FEHBlog

From the Project Glasswing front,

• Cybersecurity Dive reports,
  • “Anthropic on Wednesday [July 1, 2026] unfroze access to its advanced Fable and Mythos AI models after the Trump administration lifted an export-control ban.
  • The return of the two models — with Fable 5 available for general use and the more powerful Mythos 5 limited to a coalition of trusted partners, as it was prior to the ban — represents significant progress in ongoing talks between President Donald Trump’s administration and AI firms over the responsible deployment of frontier AI models, an issue the U.S. government and the tech industry have sparred over in recent months.
  • “In a Tuesday statement announcing a resolution to one of the AI race’s most intense clashes, Anthropic insisted that its models had always been safe and that the government had blown the situation out of proportion — suggesting that tense conversations still lie ahead about the balance between offering advanced capabilities to defenders and keeping them out of the hands of U.S. adversaries.”

• Bleeping Computer adds,
  • “Anthropic says Claude Fable 5 won’t be accessible via Claude subscriptions after July 7, but it’s not a permanent change, and the company expects the model to return outside the usage-based plan soon.
  • “Fable 5 was recently restored after the US government lifted export controls on Anthropic’s most powerful models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5.
  • “As part of the redeployment, Anthropic said Fable 5 would be available globally on Claude.ai, Claude Code, Claude Cowork, and the Claude Platform.”
• and
  • “Claude Fable, the company’s most powerful model, is now available to all users, but early impressions are disappointing, as it appears to be nowhere near the original release.” * * *
  • “[T]he real gut punch is the degraded performance, or as famously used in the AI community, the “nerfed” performance.
  • “On Reddit, users are reporting that the restored Fable 5 feels weaker, or is simply being routed through stricter safety systems more often than before.
  • “The new guardrails are kicking in on way too many tasks and falling back to Opus 4.8,” one user wrote in a Reddit post. “This is not the model that got banned.”
  • “The problem is not just limited to Claude desktop, as Claude Code is also struggling with similar issues.”
    
• Observer interviews CrowdStrike president Michael Sentonas who “discusses Anthropic’s Claude Mythos and how A.I. could speed up vulnerability discovery and exploitation.”

From the cybersecurity policy and law enforcement front,

• Cyberscoop reports,
  • “The Department of Homeland Security is bringing back a key cybersecurity information sharing effort with critical infrastructure, more than a year after the Trump administration shuttered an existing nerve center between government and private sector.
  • “The Alliance of National Councils for Homeland Operational Resilience – Critical Infrastructure program, first reported by CyberScoop in January, is meant to replace the function of the Critical Infrastructure Partnership Advisory Council.
  • “CIPAC was a federal advisory body that allowed agencies like the FBI, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the intelligence community to interact with key owners and operators of water, power, internet and telecommunications to coordinate on cyberattacks and digital vulnerabilities. ANCHOR will fulfill a similar role.
  • “ANCHOR-CI will provide forums through which cybersecurity, law enforcement, intelligence, national security, and other government representatives at the federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial levels may engage representatives of private sector entities and critical infrastructure owners and operators in reviewing the current threat environment, discussing potential vulnerabilities, and forming recommendations on securing a more resilient critical infrastructure and cyberspace,” DHS wrote in a federal register notice set to publish July 1.
  • “ANCHOR-CI will be managed by CISA, which will appoint members to the council from industry, trade associations, state and local governments and other sources.
  • “The body will consist of four types of different councils: one focused on federally designated critical infrastructure sectors, cross-sector councils to deal with emerging threats like cyber attacks or zero-day vulnerabilities, critical infrastructure industry councils and regional coordinating councils.”
• and
  • “Trump administration budget chief Russell Vought told lawmakers Tuesday that he’s willing to work with Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin on re-staffing up the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, following deep personnel cuts and further proposed reductions in the fiscal 2027 budget blueprint.
  • “Mullin said last week at a House Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security hearing that he would like to hire 600 more people at CISA, similar to remarks he made earlier this month at another House hearing. President Donald Trump has cut or lost more than 1,000 from an agency that stood around 3,400-strong at the end of the Biden administration — cuts criticized by lawmakers in both parties.”

• Federal News Network relates,
  • “The National Institute of Standards and Technology expects to advance high profile standards work around a “Cyber AI Profile” and securing artificial intelligence agents this summer, amid a flurry of federal activity aimed at addressing both the risks and opportunities for AI and cybersecurity.
  • “NIST’s National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) is now running six distinct projects focused on the intersection of AI and cyber. But Cherilyn Pascoe, director of the NCCoE, said AI is popping up across the center’s work, which focuses on practical guidance to advance secure technologies in collaboration with government agencies, industry and academia.
  • “I think AI is going to be part, if not a leading part, of every project going forward at the center,” Pascoe said in an interview. “It is becoming so foundational to cybersecurity.”
  • “Recent advancements in AI models like Anthropic’s Claude Mythos have shown the ability to quickly find software vulnerabilities and create cyber exploits much faster than humans.”

• Security Week tells us,
  • “Google, the FBI, and other organizations coordinated in a joint effort to dismantle NetNut, a massive residential proxy network.
  • “Also known as Popa, NetNut is believed to consist of more than 2 million Android devices such as smart TVs and streaming boxes, that have been infected through trojanized applications and malware such as Badbox 2.0.
  • ‘The network’s operator, linked to the publicly-traded Israeli firm Alarum Technologies Ltd, rented the residential proxies to various threat actors, including cybercriminal and espionage groups.
  • “In a single week in June, Google observed 316 distinct threat clusters using NetNut to hide their locations in password-spray attacks and to access victim environments.
  • “We believe our coordinated actions have caused significant degradation to NetNut’s proxy network and its business operations, reducing the available pool of devices for the proxy operator by millions,” Google said.
  • “As part of the operation, the internet giant disabled Google accounts and associated services used for command-and-control (C&C), dismantling the botnet’s backend infrastructure.”

