleanly through the alert smokescreen. The Attack Analytics service uses ML algorithms and AI to sort and condense daily security alerts into concise and manageable lists of incidents prioritised by threat severity.

This worked extremely well as the attack analytics dashboard presented a tidy graphical overview of events and incidents over time, which we could filter to show all protected websites or specific ones along with all blocked or alerted events. Charts showed the dominant attack origin countries, the top violations, the most popular attack tools, and the most attacked websites, with a highlight chart revealing the number of similar incidents identified by Imperva across its entire customer base and those associated with known CVEs.

Thales Imperva Cloud WAF review: Bad bots and DDoS protection

Imperva Cloud WAF includes sophisticated bot protection for smaller businesses that employs signature, IP reputation, and rate-limiting detection methods and is designed to block vulnerability scanners, simple scrapers, known bad bots, and DDoS attacks. The Advanced Bot Protection (ABP) add-on is aimed at larger businesses and dynamically sorts the good bots from the bad using behavioural analysis, ML, device fingerprinting, threat intelligence feeds, and progressive challenges.

The ABP dashboard presents a vast amount of information on bot activity and provides filters to fine-tune the information. The AI Tools page displayed graphs of all detected AI tools, agents, and web crawlers accessing our websites and showed how our website data was being scraped to train LLMs. We could see plenty of AI bot activity, such as ClaudeBot, Applebot, PetalBot, and GPTBot. Plus, the highly aggressive Bytespider and ABP policies and rulesets can be used to protect specific web pages from their unwanted attention.

Imperva Cloud WAF includes the DDoS Protection for Websites component, which blocks malicious DDoS activity, including volumetric attacks at Layer 3 and 4 and application-level attacks at Layer 7. Imperva's global network of over 60 high-capacity PoPs offers a total scrubbing capacity of 13Tbps and can process over 65 billion attack packets per second, allowing it to boast a 3-second mitigation SLA for any size, type, and duration of attack.

Protection was simple to configure for each website, and for testing, we used the HOIC (High Orbit Ion Cannon) tool to generate Layer 7 DDoS attacks – we own the websites, so there are no issues of legality. As soon as the tests started, Imperva Cloud WAF blocked all attack traffic, posted alerts in the portal summary page, issued email alerts in under a minute, and sent another when the attack had stopped.

Thales Imperva Cloud WAF review: Is it worth it?

For mid-sized businesses and enterprises – absolutely. The damage to their brand reputation and the clean-up operation after a successful website attack will probably cost many, many times more.

The simple cloud deployment process is a standout feature, as it didn't take long to get Imperva Cloud WAF protecting our websites. The cloud portal is another winner as it is capable of providing an incredible amount of information about all detected attacks and yet manages to condense it all down to manageable lists of actionable events.

Our test websites may be low-key affairs, but we were shocked by the sustained number of attacks they were being subjected to on a daily basis and from all around the globe. The level of attacks will no doubt be exponentially greater for high-profile corporate websites and will only get worse with the advent of dark LLMs and weaponised AI. From our experience, we rate Imperva Cloud WAF highly and consider it an ideal website security solution for mid-sized businesses and enterprises.

Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has called on the government to establish a cybersecurity task force to strengthen defenses against AI.

The call to action follows an emergency meeting of the LDP’s National Cybersecurity Strategy Headquarters (NCSH).

Hosted on 9 October, Masaaki Taira, head of the NCSH, declared Japan in “a state of emergency in cyber space”.

The announcement comes as a series of cyber attacks have disrupted more than 20 companies across transport, retail, finance, and cloud services, according to the Financial Times.

Rail operator JR East reported the loss of 1.67 million email addresses, while car rental company Times Car lost a large number of customer driving licence scans. Meanwhile, cloud services provider IDC Frontier reported a ransomware attack that reportedly linked data leaks to hundreds of businesses.

In the financial sector, Japan’s financial regulator warned banks against accepting driving licences to open new accounts, following reports from Reuters that nine banks had been hacked using AI.

An investigation by Japanese IT company Macnica found that Japan has been hit with 119 cyber attacks this year as of 6 October, with 68% occurring since July, marking a sharp increase from 86 recorded attacks in 2025 and 62 in 2024.

AI is accelerating the attack frequency

An investigation by the Japan Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center (JPCERT) into the attack servers found attackers used AI tools to "scan for known vulnerabilities and conduct attacks via APIs”.

JPCERT noted that evidence was found of attackers analyzing APK files to detect vulnerabilities such as Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF).

Additionally, Japanese security firm GMO Cybersecurity, cited by The Japan Times, alleged that a Chinese-developed AI tool was deployed in cyber attacks against companies in retail, finance, and e-commerce.

Nobuo Miwa, president of Tokyo-based cybersecurity firm S&J Corp, told Reuters that AI makes cyber attacks faster, cheaper, and harder to detect because “AI doesn’t get tired”.

He added, “Japan is essentially being subjected to carpet bombing.”

Building a defense against AI

Reports suggest that Japan’s ageing cyber infrastructure has left it vulnerable to these attacks. With AI making the work easier for attackers, the LDP is aiming to build cyber resilience by establishing a cybersecurity task force under a new headquarters to strengthen defenses using AI as a tool.

Although the plan is yet to be formally submitted to the Japanese Prime Minister's office, the proposal would encourage defenders to adopt AI-enabled cybersecurity solutions and call on regulators to assist small and medium-sized businesses in detecting attacks targeting them.

Mihoko Matsubara, chief cybersecurity strategist at Japan’s NTT Corporation, told ITPro that the LDP's proposal aims to relieve public anxiety by breaking down organizational silos and helping defenders adopt AI-enabled tools.

“Once formalized, the LDP recommendations would help CISOs secure more cybersecurity budget and invest in security hygiene that was overdue because of resource constraints,” Matsubara said.

She added that government-funded support for SMBs would also help strengthen supply chain security. “This would ultimately contribute to the overall resilience of the Japanese economy and industry.”

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Agentic AI security incidents are surging at an alarming pace, according to ServiceNow, and the company has warned many firms are unprepared to deal with future incidents.

A poll of cybersecurity leaders found 88% of UK firms have experienced an agent-related security incident in the past year. Crucially, only 36% of those polled said they were able to contain an incident in under 24 hours.

The findings come as agent deployments accelerate across a range of industries, the company said, from financial services and manufacturing to healthcare.

ServiceNow CISO Ben de Bont also highlighted high-profile incidents involving agents this year.

In July, OpenAI revealed that agents had escaped sandbox environments and breached third-party organizations, including Hugging Face. The admission by the firm was followed by similar cases involving agents at Anthropic and Meta.

These incidents underline the potential risks associated with the technology, de Bont said.

“The agentic incidents making headlines this year are a warning about what can happen when AI is deployed without the right controls,” he commented.

“Organizations shouldn’t have to choose between moving quickly and managing risk. The ones that get this right will build governance into how they deploy agents from the start, so they can realise the benefits of AI without losing visibility or control.”

Agentic AI security in the spotlight

According to ServiceNow, security leaders face a dual challenge when it comes to agentic AI security: the scale of adoption and adapting to “machine-speed” capabilities.

The current rate of adoption is “compounding organizations’ exposure”, the company said, with more than 51% of firms now running between 100 and 999 AI agents. Just over one-third (38%) are running upwards of 1,000 agents.

Yet despite the scale of adoption, just over half (53%) of security teams have a “full, accurate record” of every agent in production.

Moreover, 24% revealed they’d identified agents running in production that had never been registered and were unknown to them.

Running parallel to this, ServiceNow warned that the machine-speed capabilities of agents are “outpacing human-speed response” capabilities.

Three-quarters of respondents said they maintain a complete map of what services and systems agents can access, yet only 31% can monitor them in real-time.

This visibility gap means many security teams are unable to respond quickly enough in the event of a security incident or an instance where agents access unauthorized systems.

Observability has become a recurring concern since the advent of agentic AI, with enterprises unable to keep tabs on a growing array of agents operating behind the scenes.

ServiceNow’s findings on this front echo those in a recent study from Salt Labs. A survey by the security firm found the rate of adoption is placing a huge strain on security teams when it comes to visibility and governance.

Many enterprises also lack the appropriate containment controls for agents, Salt Labs warned. Indeed, the study found nearly half of respondents had observed an agent performing an action that wasn’t intended or authorized.

Assessing risk

ServiceNow noted that the use of agents will require a step change in how security leaders assess risk – and so far these efforts are falling flat.

The company said that while many security leaders “self-assess as having established agentic security postures”, just 13% have clear cut programs designed to measure leading considerations.

These key considerations span areas such as attack surfaces, accountability, visibility, and audit readiness.

According to ServiceNow, this shows that agentic AI security is primarily governed by “legacy frameworks and human-driven systems” that are unfit. Just over half (51%) of UK firms said they have governance frameworks that cover the aforementioned considerations.

Similarly, fewer than half (48%) of security teams build “design security” within the agent development process. The study warned this means that various permissions and guardrails are being implemented on an “ad-hoc, after-the-fact basis”.

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Businesses are faced with a bewildering choice of network monitoring solutions, and WhatsUp Gold from Progress Software stands out for its simplified licensing plans. Progress is commendably transparent about pricing and offers flexible subscription-based and perpetual licence options, along with a free version that monitors 10 devices and all of their components.

The Progress WhatsUp Gold 2026 on review delivers plenty of new features; the SSL certificate discovery and tracking introduced in the previous version has been updated to allow certificates to be discovered on any port, with new dashboards helping to maintain compliance with more information on expired or expiring ones. Stored device credentials are protected by customer-specific encryption keys. And businesses invested in Hirschmann will be pleased to know WhatsUp Gold now provides out-of-the-box support for its industrial network devices.

Security is even tighter with the introduction of a master secret key. Created during WhatsUp Gold installation, this key encrypts sensitive information in the WhatsUp Gold database and will be required if you want to recover or migrate to a new environment – so make sure it's stored safely in a secure location.

Progress WhatsUp Gold 2026 review: Plan to monitor

Progress Software employs device licences that allow you to monitor everything on a device, regardless of the number of components, aspects, or channels. Aimed at SMBs, a Business subscription starts around £920 per year for 50 devices and enables network discovery, topology mapping, alerting and reporting, plus cloud, wireless network and storage monitoring.

An Enterprise subscription starts at £1,540 per year, adds internet, virtualization host and application monitoring, network path analysis plus log management, and supports two WhatsUp Gold installations for distributed monitoring. Larger businesses will find Enterprise Plus appealing as it starts at around £2,600 per year and adds switch, router and firewall configuration management along with the NTA+ (network traffic analysis plus) module and support for four distributed installs.

Value for the Enterprise and Enterprise Plus plans gets a boost as they both include access to the WhatsUp Gold 360 service. This is ideal for distributed networks as you can monitor multiple sites from a single cloud portal.

Progress WhatsUp Gold 2026 review: Swift deployment

We installed WhatsUp Gold on a Windows Server 2025 host in 20 minutes and followed the quick start wizard to create our first network discovery. You add your networks and subnets, enable AWS and Azure discovery, and expand it to look for virtualization hosts, wireless infrastructures plus storage devices.

After adding all required device and service credentials, you specify which ports you want the certificate discovery to query and then set the scan to run at scheduled intervals. Our first discovery on a single subnet took around 10 minutes and reported back with a detailed list of all our Windows servers and workstations, network switches, firewalls, printers, NAS appliances, and VMware and Hyper-V hosts plus their VMs.

From the console's network view, you can select devices and manually enable monitoring, but WhatsUp Gold can do all the hard work for you as discovery jobs can be set to automatically monitor devices using predefined sets of roles and sub-roles. WhatsUp Gold also applies base sets of active and passive monitors and thresholds to each discovered device.

Redfish is fully supported, and after providing the appropriate credentials, WhatsUp Gold assigned a group of monitors to our Dell iDRAC and HPE iLO server management controllers. These can gather a lot of valuable information on server hardware, including the status of the chassis, CPUs, memory, storage devices, fans, temperatures, and power supplies.

Progress WhatsUp Gold 2026 review: Console and actions

The WUG console is easy to use as it groups all features under five main menus in an upper ribbon bar. The NTA+ menu tab is specifically for viewing flow data from Progress Software's FlowMon Collector appliances.

Colour-coded icons are assigned to each monitored element so you can easily see if they are up or down, while frequently used views can be added as Favourites for quick access from the star icon to the right. Analysis dashboards are a great feature as you can design detailed custom views, while the NOC (network operations centre) feature presents support staff with a heads-up display that combines slide decks of multiple dashboards with a view duration.

WhatsUpGold spotted all our secure web servers during its discovery and added an active SSL certificate monitor to each one. These default to checking them every 11 hours, and if they have expired or will expire in the next 30 days, it changes their status icon to show them as requiring attention.

Plenty of tools are provided for creating alert policies, linking them with device state changes, and assigning actions. WhatsUp Gold currently provides 24 types of actions, including sending SMS and email, restarting a service, running a PowerShell script, and linking up with services such as Microsoft Teams, ServiceNow, and Slack.

The Application Monitoring module is the weakest link, as the list of available profiles desperately needs updating. Links to the Progress community for downloading third-party profiles have also been removed as Progress is in the process of moving them all to GitHub.

Progress WhatsUp Gold 2026 review: WhatsUp Gold 360

WhatsUp Gold 360 is easy to deploy, as we logged into the customer portal using our Progress ID and, from the Connectors page, downloaded the install file. The connector must be virtualised, and we chose the Hyper-V version – others are available for VMware, KVM, Nutanix and Azure, with AWS support coming soon.

Creating a new Hyper-V VM using the supplied VHD file took a minute, and for tighter security, the connector will only link up with and send data to the WhatsUp Gold 360 tenant that created it. Adding our WhatsUp Gold instance was equally swift as we provided a meaningful name, its IP address, and admin credentials along with the thumbprint copied from the certificate viewer in the local WhatsUp Gold web console.

After a brief synchronization, the WhatsUp Gold 360 portal presents a dashboard with a choice of customisable widgets, including ones for connector and instance status, connector availability, total WhatsUp Gold monitors and devices, and events over time. You can create multiple dashboards, choose the widgets you want, and drag them around the view to suit.

WhatsUp Gold 360 pulls in a lot of information from each WhatsUp Gold instance, with its Infrastructure menu providing lists of all monitored assets, detailed hardware and software inventories, used credentials, and more. Details can be refined as all lists are searchable, and you can select WhatsUp Gold instances to view specific sites.

