For the latest discoveries in cyber research for the week of 2nd November, please download our Threat Intelligence Bulletin. TOP ATTACKS AND BREACHES Binance, a global cryptocurrency exchange, has suffered a cyberattack resulting in the theft of approximately $6.3 billion in digital assets. Attackers reportedly compromised a DevOps engineer’s laptop and abused internal wallet infrastructure to authorize unauthorized withdrawals. The incident ranks among the largest cryptocurrency thefts ever…
Today, we’re proud to share thatMicrosoft has been named a Leader in the 2026 IDC MarketScape for Worldwide Modern Endpoint Security for Enterprises (Doc #US54123526, September 2026). The IDC Marketscape calls out three strengths that we believe matter most in endpoint security today: Autonomous attack disruption and predictive shielding contain ransomware and identity attacks in minutes, at a meaningful scale. Agentic AI through Security Copilot is now generally available, with measured gains…
Phishing remained the leading initial access technique, appearing in slightly over one-third of all Cisco Talos Incident Response (Talos IR) engagements — a decrease from over 50 percent last quarter. In addition to traditional phishing links and attachments, we observed numerous threat actors conducting voice phishing (vishing) in tandem with IT desk impersonation to socially engineer the victim into allowing remote access via a legitimate remote monitoring and management (RMM) tool.…
For the latest discoveries in cyber research for the week of 19th October, please download our Threat Intelligence Bulletin. TOP ATTACKS AND BREACHES CenterPoint Energy, a US utility company serving Texas and several other states, has disclosed a data breach affecting more than 1 million Texas residents. Unauthorized access to an external system exposed names, addresses, Social Security information, and driver’s license numbers, according to regulatory notifications filed by the company. Burger…
Discover how to secure AI agents in your cloud environment with Tenable One Cloud Exposure. We explore Microsoft Entra Agent ID and provide essential best practices for robust agentic AI identity security. Key takeaways Understand your current maturity level and then build an appropriate action plan to secure your agent identities. Use your cloud providers’ native tools or Tenable One Cloud Exposure to locate and catalog every AI agent operating in your environment. Do not assign human…
Agents are rapidly becoming part of how work gets done. They can support a range of activities from writing code and researching products to analyzing revenue, processing expenses, and acting across the systems that run the business. To be most useful, they often need access to company data, applications, tools, and other agents. That access is what makes agents more capable. With that capability can come insider risk. This does not mean agents are inherently malicious. It means they are…
Last month, Volexity published two blog posts in its Mind the (Patch) Gap series. The series details Volexity’s discovery of multiple Chinese threat actors simultaneously using zero-day exploits in Google Chrome and Microsoft Windows in campaigns that, if successful, would download and run malware on an exploited system. Those posts covered technical details of the exploits and malware Volexity observed, along with general detection methods for each case. Behind those findings was one of the…
In this article Shift 1. From frontier capability to scale Shift 2. From token consumption to reasoning economics Shift 3. Validation and remediation as a continuous learning loop Transferring security research to help open source projects Open-source vulnerability reporting snapshot Measured costs of automated validation FORGE OSS Bug Hunt Party: Human coordination at scale (Hackathon) Akrites: Coordinated effort to remediate vulnerabilities What’s next for FORGE Lab? The mission of Microsoft…
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…
According to this year’s Microsoft Digital Defense Report, government agencies and services were the sector most impacted by cyber threats in 2026, accounting for 27% of observed activity, up from 17% in 2025. Governments are also the most frequently targeted sectors for nation-state activity. They are attractive targets because they hold sensitive information, operate essential services, and sit at the center of networks of agencies, contractors, technology providers, and critical…
In this article Why you should attend Microsoft IgniteMake the most of your time at Microsoft Ignite Explore the Security sessions at Microsoft Ignite 2026 Build your schedule In the agentic era, the stakes are higher: AI agents now act with real access to your identities, your data, and your cloud, so every adoption decision is a trust decision. That is why security is a through line at Microsoft Ignite 2026, from a Security Pre-Day before the event opens to a security segment in the keynote,…
A reminder for anyone who thinks their AI chats are private: A human may see what they upload. A report from 404 Media this week describes contractors reviewing Copilot users’ photos, editing requests, and the images Copilot produces. Some of what they see is disturbing. The third-party companies hired to conduct these reviews present their workers with an original photo and a user’s request for an edit. They are also shown two potential AI edits and asked to judge each on technical merit.…