• Cyberscoop informs us,
  • “19-year-old alleged member of the Scattered Spider extortion crew was extradited to the United States last week and remains in federal custody awaiting several cybercrime charges, the Justice Department said Wednesday. 
  • “Peter Stokes, a dual citizen of the United States and Estonia, was allegedly involved in Scattered Spider since it formed in 2022 and boasted on social media about the luxurious globetrotting life he enjoyed while he was still a child. 
  • “The cybercrime ring of young, native English-speaking people has infiltrated more than 100 businesses since 2022, and extorted more than $100 million from its victims around the world, officials said.” 

From the cybersecurity breaches and vulnerabilities front,

• HIPAA Journal reports,
  • “Verizon Business has released the findings from its inaugural Breach Impact Study, which focuses on the financial impact of data breaches. The BIS report is from the same authoring team as the Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report and was produced in partnership with CyberAcuView. The report is based on an analysis of around 70,000 U.S. cyber insurance claims, including 38,000 claims where the policies paid out. The data spans from January 2019 to October 2025.
  • “In contrast to many data breach cost reports, the report is based on median claim amounts rather than averages, which are susceptible to skewing. In 2019, the median financial impact was around $60,000, rising by 80% to $110,000 in 2025, with data breach costs outpacing inflation, which was around 23% over the period of the study. More than half of paid-out claims exceeded $83,000, with 10% having an impact of $920,000 or more. The most extreme 2.5% of cases exceeded $5 million in losses.
  • “The report shows that data breach costs almost doubled between 2019 and 2025, with business interruption the single largest loss driver, followed by loss to threat actor and response and recovery.”

• MedTech Dive relates,
  • “Medtronic has begun to notify people who may have been affected by a cyberattack that was disclosed more than two months ago.
  • “Medtronic provided the update in a statement posted to its website on Monday [June 29, 2026]. At this time, Medtronic has no evidence the data that was accessed has been publicly posted or exposed to the internet, according to the statement.
  • “The company is providing 24 months of complimentary credit monitoring, dark web monitoring and identity theft restoration services. It is also setting up a dedicated call center to address questions for those affected.”

• Bleeping Computer tells us,
  • “The Department of Homeland Security is investigating a cyberattack that compromised the Homeland Security Information Network (HSIN), a sensitive information-sharing platform used by federal, state, local, and private-sector partners.
  • “The intrusion, first reported by Nextgov, was carried out by an unknown threat actor in recent weeks and is believed to have occurred sometime between late May and early June, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
  • “DHS is currently investigating the attack and has reportedly not attributed it to any specific threat actor or foreign governments. Whether any documents were stolen from the system also remains unclear.”

• Cyberscoop informs us,
  • “Toolkits to wage phishing campaigns are a now-venerable instrument for cybercriminals, but researchers recently turned up details on something like a full-fledged “business email compromise-as-a-service” platform.
  • “Cisco Talos said Wednesday that it had found an operator panel dubbed ARToken, which shares infrastructure and other things in common with, and as an affiliate to, the EvilTokens phishing-as-a-service operation built to bypass multi-factor authentication and compromise Microsoft 365 accounts. EvilTokens has reportedly seen a dramatic increase in its phishing attacks — by 1,380% early this year compared to the same period last year — with an assist from artificial intelligence integration.
  • “ARToken is notable, though, for the capabilities that go beyond what’s been made public about EvilTokens so far by companies like Sekoia and Microsoft itself, such as inbox rule manipulation and shared access links.
  • “These features indicate the platform is more mature than a simple device code phishing kit — it is a complete BEC operations environment,” wrote Michael Kelley, security research engineer at Cisco Talos, in a blog post, referring to business email compromise scams that involve sending fake emails to solicit fraudulent payments.”
• and
  • “Citrix published a security bulletin Tuesday [June 30] disclosing six vulnerabilities in NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway appliances, including a high-severity memory disclosure flaw that researchers say belongs to a vulnerability class first identified in the 2023 incident known as CitrixBleed.
  • “The company rated the overall bulletin severity as high and assigned CVSS scores ranging from 6.9 to 8.8 across the six CVEs. Citrix said customers should install the updated builds and, in one case, manually adjust a configuration parameter even after patching.
  • “The most closely scrutinized of the vulnerabilities, CVE-2026-8451, was discovered by researchers at watchTowr, a cybersecurity firm that has published several prior analyses of issues in NetScaler products. According to a technical writeup the firm released alongside Tuesday’s disclosure, the vulnerability stems from how NetScaler parses SAML authentication requests when an appliance is configured as a SAML identity provider, a deployment mode commonly used for single sign-on.”

• CISA added two known exploited exploits (KVE) to its catalog this week.
  • June 29, 2026
    • CVE-2026-48558. SimpleHelp Authentication Bypass Vulnerability
      • Cybersecurity Dive discusses this KVE here.
  • July 1, 2026
    • CVE-2026-45659. Microsoft SharePoint Server Deserialization of Untrusted Data Vulnerability
      • Bleeping Computer discusses this KVE here.