Communications channels are being replaced by the new notification management feature, allowing WhatsUp Gold 360 to send alerts via email or webhooks to Microsoft Teams and Slack. The webhook service is currently in beta testing, and the only alert we could send to our Teams channel was to warn of connector state changes.

Progress WhatsUp Gold 2026 review: Is it worth it?

WhatsUp Gold 2026 is an affordable network monitoring solution, and the flexible device-based licensing plans make it easy to keep costs under control. The highly configurable web console delivers a remarkable range of network monitoring services, and the Enterprise and Enterprise Plus plans look like even better value, as these include access to the WhatsUp Gold 360 cloud portal.

Tech industry leaders and security experts have expressed shock amidst a surge of attempted cyberattacks and suspended websites in the wake of critical PHP vulnerabilities.

Speaking at its AI Tour event in Germany, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella reportedly said: “I’ve not seen anything like this in a long, long time.”

“It was a long day and a long night, I know, for all the IT and security folks,” Nadella added.

Nadella’s comments come after an update was issued to address critical PHP vulnerabilities that could impact millions of websites globally.

PHP (PHP Hypertext Preprocessor) is a programming language used in web development, which underpins much of the internet. The two vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, carry a CVSS score of 9.2, ranking them as ‘critical’.

Security experts have warned that both could allow unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE) and allow threat actors to seize control of servers, disrupt services, and steal data.

Given the severity of the flaws, several international cybersecurity agencies issued urgent alerts. CERT-EU and the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) urged organizations to patch immediately when available, or consider shutting down systems to prevent compromise.

“Millions of attempts”

While the PHP Foundation released an update on Wednesday, the patch was pushed forward by a day after a leak of CVE identifiers, meaning threat actors had some understanding of how to exploit the flaws.

An exploit tool known as ‘PHP2Shell’ was reportedly developed and showcased online.

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince revealed the company saw “thousands of attempts to exploit it” in the hours before it was publicly announced.

“Across the Cloudflare network we saw thousands of attempts to exploit it,” he wrote in a post on X. “That jumped to tens of thousands in the 45 minutes post-announcement, hundreds of thousands within 2 hours, and millions now.”

Websites taken down

The global impact of the PHP vulnerabilities cannot be understated, particularly given cybersecurity agencies actively encouraged some organizations to take systems offline.

Services worldwide have been taken down as a result of the vulnerabilities while organizations apply patches. Dozens of UK government services have been taken offline as a precautionary measure while updates have been applied, according to reports from BBC News.

In Japan, Asahi shuttered some websites and systems to conduct threat assessments, while French telecoms giant Orange temporarily suspended access to some PHP-based websites.

Matt Cooke, EMEA cybersecurity strategist at Proofpoint, described the incident as a “stake-in-the-ground moment” for enterprises and cybersecurity leaders alike.

“Organizations of every size have a finite window to shore up their cyber defenses, because threats now operate at machine speed,” he said.

“Patch fast, know your attack surface, and limit the blast radius, because that window is closing. If we don't act now, we will see more organizations forced to take their sites offline while they scramble to fix what should have been secured long ago."

Did AI help? find the PHP vulnerabilities

A key talking point in the PHP incident lies in how vulnerabilities were discovered: namely through the use of AI. Cybersecurity researchers at Calif originally identified the flaws using OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol model as part of the firm’s Patch the Planet initiative.

Researchers at Wiz also independently discovered and reported both vulnerabilities.

In a blog post detailing the discovery, Wiz researchers said the findings “rank among the most severe vulnerabilities discovered in PHP, and arguably in software history”.

Researchers also emphasized the importance of AI in the discovery, which helped simplify processes and shed light on the flaws.

“The underlying flaws had been present for decades, but demonstrating their exploitability required an exceptionally complex chain of steps, at the edge of what human researchers could practically achieve,” Wiz researchers wrote.

“Frontier AI models substantially reduced that barrier, turning a longstanding flaw into an exploit.”

Tom Exelby, head of cyber security at Red Helix, issued a stark warning, insisting that this “won’t be the last time we see an incident like this”.

“So much of our digital world rests on a comparatively small number of providers, platforms, and open source components, and that concentration means a single flaw can have a global impact in minutes,” he said.

“When a technology is embedded in millions of websites and services, a vulnerability stops being one organization’s problem and becomes everyone’s.”

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AI adoption in organizations has become near-ubiquitous, but has not been coupled with appropriate oversight. Few companies can answer all of the key AI security questions: who is using AI and to what extent, exactly which tools and models are in play, and what data is being shared with them.

Research from Cyera shows that 83% of businesses already use AI, but only 13% have strong visibility into how it is being used. This gap is where partners can help customers move from experimenting with AI to governing it securely.

The biggest commercial opportunity for the channel over the next few years will not come from selling customers more AI tools; it will come from helping them govern the ones they already have.

Shadow AI: the challenge customers can't see

One of the clearest examples of the disconnect between AI adoption and governance is ‘shadow AI’, the use of generative tools without direct IT approval or visibility. This creates compliance gaps, as well as hidden channels for data loss that can’t be audited, because no one knows they exist. The consequences are already impacting businesses and are only set to increase, with one in five organizations experiencing a breach linked to shadow AI last year.

The problem of shadow AI stems from how AI entered most businesses. Adoption was initially organic and employee-led, driven by curiosity rather than policy. While that fuelled useful experimentation, it has frequently left organizations with no boundaries, no ownership, and no clear line between sanctioned and unsanctioned use. Customers need help turning that experimentation into something controlled.

A management rather than an IT issue

Ungoverned AI shouldn’t be seen as a housekeeping task for IT. When confidential data can leak into publicly accessible tools, when autonomous agents can affect key databases and systems with little oversight, and when third-party models introduce risks that vendor programmes never assessed, the exposure needs to become a central concern for management.

Yet this is where organizations are frequently falling short, and this has knock-on effects on their resilience, compliance and trust responsibilities. Some 77% of organizations have an AI strategy, yet only 26% can actually enforce it.

For channel players, this changes who they should be in conversation with. As the conversation moves from the IT teams to senior leadership, the partners who can discuss holistic governance concerns, rather than individual technical features, will be the ones trusted with leading the changes.

A services opportunity, not a resale one

This is where the opportunity for Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and Value Added Resellers (VARs) becomes clear. Vendors can supply the tools, but only a partner can operationalize governance inside a customer's own environment, with its particular mix of applications, data and regulatory exposure. This kind of expert consultancy isn’t something that can be bought off a shelf.

The value here lies in services rather than resale, from discovery and visibility assessments to policy design and the ongoing management that keeps governance current as tools and rules change. Each of those is recurring by nature. The aim is to move a customer from experimenting with AI to governing it securely, with the partner as the constant throughout.

The conversations to have now

Partners do not need a mature market or a polished AI security practice to start. The value is in having these conversations today, while guidance from MSPs and VARs is most needed. Four topics should be prioritized above others:

• Visibility: Most customers underestimate how much AI is already running across their business, and a straightforward inventory, covering approved tools, unsanctioned usage, and high-risk workflows, is the best route into the wider conversation.
• Data protection: Once visibility exists, the priority is controlling what goes into AI tools, with guardrails that stop proprietary or regulated data being shared with public models where it can be retained or exposed. The risk here is often capable employees trying to work faster, rather than bad actors.
• Policy: This makes the above controls durable and easier to review. This can take the form of a clear code of conduct, a list of sanctioned tools and conditions, and explicit guidelines detailing where human judgement must stay involved in sensitive areas.
• Agentic AI: As agents gain autonomy to act across business systems, partners can help set parameters, approval thresholds and logging, and ensure a human stays in the loop on decisions affecting customers, finances or critical systems.

Turning regulation into recurring revenue

Upcoming regulation means that securing AI is now an urgent priority for customers. Sound AI governance already aligns with frameworks including NIS2, the EU AI Act, the Cyber Resilience Act, and GDPR, and the next phase of EU AI Act obligations takes effect from August 2026. That is a concrete deadline partners can build a conversation around now.

The opportunity is to frame regulatory readiness as an ongoing managed service rather than a one-off compliance project. The rules will keep evolving, and customers will need a partner who keeps them aligned as they do. Handled that way, regulatory pressure becomes a durable, recurring revenue stream.

AI will only become more deeply embedded in how organizations operate. The customers who benefit safely will be those who adopt it with control over their data, their tools, and their decisions, rather than being steered by tools they cannot see. The partners who move the fastest, from selling AI to helping secure it, will build the deepest and most lasting customer relationships.

Japanese media giant Nikkei, owner of financial publications including the Nikkei and the Financial Times, has revealed a data breach in which 1.83 million records have been stolen.

The incident, which took place from the early hours of 7 October, involved the unauthorized access of a cloud service used by the firm for system development.

Nikkei said the credentials that were used have now been disabled, and that it doesn't yet know how they were stolen.

"As of October 16, we have found no secondary damage, such as misuse of the leaked personal information," said the firm. "We have also found no other problems, such as Nikkei system outages or data tampering."

Of the 1.83 million records that were stolen, around 150,000 contained one or more name, email address, postal address, phone number, or date of birth. Of these, about 120,000 included an email address - putting these people at risk of phishing attempts.

About 1.68 million items contained information that couldn't be used to identify an individual, Nikkei said, and no credit card information was leaked.

The firm said it's now working to assess the extent of the damage and find the cause, and that it is contacting all those whose data has been affected.

It has also reported the incident to Japan's Personal Information Protection Commission, but has found no evidence that the leaked data has been misused in any way.

"For businesses, this incident highlights the importance of strong access controls and protecting employee credentials. Implementing multi-factor authentication, regularly reviewing account permissions and monitoring for suspicious login activity can significantly reduce the risk of unauthorized access," commented Jamie Akhtar, CEO and co-founder of CyberSmart.

"Employee cybersecurity awareness training is equally important, helping staff recognise phishing attempts and avoid inadvertently exposing sensitive information."

A hat-trick of Nikkei breaches

The breach is the third to have hit the company in the last few weeks. Earlier this month, it disclosed a breach that occurred in late July, when hackers compromised employees’ Microsoft 365 business software accounts and accessed personal information belonging to employees and business partners.

It also revealed a second breach, in which a cloud service it used had been accessed without authorization since late July.

“Three breaches in a month point toward a systemic problem that a series of individual incident responses isn’t resolving. The investigation and remediation approach clearly needs to widen beyond what’s been done so far," commented Muhammad Yahya Patel, vCISO and cybersecurity advisor for EMEA at Huntress.

"For an organization whose core business is the integrity and trustworthiness of financial information, a month of successive data breaches is now a reputational problem.”

Looking further back, in May 2022, the firm revealed that it had fallen victim to a ransomware attack, while, in November last year, it disclosed a data breach that was caused by the compromise of a Slack account.

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An update has been issued for two critical PHP (PHP Hypertext Preprocessor) vulnerabilities after a working exploit was published online this week.

PHP is a server-side programming language used in web development, powering millions of websites globally.

The two vulnerabilities are tracked as CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619 and carry a CVSS score of 9.2, ranking them as ‘critical’. Both enable unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE), according to analysis.

On Monday 20 October, the PHP Foundation issued an advisory warning of the two vulnerabilities, urging organizations to prepare for an impending patch. The advisory was issued following reports that an exploit tool known as ‘PHP2Shell’ has been made available, with a video guide of the tool in action posted online.

In a follow-up announcement, the PHP Foundation said fixes for both flaws are now available, outlining organizations at risk of attack.

“Who is at risk: All PHP installations serving web requests, including PHP-FPM, Apache with mod_php, php-cgi, FrankenPHP and LiteSpeed,” the foundation said.

“We consider the risk highest for mod_php, with a demonstrated exploit where an unauthenticated request can trigger the attack before any application code runs.”

How to patch the PHP vulnerabilities

According to the PHP Foundation’s advisory, organizations are required to update to PHP 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36 or 8.2.35. Sources for the patches can be found via the foundation’s downloads page.

Windows sources and binaries are also available on the same page, according to the organization.

Linux distributions and LTS vendors were given access to the patches in advance, according to the foundation. Admins are advised to check with their respective vendors for updated packages.

Notably, PHP 8.1 and older versions no longer receive support from the PHP project, the foundation warned. Admins are therefore advised to contact vendors for details on a potential backported fix or to upgrade to a supported version.

PHP flaws had the cyber industry scrambling

A host of security agencies worldwide have issued alerts over the critical vulnerabilities amid warnings that both were being actively exploited.

CERT-EU said the vulnerabilities could affect all versions from PHP 5 onwards, which, given this dates back to 2004, underlines the scale of the potential threat.

This warning was echoed by similar analysis from cybersecurity firm watchTowr.

Crucially, CERT-EU said that if organizations cannot immediately patch, they consider “isolating internet-facing applications from public networks until a fix can be applied”.

The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) gave similar advice for organizations.

“Where immediate remediation is not feasible, organisations should consider taking the system offline until it can be fully mitigated,” the agency said in a statement.

Jake Moore, global cybersecurity advisory at ESET, said that given PHP underpins large parts of the web, mass exploitation of the flaws represented a huge threat.

“When vulnerabilities are leaked before their patch is available, it is usually a scramble to do whatever possible to mitigate the damage,” he said.

“But the sheer scale of PHP across the internet makes this far more serious than the usual exploit. A vulnerability in technology used by millions of websites could immediately give cyber criminals an enormous number of potential targets.”

Notably, Moore said the leak gives attackers a “huge head start” and urged businesses to identify vulnerable systems and patch immediately when available.

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Security updates are vital in keeping software secure and users safe, but they could also act as a map for hackers to find weak spots in code, including subsequent patches.

That's according to research from Terra Security, which said the rate of patches later reported to be broken has surged from a "low, steady rate" by eight times.

"Software security fixes are both bug closers and maps: they show where a given bug used to live and how the developer chose to close it," Terra security researcher Oren Yomtov noted in a blog post. "Narrowing down the fix so that it only blocks the reported case can point the next attacker toward undefended gaps around the repair."

While Terra didn't pin the leap in patches needing patching on AI directly, the jump happened this spring, as security models such as Anthropic's Claude Mythos and OpenAI's GPT-5.5-Cyber were announced, though were only released later and in a restricted way to approved partners.

