“”We are in the Singularity.” Elon Musk

From the Project Glasswing front,

• Cybersecurity Dive reports,
  • “Versions of Anthropic’s Claude AI model broke out of their testing environments and hacked into other organizations on three separate occasions, Anthropic said on Thursday [July 30].
  • “The frontier AI lab’s announcement came roughly one week after OpenAI disclosed a similar incident involving its models, a revelation that has set off a new round of consternation about whether AI developers are adequately overseeing their sophisticated AI products.
  • “In the three incidents that Anthropic disclosed, Claude conducted the intrusions while believing that it was participating in a capture-the-flag exercise in which it did not have access to the internet and all available systems were part of the test. “Due to a misunderstanding between us and our evaluation partner,” Anthropic explained in a blog post, “this was not the case, and internet access was available.”
  • “As a result, when Claude encountered the three victim organizations, it believed that they were simulated targets and broke into them using basic attack techniques such as exploiting weak passwords.
• The article describes the incursions which is worth a click.

• Cyberscoop adds,
  • “We almost never get both sides of an intrusion. This time we did.
  • “Last month, Hugging Face disclosed a breach into part of its production infrastructure, saying an autonomous AI agent system ran the attack from start to finish. Five days later, OpenAI revealed that its own models, including GPT-5.6 Sol along with an unreleased one, were responsible for the breach. OpenAI called it an unprecedented cyber incident.
  • “Most of the commentary since has been about AI capability. That is the least useful part of the story, because the capability was doing what it was destined to do. Security teams should look at a simpler truth: in both systems, the key defenses sat behind untrusted code that was already running.”

• Cybersecurity Dive notes,
  • “Businesses are more concerned about AI-fueled threats than traditional cybersecurity dangers, potentially undermining their ability to prepare for the attacks they are most likely to face, researchers at the security firm Arctic Wolf said on Tuesday.
  • “Roughly a third of organizations said AI topped their list of cybersecurity concerns, while concerns about malware, credential theft and cloud misconfigurations dropped from their 2025 numbers, according to Arctic Wolf’s annual AI and cybersecurity trends report.
  • “The report also delved into organizations’ use of AI for their security programs, their reasons for reporting cybersecurity incidents and regional trends in cybersecurity challenges.”
• and
  • “AI agents remain a major cybersecurity risk for businesses, with 81% of CISOs worrying that their AI systems aren’t properly governed, according to a report Okta published on Wednesday.
  • “Only 47% of companies Okta surveyed said they knew all the AI agents on their networks, and only 46% reported controlling those agents’ access to corporate data.
  • “Okta’s findings highlight a complicated and dangerous environment in which companies aren’t properly balancing the risks and benefits of agentic AI.”

• Security Week points out,
  • “Anthropic on Friday [July 24] rolled out Claude Opus 5, pitching it as a cheaper alternative to its top-tier Fable 5 model. In terms of cybersecurity, the new model is nearly as good as the AI giant’s most capable system, Mythos 5, at spotting software vulnerabilities, but remains well behind it in turning those findings into working exploits.”
  • “The difference comes from Anthropic’s own OSS-Fuzz-based evaluation, which measures how well a model can locate and then exploit vulnerabilities with minimal human steering. According to the company, Opus 5 identifies vulnerabilities at a rate close to Mythos 5, but its exploit-development score trails considerably. 
  • “Anthropic frames this as a deliberate outcome, noting that it has avoided training Opus 5 directly on offensive cyber tasks. The gains it does show, the company says, are a byproduct of broader capability improvements.”
    
• Per a July 28, 2026, SonicWall news release,
  • SonicWall today confirmed it is a participant in Anthropic’s Project Glasswing and is testing Claude Mythos 5 for defensive cybersecurity work. Through the initiative, SonicWall is applying the model to vulnerability discovery and code review across its own software to find and remediate security issues before they can be exploited. 
  • Project Glasswing is an Anthropic-led industry effort that gives participating security teams access to Claude Mythos 5, a frontier model not available to the general public, for defensive security research. Anthropic launched the program to help close the gap between attackers using AI to accelerate vulnerability discovery and defenders’ ability to find and fix those same issues first. 
  • “Security vendors are not exempt from the pressure every software maker is under right now,” said Chandro Prasad, SonicWall Chief Product Officer. “Vulnerabilities move from disclosure to exploitation faster than most patch cycles can keep up with. Participating in Project Glasswing gives our security team another way to find and close gaps in our own code before an attacker does. That is the standard we hold ourselves to, and this program is a meaningful way to raise it further.” 

From the cybersecurity policy and law enforcement front,

• Bleeping Computer reports,
  • “The U.S. and Australian governments have released new guidance urging critical infrastructure organizations to prepare to isolate vital operational technology systems in the event of a cyberattack or other major disruptions.
  • “The guidance, titled “CI Fortify – Advice for isolating vital systems,” was developed by the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Australian Signals Directorate’s Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC), the FBI, and international partners.
  • “It provides recommendations for disconnecting critical operational technology (OT) and associated systems from corporate, Internet-facing, and other less-trusted networks while continuing to provide essential services for an extended period.”

• Cyberscoop relates
  • “The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency published a guidebook for federal agencies Thursday to aid them on managing security risks with open-source software, touching on topics like patching and open-source AI models.
  • “An executive order President Joe Biden signed and that President Donald Trump amended ordered CISA and other agencies to issue open-source security recommendations to federal agencies. But the guidance is also timely, given a recent slew of attacks on open-source software (OSS).
  • “As part of our statutory mission, CISA remains laser-focused on enhancing the nation’s cybersecurity by collaborating with government, industry and the open-source community to understand and securely use OSS,” said Chris Butera, acting executive assistant director for cybersecurity. “CISA encourages federal civilian agencies to review this guide and implement the principles and practices to improve risk management, better execute their mission, and better serve the public.” 
  • “The document, “Open Source Software: Security Principles and Practices,” touts the advantages of open-source software — which anyone can use, modify and share — as offering benefits in efficiency, cost, security transparency and more, but notes that it also has unique tradeoffs.”
  • “All software carries risk, and OSS is no more or less risky than other software. The key distinction is that, with OSS, agencies can directly assess code quality and security, rather than relying solely on vendor assurances,” the guidance reads. “OSS is increasingly intertwined with emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence. Agencies that adapt to OSS’s unique characteristics will position themselves to meet future challenges and leverage new innovations.”
    
• Dark Reading tells us,
  • “A gaggle of government partners from around the world has released new guidelines for the minimum elements that organizations should include in a software bill of materials (SBOM).
  • “The document, published this week, was authored by the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and 16 other government entities spread across four continents. It supersedes the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s (NTIA) 2021 guidelines, which laid out what an SBOM had to contain as far as the US government was concerned. This updated version was first drafted in 2025, and was then informed by suggestions from 90 commenters, including major organizations like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) to create the resulting document.
  • An SBOM is essentially an “ingredients list,” detailing the building blocks and supply chains that make up a given piece of software. This could include proprietary or open source software components, APIs, utilities, and more. As a risk management tool, it aims to provide visibility into where vulnerabilities exist in a software stack and how to prioritize patching, among other things.
  • “There’s nothing revolutionary in this latest spruced-up framework, which follows SBOM policy revisions earlier this year, but it introduces 10 new data fields, and a dozen or so updates to existing elements, which range from major to minor significance. Though the changes might be directionally positive, Jeff Williams, founder of OWASP and founder and CTO of Contrast Security, argues that these minor procedural changes miss the bigger picture.”
    