• Bleeping Computer adds,
  • “CISA confirmed on Monday that ransomware gangs have begun exploiting a high-severity Microsoft Defender privilege escalation vulnerability that has previously been abused in zero-day attacks.
  • “Dubbed BlueHammer, the security flaw (CVE-2026-33825) was leaked by a security researcher known as “Nightmare Eclipse” in early April, together with proof-of-concept exploit code, in protest at how the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) handles the disclosure process.
  • “Insufficient granularity of access control in Microsoft Defender allows an authorized attacker to elevate privileges locally,” Microsoft explains in a security advisory.”

• Dark Reading notes,
  • “NIST has reduced the number of CVEs receiving enrichment in the National Vulnerability Database since April due to a growing backlog, impacting the data available to security teams.
  • “Research from Volerion found that, between April 15 and June 15, only 6,759 out of 13,441 non-rejected CVEs published to the NVD received NIST enrichment, causing coverage gaps, delayed analysis, and reliance on inconsistent CVSS scores provided by over 500 CVE Numbering Authorities (CNAs).
  • “Volerion’s analysis identified issues with timeliness, enrichment quality, and scoring discrepancies—especially in critical metrics such as attack complexity—potentially causing organizations to misjudge vulnerability severity and prioritize incorrectly.
  • “The report urges organizations not to rely solely on NIST or CNA CVSS scores for risk assessment, recommending the use of diverse metrics and independent analysis for more accurate prioritization.”

• Security Week points out,
  • “Cisco confirmed that a recently patched vulnerability in its Unified Communications Manager (Unified CM) and Unified Communications Manager Session Management Edition (Unified CM SME) has been exploited in the wild.
  • “Tracked as CVE-2026-20230 (CVSS score of 8.6), the security defect is described as the improper validation of specific HTTP requests, which could allow attackers to mount SSRF attacks.
  • “Successful exploitation of the bug could lead to arbitrary files being dropped to the underlying operating system, which could then be used to gain root access.
  • “Only appliances with the WebDialer service enabled are vulnerable, Cisco says. The service is disabled by default.”

• Cybersecurity Dive adds,
  • “Researchers say a critical vulnerability in Oracle E-Business Suite is facing exploitation attempts by a threat actor. 
  • “The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-46817, is a flaw in the Oracle Payments, and has a severity score of 9.8. 
  • “If successfully exploited, an unauthenticated attacker with network access via HTTP would be able to compromise the product. 
  • “Researchers at Defused observed a hacker exploiting the flaw on its Oracle E-Business honeypots, according to a post on X. The activity was observed on June 27 from a French IP address, but researchers said the threat actor was using a VPN. 
  • “There has been no prior known exploitation activity or any release of a proof of concept, researchers said.” * * *
  • “Oracle previously addressed the vulnerability as part of a larger series of security patch updates in May.”

From the ransomware front,

• Dark Reading reports,
  • The initial access broker (IAB) operation behind the credential-harvesting FortiBleed campaign is working in concert with ransomware actors, indicating the victims of the massive operation are now facing an even greater threat.
  • Research published by SOCRadar this week connects FortiBleed actors with two ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) gangs, Inc Ransom and Lynx. SOCRadar researchers discovered an operator behind the campaign’s infrastructure that was actively logged into the ransom negotiation panels for both groups, and “engaging directly with ransom demands.”
  • “Finding a single operator working both panels, using infrastructure traceable back to FortiBleed, is the clearest evidence yet that FortiGate credentials harvested through this campaign are being handed off, or used directly, for ransomware deployment,” according to the SOCRadar blog post. 
  • “The connection to ransomware gangs marks the latest development in this saga. The attacks against insecure Fortinet FortiGate firewalls were initially discovered last month by security consultant Volodymyr “Bob” Diachenko. SOCRadar then later found that the attacks were part of a global campaign it dubbed “FortiBleed,” which had compromised thousands of devices and used a Golang-based sniffer to turn firewalls into credential stealers.”
• and
  • “An emerging ransomware campaign is targeting small businesses across multiple regions with fake Interpol notices designed to trick victims into downloading malware disguised as evidence of alleged criminal activity.
  • “The campaign has so far has targeted businesses in multiple sectors, including pharmaceuticals, food, agriculture, technology, media, and legal services in the US, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.
  • “Besides its focus on small businesses, the campaign is notable because it highlights how attackers no longer need sophisticated ransomware or the resources of a major cybercrime operation to launch disruptive attacks, Bitdefender said in a report this week. “Even relatively simple malware can become a serious threat when paired with convincing social engineering,” Bitdefender security analyst Alina Bizga wrote.”
    
• The Hacker News relates,
  • “Security firm Sysdig says it has found what it believes is the first ransomware attack run from start to finish by an AI agent.
  • “Its Threat Research Team calls the operator JADEPUFFER and says a large language model handled the whole job: breaking in, stealing credentials, moving deeper into the network, then encrypting and wiping a company’s production database.
  • “Ransomware has always needed a skilled person somewhere in the loop, either at the keyboard or writing the script the malware follows. If a model can chain those steps on its own, the skill needed to run an attack drops to whatever it costs to rent an AI agent.”
  • “The way in was an old, already-patched bug. JADEPUFFER exploited CVE-2025-3248, a missing-authentication flaw in Langflow, an open-source tool for building AI apps and agent workflows. The flaw lets anyone who can reach the server run their own Python code on it, no login needed.” * * *
  • “The fixes are familiar. Patch Langflow and never expose its code-running endpoints to the internet. Do not run AI tools with cloud keys and provider credentials sitting in their environment; keep secrets in a proper manager, away from anything the web can reach.
  • “Harden Nacos: change the default signing key, keep it off the public internet, and never let it connect to its database as root. Never expose a database’s admin account to the internet, and lock down outbound traffic so a hacked server cannot phone home.”
    
