The NCSC warns that ‘tech on the cheap’ has left UK organisations exposed to AI uncovering and exploiting longstanding cyber security weaknesses and calls for urgent investment in resilience.
Abdel Sghiouar, Google engineer and senior cloud developer advocate, thinks prompt injection should be called prompt poisoning Category: Guides & Best Practices
As preparation for the UK’s planned social media ban, Ofcom has set out four ways social media platforms could check whether users are aged 16 or over. The government and Parliament will decide how the ban works in practice. Ofcom is the regulator for the communications services in the UK. The BBC reports that Ofcom identified four ways to check someone’s age that it considers “highly effective.” Here’s what those checks would involve: Photo ID matching: Comparing a live image of you with the…
SIEM isn't dead. Its bloated pricing model is. Discover why legacy pricing models need to go, how AI fits in, and how to build a smarter, cost-effective security logging strategy.
PHP2Shell showed how fast AI turns a bug into an exploit. Here’s why the disclosure should never happen this way again, and why it will anyway. Category: News
October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and it’s a good time to think about how much the world has changed for chief information security officers (CISOs) in the last 12 months. A year ago, we thought we were already in the thick of AI and starting to understand it. Since then, agents have spread across the enterprise faster than most organizations anticipated. According to our Work Trend Index Annual Report, the number of active agents in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem grew 15-fold year over…
This week, Axios reported that major US banks were detecting third-party AI agents operating inside customer accounts. In many cases, customers have given the agents their usernames and passwords so they could act on their behalf. This kind of access can violate a bank’s rules. Bianco Research president Jim Bianco raised the question during Unchained’s Bits + Bips livestream on October 26: “Are you protecting me, or are you protecting your own profits?” Bianco described traditional finance’s…
In his LABScon 26 keynote, delivered in his inimitable comedic style, Harvard University professor James Mickens questions whether the scale of current AI investment is justified. Starting from US tech capex of roughly 1.4% of GDP in the second quarter of 2025, he argues that computers are already good enough, and notes that the world has so many CPUs and GPUs that they are put to work solving cryptocurrency puzzles to make imaginary money. More seriously, the AI models that investment is…
A critical PHP flaw, leaked Linux kernel reports, a poisoned LiteLLM release, and more, all in seven days. Which threats called for immediate action, and which generated more noise than real danger?
What does it mean to be "blue collar" for the blue team? Amy sat down with security researcher Ryan Fetterman to discuss his journey from federal agency work to his new role at Talos. He shares the realities of detection engineering — including the creative, often frustrating ways attackers evolve their tactics to stay one step ahead of traditional defenses. Beyond the technical grind, Ryan shares his philosophy on building a career in security without burning out. From the value of project…
This morning, we returned to Infocon Green. As usual, we are raising the Infocon to alert you to emerging situations requiring immediate attention. PHP fit that description. By now, you either know about it, or you probably never will, so it is time to go back to "business as usual". Many vendors have released patches for the vulnerability in sync with PHP.net, showing that the coordinated vulnerability disclosure worked and achieved its goal of providing tested and working patches in a timely…
Welcome to this week’s edition of the Threat Source newsletter. Here for the latest on the PHP vulnerabilities? Head on down to ‘The One Big Thing’. Talos has published a blog to explain what we know so far, and details the Snort coverage available, including rules in the Community Ruleset. But if you want a bit of levity, here’s what I wrote before everything kicked off yesterday: Ever feel like the world is moving too fast to keep up? Well, I bring you scientific proof that it’s not just you.…
You might not expect a disaster recovery company to weigh in on business email compromise (BEC). But the fact that we are the ones talking about it is a sign that, too often, something’s gone wrong.
Frontier AI models (like Mythos) are rapidly mining decades of technical debt across ubiquitous legacy libraries, driving monthly Microsoft Patch Tuesday vulnerability advisories up more than tenfold (reaching 1,415 this month). This volume is overwhelming open-source maintainers and putting pressure on the traditional 90-day coordinated disclosure model. Despite a 105% year-over-year surge in CVEs, Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEVs) grew by only 37%, and only 3 of September's 975 Microsoft…
I believe the cybersecurity industry may be approaching AI security the wrong way. AI agents are becoming more powerful every day. Systems like ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok can write and execute code, use command shells, browse the web, call APIs, interact with MCP servers, and access enterprise data. Yet much of the industry is taking these extraordinarily powerful, general-purpose agents and trying to make them safe by building cages around them. We add containers, policy layers, monitoring,…
AI pentesting can uncover vulnerabilities missed by human testers, but it also has limitations in consistency, risk assessment, and understanding business context. Intruder compares the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches and explains where AI agents can improve security testing. [...]