• Per a Health and Human Services Department news release,
  • “The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Office for Civil Rights (OCR) today announced a settlement with OSF Healthcare System and its Affiliated Covered Entities (OSF), concerning potential violations of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) Privacy, Security, and Breach Notification Rules. OSF is headquartered in Illinois and has providers located in Illinois and Michigan.
  • “An accurate and thorough HIPAA risk analysis is not only required by law, but it is also necessary to protect health information and prevent or mitigate ransomware attacks,” said OCR Director Paula M. Stannard. “If a HIPAA regulated entity doesn’t know what threats and vulnerabilities exist to its electronic protected health information (ePHI), they will often learn the hard way when their systems are hacked.” * * *
  • “The settlement resolves an investigation that OCR initiated after OSF filed a breach report in October 2021. In April of 2021, OSF discovered that its files had been infected with the “Nephilim” variant of ransomware. The PHI of 53,907 individuals was exfiltrated by the threat actor. Affected PHI included driver’s license numbers, diagnosis and treatment information, prescription information, medical record numbers, provider names, dates of services, financial account information, and health insurance information.” * * *
  • “Under the terms of the resolution agreement, OSF agreed to implement a corrective action plan that OCR will monitor for two years and paid $552,250 to OCR. Under the corrective action plan, OSF has committed to taking steps to ensure compliance with the HIPAA Rules and protect the security of ePHI, including:
    • “Conduct an accurate and thorough risk analysis to determine the potential risks and vulnerabilities to the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of its ePHI; and
    • “Develop and implement a risk management plan to address and mitigate security risks and vulnerabilities identified in its risk analysis.
  • “Read the resolution agreement and corrective action plan.”

From the cybersecurity breaches and vulnerabilities front,

• Dark Reading reports,
  • “A coordinated cyberattack targeting more than 30 community water systems in Minnesota this week underscored the growing threat to often poorly protected operational technology (OT) from adversaries seeking to disrupt critical infrastructure services across the US.
  • “The attacks, which US government officials have reportedly attributed to Iran, disrupted automated systems in some Minnesota communities, forcing them to switch to manual operations for brief periods. However, the attacks don’t appear to have affected water supply, water safety, or wastewater services in a major way, based on public statements by community officials and Minnesota’s IT Services (MNIT) unit.” * * *
  • In an advisory Thursday [July 30], the FBI described the attacks as broader and impacting water and wastewater systems in at least seven states with some of the attacks degrading water operations. The FBI advisory said attackers were targeting OT devices including Rockwell Automation/Allen-Bradley PLCs, specifically MicroLogix 1100 and 1400 series devices. “After remotely accessing internet-facing devices, the actors changed the IP addresses and passwords, resulting in a loss of monitoring and control functionality,” the FBI said. It recommended that affected organizations remove PLCs “from direct Internet exposure via secure gateway and firewalls, setting up strong, unique passwords, and utilizing access control list (ACL) to allow only authorized communication between expected control system devices.”

• Bleeping Computer adds,
  • “Pharmaceutical company Amgen says it suffered a data breach after threat actors stole corporate data and patient information stored in multiple cloud systems operated by third-party service providers.
  • “Amgen is a California-based biotechnology company that develops and manufactures medicines for serious illnesses, including cancer, cardiovascular disease, inflammation, and rare diseases.
  • “The company said it detected the unauthorized activity in July 2026 and responded by activating its cybersecurity response plan, implementing containment measures, and hiring independent forensic experts to investigate the incident.
  • “The investigation found that the attackers stole sensitive data from the cloud environments.
  • “The Company has since learned that some of its data, including proprietary data, patient protected health information, and other information, has been exfiltrated from these cloud environments,” Amgen said in a Form 8-K filing with the SEC.”

• Cyberscoop tells us,
  • “Huntress researchers spotted an active and ongoing series of attacks targeting SonicWall VPN and firewall accounts, which compromised 30 organizations in less than two days, the company said in a threat advisory Tuesday [July 28].
  • The credential stuffing campaign started Saturday and grew rapidly, ultimately compromising 92 unique user accounts during the next 41 hours, according to Huntress. Researchers said the attacks were broad and opportunistic, hitting various SonicWall devices, rather than targeting specific types of organizations.
  • SonicWall hasn’t released a security advisory about the malicious activity as of press time. A spokesperson told CyberScoop the company is still investigating and hopes to have more information soon.
  • The attacks ended — at least for now — as abruptly as they began. The last compromise occurred Monday, according to Michael Tigges, principal tactical response analyst at Huntress.

• Bleeping Computer informs us,
  • “Hackers are actively exploiting a vulnerability in the FastJson open-source Java library, allowing remote code execution without user interaction or elevated privileges.
  • “The security issue affects FastJson versions 1.2.68 through 1.2.83 and is leveraged in attacks targeting various organizations in the U.S.
  • “The malicious activity was observed last week by the agentic security company ThreatBook, and researchers at the business protection company Imperva confirmed that it was “targeting a wide range of organizations, across Financial Services, Healthcare, Computing, Retail, Business, and other industries.” * * *
  • “FastJson is an open-source Java library developed by Alibaba, used for serializing Java objects to JSON, and vice versa.” * * *
  • “In its security bulletin, Alibaba confirmed the critical severity of the vulnerability and warned that it is exploitable on “the most common Spring Boot deployment model.”
    
• CISA added three known exploited vulnerabilities to its catalog this week.
  • July 27, 2026
    • CVE-2025-68686 Fortinet FortiOS Exposure of Sensitive Information to an Unauthorized Actor Vulnerability
    • CVE-2026-16812 Arista VeloCloud Orchestrator On-Prem OS Command Injection Vulnerability
      • Cybersecurity News discusses the Fortinet KVE here.
      • Arista discusses its KVE here.
  • July 29, 2026
    • 2026-20316. Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center Use of Hard-coded Password Vulnerability
      • Cybersecurity News discusses this KVE here.

• Bleeping Computer notes,
  • “Broadcom has released security updates to fix five vulnerabilities in VMware vCenter, ESX, Workstation, and Fusion, including three critical flaws that allow attackers to bypass authentication, execute arbitrary code, or escape from a virtual machine to the host.
  • “The vulnerabilities also affect products containing vCenter or ESX, including VMware Cloud Foundation, VMware vSphere Foundation, VMware Telco Cloud Platform, and VMware Telco Cloud Infrastructure.
  • “Broadcom says organizations running versions released before those listed as fixed in its advisory should assume they are vulnerable and take immediate action.”

• Dark Reading adds,
  • “A maximum-severity vulnerability in the open source AI agent platform Ruflo puts enterprise AI deployments at risk by letting attackers conduct various malicious activities from inside the orchestration framework. The flaw also can leave agents behaviorally compromised even after it’s been patched.
  • “Researchers at Noma Security’s Noma Labs discovered the flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-59726, in Ruflo, formerly called Claude Flow and which hosts AI agent swarms for Codex and Claude Code, they revealed today. The vulnerability, which received the highest CVSS severity score of 10, allowed them to access the platform without logging in at all, according to Noma Labs.”
  • “The weakness is a lack of authentication coupled with command execution capabilities, enabling complete control over the container and exposure of sensitive credentials,” according to details about the flaw posted on OpenCVE.”

• ZDNet notes,
  • “Forty-three percent of organizations have experienced AI-enhanced or AI-generated phishing attacks, and 37% have encountered AI-augmented malware, according to a new survey. 
  • “CDW’s 2026 Security Research Report is based on a survey of 951 IT decision-makers across a variety of industries. Published Monday, the research reveals what appears to be an AI arms race between cyberattackers and defenders. Many organizations are considering investing in AI threat detection, training, and controls to combat the new face of modern cyber threats: AI techniques, tactics, and technologies.” 

From the ransomware front,

• Inc.com reports,
  • “The hackers behind the Fairlife ransomware attack have identified themselves, and experts are sounding the alarm. 
  • “A hacking group known as Anubis has claimed responsibility for the ransomware attack that hit Fairlife, Coca-Cola’s dairy products unit, saying it locked the company’s servers and stole about one terabyte of confidential data.
  • “Coca-Cola first confirmed the attack on July 17, noting that the incident had affected Fairlife’s production systems and forced a temporary suspension of its U.S. operations. At the time, the company said it expected the disruption to continue for the foreseeable future. It said that there was no impact on the safety or quality of its products.
  • “Upon revealing its identity, Anubis threatened to leak the stolen data unless Fairlife paid a ransom. Despite that, Coca-Cola announced this week that much of production had resumed. The company did not disclose how it managed to restore operations or share any details about how the hackers initially gained access to Fairlife’s systems. Coca-Cola has not disclosed whether it paid the ransom.
  • Zach Lewis, chief information officer and chief information security officer at a private higher education institution, told Inc. that this was a case of double extortion: Attackers encrypt a company’s systems and demand payment for a decryption key, and then come back with a second demand, threatening to leak stolen data unless they’re paid again.
  • He described the process as an oddly formal one, with negotiations often playing out through dedicated portals set up by the hackers themselves. “It’s really bizarre working with these criminals who are running a really good support site to navigate through this negotiation,” he said. “They want the transaction to be successful, because if they don’t hold up their end of the bargain, they don’t get that good reputation, and when they go to hit someone else, they won’t get paid either.”
    