• Cyberscoop explains,
  • “How ransomware syndicates weaponize corporate-style organization
    • “From outsourced labor to tiered pricing models, an inside look at how today’s top ransomware threats operate less like rogue hackers and more like Fortune 500 companies.”

• Cybersecurity Dive informs us,
  • “A massive credential-harvesting campaign, dubbed FortiBleed, is linked to two ransomware-as-a-service operations, tracked as INC ransom and Lynx, according to a blog post Wednesday [July 2, 2026] by cybersecurity firm SOCRadar. 
  • An operator with access to FortiBleed infrastructure was found to be logged into negotiation panels for INC as well as Lynx, researchers said. 
  • In certain cases, the attacks may have involved exploitation of a vulnerability in a content collaboration platform called Nextcloud. The analysis is still ongoing, so a public advisory or common vulnerabilities and exposures number has not yet been assigned. 
  • “The Nextcloud issue appears to have been used as part of the attackers’ broader operational workflow, likely for expansion or infrastructure access after initial compromise,” Ensar Seker, CISO at SOCRadar, told Cybersecurity Dive.
  • “Not all cases involved Nextcloud, nor was compromise fully dependent on exploitation of the zero day.” 

From the cybersecurity business and defenses front,

• The Wall Street Journal reports,
  • “Chinese artificial-intelligence systems have matched the performance of Anthropic’s powerful model Mythos in some cybersecurity scenarios, a development poised to reset the global tech race and pressure the White House in its overhaul of U.S. AI policy.
  • “Security researchers said that a new AI model, released this month by China’s Zhipu AI, also known as Z.ai, can match the latest U.S. models when it comes to finding security bugs, although it still lags behind Anthropic’s and OpenAI’s products in other tasks.
  • “Overall, the capability gap between top U.S. models and those built by Chinese companies has narrowed significantly, and use of Chinese AI systems has surged as businesses seek to rein in runaway costs. A host of companies, including Microsoft, are weighing how they can offer Chinese models on their platforms, a development that is set to alter the balance of power among tech companies.
  • “China is making sure that the gap becomes smaller and smaller over time,” said Lior Div, chief executive officer of the cybersecurity company 7AI.”

• Dark Reading relates,
  • “Red Hat and its parent IBM have committed an eye-popping $5 billion to Project Lightwell, a new subscription-based patching service for enterprises running business-critical systems that can’t risk the disruption of updating open-source software in production. It is the largest known commitment specifically targeting open-source software supply chain security — dwarfed only by Google’s broader $10 billion cybersecurity pledge in 2021, which also covered zero-trust and workforce training.”
• and
  • “Apple is changing its approach to security patching, in response to the growing threat of accelerated artificial intelligence (AI) attacks.
  • “The company has historically saved big, bundled sets of bug fixes for new versions of its operating system (OS). That’s set to change. The company released a variety of security updates June 29 for iPhones, iPads, Macbooks, and the Safari browser, untethered to any major version releases. It’s hardly the first time it’s released security updates out-of-band, but the motivation was different this time. According to Reuters, the company said “it was adapting to the reality that, given the ability of artificial intelligence to speed the development of malicious hacking tools, it ⁠needed to reduce the time between when updates were first made public and when they were put into customers’ hands.”
    
• Tech Target discusses “The agentic AI ‘lethal trifecta’: What CISOs should know.”
  • “The very capabilities that make an AI agent useful also make it dangerous. Here’s what CISOs should know about the agentic AI lethal trifecta, and what they should do about it.”

• Security Week explains “How to Conduct a Successful Audit of AI-Driven Software Development.”
  • “As AI-generated code becomes commonplace, CISOs need new audit strategies to measure developer practices, govern AI tool usage, and identify software risks before they reach production.”

• Here’s a link to Dark Reading’s CISO Corner.

From the Project Glasswing front,

• CNBC reports,
  • “A U.S. official told The Associated Press on Tuesday [June 23] that one of Anthropic’s artificial intelligence models had identified vulnerabilities in highly sensitive and secure U.S. government computer systems during a testing exercise.
  • “The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the matter, said Anthropic had teamed up with U.S. intelligence agencies to conduct tests using the company’s Mythos model. It had identified certain vulnerabilities within hours, but that does not mean the model was able to exploit them within that time, the official said.
  • “The official said the testing was done through an Anthropic initiative called Project Glasswing, which brought together tech giants and other companies in hopes of securing the world’s critical software from “severe” fallout that the Mythos model could pose to public safety, national security and the economy.”

• NextGov/FCW relates,
  • “OpenAI is offering a limited preview of its new GPT-5.6 model series to select partners, part of an “ongoing engagement with the U.S. government” as Washington and leading artificial intelligence developers try to strike a balance between tech innovation and safety.
  • Three models in the company’s GPT-5.6 series — Sol, Terra and Luna — will initially be available to select partners following conversations and previews with government officials, OpenAI said in its Friday [June 26] announcement. 
  • “That initially limited rollout follows a request made by the federal government. During the narrow preview period, OpenAI will test model capabilities and coordinate with collaborating partners before making it more broadly available. General access to the models will be available “in the coming weeks,” a similar structure to Anthropic’s Project Glasswing that was set up to test its Mythos Preview model.
  • “OpenAI made it clear that it primarily believes in broad, open access to AI models and that limited previews for government partners are short-term.” * * *
  • “OpenAI’s announcement follows Trump’s signing of an executive order earlier this month that calls for leading AI developers to share model access before market release for safety analyses. Signed following last-minute industry pushback regarding overregulation concerns, the order and OpenAI’s choice to voluntarily share its new model with the government signal the priority the White House is placing on AI safety despite trying to thread the needle between a light-tough regulatory posture and ensuring companies are unencumbered enough to innovate.”