How reliability scoring keeps risky patches out of zero-touch jobs, and how one blocking rule stops a paused update across your environment. Executive Summary Microsoft has paused the rollout of KB5002907, an optional Microsoft 365 Apps update that left some Office 2016 and Office 2019 installations unlicensed or removed. When an update runs into trouble after release, the teams that already deployed it are the ones left dealing with it, as KB5002907 and several other 2026 updates have shown.…
In this article Attack overviewTechnical analysisMitigation and protection guidanceReferencesLearn More Microsoft Security Research has identified malicious cloud activity associated with JADEPUFFER, a threat actor discovered by Sysdig in July 2026 and reported to be the first documented agentic ransomware operation. Our investigation found an extensive Azure-focused resource destruction activity using compromised service principals and cloud credential collection that could be used to…
AI agents are now running on employee devices, cloud platforms, and across developer workflows. Security teams need to see those agents, govern what they can reach, and contain them when something goes wrong. This month’s updates help you discover and control local AI agents, extend Zero Trust to agent traffic, and strengthen the security operations center (SOC) foundations that AI-era operations depend on. Here’s what’s new: Extend protection and support investigations with Microsoft Defender…
The physics of cybersecurity are changing. So must the security operations center (SOC). Cyberattackers are using agents to automate execution at unprecedented scale. What once required entire teams now requires a single operator and an agent framework. That shift has exposed a hard truth: security cannot operate at AI speed when protection and operations are built as separate systems. Every handoff, integration, and boundary slows defenders down. Agents inherit that complexity. For agentic…
Available on Telegram for a $1,500 initiation fee and a recurring monthly $500 subscription, EvilTokens provided cybercriminals with artificial intelligence tools enabling them to compromise accounts, analyze breached inboxes and find the best methods for monetizing their access through fraud.
In this article What is device code phishing?EvilTokens platform and operationsEvilTokens phishing emailsMitigation and protection guidanceMicrosoft Defender XDR detectionsHunting queries Following its emergence in February 2026, EvilTokens quickly became one of the most widely used phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) platforms, providing cybercriminals with AI capabilities for tailoring phishing lures and analyzing compromised inboxes to identify high-value targets. This AI-powered cybercrime…
AI has already made fundamental changes to the operating environment for cybersecurity. Cyberattackers are testing more paths, adapting their techniques, and moving across digital environments with greater speed and persistence. The weaknesses they exploit remain familiar: excessive permissions, unprotected authentication flows, unpatched systems, exposed execution paths, and gaps between controls. What has changed is how quickly these weaknesses can combine into attack paths that cross…
Every benchmark tells a story. The most valuable ones tell us where to improve next. For five consecutive quarters Microsoft has published email security benchmarking reports to provide greater transparency into real-world protection outcomes. The results have shown strong Microsoft Defender performance across pre-delivery and post-delivery scenarios, while revealing where threats and defenses continue to evolve. This quarter’s benchmark examines how continuous measurement informs protection…
Improper neutralization of special elements used in a command ('command injection') in Microsoft 365 Copilot's Business Chat allows an unauthorized attacker to disclose information over a network.
Improper neutralization of special elements used in a command ('command injection') in M365 Copilot allows an authorized attacker to elevate privileges over a network.
Improper neutralization of special elements used in a command ('command injection') in Microsoft Copilot allows an unauthorized attacker to disclose information over a network.
Executive Summary Microsoft’s September 2026 security updates, KB5124008 and KB5124012, have been linked to USB audio failures on some Windows systems, highlighting the operational risk that can accompany security patching. Qualys TruRisk Eliminate classified both updates as Low Reliability, signaling the need for additional validation before production deployment. Patch Reliability helps IT and security teams focus on deeper testing where needed while allowing high-confidence patches to move…
For the latest discoveries in cyber research for the week of 14th Setpember, please download our Threat Intelligence Bulletin. TOP ATTACKS AND BREACHES IDScan.net, a US identity verification provider, has disclosed a data breach after detecting unauthorized access on September 1. Exposed data included names and government identification numbers, while a criminal marketplace advertised a collection containing millions of identity documents, including driver’s licenses, associated with the…
Researchers analyzed a flood of fraudulent business emails and found that the threat actors had doubled-up on tactics to make them appear legitimate, including help from AI.