That said, AI has unquestionably led to a boom in the number of flaws being spotted this year.

Spotting broken patches

Terra noted this pattern of patches requiring subsequent fixes in its own efforts over the last year, with bypasses quickly found, necessitating yet another patch. To check that this wasn't simply the company's own experience, Terra researchers looked at every flaw listed in the CVE system as well as GitHub advisories.

Researchers noted it wasn't just Terra seeing an increase in patches requiring fixes.

"Broken fixes have been reported for years at a low, steady rate until 2026, when the share of open-source fixes on GitHub later reported broken rose about eightfold," Yomtov said.

A chart shared in Yomtov's blog post showed reports of open source fixes that needed their own patches within 90 days jumped from below 0.5% to 2.3% in a matter of months, with the leap happening after March 2026.

"The CVE record database gives much wider coverage than our GitHub data and shows the same jump in the same year," Yomtov added.

He added that patches for bugs on the known-exploited list are four times as likely to be reported as broken as flaws from the very same vendors.

"The likely reason is attention: exploited bugs draw more researchers, who study the patch and find what it missed," he added.

What can be done?

Security teams should be aware that patched flaws may still remain a vulnerability, according to Yomtov.

"The upshot is that the "patch and move on" habit is a bad one, especially for the bugs that matter most," he noted.

Yomtov added that one of the most common types of broken fixes are server-side request forgery and prototype pollution, where the usual solution is to create a list of inputs to automatically reject.

"The reason is simple: if the blocklist doesn't foresee every encoding of a bad input, the attacker only needs to find one," Yomtov added.

Beyond that, this technique for addressing flaws highlights what's broken to would-be attackers. As Yomtov noted, a patch that only blocks reported inputs can “give the impression the bug is addressed”, even if it’s still present in the underlying code.

"It functions as a map for attackers, marking out both vulnerable code and what the defender thought the bug was."

That means that security professionals should look "just outside the diff" – as opposed to looking only at the code that was changed – in order to spot potential problems. Calling it the "cheapest form of bug hunting," Yomtov added: "We believe a growing share of attacker effort, and AI tokens, goes into exactly this."

Because of that, he advises security pros should "diff-hunt your own fix before shipping it," as attackers certainly will, taking into consideration whether the patch actually fixes the root cause – rather than merely blocking one input – and whether it covers the whole bug class or might break anything else.

"The same goes for patches you install," he adds. "If a vendor fixes an exploited bug, assume someone is reading the patch for a way around it."

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ConnectWise has entered day three of disruption to its cloud services, which it had to take offline following a breach of its systems detected on 16 October.

ConnectWise Cloud Backup – formerly SkyKick – offers backup and recovery services to MSPs to protect their customers’ Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 environments.

The company announced it had discovered “recent attempts of unauthorized access associated with the ConnectWise Cloud Backup environment”. The firm said its incident response procedures were “promptly initiated” and containment measures put in place.

A little under 12 hours after publishing the initial advisory, at 5.00am UTC on 17 October, the company shut off Cloud Backup access as a “protective measure”. Approximately eight hours later, CloudWise SaaS Security and Cloud Management were taken offline as well “as an additional precaution”.

Customer Microsoft 365 environments accessed

According to security organizations like Huntress and Todyl, which monitor ConnectWise tenant environments on behalf of their customers, the attack started with the application’s identity signing into Microsoft 365 tenants from a hosting provider and receiving Microsoft Graph access tokens.

“This is not how the app normally behaves,” Huntress explained in a blog. “Legitimate traffic comes from Azure private IP space. As of [7.00pm UTC] on October 16, Huntress has confirmed unauthorized sign-ins in 162 tenants.”

Expanding on the nature of the threat, Todyl said: “Because the application already held broad, previously granted permissions in each tenant, those sign-ins gave the attacker the technical ability to read and write mail and attachments, OneDrive and SharePoint files, and Teams chats.”

According to Huntress’s observations, in the two tenants it has been monitoring that have been compromised, the behaviour after access had been established was “fast, scripted, and notably indiscriminate”.

“The procedure was the same each time: the application granted itself Global Administrator, then planted a new secret on a small number of other applications in the tenant to keep a foothold,” Huntress said, though there were some differences in where the secret was planted.

The incident isn’t over

The issue for ConnectWise MSP customers, as security firm CoreView pointed out, is while it has disabled new logins to its applications, “this should not be read as if the incident is over for businesses that had the affected service principals in their tenant".

Indeed, ConnectWise said in its own advisory that disabling the affected connections only prevents new connections.

“It does not reverse changes previously made inside a tenant,” ConnectWise said.

The company added that while its investigations have established that “existing backup archives remain encrypted, isolated, and preserved,” these findings don’t extend to live Microsoft 365 environments.

As of 19 October, Huntress has discovered “almost 1,000 Entra tenants with sign-in activity from the IP address associated with the unauthorized activity (144.172.64[.]128). Over 300 of these succeeded”.

What should MSPs do now?

ConnectWise has said partners should review their own Microsoft 365 tenants, as well as each managed customer tenant. This includes environments with dormant SkyKick connections.

The company has offered detailed instructions on what MSPs should do now, including:

• Verifying local status and preserving evidence
• Reviewing sign-ins across identities from 13 October minimum – possibly as far back as 1 October – to date. Filter for the IP address listed by Huntress as well as 144.172.64[.]99 and 144.172.64[.]60
• Reviewing directory audit events
• Checking credentials and federation trusts
• Checking roles, application owners, and consent
• Checking policy changes
• Checking exchange and resource activity
• Reviewing remaining connections and recording the outcome.

Further information can be found on the ConnectWise advisory page under the entry listed as Update: Sunday, October 18, 2026 at 01:00 UTC.

Huntress added additional actions impacted customers should take, including:

• Disabling ConnectWise Cloud Backup and ConnectWise Cloud Management - MS Teams in their Microsoft 365 tenant
• Consider also temporarily disabling other ConnectWise Cloud Management application IDs
• Don’t delete the application IDs, only disable them
• Don’t re-enable affected applications until ConnectWise confirms all credentials have been reset.

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The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has banned the use of DeepSeek by civilian federal agencies, citing security concerns.

The ban covers any technology built with the aid of the company's AI models, and applies to agencies including the Department of the Treasury, the Department of State, and the Department of Justice, as well as prime contractors and subcontractors serving federal agencies.

It also bars DeepSeek from future procurements, and requires agencies to remove versions put into place prior to the ban.

The main worry is that DeepSeek servers are located in the PRC, where government cyber and intelligence operations legally have broad authority to access private company infrastructure.

"For DeepSeek-hosted instances of their models, DeepSeek's account generation process collects personally identifiable information (PII) and may also track and digitally fingerprint users. DeepSeek's most widely used applications function through a prompt-and-response process that requires presenting information to the model, and which may result in the transfer of sensitive data to the PRC if used by US government employees or vendors," the notice reads.

"The transfer of the aforementioned information to the PRC, either independently or in combination with publicly available data could produce actionable intelligence on US persons and/or government programs."

DHS cites DeepSeek vulnerability concerns

The DHS is also concerned that the models themselves may contain malware or other security vulnerabilities. Indeed, open source security research has already found that the DeepSeek iOS mobile application contains multiple critical vulnerabilities.

Agencies that have been using DeepSeek are warned that they should check that they haven't already been compromised. According to the DHS, these organizations should monitor the flow of traffic in and out of the agency, implement enhanced logging and controls for relevant systems, and flag any anomalous activity.

Gabrielle Hempel, security operations strategist at Exabeam, said the advisory “raises some significant questions” with regard to supply chain security.

"What I find particularly interesting about the DeepSeek order is the breadth of its language," Hempel commented.

"The restriction extends beyond DeepSeek itself to third-party products and services developed using its implementations, which raises some significant questions about software provenance and supply-chain compliance."

DeepSeek is already banned from state systems in Texas, New York, and Virginia, as well as in Australia, South Korea, and Taiwan. Individual US government bodies, including the Commerce Department and the US Navy, have also removed it from use.

It remains to be seen how effective such bans can be, however, and how quickly existing systems based on DeepSeek can be replaced or redesigned.

"I suspect we're going to see increasing tension between national security policy and the practical realities of AI development, particularly as governments begin imposing restrictions that extend beyond the models themselves and into the broader software supply chain," said Hempel.

"The challenge will be making those requirements sufficiently clear and technically enforceable.”

The ban comes just days after the release of DeepSeek's latest AI model, V4.1-Flash-1017, which the company described as faster and more efficient than previous models.

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As ransomware continues to proliferate, ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) is now firmly rooted in the ecosystem. Some operations come and go, such as LockBit, which was taken down in 2024 after a multi-jurisdictional law enforcement effort dubbed Operation Cronos.

Yet LockBit continues to reinvent itself and has recently relaunched, alongside a busy market of RaaS rivals with various targets and aims.

In the current climate, some operations pose more of a risk to businesses than others. Here are five RaaS groups businesses should be aware of – according to current research and threat intelligence – along with some steps firms should take to mitigate the threat.

Akira

Akira operates on an affiliate RaaS structure, with a long lineage associated with storied Russian cybercrime syndicates.

Akira is objectively considered a “semi-private offering”, maintained by “an eclectic cartel of experienced ransomware operators”, according to Adam Brown, principal threat intelligence analyst at Huntress.

TTPs vary and are indicative of the techniques applied by individual affiliate operators themselves, says Brown. For example, he says, Akira ransomware shares direct source code overlap with previous Conti ransomware payloads.

Operating since 2023, Akira is notable for expanding beyond traditional Windows environments and targeting virtualisation infrastructure, including VMware ESXi and Nutanix AHV environments, says Xavier Mertens, principal instructor, SANS Institute.

Mitigation

To protect against attacks from Akira, authentication logs are “a good starting point”, says Mertens. Organizations should look for successful VPN connections from unusual locations or devices, dormant accounts suddenly becoming active, or “accounts authenticating to systems they normally never use”.

DragonForce

DragonForce emerged publicly in 2023 and has evolved from a conventional operation into what it describes as a ransomware ‘cartel’. It was responsible for 2025 retail attacks including M&S and the Co-op.

The group reflects a “broader trend” in which affiliates, access brokers and ransomware operators share infrastructure, tooling and expertise, says Mertens.

DragonForce affiliates’ intrusion patterns include credential compromise, reconnaissance, lateral movement, data theft, and encryption. Double extortion is “central to its model”, according to Mertens.

“Attackers typically steal sensitive information before encrypting systems, allowing them to threaten publication of stolen data, even if victims can recover from backups.”

Mitigation

To defend against the group, firms should monitor both the intrusion and exfiltration stages of an attack, says Mertens.

“Unusual PowerShell activity, credential dumping, new remote-access tools and unexpected SMB or RDP activity can indicate an attacker establishing control of the environment.”

Organizations should also watch for large archive files, unexpected use of tools such as 7-Zip or RAR, and abnormal outbound transfers, he says. “Exfiltrating large volumes of data takes time and can provide an opportunity to detect the intrusion before encryption begins.”

LockBit 5.0

LockBit suffered a steep drop in activity following Operation Cronos, but researchers say it has now returned to roughly fourth place in the last year. This shows “the difficulty in clamping down on ransomware if the people involved remain at large”, says Cian Heasley, principal consultant, Acumen Cyber.

Originally identified as ABCD ransomware, a moniker derived from the file extension applied to the files the ransomware encrypted, LockBit originated in the Russian-speaking cybercrime underground around September 2019.

While the threat from the group has fallen sharply since its heyday, LockBit-associated adversaries continue to release updated builders and remain “a prevalent threat”, says Brown.

Mitigation

Mitigating attacks from LockBit affiliates requires ensuring a robust defence. Heasley mandates “a combination of phishing-resistant multi-factor authentication (MFA) on every internet-facing service, offline and immutable backups regularly tested, and network segmentation to slow lateral movement in the event of a breach”.

Qilin

Qilin emerged in mid-2022 when established RaaS brands such as Conti, LockBit, BlackCat/ALPHV, and Hive were experiencing disruption from law enforcement actions, leaks, or internal fragmentation.

Amid the chaos, the Russia-linked group positioned itself as a “professional affiliate program”, recruiting experienced operators from other syndicates and offering a revenue-sharing model, explains Brown.

The now-infamous group caused havoc in 2024 when it was responsible for the attack on NHS provider and blood testing company Synnovis.

Today, Qilin is still keeping itself busy. The group is “unquestionably the most active RaaS operation of the last year”, according to Heasley. Some statistics show the outfit was involved in one in every six disclosed ransomware breaches across the top 50 countries impacted by ransomware between April 2025 and March 2026.

Mitigation

Qilin affiliates typically gain access via VPN accounts, exploiting an internet-facing appliance, or credentials from another criminal. Therefore, rather than concentrating solely on Qilin signatures, organizations should monitor for unusual VPN logins, unexpected Active Directory enumeration, suspicious Local Security Authority Subsystem Service (LSASS) access, and remote administration activity, according to Mertens.

“A workstation suddenly querying large parts of Active Directory, an administrator account authenticating to dozens of servers, or PsExec appearing where it has never previously been used can all indicate an intrusion in progress. The combination of these behaviours is often more revealing than any single alert.”

The Gentlemen

The Gentlemen, which emerged in mid-2025, consists of highly organized former affiliates of other massive ransomware networks such as Qilin. The group has become notorious for its aggressive double extortion model and a unique 90% profit split payout offered to affiliates, which has helped fuel its rise.

The Gentlemen typically gains initial access by exploiting internet-facing edge devices, according to Christiaan Beek, VP of Rapid7 Labs at Rapid7. “Once inside, the Gentlemen ransomware affiliates conduct reconnaissance to map the environment and identify high-value targets for encryption and data exfiltration.”

The Gentlemen is currently the second most active RaaS, based on statistics from reported breaches, according to Heasley.

Mitigation

To defend against The Gentlemen, it’s crucial that a patch management program prioritizes fixes to network edge devices as they are released, says Beek. “Prioritization of fixes should also be based on known exploits, the potential impacts on your business, and how these align with your risk tolerance.”

Heasley believes the strongest defence against The Gentlemen lies in disrupting the group's kernel-level endpoint detection and response (EDR)-killing playbook by enabling Microsoft's vulnerable driver blocklist.

At the same time, he recommends “removing internet exposure from firewall management interfaces and protecting backup infrastructure with credentials and controls that sit entirely outside your production Active Directory”.