• The Wall Street Journal informs us,
  • “The Trump administration is allowing Anthropic to reoffer one of its banned AI models to trusted companies and government partners, a key step toward rolling back restrictions that fueled industry concern about ad hoc federal regulation of artificial intelligence.
  • “Anthropic can allow dozens of companies and partners trusted by the government to access Mythos 5, one of the two models that the administration banned for foreign use two weeks ago, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said in a Friday letter to Anthropic Chief Compute Officer Tom Brown, a copy of which was viewed by The Wall Street Journal. 
  • “Fable 5, a general-purpose version of Anthropic’s powerful Mythos model that was also banned, remains restricted, and restrictions on Mythos 5 still apply to entities that aren’t trusted partners.
  • “The olive branch from the administration is the result of two weeks of talks led by Lutnick and Brown to address the government’s security concerns, which were sparked by Amazon researchers who found a way to evade Fable’s safeguards.” * * *
  • “An Anthropic spokesman said the company was working to restore access to Mythos 5 for the partners as soon as possible. “We are pleased to see this progress and continue to work with the government to expand access to Mythos 5 and make Fable 5 available for general use again,” he said.” 

From the cybersecurity policy and law enforcement front,

• Cybersecurity Dive reports,
  • “President Donald Trump on Monday [June 22] set ambitious deadlines for how quickly federal agencies and government contractors must adopt quantum-resistant encryption algorithms, aiming to prevent U.S. adversaries from using quantum computers to decrypt sensitive data in the coming decades.
  • “The United States must take steps to strengthen cryptographic protections for the Nation’s sensitive data, critical infrastructure, and digital economy,” Trump said in a new executive order.
  • “The directive requires the Office of Management and Budget to issue guidance setting two major deadlines for agencies’ adoption of post-quantum cryptography (PQC) in their high-value assets: Dec. 31, 2030, for key establishment, and Dec. 31, 2031, for digital signatures.”
  • “By accelerating the U.S. Government’s PQC migration timeline, this Order ensures that American cybersecurity keeps pace with emerging technology and recognizes the reality of the accelerating quantum industry,” the White House said in a fact sheet about the new order.”

• Dark Reading adds,
  • “Organizations will face major challenges — and even greater costs — on the road to becoming quantum-ready over the next five years.” * * *
  • “Jonathan Nguyen-Duy, chief technology officer (CTO) at quantum security vendor Arqit, tells Dark Reading that many organizations underestimate the scale of this challenge, viewing post-quantum migration as a technology upgrade.
  • “Cryptography sits everywhere from applications, networks, cloud environments, and software libraries to connected devices and third-party systems,” he says. “That’s why post-quantum migration is much more than swapping one algorithm for another. Every update needs to be tested and implemented without disrupting the business. It requires long-term funding, cross-functional ownership and a level of persistence that many organizations will find challenging.”
  • “Garfield Jones, SVP of research and strategy at post-quantum cryptography vendor QuSecure, says that many agencies are in the inventorying stage, and some have designated PQC leads. “But substantial work remains on implementation and testing of NIST standardized algorithms within agency environments,” he explains. “Smaller agencies may be able to meet these accelerated deadlines, but larger and federated agencies face a more difficult path as previously unaccounted IT and OT assets continue to surface through manual counting processes.”
    
• The American Hospital Association News relates,
  • “Leaders of the Five Eyes cybersecurity agencies, consisting of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States, released a joint statement June 22 urging resilience as the evolution of artificial intelligence has been rapidly transforming cyber risk. The alert recommends leaders and organizations to understand and assess risk, readiness and accountability; prioritize foundational cybersecurity practices and controls; empower leaders with authority and resources; and remain engaged as threats and guidance evolve. The agencies recommended additional actions to reduce operational, financial and reputational exposure. Specific tactical recommendations include reducing attack surface, accelerating patching processes, addressing legacy systems, reviewing and strengthening identity and access controls, and preparing for incidents before they happen. 
  • “This important advisory from leaders of the world’s most trusted domestic and international cybersecurity agencies amounts to a clear and stark warning for the private sector,” said John Riggi, AHA national advisor for cybersecurity and risk. “Cyber adversaries are using AI to increase the speed, sophistication and severity of cyberattacks. Within months, not years, the rapid development of frontier AI models will accelerate cyber risk. It is recommended that organizations treat cyber risk as an enterprise risk, use AI to bolster network defenses, and mitigate potential risk to patient care and safety by preparing in-depth cyber resiliency and extended clinical continuity plans. It is especially important for hospitals and health systems to prioritize cyber resiliency for mission-critical and life-critical services.” 
     