In this article What is ASCII smuggling?Writing a practical ASCII-smuggling signatureWhat we observed: ASCII smuggling repurposed for phishingWhat is known and what is newIs there a detection gap?Mitigation and protection guidanceReferencesLearn More Microsoft researchers observed a high-volume phishing campaign using invisible Unicode tag characters, a technique popularized in AI prompt injection research as ASCII Smuggling. Instead of using these characters to hide instructions from people…
As organizations incorporate AI agents into more processes across business and operations, security teams can benefit from greater visibility and new purpose-built tools that help manage, secure, and govern AI. This month’s updates provide new capabilities to help organizations gain insights into agent activity, expand security coverage across supported environments, and enhance security management across their environments. Here’s what’s new: Extend expert-led protection with new capabilities…
You can’t patch everything. So what do you fix first? Findings in Q2 2026 have changed traditional answers.The latest Quarterly Threat Landscape Report from Rapid7 Labs shows vulnerability disclosures still surging while attackers use automation and AI-assisted tooling to compress the time between disclosure and exploitation. The gap that patch cycles were built to fill is closing. Speed and volume are overwhelming security teams that have relied on traditional patch cycles and reactive…
Security teams are being asked to defend a growing attack surface with fewer people and around the clock, against threat actors who never take a night off. As cyberattackers increasingly use AI to launch and scale campaigns, the volume, speed, and sophistication of threats continue to rise. Closing that gap takes more than tooling. It takes a partner that pairs a leading security platform with scaled intelligence and human experts who can act on your behalf at any hour. That’s exactly what…
As organizations adopt AI, they must secure both cloud and AI environments through a unified security control plane as their attack surface expands. Because modern applications and AI workloads are built and run in the cloud, security teams must understand which exposures matter most, prioritize what can truly be exploited, and reduce risk across cloud infrastructure, applications, identities, data, and AI systems in one place. Modern IT estates now span multiple clouds and on-premises systems,…
The calculus of cybersecurity has changed. AI is reshaping how organizations build, deploy, operate, and defend digital systems. AI-powered development tools, agents, and autonomous workflows are accelerating innovation but they are also introducing new attack surfaces, new trust boundaries, and new security challenges. Microsoft has long helped organizations secure their digital estates using Zero Trust principles. That leadership was recently recognized by KuppingerCole analysts, which named…
For the latest discoveries in cyber research for the week of 27th July, please download our Threat Intelligence Bulletin. TOP ATTACKS AND BREACHES Minnesota IT Services has confirmed coordinated cyberattacks affecting more than 30 community water utilities across the state. The incidents briefly disrupted a treatment plant in Braham and affected industrial control systems. Officials reported that drinking water safety was not affected. While the attack was not officially attributed, federal…
Every organization needs security that protects end to end with the speed and scale of AI. Microsoft’s vision is simple: security should be ambient and autonomous, just like the AI it protects. As organizations scale AI and expand across environments, security teams need protection that covers every surface. This month’s updates help security and IT teams secure their AI environments, use AI to defend at speed and scale, and strengthen the foundations that AI-powered operations depend on.…
Elastic automatically translates your Microsoft Sentinel detection rules into Elastic Security. Export your Scheduled and Near Real Time (NRT) analytics rules from Sentinel, upload them, and Elastic picks up the mapping and translation from there using an LLM you choose. Watchlists and severity mappings carry over. This is the first automatic migration path off a modern SIEM, available now in Tech Preview in 9.5, and it works across multiple cloud providers and regions so you can deploy closer…
Elastic automatically translates your Microsoft Sentinel detection rules into Elastic Security. Export your Scheduled and Near Real Time (NRT) analytics rules from Sentinel, upload them, and Elastic picks up the mapping and translation from there using an LLM you choose. Watchlists and severity mappings carry over. This is the first automatic migration path off a modern SIEM, available now in Tech Preview in 9.5, and it works across multiple cloud providers and regions so you can deploy closer…
For the latest discoveries in cyber research for the week of 27th July, please download our Threat Intelligence Bulletin. TOP ATTACKS AND BREACHES Nichirei, a Japan-based frozen-food supplier and logistics company, has experienced a ransomware attack that disrupted shipping operations and affected approximately 5,000 customers. KFC Japan warned of possible shortages. Nichirei confirmed personal data theft, while the RansomHouse group claimed responsibility and published a subset of the stolen…
Welcome to this week’s edition of the Threat Source newsletter. We all knew, to some degree or another, that this summer was going to a hot mess. I don’t mean FIFA drama or record setting heat waves. I mean the slow but steady momentum that AI frontier models were accruing for vulnerability research. If you were like me, and guesstimating exactly when that shoe would drop, my money was on the middle of summer. And... well, friends, I hate to say it, but I was right. This July’s Patch Tuesday is…
Preamble In 2025 and 2026, we watched a pattern play out across the industry. Attackers stopped going after production servers directly and started targeting the automation that deploys to them. Compromised developer credentials, a modified workflow file, and suddenly every secret in a CI/CD environment is streaming to an attacker-controlled endpoint. We saw this play out across incidents involving major open-source projects, Fortune 500 companies, and critical infrastructure tooling. The…