Israeli digital advertising agency Discover-Tech has been caught serving millions of online adverts that installed spyware on the phones of targets around the world.

Through a zero-click technique dubbed "AdFection", Discover-Tech's Controlium platform has been used by financially motivated customers to de-anonymize, fingerprint, and automatically infect devices the moment an advertisement is rendered.

Apps found displaying Discover-Tech ads include Duolingo, dating apps, period trackers, German weather apps, Yahoo Mail, Viber, and calling apps such as Truecaller.

This is the first example, said Citizen Lab, of in-the-wild infection of devices with zero-click mercenary spyware via targeted advertisements.

The spyware, said Citizen Labs, was used against dozens of devices belonging to journalists who reported on sensitive subjects at Qatari news network Al Jazeera. Its ads also appeared in critical networks used by the Pentagon, the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency and the International Criminal Court.

And it's also been used to hit media organizations in Austria, Denmark, France, Mexico, Israel, Italy, Norway, and Sweden, as well as networks of international media services.

"Discover-Tech presents itself as a legitimate online advertising business. In fact, the Israel-based company provides a bridge between multiple mercenary spyware companies engaged in hacking and the legitimate online advertising ecosystem," the researchers said.

"We have found billions of instances of Discover-Tech bidding to send such advertisements to users, and no sign that the company is engaged in any legitimate advertising business activities."

The firm's Controlium platform, the researchers said, allows mercenary spyware firms to infect targets via online ads. After mass-profiling and deanonymizing millions of users, they can then covertly hack individual targets by sending them seemingly harmless ads containing zero-click exploits to install spyware on their devices.

The device is sent malicious JavaScript code, which is executed by the browser or app and then exploits and infects the device.

Controlium's users include mercenary spyware company Candiru – reportedly now owned by US-based Integrity Labs. This firm has already been called out by the US Commerce Department for developing spyware used to target government officials, journalists, businesspeople, activists, academics, and embassy workers.

The platform's also linked to Israel-based Bindecy, which specializes in zero-click mobile exploits, and another mercenary surveillance firm called Intelos.

"Our analysis reveals a dangerous lack of due diligence in the advertising ecosystem that Discover-Tech actively exploited. Despite supporting mass-profiling and mercenary spyware hacking, Discover-Tech has nonetheless appeared on several lists of "certified" and "approved" advertising vendors maintained by Google and IAB Europe, the advertising industry association," the researchers said.

"The fact that a "certified" company could target millions of users for years with no signs of legitimate activity highlights the dangerously inadequate controls over a sector that by its very nature touches almost every individual with a mobile device or a web browser in extremely invasive ways."

Google and digital marketing and advertising platform IAB Europe have now removed Discover-Tech from their ad vendor lists.

The Metropolitan Police Service (‘the Met’) has landed itself in hot water with the UK’s data regulator, the ICO, after members of staff uploaded sensitive data to an unauthorized third-party platform.

Between March 2023 and September 2024, officers and staff in the Greater London police force used the Auror intelligence-sharing platform as part of a crackdown on shoplifting, despite it not being formally approved for use.

Auror is a third-party, cloud-based platform from SaaS provider Auror Europe Limited, a wholly-owned subsidiary of New Zealand firm Auror Limited.

It's accessible via a website and mobile application and is mainly used by retailers to record, manage and analyse incidents of retail crime. It does this using a range of technologies, including facial recognition, automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) and AI.

Retailers can upload incident reports, images and CCTV footage relating to suspected shoplifting and other retail-related offenses, which can then be shared for free with law enforcement authorities.

This may seem not only harmless but actively helpful in the detection and prosecution of crime, however the tool wasn’t subjected to the usual data protection assessments or governance before use.

"Police forces hold large volumes of sensitive personal information and must have robust safeguards in place to protect it," said David Doodson, ICO head of investigations.

"Whilst new technologies can deliver significant operational benefits, organizations cannot allow innovation to outpace their data protection responsibilities. Before introducing new systems or platforms, they must properly assess the risks, put appropriate safeguards in place and ensure effective oversight."

Specifically, said the ICO, the Met unlawfully processed personal information without individuals’ consent and in situations where sharing wasn't actually necessary for law enforcement purposes.

In all, around 500 accounts were created, with 375 actively used for policing activities. The ICO found that, between January and September 2024, personal information relating to 179 people – three of whom were under the age of 18 – was uploaded to the platform as part of efforts to identify individuals suspected of shoplifting.

This included names, dates of birth and, in a small number of cases, home addresses.

The police force also failed to put the appropriate technical and organizational measures in place to make sure that personal information was protected or that assessment and approval processes for third-party technologies were followed.

Additionally, the ICO found that, not only did the Met not carry out a data protection impact assessment, it still isn't ensuring that only approved third-party technologies are used to process personal information.

Since the issue first emerged, MPS has tightened up its procedures. However, the ICO said it still needs to do more.

It has ordered the force to strengthen its approach to identifying, assessing and approving any third-party services used to process personal information. It must also review its controls, improve governance processes, enhance staff awareness and regularly test the effectiveness of the measures it has in place.

Controlling the spread of shadow AI

Shadow IT – and shadow AI in particular – is a growing problem. A survey from SailPoint earlier this year found that two-thirds of organizations can’t account for the information staff are sharing with AI platforms and large language models (LLMs). It also found that 35% of staff are sharing data through external tools, rather than approved internal applications.

"This action should send a message across the policing sector, and beyond: if you are using new technology to process people's information you must do so lawfully, transparently and with appropriate governance from the outset," said Doodson.

"Where organizations fail to protect people's information, we will take action. Our role is not only to hold organisations to account, but to drive improvements and promote the standards people have a right to expect."

Two critical flaws in one of the most widely-used LLM gateways, LiteLLM, could let low-privilege users execute code, hijack admin accounts, and steal AI provider API keys.

With 97 million downloads per month and more than 59,000 GitHub stars, LiteLLM runs inside large enterprises, startups and many of the platforms used to build AI applications.

It functions as an LLM gateway, used for storing API keys for every AI provider the organization uses, managing user access through roles and permissions, routing prompts and responses between applications and providers and tracking usage and costs across models.

However, according to Checkpoint researchers, CVE-2026-35029 allowed any user – including those with read only access – to reach administrative functions and take over the gateway. CVE-2026-59823, meanwhile, allowed attackers to redirect gateway requests to their own server and capture AI provider API keys.

"In practical terms, anyone holding an account on a vulnerable LiteLLM deployment could take over the gateway and use it for malicious purposes," said the firm.

LiteLLM uses role-based access control, where administrators manage the system and other users receive limited or read-only access. However, the CVE-2026-35029 access control vulnerability means that users with minimal privileges could reach administrative functions controlling the gateway’s core configuration.

From there, an attacker could read files stored on the server, including configuration files and system files containing sensitive information. They could also overwrite administrator credentials with their own, locking legitimate administrators out of the system, and instruct the gateway to download and execute code from an external source, enabling malware installation, data exfiltration or movement to other systems on the network.

CVE-2026-59823 is a server side request forgery vulnerability that allowed any gateway user to direct LiteLLM to send API requests to a server under the attacker’s control without validation.

Attackers could steal AI provider API keys without any compromise of OpenAI, Anthropic or other providers, use the organization’s AI provider accounts without authorization and cause unexpected costs to be billed to the organization.

LiteLLM has now resolved CVE-2026-35029 and CVE-2026-59823 in version 1.83.9, with all later versions including the fixes.

It's notable that the two vulnerabilities are nothing new: they include missing authorization checks, path traversal, RCE via dynamic module loading, and insecure password storage, and all have established mitigation patterns.

"Both vulnerabilities belong to well understood classes of security error, which shows that AI infrastructure is now exposed to the same risks that enterprise software has faced for years," warned Checkpoint.

"As tools like LiteLLM gain adoption at speed, attackers are paying close attention to them, and organizations need to secure their AI gateways with the same rigor they apply to any other business critical system."

AI gateways are starting to emerge as high-value targets, holding credentials, managing trust relationships, and controlling access to multiple AI services, said Li Zhao, principal strategic services consultant at Black Duck.

"Because many organisations consume these technologies indirectly through platforms, frameworks, and internal tooling, the risk extends beyond a single product and becomes a broader ecosystem concern," she said.

"Organizations should treat AI gateways with the same level of scrutiny they apply to identity platforms, API gateways, secrets-management systems, and other high-trust enterprise infrastructure."

How many security professionals does it take to clean up the flaws found by AI? About a third more than you've got now.

That's how many more security professionals and other third-party consultants Bank of America has temporarily hired in order to work through the patches and other fixes necessary to address vulnerabilities spotted by Anthropic's Mythos and other AI security models. In addition to 3,000 existing staff, the bank added 1,000 external contractors to address the challenge.

Anthropic unveiled its Claude Mythos security model in April, but initially only gave access to approved partners via Project Glasswing. Mythos was then temporarily banned for export by the US government, alongside its Fable model, lifting the restrictions three weeks later.

In an interview with CNBC, the bank's CEO Brian Moynihan said the company had spent hundreds of millions of dollars over the last quarter fixing software as well as sorting out anti-money laundering compliance following a near-record fine from US regulators.

Finding flaws

Banks were included in the list of organisations given access to Mythos, with JPMorgan Chase an early partner, though reports from earlier this year suggest Bank of America has been testing the model since April. The main concern is the ability of the model to spot flaws in systems, sparking a wave of patching to avoid security risks.

"That risk is real risk, and that's why when the frontier-type models came out... A lot of us sat down and said, 'How do we figure out how to get through this quickly?'" Moynihan said in an interview with the American news network.

"We put on 1,000 contractors to help us do the patching work in the second quarter, and those people remain here today, helping us, on top of the 3,000 people we have in that area," he added.

However, Moynihan admitted concerns around the fact that companies rolling out AI products spotting these flaws were also offering services to mitigate them.

"We've got to stay ahead of them, and we've got to be mindful that the people doing the software development are the people trying to sell us the services," Moynihan said.

High costs

While the security work comes at a high cost, Moynihan said the company expects that to reduce over time. "Once you patch, you don't have to patch as much. ... The pipeline moves through," he added in the interview.

Bank of America predicts it will save $300m this year thanks to internal AI projects, rising to $700m by next year – however, Moynihan also suggested the bank was spending $4bn a year on new technologies, including AI.

Moynihan said on the call with analysts that "AI has helped us", with 130 projects implemented. Though he admitted "none of them are huge contributors," Moynihan predicted a 10% boost in efficiency at the same cost.

Bank of America's share price slid 8% after its quarterly results revealed a 17% slip in third-quarter profit – and after $1.2bn in fines for violating anti-money laundering rules was announced Tuesday.

AI agents are going rogue on a massive scale, with half of enterprises reporting that they've had to deal with at least one taking unauthorized actions over the last year.

In a report based on a survey of more than 380 security and technology professionals, along with production telemetry from hundreds of customer environments, Salt Labs claimed agentic AI has moved into daily operations too quickly for visibility, governance, and containment controls.

Half of survey respondents (49.8%) said they had confirmed or suspected that an AI agent in their organization took an action in the past 12 months that wasn't intended, expected, or authorized.

Of these, more than half reported an unauthorized external API call or transaction, while more than four-in-ten reported that an agent modified or deleted data.

"The data shows a gap that is already producing real operational consequences," said Roey Eliyahu, CEO of Salt Security.

"Organizations are deploying agents and granting them access to enterprise data, APIs, and services before they can trace what those agents are doing or stop them automatically when something goes wrong. Closing that gap is the discipline of agentic security, and it is what lets enterprises give AI agents the autonomy they need without inheriting unmanaged risk."

Enthusiastic deployment meets lack of control

The vast majority of organizations surveyed (86%) are using at least one AI agent, the survey found while 60% run more than ten. Another 77% of respondents said their agents chain actions across other agents, tools, and APIs, in sequences no single team designed in advance.

Only 12.5% said they can consistently trace a complete agent path across all agents, from initial instruction through tools and APIs to outcome. More than six-in-ten believe they would need hours or days of manual work to reconstruct what a specific agent did the previous day.

When problems do occur, they're hard to deal with. Only 17.5% can automatically stop an agent that begins behaving unexpectedly in production. Most can intervene only manually, or by taking the application offline.

More than eight-in-ten said AI-generated or AI-assisted code contributes to at least some of their application security findings. Only 7% resolve issues inside the coding assistant at generation time, rather than through code review, testing, or after deployment.

Meanwhile, shadow model context protocol (MCP) infrastructure is already a live operational problem. 33% of survey respondents said they had found an unauthorized, shadow, or misconfigured MCP server in the past 12 months. 54% said they'd confirmed or suspected one.

Salt Labs' own data shows MCP-related infrastructure in 22% of customer environments in August this year, up from 16.7% in January.

Earlier this year, a survey commissioned by Aembit found that 68% of organizations can’t accurately identify AI agent activity compared to human activity.

Nearly three-quarters said that agents often receive more access than necessary, and 79% believe they create new access pathways that are difficult to monitor. Just over half said agents, at least occasionally, inherit access originally intended for humans or other systems.

The FBI has shut down 40 laptop farms that were being used for a North Korean fake IT worker scheme.

As part of Operation Lonestar Roundup, 187 computer devices being used by North Korean IT workers were seized, and two people were arrested.

In a scheme labelled Famous Chollima, the fake workers were applying for – and often getting – remote positions by using stolen or fabricated identity documents, VPNs and proxy infrastructure to make it look as though they were working from within the US.

They used US-based co-conspirators to receive laptops from victim companies. These individuals then housed and configured those devices, installed remote-access software and transferred earnings to Korean government‑controlled accounts.

“Operation Lonestar Roundup was aimed at disrupting malicious cyber activity perpetrated by the North Korean government with the purpose of supporting its WMD and ballistic missile programs, intelligence program, and nuclear program,” said FBI Dallas special agent in charge R Joseph Rothrock.

"Each laptop seized potentially represents one company that has hired a DPRK (Democratic People's Republic of Korea) IT worker."

US nationals Michael James Bostelle of Pennsylvania and Juan Cecilio Pena Carrillo of Texas have been arrested for the scheme, which is believed to have generated more than $3 million in revenue. Another dozen people based in China have been charged.

