From the Iranian war front,

• Cybersecurity Dive reports on April 23,
  • “Iran, long considered a steady and persistent cyber threat to the U.S., has raised its game in the months since the two nations went to war in February. 
  • “Iranian-backed cyber threat groups, which range from state-sponsored actors to pro-Iranian hacktivists and financially motivated hackers, appear to have evolved some of their motivations and capabilities in cyber, according to analysts and security researchers. 
  • “What we are seeing are attacks that are aiming to have a more destructive effect,” Annie Fixler, director of the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation (CCTI) at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies told Cybersecurity Dive. 
  • Specifically, Iran-linked actors have increased the use of data wiping malware in recent attacks against Israel and demonstrated greater capability to evade detection, according to researchers at Palo Alto Networks. 
  • “In another alarming development, Darktrace last week published an analysis of a malware strain called ZionSiphon, to potentially tamper with chlorine levels and pressure controls in Israeli water facilities. The malware was embedded with pro-Iran and Palestinian messaging for additional psychological impact.”
    
• Federal News Network commentator shares “what federal leaders need to know about Iran’s cyber campaign.”
  • “To understand the cyber implications of this conflict, federal leaders need to understand how Iran uses cyber as a strategic instrument.”

From the cybersecurity policy and law enforcement front,

• Cyberscoop reports,
  • “Sean Plankey, the long-sidelined nominee to lead the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, asked President Donald Trump on Wednesday to withdraw his nomination.
  • “At this point in time, I am asking the President to remove my nomination from consideration,” he said in a notification letter seen by CyberScoop. “After thirteen months since my initial nomination, it has become clear that the Senate will not confirm me.”
  • “Plankey’s request comes weeks after the Senate confirmed MarkWayne Mullin to lead the Department of Homeland Security, CISA’s parent agency.”
• and
  • “House Republicans unveiled on Wednesday Congress’ latest effort to tackle comprehensive digital privacy legislation for Americans.
  • “The Secure Data Act would allow consumers to opt out of data collection for individual businesses for the purposes of targeted advertising, selling to third parties or for use in automated decisionmaking.
  • “It would also require companies to inform consumers when their personal data is being collected or used, provide them with a portable version of that data, and give consent rights to parents over the data collection of teenagers.”

• Per a NIST news release,
  • “The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), in collaboration with the Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights (HHS OCR), announced the Safeguarding Health Information: Building Assurance through the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Security 2026 conference, scheduled for September 2–3, 2026, at the NIST campus in Gaithersburg, Maryland. The event will examine the current healthcare cybersecurity landscape and the HIPPA Security Rule, which establishes federal standards to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of electronic protected health information. The conference will highlight practical strategies, tips, and techniques for implementing the HIPAA Security Rule, including required administrative, physical, and technical safeguards for covered entities and their business associates. Sessions will address best practices for managing risks to electronic health information and ensuring technical assurance, along with topics such as cybersecurity risk management, current threats to the healthcare community, and cybersecurity considerations for Internet of Things technologies in healthcare environments. The event will be offered in both in-person and virtual formats, with separate registration fees and timelines for each option. For additional details, visit the Safeguarding Health Information: Building Assurance through HIPAA Security 2026 event page.”
     
• Per an April 23, 2026, HHS news release,
  • “Today, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Office for Civil Rights (OCR) announced settlements with four regulated entities following separate ransomware investigations under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) Security Rule. Ransomware is malicious software that blocks access to data—typically by encrypting it with a key known only to the attacker—until a ransom is paid. The resolutions announced mark 19 completed investigations from ransomware breaches and 13 completed investigations in OCR’s Risk Analysis Initiative.” * * *
  • “The settlements follow investigations into separate ransomware breaches that collectively affected over 427,000 individuals and involved the exposure of unsecured ePHI. The types of ePHI affected include demographic data, Social Security numbers (SSNs), financial information, lab results, medications, and diagnoses or conditions. Under the settlements, the regulated entities have agreed to implement corrective action plans subject to OCR monitoring for two years and paid a total of $1,165,000 to OCR.”

• Per an April 20, 2026, Justice Department news release,
  • “A Florida man, formerly employed as a ransomware negotiator, pleaded guilty to conspiring to commit ransomware attacks against U.S. companies in 2023.
  • “According to court documents, Angelo Martino, 41, of Land O’Lakes, Florida, collaborated with the operators of the Blackcat/ALPHV (“BlackCat”) ransomware variant used by cybercriminals to attack and extort institutions and companies. Beginning in April 2023, Martino abused his role at a U.S.-based cyber incident response company to assist BlackCat actors. Working as a negotiator on behalf of five different ransomware victims, Martino provided BlackCat attackers with confidential information about the negotiating position and strategy of his company’s clients without the clients’ or his employer’s knowledge or permission. This confidential information assisted the ransomware actors and maximized the ransoms that the victims were required to pay. The confidential information included the victims’ insurance policy limits and internal negotiation positions. The BlackCat actors paid Martino for this confidential information.” * * *
  • “To date, law enforcement has seized $10 million of assets from Martino, including digital currency, vehicles, a food truck, and a luxury fishing boat that Martino obtained using proceeds of the offense or acquired as a result of the offense.”
    
• Cyberscoop adds,
  • “A core leader of the hacker subset of The Com responsible for a series of high-profile phishing attacks and cryptocurrency thefts from September 2021 to April 2023 pleaded guilty to federal charges, the Justice Department said Friday. 
  • “Tyler Robert Buchanan of Dundee, Scotland, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. The 24-year-old was arrested by Spanish police in Palma in 2024 as he attempted to board a charter flight to Naples, Italy. 
  • “Buchanan has been in federal custody since April 2025 and faces up to 22 years in federal prison at his sentencing, which is scheduled for August 21. 
  • “The British national and his co-conspirators, including Noah Michael Urban, who was sentenced to a 10-year federal prison sentence last year, harvested thousands of credentials via phishing and stole more than $8 million in cryptocurrency from U.S. residents via SIM-swapping attacks.”

From the cybersecurity breaches and vulnerabilities front,

• Cybersecurity Dive reports,
  • “The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency on Monday [April 20] released guidance related to the axios supply chain compromise originally disclosed in late March. 
  • “A suspected North Korean actor compromised the node package manager account for an axios maintainer last month. Axios is a Javascript library used widely across the software industry with millions of downloads per week. 
  • “CISA is urging security teams to monitor and review code depositories as well as continuous integration/continuous delivery pipelines that ran npm install or npm update on the compromised axios version, according to the guidance released Monday. 
  • “Security teams should search for cached versions of the affected dependencies in artifact repositories along with dependency management tools, according to the guidance. 
  • “If compromised dependencies are found during the search, organizations should revert the environment back to a known safe state, CISA said.” 
• and
  • “Vercel, a cloud development platform, said that some of its internal systems were accessed after a third-party tool called Context.ai was compromised while being used by one of Vercel’s employees, according to a blog post released Sunday [April 20].
  • “Vercel is widely known as the creator of Next.js, which is the open-source framework for React. 
  • “The attacker was able to take over the employee’s Vercel Google Workspace account and access certain company “environments and environment variables” that were not designated as “sensitive.”
  • “Vercel said that a limited number of customers had their credentials compromised during the attack, and that they have been notified. They were urged to immediately rotate credentials. 
  • “The company said it believes the attacker is highly sophisticated, based on an assessment of their “operational velocity and detailed understanding of Vercel’s systems.”
• and
  • “Hackers working for the Chinese government are increasingly hiding their attacks behind ready-made networks of hacked routers and other networking equipment, the U.S. and several allies said on Thursday [April 23].
  • “Attackers’ use of these so-called covert networks is not new, the agencies said in a joint advisory, “but China-nexus cyber actors are now using them strategically, and at scale.”
  • “By funneling their activity through compromised networking equipment — mostly small office and home office (SOHO) routers, but also internet of things devices — hackers can obfuscate their origins and make it harder for defenders to spot reconnaissance, malware deployment and data exfiltration.”

• Cyberscoop adds,
  • “A state-sponsored hacking group has implanted a custom backdoor on Cisco network security devices that can survive firmware updates and standard reboots, U.S. and British cybersecurity authorities disclosed Thursday, marking a significant escalation in a campaign that has targeted government and critical infrastructure networks since at least late 2025.
  • “The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Centre jointly published a malware analysis report identifying the backdoor, code-named Firestarter. Cisco’s threat intelligence division, Talos, attributed the malware to a threat actor it tracks as UAT-4356. The company attributed the same group to a 2024 espionage campaign called ArcaneDoor, which focused on compromising network perimeter devices.
  • “CISA confirmed it discovered Firestarter on a U.S. federal civilian agency’s Cisco Firepower device after identifying suspicious connections through continuous network monitoring. The finding prompted an updated emergency directive issued Thursday, requiring all federal civilian agencies to audit their Cisco firewall infrastructure and submit device memory snapshots for analysis by Friday.”

• CISA added fourteen known exploited vulnerabilities (KVEs) to its catalog this week.
  • April 20, 2026
    • CVE-2023-27351 PaperCut NG/MF Improper Authentication Vulnerability
    • CVE-2024-27199 JetBrains TeamCity Relative Path Traversal Vulnerability
    • CVE-2025-2749 Kentico Xperience Path Traversal Vulnerability
    • CVE-2025-32975 Quest KACE Systems Management Appliance (SMA) Improper Authentication Vulnerability
    • CVE-2025-48700 Synacor Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) Cross-site Scripting Vulnerability
    • CVE-2026-20122 Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Manager Incorrect Use of Privileged APIs Vulnerability
    • CVE-2026-20128 Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Manager Storing Passwords in a Recoverable Format Vulnerability
    • CVE-2026-20133 Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Manager Exposure of Sensitive Information to an Unauthorized Actor Vulnerability
      • The Cybersecurity Express discusses these KVEs here.
      • Cybersecurity Dive discusses the Cisco KVEs here.
  • April 22, 2026
    • CVE-2026-33825 Microsoft Defender Insufficient Granularity of Access Control Vulnerability
      • Bleeping Computer discusses this KVE here.
  • April 23, 2026
    • CVE-2026-39987 Marimo Remote Code Execution Vulnerability
      • Resecurity discusses this KVE here.
  • April 24, 2026
    • CVE-2024-7399 Samsung MagicINFO 9 Server Path Traversal Vulnerability
    • CVE-2024-57726 SimpleHelp Missing Authorization Vulnerability
    • CVE-2024-57728 SimpleHelp Path Traversal Vulnerability
    • CVE-2025-29635 D-Link DIR-823X Command Injection Vulnerability 
      • The Hackers News discusses these KVEs here.

• Cybersecurity Dive informs us,
  • “Phishing was the most common way hackers breached their targets in the first quarter of 2026, after nearly a year out of the top spot, Cisco’s Talos threat intelligence team said in a report published on Wednesday.
  • “Nearly 20% of Cisco’s incident-response engagements involved the preliminary stages of a ransomware attack, according to the report — significantly lower than in the first two quarters of 2025, when it was 50%.
  • “Cisco also said it saw hackers using AI to improve phishing attacks.”
• and
  • “Companies using AI to write code are creating serious security risks that not all organizations feel prepared to handle, according to a reportreleased Wednesday by the security testing firm ProjectDiscovery. 
  • “Security personnel want audit trails and access limitations before they integrate AI into their processes, ProjectDiscovery found. “They are not opposed to the technology, but they need it to earn its place.”
  • “The report highlights one of the most fraught aspects of the AI revolution in the corporate world: the tension between AI-assisted coders and the people responsible for protecting their work.”