• Health Exec relates,
  • “A 2025 data breach on a medical billing company, first revealed in late June, exposed sensitive protected health data on 1.3 million people to hackers.
  • “In an announcement, Medical Computer Business Services (MCBS) said the September 2025 incident stemmed from an unauthorized third party gaining access to its network, though it revealed few details about the nature of the attack, saying online that personal information on individuals stored on its network may have been “accessed or removed.”
  • “Soon after, an updated filing with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Civil Rights Healthcare Data Breach Tracker showed the official number of victims, meaning that hackers at the very least accessed files on 1,261,464 patients.
  • “The company did not confirm that files were moved offsite. However, BleepingComputer reports—complete with a screenshot from the dark web—that a data trove from the incident is available online, with a ransomware group called PEAR (Pure Extraction and Ransom) taking credit. 
  • “The data is available for download, which typically means a ransom wasn’t paid. 
  • “The trove was discovered by researchers at the outlet sometime this week.” 

• Bleeping Computer tells us,
  • “Health-ISAC, a cybersecurity information-sharing organization for the health sector, is warning healthcare and medical technology organizations of an observed increase in successful attacks by ShinyHunters.
  • “ShinyHunters is an extortion gang that primarily conducts supply chain and identity attacks to breach cloud SaaS and storage platforms in data theft attacks,
  • “Over the past two years, the threat actors have become notorious for conducting numerous supply chain attacks on third-party integration partners. These breaches give them access to OAuth tokens that are used to integrate with SaaS providers like Salesforce and Snowflake.
  • “The threat actors are known for identity attacks, where they target employees through social engineering, including vishing and phishing, to compromise corporate single-sign-on accounts. Once they gain access to an account, they log in to an organization’s Okta, Microsoft Entra, or Google SSO dashboard, which acts as a centralized hub listing all SaaS applications the user has permission to access.” * * *
  • “Health-ISAC says the most important defensive step is breaking the attack chain between the initial vishing call and the takeover of an SSO account.
  • “Organizations are advised to require out-of-band identity verification for password resets, MFA resets, and device re-enrollment requests.
  • “This can include calling users back using a previously verified phone number and requiring manager approval for privileged accounts.”

• Cybersecurity Dive adds,
  • “Dozens of North American companies have been targeted in a social engineering campaign that abuses Microsoft Teams to deploy ransomware, according to a report by cybersecurity firm Sophos.
  • “A threat group, tracked as STAC4749, has initiated chats or calls through Microsoft Teams under the guise of providing help desk or IT support to companies in the U.S. and Canada. 
  • “After initiating a remote session through Microsoft Quick Assist or the cloud-based RemSupp tool, hackers deploy PowerShell in order to establish persistence and execute malicious payloads.” * * *
  • “In at least three cases, the hackers deployed Chaos ransomware on a compromised system. Researchers said in one of the cases, the time between initial access to deployment of ransomware was 17 hours, which is consistent with prior Chaos cases. 
  • “The observed attacks ran between February and June, targeting organizations in the services, manufacturing, energy, construction and engineering sectors.” 

• Cybersecurity News informs us,
  • “The Gentlemen ransomware operation is drawing attention for its aggressive effort to disable security software before locking files. Instead of relying only on fast encryption, the attackers attempt to remove the tools that could detect, block, or contain the attack.
  • “This approach raises the risk for businesses because antivirus and endpoint monitoring tools may be silenced when they are needed most. 
  • “The campaign’s exact initial access method was not detailed, but the activity shows attackers preparing systems for encryption after obtaining a foothold.
  • “Catalyst analysts identified the malware component as anticheatG13.sys, a kernel-level driver with broad capabilities for manipulating processes, networking, files, and system memory.”
    
• Per Dark Trace,
  • “Darktrace detected a multi-stage ransomware intrusion from its earliest stages, identifying reconnaissance, privilege escalation, lateral movement, command-and-control communications, and data exfiltration before encryption occurred. This analysis highlights how behavioral detection exposed attacker activity using legitimate tools and infrastructure, providing multiple opportunities for early intervention and containment. “

From the cybersecurity business and defenses front,

• Security Week reports,
  • “Nvidia and a large group of technology, cybersecurity, and enterprise software companies announced on Monday the launch of the Open Secure AI Alliance, a new initiative aimed at developing and sharing open source tools, models, and techniques for securing AI systems and agents. 
  • “The effort builds on existing work from the Linux Foundation’s recently launched Akrites initiative and the OpenSSF community.
  • “Inaugural partners of the Open Secure AI Alliance also include Adobe, Cadence, Capital One, Cisco, Cloudera, Cloudflare, Cognition, CrowdStrike, Databricks, Dell, DoorDash, Elastic, HPE, Hugging Face, IBM, LangChain, Microsoft, Naver, NetApp, Nous Research, OpenClaw, Palantir, Palo Alto Networks, Red Hat, Reflection AI, Salesforce, SAP, SK Telecom, ServiceNow, Siemens, Snowflake, SpaceXAI, Synopsys, Thinking Machines Lab, and TrendAI.”

• Cybersecurity Dive adds,
  • “Microsoft on Monday announced the launch of Project Perception, an agentic security system designed to help defenders combat a rapidly evolving threat of AI-based attacks by malicious actors. 
  • “The company also introduced MAI-Cyber-1-Flash, an AI model that helps users identify and remediate vulnerabilities through an integration with the company’s MDASH code-scanning harness. 
  • “The launch is part of a major industry push to implement AI-based security that can protect corporate IT and critical infrastructure systems from sophisticated attacks. In the past year, threat actors have demonstrated the ability to speed and scale attacks in a way that traditional security technologies cannot match.” 

• Forresters offers its take on how Project Perception should be implemented.

• The Wall Street Journal reports,’
  • “Data-security company Cyera has agreed to acquire startup Oasis Security for $1 billion, the latest large deal in a wave of consolidation across the cybersecurity industry fueled by artificial intelligence.
  • “The cash-and-stock acquisition would help Cyera bridge its data-protection platform with Oasis’s technology for managing nonhuman identities, such as AI agents and automated software, as companies grapple with the risks of deploying autonomous tools across their businesses. The companies expect the deal to close later this year.
  • “The biggest catalyst for this acquisition is the customers,” said Yotam Segev, Cyera’s chief executive, who co-founded the company in 2021. “Our customers, and especially our shared customers, have been telling us that these capabilities belong together.”
  • “The transaction between the two New York-based companies is among the largest cybersecurity acquisitions of the year, underscoring how AI is reshaping the industry.”

• Cyberscoop adds,
  • “Okta announced Thursday it has signed a deal to buy Permiso Security, a cloud-based firm that tracks threats tied to human, machine, and AI-driven digital identities. 
  • “Permiso specializes in spotting risks after a user or system has already logged in, an area the industry refers to as identity threat detection and response. The company draws on more than 2,500 signals gathered from over 70 identity-related partners to flag issues such as excessive access permissions, unused credentials, unusual behavior from AI agents, and violations of internal security policies.
  • “Ely Kahn, Okta’s chief product officer, told CyberScoop that Permiso will allow Okta to merge two functions that have operated separately: real-time threat detection and identity security posture management. “Today those are two separate products that don’t really talk to each other,” he said.” 

• The American Hospital Association offers “Lessons Learned from Conversations with the FBI: Healthcare Cyberthreats and Best-practice Defense.”

• The Health Sector Coordinating Council provides a summary recap of the Operation Vital Signs National Cybersecurity Exercise which took place on July 21 an 22, 2026.

• The HIPAA Journal shares its HIPAA Audit Checklist.

