Cybersecurity Saturday

David Ermer–Cybersecurity, Generative AI, Uncategorized–

From the Iranian war front,

  • The Center for Strategic and International Studies offers an April 27, 2026, FAQ about “The Iranian Cyber Threat to U.S. Critical Infrastructure.”
  • MedTech Dive tells us,
    • “A cyberattack that shut down ordering, shipping and manufacturing at Stryker for weeks cut into the company’s first-quarter results.
    • “CEO Kevin Lobo told investors Thursday that the cyberattack “meaningfully” affected Stryker’s growth.
    • “The cyber incident had a big impact on our results and affected each of our businesses differently given their varied go-to-market models and processes to record revenue,” Lobo said. “This resulted in distortions in our first-quarter results that will normalize over the course of the year.” * * *
    • “Stryker was hit by the cyberattack on March 11. The company’s global Microsoft environment was disrupted, and ordering, shipping and manufacturing were shut down for weeks. Operations were not restored until the first week of April.
    • “The attack has been claimed by an Iran-linked threat actor tracked as Handala, according to Check Point Research. Along with the operational disruption, the group claims to have wiped thousands of servers and mobile devices, and stolen data.
    • “Lobo said the cyberattack wiped 40,000 laptops. He added that the company lost some procedures due to operations shutting down, and some sales reps were unable to get into hospitals. However, Lobo maintained that the company didn’t lose overall business.”
  • SC Media reports on April 27,
    • “Large medical devices maker Medtronic on April 24 said it was hit by a cyberattack that led to unauthorized access to data in some of its corporate IT systems. 
    • “However, in a statement, Medtronic said it had not identified any impact to its products, patient safety, or connections to its customers, manufacturing and distribution operations, financial reporting systems, or the company’s ability to meet patient needs.
    • “The networks that support our corporate IT systems, our products and our manufacturing and distribution operations are separate,” said the company. “Hospital customer networks remain separate from Medtronic IT networks and are secured and managed by customers’ IT teams.”
    • “The attack raised some eyebrows because it was reportedly claimed by Handala, the same group that was behind the attack on Stryker March 11 that led to service disruptions. This was the second publicly reported attack on a large medical device maker since the war with Iran started Feb. 28.”
    • “Handala didn’t target Medtronic by accident,” said Amir Khayat, co-founder and CEO of Vorlon. “Critical infrastructure, complex vendor networks, sensitive data, and known security gaps make healthcare one of the most attractive targets in the world. The teams that find out their exposure after an incident are the ones who never looked before it.”