• Dark Reading points out,
  • “AI agents can now carry out end-to-end cloud attacks with minimal human guidance, exploiting known misconfigurations and vulnerabilities at a speed no human attacker can match. 
  • “That’s the central finding of a new proof-of-concept (PoC) study by Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42, where researchers built an autonomous multi-agent system that carried out a complete cloud attack chain in a live environment, using a single natural-language prompt.
  • “The study suggests an intrusion campaign that Anthropic uncovered last year, when a Chinese state-affiliated cyber-espionage group used the company’s Claude AI to automate large portions of an attack chain, was more a preview of things to come rather than an exception.”

• Cyberscoop notes,
  • “Attackers rarely exploit an edge-device vulnerability indiscriminately. Typically, they first test how widely the flaw can be used and how much access it can provide, then move on to steal data or disrupt operations.
  • “Pre-attack surveillance and planning leaves a lot of noise in its wake. These signals — particularly spikes in traffic that are hitting specific vendors — can act as an early-warning system, often preceding public vulnerability disclosures, according to research GreyNoise shared exclusively with CyberScoop prior to its release. 
  • “Roughly half of every activity surge GreyNoise detected during a 103-day study last winter was followed by a vulnerability disclosure from the same targeted vendor within three weeks, GreyNoise said in its report.
  • “Researchers determined that the median warning of an impending vulnerability disclosure arrived nine days before the targeted vendor issued a public alert to its customers.”

From the ransomware front,

• Bleeping Computer reports,
  • “Home security giant ADT has confirmed a data breach after the ShinyHunters extortion group threatened to leak stolen data unless a ransom is paid.
  • “In a statement shared today, the company said it detected unauthorized access to customer and prospective customer data on April 20, after which it terminated the intrusion and launched an investigation.
  • “This investigation determined that personal information was stolen during the breach.”
  • “The investigation confirmed that the information involved was limited to names, phone numbers, and addresses,” ADT told BleepingComputer.
  • “In a small percentage of cases, dates of birth and the last four digits of Social Security numbers or Tax IDs were included. Critically, no payment information — including bank accounts or credit cards — was accessed, and customer security systems were not affected or compromised in any way.”
• and
  • “Recently observed Trigona ransomware attacks are using a custom, command-line tool to steal data from compromised environments faster and more efficiently.
  • “The utility was emplayed in attacks in March that were attributed to a gang affiliate, likely in an effort to avoid publicly available tools, such as Rclone and MegaSync, that typically trigger security solutions.
  • “Researchers at cybersecurity company Symantec believe that the shift to a custom tool may indicate that the attacker is “investing time and effort in proprietary malware in a bid to maintain a lower profile during a critical phase of their attacks.”
• and
  • “A new Kyber ransomware operation is targeting Windows systems and VMware ESXi endpoints in recent attacks, with one variant implementing Kyber1024 post-quantum encryption.
  • “Cybersecurity firm Rapid7 retrieved and analyzed two distinct Kyber variants in March 2026 during an incident response. Both variants were deployed on the same network, with one targeting VMware ESXi and the other focusing on Windows file servers.
  • “The ESXi variant is specifically built for VMware environments, with capabilities for datastore encryption, optional virtual machine termination, and defacement of management interfaces,” explains Rapid7.”

• Dark Reading relates,
  • “A ransomware gang known as “The Gentlemen” has made a name for itself, claiming hundreds of victims in a matter of months.
  • “The Gentlemen is a ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) outfit that first popped up in mid-2025. While it operates fairly typical double extortion attacks (using both encryption and data leaking as extortion levers), The Gentlemen is known for sophisticated tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), such as antivirus killers and complex infection chains.
  • “Check Point Research this week published its latest findings concerning the gang, noting that it has claimed hundreds of victims and uses malware including something called SystemBC, which researchers described as “a proxy malware frequently leveraged in human‑operated ransomware operations for covert tunneling and payload delivery.”

From the cybersecurity defenses front,

• TechTarget discusses,
  • “Beyond awareness: Human risk management metrics for CISOs
  • “Traditional security training isn’t keeping threat actors out. As employee awareness programs fall short, Forrester Research suggests a better approach.” * * *
  • “With cybersecurity threats evolving so swiftly, organizations cannot afford to rely on outdated security awareness programs that fail to address the root causes of human vulnerabilities. Human risk management offers a transformative approach, shifting the focus from mere awareness to actionable behavior change.”

• Dark Reading points out,
  • “When Anthropic announced Project Glasswing this month, most coverage landed on the headline numbers: a 27-year-old OpenBSD vulnerability, a 16-year-old FFmpeg flaw, a Linux kernel exploit chain assembled without human steering. The coalition behind it, including AWS, Apple, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Google, Microsoft, Palo Alto Networks, and others, isn’t there for the optics; they’re there because the model’s capabilities are real, and the coordinated disclosure pipeline matters.
  • “The part worth dwelling on is the FFmpeg result specifically. At least five million automated fuzzer testing passes hit that vulnerable line of code and not one caught it. Mythos Preview read the code, understood what it was doing, and found the flaw.
  • That gap highlights a fundamental security misconception of the past two decades.
  • The industry built enumerators. It needed readers.
  • Automated security tooling has almost always worked the same way at its core: define a pattern, scan to identify the pattern, flag the match. SIEMs ingest event logs and match rules. Static analysis tools check code against known signatures. Vulnerability scanners compare software versions against CVE databases, and so on. These are mostly based on enumeration, and enumeration can only find what you already know to look for.
  • “Five million passes with the industry standard tools, zero catches. These tools knew how to count. But they didn’t know how to read.
  • “Mythos Preview succeeded because it approached the code the way a skilled human analyst would: with an understanding of intent, of relationships between components, of what a sequence of operations does, rather than what it superficially looks like. Security at that depth has been the exclusive domain of rare, expensive human expertise. A model that replicates it at scale is genuinely a different kind of thing, and the industry is right to pay attention.”
    
• Here is a link to Dark Reading’s CISO Corner.

From the Iranian war front,

• The New York Times reports on April 16,
  • “The exchange of bombs and missiles in the Middle East between Iran and its foes has been paused for more than a week now. Iran’s hackers, however, have remained active on the digital battlefield.
  • “Iran has continued its cyberspace operations since the cease-fire with the United States began on April 8, according to Western cybersecurity experts and former U.S. intelligence officials. In doing so, Tehran is trying to keep up pressure on the United States and Israel but also positioning itself to mount a bigger retaliation if peace talks do not resume.” * * *
  • “This is a time, more than ever, we should worry about Iran,” said Evan Peña, a co-founder of the cybersecurity firm Armadin. “In cyberwarfare there isn’t really a cease-fire.”
  • “Mr. Peña said that if the cease-fire or negotiations collapsed, Iran would want to be in a strong position to retaliate, potentially by attacking critical infrastructure in the United States. Tehran has done so in the past but generally with limited impact. More than a decade ago, Iranian hackers targeted a small dam in upstate New York, but by happenstance the dam’s sluice-gate controls had been taken offline for maintenance, much to the relief of U.S. investigators at the time.
  • “Iran, Mr. Peña said, is going to be more aggressive and devote more resources to trying to get access to American companies as the war rages on.” * * *
  • “Josh Zweig, the chief executive of Zip Security, which secures small and midsize enterprises, said Iran was specifically looking for less well-defended targets, like municipal-run water and energy facilities.
  • “He also said small firms that make investment decisions for wealthy individuals and families have been targeted.”

From the cybersecurity policy and law enforcement front,

• Cyberscoop reports,
  • “National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross expects more executive orders coming from the White House as part of implementing the national cybersecurity strategy, he said Wednesday [April 15].
  • “Staffers on Capitol Hill and others in the cyber world have been awaiting the implementation guidance the Trump administration had proclaimed would come to accompany the strategy  published last month.
  • “Asked at a Semafor event about whether that would include executive orders, Cairncross answered, “I think that that’s the case.”
  • “Cairncross touted American ingenuity for producing an artificial intelligence model like Anthropic’s Claude Mythos, rather than it developing under U.S. cyber rivals like China or Russia. He acknowledged reports about the administration holding meetings about the cyber risks and benefits of something like Mythos — “the model right now that everyone’s talking about” — adding that the administration is looking to balance the dangers and positive capabilities of AI in cyberspace.”
• and
  • “The federal agency tasked with analyzing security vulnerabilities is overwhelmed as it and other authorities struggle to keep pace with a flood of defects that grows every year. The National Institute of Standards and Technology announced Wednesday that it has capitulated to that deluge and narrowed the priorities for its National Vulnerability Database.
  • “NIST said it will only prioritize analysis for CVEs that appear in the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s known exploited vulnerabilities catalog, software used in the federal government and critical software defined under Executive Order 14028.
  • “The federal agency’s goal with the change is to achieve long-term sustainability and stabilize the NVD program, which has encountered previous challenges, notably a funding lapse in early 2024 that forced NIST to temporarily stop providing key metadata for many vulnerabilities in the database.” * * *
  • “NIST said CVEs that don’t fit its more narrow criteria will still be listed in the NVD, but they won’t be automatically enriched with additional details. 
  • “This will allow us to focus on CVEs with the greatest potential for widespread impact,” the agency said. “While CVEs that do not meet these criteria may have a significant impact on affected systems, they generally do not present the same level of systemic risk as those in the prioritized categories.”

• Dark Reading adds,
  • [C]ybersecurity teams will need to move to make up for the loss of enrichment data, according to Shane Fry, chief technology officer at RunSafe Security. 
  • “Anthropic’s Mythos highlights why NIST is making this move in the first place,” Fry says. “They have already seen a surge in CVE submissions over the past year and have not been able to keep up. Mythos and other tools for AI-assisted vulnerability will only add to the volume of vulnerabilities disclosed. It’s a problem the industry has been aware of for some time.” 
  • “So without the ability to keep up with the sheer volume of CVEs cyber teams need to pivot, Fry adds. 
  • “The way forward will have to emphasize building defenses into software itself to prevent the exploit of bugs and zero-days even before patches are available or the vulnerability is disclosed,” he advises.” 

• Federal News Network tells us,
  • “The [U.S.] Office of Personnel Management announced this week that it will be expanding its Tech Force hiring program to include opportunities for agencies to hire cybersecurity specialists. That’s on top of the program’s existing recruitment efforts for software engineers, data scientists and product managers.
  • “The newly added cybersecurity roles will focus on “protecting critical systems, strengthening federal cybersecurity capabilities and safeguarding the digital infrastructure relied on by millions of Americans,” OPM said in a press release.
  • “The federal government depends on strong cybersecurity to protect critical systems and maintain public trust,” OPM Director Scott Kupor said Monday. “Through Tech Force, we’re recruiting highly skilled cybersecurity professionals to take on real challenges and strengthen the government’s defenses where it matters most.”