The companies falling victim included organizations in the health care, communications, cyber support, retail, and manufacturing sectors, with the revenue generated being sent to sanctioned entities controlled by the North Korean government.

The operatives appear to have used a network of fraudulent Google accounts to facilitate their criminal activity.

Employers are being encouraged to add accounts listed by the Justice Department to the list of indicators they use to identify and disrupt North Korean IT worker employment.

CrowdStrike, which worked with the FBI to bring the operation down Famous Chollima operatives have been using a range of deception techniques during onboarding. They've filed fraudulent police reports claiming a laptop was stolen to trigger replacement shipments to farm addresses, and rotated through residential addresses to obscure the final destination.

Others have claimed they've been forced to relocate at the last minute to divert devices mid-shipment. In some cases, operatives secured roles through IT staffing firms, which allowed end-client devices to be quietly redirected to farm infrastructure without the staffing firm's knowledge.

This summer, Huntress uncovered at least five North Korean operatives that were part of the Famous Chollima operation and who, between them, were applying for as many as 60 jobs per day.

“This investigation is about far more than fraud,” said US attorney Ryan Raybould for the Northern District of Texas.

“It is about a hostile foreign regime infiltrating American companies through stolen identities and covert access points inside our own borders. Every laptop farm we dismantle shuts down a revenue stream that the North Korean government relies on to fund weapons programs that threaten global stability."

The North Korean fake IT worker scheme has become a familiar tale. A company performs a series of remote interviews with a seemingly perfect employee. Every question is answered correctly, they appear legit, and they’re onboarded onto company systems.

That’s when things start to go wrong. In cybersecurity firm Knowbe4’s case, the individual attempted to load malware onto their company-issued device before the business quickly shut it down.

But it’s becoming more difficult to spot and stop North Korean fake IT worker schemes. As organizations wise up to the technique, novel tactics are emerging. New research shows fake IT workers are taking their job hunt seriously, submitting as many as 60 applications per day.

Groups of North Korean IT workers, dubbed PurpleDelta by Recorded Future, created at least 22 fabricated personas, with job applications being made across a range of recruitment websites and platforms such as LinkedIn and Upwork.

In another recently documented case, workers linked to the Famous Chollima group have managed to get hired in at least five cases this year, according to security outfit Huntress.

It came as security agencies issued an alert after North Korean-backed cyber criminals were found posing as recruiters to target freelance IT workers.

WaterPlum – which targets software developers and IT professionals – has infected at least 30,000 devices in more than 100 countries. The group has stolen funds or account credentials from over 7,000 cryptocurrency wallets, raking in around $10.7 million.

How are fake IT worker schemes evolving, and what should businesses be doing to manage the threat?

Beyond the US

US companies such as KnowBe4 have long been a target for North Korean IT workers; however, data shows the threat is expanding to multiple countries.

Recorded Future’s research found that around 80% of companies targeted by fake IT worker placements were in North America, but adversaries were also applying to companies around the world. “Operations tend to prioritise targeting markets with established online recruitment processes and where remote working continues to mature in a post-pandemic world,” says Alexander Leslie, senior advisor at Recorded Future.

The aim is to gain an undetected foothold in Western businesses, particularly in organizations working in software services, staffing and consulting, and healthcare and biotechnology, he tells IT Pro.

“Once they are ‘employed’ they can access sensitive and confidential information that can be exploited for political and commercial gain.”

As remote work continues to be the norm, identity brokering, rented accounts and remote-access tools make it “difficult to distinguish a criminal from a genuine applicant”, says Javvad Malik, lead CISO advisor at KnowBe4.

While fake worker schemes aim to make cash for the North Korean regime, the risk extends beyond payroll fraud, he says.

“Once inside, these individuals may gain access to source code, customer data, intellectual property and wider corporate systems. Additionally, they can simply use their legitimate position to build a broader network and trust with individuals within and outside of the organization.”

Given the global nature of remote work, any organization that hires IT contractors without conducting in-person verification is “potentially exposed”, according to Tracey Hannan-Jones, consulting director in information security, UBDS Digital.

She describes how targeted companies face risks such as sanctions exposure, because when an organization unknowingly employs a North Korean IT worker, it is “almost certainly” violating international sanctions frameworks.

The penalties can be severe, “even where the violation was entirely inadvertent”, warns Hannan-Jones.

Novel techniques

As Recorded Future’s data shows, attackers are using new technology and techniques to keep schemes alive. For example, the PurpleDelta threat group is using identity-brokering services, account-renting via AnyDesk and multi-accounting tools.

More widely, AI has made fake IT worker schemes much easier for threat actors to carry out at scale, says Jake Moore, global cybersecurity advisor at ESET. “AI chatbots can help them to draft emails, documents and interview talking points that sound impressive, even if they aren’t fluent English speakers.”

While some AI platforms have put controls in place, many can be used to generate the fake identity documents essential for this type of espionage, according to Moore.

Advanced AI tools themselves are also improving, helping fake applicants to disguise themselves – even in live video interviews, says Moore. “Deepfake technology has come along leaps and bounds. Two years ago, publicly available tools looked like Snapchat filters and weren’t convincing at all. But real-time deepfakes are now highly convincing.”

Deepfake tools can also be combined with modulation software to change the applicant’s voice in real time. “This enables fake IT workers to pose as candidates from any country and background,” Moore explains.

AI-driven recruitment practices are amplifying the threat. While AI can help employers to sift through applications, it is also easy to manipulate, says Moore. This is especially true when an organization is targeted by a practiced group of fake IT workers, who will “understand hiring processes, know what AI systems are looking for and use their own AI tools to avoid being sifted out at an earlier stage”, Moore warns.

Prevention is key

Security firm Netskope has shared its experience of being targeted by a fake worker scheme. James Robinson, CISO at Netskope, tells IT Pro how a fraudulent applicant applied for an open role. “The application itself was strong, and the associated LinkedIn profile was legitimate, but there were small inconsistencies in the candidate’s history, as well as a throwaway Outlook email address.”

Sensing something wasn’t right, the interviewer asked some conversational questions about a city where the candidate claimed to have worked for several years. “The applicant could not give any specific details about local places – or even offer a more precise address beyond repeating the city name,” says Robinson. “When pressed, he panicked and ended the call.”

While questions such as this can help catch fake IT workers out, Robinson believes teams need to collaborate throughout the recruitment process. “HR, security and IT teams need to work together to verify identities, limit unnecessary access and look for behavior that doesn’t match what’s expected of a legitimate employee.”

Yet overall, the most effective way to root out fake IT workers is to insist on meeting the candidate in person. “Let them know early on that this will be part of the interview process,” advises Moore.

“This will make it crystal clear to the threat actor that they will not be able to infiltrate the organization. If the candidate is in another country, ask a trusted third party to meet them. It will be worth the expense for the peace of mind.”

Organizations should introduce proportionate identity and right-to-work checks, and verify employment and qualifications independently, says Malik. “Use whatever reasonable means they have to deliver equipment via secure channels and validate identity in person before handing over equipment.”

Hiring managers and recruiters need training to recognize inconsistencies and escalate concerns without creating bias or unfairly penalizing legitimate remote workers, according to Malik. “Managers need to be given an environment where they can safely raise any potential red flags."

The owner of Phase Eight, Hobbs, and Whistles, TFG London, has confirmed that it has been hit by a cyber attack.

TFG London is the UK subsidiary of South African retail group The Foschini Group, which includes several UK retail brands.

“On Sunday, 11 October, TFG London identified a cybersecurity incident affecting some of our IT systems, specifically impacting our Phase Eight, Hobbs, and Whistles brands. We are actively investigating and working with external cyber security specialists," a spokesperson told ITPro.

"Stores are open as normal but some of our brand’s website capabilities may not be available as the investigation continues. We apologize for any disruption and will provide additional updates to our customers as appropriate.”

Online orders and returns are believed to be affected.

The firm said it has now put its business continuity plan into place, and has reported the incident to the relevant authorities. It said it was contacting all those customers whose personal data might have been accessed, but that there was no need for customers to change their passwords.

"Importantly, payment processing is carried out by a third-party provider," it told customers in an email.

"Based on our investigation so far, we have no reason to believe that payment information is at risk. As our investigation continues, we will be working to identify if any sensitive information related to our customers was impacted."

TFG's African and Australian operations appear unaffected, as are two other brands it owns, Inside Story and White Stuff.

The hack follows similar attacks last year on M&S, Co-op, Harrods and, most recently, ASOS, which last week warned that an unauthorized party had gained access to some personal data, including names and contact details by impersonating a trusted contact to obtain login credentials.

"It may be a different target but it’s the same hack; impersonate a trusted individual such as an employee, a manager, or a contractor and use that to change passwords and privileges to access systems, and potentially steal millions of customer records and personal information," said Clive Summerfield, CEO at FARx.

"One phone call is all it took to pull down M&S, Co-op, and Harrods. This resulted in systems going offline, supply chains in chaos, millions of customer records stolen or compromised, and commercial losses in the hundreds of millions."

It's not known exactly how the attackers gained access, but – as with the ASOS attack – it seems likely that it was through a third-party supplier, perhaps a Managed Service Provider (MSP) or data hosting provider. So far, no cybercrime group has claimed the attack.

"Organizations need to be shoring up their defenses before attackers find a way in, rather than scrambling to contain the damage afterwards," warned Susannah Streeter, chief investment strategist at Wealth Club.

"Retailers are particularly attractive targets, sitting on valuable customer data and relying on interconnected systems to keep everything from online orders to supply chains moving. The consequences of a breach can stretch far beyond stolen information, hitting sales, disrupting operations, and eroding customer trust."

Hackers have sparked fires and floods in French supermarkets after targeting temperature gauges in internet-connected refrigerators.

The attackers remotely took over refrigeration systems, resetting target temperatures to 50ºC, leading to fires as well as floods from sprinkler systems, destroying fresh and frozen food.

The hack hit hundreds of supermarkets, including Intermarche, Carrefour, Cooperative, and Monoprix, according to reports. Authorities said an investigation had been started into the "large-scale cyberattack" that targeted the country's food supply.

"Targeting equipment essential to the preservation of fresh products and to the food supply of the French people is extremely serious and is unprecedented. It is unacceptable," CEO of Cooperative U, Dominique Schelcher, wrote on X.

Dutch supermarkets also reported security issues, with some digital systems taken offline at the Albert Heijn chain, while reports suggest supermarkets across Europe may also be affected.

What happened?

The attack began overnight, with temperatures slowly rising over the course of several hours. The hackers appear to have targeted store fridges and freezers via control panels that are accessible via the internet in order to be adjusted and maintained, Reuters reported.

"The attack was probably launched at about 11.00pm but we didn't become aware of it until 4.00am, when our delivery driver saw that the stock room was flooded," said Charles Dezon, manager of the Intermarché supermarket in Gradignan (Gironde), in a report from Le Monde. "The temperature had risen to 50ºC in the cold room and activated the automatic sprinkler system."

Reports suggest the hackers forced the equipment into a constant defrost cycle, leading to overheating.

Known flaw, legacy systems

A source told AFP that the hacked systems appeared to be largely made up of refrigeration control systems from Danfoss, a Danish equipment manufacturer. Danfoss told that news agency that the attack targeted "legacy" systems that no longer received software or security updates, notably the AK-SM800 and AK-SC355 regulator systems that had "outdated firmware".

Danfoss added, in a statement sent to Reuters, that it had "long advised customers to keep supported systems updated with the latest firmware and to migrate legacy systems to current-generation solutions".

Indeed, the attacks come two months after Claroty's Team82 spotted multiple vulnerabilities in Danfoss's AK-SM 800A platform. The vulnerabilities were disclosed to Danfoss, which issued fresh firmware to patch the flaws; however, that appears to not have covered the older version, as it was no longer supported by the company.

At the time, Claroty noted: "A compromised supervisory controller grants an attacker the ability to physically manipulate refrigeration systems and silently spoil the contents."

What's next?

Stores are working to clean up after the incident, with staff spotted chucking spoiled food into bins, but full recovery will likely take much longer — and be expensive. Intermarche CEO Thierry Cotillard told local television that the losses were likely to top "tens ​of millions of euros nationwide in a single day." In the UK, last year's ransomware attacks cost M&S and Co-op up to £440 million.

"The impact on French supermarkets will likely last months," said James Neilson, SVP of Global at OPSWAT. "More than a year on, M&S and Co-op are still feeling the financial and organisational effects of their attacks."

He added: "Refrigeration technicians have to inspect and restore systems site by site, and retailers must reassure customers that what’s back on the shelves is safe."

It's as yet unclear who committed the attacks, but they come a month after French President Emmanual Macron warned that critical national infrastructure needed to be protected from Russian cyber attacks.

Muhammad Yahya Patel, vCISO and cybersecurity advisor for EMEA at Huntress, noted that the security industry has long been warning about attacks on operational infrastructure, saying that these refrigeration systems had been "weaponised". He added: "The food retail sector across Europe should be treating this as a signal that they are being actively targeted."

It is "likely, if not inevitable" that the UK will fall victim to a major cyber attack similar to Australia's recent healthcare breach, AI minister Kanishka Narayan has warned.

His speech comes as part of a government pledge to introduce greater protections against emerging AI threats, use frontier AI to strengthen cyber defences, look at stronger legal protections and make the UK better-prepared for serious incidents involving autonomous AI systems.

"We will use every power at our disposal. We will legislate wherever necessary," Narayan said.

"And we won’t look to law alone. We will look to British ingenuity: our scientific expertise, technological capabilities and institutions to understand these increasingly powerful systems, defend against emerging threats and respond when things go wrong."

There are plans to build on two existing pilot schemes that have already used frontier AI to help identify and fix more than 1,000 vulnerabilities across government systems.

The government is also looking at stronger protections against emerging AI threats with the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill, currently with the House of Lords, looking at how serious AI incidents and near misses can be identified and reported.

It's working with the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and the AI Security Institute (AISI) – which has once again been given access to major US models before they are released.

Naryan pointed out that the UK is increasingly dependent on technologies developed elsewhere.

"Much of the technology that will shape our economy, our public services, our national security is being developed outside this country," he said.

"That is now a question of national security, also a question of democratic power. If the British state cannot exercise meaningful control over the technologies on which our country depends, neither can the people that it represents."

The announcement follows a series of incidents in which AI agents have autonomously hacked into external systems. In one major example, OpenAI admitted that a combination of its models had breached Hugging Face systems, gaining access to the production database.