• Homeland Security Today informs us,
  • “The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) published a guide [on June 24] that helps federal civilian agencies advance their zero trust capabilities and adopt modern architectures supported under the Trusted Internet Connections (TIC) 3.0 Initiative. Part of CISA’s Journey to Zero Trust series, this guide helps agencies transition away from the limitations of using TIC 2.0 and capitalize on TIC 3.0 flexibilities to employ Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) solutions. Federal agencies will better understand, plan and mature to zero trust architecture to improve user experience, increase visibility and control, and enable telemetry sharing with CISA services.
  • “Many legacy architectures rely on perimeter-based security models such as TIC 2.0 that routes all traffic through centralized controls. Today’s rapidly evolving threat landscape and organizations’ shift to more distributed business models with cloud capabilities and remote workforces reveal shortcomings in legacy perimeter-based paradigms. Based on CISA’s work with federal agencies, this guide helps technical leaders and enterprise architects implement a SASE solution to replace their existing managed trusted internet protocol services (MTIPS) connectivity. The transformation to SASE solution improves network performance, reduces latency, and increases visibility and control.”

• Per a General Accounting Office news release,
  • “Cloud computing services allow access to resources like networks, storage, and software. It can cost federal agencies less to use these services than to create their own. But using cloud computing services can pose cybersecurity risks.
  • “We looked at how some agencies protect data in the cloud. Agencies we reviewed varied in implementing key cloud computing security practices. For example, some agencies didn’t fully continuously monitor security controls. Also, some agencies didn’t document how to respond to or recover from cybersecurity incidents.
  • “Our recommendations address these issues and more to ensure cloud services are safe.”

• Security Week points out,
  • “The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced Wednesday that it’s seeking public feedback on updated Internet of Things (IoT) security guidelines.
  • “Updated to reflect current security needs, the guidance provides general considerations on the impact of IoT products on risk assessments and aims to establish cybersecurity requirements to support security controls.
  • “The initial public draft (IPD) of SP 800-213 Revision 1, titled ‘IoT Product Cybersecurity Guidelines for the Federal Government: Establishing IoT Product Cybersecurity Requirements’, is available for download on NIST’s website (PDF), with the public comment period ending August 24.
  • “As organizations increasingly rely on IoT products, they need to understand that these products are system elements and must be taken into account in the risk management process, NIST argues.
  • “The updated guidelines build on SP 800-213A, which provides a catalog of IoT product cybersecurity capabilities and non-technical capabilities for both manufacturers and consumers.”

• Cybersecurity Dive notes,
  • “Microsoft on Wednesday announced a coordinated operation with Europol and other international partners to disrupt Amadey and StealC — tools used as infostealers to conduct ransomware, financial fraud and other digital crimes. 
  • “Amadey is a specialized tool used by cybercriminals to infect computers, while StealC is used to steal passwords and other sensitive data after the computers are infected. The tools are used widely around the globe, with Microsoft finding more than 140,000 computers worldwide infected with the tools during the first two weeks of May. 
  • “Microsoft identified more than 200 malicious Amadey and StealC command-and-control domains and IPs and shut them down using a combination of court-ordered actions, domain seizures and related actions. 
  • “In a filing with the U.S. District Court in Miami, Microsoft accused a series of unnamed defendants of operating a malware-as-a-service enterprise. Microsoft asked the court to disable and transfer control of related internet domains to the company. 
  • “Microsoft, in a blog post Wednesday, said investigators used AI to help analyze how Amadey and StealC were being used in the infostealing operation.” 

From the cybersecurity breaches and vulnerabilities front,

• HealthExec reports,
  • “Last week, HealthExec reported on a data breach at a healthcare AI company that resulted in personal data from its hospital and payer clients being exposed to hackers. This week, a filing with the federal government provided details on how many patients were impacted. 
  • “According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Office of Civil Rights healthcare data breach tracker, the number of individuals impacted by the hack on Xsolis was determined to be 1,396,519.
  • “Stolen data was determined to include protected health information, including details on medical treatments that patients received. Names, dates of birth, contacts, Social Security numbers and health insurance information were also compromised. 
  • “Xsolis, a company that uses artificial intelligence to improve patient care utilization, posted a notice earlier this month that contained many of the details of the data security incident, said to have stemmed from a “targeted phishing attack” that resulted in an unauthorized third party accessing its network.” 

• Cybersecurity Dive relates,
  • “Klue, a provider of a market intelligence platform, is investigating a supply chain attack that led to the mass exfiltration of Salesforce customer relationship management data belonging to hundreds of customers, including several prominent cybersecurity firms. 
  • “A threat actor used a compromised Klue Battlecards app to gain access to OAuth tokens for connecting Klue with third-party integrations, including Salesforce, according to information from Klue and security researchers at Reliaquest, which warned about the attack in a recent blog post. 
  • “Salesforce, which disabled connections through the Klue Battlecards appuntil further notice, said there is no indication of a vulnerability within its own platform. 
  • “A threat actor tracked as Icarus posted stolen data from several victims on its website, according to a Monday [June 22] blog post from Huntress. Itself a victim of the attack, Huntress said none of its internal systems were impacted.
  • “The threat group has begun reaching out to companies whose customer data was compromised in the attack, said Charles Carmakal, CTO at Mandiant Consulting.” 

• Bleeping Computer tells us,
  • “The FBI and CISA are warning that a phishing campaign targeting Signal users tied to Russian intelligence services has evolved to steal Signal Backup Recovery Keys, allowing attackers to access victims’ historical messages.
  • “The updated public service announcement is an update to a March 2026 advisory that warned the threat actors were targeting users of commercial messaging applications, particularly Signal, through phishing campaigns designed to hijack accounts rather than break end-to-end encryption.
  • “RIS cyber threat actors continue to masquerade as automated CMA support accounts in updated phishing messages but have evolved their tactics to attempt to elicit victims’ Backup Recovery Keys,” warns an FBI PSA published today [June 26].
    