• Cyberscoop informs us,
  • “Authorities from 21 countries took down 53 domains and arrested four people allegedly involved in distributed denial-of-service operations used by more than 75,000 cybercriminals, Europol said Thursday. 
  • “The globally coordinated effort dubbed “Operation PowerOFF” disrupted booter services and seized and dismantled infrastructure, including servers and databases, that supported the DDoS-for-hire services, officials said.
  • “Law enforcement agencies obtained data on more than 3 million alleged criminal user accounts from the seized databases, and ultimately sent more than 75,000 emails and letters to participants, warning them to halt their activities.”
• and
  • “Two New Jersey men were sentenced Wednesday for facilitating North Korea’s long-running scheme to plant operatives inside U.S. businesses as employees, generating more than $5 million in illicit revenue for the regime, the Justice Department said. 
  • “The U.S. nationals — Kejia Wang, also known as Tony Wang, and Zhenxing Wang, also known as Danny Wang — were part of a years-long conspiracy that placed operatives in jobs at more than 100 U.S. companies, including many Fortune 500 companies, based in 27 states and the District of Columbia. * * *
  • “Both men previously pleaded guilty to an assortment of crimes. Kejia Wang was sentenced to nine years in prison for conspiracy to commit wire and mail fraud, money laundering and identity theft. Zhenxing Wang was sentenced to 92 months in prison for conspiracy to commit wire and mail fraud and money laundering. 
  • “The pair were also ordered to forfeit a combined $600,000, of which two-thirds has already been paid, officials said.”

From the cybersecurity breaches and vulnerabilities front,

• Health Exec reports,
  • “Healthcare IT infrastructure and electronic health record company CareCloud confirmed in a regulatory filing that it’s suffered a data breach, said to have impacted one of its six patient record stores, with hackers inside its network for “approximately eight hours.”
  • “The “cybersecurity incident” was disclosed in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and said the incident occurred on March 16. The company said that, while intruders did access patient medical records, it wasn’t clear if any data was stolen.
  • “An investigation into the data breach is still ongoing, and CareCloud said it’s working with a third-party cybersecurity organization to gather the details. After some downtime, CareCloud said it believes the invasion has been thwarted and that criminals no longer have a way inside its network.
  • “Systems were taken down and restored the same day. Details such as how the cyberattack was conducted and if any ransomware was deployed was not revealed. It’s also not clear if any notable cybercrime syndicate was behind the data breach, nor whether those responsible made any demands. 
  • “The filing with the SEC was released on March 24, and there hasn’t been any real update from the company since.”

• The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency added ten known exploited vulnerabilities (KVEs) to its catalog this week.
  • April 13, 2026
    • CVE-2012-1854 Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications Insecure Library Loading Vulnerability
    • CVE-2020-9715 Adobe Acrobat Use-After-Free Vulnerability
    • CVE-2023-21529 Microsoft Exchange Server Deserialization of Untrusted Data Vulnerability
    • CVE-2023-36424 Microsoft Windows Out-of-Bounds Read Vulnerability
    • CVE-2025-60710 Microsoft Windows Link Following Vulnerability
    • CVE-2026-21643 Fortinet SQL Injection Vulnerability
    • CVE-2026-34621 Adobe Acrobat and Reader Prototype Pollution Vulnerability
      • Security Week discusses these KVEs here.
  • April 14, 2026
    • CVE-2009-0238 Microsoft Office Remote Code Execution Vulnerability
    • CVE-2026-32201 Microsoft SharePoint Server Improper Input Validation Vulnerability 
      • Security Week discusses both KVEs here.
      • Cybersecurity Dive discusses the Microsoft SharePoint KVE here.
    • April 16, 2026
      • CVE-2026-34197 Apache ActiveMQ Improper Input Validation Vulnerability
        • Bleeping Computer discusses this KVE here.

• Cybersecurity Dive tells us,
  • “Hackers are attempting to exploit a high-severity flaw found in several end-of-life routers from TP-Link, according to a blog post published Friday [April 17] by Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42. 
  • “Researchers warn the observed payloads share similarities to those found in malware used in Mirai-like botnets. Such activity would involve attempts to download the malware and execute on vulnerable devices, according to researchers. 
  • “The vulnerability was originally disclosed in June 2023, and proof of concept exploits appeared prior to the disclosure, wrote Unit 42 researchers. 
  • “The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency previously added the command injection vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023-33538, to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog in July 2025.” 

From the ransomware front,

• The HIPAA Journal reports,
  • Brockton Hospital in Massachusetts is continuing [as of April 15] to grapple with a cybersecurity incident that took many of its electronic systems offline on April 6, 2026, and forced the hospital to divert ambulances to alternate facilities and cancel scheduled cancer treatments. An investigation into the cyberattack is ongoing, and the hospital is working with federal and state officials. While some systems have been brought back online, the hospital is continuing to use its downtime procedures, with staff members working off paper rather than computers. A Signature Healthcare spokesperson told Boston 25 News that the hospital would continue under downtime procedures for the next two weeks. * * *
  • “The Anubis ransomware-as-a-service group claimed responsibility for the attack. Anubis engages in double extortion, stealing data and encrypting files. A ransom must be paid to prevent the release of stolen data and obtain the keys to recover encrypted files. According to SuspectFile, which was contacted by a member of the Anubis group, files were encrypted in the attack. The Anubis spokesperson told SuspectFile that only non-critical systems were encrypted, and 2TB of data was stolen in the attack, including a large volume of patient data.
  • “Anubis is attempting to pressure Signature Healthcare into paying the ransom by adding the hospital to its data leak site, along with a countdown clock when the stolen data will be published. Signature Healthcare has yet to confirm the extent of data theft, which may not be known for some time. The priority continues to be patient care, remediating the attack, and bringing systems back online when it is safe to do so.”

• Govtech relates,
  • “Ransomware continues to pose a serious threat to U.S. critical infrastructure, with more than 2,100 related incidents reported to federal authorities in 2025, according to the latest FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) report.
  • “To put that number in perspective, IC3 reported roughly 1,100 data breach threats to critical infrastructure, which includes sectors such as health care, critical manufacturing, financial services, energy and agriculture, among others. Ransomware attacks directed at critical infrastructure are serious, possessing as they do the potential to disrupt operations, expose sensitive data and affect the delivery of public services.
  • “Those incidents have implications for state and local government organizations, which operate or support many of these systems. The nation’s critical infrastructure spans 16 sectors whose disruption would have a debilitating effect on the United States. Of these, the health-care and public health services sector reported the highest number of incidents, the report shows.”

• SC Media adds,
  • “Analysis by Check Point researchers showed that out of the 672 ransomware attacks reported in March 2026, Qilin alone accounted for 20%, followed by Akira, which was responsible for 12% of the attacks, and Dragonforce RaaS, which was responsible for 8% of the incidents, reports Infosecurity News.”
• and
  • “Suspected former Black Basta ransomware affiliates are ramping up targeting of senior-level executives with social-engineering attacks designed to deploy remote monitoring and management (RMM) software, ReliaQuest reported Tuesday.
  • “Black Basta, a previously notorious Russia-linked ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS), became defunct last year following leaked chats exposing its infrastructure and techniques. However, attacks leveraging the group’s distinct tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) have continued into 2026, with ReliaQuest noting an accelerating volume and increased targeting of company leadership.
  • “For example, Microsoft Teams-based phishing — a staple of Black Basta’s playbook — is becoming more prevalent, with 56% of all Teams phishing over the last year occurring within the last quarter, and nearly a third happening in March 2026 alone.”
    
• Industrial Cyber notes,
  • “New data from Cyfirma disclosed that ransomware activity in March reflects a continuation of the sector’s shift toward structured, repeatable extortion models, where encryption is paired with data theft to maximize pressure on victims. The findings show that growing fragmentation of extortion groups suggests that smaller or emerging threat actor groups could adopt automation, AI-assisted reconnaissance, and data-driven victim profiling to scale operations efficiently. These campaigns rely heavily on coercive messaging, warning against third-party recovery attempts and reinforcing the risk of permanent data loss, underscoring how psychological pressure remains central to payment conversion strategies. 
  • “At the operational level, ransomware actors in March continue to refine rather than reinvent their tactics, prioritizing efficiency, scalability, and consistency across attacks. Cyfirma assesses that groups are likely to enhance encryption speed, standardize extortion workflows, and expand double extortion practices, while relying on common intrusion vectors such as phishing and exposed services. The broader trajectory points to incremental evolution within a mature ecosystem, where innovation is less about novel techniques and more about optimizing execution and monetization across a globally opportunistic threat landscape.” 

• Security Boulevard informs us,
  • “Double extortion is bad enough—that’s the current tactic favored by ransomware groups—but the emerging quadruple extortion promises to further complicate mitigation and response by targeted organizations, prompting an escalation in extortion payments.  
  • “Yet that’s just one piece of evidence that ransomware continues to evolve despite high-profile takedowns by law enforcement—they just reincarnate or rebrand as new groups, new research by Akamai shows. Of course, the biggest game-changer is GenAI, as RasS operators like Black Basta and FunkSec press LLMs into service to generate code and greatly improve the social engineering techniques that give bad actors a foot in the door and to scale up attacks, opening the door for even less sophisticated actors to execute damaging attacks. 
  • “Ransomware groups continue to seek additional ways to generate profit, such as by pressuring victims and weaponizing compliance,”  researchers at Akamai note in their Ransomware Report 2025. 
  • “Noting that ransomware tactics have moved “away from traditional encryption-centric ransomware tactics towards more sophisticated and advanced extortion methods,” Nathaniel Jones, vice president, security and AI strategy and field CISO at Darktrace, says, “rather than relying solely on encrypting a target’s data for ransom, threat actors will increasingly employ double or even triple extortion strategies, encrypting sensitive data but also threatening to leak or sell stolen data unless their ransom demands are met.” 

From the cybersecurity defenses front,

• The Wall Street Journal reports,
  • “The software bug was capable of crashing an operating system used by firewalls, servers and network appliances. It went undetected for over 27 years.
  • “Last month, it was caught by Mythos, the latest AI model from Anthropic that has spooked the White House, banking executives and cybersecurity professionals around the world.
  • Welcome to the bug armageddon. AI models like Mythos and others are finding bugs in older software at a rate never seen before.
  • “While most of the coding issues may be minor, their sheer volume has amplified the risk that smaller software developers will become overwhelmed with reports of bugs such as the one Mythos found. Thanks to AI, hackers will be able to leverage those bugs more quickly than ever before.
  • “The 1998 bug in the OpenBSD operating system was one of thousands Mythos found last month. Anthropic said last week that it is working with about 50 technology companies and organizations to find and fix bugs and currently has no plans to release Mythos to the general public.
  • “We need to know that we can release it safely, and it’s not exactly clear how we can do that with full confidence,” said Logan Graham, the head of Anthropic’s Frontier Red Team, which evaluates AI for risks.”