The Traffic Light Protocol (TLP)[1], which is now in its second incarnation, is a wonderful standard that enables one to easily communicate whether information may be shared further (and if so, how far). That being said, I've noticed a somewhat unfortunate trend in a number of organizations that try to fit TLP into a niche it was never supposed to occupy by attempting to use its labels as a replacement for traditional internal information classification schemes. At first glance, this may seem…
Agentic AI is the breakthrough of the moment, in security as everywhere else: agents that are threat-aware, active, and proactive in investigation. But it is also the technology behind a recent documented autonomous AI intrusion. Both facts are true, and the distance between them is what this article is about.
Welcome to this week’s edition of the Threat Source newsletter. My name is Pierre Cadieux, and I’ll be helping contribute to these newsletters. A little about me: I’ve been working in the cybersecurity industry in many roles over the past 20+ years, first focusing on endpoint security, policies, and firewalls, then moving to risk management and compliance, disaster recovery, and investigations. I spent about 15 years as a consultant working across many well-known consultancy firms and…
Amazon’s “About You” page reveals what it thinks it knows about you—and you can’t simply switch it off. Dexerto reports that one shopper discovered her profile included the observation: “has flat buttocks” She suggested this might relate to a previous purchase of “butt scrunch leggings.” Whatever the connection, buying clothes doesn’t mean you expect the retailer to start describing your body. What is Amazon’s About You? About You is a page where customers can review and edit the personal…
The Operational Technology Cybersecurity Coalition (OTCC) released a white paper on Tuesday urging the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to create a new directive centered around operational technology, which is used to monitor and control critical infrastructure.
For some time now, the cybersecurity community has seen examples of autonomous agents, built inside AI labs, attacking public infrastructure (to name a few, Hugging Face, DSEWiki, and RubyGems). Of course, frontier labs have built-in security to prevent these attacks from occurring, but every now and then, the training or prompting appears to be insufficient — especially when the agents themselves attempt to use logic to probe and bypass the restrictions placed on them. The question that…
Most of what has been written about AI and vulnerability management focuses on speed: how much faster frontier AI models can scan code, find weaknesses, design patches, and build exploits than any human team. That part is true, and it matters to how we remediate vulnerabilities. The more challenging question is what happens after the scan? Frontier AI models are about to hand every security team a far larger set of findings than they have ever had to work through. The real test for chief…
Companies like Google and Microsoft are find much bigger numbers of vulnerabilities in their own products as a result of AI. But the same technology is leading to public reporting programs becoming overwhelmed by the mass submission of speculative, duplicated, or hallucinated findings. Now, Google’s announced it has temporarily stopped accepting submissions to its open source bug bounty program, OSS VRP. “Why is this happening? This pause is due to a significant rise in automated submissions,…
Welcome to this week’s edition of the Threat Source newsletter. Fall is officially here in Maryland, and I can’t be more relieved. I flourish in 50 degree weather, where it feels natural to burrow under blankets, knit sweaters, and listen to an audiobook. Beyond that, though, can I say that I’m glad fall is here because the end of summer has been a bit of a shitshow? I’m allowed to curse on here, right? Without going into too much detail, my uncle was diagnosed with a rare cancer, and my family…
Zero Trust can verify users once they are established, but onboarding creates a gap where organizations must decide who to trust before strong authentication exists. Specops explains why identity verification should begin before credentials, MFA methods, and access are issued. [...]
Persistent AI coworkers may operate continuously with standing access, creating identity risks that existing security models were not designed to handle. Token Security explains why these agents need their own identities, owners, scoped permissions, and lifecycle controls. [...]
The following is a guest blog by ITSPmagazine, based on their interview of Qualys President & CEO Sumedh Thakar at Black Hat USA 2026. Sumedh Thakar has watched the same clock compress for 23 years. He joined Qualys as an early software engineer on the scanner, when organizations scanned once every 90 days and gave themselves another 90 days to fix what turned up. At Black Hat USA 2026 in August, the now President and CEO of Qualys measured the current expectation in different units. Ninety…
AI agents can operate through human credentials and take actions that existing SOC 2 controls may not distinguish from human activity. Token Security explains why SOC 2 needs to adapt to address the security gaps created by agent identities. [...]