In a separate incident, four different versions of Anthropic's Claude AI models were revealed to have breached third-party systems.

"To the companies developing the world’s most powerful AI systems, my message is: Listen when your scientists warn of severe dangers. Investigate unexpected behaviours. And if you can’t adequately control the risks, do not release the system," Naryan said.

However, Nuala Polo, UK Public Policy Lead at the Ada Lovelace Institute, said the announcement contains little in the way of definite commitment.

"Stronger protections will be ‘considered’, strengthening the Cyber Bill ‘explored’ and near-miss reporting ‘looked at’, with the detail to come later. There is no new regulatory power, no timetable and no obligation on AI developers," she said.

"Even incident reporting, the most modest measure on the table, is still only under consideration, and might only apply to the ‘victims’ – the operators of essential services – rather than the AI companies."

The Zero Trust cybersecurity paradigm gained huge momentum during the COVID-19 pandemic with the rise of remote working. This was due to a distributed workforce with licensed and employee-owned endpoints that needed protection. But the ideas actually originated in the late 2010s; it just took a massive global catastrophe for organizations to accept and adopt it in the mainstream.

Matters have moved on considerably since then, however, with AI in the driving seat and the cybersecurity industry along for the ride. Google's security engineers, who played an instrumental role in devising the original thinking behind Zero Trust, have now outlined their thinking behind a new cybersecurity paradigm that they have labelled 'Beyond Zero' in a fresh paper.

"The enterprise landscape is now entering a new era shaped by artificial intelligence, where AI is changing the assumptions around how enterprise security works. AI agents are being deployed globally to increase operational velocity and boost productivity," wrote Google's VP of security engineering Heather Adkins and its senior director for cybersecurity and data protection, Archana Ramamoorthy, in a blog post.

"However, this increased capability also presents new potential risks, as attackers can leverage similar speed to compromise privileged credentials and execute attacks. This creates the need for a new security paradigm that is capable of defending against these new threats."

Enter Beyond Zero, which is designed to address the AI-era challenges. But what is this framework, and how can businesses adopt the principles at the heart of it?

What is Beyond Zero and how does it work?

Google's engineers define Beyond Zero as a model built on five key principles, which include the following key points:

• Resource and action-based security: Rather than granting authorization broadly for an entire application or tool, users are evaluated based on the level of individual actions or the need to tap into specific resources.
• Blended static and dynamic security: Heightened security measures are applied during high-risk or complex scenarios by pairing dynamic controls with granular static policies.
• Automatically enriched context: Decision systems can reveal insights and glean context from what users do specifically, including offering an idea of what the user should be working on, what data they're trying to access, what they're doing with the data, and which risk mitigations might be available.
• Automated in-depth investigation: Security investigations are immediately and autonomously triggered when risk signals are detected. When that happens, the system can deploy user challenges or containment measures.
• Challenges and containments: This involves triggering verification challenges or containment protocols based on containment policies, where users or agents must provide additional risk telemetry on demand.

Zero Trust introduced the "enduring principle" that legitimate access should never be confused with unlimited trust, says founder and CEO of cybersecurity workforce development firm NukuDo Dean Gefen, who has a deep background in military intelligence, cyber operations and enterprise security. What is evolving, he adds, is the level at which trust must be evaluated, with Beyond Trust representing an evolution from making trust decisions primarily around access toward making granular decisions around specific actions and resources.

"As organizations introduce more automation and AI into their environments, determining whether an identity should enter a system is only part of the security challenge," Gefen explained. "Organizations also need to understand what that identity or agent is attempting to do, what resource it is interacting with, the context surrounding the request, and the potential risk associated with the action."

Autonomous AI is where this new paradigm will become essential. While humans may perform dozens or even hundreds of actions over the course of a day, it's a fraction of the number of actions that swarms of agents could perform. Each action must be compliant with access principles – and conventional Zero Trust principles simply won't cut it.

The legacy of Zero Trust – what's changed?

While Google laid much of the foundation of the Zero Trust principles we see across organizations today, the philosophy itself can be traced back to Stephen Paul Marsh's 1994 doctoral thesis on computer security at the University of Stirling. Although he coined the term, it wasn't until 2009 and a report by Forrester's John Kindervag that the notion of "never trust, always verify" gained traction for the first time. Running in parallel, Google's BeyondCorp internal initiative removed reliance on virtual private networks (VPNs) by verifying user identity and device context for all access requests.

It's been more than a decade since the conception of Zero Trust, and things have moved along an awful lot since then, says Gefen.

"The security landscape has fundamentally changed in both complexity and velocity. Zero Trust gained prominence when organizations were primarily focused on securing human access to networks, applications, and data. Today, that environment includes cloud infrastructure, APIs, automated systems, and increasingly autonomous AI agents operating across multiple platforms.

"Its foundational principles remain extremely valuable," he continues. "The challenge is that the environment those principles must protect has expanded significantly. Organizations are no longer securing only employees accessing applications. They are securing cloud workloads, APIs, automated processes, machine identities, and AI agents that can interact with systems and data with varying degrees of autonomy. That introduces a different level of risk."

Julien Richard, vice president of information security at cybersecurity and identity management company Lastwall, agrees, telling ITPro: "If we’re giving an AI agent the same privileges as a highly privileged human simply because it’s acting on that person’s behalf, I’d first ask why we designed it that way. Least privilege, PAM, JIT access, and human approval already give us ways to constrain non-human identities. What’s different with AI is its autonomy and unpredictability, and that’s where more granular, action-level authorization becomes interesting."

How should businesses approach Beyond Zero?

"As we did with prior security publications, we will provide details on our progress, the architectural and operational / implementation considerations that went into this achievement, as well as ideas for how the industry can come together to help advance the state of technology so that everyone can benefit," wrote Google's Adkins and Ramamoorthy – indicating that it's still early and that this new security paradigm may take some time to mature.

That said, businesses would be minded to approach this as an evolution of their existing security strategy rather than a matter of rip-and-replace. Gefen advises that the fundamentals – including strong identity management, least privilege, device security, segmentation, visibility and continuous monitoring – remain essential. Then, it's about understanding where AI is entering workflows and what authority those systems have.

"Business and security leaders should know which AI agents can access sensitive information, what permissions they hold, which systems they can interact with, what actions they can execute autonomously, and how quickly the organization can identify and stop behavior that falls outside its intended purpose."

He recommends starting with the most sensitive data and highest-risk workflows, then applying greater contextual control there. Businesses must also develop the workforce capable of implementing, securing and operating the technology adopted – although this will take considerably longer. With AI becoming embedded across the business, he adds, building capabilities across various domains including cybersecurity, cloud, data and software must become intertwined with the transformation strategy itself.

As for who this affects, both Gefen and Richard indicate that any business, regardless of size or sector, could have a stake in this transition – it's less about being an absolute necessity and more related to AI's usage. In particular, Richard tells ITPro, it's about the threat model, risk appetite, and how AI is being used within an organization.

"An AI assistant summarizing public information presents a very different risk from an autonomous agent making production changes or accessing sensitive data," he says. "Not every organization needs a new security architecture because it uses AI. Start with the risk, not the technology."

The number of ransomware attacks in the UK is rising fast, with two groups in particular identified as the main culprits.

New data from Cohesity has revealed that UK attacks are up 60% quarter-on-quarter and 42% year-on-year. And despite the rising numbers of hackers entering the market, just two hacking groups were behind nearly a third – 32% – of all UK attacks.

One of these is Qilin, a Russian-speaking ransomware group that's believed to be behind the cyber attack on NHS medical services provider Synnovis. This led to the cancellation of thousands of elective procedures and outpatient appointments this summer.

Qilin was responsible for 19% of UK ransomware attacks during the last quarter, according to Cohesity, with data from Rapid7 Labs indicating that it made around $193 million between July 2025 and March 2026.

The Gentlemen, meanwhile, accounted for 13% of all UK attacks, despite only having emerged in July last year. Its victims are mainly found in industrial organizations, the IT sector, and some consumer spaces. Its activity is largely concentrated in Europe, with the UK and Germany among the most heavily targeted countries. Notable victims include Synergy France, UK Electronics, and Equity Life.

And if Mondays aren't bad enough already, they're the most common day for UK ransomware activity, with an average of 71 attacks, followed by 64 per day on Wednesdays.

The most targeted UK industries during the quarter were professional services, with 22 recorded ransomware attacks in Q3 2026, followed by manufacturing at 17 and technology at 13.

The use of AI is becoming increasingly common, with The Gentlemen using AI models in negotiations and data triage, and hacking group JadePuffer demonstrating that an agent can execute an entire intrusion chain without a human operator.

"The biggest change in ransomware is not simply that attacks are becoming more sophisticated. It's that AI is making them easier to scale and harder to predict. Criminals can now use AI to speed up everything from finding valuable data to negotiating with victims, while increasingly automating parts of an attack," said Julien Mousqueton, field CISO at Cohesity.

"For businesses, that means the old assumptions that ransomware attacks follow a linear pattern and require large skilled teams are no longer reliable. Organisations should be putting more focus on protecting identities and stopping attackers from moving through their systems, rather than relying on yet another layer of endpoint security."

But while UK attacks are coming from two groups in particular, overall the number of ransomware groups continues to soar, indicating increasing fragmentation.

There were 109 active groups globally in the third quarter of this year, with 35 new hacking groups emerging, although the top five groups accounted for just over a third of all listings.

And, said Cohesity, geographic diversification is increasing. The US share of recorded ransomware attacks fell from 51% to 34% over the third quarter. Meanwhile, the number of European victims more than doubled, led by a rise in reported incidents in Germany, the UK and Italy.

Overall, global ransomware hit a record high this quarter, up 28% on the previous quarter and 86% year-on-year.

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The US Justice Department and FBI have seized the domains of a company linked to the Flax Typhoon cyber crime group, disrupting access to two hacking tools.

The tools, Microscan and FishHub, were used to scan and compromise critical infrastructure systems and other networks in the US and around the world.

Integrity Technology Group, a China-based company with contracts with the Chinese government, is believed to be behind the activity, which has been linked with campaigns known as Flax Typhoon, Ethereal Panda and Red Juliett, amongst others.

The threat actors use a unique combination of large-scale botnets, VPN infrastructure, living off the land (LOTL) techniques, and repositories of computer network exploitation (CNE) tools.

“Integrity Technology Group provided China-linked threat actors with capabilities used to conduct widespread vulnerability scanning and, in some cases, intrusions targeting US and foreign critical infrastructure,” said assistant director Brett Leatherman of the FBI’s Cyber Division.

“The PRC relies on contractor and enabling companies to expand the reach and scale of its malicious cyber activity. By exposing and disrupting these enablers, we make it harder for the PRC to target American networks and infrastructure.”

According to US officials, Integrity Tech developed Microscan to conduct reconnaissance, via the botnet and otherwise, of victim computer networks for vulnerabilities that its clients would later exploit.

A Python-based web application, Microscan contains over 1,300 penetration testing scripts written to scan websites for specific vulnerabilities. The threat actors used these scripts to target services including OpenSSL, Oracle WebLogic, Rejetto, WordPress, Juniper ScreenOS, Jenkins, and Apache Struts.

Targets included a US power company based in South Carolina, a multi-national NGO, Japanese and Polish airports, Taiwanese critical infrastructure companies in the natural gas and power sectors, and two Taiwanese universities.

Spear phishing campaign targeted corporate networks

Meanwhile, a second tool, FishHub, is believed to have played a part in the exploitation of computer networks through spear phishing.

After an initial network compromise, FishHub downloaded additional malware to the victim network, giving Integrity Tech’s clients unauthorized remote access. It also searched for specific files and sent them to servers controlled by the group. Confirmed victims included around 20 Taiwanese universities.

"The extensive malicious cyber activities, and services by Integrity Tech, that have been exposed today should be extremely concerning for all network defenders," said Paul Chichester, director of Operations at the UK's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC).

"The breadth of sectors that have been targeted across the globe demonstrate the extent of the threat and all organizations should take note of this warning."

Last year, the UK government sanctioned Integrity Tech, alongside another China-based information security company, known as i-Soon, for their part in malicious cyber activity.

“These state-sponsored hackers continue to aggressively target and access networks and systems throughout the world in an effort to identify and steal files and otherwise exploit victims’ vulnerabilities,” said attorney Troy Rivetti for the Western District of Pennsylvania.

“These seizures, our second disruption of Integrity Tech’s massive operations in as many years, send another clear message to cybercriminals from the PRC and elsewhere of the department’s dedication to defending and maintaining cybersecurity in the United States and abroad.

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Computing pioneer and the originator of software engineering, Margaret Hamilton, has died aged 90 years old.

Hamilton is perhaps most remembered for her work coding Apollo 11 to the moon, made famous in part by a photo of her standing next to a print out of the code she created.

Her legacy, however, extends far beyond that role. Anyone who has ever called themselves a software engineer owes that job title to Hamilton.

In 2017, she told Spanish newspaper El País: “I fought to bring the software legitimacy so that it – and those building it – would be given its due respect, and thus I began to use the term 'software engineering' to distinguish it from hardware and other kinds of engineering, yet treat each type of engineering as part of the overall systems engineering process."

“When I first started using this phrase, it was considered to be quite amusing. It was an ongoing joke for a long time. They liked to kid me about my radical ideas. Software eventually and necessarily gained the same respect as any other discipline,” she said.

Hamilton also pioneered defensive programming, a development practice of creating software that can anticipate or fix errors on its own.

Speaking to ITPro in 2016 about the spark that ignited her interest in software reliability, she said: "When the computer crashed during the execution of your program, lights would start flashing, bells would start ringing and developers and computer operators would come running to find out whose program was doing something bad to the system. I didn’t want it to be mine!"

A prime example of this in action occurred during the Apollo 11 mission, when the computer in the lunar landing module, Eagle, experienced a 1202 error, indicating there was a fault in the hardware switch.

This fault led to the system becoming overloaded and there was a possibility that, with just three minutes to go until touch down, it wouldn’t be able to handle the landing procedure.

The software Hamilton and her team had developed, however, was able to prioritize mission critical tasks and shut down any unnecessary background tasks, leading to a successful landing.

An early tech entrepreneur

Hamilton was also an early computing entrepreneur, leading an MIT spinout after the Apollo missions were wound up and founding two tech startups.