• CISA added six known exploited vulnerabilities (KVEs) to its catalog this week.
  • June 23, 2026
    • CVE-2025-67038 Lantronix EDS5000 Code Injection Vulnerability
    • CVE-2026-34908 Ubiquiti UniFi OS Improper Access Control Vulnerability
    • CVE-2026-34909 Ubiquiti UniFi OS Path Traversal Vulnerability
    • CVE-2026-34910 Ubiquiti UniFi OS Improper Input Validation Vulnerability
      • The Hacker News discusses these KVEs all of which required patching within three days.
  • June 25, 2026
    • CVE-2026-12569 PTC Windchill and FlexPLM Improper Input Validation Vulnerability
    • CVE-2026-20230 Cisco Unified Communications Manager Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) Vulnerability
      • Bleeping Computer discusses these KVEs. CISA set the same June 28 deadline for federal agencies to patch both KVEs.

• Cyberscoop adds,
  • “An attacker exploited a previously unknown and unpatched Cisco vulnerability earlier this year to infiltrate a communications service provider and gain the highest level of access possible, Mandiant said Wednesday [June 24].
  • “Cisco has since patched the flaw, one of seven actively exploited zero-day vulnerabilities this year in its SD-WAN (software-defined wide area network) software used to manage internet traffic within organizations, typically those that are widely distributed, such as banks with numerous branches.
  • “But Google-owned cybersecurity firm Mandiant said the attacker (or attackers) could have used its root-level access to obtain broad and undetected visibility into the internal traffic throughout the provider’s entire corporate network. In a caveat, Mandiant also said it could not fully assess how far the compromise actually went because of how cleverly the perpetrators hid their activity.
  • “The attack illustrated hackers’ ongoing targeting of edge devices, Mandiant said. Attacks on such devices have been very common and involved in some of the most consequential breaches in recent years, prompting the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency to direct federal agencies to give them special attention this year.

• Cyberscoop observes,
  • “When CISA issues an emergency directive, the message to every federal agency and every security team paying attention is to patch now. For CVE-2026-50751, a CVSS 9.3 authentication bypass in Check Point Remote Access VPN, that directive landed on June 21. despite exploitation beginning in early May. That, six-week active intrusion gap is not a footnote. It is the entire story.
  • “The flaw itself is straightforward in the worst possible way. A logic error in the certificate-validation process, triggered when the deprecated IKEv1 key-exchange protocol is enabled, allows a remote attacker to establish a fully authenticated VPN session without a valid password. No phishing. No credential theft. No lateral movement required to reach the perimeter. The attacker walks through the front door, and the door logs it as a legitimate entry.
  • “By the time Check Point disclosed the vulnerability on June 8, a Qilin ransomware. affiliate had already used it to compromise a few dozen organizations worldwide. The post-access playbook was efficient, including Rclone for data exfiltration, the Tox protocol for command-and-control communication routed through disposable VPS infrastructure. Quiet, fast, and designed to complete the job before detection had a chance to matter.” * * *
  • “CISA will issue another emergency directive. There will be another authentication bypass, another perimeter device turned attack vector, another financially motivated threat actor with a head start measured in weeks. The patch-and-detect cycle will play out again, and organizations that had their exposure managed entirely at the perimeter will find themselves in the same position.
  • “The lesson here is not that Check Point failed or that VPNs are over. It is that any architecture where a single authentication bypass gives an attacker operating authority over the entire environment has a structural problem that no patch resolves. Closing the door is necessary. Making sure the ransomware cannot detonate even after the attacker is inside is the part the industry still has not solved at scale.
  • “That is the conversation the CISA directive should be starting, and mostly is not.”

• Security Week points out,
  • “Researchers at Wiz have disclosed a high-severity vulnerability in the Amazon Q Developer extension for Visual Studio Code that could allow attackers to steal developers’ cloud credentials by luring them into opening a booby-trapped code repository.
  • “Amazon Q Developer is an AI-powered coding assistant that offers developers features such as code suggestions, automated refactoring, and access to external tools and services via integrations with local processes.
  • “AWS was notified about the issue on April 20 and a patch was released on May 12. The cloud giant published a security advisory this week.
  • “The root cause of the vulnerability was that the extension would automatically act on configuration files embedded in a workspace without first asking the user for permission.

From the ransomware front,

• Cybersecurity Dive reports,
  • “The number of ransomware attacks that hackers claimed on dark-web leak sites rose by nearly one-fifth in 2025, to 6,883, while the total number of leak sites increased by roughly one-third, to 115, the security firm Bitsight said in its annual “State of the Underground” report.
  • “Ten groups — five of them associated with Russia — were responsible for roughly 58% of attacks, according to the report, suggesting a remarkable concentration of activity.
  • “Roughly 60% of ransomware victims were in the U.S., with the manufacturing sector topping the list.”

• Dark Reading adds,
  • “A specter is haunting Europe — the specter of ransomware.
  • “After a global lull in 2024 and 2025, the ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) ecosystem appears to be back to form, at least in Europe. Researchers from Black Kite tracked 684 ransomware attacks across the continent through the first four months of 2026. That’s 55% more than the 441 recorded in the first four months of 2025, even more than the 643 recorded through the first half of 2025.
  • “Globally, the US absorbs almost half of all ransomware victims. Canada and the UK have traded second place. Europe was a step behind. Now that’s shifting,” Ferhat Dikbiyik, chief research and intelligence officer at Black Kite, tells Dark Reading. He believes that at least a couple of factors are at play. 
  • “First, an oversaturation of ransomware activity in the US is leading some to seek opportunities elsewhere. And “second, and this is my read: [Attackers’] own artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted target research is starting to point them at Europe,” he says. “The stealer logs are there. The unpatched vulnerabilities are there. The money is there. Smaller countries may run weaker defenses, but the big economies offer the full package: wealth and exposure together. The question isn’t why ransomware groups target the major EU powers; it’s why would you not?”