From the cybersecurity policy and law enforcement front,

  • Cybersecurity Dive reports,
    • “The U.S. government wants to know how major U.S. technology companies are using AI to protect their computer networks and how they’re preparing for the possibility of an AI-driven cybersecurity crisis.
    • “Officials from the White House’s Office of the National Cyber Director (ONCD) have reached out to tech giants in recent weeks with questions about AI, information sharing, vulnerability patching and how the federal government can help, according to an email and a list of questions shared with Cybersecurity Dive.” * * *
    • “ONCD asked the companies to answer 11 questions on a range of cybersecurity topics by May 1.”
  • √and
    • “A group of U.S. government agencies on Wednesday [April 29] offered advice for critical infrastructure organizations on applying zero-trust (ZT) principles to their operational technology (OT) environments.
    • “Taking a zero-trust approach to these industrial systems requires careful consideration, the new government publication says, “because OT systems interact with the physical environment and are constrained by availability and safety requirements, as well as legacy technology with long lifespans.”
    • “The document — co-authored by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the FBI and the departments of Defense, Energy and State — describes the unique challenges that OT environments pose, the importance of clear governance frameworks and supply-chain oversight, and the steps that infrastructure operators should take to implement zero trust.”
  • and
    • “The Australian and U.S. governments, along with other international partners, released guidance on Friday [May 1] for safely deploying agentic AI systems.
    • The automation capabilities of AI agents create unique risks that can lead to “productivity losses, service disruption, privacy breaches or cybersecurity incidents,” the guidance document reads. “Organisations must therefore anticipate what could go wrong, assess how agentic AI risk scenarios might affect operations and establish ongoing visibility and assurance to maintain confidence in their agentic AI investments.”
    • “Safely using AI agents means “never granting it broad or unrestricted access, especially to sensitive data or critical systems,” the document warns. Companies, it says, “should only use agentic AI for low-risk and non-sensitive tasks.”
    • “The publication — co-issued by the Australian Signals Directorate, the U.S.’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and National Security Agency and their British, Canadian and New Zealand counterparts — comes as businesses race to integrate AI tools into their workflows and increasingly embrace agentic AI for its ability to automate repetitive tasks.”
  • HelpNet Security adds,
    • “AI agents need credentials to work. They authenticate with LLM platforms, connect to databases, call SaaS APIs, access cloud resources, and orchestrate across dozens of external services. Every integration point requires an identity. Most organizations are handling this badly, and the evidence is in the code.
    • “GitGuardian’s State of Secrets Sprawl Report found 28,649,024 new secrets exposed in public GitHub commits across 2025, a 34% year-over-year increase and the largest annual jump in the report’s history.
    • “One of the root causes is authentication design: which credential type gets chosen, what scope it carries, how long it lives, and where it gets stored. In the meantime, AI is creating more credentials that need managing and generating more artifacts where those credentials leak.”
  • Per a National Institute of Standards and Technology news release,
    • “The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is hosting a virtual event titled “Building Your Small Business Cybersecurity Team: From In-House to Outsourcing” on May 5, 2026, from 2:00 to 3:00 p.m. EDT. The webinar, part of National Small Business Week, focuses on helping small businesses develop cybersecurity teams to manage and reduce risks. It will address different team structures based on factors such as budget, staff capabilities, and organizational needs, including in-house roles, full teams, and outsourced support. Speakers will discuss considerations for hiring, outsourcing, and training employees, as well as available resources such as the National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education Workforce Framework for Cybersecurity.  For additional information and to register for the event refer to the official NIST Event page.”
  • Cyberscoop informs us,
    • “Two former cybersecurity professionals who moonlighted as cybercriminals, committing a series of ransomware attacks in 2023, were each sentenced to four years in prison, the Justice Department said Thursday [April 30].
    • “Ryan Clifford Goldberg and Kevin Tyler Martin previously pleaded guilty to one of three charges brought against them in December and faced up to 20 years behind bars. 
    • “Goldberg, who was a manager of incident response at Sygnia, and Martin, a ransomware negotiator at DigitalMint at the time, collaborated with Angelo John Martino III to attack victim computers and networks and use ALPHV, also known as BlackCat, ransomware to extort payments.
    • “These defendants exploited specialized cybersecurity knowledge not to protect victims, but to extort them,” Jason A. Reding Quiñones, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, said in a statement. “They used ransomware to lock down critical systems, steal sensitive data, and pressure American businesses into paying to regain access to their own information.”