Her final endeavor was Hamilton Technologies, which she founded “to provide products and services to modernise the planning, system engineering, and software development process in order to maximise reliability, lower cost, and accelerate time to market”.

It’s perhaps best known for developing the systems modelling language and methodology Universal Systems Language. Designed for engineering complex software systems, it too is built on Hamilton’s philosophy of defensive programming and priorities error prevention.

Universal Systems Language may not be as common as other coding languages due to its specificity but it’s still in production today, more than 30 years after its initial creation.

Hamilton’s legacy will be felt by the technology community everywhere.

Olivier de Weck, the Apollo Program professor and interim head of the MIT Department Aeronautics and Astronautics, told MIT News: "To say Margaret Hamilton was a pioneer -- to say she was ahead of her time -- would be a dramatic understatement. She was a software engineer at a time when that field was in its infancy, and she not only developed advanced code herself but also led a team in using that nascent technology to develop one of the most complex systems humanity had ever achieved."

"[She] has been an inspiration to generations of computer scientists and engineers. Hers was a career dedicated to preventing errors and what she called 'handling the unknown,'" he added. "She personified leadership by example, and established a practice of software engineering based on problem-solving and systems engineering that we all benefit from."

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The FBI has reportedly removed an Accenture contractor in connection with the recent data breach that exposed sensitive information on thousands of employees.

Data stolen in the incident is believed to have included descriptions of counterintelligence workers' roles, the home addresses of human intelligence operatives, and even the medical and psychiatric records of bureau employees.

The breach, revealed last month, involved a compromise of the FBI’s jobs portal. It was claimed by ShinyHunters, which said it had exploited a vulnerability in Oracle PeopleSoft, an enterprise resource planning (ERP) suite used in human resources (HR), finance, and supply chain management.

FBI cyber chief Brett Leatherman told Reuters the contractor failed to apply the appropriate patch.

“To date, our review has determined that the incident occurred as the result of a security failure ​of a platform managed by a third-party organization — after a contractor failed to implement a security patch explicitly issued to secure the ​platform," he said.

"As such, the FBI has removed the contractor and taken all necessary steps to both mitigate any further risk and protect our workforce.”

Responsibility lies with the organization

It's not clear why the contractor failed to apply the patch. While the removal of the contractor implies it was negligence, David Neeson, SOC deputy team lead at Barrier Networks, suggested that there might have been a good reason, such as a possible impact on another critical system.

"Leadership must always be accountable for security decisions, so if the patch not being applied was out of the contractor’s control, then the FBI could be making a dangerous mistake with their removal. It could also spur other organizations to take similar action when they are trying to shift responsibility around the cause of an attack," he said.

"Patch management is never simple, and the FBI must clearly understand this.”

This view is echoed by Jason Brown, director of customer advisory and counter fraud lead at iCounter, who said that accountability should always reside with the organization itself.

"Every contract for a managed platform should spell out how quickly critical patches have to be applied, require the third party to prove it was done, and give the customer the right to check," he said.

"Security teams also need to stop treating third-party managed systems as someone else's problem. Keep an inventory of every platform a third party runs on your behalf, know what data sits in it, and watch for warning signs, like that platform showing up in exploit activity or criminal forums."

Extortion group ShinyHunters has been operating since 2019, with members apparently coming from all over the world. Since that time, the group has been associated with a number of major breaches, including the European Commission, Snowflake, LastPass, Okta, AMD, and Salesforce.

International law enforcement bodies have been working to take down ShinyHunters for some time, most recently with the arrest of a 24-year-old Dutch man last month and another man in Jordan this week. Detainees are reported to be cooperating with the FBI.

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Asos users have told ITPro of their “shock and alarm” after receiving messages apparently sent by cyber criminals.

Users across the UK received a message on their smartphone this morning (6 October) warning of a data breach and urging the company to comply with demands.

“Dear Asos DPO and IT, we have fully compromised the Snowflake instance,” the message reads. The notification also warned the online retailer to “engage with us or we will leak it”.

Snowflake has denied this claim.

In the wake of the notification, thousands of users took to social media to report their own experiences, contacting the retailer online for clarification. One user told ITPro they were shocked by the notification, but did not engage with the message or embedded link.

“It’s unusual for me to check the Asos notifications but this one caught my attention,” they said. “It’s very concerning and I’m worried about my information being leaked.”

“As someone who’s been a scam victim in the past I’m extra vigilant.”

Another told ITPro they were in a “state of shock and alarm” after receiving the message.

“It’s rather concerning that I’ve received a message from what seems to be some form of hacker group while on my way to work,” they said.

At this stage, it appears that the notification isn’t primarily aimed at compromising customers, but instead used as a blackmail tactic to force the retailer to comply with demands.

In a statement given to ITPro, a spokesperson for Asos confirmed the incident, adding that the retailer is "investigating activity involving third-party platforms that we use to communicate with customers".

Notably, the spokesperson said that "basic personal information including name and contact details may have been accessed".

"We do not believe that payment card information or account passwords were impacted," the statement reads. "Our website and app are operating as normal, with no current disruption to any aspects of our operations."

A spokesperson for Snowflake, meanwhile, told ITPro that when the company was made aware of the notification it began an investigation.

"At this time, we can report that we have found no compromise of the Snowflake platform," they said. "We take customer privacy and security very seriously. The investigation is ongoing and we will provide further updates as soon as more information becomes available."

Snowflake is a data management service provider used by enterprises globally. The company has been linked to a series of data breaches in recent years, including at companies such as Ticketmaster and AT&T.

Asos incident "one of the most visible attacks in history"

Jake Moore, Global Cybersecurity Adviser at ESET, said the incident ranks among one of the most “visible” cybersecurity incidents in recent memory. Concerningly, the notification suggests the threat actor(s) may have gained deep access to Asos systems.

“This has got to be one of the most visible hacks in history,” he said. “The fact the hackers managed to send a push notification to customers suggests they have gained access to at least some of Asos’s connected systems, but it doesn’t prove their full claims about the extent of the breach.”

“By broadcasting their breach directly to ASOS app users, the threat actors are likely trying to apply pressure to ASOS, showing how extensive their access is so they can leverage some sort of ransom,” Moore added.

Dan Bird MBE, field CTO for Emea at Horizon3, echoed Moore’s comments regarding the scope of the breach.

“Sending a push notification to Asos’s app users would require access to the company’s notification system, which is separate to the Snowflake data platform the attackers claim to have compromised,” he commented.

“If both claims hold up, it suggests the attackers got hold of credentials that opened more than one door.”

Who’s behind the Asos attack?

Details on who is behind the attack remain murky. However, the link sent to users directs them to a Telegram channel created today. This channel is believed to have been created by a group dubbed the ‘Xuanye Group’.

Moore urged users to avoid clicking on the notification or attempting to access the Telegram group.

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A Russian-speaking ransomware affiliate not only robbed his victims, but secretly cheated his Ransomware as a Service (RaaS) operator by setting up his own leak site.

Hacker Azazel worked as an affiliate of The Gentlemen ransomware group, according to recent research from CloudSEK. Using its tooling, negotiation channels and ransom note template, he attacked more than two dozen organizations in six countries.

Organizations targeted spanned industries such as logistics, medical services, insurance, pharmaceuticals, and government-adjacent sectors.

CloudSEK said it was far larger than a typical affiliate setup, with more than 50TB of dedicated physical servers, including a 22TB long-term vault built to retain the proceeds across multiple campaigns.

However, researchers noted that Azazel was not running a standard affiliate playbook.

"He built and operated his own independent leak site under the brand LEAKNED, publishing victim data and collecting extortion proceeds without routing them through the Gentlemen program, a betrayal of the RaaS operator running alongside the betrayal of victims," CloudSEK said.

"One exfiltration was still actively running during the investigation, with a target directory growing by hundreds of gigabytes between observations."

All the confirmed victims were reached through stolen CI/CD secrets: a single compromised GitLab instance was used with two organizations, while one CI/CD token exposed more than 150 databases across a SaaS platform and its clients.

A first of its kind campaign?

Notably, in what CloudSEK describes as a criminal first with AI tooling, Azazel registered a reverse shell as a callable tool inside an AI agent harness via the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and ran his attacks through it.

He also built infrastructure to scan the internet for exposed AI assistant ports, and used an AI assistant to manage his own criminal infrastructure.

In one case during an attack on an AI company, a sustained compromise began with an unvalidated AI imaging API, then moved through bulk credential decryption, a JWT token recovered from git history, offline Grafana password cracking and a full Kubernetes sweep.

More than 6TB was taken, and the transfer was still running when investigators found it.

In another, involving a government-linked financial registry, Azazel exfiltrated more than 120,000 records, then deleted the victim's live production database.

Double-crossing hacker has Russian ties

CloudSEK believes that Azazel is Russia-linked, thanks to the fluent Russian language used in operational scripts, while the staging server was codenamed "novostnik" - Russian for "newsman".

The news of Azazel's betrayal comes just weeks after it was revealed that hacking collective ShinyHunters launched an attack on rival cyber crime group Clop after long-running tensions between the two groups.

ShinyHunters hijacked Clop's dark web data leak site, leaving the message: "THIS SITE HAS BEEN PWN3D BY SHINYHUNTERS... Maybe don't try to threaten us next time", and demanded a ransom.

Similarly, research from Sophos last year revealed Russian-speaking group DragonHub took down the site of rival RansomHub, after which a RansomHub member defaced DragonForce’s site, labeling the group “traitors.”

It also apparently defaced the leak sites operated by the BlackLock and Mamona ransomware groups.

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The Danish government has confirmed a "deeply serious incident" which exposed personal data belonging to 8.8 million citizens.

Hackers accessed the Central Person Register (CPR) by taking advantage of a Danish company's access to the system, the government admitted in a statement on 5 October.

The data accessed includes names, addresses, CPR numbers – akin to national insurance numbers that also link to healthcare and other services – and other data on 8.8 million people registered on the system in Denmark.

Minister of research, education and digitalization Christina Egelund said in a statement translated to English that it was a "deeply serious incident" and that authorities were in the "process of mapping the full extent of the incident."

Danish data breach: What happened?

The attack was spotted on Friday night, with CPR staff observing irregular behavior on systems during September. Nathan Davies-Webb, principal consultant at Acumen Cyber, said this discovery gap is a highly concerning aspect of the breach.

"While this may not be a direct factor in this case, delays are common when a breach originates from a third-party."

Over the weekend following further investigation, it became clear that hackers had managed to access the names, addresses and CPR numbers of 8.8 million citizens.

While Denmark's population is about six million, the system includes people who have moved away from Denmark as well as those who have passed away, holding data on roughly 11 million people in total. The government said the hackers did not access the names and addresses of people who asked for address protection.

As the investigation is in early stages, the government said it wasn't possible to say who was behind the attack. However, officials said the threat actor(s) took advantage of a system that allows Danish companies to legitimately search for information within the CPR system.

The suggestion is the attackers gained access by targeting a private Danish company to target the CPR system.

Dray Agha, senior manager of security operations at Huntress, said the incident shows the risk of developing a centralized national database that offers direct access to third parties.

"A compromised account at a single supplier can bypass an organisation's core security controls and turn a legitimate connection into a massive data exposure," Agha said.

"To defend against this threat, governments and businesses must also strictly limit what external partners are allowed to view," Agha added. "They must also monitor these systems continuously to detect unusual search patterns before millions of records are extracted."

What next?

The government reported the incident to the Danish data protection regulator, and local police are investigating. Protections have been put in place to better protect the CPR, the government added.

In light of the breach, Egelund warned Danes to "be aware now and in the future," with a government statement warning citizens against giving out passwords or other confidential information over the phone or email to an unknown person, even if they have personal details like your address or CPR number.

Jamie Akhtar, CEO and co-founder of CyberSmart, agreed that Danes should be on the alert for phishing emails, texts and calls that claim to come from banks or public authorities.

This is a common tactic employed by threat actors in the wake of data breaches, with groups capitalizing on freely available information to conduct follow-up attacks on those impacted.

"Knowing your name, address or identification number does not make a caller trustworthy," Akhtar added.

"Customers must verify requests through an official website or a known telephone number, check accounts for unusual activity and report suspected fraud promptly."

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Fears that AI could escape human control have heightened calls for a ‘kill switch’, which would require companies developing frontier models to cut off access to their tools.

Politicians in the US have been putting forward a series of legislative proposals in an attempt to rein in AI models that could go rogue.

The AI Kill Switch Act was introduced in late July with a view to forcing developers to throttle, suspend, or shut down AI systems at risk of causing catastrophic damage.

“As a computer science major, I am very aware of the dramatic possibilities – both good and bad – that AI presents,” Democratic congressman Ted Lieu said in a press release. The bill had the support of both parties.

The Stop Rogue AI Act, another bipartisan bill, was introduced on September 15. It would guarantee the US National Institute of Standards and Technology develops standards, guidelines, and best practices for controlling AI agents

“Right now, AI agents are running loose in our networks, and nobody can see them or verify who built them, making it increasingly hard to stop them,” Democratic congressman Josh Gottheimer said in a press release.

An AI Emergency Button Act was introduced by Republican congressman Tom Kean Jr on September 24. “While AI can be a helpful tool, it is essential that humans remain in control of complex artificial intelligence systems,” he said in a press release.

Legislation is already facing hurdles, though. An attempt to fast-track the passage of a separate AI Emergency Button Act was blocked by the Senate on September 16. It could be months before President Trump actually signs a bill into law.

The operational risks of a ‘kill switch’

While legislation is well-intentioned, there is an argument to be made that any ‘kill switch’ would be difficult to implement from a frontier model perspective.

“If something goes wrong, for example, an AI attack on national infrastructure, you’d want to be able to roll it back and switch it off. In reality, though, AI exists at every level. It’s on our mobile devices, across physical networks, in data centre networks, on our laptops. You'd have to find all of it before you could shut it down,” Charlotte Wilson, head of enterprise at Check Point, tells ITPro.

Gary Barlet, public sector CTO at Illumio, adds that a ‘kill switch’ could cause systemic risk given how embedded AI has become in business operations.

“If a model suddenly becomes unavailable, those workflows could be disrupted overnight. Even intended as a safety measure, it could become a source of uncertainty, disruption, and economic harm if it's triggered too aggressively or without clear standards,” Barlet says.