• Tech Target gives us a CISO’s guide to privileged identity management.

• SC Media explains why “effective incident response plans elusive for most cybersecurity teams.”

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

“”We are in the Singularity.” Elon Musk

From the War with Iran front.

• The American Hospital Association News tells us
  • “The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and other U.S. and international partners July 22 released an updated advisory on Iranian-affiliated cyber actors targeting internet-connected programmable logic controllers, which are computers used to manage and monitor equipment. PLCs can be found in climate control systems, access control systems and many other applications in healthcare. Agencies first warned of malicious activity targeting Rockwell Automation PLCs in April. The updated advisory expands the scope of incidents to include observed targeting of Schneider Electric, Siemens and potentially other manufacturers of PLCs. It also includes new guidance on detecting malicious changes in reusable code modules exploited within Rockwell Automation PLC programs.”

From the Project Glasswing / the Singularity front,

• Cybersecurity Dive reports on July 22,
  • “Two OpenAI large language models, including one not yet released to the public, broke free of their constraints last week and autonomously hacked into the AI application library Hugging Face.
  • “The first-of-its-kind event, in which the LLMs tried to steal information that would help them excel on an important test, has highlighted the dangers of the AI industry’s increasingly powerful tools.
  • “We consider this incident to be an unprecedented cyber incident, involving state-of-the-art cyber capabilities, and are responding accordingly,” OpenAI said in a blog post on Tuesday that confirmed its models’ responsibility for the attack, which Hugging Face announced on July 16.”

• AI Strategist David Borish, writing in LinkedIn, lets us know,
  • “On July 21, Elon Musk quote a message from OpenAI researcher Will Depue that laid out a timeline: a security incident at Hugging Face on July 21, a counterexample to the Jacobian conjecture on July 20, the disproof of Erdős’s unit distance conjecture on May 20, the solution to Erdős problem 1196 on April 14, and Anthropic’s Project Glasswing finding thousands of zero day vulnerabilities on April 7. Depue’s post noted that in “normal” times, these milestones would have been spread across months or years. Compressed into a single week of news cycles, they read differently. Musk’s reply ran five words: “We are in the Singularity.”
  • “The claim landed hard because, unlike most Singularity talk, this timeline is not speculative. Each item is a documented event with a paper trail, and the details matter more than the framing.” * * *
  • “The skeptical case. Grocery prices, commute times, and most people’s jobs look the same this week as they did a month ago. Every event on Depue’s timeline required a human to set up the evaluation, pose the conjecture, or prompt the model, and in most cases required teams of human experts to verify, formalize, or clean up afterward. Deep learning researcher Yann LeCun has argued current architectures will not reach general intelligence without a different approach entirely. Writer Freddie deBoer has made the broader point that a self-improving AI escaping human oversight remains a speculative scenario without a demonstrated mechanism, distinct from AI systems getting better at specific tasks people assign them.
  • “Both things can be true at once. The rate of capability progress across math, security research, and coding is genuinely compressing what used to take years into weeks, and the humans setting the objectives, verifying the outputs, and deciding what gets deployed have not gone anywhere. The more telling test ahead is quieter than another isolated proof or another leaderboard topper: whether formal verification, in Lean or otherwise, keeps pace with the rate of claims, and whether the containment failures at Hugging Face turn out to be a one time embarrassment or the first entry in a longer list.”

• TechTimes adds,
  • “Microsoft is preparing to launch Project Perception, an AI-powered security platform that scans enterprise codebases for exploitable vulnerabilities — and is built around a deliberate cost-and-access argument against Anthropic’s Claude Mythos Preview, the most capable vulnerability-hunting AI available and one that most organizations on Earth cannot currently use.
  • “The platform is expected to debut before the end of July. It routes security analysis tasks across AI models from Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic, using a model-selection layer that reserves expensive frontier model calls for the steps where they create real value and assigns cheaper, distilled models to high-volume scan passes. That architecture, according to reporting first published by The Information, is designed to bring the cost of running continuous, enterprise-grade vulnerability discovery well below what Anthropic charges for direct Mythos access.”

From the cybersecurity policy front,

• Federal News Network reports,
  • “The unprecedented breach of a technology vendor by autonomous artificial intelligence agents is serving to underscore governmentwide efforts to streamline federal cloud security and prioritize faster patching of critical software vulnerabilities.
  • “OpenAI confirmed this week that its advanced AI training models broke out of their test environment and then hacked into the networks of start-up vendor Hugging Face. The incident is the latest AI cybersecurity development driving policy conversations across Washington.
  • “Pete Waterman, director of the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) at the General Services Administration, pointed to the Hugging Face incident as a landmark moment for cybersecurity during Carahsoft’s FedRAMP Summit on Thursday.
  • “Waterman said the incident underscores his program’s shift to the FedRAMP 20x model.”

• Cyberscoop relates,
  • “Industry groups who spoke at town halls hosted by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency [(CISA)] about a pending cyber incident notification regulation had a few consistent messages:
  • “We want this to apply to fewer of us. We don’t want to report to you on as many incidents. We want to give you less information when we do. 
  • “CISA last week published transcripts from the town halls, where the agency sought feedback on the delayed rule for the 2022 Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act — perhaps the most significant cyber legislation Congress has ever passed. That law required critical infrastructure owners to report major cyberattacks to the federal government within 72 hours, and ransomware payments within 24 hours.” * * *
  • “Where the rule specifies what kind of data organizations should report in a major incident, CISA should “seek to collect the least amount of information possible in the easiest to report fashion to facilitate information accuracy and reporting speed,” said Samantha Burch, vice president of technology public policy at government affairs at AHIP, a health insurance industry trade association.” * * *
  • “One industry representative told CyberScoop that CISA’s willingness to hold town halls, combined with the Trump administration strategy emphasizing “common sense regulation,” was a good sign about where the rule might be heading.
  • ‘They are not picking up on the Biden administration’s approach and tweaking it. They’re thinking, ‘What are the specific pieces of information we need during a cyber incident to help critical infrastructure companies respond?’” said Henry Young, senior director of policy for the Business Software Alliance. “In general, industry is optimistic that what we’ll end up with are a few of the most important pieces of information, so that in the emergency, companies can act quickly and actually respond to an incident rather than completing lots of paperwork.”
• and
  • “Seven out of 10 federal cyber regulations requiring written reports to federal agencies are duplicated elsewhere, a report from a government watchdog found in a report to Congress Wednesday.
  • “And so far, efforts to de-conflict haven’t had much success, the report from the Government Accountability Office concluded.
  • “At the request of two top lawmakers, the GAO examined federal cyber regulations at 37 agencies. It counted 80 out of 117 rules that “either contain the same kind of reporting requirement applicable to a sector or the same reporting requirement as at least one other regulation.”
  • “The desire to harmonize those conflicting rules gathered steam under the Biden administration, as it undertook a more aggressive push to regulate cybersecurity than prior administrations. It has continued into the second Trump administration.”

From the cybersecurity breaches and vulnerabilities front,

• HIPAA Journal reports,
  • “There has been a general trend of increasing data breaches over the past decade, with this year on track to set a new record. According to the H1 2026 Data Breach Report from the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC), there have been at least 1,803 data compromises in H1 2026, which will give an annual total of more than 3,600 data compromises if they continue to occur at a similar rate as the first half of the year.
  • “Across those data compromises, there have been 1,394 confirmed data breaches (excluding leaks, exposures, and unknown incidents), accounting for 77% of total events. More than 471 million victim notices have been issued, which already exceeds the total number of victim notices for all of 2025, and there are still six months of the year to go. While at the current rate, this year is unlikely to beat the total for 2024, even with only 6 months of data, 2026 already ranks as one of the worst years to date.
  • “As ITRC explains in the report, part of the reason is the return of mega data breaches, the biggest of which involved the Instructure Holdings’ Canvas platform, which accounted for an estimated 275 million notices. A mega data breach at Under Armour involved more than 72.7 million notices, while the SoundCloud data breach saw 29.8 million victim notices issued.
  • “There were no healthcare data breaches in the top 10 data compromise list, in contrast to H1, 2025, when three healthcare data breaches made it into the top 5. In fact, based on breach reporting to the HHS’ Office for Civil Rights, there have been relatively few mega data breaches in healthcare. In H1 2026, only 7 healthcare data breaches required more than 1 million notices.”