• Security Week relates,
  • “To help security teams prepare for this future, the Cloud Security Alliance has developed and published The ‘AI Vulnerability Storm’: Building a ‘Mythos-ready’ Security Program. The report does not provide a solution, but it will help readers understand what is coming, and what they must do in preparation.
  • “Mythos will not fundamentally change the nature of cybersecurity. It primarily provides a step change in the pace of attacks, and the biggest single change will be the asymmetric advantage to the attacker increasing dramatically. Cybersecurity itself doesn’t change – it just needs to cope with a new ferocious pace. Best practice fundamentally remains the same, but its importance becomes more critical.
  • “Focus on the basics and harden your environment further,” say the CSA report authors. “Segmentation, egress filtering, multifactor authentication, and defense-in-depth/breadth all increase the difficulty for attackers.” Nothing there is new, but many firms have not done it adequately – and must rapidly start doing it effectively”
• and
  • “OpenAI announced that it’s scaling its Trusted Access for Cyber program to thousands of verified defenders and hundreds of security teams. They will be given access to GPT-5.4-Cyber, a fine-tuned variant of GPT-5.4 that relaxes the usual guardrails for legitimate cybersecurity work. 
  • “GPT-5.4-Cyber also provides new capabilities such as binary reverse engineering, which enables users to analyze compiled executable software for vulnerabilities and malicious behavior.
  • “The new AI model is initially being offered on a limited, iterative basis to vetted security vendors, organizations, and researchers.
  • “Individual defenders who want to enroll into the Trusted Access for Cyber program and test GPT‑5.4‑Cyber can apply through chatgpt.com/cyber via an identity verification process, while enterprise teams must go through their OpenAI account representative.” 

• Cyberscoop adds,
  • “A joint report from the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), the SANS Institute and the Open Worldwide Application Security Project (OWASP) concludes that in the near term, organizations are “likely to be overwhelmed” by threat actors using AI to find and exploit vulnerabilities faster than defenders can patch them.
  • “While those organizations can use AI tools to speed up their own defenses, attackers “still face a heavier relative burden due to the inherent limitations of patching. This in turn leads to “asymmetric benefits” for attackers who can afford to adopt the technology without the same caution and bureaucracy as a multi-billion dollar business.
  • “The cost and capability floor to exploit discovery is dropping, the time between disclosure and weaponization is compressing toward zero, and capabilities that previously required nation-state resources are now becoming broadly accessible,” wrote Robert Lee, SANS Institute’s Chief AI Officer, Gadi Evron, CEO of Knostic and Rich Mogull, chief analyst at CSA, who served as the primary authors.”

• TechTarget tells us, “How CIOs can beat AI challenges: A top researcher’s view.”
  • “CIOs are grappling with moving AI from the pilot stage to genuine implementation, and many are encountering organizational pitfalls that are stalling the delivery of real value.”

• Healthexec informs us,
  • “Hospitals have always had to rely on multitudes of healthcare vendors to keep operations humming. In recent years the arrangement’s inherent management challenge has only grown more complex. 
  • “That’s largely because myriad AI technologies have changed daily life for provider organizations and industry partners alike. Arguably the biggest single difficulty to emerge from the transformation is the risk of cybersecurity breaches. 
  • “The Health Sector Coordinating Council (HSCC) is taking a crack at helping cybersecurity leaders, teams and stakeholders clear a path through the thicket. The assistance comes in the form of a 109-page document titled Third-Party AI Risk and Supply Chain Transparency Guide.
  • “The guidebook is authored by members of an HSCC working group focused on cybersecurity. The team’s guiding aim for the project was to “address the growing gaps in discovery and disclosure processes that make AI supply chain risk so difficult to manage.”

• A NIST press release announced
  • “NIST SP 800-133 Rev. 3 (Initial Public Draft) Recommendation for Cryptographic Key Generation
  • “Proposed changes in this revision include the following:
    • “Asymmetric key-pair generation has been expanded to include methods for deriving randomness during key-pair generation.
    • “Key-pair generation now has options for derivation similar to symmetric keys and new methods for “seed expansion,” which allows for the limited use of SHAKE and deterministic random bit generators (DRBGs).
    • “Key-encapsulation mechanisms (KEMs) are discussed as a key-establishment option for symmetric key generation, and post-quantum cryptography (PQC) references have been added throughout (e.g., the new PQC signatures).
    • “Text has been reworded to address random number generation in alignment with SP 800-90C.
  • “Comments are especially requested regarding:
    • “Hardware security module (HSM) design — How do these requirements align with common practice and existing systems using a root seed/secret value?
    • “PQC implementations and protocol — How do these requirements fit with storing keys as seeds (e.g., for ML-KEM) and performing hybrid (i.e., combined classical and post-quantum) implementations?”

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

From the Iranian War front,

• Dark Reading reports,
  • With the US and Iran having reached a fragile ceasefire this week, security researchers and executives are left wondering whether there will be a commensurate pause in the cyberwarfare that has ramped up around the war.
  • The day after the temporary truce was announced, Iran’s most high-profile false-flag hacktivist operation, Handala, offered that it would participate in a temporary pause in hostilities. But even if one takes that group at its word, history suggests that ceasefires rarely stop or slow cyberactivity surrounding kinetic wars. In fact, in the absence of more effective ways of fighting, cyberattacks tend to flare significantly.
  • “Historical data and recent intelligence analysis indicate that a military ceasefire rarely equates to a ‘digital stand-down,'” warns Austin Warnick, director of Flashpoint’s National Security Intelligence Team. Instead, he tells Dark Reading, “Cyber operations often remain steady or even flare up as an asymmetric pressure valve while kinetic hostilities are paused.”

• Cyberscoop adds,
  • “The fallout and potential exposure from Iran’s state-backed targeting of U.S. critical infrastructure extends to more than 5,200 internet-connected devices, researchers at Censys said in a threat intelligence brief Wednesday [April 8]. 
  • “Of the programmable logic controllers manufactured by Rockwell Automation/Allen-Bradley that Censys identified as potentially exposed to Iranian government attackers, nearly 3,900, or about 3 out of every 4, are based in the United States. 
  • “The cybersecurity firm identified the devices based on details multiple federal agencies shared in a joint alert Tuesday, and published additional indicators of compromise, including operator IPs and other threat hunting queries.
  • “Federal authorities earlier this week warned that Iranian government attackers have exploited devices that control industrial automation processes and disrupted multiple sectors during the past month. Some victims also experienced financial losses as a result of the attacks, officials said.” 

• MedTech Dive tells us,
  • “Stryker is now fully operational after a[n Iranian] cyberattack took down its manufacturing, ordering and shipping operations.
  • “The medtech company’s global manufacturing and commercial, ordering and distribution systems have been fully restored, according to a Thursday [April 9] filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
  • “Stryker said that the attack had a material impact on its operations, which will affect the company’s financial results for the first quarter of 2026. However, Stryker does not expect a material impact on its full-year guidance of 8% to 9.5% organic sales growth and adjusted earnings per share of $14.90 to $15.10.
  • “The company did not detail the expected financial impact on the first quarter.”

From the cybersecurity policy and law enforcement front,

• The Wall Street Journal reports,
  • “Top White House officials are racing to address potential cybersecurity threats posed by the latest artificial-intelligence models, highlighting how AI’s perils are becoming a top priority for the Trump administration.
  • “National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross is leading the administration’s response, convening officials across agencies to identify security weaknesses in critical infrastructure and bolster government systems that could be exploited by AI, people familiar with the matter said. The administration is working with the private sector to make sure Americans are safe when new models are released, White House officials said.
  • “In recent days, the administration has held discussions featuring Vice President JD Vance and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent with leading tech and financial executives about coordinating the private sector’s response to potential cyberattacks and preparing online systems, the people said. 
  • “The moves come during an intensifying race among the top AI companies to release more powerful models that could cause widespread online disruptions if put to work by bad actors. 
  • Anthropic said this week its new AI model Mythos was so good at finding and exploiting software bugs that the company has no plans to release it to the general public. Instead, Anthropic has made a preview version of the model available to roughly 50 companies and organizations that run critical infrastructure, including leading tech companies such as Apple, Amazon.com and Google. The aim is to find and fix bugs in hardware and software before the model is publicly released. 
  • ​​”The company has also held discussions with government officials about the model’s cyber capabilities. 
  • “OpenAI and other model developers are also expected to release powerful tools in the weeks ahead.” 
• and
  • “Over the past six months, cybersecurity researchers have become increasingly worried that AI systems are not only becoming better at finding bugs, but that they are also shrinking the window of time between when a bug is disclosed and when it can be exploited with working attack software.
  • “Late last year, researchers at Stanford University found that AI software was almost as good as humans at finding and exploiting bugs on a real-world network. 
  • “And earlier this year Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 model found more high-severity bugs in the Firefox browser in two weeks than the rest of the world typically reports in two months. 
  • When measuring dollar cost to find a bug, Mythos is about 10 times as efficient as previous AI models, Graham said.  Details of Mythos’s capabilities were previously reported by Fortune.”

• HIPAA Journal lets us know,
  • “To help HIPAA-regulated entities manage risks and vulnerabilities, OCR has recorded a risk management video. In the video, Nicholas Heesters, OCR’s Senior Advisor for Cybersecurity, explains the HIPAA risk management requirements and provides examples of potential risk management violations identified during OCR’s investigations of data breaches.
  • “In December 2025, OCR requested questions from HIPAA-regulated entities on risk management,and has provided answers to a selection of those questions in the video. The video also shares important resources to help HIPAA-regulated entities comply with this important HIPAA Security Rule requirement. You can view the video on OCR’s YouTube channel.”
    
• Cybersecurity Dive relates,
  • “The Justice Department on Tuesday [April 7] announced that it had stopped Russia’s military intelligence agency from using hacked U.S. routers to maliciously redirect internet traffic and steal data from victims that include governments and critical infrastructure operators.
  • “Operatives of the Russian GRU have spent several years breaking into TP-Link small office and home office (SOHO) routers around the world and reconfiguring them to send DNS requests through Kremlin-controlled servers, which allowed Moscow to collect internet traffic and even passwords, emails and other sensitive information from victim networks. In response, the FBI launched “Operation Masquerade,” sending commands to hacked routers that collected forensic data and reset their DNS settings to erase Russia’s foothold in the devices.
  • “DOJ announced the operation hours after Microsoft revealed Russia’s abuse of SOHO routers. “For nation-state actors like Forest Blizzard,” Microsoft said, “DNS hijacking enables persistent, passive visibility and reconnaissance at scale.”

From the cybersecurity breaches and vulnerabilities front,

• Bleeping Computer reports,
  • “Bitcoin Depot, which operates one of the largest Bitcoin ATM networks, says attackers stole $3.665 million worth of Bitcoin from its crypto wallets after breaching its systems last month.
  • “The company manages more than 25,000 Bitcoin ATMs and BDCheckout locations worldwide and reported revenue of $615 million in 2025.
  • “As revealed in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the company discovered the attack on March 23 after detecting suspicious activity on some of its IT systems.”
  • “While it took immediate measures to contain the breach, the attackers had time to steal credentials to digital asset settlement accounts and transfer over 50 Bitcoin from Bitcoin Depot’s wallets before their access was blocked.”

• Dark Reading discusses how “Russia’s ‘Fancy Bear’ APT Continues Its Global Onslaught.”
  • “Victims don’t need to match the cyber espionage group’s technical sophistication, experts say. But patching and some form of zero trust are now non-negotiable.”