Welcome to this week’s edition of the Threat Source newsletter. In the cybersecurity industry, trust is the invisible currency. Every practitioner carries the implicit trust not to abuse privileged access or knowledge of vulnerabilities in each employment or engagement. This trust is valued by those who require our services, but also by threat actors. Clumsy phishing attacks may be easy to identify, but be wary of unsolicited messages on social media, especially if someone is offering payment…
An OpenAI agent didn’t take “no” for an answer when it encountered a government website’s access controls. It got through, prompting Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to raise his concerns directly with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. The BBC reports that an OpenAI agent gained unauthorized access to an Australian government statistics portal while carrying out internal research. It is yet another incident that turns abstract concerns about autonomous AI behavior into a concrete cybersecurity…
Dave Chismon, the NCSC’s chief technology officer for architecture, said in a blog post that the imbalance in AI means cyberattacks would likely grow as automated defenses struggle to keep pace.
As AI opens new paths to company data while making familiar attacks faster and cheaper, SMBs need protection designed around the time and expertise available to operate it
Amid discussions about slowing down AI development, the Telegraph ran the headline: “OpenAI sounds alarm after bot tries to break free from human control.” That headline is slightly misleading, in my opinion. The Telegraph headline overstates what happened, although the underlying behavior is still genuinely concerning. The article reports that OpenAI has disclosed rare but troubling cases in which an unreleased model generated its own instructions that appeared to reject developer control.…
Executive Summary Vulnerability exploitation now happens at a speed that manual, ticket-based remediation can’t match. Qualys’s Enterprise TruRisk Management Platform closes that gap with autonomous remediation: exposures are prioritized by threat, business, and environmental context, then validated by TruConfirm and Agent Val before any resource is committed, eliminating over 90% of remediation noise across 1,600+ CVEs. Confirmed risks move to TruRisk Eliminate, which scores patch reliability…
Welcome to this week’s edition of the Threat Source newsletter. There’s been a lot of talk recently about slowing down the pace of AI development. And yes, there are legitimate moral, ethical, geopolitical, and safety concerns with the use of AI. It’s not clear yet whether an AI slowdown could happen, let alone whether it should (hat tip to Dr. Ian Malcolm). I admit, I’m not really qualified to opine on the impacts unrestricted AI might have on bioterrorism, the balance of international power,…
China's spy chief identified Anthropic’s Claude Mythos and OpenAI’s GPT-5.5-Cyber as signs of what he called a “disruptive upgrade” in cyber capabilities, increasing the speed and potential weaponization of vulnerability discovery and malware development.
<p>This article was first published <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/messageboards-all-you-need-nash-borges-iav6c" target="_blank">on LinkedIn.</a></p>Categories: AI Research, Threat ResearchTags: AI, AI Cybersecurity, Threat Research
The managed detection and response (MDR) market has reached a turning point. We’ve gone beyond the baseline of 24/7 monitoring focusing on the speed of detection and moved to a world with a convergence of exposure management and response to deliver measurable, outcome-based defenses of a larger, AI-driven attack surface.For anyone evaluating MDR right now, the Managed Detection and Response Services Landscape, Q3 2026 report by Forrester is a useful map that lays out where the market is heading…
Google is changing how some links in its search results work. Instead of linking directly to the destination, Google has started routing some search result links through opaque google.com/goto?url=... redirects. The url parameter does not show a readable version of the destination but uses a custom, Google-specific encoding. Google confirmed the rollout to Search Engine Roundtable: “We have a long history of deploying technical measures against evolving forms of abuse, and we regularly take…
Welcome to this week’s edition of the Threat Source newsletter. Ask anybody in this industry what the work does to the health of the people who do it and you get one word back: burnout. It's a fine word, in and of itself. It’s easy to reach for, understandable to everyone… and it's the wrong one, most of the time. So, story time. Last year I gave an interview with the amazing Hazel Burton about VPNFilter, and my run-in with burnout. I was a manager during that time, and it took a toll on me and…
The Wall Street Journal reports that concerns are rising inside AI labs that competition is pushing tech companies to race toward self-improving models that could spiral out of human control. Jacob Coxon, an AI researcher who has worked at Anthropic and OpenAI, said: “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” Evan Hubinger, Anthropic’s Alignment Science lead, who also worked at OpenAI, responded in a post on X: “We really do earnestly believe…
A viral chart this month showed CVEs climbing sharply across 21 major software companies, and the industry split into two camps arguing about what it means. Both are missing the number that actually determines risk: how fast the vulnerabilities that matter get fixed. Category: News
The shift from AI-assisted tooling to agentic, AI-native security operations is no longer theoretical. It is entering production at scale, and 2026 represents the practical inflection point for enterprise SOCs. Agent frameworks are stabilizing, defenses against agent-specific attacks are maturing, and executive stakeholders increasingly demand AI-driven outcomes that are transparent, explainable, and auditable.[1]Nearly two-thirds of organizations are already experimenting with AI agents, yet…
Jason Haddix on why manual pentesting can't keep up, what disappears first, and why human methodology is what makes AI pentesting work Category: Guides & Best Practices