Darren Guccione, CEO and co-founder of Keeper Security, points out that any ‘kill switch’ would not make AI secure by itself and definitely wouldn’t address every risk. However, it would help to establish an emergency baseline that frontier model developers have to meet.

Preparing for a shutdown

The question for organizations is whether they’re prepared for developers having to design a ‘kill switch’ into their frontier models – and how they would react to it.

Guccione says that large companies generally have a bigger pool of resources to invest in a wide range of models. However, it’s the smaller companies that are likely to be dependent on the same frontier models, putting their operations at greater risk of being impacted by any switch-off.

Smaller companies are also less likely to invest in their own AI safety mechanisms. Kiteworks’s annual data security and compliance risk report, published in July, found that the ‘kill switch’ gap is widening. Researchers at the software development company had forecast that 60% of organizations in 2026 wouldn’t have a tested capability that can shut down an active AI agent in real time, but the actual figure was 79% among 459 security and compliance professionals surveyed.

In the event a shutdown suspends a model that workflows are built around, the onus is on organizations to keep whatever depends on the model functioning, Guccione stresses. “Continuity planning needs to treat that as an operational imperative in its own right."

It may seem obvious, but to prepare for a shutdown, organizations need to improve their visibility by establishing an inventory of AI models and their dependencies.

“They should identify where AI models are embedded in business-critical processes, which providers those processes rely on, and what data and systems are connected to them,” Guccione continues.

From there, organizations need to put a fallback plan in place for their most important business processes. Where possible, they should “avoid unnecessary dependence on any single provider” and seek out alternative models to prevent single-model lock-in, Barlet advises.

A ‘kill switch’ would increase confidence in AI

While unexpected shutdowns caused by a ‘kill switch’ could scare organizations into stopping using models, its introduction would likely drive AI adoption in the long run.

As Barlet explains: “There's a tendency to assume regulation slows adoption, but uncertainty is often the bigger obstacle. When organizations understand the security requirements, testing standards, and governance obligations, they're more willing to invest. The right safeguards can increase confidence.”

Ultimately, a ‘kill switch’ would mean that organizations don’t have to rely on vendor assurances about AI safety, Guccione adds. “It would shift trust from claims made by individual vendors towards controls that organizations can actually verify.”

Google has revealed it will pause its open source bug bounty program, attributing the move to a “significant rise” in AI slop submissions.

In a statement on 1 October, posted both to X and the program brief, the tech giant revealed the pause will be enforced until at least the first quarter of 2027.

“As of October 1 2026, we are no longer accepting product vulnerabilities submitted to the OSS VRP,” the statement reads. “This pause is due to a significant rise in automated submissions, the vast majority of which are not valid.”

Google noted that it still might accept some reports covering product vulnerabilities through Cloud VRP. Similarly, the changes do not affect vulnerability reports submitted before 1 October.

“We will continue to reformat and work on this aspect of the OSS VRP and commit to giving an update in Q1 2027. In the meantime, we encourage you to find impact across our other VRP programs and submit there instead, or pursue the Patch Rewards Program,” the company added.

AI slop submissions are a menace

The move by Google marks the latest in a series of efforts to clamp down on AI slop vulnerability reports in recent years. It’s an issue that has caused repeated issues across the open source community.

As ITPro reported in January this year, a bug bounty program run by Curl was shut down due to an onslaught of AI-generated contributions.

Daniel Stenberg, lead maintainer at the open source data transfer service, said teams were dealing with a torrent of submissions. Indeed, Curl recorded seven AI-generated contributions within just a sixteen hour period.

In an announcement at the time, Stenberg said this was placing a “high load” on security practitioners and the move aimed to “reduce the noise” created by AI-generated submissions.

The scale of AI slop reports across the open source community has reached such an extent that big tech companies have taken drastic action to tackle the issue.

In March, a consortium of companies pledged financial support for Alpha-Omega and the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF), both of which are security initiatives within the Linux Foundation.

That consortium included several industry big-hitters such as Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, GitHub, OpenAI, and AWS. The $12.5 million funding package aims to develop sustainable security solutions and help eliminate slop reports.

At the time, AWS’ Mark Ryland said AI-generated reports were overwhelming open source maintainers and impacting broader security processes.

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Three people, including a 16-year-old boy, have been arrested for alleged involvement in the KillSec ransomware operation.

Law enforcement bodies from several countries, led by the Hamburg State Criminal Police Office and the Hamburg Public Prosecutor's Office, raided eight properties in Spain, Greece, the UK, and Romania. Digital infrastructure, evidence, and criminal assets were seized.

They also took control of KillSec's leak site, securing at least 110 terabytes of data against further unauthorized access. Five central servers used to manage the group's activities and store data taken from victims were brought under police control, and KillSec's domains were redirected to a law enforcement seizure notice.

The unnamed 16-year-old, a Romanian national, is believed to have been the leading figure behind KillSec. Meanwhile, other suspects are believed to hold different roles within the group, including an administrator, a developer – still a minor when some of the offences were committed – a negotiator, and an affiliate.

"It's concerning to know a child was the mastermind behind it all. This is something the cyber security industry and governments cannot dismiss, because it clearly highlights we are not doing enough to deter young people from cyber crime," said Daniel Wilcock, threat intelligence analyst at Talion Cyber Security.

"These children, who clearly possess expert technical skills, need to be educated that there are other ways they can use their talents to make money."

Another alleged member of the group, Dutch national Fouad Eltibrizi, has meanwhile been charged in the US with conspiracy to intentionally access a computer without authorization for financial gain, intentionally causing damage without authorization to a protected computer, and intentionally transmitting a threat to obtain information from a protected computer without authorization with the intent to extort.

KillSec, a financially motivated ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) group has been linked to around 1,000 suspected attacks worldwide. So far, around 500 of the suspected attacks have been identified as successful, a figure that may change as investigators examine the evidence seized, the authorities warned.

The group was first identified in 2024 when the group recruited affiliates via a dark web leak site and public Telegram channels to carry out attacks using its platform in exchange for a percentage of each ransom.

Last year, Group-IB's High-Tech Crime Trends Report 2026 ranked KillSec among the ten most active ransomware groups in Asia-Pacific, Latin America, and the Middle East. Financial services and healthcare were the most targeted sectors, while the victim list also included government bodies and a major insurer, investment firms, and a consumer app with millions of users.

Investigators are now examining the seized devices and data and tracing the group's criminal proceeds, including cryptocurrency. The evidence, said Europol, may help identify further victims, attacks, and people involved.

"Closing the gaps these groups exploit is essential, but it does not end an operation like this," said Dmitry Volkov, CEO of Group-IB, which was involved in the operation.

"Servers can be replaced in weeks; the people who build the platform and approve every attack cannot. Identifying them and supporting law enforcement in bringing them to justice is what turns a takedown from a pause into an end."

Chinese hackers impersonated prominent figures to target AI policy experts working for US think tanks, universities, and legal firms.

In July this year, according to Proofpoint researchers, a group tracked as TA419 pretended to be a former member of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy leadership team, Lynne Parker, as well as economist and foreign policy expert Heidi Crebo-Rediker.

In another incident, the group impersonated a senior employee of Anthropic to target an AI policy analyst at a US think tank, asking for feedback on the military integration of Claude.

The credential-phishing campaign started with apparently harmless emails proposing collaboration, for example, by joining an “AI Policy Advisory Committee”.

If the recipient took the bait, the hackers followed up with a multi-stage URL redirection chain that led to an Adversary-in-the-Middle (AitM) credential phishing attack.

This involved using a customized version of the open-source Browser-in-the-Browser (BitB) phishing tool Frameless BitB. This creates a fake browser window inside a webpage: a counterfeit Microsoft login pop-up placed over a page designed to look like a OneDrive document-sharing site.

This page relayed the login to genuine Microsoft infrastructure, allowing the harvesting of Microsoft 365 passwords, MFA codes, and session cookies.

Cloudflare’s content delivery network was used to obscure the backend hosting IP address for its domains, which are mostly registered via NameSilo.

TA419 is a China-aligned and espionage-motivated threat actor that's been carrying out credential phishing campaigns against individuals working for US- and Japan-based think tanks, defense contractors, universities, and law firms since at least April 2025.

"TA419 has consistently shown an interest in defense, national security, energy, international relations, and foreign policy targets, predominantly with a nexus to the US and Japan," said Proofpoint threat intelligence analyst Mark Kelly.

"The targeting of AI policy experts represents an extension of that remit rather than a departure from it."

The campaign, said Proofpoint, seems designed to support wider Chinese intelligence objectives around developments in US AI policy and regulation, as well as strategic competition over AI, export controls, and other critical technologies.

Two years ago, Proofpoint uncovered a similar campaign from the China-linked group UNK_SweetSpecter, targeting Western organizations involved in generative AI. This focused on individuals in academia, government entities, and high-profile private AI firms, including employees at OpenAI.

It said it also regularly observes China-aligned actors targeting other industries, such as semiconductors and rare earths, vital to the supply chain of AI and other strategic technologies.

Organizations likely to be a target of TA419 activity should, said Proofpoint, consider phishing-resistant, origin-bound authentication such as passkeys. Individuals, meanwhile, should be wary of unsolicited emails, and check that they're genuine via another route of communication.

"Proofpoint assesses that TA419 will likely continue targeting think tanks and policy experts working on technologies, and in geographies, of particular interest to the Chinese government," said Kelly. "These campaigns will likely also continue spoofing the identities of real subject-matter experts."

The number of vulnerability disclosures made each month has more than doubled since the start of the year, hitting 10,740 in August, according to Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG).

The researchers also found the number of vulnerabilities being exploited is showing a similar trajectory. In 2025, the average was 10.5 exploits per month, this rose to 18 per month from January 2026 to August 2026.

The researchers said they expect both these trends to continue in the short to medium term.

Zero-day exploitation, however, increased only marginally, rising from an average of eight cases per month in 2025 to an average of 11 from January 2026 to August 2026.

According to GTIG, AI is changing not just the pace of vulnerability discovery and exploitation, but also the types of vulnerabilities that are being discovered.

While fewer low-risk vulnerabilities are being found, there are more moderate-risk vulnerabilities and vulnerabilities leading to remote code execution (RCE) are being unearthed.

High-risk vulnerabilities surged from 131 disclosures in January 2026 to 350 in August, up by 167%, although they still account for just 3% of all vulnerabilities disclosed. The increase, said GTIG, comes down to a widening pool of affected vendors and concentrated vendor disclosure cycles.

"It’s important to note that the proportion of vulnerabilities exploited versus disclosed remains vanishingly small: only 0.23% of all disclosed vulnerabilities in 2026 (roughly one in 431) were ever observed in active exploitation, or on the order of tens versus thousands per month," the researchers said.

"This means that monthly exploitation counts can more easily be influenced by other factors such as vendor disclosure cycles and threat actor campaign spikes."

Meanwhile, current public data significantly undercounts vulnerabilities discovered by AI, the researchers said. This is partly due to the absence of standardized metadata, and partly because of silent first-party and cloud patching. Major cloud and SaaS providers routinely remediate AI-surfaced vulnerabilities directly in production without requesting formal CVE IDs, with CVE assignments typically reserved for on-premises or third-party software.

The increase in vulnerability discovery, said Steve Povolny, vice president of AI strategy and security research at Exabeam, shouldn't come as a surprise.

"We know by now that AI models are able to achieve speed, scale and efficiency that few, if any, human beings are capable of. Inevitably, discovering known flaws and finding ways to exploit them is par for the course when it comes to AI," he said.

However, he highlighted the lack of change in zero-day exploitation.

"This leads to one of two conclusions: first, AI models are very good at uncovering known (N-day) vulnerabilities but not mature enough to discover widespread zero-day vulnerabilities of significance," he suggested.

"The second option is that AI augmented zero-day discovery is happening en masse, but flying under the radar, based on the inherent value it provides to attackers such as nation states and zero-day bug broker groups. Given the amount of security researchers focused on leveraging AI for zero-day discovery, I think the latter is less likely."

Schools and colleges across England are experiencing fewer cyber attacks and are getting better at dealing with the fallout when they do.

New data from exams regulator Ofqual shows that 27% of schools experienced a cyber incident during the 2025 to 2026 academic year, down from 29% in the previous year and 34% in 2023 to 2024.

And when incidents do occur, schools are recovering more quickly, with 66% able to recover immediately, up from 55% in the previous year. Critical damage from attacks has also fallen, down to 7%.

"It's encouraging to see schools recovering faster, but a cyber breach can still cause real uncertainty for students if coursework or marks are lost, and staff confidence can be affected long after systems are back online," said Amanda Swann, Ofqual's executive director of delivery.

When asked who is primarily responsible for cyber security, 46% of teachers said their IT team, 40% said all staff, and just 9% said it was senior leadership.

But, said Swann, "Cybersecurity isn't just an IT problem; it's a leadership responsibility. Regular backups and a clear response plan can make a huge difference when things go wrong."

More than half of the secondary schools surveyed, 55%, have already taken action to protect against cyber attacks, with measures including implementing a cybersecurity policy, carrying out risk assessments, and setting up backup and recovery procedures.

Education is one of the most frequently attacked sectors. Schools and colleges hold large amounts of personal data on both pupils and staff, while low budgets mean that cybersecurity is often underfunded.

Earlier this week, SonicWall urged educational establishments to beware of exposure to legacy vulnerabilities. Apache Log4j2 Remote Code Execution, for example, was the leading signature targeting UK primary and secondary schools last year, generating around 660,000 hits.

There were also 71,000 attempts against TFTP Server Directory Traversal signatures during the year, targeting network boot infrastructure that's widely used in school IT environments.

Earlier this year, an attack on the C2K system, which provides access to coursework, teaching materials, exam revision tools and communication platforms, affected more than 30 schools across Northern Ireland, leaving staff and pupils unable to access services.

Last year, West Lothian council's education network was hit by a ransomware attack that saw the loss of data from a dozen schools.

According to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), it's often the pupils themselves who are responsible, for reasons ranging from boredom to financial gain.

Ofqual is urging schools to put more robust measures in place so staff know what to do if systems do come under fire. It recommends that educational institutions visit the Department for Education's Cyber Security Hub for advice on how to strengthen their cyber resilience, prepare for cyber incidents and respond effectively when attacks happen.

Meanwhile, the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) offers security advice for governing boards and senior leaders, school staff and admin teams, procurers and providers.