• Dark Reading relates,
  • “Russian state-backed threat actors are compromising networks of Western governments and enterprises through the Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS), according to intelligence and cybersecurity agencies in more than a dozen countries.
  • “In a joint advisory Thursday, the US government and several allied nations warned that an advanced persistent threat (APT) dubbed “Laundry Bear” has been targeting ZCS customers since July 2025. Laundry Bear actors used a zero-day vulnerability in ZCS, tracked as CVE-2025-66376, in a phishing campaign that featured what experts describe as a “half-click exploit” to breach Zimbra webmail servers.
  • “Unlike traditional phishing campaigns that persuade a user into taking an action, such as clicking a link or opening a file, Laundry Bear’s latest campaign leverages a view-based exploit that only requires a user to view a malicious email within a vulnerable version of the webmail service,” the agencies said in the advisory.
  • The campaign is designed “almost certainly to gather sensitive information for the Russian Federation,” according the advisory. The Laundry Bear attacks mark yet another threat from Russian APTs against US organizations.
    
• Cybersecurity Dive tells us,
  • “A critical vulnerability in Check Point Software’s SmartConsole login process is being exploited, with a small number of customers already impacted, according to a security advisory released Wednesday from the company. 
  • “The authentication bypass flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-16232, allows an attacker to gain full administrative privileges after they access an application login token. An attacker can then make changes to security policy and configurations. The vulnerability has a severity score of 9.1 out of 10. 
  • Check Point on Wednesday released a jumbo hotfix to address several security issues in its firewall and management products, according to the advisory.
  • A vulnerability of this type is particularly concerning, giving an attacker the ability to make a number of changes, according to a blog post released Thursday by Rapid7. A remote hacker can “alter administrator permissions, manipulate VPN configurations, and potentially disable or tamper with logging and monitoring,” Rapid7 said. 
• and
  • “A critical-severity deserialization vulnerability in Microsoft SharePoint is now under exploitation, according to security researchers at watchTowr and Defused. 
  • “The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-50522, has a severity rating of 9.8 out of 10 and could enable an attacker to execute remote code over a network. 
  • “Hackers are targeting on-premises SharePoint server environments following the release of new exploit code, watchTowr researchers said in a LinkedIn post. Researchers warned that attackers are stealing machine keys to maintain long-term access.”

• CISA added six known exploited vulnerabilities to its catalog this week.
  • July 21, 2026
    • CVE-2021-27137 DD-WRT Stack-Based Buffer Overflow Vulnerability
    • CVE-2026-0770 Langflow Inclusion of Functionality from Untrusted Control Sphere Vulnerability  
    • CVE-2026-63030 WordPress Core Interpretation Conflict Vulnerability  
    • CVE-2026-60137 WordPress Core SQL Injection Vulnerability
      • Security Affairs discusses these KVEs here.
  • July 22, 2026
    • “CVE-2026-16232 Check Point SmartConsole Improper Authentication Vulnerability
      • The Hacker News discusses this KVE here.
    • “CVE-2026-50522 Microsoft SharePoint Deserialization of Untrusted Data Vulnerability
      • Cybersecurity Dive discusses this KVE here.

• Cyberscoop adds,
  • “Malware targeting AI coding assistants and software developers’ automated workflows is spreading into more environments with more capabilities, placing defenders at a growing disadvantage.
  • “A malware strain dubbed Sandworm_Mode, first discovered by Socket in February, represents a growing threat to software development. According to a CrowdStrike report, the self-propagating worm can spread through code repositories with minimal detection, raising alarms about software supply chains.
  • “The malware’s capabilities are extensive, but not especially unique compared to the series of supply-chain worms known as Shai-Hulud, and more recently Mini Shai-Hulud.
  • “This is the new trend,” Adam Meyers, senior vice president of counter adversary operations at CrowdStrike, told CyberScoop. “This is something we’re seeing more and more. It’s the new hotness right now.”

From the ransomware front,

• Cybersecurity Dive reports,
  • “A threat group called Anubis claimed credit for the ransomware attack against Fairlife, the dairy products unit of Coca-Cola. 
  • “The group says it locked the servers at Fairlife and obtained 1TB of data from the attack, according to researchers at Arctic Wolf. Anubis is threatening to leak information if its demands are not met within a week. Researchers provided screenshots posted on the group’s data leak site
  • “Coca-Cola was forced to suspend U.S. production at Fairlife while it launched an investigation into the attack. Coca-Cola officials noted there was no impact on the safety or quality of its dairy products.” “

• Dark Reading relates,
  • “Ransomware is not just growing, it is actually accelerating, with activity surging between October 2025 and March 2026, as more than 60 new groups entered an increasingly crowded criminal ecosystem.
  • “For enterprises, the surge means not only more attacks but also a larger and constantly changing pool of adversaries to track and defend against.
  • “Black Kite analyzed ransomware incidents between April 1, 2025, and March 31, 2026, and identified 7,551 known victims worldwide. That represented a 25% increase over the previous 12-month period, with much of the growth concentrated in the second half of the year. Black Kite counted 2,904 victims between April and September 2025 and 4,647 between October 2025 and March 2026, marking a 60% increase in reported ransomware victims. March 2026 was the busiest month with as many as 861 organizations — or nearly 28 per day — falling victim to a ransomware attack.
  • “This isn’t a problem we’ve contained,” says Ferhat Dikbiyik, chief research and intelligence officer at Black Kite. “It’s still a lucrative business, and the barrier to running one keeps getting lower.”
    
• The Hacker News tells us,
  • “Threat actors have been observed exploiting a now-patched high-severity Palo Alto Networks PAN-OS vulnerability as an entry point to deploy Qilin (aka Agenda) ransomware on victim environments.
  • Arctic Wolf Labs said it investigated multiple intrusions in June 2026 that began with the exploitation of CVE-2026-0257 (CVSS score: 7.8), an authentication bypass flaw affecting the portal and gateway components of PAN-OS software.
  • Successful exploitation of the flaw allows unauthenticated remote attackers to sidestep authentication and establish VPN sessions without valid credentials when authentication override cookies are enabled with specific certificate configurations.
  • “Post-exploitation tradecraft varied across intrusions, from rapid encryption-only operations to full double-extortion, possibly suggesting multiple affiliates operating under the Qilin ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) umbrella,” the cybersecurity company said.
    
• Bleeping Computer points out,
  • “The Clop ransomware gang (also tracked as Cl0p) is targeting Internet-exposed PTC Windchill and FlexPLM instances in a new data theft extortion campaign.
  • “Clop has reportedly been exploiting a critical improper input validation vulnerability tracked as CVE-2026-12569, which allows attackers to execute arbitrary code on vulnerable Windchill and FlexPLM instances.
  • “As cybersecurity company ReliaQuest reported on Thursday, Clop operators have been deploying JSP webshells that allow them to exfiltrate sensitive data from targeted companies’ compromised PLM platforms.
  • “ReliaQuest has observed threat actors actively exploiting CVE-2026-12569, a critical unsafe deserialization vulnerability (CVSS 9.3) affecting PTC Windchill and FlexPLM. Exploitation enables unauthenticated remote code execution and JSP web shell deployment for remote command execution and sensitive product data exfiltration,” the company said.”

• Per Cisco Talos,
  • “Cisco Talos has discovered a new Rust-based remote access trojan (RAT) we call “msaRAT” attributed to the Chaos ransomware group. The name is derived from the binding names found in the binary: “msaOpen,” “msaClose,” “msaError,” and “msaMessage”.
  • “msaRAT is implemented using the Tokio asynchronous runtime, with primary capabilities of browser-leveraged remote code execution and covert tunneling to establish command-and-control (C2) communications.
  • “This RAT never touches the network directly — it controls its C2 communication channel exclusively through Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP), a browser debugging API. The binary contains a Cloudflare Workers endpoint, but it never makes HTTP connections to that domain itself; it offloads that work entirely to the browser.
  • “msaRAT manipulates the browser via CDP, performs signaling (SDP Offer/Answer exchange) with Cloudflare Workers, and establishes a WebRTC DataChannel between the browser and the C2 server using Twilio TURN (Traversal Using Relays around NAT) as a relay.”

