Check Point Software Technologies has announced the launch of Firewall-as-a-Subscription, a new offering designed to make advanced AI-powered network security more accessible to organisations without requiring a significant upfront hardware investment.

The new subscription model gives businesses access to Check Point Force Firewalls, AI-powered threat prevention and agentic security management through predictable monthly or annual payments. The offering is designed to help organisations modernise their network defences while managing increasingly constrained cybersecurity budgets.

The announcement comes as businesses face growing financial pressures, with inflation and higher borrowing costs forcing many to delay infrastructure upgrades. According to the IANS Research and Artico Search 2026 Security Budget Benchmark, the median cybersecurity budget remained unchanged this year, with 55% of CISOs reporting flat or declining budgets. Although 64% requested additional funding, just 45% received an increase.

These financial constraints are emerging at a time when AI adoption is introducing new challenges for network security, including the need to inspect AI-generated traffic, protect AI applications and monitor autonomous agents.

Check Point’s Firewall-as-a-Subscription aims to address these challenges by removing the need for large capital investments, allowing organisations to access advanced security capabilities through a subscription-based model.

The offering builds on Check Point’s R82.20 release, introduced in July 2026, which brought AI Network Firewall capabilities designed to inspect AI traffic, protect AI applications and help govern AI agents at the network layer.

The subscription includes Check Point Force Firewalls, with capacity and pricing based on the threat prevention throughput required by each organisation. Customers also receive AI-powered threat prevention, including SandBlast technology, which Check Point claims achieves a 99.9% block rate against zero-day attacks.

Additional features include Live Updates, which enable security updates without reboots or downtime, and Smart-1 cloud-based agentic management. The package also includes 24/7 premium support and professional services credits to assist with activities such as migrating firewall policies from other vendors.

Under the three-year subscription, organisations can increase their firewall throughput as their requirements evolve, with the option to move to new hardware after 36 months.

Pete Finalle, Research Manager, Security and Trust at IDC, commented on the growing demand for more flexible security purchasing models.

“Organizations of all sizes face the same AI-driven threats, but for many, capital budget cycles often force them to delay firewall refreshes or buy more capacity than they need,” he said.

“Consumption models that turn on-premises security hardware into a predictable operating expense, and let organizations scale protection as their needs grow, can help close that gap. We expect demand for this kind of flexibility to rise as AI adoption increases the traffic and risk networks must handle.”

The subscription model could also provide opportunities for channel partners to help customers progress firewall refresh projects that have been delayed by capital expenditure restrictions.

Avi Rembaum, President Global Technical Sales at Check Point Software Technologies, said: “Every organization is adopting AI, and every organization deserves the same level of protection, whatever its size or budget.

“With Firewall-as-a-Subscription, we are making our most advanced AI security, threat prevention and agentic management available through one simple subscription, so organizations can secure their AI transformation today.”

Check Point Firewall-as-a-Subscription will be available from 1 November 2026 through Check Point’s partner network, with monthly and annual payment options.

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Two critical PHP vulnerabilities, the widely used programming language underpinning millions of websites and web applications, have prompted urgent warnings from cybersecurity authorities worldwide.

Following reports on the 20th October that details of the vulnerabilities had leaked ahead of their scheduled disclosure, PHP developers released emergency security updates on 21 October. The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) urged organisations to identify affected systems and apply updates immediately, while Amazon’s threat intelligence team reported evidence of exploitation attempts dating back to 17 October.

With the vulnerabilities highlighting the potential consequences of security flaws in widely used web infrastructure, The IT Security Guru has gathered reactions from cybersecurity industry experts on the risks, implications and lessons for organisations.

Samuel Hassine, CEO and co-founder, Filigran:

“Taking a website offline for a day is a far cheaper decision than explaining a breach for a year. The agencies asking organisations to do exactly that are giving sound advice, and the speed of the coordinated response shows how much the discipline has matured. These flaws sat in code that dates back to 2004 and were found with AI. The same tools will help attackers move just as fast, and early attacks are already being reported. The job is simple to state and hard to do. Find every system running PHP, including the ones hidden inside third-party products. Update to a supported version or take it offline. Then check that nothing got in while the window was open. Patching is the easy part. Knowing what you run is the real test.” 