• The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency added two known exploited vulnerabilities to its catalog this week.
  • April 6, 2026
    • CVE-2026-35616 Fortinet FortiClient EMS Improper Access Control Vulnerability
      • Cybersecurity Dive discusses this KVE here.
  • April 8, 2026
    • CVE-2026-1340 Ivanti Endpoint Manager Mobile (EPMM) Code Injection Vulnerability
      • Cybersecurity Dive discusses this KVE here.

• Bleeping Computer advises,
  • “Analysis of CISA’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities over the past four years shows critical vulnerabilities still open at Day 7 worsened from 56% to 63% despite teams closing 6.5x more tickets. Staffing cannot solve this.
  • “Of the 52 tracked weaponized vulnerabilities in our study, 88% were patched more slowly than they were exploited — half were weaponized before any patch existed.
  • “The problem is not speed. It is the operational model itself.
  • “Cumulative exposure, not CVE counts, is the true risk metric that security teams now need to measure. While dashboards reward the sprint to get patches implemented, breaches exploit the tail. AI is not another attack surface — instead, the transition period where AI-powered attackers face human defenders is the industry’s most dangerous window.
  • “In response, defenders have to implement their own autonomous, closed-loop risk operations.”
• and tells us,
  • “Attackers have been exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in Adobe Reader using maliciously crafted PDF documents since at least December.
  • “The attacks have been discovered by security researcher Haifei Li (the founder of the sandbox-based exploit-detection platform EXPMON), who warned on Tuesday that the attackers are using what he described as a “highly sophisticated, fingerprinting-style PDF exploit” to target an undisclosed Adobe Reader security flaw.
  • “Li also said that these attacks have been targeting Adobe users for at least 4 months, stealing data from compromised systems using privileged util.readFileIntoStream and RSS.addFeed Acrobat APIs, and deploying additional exploits.
  • “This ‘fingerprinting’ exploit has been confirmed to leverage a zero-day/unpatched vulnerability that works on the latest version of Adobe Reader without requiring any user interaction beyond opening a PDF file,” Li warned.
  • “Even more concerning, this exploit allows the threat actor to not only collect/steal local information but also potentially launch subsequent RCE/SBX attacks, which could lead to full control of the victim’s system.”

• Cybersecurity Dive informs us,
  • “A cyber threat actor is using the React2Shell vulnerability as the basis for a widespread credential-harvesting campaign that has compromised everything from AI tool API keys to cloud platform passwords.
  • “After identifying internet-facing React Server Components instances that are vulnerable to React2Shell, the hackers upload a malicious payload to the server — without the need for authentication — that lets them execute arbitrary code on the target server, researchers at Cisco’s Talos threat intelligence group said in a recent report.
  • “The payload contains a “multi-phase credential harvesting tool that harvests credentials, SSH keys, cloud tokens, and environment secrets at scale,” Cisco researchers wrote.
  • “The entire process after target identification is automated. “No further manual interaction is required to extract and exfiltrate credentials harvested from the system,” Cisco said.”

From the ransomware front,

• The American Hospital Association reports,
  • “Health care and public health was the top sector targeted for cyberthreats in 2025, according to the FBI’s latest annual report on internet crimes. There were 460 ransomware attacks and 182 data breaches, totaling 642 cyber events. Financial services was the next highest sector at 447 total events. 
  • “This report quantifies what we already knew anecdotally about the health care sector being the most targeted by ransomware attacks,” said John Riggi, AHA national advisor for cybersecurity and risk. “The vast majority are perpetrated by foreign ransomware gangs, primarily Russian-speaking groups, which specifically target health care hoping for a big payout. They know these attacks cause disruptions and delays to digitally dependent health care delivery, posing a risk to patient and community safety, thereby increasing the exigency and pressure for a potentially large ransom payment. These despicable acts are in fact threat-to-life crimes and remind us to do what we can on defense and prepare for clinical continuity not if, but when, an attack strikes.” 

• Dark Reading relates,
  • “Storm-1175 actors are running up-tempo campaigns to deliver Medusa ransomware, putting pressure on organizations to patch critical vulnerabilities faster. 
  • “In a blog post on Monday, Microsoft Threat Intelligence detailed how Storm-1175, a financially motivated cybercrime group, is conducting “high velocity ransomware campaigns” that typically exploit known vulnerabilities in the sweet spot for threat actors: the time between a vulnerability’s initial disclosure and the widespread adoption of the patch. Microsoft also tied the exploitation of several zero-day vulnerabilities to the group.”
  • “Storm-1175’s playbook appears to be predicated on speed. Attackers move quickly from vulnerability exploitation to data exfiltration and, finally, delivery of Medusa ransomware, “often within a few days and, in some cases, within 24 hours,” according to Microsoft.
  • “The threat actor’s high operational tempo and proficiency in identifying exposed perimeter assets have proven successful, with recent intrusions heavily impacting healthcare organizations, as well as those in the education, professional services, and finance sectors in Australia, United Kingdom, and United States,” the blog post stated.”

• SC Media informs us,
  • “In March, more than a dozen CISOs and other security managers gathered online to discuss how best to handle ransomware in today’s AI-powered environments.
  • “Because the CyberRisk Collaborative roundtable discussion, sponsored by Akamai, followed the Chatham House rule, we can’t tell you who said what. But the latest CRC report, “Redefining Ransomware Containment,” summarizes what was said.
  • “The group’s main message: Ransomware is no longer just a cybersecurity issue, but a full-scale business-resilience challenge.
  • “Organizations should focus on ransomware recovery, the participants agreed. While rapid containment remains critical, stopping an attack is only part of the solution. True success against ransomware includes maintaining business operations, minimizing disruption, and lining up technical response with organizational priorities.
  • “Containment speed is important, but even a quickly halted attack can lead to substantial financial loss or reputational damage. Organizations must take a view of incident success that includes recovery timelines and customer impact alongside traditional security metrics. That’s because a ransomware incident affects the entire enterprise, not just IT systems.
  • “Because business continuity is the true benchmark of resilience, CISOs and other security managers in the roundtable discussion stressed that customers and stakeholders often care less about how quickly an attack is contained and more about whether services remain available.
  • “The CISOs said that as a result, leading organizations are folding ransomware response into broader business-continuity and disaster-recovery plans. That way, critical operations can keep going even during an active incident, and downstream impacts on customers, partners, and markets will be lessened.”

From the cybersecurity defenses front,

• The Wall Street Journal reports,
  • “Artificial intelligence giant Anthropic unveiled a partnership with cybersecurity companies Tuesday [April 7] that raises more questions about how parts of the security industry may be disrupted by the emerging technology.
  • The company said its new Project Glasswing initiative allows select companies access to its Claude Mythos2 Preview frontier model, specifically for defensive cybersecurity work. Participants include CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon’s AWS cloud business, JPMorgan Chase, Google, Broadcom, Nvidia and the Linux Foundation.
  • “Anthropic said its new model already has found thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities, including some in every major operating system and web browser.
  • “AI models have reached a level of coding capability where they can surpass all but the most skilled humans at finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities,” Anthropic said of Project Glasswing.
  • “The project shows how AI is beginning to reshape parts of the cybersecurity industry, with investors trying to anticipate which areas are built to last and which are ripe to be disrupted by automation. Cyber shares rose as some investors were encouraged by the companies’ inclusion in the Anthropic project, but uncertainty remains about how AI’s impact on the industry will play out.”

• Forrester identifies ten consequences of Project Glasswing nobody’s writing about yet.

• SC Media offers five ways to mitigate the risks of “cracked” software.
  • “The human element remains one of the top threat vectors within organizations. Well-intentioned employees trying to get their work done quickly and efficiently can sometimes unknowingly introduce new security risks in doing so.
  • “For instance, an employee needs a PDF editor or design tool, but can’t find an IT-approved option or doesn’t want to wait for access. So they download a free or “cracked” version from the web. It feels harmless. In reality, it creates a direct path into the organization’s IT environment.” * * *
  • “Security teams can reduce this risk, but it takes a shift in focus from policy to control. Taking the following five steps won’t eliminate shadow IT, but they will make it much harder for a quick download to turn into a serious incident:
    • “Block unauthorized executables at runtime: Stop unknown binaries from running, even if a user downloads them manually.
    • “Restrict local admin rights: Limit who can install or modify software so a single download can’t change the system.
    • “Apply a zero-trust approach to application control:  Allow only approved applications to run, block everything else.
    • “Use advanced endpoint protection to monitor for behavioral indicators, not just signatures:Look for patterns like manual installs, archive extraction, and unusual execution paths.
    • “Reinforce acceptable use policies and user awareness: Make expectations clear and explain the risks.”

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

From the Iranian war front,

• Industrial Cyber reports,
  • “New data from KELA recognizes that Iranian state-sponsored threat actors have moved well beyond traditional espionage, increasingly blurring the line between nation-state operations and financially motivated cybercrime. Rather than running large-scale ransomware cartels of their own, these groups have embedded themselves into the existing criminal ecosystem, acting as initial access brokers, collaborating with ransomware affiliates, and deploying pseudo-ransomware to mask destructive attacks as extortion campaigns.
  • “A key example is Pay2Key, an Iran-linked ransomware operation that has resurfaced as a professionalized RaaS platform operating on the anonymous I2P network, actively recruiting affiliates from Russian cybercrime forums and offering an elevated profit share, bumping the affiliate cut from 70% to 80%, for attacks on U.S. and Israeli targets. The model creates a significant compliance risk for victim organizations: paying what appears to be a routine ransom demand could unknowingly funnel money to OFAC-sanctioned Iranian entities, exposing companies to severe legal and financial penalties.
  • “The KELA Cyber Intelligence Center identified in its Monday [March 30] post that one of the more concerning developments is the growing collaboration between Iranian state-linked actors and the broader ransomware ecosystem.”

• Security Week relates,
  • The FBI has confirmed that threat actors have gained access to an email account belonging to FBI Director Kash Patel, but said no government information has been compromised. 
  • “The Iran-linked hacker group Handala on Friday [March 27] claimed to have hacked Patel’s email account, releasing files allegedly representing photos, emails, and classified documents taken from the FBI director’s inbox.
  • “The so-called ‘impenetrable’ systems of the FBI were brought to their knees within hours by our team,” the hackers wrote. 
  • However, the account does not appear to be hosted on FBI systems; it is a personal Gmail account. In addition, the stolen information does not seem to be recent.
  • It’s unclear when the account was hacked, but it may have been one of the many targeted by Iranian hackers back in 2024 as part of an operation targeting Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.” 

• Cyberscoop tells us,
  • “Medtech company Stryker says it’s back to being “fully operational,” three weeks after it became the most prominent victim to date of Iranian hackers, who said they attacked the Michigan-based company in retaliation over the conflict with the United States and Israel.
  • “A March 11 wiper attack from the pro-Palestinian, Iranian government-connected group Handala damaged the company’s order processing, manufacturing and shipping.” * * *
  • “Production is moving rapidly toward peak capacity with discipline and stability, supported by restored commercial, ordering and distribution systems,” the company wrote in an update on its website Wednesday. “Overall product supply remains healthy, with strong availability across most product lines, as we continue to meet customer demand and support patient care.”
  • “Stryker said it continues to work with outside cyber experts, government agencies and industry partners on its investigation and recovery.” * * *
  • “Iranian hackers have been busy since the U.S.-Israel strikes began, but have claimed few successes in the United States. Handala boasted this week about an attack on St. Joseph County, Indiana, where officials said they were investigating a hack of its external fax service.”