From the cybersecurity breaches and vulnerabilities front,

  • The Washington Post reports on April 30,
    • “The Trump administration inadvertently exposed the Social Security numbers of health care providers in a database powering a new Medicare portal, The Washington Post found.
    • “The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) last year created a directory to help seniors look up which doctors and medical providers accept which insurance plans, framing it as an overdue improvement and part of the Trump administration’s initiative to modernize health care technology.
    • “But a publicly accessible database used to populate the directory contains some of the providers’ Social Security numbers, linked to their names and other identifying information. For at least several weeks, CMS made the database available for public use as part of its data transparency efforts. The files are not immediately visible to users who visit the provider directory.
    • “The Post downloaded the database and identified at least dozens of Social Security numbers belonging to health care providers while reviewing a sample of rows.
    • “The Post informed health officials on Tuesday that the numbers had been exposed, giving the agency time to take down the database, and contacted some of the affected providers, who said they were confused and concerned.” * * *
    • “CMS officials said they are working to fix the problem that led to the exposure. A spokesperson said the problem “stems from incorrect entries of provider or provider-representative-supplied information in the wrong places” — essentially, that providers entered information in the wrong place and left their own Social Security numbers exposed.
    • “The agency has taken steps to address it promptly and reinforce safeguards around data submission and validation,” CMS said in a statement.”
  • Cyberscoop relates on April 30,
    • “A pair of persistent and problematic threat groups affiliated with The Com are actively targeting organizations across multiple critical infrastructure sectors for rapid data theft and extortion attacks, according to CrowdStrike.
    • “The financially-motivated attackers, which CrowdStrike tracks as Cordial Spider and Snarky Spider, have used voice-phishing and social engineering attacks to break into victims’ identity platforms and traverse SaaS environments since at least October 2025, the company said in a report Thursday, which it shared exclusively with CyberScoop prior to release. 
    • “Adam Meyers, senior vice president of counter adversary operations at CrowdStrike, said the subgroups composed of native English speakers primarily target U.S.-based organizations in the academic, aviation, retail, hospitality, automotive, financial services, legal and technology sectors.
    • “This “new wave of ecrime threat actors” are closely aligned with Scattered Spider and linked to other subsets of The Com, including SLSH and ShinyHunters, Meyers said.” 
  • Cybersecurity Dive tells us,
    • “Phishing attacks using QR codes to direct victims to malicious links surged in the first quarter of 2026, Microsoft said in a threat report published on Thursday [April 30].
    • “Email-based phishing attacks overwhelmingly used malicious links rather than attachments during the first three months of the year, reflecting the greater range of delivery options for externally hosted threats.
    • “A major phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) platform is significantly diminished after recent attempts to choke off its infrastructure, the company said.”
  • InfoSecurity Magazine points out,
    • “The threat landscape in 2025 was characterized by a surge in compromised credentials, extortion and vulnerability exploitation, according to a new report from KELA.  
    • “The threat intelligence firm tracked nearly 2.9 billion compromised credentials last year globally, it said in its latest report, The State of Cybercrime 2026: Emerging Threats & Predictions.” * * *
    • “Cybercriminals and APT groups have moved from using AI merely as a supportive tool in attacks to making it an essential component in the complexity, enhancement, and escalation of those attacks,” it warned.
    • “Specifically, attacks have moved on from basic jailbreaking of LLMs to vibe hacking for autonomous execution of entire workflows, the report claimed. AI-assisted malware and prompt injection attacks designed to hijack agents are also increasingly common, KELA said.
    • “We’re seeing a fundamental pivot in adversary behavior with the shift from AI-assisted tools to fully autonomous, agentic malicious workflows, where over 80% of operations require minimal human oversight,” said David Carmiel, CEO of KELA.
    • “Attackers no longer need to break in through a backdoor, they can quickly find the key and walk through the front using stolen credentials. Organizations relying on stale intelligence and legacy defenses instead of AI-powered solutions are leaving the door wide open to attacks.”
  • The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which beginning yesterday is no longer subject to shutdown, added four known exploited vulnerabilities to its catalog this week.