From the cybersecurity business and defenses front,

• The Wall Street Journal reports,
  • “The Defense Department signed an up to 10-year, near $7 billion contract with Oracle intended to streamline fragmented licensing and intra-agency efficiency.
  • “The Austin-based cloud computing and software company separately maintained different contracts across the agency. The government said the deal will optimize services and deliver hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer savings.”

• TechCrunch relates,
  • “Glow, a cybersecurity startup founded by former Meta and Snowflake executives, emerged from stealth as a unicorn, betting that artificial intelligence is reshaping how enterprises secure employee devices.
  • “The Palo Alto-headquartered startup on Wednesday said it raised $180 million in an all-equity Series A funding round that valued it at $1.2 billion, with backing from Sequoia Capital, Cyberstarts, Greenoaks, and Redpoint Ventures, alongside participation from Index Ventures, Swish Ventures, Lux Capital, Operator Collective, and Holly Ventures. The investment made Glow one of the latest cybersecurity startups to achieve unicorn status before publicly disclosing revenue metrics.”
    
• Cybersecurity Dive relates,
  • “Many ransomware victims remain vulnerable to follow-up cyberattacks, even after they complete their incident response processes, highlighting gaps in mitigation activities that increase their odds of becoming repeat targets, the security firm Black Kite said on Tuesday in its annual ransomware report.
  • “The report described how victims fail to patch critical vulnerabilities and properly configure email security tools, underscoring the importance of thorough digital cleanup operations as part of the ransomware recovery period.” * * *
  • “Black Kite also shared fresh data on the ransomware ecosystem and its top targets.”
  • Because ransomware is a profit-motivated business, cybercriminals prioritize the easiest and most lucrative targets, and if an organization fails to fix the problems that opened the door for hackers in the first place, they are likely to return. That fact makes it imperative for hacked businesses to fix digital liabilities as soon as possible after an incident, lest hackers revictimize them seeking another payout.
    
• MSN adds, “The next cyber arms race isn’t about finding bugs. It’s about fixing them first.”

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

From the renewed war with Iran front,

• Dark Reading offers an opinion piece explaining that “Iran’s Cyber Crosshairs Focus Beyond Critical Infrastructure.”
  • “Obscurity isn’t a defense. If your company has any Internet-facing vulnerability, you’re at risk from multiple threats.” * * *
  • “The groups behind recent attacks, including Handala, Ababil of Minab, and others operating within Iran’s cyber-influence ecosystem, cloak themselves in the mask of cyber activism, or “hacktivism.” They are largely opportunistic. They aren’t specifically hunting targets; they are on “Shodan Safaris” hunting easily exploited vulnerabilities or insecure systems. A law firm or logistics hub with an exposed programmable logic controller or an unpatched VPN is an easy, appealing target.
  • “Many companies don’t realize how much of their infrastructure is externally accessible, or how little it takes to exploit what’s exposed. Handala, which the US Justice Department has attributed to Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security, remotely wiped over 200,000 hosts in an attack on Stryker, a medical device manufacturer, in March. The incident disrupted manufacturing and impacted their first-quarter earnings. More recently, Ababil of Minab compromised Vyncs, a GPS tracking platform used across the logistics sector, taking systems offline and defacing its website. In the Stryker incident, the attack was likely made possible through credentials stolen via commodity malware and provided for sale via illicit channels — emphasizing the opportunistic nature of these events.”
    
• Security Week adds,
  • “An Iran-linked advanced persistent threat (APT) actor has been using a modular command-and-control (C&C) framework in recent attacks targeting organizations in Israel, Check Point reports.
  • “Tracked as Cavern Manticore, the APT focuses on government entities and IT providers, and appears linked to Iran’s MOIS (Ministry of Intelligence and Security), with possible ties to the OilRig subgroup Lyceum (also known as Hexane and SiameseKitten).
  • ‘Cavern Manticore’s C&C framework includes an adaptable toolset built using .NET, with various compilation formats used across components, used as an anti-analysis layer.”

From the Project Glasswing front,

• Crypto Briefing reports,
  • “The U.S. government has begun utilizing AI technology developed by Anthropic to identify vulnerabilities in its software systems. This initiative, part of Project Glasswing, leverages Anthropic’s Mythos model to detect bugs within hours, a significant improvement over traditional methods. Despite previous concerns over security risks associated with the Mythos model, its deployment underscores the government’s commitment to strengthening cybersecurity measures. The move is seen as a strategic effort to protect critical infrastructure and enhance national security.”

• Bleeping Computer adds,
  • Microsoft says Windows users should expect to see an increase in security updates as the company increasingly relies on artificial intelligence to discover vulnerabilities in its codebase.
  • In a blog post published today, Microsoft said advances in AI have significantly accelerated vulnerability discovery, allowing engineers to identify more security issues before they can be exploited in zero-day attacks.
  • “The pace of vulnerability discovery is changing with advances in AI making it possible to find more issues, faster, across more code, with new mechanisms that can accelerate both discovery and analysis,”  Microsoft said. * * *
  • “This announcement comes two days [July 8] after Reuters reported that the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has begun using Anthropic’s Fable AI model to scan government software for vulnerabilities that cybercriminals or foreign intelligence services could exploit.
  • “According to the report, the AI-assisted code audits have already uncovered numerous vulnerabilities, though officials did not disclose how many or provide details on their severity.”

• SC Media lets us know “what our industry learned the past 90 days since the Mythos announcement.”
  • “For years, security leaders have discussed the possibility that AI would eventually accelerate offensive cyber operations. Mythos transformed that discussion from a future-looking hypothesis into an immediate operational concern.
  • “Over the past three months, the industry has begun adjusting to a new reality. We no longer view AI simply as a productivity tool that helps developers write code or assists analysts with investigations. It’s emerged as a force multiplier for vulnerability discovery, capable of identifying weaknesses at a pace that challenges traditional security workflows. As the time between vulnerability discovery and exploitation shrinks, organizations are now forced to rethink long-standing assumptions about patch management, vulnerability prioritization, and cyber defense.
  • “This shift extends well beyond one AI model or one vendor. Whether organizations use commercial frontier models, open-weight alternatives, or internally developed AI systems, the underlying trend remains the same: AI has dramatically compressed the window defenders have to identify, validate, and remediate software flaws before attackers can weaponize them. In many ways, the security industry has entered an era in which the speed of decision-making may become just as important as the quality of detection.”

From the cybersecurity policy and law enforcement front,

• On July 3, the Office of Management and Budget’s Office for Information and Regulatory Affairs posted the federal government’s 2026 unified regulatory agenda.
  • Fierce Healthcare tells us,
    • “Federal regulators have delayed a major overhaul of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Security Rule, pushing back final action on the rule by a year.
    • “The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) had proposed a May 2026 release for a final rule that makes significant changes to the HIPAA Security Rule and marks the first major update to the 23-year-old rule in more than 10 years.
    • “The U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) website was updated and indicates that the final rule was pushed back to July 2027.”
  • Federal News Network lets us know,
    • “[The unified agenda] shows that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency expects to issue a final rule for the Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act in September 2026. Earlier this summer, CISA held a series of townhalls to get some final feedback on the regulations.” * * *
    • “Meanwhile, the Unified Agenda also shows that a federal contracting rule that standardizes cybersecurity requirements for unclassified IT systems will also be finalized in September 2026.
    • “The rule “will ensure federal information systems are better positioned to protect from cybersecurity threats by standardizing common cybersecurity contractual requirements across agencies for unclassified federal information systems,” according to the regulatory preview.
    • “And another federal contracting rule on “cyber threat and incident reporting and information sharing” is also projected to be finalized in September, the Unified Agenda shows.
    • “Both the CUI rule and the incident reporting rule have been long anticipated, with proposed rules dating back to 2023. They each represent landmark rules for the government contracting community, which is also grappling with the roll out of the Defense Department’s Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) requirements.
    • “The CMMC regulations went into effect late last year, but DoD has been slowly ramping up the requirements for third-party audits. This November, however, the requirement for a third-party CMMC assessment is expected to become standard in all applicable contracts.
    • “DoD also expects to shortly issue more details on how the cybersecurity standards that underpin CMMC will be updated.
    • “The Unified Agenda shows that this month, DoD will adopt an interim final rule for the CMMC program that details the deadline for shifting to the National Institute of Standards and Technology Special Publication 800-171 Revision 3. Currently, CMMC assessments are tied to Revision 2 of the NIST standards.”