Sai Molige, senior manager of threat hunting at Forescout: 

“PHP2Shell has the potential to become a Log4Shell-scale event, but for a different reason. With Log4j, the main problem was finding a library you didn’t know you had. With PHP, much of the forgotten infrastructure will be found, but won’t have an upstream fix.

“The durable lesson from Log4j is that organisations should treat “How quickly can we identify where we run X” as a measurable capability separate from patching speed.

“Discovering vulnerable infrastructure, however, is only the first step. When older systems have no available fix or depend on a vendor update, organisations need to reduce exposure, restrict unnecessary connections, and isolate affected systems while planning remediation.

“AI is very good at performing variant analysis when it has a reference point, lowering the effort and expertise required. That could increase the volume of attempts we see with these critical vulnerabilities, even if many never turn into full exploits.

“Common places where forgotten PHP tends to live include:

• Vendor appliances whose admin UIs are PHP: NAS devices, some firewalls and VPN portals, printers, building-management panels, and OT/ICS HMIs with web front ends. Organisations cannot patch them directly and have to wait for vendors which introduces lag.
• Bundled runtimes. Control panels and commercial packages often ship their own PHP binary, invisible to the OS package manager.
• Containers pinned to old base images. The host is current; the image from 2021 isn’t.
• Marketing microsites, campaign pages, and acquired-company infrastructure, often on hosting accounts paid by credit card outside IT.
• Admin tools on dev or jump boxes: phpMyAdmin, Roundcube, Nextcloud.
• Origins behind a CDN or WAF that are still directly reachable, which quietly defeats your edge rules.

“Organisations concerned about exposure should prioritise identifying affected systems, reducing unnecessary external exposure, and follow vendor guidance for remediation or compensating controls. Teams should use a combination of external exposure scanning, host-level package managers, container or SBOM scans and network behavior to identify all implementations of PHP in their environment. Organisations who believe they are compromised should rotate secrets on exposed hosts, filter multipart at the edge, restrict agree from web workers, isolate EOL hosts. Look for classic web-shell patterns: php-fpm, httpd, or apache2 spawning sh, bash, curl, wget, or base64, new or modified .php files in web roots and outbound connections from web worker processes.”

Oliver Simonnet, Lead Cybersecurity Researcher at CultureAI:

“PHP2Shell is a clear example of how little time we now have as defenders to secure our environments in the age of AI. In a world where these types of vulnerability discoveries may become commonplace, and details being leaked before formal disclosure, exploits created exceptionally fast, and attackers exploiting the issue in the wild rapidly before fixes are even available. It’s almost impossible to justify a traditional maintenance window in this situation and what can you do if you know for a fact you’re vulnerable and you need to decide if you even can apply a temporary mitigation, or need take exposed systems offline. Its a nightmare scenario for security teams.

AI may play a part in making this worse as it helps attackers develop exploits faster, but its also what gives us the power to discover these issues so they can finally be fixed. So the challenge is now to arrive at a balance where we have the capability to not only identify exposed systems, but also develop effective mitigations and get them deployed before active exploitation can cause these types of disruptions.”

Charlotte Wilson, head of enterprise at Check Point:

“The scale of this is enormous. We’re talking about two serious security flaws in technology that underpins around three-quarters of the internet, potentially allowing criminals to access vulnerable systems remotely without even needing a password. We’ve become so dependent on digital services that we rarely stop to consider how much of our everyday lives relies on the same underlying technology. Governments, businesses, banks and public services are all connected through an increasingly complex web of systems, and when a weakness like this is discovered, huge numbers of organisations can find themselves exposed at once. It’s a bit like discovering that millions of buildings have been fitted with the same faulty lock. Suddenly, everyone is racing to change it before someone works out how to open the door.

We’ve already seen how disruption involving major technology providers can have consequences across the world, and there are growing questions about our reliance on a handful of companies to keep essential services running. Regulators are now looking much more closely at the role these providers play in our critical infrastructure. The timing is particularly concerning given the NCSC’s warnings that artificial intelligence will increase the frequency and intensity of cyberattacks. Criminals are becoming faster at identifying weaknesses and exploiting them, leaving organisations with less time to respond.