• HelpNetSecurity tells us,
  • “A relatively new backdoor called Mistic has been deployed in multiple attacks since April 2026 targeting organizations in the insurance, education, IT, and professional services sectors, according to Symantec.
  • “The malware appears to be associated with Woodgnat, also known as KongTuke, a financially motivated initial access broker (IAB) active since at least May 2024 that has been connected to ransomware operations including Qilin, Interlock, Rhysida, Akira, 8Base, and Black Basta.
  • “Woodgnat reportedly functions primarily as an IAB. Its goal is not to deliver the final payload, but to establish highly durable remote access within an enterprise and sell this high-level access to ransomware affiliates and other attackers for a fee,” the researchers said.”

• CSO Online shares an “Anatomy of a retail ransomware attack: Tabletop simulates modern mayhem methods.”

From the cybersecurity business and defenses front,

• Cybersecurity Dive reports
  • “A coalition of technology companies, including Anthropic, AWS, IBM and Microsoft, announced a joint effort to find, disclose and remediate security flaws in open-source software. 
  • “The group, called Akrites, will establish a shared security incident response team as well as a coordinated vulnerability disclosure process.
  • “The founding members, led by the Linux Foundation, will commit extensive resources to the effort, including funding, engineers and cybersecurity expertise. 
  • “Officials said the plan was mainly driven by the emergence of frontier AI models that radically accelerated the ability to discover vulnerabilities in critical software applications. In recent months, malicious actors have demonstrated the ability to weaponize AI for use in sophisticated attacks.” 
• and
  • “AWS launched agentic tools AWS Continuum, which flags and helps remediate security risks, and AWS Context, a search layer that uses a company’s data to make better informed agents, at its AWS Summit in New York City on June 17.
  • “The company rolled out the tools as the rise in AI agents is rapidly changing the way enterprises operate, reshaping the cybersecurity landscape and necessitating tools that connect siloed data.
  • “AWS rolled out new capabilities for AI tools Kiro, AWS DevOps Agent, AWS Transform for modernization and Amazon Bedrock AgentCore to build and deploy agents. It also updated Amazon Quick, an agentic assistant-modeled AI application, which was released as Quick Suite last year.”

• Dark Reading adds,
  • “In 2025, nearly 3 in 10 security professionals thought that fully autonomous AI systems could satisfy their companies’ security-testing needs. But after a year of testing and experimentation, that optimism has largely gone away.
  • “Instead, chief information security officers (CISOs) and other security practitioners have more realistic expectations of the AI-based systems, which often have significant blind spots, are prone to false positives, and can blow through AI budgets, according to a June 25 report released by Cobalt, a penetration-testing-as-a-service firm. The number of organizations willing to rely on AI-powered penetration testing for their security needs fell to 9% in 2026, down from 29% a year earlier. The vast majority of companies preferred a hybrid, human-in-the-loop approach or relegating only non-critical tasks to automation.
  • “Security practitioners are experimenting to find the sweet spot of what can be automated reliably and responsibly, says Gunter Ollmann, chief technology officer for Cobalt.”
    
• HIPAA Journal informs us,
  • “Cybersecurity risk is growing, and healthcare organizations are struggling to defend a rapidly increasing attack surface. AI tools are being implemented without the secure infrastructure to support them. Most healthcare practices have meaningful gaps in cyberattack recovery readiness, face ongoing and regular third-party vendor disruptions, and there is growing concern that a cyberattack will result in a patient fatality. The current state of cybersecurity in healthcare is far from rosy.
  • “These were some of the findings from the 2026 Healthcare IT Landscape Report from Omega Systems, a leading provider of managed IT and security services to the healthcare and financial services industries. The report is based on a survey of 200 healthcare business leaders in the United States, including CEOs, CISOs, CIOs, CFOs, and COOs, at healthcare organizations with between 50 and 600 employees. The healthcare organizations represented in the report include medical practices, clinics, ambulatory care centers, specialty services, and long-term care facilities.”

• Tech Target offers “A CISO’s guide to infostealers: Prevention and detection.”
  • “Infostealers aren’t new. But what is new is that almost anyone — regardless of skill — can now deploy the malware. Update incident response plans to safeguard your operations.”

• Security Week notes,
  • “AI agents go beyond answering questions. They can autonomously browse websites, read emails, search company files, query software tools, and more. AI models producing incorrect answers is hardly a threat, until agents encounter information that’s maliciously designed to influence what it sees, believes, remembers, or executes.
  • “An agent leverages webpages, document stores, wikis, images, emails, or tools to produce intended outputs. But what happens when these sources mask malicious instructions? These trap AI agents into making a wrong interpretation or taking unintended action. Scientists from Google DeepMind categorized these “traps” into six categories, including content injection, semantic manipulation, cognitive state, behavioral control, systemic, and human-in-the-loop traps. The last two are more theoretical and expected to become more relevant as AI agent use grows. It helps to understand these traps to determine the necessary mitigations.”

• Per Cybersecurity Dive,
  • “As cyber risk evolves, the insurance industry tightens guardrails.”
  • “C-suite executives are concerned about resilience, but claims are increasingly tied to strict underwriting standards.”

• Here is a link to Dark Reading’s CISO Corner.