• Fedscoop informs us,
  • “Greg Barbaccia is stepping down as federal CIO and leaving government at the end of August, he said in an email to the CIO Council Tuesday [June 7, 026].
  • “I’m writing to share that I’ve made the difficult decision to leave government, and my time as Federal CIO is coming to an end,” Barbaccia wrote to CIOs on the council in his email, obtained by FedScoop. 
  • “Barbaccia, who joined the Trump administration as its top IT official in January 2025, said his last day in the role will be Aug. 31.
  • “Barbaccia’s departure comes just months after he brought on former Department of Education CIO Thomas Flagg to be his deputy. Flagg would be the default acting official with Barbaccia’s departure, a government chief information officer told FedScoop on the condition of anonymity to be more candid.”

• Cyberscoop observes,
  • “The AI-focused executive order President Donald Trump signed last monthgave the Treasury Department, the National Security Agency, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) 30 days to establish a new “AI cybersecurity clearinghouse.” The deadline passed last week.
  • “The clearinghouse is meant to coordinate the scanning, discovery, and validation of software vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure, and then prioritize how those vulnerabilities get patched and distributed.
  • “It’s the right problem to solve. The question now is whether what is created will actually solve it.”
• and
  • “A major credential leak spurred the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to strengthen protections for its sensitive materials, improve how researchers can report agency vulnerabilities and develop plans for similar incidents, the agency said in a forensic report released Thursday.
  • The blog post outlines CISA’s response to the leak that the researcher who discovered it in May called one of the worst he had ever seen, which also drew congressional scrutiny.”

• Cyberscoop adds,
  • “”A former ransomware negotiator for DigitalMint was sentenced to 70 months in jail for deceiving his employer’s clients and conspiring with ransomware affiliates to extort a combined $75.3 million from five U.S. companies he was entrusted to aid during their moments of extreme crisis, the Justice Department said Thursday. 
  • Angelo John Martino III shared confidential information he gained from his work as a ransomware negotiator, including victim organizations’ negotiating positions and insurance policy limits, to extract the maximum payment for himself and other BlackCat affiliates he colluded with in backchannels.”
• and
  • “An Armenian national who was extradited from Ukraine to the United States last year pleaded guilty to participating in a series of attacks in 2019 and 2020 involving Ryuk ransomware, the Justice Department said Thursday.
  • “Karen Serobovich Vardanyan pleaded guilty to computer fraud and conspiracy to commit fraud and extortion. He agreed to pay nearly $1.2 million million in restitution and faces up to 15 years in jail.
  • “The 34-year-old admitted to participating in cybercrime from November 2019 to April 2020 when he and his co-conspirators deployed Ryuk ransomware against three U.S.-based organizations while living in Ukraine and Russia.”

From the cybersecurity breaches and vulnerabilities front,

• Dark Reading reports,
  • “In February, a ransomware attack against the University of Mississippi Medical Center disrupted operations for more than two weeks. In March, a cyberattack on German medical-billing provider Unimed, which services 95% of the nation’s university hospitals and more than half of large clinics, resulted in the theft of sensitive health data for tens of thousands of patients.
  • “In the first half of 2026, cyberattacks on the healthcare sector jumped 14%, slightly more than the overall increase of 11% across all industries, according to data from technology research firm Comparitech. While healthcare providers — such as hospitals and doctors’ offices — saw a moderate rise in attacks, healthcare businesses suffered a significant increase of 35% compared with the second half of 2025 and 110% compared with the same six months from the previous year.
  • “Much of the shift in focus is likely because attackers have recognized that compromising a single provider can provide access to multiple hospitals, says Rebecca Moody, head of data research at Comparitech.”
    
• Cybersecurity Dive relates,
  • “A threat actor claims to have stolen a vast trove of sensitive data from the consulting giant Accenture in a recent cyberattack.
  • “The compromised data includes source code, Microsoft Azure personal access tokens, RSA encryption keys and SSH keys, a hacker calling themselves “888” said in a dark-web post shared by Bleeping Computer.
  • “The actor says they hacked roughly 35GB of data from Accenture during the intrusion, which occurred in early July.
  • “Accenture downplayed the incident in a statement to Cybersecurity Dive.
  • “We are aware of this isolated matter and we have remediated its source,” spokesperson Peter Soh said. “There is no impact to Accenture operations and service delivery.”
  • “The stolen data could put Accenture and its clients at significant risk of further attacks. “Source code can help attackers understand internal application logic, identify weak implementation patterns, and search for hardcoded secrets or exploitable paths in custom systems,” the threat intelligence firm SOCRadar said in an analysis of the incident. Meanwhile, the exposed access keys could let hackers roam freely through code repositories and cloud storage services.”
• and
  • “AssuranceAmerica, a closely held provider of auto and renters insurance, was the target of a cyberattack earlier this year that impacted more than 6.9 million customers, according to state regulatory filings. 
  • “The Atlanta-based firm said the incident was detected on March 17, stemming from an attack that targeted one of its employees a day earlier, according to a filing with the California Attorney General’s office. 
  • “An investigation found an unauthorized party gained access to the company’s IT department and copied a number of data files. The company said it notified law enforcement about the attack. 
  • “According to a filing with the Maine Attorney General’s office, the breach involved more than 6.9 million people. This included nearly 880 people within the state of Maine. The Maine AG discontinued posting new notices on its public site in June after its breach reporting system was the target of an attack.”
• and
  • “An initial access broker weaponized a critical vulnerability known as CitrixBleed 2 in a series of attacks during the first half of 2026 across multiple organizations, according to a report released Thursday [July 9] by the security company Huntress. 
  • “After exploiting the vulnerability, the hackers escalated privileges, created rogue local administrator accounts and established persistence with legitimate remote access tools, including ScreenConnect and Zoho Assist. 
  • “About a half-dozen cases between January and June followed a consistent playbook. In the most advanced case, the attackers deployed DragonForce ransomware, Huntress researchers said.”

• Healthcare Dive adds,
  • “AdaptHealth disclosed last week that a recent cyberattack resulted in patient data being stolen.
  • “A threat actor gained unauthorized access to company systems through a social engineering attack and exfiltrated data, including certain personally identifiable information, protected health information of patients and stored password files associated with insurance billing, according to a July 2 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
  • “Based on information obtained to date, AdaptHealth believes that the threat actor gained unauthorized access to certain cloud-based business applications, including internal patient management systems and document storage platforms. The company also confirmed that certain external electronic health record system portals were accessed.”

• CISA added six known exploited vulnerabilities to its catalog this week.
  • July 7, 2026 (two releases; “Per BOD 26-04, federal agencies are required to patch all four security weaknesses by July 10.”)
    • CVE-2026-48282 Adobe ColdFusion Path Traversal Vulnerability
    • CVE-2026-48908 JoomShaper SP Page Builder Unrestricted Upload of File with Dangerous Type Vulnerability
    • CVE-2026-55255 Langflow Authorization Bypass Through User-Controlled Key Vulnerability  
    • CVE-2026-56290 Joomlack Page Builder Improper Access Control Vulnerability
      • Security Week discusses these KVEs here.
  • July 10, 2026
    • CVE-2026-48939 iCagenda Unrestricted Upload of File with Dangerous Type Vulnerability
    • CVE-2026-56291 Balbooa Forms Unrestricted Upload of File with Dangerous Type Vulnerability
      • Mallory discusses these KVEs here.