From the cybersecurity policy front,

• Cybersecurity Dive reports,
  • “President Donald Trump on Friday [April 3] proposed significantly slashing the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s budget.
  • “The White House’s fiscal year 2027 budget would reduce CISA’s funding by $707 million, roughly 30% of its FY2025 budget of $2.4 billion.
  • “The administration said its proposal “refocuses CISA on its core mission” of protecting federal networks and helping critical infrastructure operators defend themselves from cyberattacks and physical threats.”

• Per a March 31 HHS news release,
  • “The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) today announced that it is reversing a 2024 reorganization that: (1) dually titled the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) as the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy/Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ASTP/ONC), headed by the Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy, dually titled as the National Coordinator for Health IT; (2) moved three HHS-wide technology roles to ONC from the Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO); and (3) shifted specific cybersecurity functions out of OCIO.
  • “Today’s action restores a unified, Department‑wide technology leadership model by returning these enterprise responsibilities to OCIO while sharpening ONC’s mission focus on nationwide health IT interoperability and data liquidity.
  • “Under this alignment, HHS has ended the Biden administration’s dual management title for the Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy, restored ONC as a singularly titled office, and shifted the roles, responsibilities, and offices of the HHS Chief Technology Officer (CTO), HHS Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer (CAIO), and HHS Chief Data Officer (CDO) back under the HHS Chief Information Officer’s leadership. This structure reinforces OCIO’s statutory responsibility for enterprise IT, cybersecurity, and data operations, while enabling ONC to concentrate on health IT policy, standards, and certification that support better care and lower costs.
  • “To better integrate policy and operations, OCIO will organize enterprise roles around three core functions: (1) strategic technology leadership and innovation, led by the CTO; (2) responsible, trustworthy artificial intelligence, led by the CAIO; and (3) enterprise data governance and analytics, led by the CDO. These leaders will work as a unified team under the CIO to deliver secure, scalable platforms and common services that support ONC’s policy work and the Department’s mission programs.
  • “This structure allows OCIO to provide an integrated backbone for cloud, cybersecurity, data, and AI that every HHS component can rely on,” said HHS Chief Information Officer Clark Minor. “By bringing CTO, CAIO, and CDO functions together under one roof, we can move faster on shared platforms, protect our systems more effectively, and support ONC and the operating divisions with the technology capabilities they need to innovate for patients.”

• Cybersecurity Dive informs us,
  • “Federal government leaders are prioritizing cybersecurity improvements as they sketch out their technology-modernization agendas for the year, consulting firm EY said in a survey released this week.
  • “Roughly half of survey respondents (56%) said cybersecurity was one of their top modernization priorities, with roughly a third saying that growing cybersecurity threats “are a barrier for their agencies to achieve their modernization goals,” the survey found.
  • “EY also presented data on government leaders’ impressions of their agencies’ current security postures and their hopes for AI.”

• Bleeping Computer points out,
  • “The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) warned Americans against using foreign-developed mobile applications, particularly those created by Chinese developers.
  • “In a public service announcement (PSA) issued via its Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) platform this Tuesday [March 31], the FBI warned of privacy and data security risks associated with these apps.
  • “As of early 2026, many of the most downloaded and top-grossing apps in the United States are developed and maintained by foreign companies, particularly those based in China,” the bureau warned.”

From the cybersecurity breaches and vulnerabilities front,

• Health Exec reports on April 2,
  • “A hospital in Texas revealed that it’s fallen victim to a data breach that exposed the personal information of more than 257,000 patients to hackers.
  • “Nacogdoches Memorial Hospital—an independent health system in Texas consisting of one emergency-capable facility, several affiliated provider practices, and a rehabilitation center—made the breach public this week.
  • “The incident occurred on Jan. 31—or at least, that’s when Nacogdoches Memorial staff became aware of an ongoing cyberattack.
  • “At that time, the hospital said it notified law enforcement, initiated an “incident response plan” and began an investigation to find out what happened. As for details such as the nature of the breach and who was responsible, neither a statement from Nacogdoches Memorial nor a report filed with the Office of the Maine Attorney General contain those details.
  • “To date, no known listing of the data trove on the dark web exists, and no hacker group has claimed responsibility for the cyberattack. Whether or not the data will eventually end up leaked onto the Internet or put up for sale remains unknown—but given the scope of the breach and the black market value of the stolen information, it’s not out of the realm of possibility.”

• Bleeping Computer relates,
  • “Telehealth giant Hims & Hers Health is warning that it suffered a data breach after support tickets were stolen from a third-party customer service platform.” * * *
  • “It is one of the most successful U.S. brands in the online pharmacy and telehealth space, with strong marketing presence, and annual revenues close to $1 billion.” * * *
  • “BleepingComputer learned last month that the ShinyHunters extortion gang conducted the breach.
  • “The data was stolen as part of a widespread campaign in which threat actors compromised Okta SSO accounts to gain access to third-party cloud storage services and SaaS platforms to steal data.
  • “In this particular attack, BleepingComputer was told that the threat actors used the Okta SSO account to access the His and Hers Zendesk instance, where they stole millions of support tickets.”

• Dark Reading notes,
  • “The impact of TeamPCP’s high-profile supply chain attacks is rapidly expanding — in more ways than one.
  • “Following last month’s spree of compromised open source projects, two victim organizations disclosed breaches related to the attacks this week. On Tuesday, AI startup Mercor said on social media platform X that it was “one of thousands of companies impacted by a supply chain attack involving LiteLLM.”
  • “And on Thursday, the EU’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-EU) disclosed that a recent attack on the European Commission’s cloud and Web infrastructure stemmed from the previously reported Trivy supply chain attack,also attributed to TeamPCP. According to CERT-EU, the EC inadvertently installed a compromised version of the Trivy code-scanning security tool, which allowed threat actors to harvest credentials and secrets that they later used to access the organization’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud environment.”

• CISA added three known exploited vulnerabilities to its catalog this week.
  • March 30, 2026
    • CVE-2026-3055 Citrix NetScaler Out-of-Bounds Read Vulnerability
      • Cybersecurity Dive and Security Week discusses this KVE here.
  • April 1. 2026
    • CVE-2026-5281 Google Dawn Use-After-Free Vulnerability
      • The Hacker News discuss this KVE.
  • April 2, 2026
    • CVE-2026-3502 TrueConf Client Download of Code Without Integrity Check Vulnerability 
      • CyberPress discusses this KVE here.

• The American Hospital Association News tells us,
  • “The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency released an alert March 27 on a vulnerability in F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager software that is being exploited for malicious cyber activity. F5 devices and software, used widely by health care and other critical infrastructure, provide app security and management services. The vulnerability was previously disclosed in October 2025 as a denial-of-service issue but was reclassified this month due to new information that found the vulnerability allows malicious actors to perform remote code execution, according to an alert from F5. 
  • “F5 has determined that this issue is much more severe than previously thought,” said Scott Gee, AHA deputy national advisor for cybersecurity and risk. “The original patch released last year fixes the larger issue, so if you are using F5’s BIG-IP software, a very common app delivery and security service, ensure that you patch the system as soon as possible.” 
     
• Cybersecurity Dive informs us,
  • “Security researchers warn that chaining two critical vulnerabilities in Progress Software’s ShareFile service could allow an attacker to achieve remote code execution.
  • “The flaws exist in ShareFile Storage Zones Controller, which helps users manage files while they are using the ShareFile software-as-a-service interface, according to researchers at watchTowr Labs.
  • “The vulnerabilities include an authentication bypass flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-2699, and a remote code execution flaw, CVE-2026-2701. The vulnerabilities have severity scores of 9.8 and 9.1, respectively.
  • “Progress Software warned in a security bulletin released Thursday [April 2] that an attacker could access on-premises Storage Zones Controller configuration pages, allowing them to make changes in system configuration or achieve remote code execution.
  • “There is no immediate evidence of exploitation, but researchers urged users to immediately apply security updates.”
• and
  • “A North Korean threat actor is suspected to be behind a major supply chain attack against a
    Axios, a JavaScript library that is downloaded more than 100 million times per week, according to security researchers. 
  • “Earlier this week, an attacker compromised the node package manager account for an axios maintainer and introduced a malicious dependency plain-crypto-js. The malicious versions were deleted within a few hours, but, with the widespread use of axios, there was a risk that a large number of users could have downloaded the poisoned version.
  • “Researchers from Google Threat Intelligence Group said the malicious dependency is an obfuscated dropper that deploys a backdoor called Waveshaper.v2 across Windows, Linux and Mac environments.” 

• Bleeping Computer notes,
  • “Threat actors are exploiting the recent Claude Code source code leak by using fake GitHub repositories to deliver Vidar information-stealing malware.
  • “Claude Code is a terminal-based AI agent from Anthropic, designed to execute coding tasks directly in the terminal and act as an autonomous agent, capable of direct system interaction, LLM API call handling, MCP integration, and persistent memory.
  • “On March 31, Anthropic accidentally exposed the full client-side source code of the new tool via a 59.8 MB JavaScript source map included by accident in the published npm package.”
• and
  • “Device code phishing attacks that abuse the OAuth 2.0 Device Authorization Grant flow to hijack accounts have surged more than 37 times this year.
  • “In this type of attack, the threat actor sends a device authorization request to a service provider and receives a code, which is sent to the victim under various pretexts.
  • “Next, the victim is tricked into entering the code on the legitimate login page, thus authorizing the attacker’s device to access the account through valid access and refresh tokens.

• Per Cyberscoop,
  • “A new malware-based credential-stealing campaign, which researchers are calling “DeepLoad,” has been infecting enterprise business IT environments.
  • “In a report released Monday, ReliaQuest AI researchers Thassanai McCabe and Andrew Currie say the most relevant feature of this attack is the way it uses artificial intelligence and other engineering “to defeat the controls most organizations rely on, turning one user action into persistent, credential-stealing access.”
  • “DeepLoad is delivered to victims via “QuickFix” social-engineering techniques, such as fake browser prompts or error pages. If the user falls for the scheme, the malware developers — or more likely their AI tools — put a lot of work into building evasion of security technology “at every stage” of the attack chain.
  • “The loader “buries functional code under thousands of meaningless variable assignments,” and the payload runs behind a Windows lock screen process that is “overlooked by security tools” monitoring for threats. ReliaQuest said “the sheer volume” of code padding likely rules out human-only involvement.”

• Info Security discusses,
  • “A new malware-as-a-service (MaaS) platform dubbed Venom Stealer that automates credential theft and continuous data exfiltration has been identified by cybersecurity researchers.
  • “The platform is being sold on cybercrime networks and is designed to go beyond traditional credential harvesting tools by maintaining ongoing access to stolen data even after the initial infection.”

From the ransomware front,

• Cisco Talos reflects on ransomware trends in 2025.

• Cyberscoop reports,
  • “The Akira ransomware group has compromised hundreds of victims over the past year with a well-honed attack lifecycle that has whittled down the time from initial access to encryption of data in less than four hours, according tocybersecurity firm Halcyon.”
    