From the ransomware front,

  • Security Week reports,
    • “South Carolina-based healthcare provider Sandhills Medical Foundation has disclosed a data breach affecting nearly 170,000 individuals.
    • “Sandhills Medical said in a data security incident notice on its website that it discovered a ransomware attack on May 8, 2025. 
    • “It has since been working with law enforcement, cybersecurity experts, and a forensics firm to investigate the intrusion and determine its impact.
    • “Now, nearly one year later, the healthcare organization has publicly disclosed the incident and notified affected individuals.
  • Insurance Business Magazine relates
    • “A single ransomware crew exploiting a single brand of firewall is now driving nearly half of all cyber insurance claims, At-Bay has warned, in a finding that recasts how underwriters and brokers should be thinking about risk selection.
    • “The cyber carrier’s 2026 InsurSec Report, drawn from more than 6,500 claims and 100,000 policy years, concluded that ransomware has entered an infrastructure-driven phase.
    • “Attackers, it said, are no longer hunting by industry or company size but by the network appliances their targets happen to run.
    • “Nearly three in four ransomware attacks, or 73%, began with a VPN in 2025 — a share that has almost doubled in two years.
    • “SonicWall topped the list of most-targeted VPNs for the first time, linked to 27% of ransomware claims. Akira alone accounted for more than 40%, the highest concentration of a single strain on At-Bay’s books, with SonicWall appliances present in 86% of its attacks.”
  • Security Affairs tells us,
    • “Symantec researchers report that recent Trigona ransomware attacks used a custom-built data exfiltration tool instead of common utilities like Rclone or MegaSync. This shift, seen in March 2026 incidents, gives attackers more control and helps them evade detection, as standard tools are often flagged by security systems. Researchers believe this move shows a growing investment in proprietary malware to stay stealthy. 
    • “The attacks, which occurred in March 2026, mark a significant shift in tactics for Trigona affiliates. The motivation for moving away from publicly available tools remains unknown.” reads the report published by Symantec. “Many publicly available tools are now so well known that they may be flagged by security solutions.”
    • “Trigona, active since late 2022, operates as a Ransomware-as-a-Service linked to the Rhantus cybercrime group.”
  • Dark Reading informs us,
    • “The latest variant of an emerging ransomware may be far more destructive than its operators intended, acting as a wiper that deletes many of an organization’s captured files instead of encrypting them, as typical ransomware does. This scenario makes recovery impossible for defenders while complicating the possibility of holding files for ransom for the attackers.
    • “The Vect 2.0 variant of the ransomware-as-service (RaaS) operation, which first appeared last December, has a flaw across its versions for Windows, Linux, and VMware ESXi that inadvertently and permanently destroys so-called “large files” rather than encrypting them, according to a report published this week by Check Point Software. 
    • “For all files of only 128KB or higher, “this effectively makes Vect a wiper for virtually any file containing meaningful data, enterprise assets such as VM disks, databases, documents and backups included,” according to the report. Check Point has confirmed that the flaw, which “discards three of four decryption nonces for every file above 131,072 bytes (128 KB),” is identical across all three platform variants.” * * *
    • “For defenders, this makes the situation slightly worse, as they no longer will be able to recover all of their files, even if they agree to pay the ransom to do so, Check Point says. “Victims who pay the ransom cannot receive a working decryptor for their largest files, not through operator deception, but because the information required for decryption was irrecoverably destroyed at the moment of encryption.”
    • “They probably wouldn’t realize they can’t recover files only after the ransom is paid and their decryption key doesn’t work, which is why Check Point found it so important to report the flaw in Vect, Smadja says.”

From the cybersecurity business and defenses front,

  • CRN reports,
    • “Anthropic announced Thursday [April 30] it’s moving Claude Security, formerly known as Claude Code Security, into public beta to enable rapid AI-powered vulnerability discovery and remediation.
    • “The launch follows the widely discussed disclosure about Anthropic’s Claude Mythos Preview earlier this month, though the Claude Security offering does not leverage Mythos.
    • “Today’s models are already highly effective at finding flaws in software code,” Anthropic said in a blog post Thursday. “The next generation will be more capable still, and will be particularly effective at autonomously exploiting these flaws.”
  • Cybersecurity Dive relates,
    • “PwC has launched an AI-driven, unified detection-and-response managed security service, enabled by Google Security Operations.
    • “The recent announcement follows PwC’s three-year, $400 million collaboration investment with Google Cloud to modernize cybersecurity operations, unveiled in January. The offering targets smaller and mid-sized enterprises that wouldn’t typically turn to a big consulting firm for cybersecurity.
    • “This is not an old-school cyber-managed service offering that requires a lot of people, time and infrastructure to set up,” PwC’s Partner, Global and US Managed Services Leader, Tim Canonico told Channel Dive from the Google Cloud Next conference in Las Vegas. “We’re leveraging Google’s SecOps platform and building agents to do a lot of the work that would typically require large-scale teams to operate.” * * *
    • “All this automation has human checkpoints, and Canonico says it helps create an efficient, low-cost cybersecurity service with 24/7 monitoring, detection and response.”
  • Security Week tells us,
    • Cisco on Thursday [April 30] unveiled a new open source tool, named Model Provenance Kit, designed to help organizations address potential issues associated with the use of third-party AI models.
    • Organizations often leverage AI models obtained from model repositories such as HuggingFace, where millions of models are available.
    • While these models can offer many benefits, organizations often don’t track the changes made to them. In addition, although repositories provide guidance on the importance of model cards and metadata, the maintenance work performed by their developers can vary, affecting downstream users. 
  • The Wall Street Journal infoms us
    • “OpenAI and Microsoft MSFT have reached a truce.
    • “The startup and its longtime partner have forged a new deal that offers OpenAI more freedom to partner with Microsoft’s rivals, caps the amount of revenue it must share with the software giant through 2030 and removes a controversial clause in prior agreements. Microsoft, meanwhile, will retain access to the startup’s models and products.”
  • Here is a link to Dark Reading’s CISO Corner.

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