• Dark Reading adds,
  • “Microsoft has tackled yet another zero-day vulnerability published by a disgruntled security researcher with a vendetta against the software giant.
  • “On Wednesday, Microsoft issued an out-of-band patch for RoguePlanet, an elevation-of-privilege vulnerability in Windows Defender, tracked as CVE-2026-50656. The high-severity flaw, which received a 7.8 CVSS score from Microsoft, could allow an attacker to escalate privileges on a Windows device from a basic user to the highest SYSTEM-level access, which would give them complete control over the device.” * * *
    “Despite a public exploit being available for RoguePlanet, it’s unclear if the vulnerability has been exploited in the wild. Microsoft’s updated advisory states the flaw has not been exploited, and CISA has not added CVE-2026-50656 to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog. Qualys, meanwhile, published a threat report on June 18 stating that RoguePlanet has been “exploited in attacks,” though no details were provided.”
    
• Security Week relates,
  • “Organizations across multiple sectors have been targeted in a vishing campaign aimed at harvesting Microsoft 365 credentials, Okta warns.
  • “The campaign started in April and has involved voice calls directing the victims to fake Microsoft Entra ID login pages under the pretense that they need to register a new passkey.
  • “Tracked as O-UNC-066 and also known as CL-CRI-1147 and Pink, the hacking group has been targeting automotive, aviation, construction, food and beverage, healthcare, and technology organizations, mainly for data extortion.
  • “As part of the observed attacks, the threat actor has been registering domains incorporating the word ‘passkey’, and has been directing victims to pages that closely mirror the Microsoft passkey enrollment process.
  • “It appears engineered to convince a targeted user they are in the process of enrolling a passkey with Microsoft, while the threat actor simultaneously registers their own passkey in the targeted user’s Microsoft account,” Okta says.”
• and
  • “A critical prompt injection vulnerability in GitHub Agentic Workflows could allow unauthenticated attackers to leak private repository data, Noma Labs warns.
  • “GitHub Agentic Workflows allows users to write workflows in natural language using markdown files that an AI agent will use as GitHub Actions, thus automating the interaction with code repositories.
  • “Because of the security defect, named GitLost, unauthenticated attackers can hide indirect prompts in crafted GitHub Issues posted on the public repositories of an organization that also maintains private repositories, and the AI agent will follow the instructions.”

From the ransomware front,

• Cybersecurity Dive reports,
  • “Ransomware activity grew slightly between the first and second quarters of 2026 but significantly year over year, and there were more hacker groups active during April, May and June than in any previous quarter, researchers said on Thursday [July 9].
  • “Cybercrime actors claimed breaches of 2,279 victims in Q2 2026, a 7% increase over Q1 2026 but a 43% year-over-year increase compared with Q2 2025, GuidePoint Security said in a quarterly report.
  • “The Qilin ransomware gang led the quarter, accounting for 13% of attacks, but the relatively new group The Gentlemen has grown quickly and now accounts for almost as much activity, GuidePoint said.” * * *
  • “Qilin, The Gentlemen, Akira and DragonForce compromise what GuidePoint calls the “four-headed monster” of high-volume ransomware groups. The lack of a “singular monolithic figure” could make the ransomware community more resilient to law-enforcement takedowns, the security firm said, because there are now “multiple franchises poised to absorb displaced affiliates if another were to disappear overnight.”

• Tech Crunch relates,
  • “Last week, researchers at cloud security firm Sysdig said they’d documented the first known case of “agentic ransomware.” It was an extortion operation, dubbed JadePuffer, in which an AI agent — not a human — handled the technical execution of a real-world cyberattack from start to finish. The agent broke into a vulnerable server, stole credentials, moved through the target’s network, encrypted files, and even wrote its own ransom note, adapting to obstacles along the way like a human hacker would. Coverage of the operation described it as run “without any human oversight,” with “no human at the keyboard.”
  • “That’s not quite the full picture. In an interview on Monday with CyberScoop, Sysdig’s Michael Clark, the company’s senior director of threat research, clarified that a human was still very much involved — just not in the technical execution. “A human still set up and pointed the operation and provisioned the infrastructure behind it, the command-and-control server, the staging server used for the stolen data and chose a victim,” Clark said. The credentials used to break into the victim’s database, he added, weren’t harvested by the AI agent itself; someone obtained them separately, through a prior compromise, and handed them to the operation.
  • “None of this contradicts Sysdig’s original claim, and the technical details of the attack remain notable on their own — wild, even. The agent got in through a known bug in Langflow, a popular open source tool for building LLM apps, then moved on to a production MySQL server and exploited another known flaw to gain admin access. It encrypted over 1,300 configuration records and not only left behind a ransom note that it wrote itself but it left a Bitcoin address where the ransom could be sent. Sysdig hasn’t disclosed who was targeted.”
    
• Dark Reading tells us,
  • “A newly rebranded ransomware outfit is sneaking malware into American organizations using a malicious yet Microsoft-approved driver.
  • “Researchers at Symantec recently observed a cyberattack from a group known as “Hyadina.” Hyadina is a 4-year-old ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operation with a new locker, “GodDamn,” an iteration on its previous lockers, “Beast” and “Monster.” It typically attacks American organizations, and it also has a distinct distaste for former Soviet countries. Its targets have spanned sectors that include healthcare, manufacturing, education, and wherever else it finds opportunity.
  • In a recent case against an unidentified organization, Hyadina used a smorgasbord of dual-use hacking tools, including legitimate remote monitoring and management (RMM) software, and more than a dozen penetration testing programs. The real kicker, though, was a malicious program with kernel access on Windows, capable of killing any and all processes, including security software.

From the cybersecurity business and defenses front,

• Cybersecurity Dive reports,
  • “U.S. companies are merging cyber risk issues into their overall enterprise risk strategy, at a time when AI adoption and business resilience are leading to significant shifts in business priorities, according to a report released Tuesday [July 7] by Information Services Group, a technology research and advisory firm.
  • “Cybersecurity is increasingly seen as a business-critical concern, as companies accelerate their adoption of agentic AI and transform much of their technology and data infrastructure to hybrid or multicloud environments. 
  • “Enterprise leaders are closely integrating cyber spending decisions with overall IT strategy. In addition, C-suite and board members are taking greater accountability for business continuity, financial exposure and regulatory compliance.”

• Info-Security Magazine relates,
  • “Chris Betz has officially taken the helm as the new CISO of Google Cloud. Transitioning from his previous role as Google’s VP of infrastructure security, Betz is stepping up to lead the company’s security posture at a critical turning point in the industry.
  • “In his very first interview since assuming the CISO title [which is found in the article], he shared his vision on the role generative AI will play in defending global enterprises.
  • “Coinciding with his transition, Betz published a key blog post on the Google Cloud blog titled Cloud CISO Perspectives: The 4 lessons that guided AI threat defense. In the article, he lays out Google’s playbook for using AI to defend against AI, advocating for a multi-model approach, robust security harnesses and the irreplaceable value of human expertise in modern cyber defense.”

• Tech Target offers “a roadmap to zero trust maturity.”
  • “Transforming an organization to take on a zero-trust posture is no small affair. A phased, thoughtful approach can bolster security while supporting business outcomes.”
  • “Zero trust is not a product, control or single technology deployment; it’s a strategic architecture and operating model designed to reduce risk and improve the security posture of organizations that have traditional, perimeter-based security models. Perimeter-based models — which assume clearly defined “inside” and “outside” boundaries — fail to address modern threats because they were designed for a world that no longer exists.
  • “Zero trust relies on three foundational principles:
    • “Explicit verification. Every access request is authenticated and authorized using components such as user identity, device health, location and behavior.
    • “Least-privilege access enforcement. Users and devices receive only the minimum access required, and only for as long as needed.
    • “Assume breach. Security operates under the assumption that attackers are already present, with controls designed to limit access and damage.”
• and sugggests an approach for “evaluating secure enterprise browsers vs. security plugins
  • “Malicious actors have long targeted and exploited browser vulnerabilities. The widespread adoption of AI increases the risk, forcing CISOs to reevaluate browser security options.” * * *
  • “In this moment of renewed attention to browser security and the risks of it failing, CISOs face two options for improving browser security: deploying secure enterprise browsers and deploying browser security plugins.”

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

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.