• Security Week relates,
  • “Like an inverted pyramid, the range of different attack modes are now built on top of the single point of identity abuse.
  • “Stolen credentials are a major threat. Legitimate credentials illegitimately acquired provide legitimate access to illegitimate actors. Once inside the network, these bad actors have greater ability to move and act in stealth. The continuing rise in ransomware attacks bears testament.
  • “The theft and resale of credentials operates on an industrial scale. Fueled by the rise of increasingly more sophisticated infostealers, stolen credentials are packaged into ‘logs’ and sold to criminals on the black market. Ontinue reports, “Listings tied to LummaC2 alone surged by 72%, with high-privilege cloud console credentials selling for $1,000–$15,000+.”
  • “Ransomware has been one of the primary beneficiaries of stolen credentials. More than 7,000 incidents and 129 active groups were tracked through 2025. At the same time, ransom payments decreased slightly from $892M in 2024 to $820M in 2025. This apparent contradiction is actually logical.
  • “Larger targets, with larger payout potential, will have seen the most aggressive corporate investment (process and technology) mitigating exposure to this attack pattern,” explains Trey Ford, chief strategy and trust officer at Bugcrowd. These larger targets are also more susceptible to government pressure to not pay ransoms, and ransomware income has consequently declined. The ransomware groups have responded with more attacks demanding smaller payments from more but smaller companies.” 

From the cybersecurity defenses front,

• Dark Reading reports,
  • “After some delay, Apple has patched the vulnerabilities associated with the DarkSword exploit chain for all affected customers, even those who aren’t updated to iOS 26 — a boon for organizations trying to get users updated to a new version all at once, and for those with patch management policies that preclude such updates.”
• and
  • “Joseph Izzo, chief medical information officer for San Joaquin General Hospital, received ransomware training during a downtime period. He practiced responding and maintaining patient care in the event that the facility is forced to operate offline. But when the hospital where he was working was actually hit with ransomware, he realized very quickly how “different it was under pressure.” 
  • “Izzo shared his story at RSAC 2026 Conference and provided key incident response (IR) recommendations for healthcare organizations, a sector frequently targeted by ransomware gangs due to highly sensitive information. Ransomware doesn’t always cripple hospitals, but partial attacks happen frequently, Izzo explained. Either way, a rapid response is necessary when serving a vulnerable population.
  • “Recommendations ranged from identity protection to being prepared to operate with pen and paper in a digital world. Preparation is what really “makes the difference” when healthcare facilities are trying to get past a ransomware incident, Izzo emphasized.” 

• Cybersecurity Dive tells us,
  • “Cybersecurity is one of the leading risks influencing corporate executives’ decisions about AI adoption, the consulting firm KPMG said in a quarterly AI pulse survey released on Tuesday.
  • “Three-quarters of senior leaders at large corporations told KPMG that they were worried about the cybersecurity and privacy risk associated with AI tools, according to the report.
  • “The survey also asked questions about governance approaches and agentic AI, offering a window into how businesses around the world are wrestling with new security challenges.”

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

From the Iranian war front,

• Industrial Cyber reports,
  • “Following its recent cybersecurity incident, medical technology giant Stryker said it found no indication of ransomware or malware. As the investigation progressed, alongside Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 and other experts, the company determined that the threat actor used a malicious file to execute commands, enabling them to conceal activity within its systems. The file was not capable of spreading, either within or outside the environment.
  • “Our internal teams continue to work around the clock with external partners to make meaningful progress on our restoration efforts. We are grateful for the partnership and collaboration with government agencies and industry partners,” Stryker wrote in its latest update. “We believe the incident is contained, and we are prioritizing restoration of systems that directly support customers, ordering and shipping. Our internal teams, in partnership with third-party experts, reacted quickly to not only regain access but to remove the unauthorized party from our environment.”
  • “The update noted that, most importantly, the investigation has not identified any malicious activity directed towards customers, suppliers, vendors, or partners.” * * *
  • “Resecurity warns that the Iran conflict has rapidly evolved into a multi-domain confrontation where kinetic military operations are tightly integrated with cyber, electronic, and information warfare, marking a shift in how modern conflicts unfold. The analysis highlights sustained missile and drone strikes occurring alongside coordinated cyber campaigns driven by state-linked actors and proxy groups targeting critical infrastructure, enterprises, and government systems. This convergence is expected to persist, with cyber operations increasingly used to disrupt services, gather intelligence, and amplify geopolitical impact, even as physical hostilities continue across the region.”
    
• MedTech Dive adds,
  • “Stryker has restored most manufacturing sites and critical lines roughly two weeks after the company suffered a cyberattack.
  • “The company is working with its global manufacturing sites as “operations steadily improve towards full capacity,” a spokesperson said in a statement emailed to MedTech Dive. Stryker is making “strong progress” on restoring underlying systems that support production and fulfillment.
  • “Stryker’s electronic ordering system, which was shut down due to the attack, has been restored for customers. The Portage, Michigan-based company is “working as quickly and safely as possible to reconcile orders, manufacture products and deliver to our customers so they can continue to provide seamless patient care,” the spokesperson said.
  • “The spokesperson declined to comment on whether Stryker has a timeline for full restoration of its operations, and whether the financial and material impact on the company is yet known.”

• Cybersecurity Dive relates,
  • “An Iran-linked ransomware group targeted an unnamed U.S. healthcare provider in the lead-up to the Iran war, according to a report Tuesday [March 24] from Halcyon. 
  • “Tracked under the name Pay2Key, the group gained access to a compromised administrative account for several days and then encrypted the account. 
  • “Forensics investigators, which included Halcyon and Beazley Security, found no evidence that data was stolen. This marks a departure from the group’s previous attacks. Researchers suggest the attacker may have changed tactics to focus more on destruction rather than pure extortion. 
  • “Also, the threat group appears to have shifted its attention toward the U.S. after historically targeting Israeli systems.” 

From the cybersecurity policy and law enforcement front,

• Cybersecurity Dive reports,
  • “Members of Congress and their staffs are eagerly awaiting the Trump administration’s plan for implementing its new cybersecurity strategy and want more regular updates on how the government is helping critical infrastructure organizations guard against new Iran-linked hacking threats.
  • “Staffers from the House Homeland Security Committee and the House Oversight Committee discussed those and other cybersecurity issues during a panel at the RSAC 2026 Conference here on Tuesday [March 24].
  • “While the Democratic and Republican staffers sometimes took different approaches to the issues, they agreed on the need for more details about the strategy and about efforts to counter Iran-linked cyberattacks.”
• and
  • “The program that underpins the entire global vulnerability-fixing ecosystem is in danger of either collapsing or fading into irrelevance without major changes, according to one of the program’s leaders.
  • “I don’t think we can afford to continue at the pace [and] with the tools that we currently have in order to make real progress. We’re just gonna be left in the dust,” Katie Noble, a board member for the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) Program, said during a panel at the RSAC 2026 Conference here on Tuesday [March 24].” * * *
  • “Through a network of affiliated organizations, the CVE Program vets vulnerability reports and assigns each flaw a unique CVE number, which helps researchers, businesses, government agencies and information-sharing groups track the flaws and understand their impact. The program is widely considered a crown jewel of the cybersecurity community. But its fate is uncertain after the nonprofit MITRE Corporation, which runs the program, almost lost crucial federal funding last year.
  • “On top of those logistical woes, the broader CVE ecosystem is also reeling from the dramatic AI-powered increase in the number of vulnerability reports flowing into software vendors and open-source platforms.”

• Cyberscoop adds,
  • “Four former National Security Agency directors shared varying concerns about a lack of earnest and widespread response to growing threats in cyberspace during a discussion at the RSAC 2026 Conference on Tuesday.
  • “Accelerating threats posed by artificial intelligence, China and cybercriminals at large are testing the country’s resolve and determination to foster meaningful public-private collaboration, the former commanders of U.S. Cyber Command said. 
  • “While the four-star military officials remain confident in the country’s resources and people committed to defending the nation from cyberattacks, they voiced unease about challenges that could upend technological dominance and diminish a collective response to serious intrusions. 
  • “I think we’ve become numb to it,” retired Gen. Paul Nakasone said. “We continue to see these different intrusions, and intrusions have gotten to a size that the scale is just incredible to me.”
• and
  • “A year-long effort to strengthen cybersecurity and modernize tech at U.S. intelligence agencies has led to policy standards for using AI to bolster cyber defenses, a shared repository of all apps that have undergone a cybersecurity review and more, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence announced Thursday [March 26].
  • “An unclassified summary of cyber and tech modernization work under the first year of DNI Tulsi Gabbard’s stewardship states that the office has expanded the automation of threat hunting across intelligence community networks. (The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency conducts threat hunting across federal civilian agencies.)
  • The ODNI also has developed a zero-trust strategy that shifts “to a data-centric security model that protects information regardless of location or network,” according to the summary.
  • “Over the past year, we have taken meaningful steps to begin fulfilling that responsibility through the largest IC-wide technology investment and modernization effort in history,” Gabbard said in a news release. “President Trump’s Intelligence Community is moving faster and more decisively on cybersecurity modernization and investments in IT than ever before, delivering stronger defenses, greater efficiency, and real cost savings for the American people.”   

• Tech Target shares a boatload of other insights from the RSAC conference.

• Federal News Network tells us,
  • “The Trump administration is prioritizing ensuring the government leads on adopting artificial intelligence for cyber defense, according to a top Office of Management and Budget official.
  • “The use of “AI-enabled cyber tools” is specifically called out in the new national cybersecurity strategy. The White House’s top cyber official has said the administration will launch a series of pilot programs to harden government networks under the new strategy.
  • White House officials in recent weeks convened a roundtable featuring “representatives from industry as well as agencies who are at the cutting edge of cyber defense, to talk about how we can really operationalize AI for cyber defense,” Nick Polk, branch director for cybersecurity within OMB’s Office of the Chief Information Officer, said during a Thursday webinar hosted by the Digital Government Institute.
  • “This is something where we have really decided that we want to take the mantle and have the government lead in this space,” Polk added.”
• and
  • “The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, after a year of workforce reductions that has left CISA’s ranks depleted, is planning to recruit more than 300 people in the coming months.
  • “The cyber agency is also loosening restrictions around flexible work schedules for its employees.
  • “Acting CISA Director Nick Andersen announced those plans in a March 23 email to staff. Andersen said Department of Homeland Security headquarters had approved CISA’s “critical hire list,” including 329 “mission critical hires” throughout the agency.
  • “During the ongoing government shutdown, CISA will only be hiring for “excepted” positions, Andersen added. Roughly two-thirds of CISA’s staff is currently furloughed due to the DHS shutdown.“

• Per a National Institute of Standards and Technology news release,
  • “NIST has released two new CSF 2.0 quick-start guides, adding to an expanding portfolio of available implementation resources offering tailored pathways for different audiences to engage with the CSF 2.0. The two new resources include:
    • “Final Version: NIST Special Publication (SP) 1308, NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0: Cybersecurity, Enterprise Risk Management, and Workforce Management Quick-Start Guide
    • “Open for Public Comment: NIST SP 1347 Initial Public Draft (ipd), CSF 2.0 Informative References Quick-Start Guide

• Cybersecurity Dive informs us,
  • “The Federal Communications Commission on Monday said it will no longer approve imported routers for consumer use without government review. 
  • “An interagency body convened by the White House determined that consumer-grade routers made outside the U.S. present an unacceptable risk to national security, according to FCC officials. 
  • “The Trump administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy says the U.S. should not be dependent on an outside power for core components considered vital to the nation’s economy or defense.”

• Cyberscoop points out,
  • “An operation to crack down on the widely used RedLine infostealer has netted the extradition of an Armenian man to the United States, where he made an initial appearance in a Texas court Wednesday.
  • “Authorities charged Hambardzum Minasyan with conspiracy to commit access device fraud, conspiracy to violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and conspiracy to commit money laundering for his alleged role with RedLine. Infostealers thieve billions of user credentials such as passwords annually.”

• Security Week adds,
  • “Russian cybercriminal Ilya Angelov, known online as ‘Milan’ and ‘Okart’, has been sentenced to two years in federal prison for his role in the administration of a botnet used to facilitate ransomware attacks, the DOJ announced on Tuesday [March 24].
  • “According to the DOJ, Angelov was part of a threat group tracked by the FBI as Mario Kart, and by the cybersecurity community as TA-551, Shathak, Gold Cabin, Monster Libra, G0127, and ATK236.
  • “The charges against Angelov stem from activities he engaged in between 2017 and 2021, during which his cybercrime group built a botnet by distributing malware via spam email attachments.” * * *
  • “Angelov’s sentencing comes shortly after the DOJ announced that another Russian national, Aleksei Volkov, has been sentenced to 81 months in prison for his role in ransomware attacks.” 

• The Wall Street Journal notes,
  • “Global hackers are getting better at drawing lessons from online crime busts to build more resilient operations, posing a dilemma for law-enforcement officials.
  • “The problem, known as tactical exposure, is expected to deepen amid calls by the White House for more aggressive action against cybercrime and a recent wave of takedowns and disruptions of cybercrime networks and platforms.”

From the cybersecurity vulnerabilities and breaches front,

• CISA added three known exploited vulnerabilities to its catalog this week.
  • March 25, 2026
    • CVE-2026-33017 Langflow Code Injection Vulnerability
      • Bleeping Computer discusses this KVE here.
  • March 26, 2026
    • CVE-2026-33634. Aqua Security Trivy Embedded Malicious Code Vulnerability
      • CyberPress discusses this KVE here.
  • March 27, 2026
    • CVE-2025-53521 F5 BIG-IP Remote Code Execution Vulnerability
      • Help Net Security discusses this KVE here.

• Cybersecurity Dive reports,
  • “A sophisticated China-nexus threat actor has embedded digital sleeper cells into the networks of telecom firms in multiple countries, according to a report released Thursday from cybersecurity firm Rapid7.
  • “The adversary, tracked as Red Menshen, has used a stealthy, Linux-based implant called BPFdoor that is designed to function within the operating system kernel.
  • “The goal is to run an espionage campaign against critical industry segments and government agencies, maintaining a long-term presence inside these networks, Rapid7 researchers said. ‘There are similarities to campaigns previously launched by other China-nexus actors, including Volt Typhoon and Salt Typhoon, but the mechanisms have evolved and the strategic objectives of these attacks have a longer tail.”
• and
  • “The evolving threat landscape has placed identity governance at the center of cybersecurity, according to a pair of reports released this week, meaning that organizations should prioritize identity management as a way to protect sprawling computer networks from under-the-radar intrusions.
  • “Cloudflare’s report, released Wednesday, and PwC’s report, released Tuesday, both emphasize the need for companies to do a better job of monitoring user behavior and scanning for suspicious network activity.
  • “The rise of AI only makes identity governance even more important, researchers wrote, as the technology helps hackers improve their impersonation tactics.”
• and
  • “Security researchers warn that a critical vulnerability in Citrix NetScaler products might lead to a wave of exploitation that could rival the 2023 CitrixBleed crisis. 
  • “Citrix on Monday [March 23] disclosed an insufficient input validation flaw in NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway application-delivery products, tracked as CVE-2026-3055, with a severity score of 9.3. 
  • “Citrix also disclosed a race condition flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-4368, in the same products. That vulnerability has a severity score of 7.7.
  • “The input validation flaw can allow an attacker to leak sensitive information, similar to the original CitrixBleed flaw, which led to a wave of high profile data theft and ransomware attacks. 
  • “NetScalers are critical solutions that have been continuously targeted for initial access into enterprise environments,” Benjamin Harris, founder and CEO of watchTowr, told Cybersecurity Dive.”

• Cyberscoop relates,
  • “Researchers and threat hunters are scrambling to contain a maximum-severity defect in Ubiquiti’s UniFi Network Application that attackers could exploit to take over user accounts by accessing and manipulating files.
  • “The path-traversal vulnerability — CVE-2026-22557 — affects software used to manage UniFi networking devices, including access points, gateways and switches. The vendor disclosed and released patches for the defect in a security advisory Wednesday [March 25].
  • “As of this morning, we have not observed any public proof-of-concept exploits or confirmed reports of exploitation in the wild,” Matthew Guidry, senior product detection engineer at Censys, told CyberScoop.
  • “However, because this is a path-traversal vulnerability, the technical complexity for an attacker is typically lower than memory-corruption or buffer-overflow bugs,” he added. “Given that the CVSS 10 rating implies low attack complexity, we anticipate that once the specific vulnerable endpoint is identified, exploitation will be trivial to automate.”

From the ransomware front,

• The Bangor Daily News reports,
  • “The Maine mental health agency AMHC was the subject of a ransomware attack this month allegedly perpetrated by a Russia-based cybercrime group. 
  • “Qilin, which analysts have cited as the world’s leading ransomware threat, added the Presque Isle-based healthcare organization to a list of victims on its dark web data leak site Tuesday, according to screenshots and reports posted by more than a dozen websites and groups that track ransomware. 
  • “AMHC is the largest behavioral healthcare provider for a large swath of rural Maine, operating in Aroostook, Hancock and Washington counties. It has more than 350 employees and over 5,500 clients between 27 service locations, according to its website. 
  • “The organization acknowledged the attack in a statement to the Bangor Daily News Wednesday, saying that it “recently experienced a network disruption,” and that it had partnered with “cyber incident specialists” to investigate.”

• Dark Reading relates,
  • “Ransomware is not only growing, threat actors are also accelerating the pace of their attacks by using offensive tools to exploit valid credentials and hit targets with speed and precision. 
  • “The practice has undergone big changes over the past five years. Initially, attacks focused on encrypting data; now, threat actors threaten to extract it to pressure victims into paying. Double-extortion tactics quickly shifted to triple-extortion threats to expose stolen data. Threat actors also transitioned from extorting companies to contacting victims directly — whatever it takes to rake in the cash.
  • “The latest shift is all about speed. Ransomware actors discovered methods to bypass endpoint detection and response (EDR) tools, and they’re increasingly using artificial intelligence (AI) to steal data more quickly. 
  • “Halcyon’s 2026 Method Survey Report reveals that while 98% of organizations use EDR tools for ransomware defense, only 25% “actually trust it to defend against today’s evolving ransomware threat.” Additionally, 78% of surveyed participants say AI made ransomware attacks more effective. Conversely, only 6% believe the tools have improved their own defenses.”  

• CSO adds,
  • “In 2025, attacker dwell time rose, voice phishing topped email phishing, and threat actors increasingly targeted backup and identity systems, according to Mandiant’s latest incident response data.
  • “Mandiant’s M-Trends 2026 report, released today at the RSA Conference, shows that attackers are moving faster, operating more collaboratively, and increasingly focusing on the systems organizations rely on to recover from breaches.
  • “The report, based on more than 500,000 hours of incident response engagements in 2025, finds that attackers are compressing key phases of the attack lifecycle, even as median dwell time increased to 14 days, up from 11 days the previous year.
  • “In addition, it reveals a change in tactics. Voice phishing accounted for 11% of initial infection vectors, making it the second most common entry point after exploits, which led at 32%. Email phishing declined to 6%, down from 14% the year before, reflecting a move toward more interactive social engineering. Together, the trends point to a shift in both how quickly attacks unfold and what attackers are trying to achieve once inside.”

• Tech Radar explains why stolen credentials continue to work even when multi-factor authentication is in place.

• Cybersecurity Dive tells us,
  • “Businesses need to think carefully about when they publicly blame a threat actor for a cyberattack, lest they invite unwanted consequences, experts said at a panel at the RSAC 2026 Conference here on Tuesday.
  • “The rush to attribute is a risky one,” Megan Stifel, the chief strategy officer at the Institute for Security and Technology, a cybersecurity think tank, said during a panel discussion.
  • “Brett Callow, a ransomware expert and senior adviser at FTI Consulting who advises cyberattack victims, called attribution “extremely risky” because “you are bringing third parties into the discussion, and those third parties may very well respond.”

From the cybersecurity defenses front,

• Cyberscoop reports,
  • “Google is accelerating its timeline for migrating its products to quantum resistant encryption to 2029, the latest sign that tech leaders are worried that they haven’t been aggressive enough in planning for a post-quantum future.
  • “In a blog posted Wednesday [March 25], vice president of security engineering Heather Adkins and senior staff cryptology engineer Sophie Schmieg said that Google and other tech companies have observed faster than expected advances in several quantum fields.
  • “This new timeline reflects migration needs for the PQC era in light of progress on quantum computing hardware development, quantum error correction, and quantum factoring resource estimates,” Adkins and Schmieg wrote.
  • “Google is replacing outdated encryption across their devices, systems and data with new algorithms vetted by the National Institute for Standards and Technology. Those algorithms, developed over a decade by NIST and independent cryptologists, are designed to protect against future attacks from quantum computers.”

• Cybersecurity Dive relates,
  • “Businesses hoping AI can automate away their security woes should think again, because the technology isn’t a cure-all and is actually introducing new risks, experts warned at the RSAC 2026 Conference here.
  • “We’re seeing advantages [with AI for defense], but we’re also seeing a lot of hiccups as we figure out how to get there,” Adam Pennington, who oversees MITRE’s ATT&CK framework, said during a panel about how AI is changing the push-and-pull between attackers and defenders.
  • “Security teams are using AI in a lot of the same ways as hackers, Pennington said, especially rapid code-writing. “There does need to be some caution, though, in using it directly in defense,” he said. “False positives have always been a problem in trying to apply machine learning and AI to defense.”
  • “The warnings from Pennington and others on the panel come as businesses rush to purchase AI security services, often with seemingly little regard for their efficacy or tradeoffs.”

• Dark Reading adds,
  • “Organizations may want to think twice before consulting with AI models on software dependency decisions.
  • “New research from Sonatype found that “frontier” models (defined as the most advanced AI models available at a given moment) often generate faulty or fabricated recommendations for software dependencies, which spells trouble for organizations that lean on AI for upgrade and patching guidance. 
  • “Sonatype’s research team analyzed 36,870 unique dependency upgrade recommendations across Maven Central, npm, PyPI, and NuGet between June and August 2025. In all, the DevSecOps company studied a total of 258,000 recommendations generated by seven AI models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google.”

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