When governments are choosing to take their own websites offline rather than risk leaving them exposed, it gives you a pretty clear indication of how seriously this is being taken. The immediate priority is getting systems updated, but the bigger question is whether we’ve become too dependent on technology that can leave so many organisations vulnerable at exactly the same time.”

Ben Ronallo, director of cybersecurity operations at Black Duck:

“This is a genuine drop-everything moment for anyone running PHP. The flaws are in the PHP engine itself, so a perfectly secure application on top of a vulnerable runtime is still exposed. Updating WordPress or your framework won’t fix it. You have to update PHP itself and restart the services that run it. It’s understandable that people are confused about how this unfolded. Word of the vulnerabilities leaked on Y Combinator’s Hacker News forum two days before the planned disclosure, and PHP moved its security release up a day in response. The source of the leak hasn’t been identified, but there’s no evidence a threat group was involved, and no exploit code was released. A screenshot of the researchers’ exploit tool did circulate, which added to the alarm. In the end, the early reports were largely accurate. The main difference is severity: PHP officially rates both flaws 9.2 rather than the 10.0 some reports cited. That’s still critical, and it doesn’t change the advice. The organizations I’m most concerned about are the ones that don’t know where PHP is running in their environment. Older versions sitting in containers, appliances, or legacy sites won’t receive an official fix. Nobody wants to be building a software inventory in the middle of an emergency. You need that visibility before the next one hits.”

Tim Mackey, head of software supply chain risk strategy at Black Duck:

“Preventing leaks of any vulnerability data for a CVE prior to an embargo for the patch being published is precisely what coordinated vulnerability disclosure processes are designed to protect against. When a leak, or advance knowledge, of a vulnerability occurs the entire ecosystem surrounding the vulnerability is placed at risk. As details of the leak are published, security defenders are faced with the real risk that malicious actors could use the absence of an official patch to supply their own malicious patches. Defenders should pay extra attention to the origin of their patches and validate functional changes against official release notes. After all, a malicious patch could implant a backdoor for future use and a rush to patch might present the right opportunity for malicious actors.”

Jamie Akhtar, CEO and Co-founder of CyberSmart:

“The NCSC advises identifying PHP across your infrastructure, prioritising internet-facing systems, and not limiting the search to outdated versions. That includes appliances and services that bundle PHP, so keep monitoring for updates from third-party vendors.

Update to the latest version of PHP and apply the additional hardening steps from the PHP Team. If you cannot update, the PHP Team has provided temporary mitigations. If those cannot be applied, or would take too long, the NCSC suggests considering taking the system offline until it can be fully mitigated.”

The PHP2Shell vulnerabilities serve as a reminder of how quickly weaknesses in widely used software can become a global cybersecurity concern. As organisations work to secure affected systems, the incident reinforces the importance of timely patching, continuous monitoring and maintaining visibility across the software powering critical services.

Shane Barney, CISO at Keeper Security, said:

“The two critical flaws found in PHP, the programming language behind WordPress and countless online shops, have now led to government services in France, Denmark, Finland and the Netherlands going offline, alongside UK council sites, NHS Scotland and Wikipedia. Fixes arrived on Wednesday amid reports of millions of attempts to exploit the flaws, though it remains unclear whether any have succeeded. CERT-EU, the EU’s cybersecurity response team, had advised organisations that could not patch immediately to consider isolating their internet-facing applications.

The scale sets this apart from a routine patch cycle. PHP sits beneath sites run by multinationals, public bodies and one-person businesses alike, and most of the people running them are not security specialists. They rely on hosting providers, plugins and agencies to keep up, and many are learning about PHP for the first time this week.

The flaws sat in widely used code for years until AI tools surfaced them. OpenAI, whose model helped find them, expects similar findings to increase sharply in the coming months, as AI continues to lower the effort needed to turn a complex flaw into a working attack. Patching is only the first step, and any site exposed before it was fixed should review who has access to both the site, as well as internal systems within an organisation. Security teams should remove admin accounts that are no longer in use, implement the principle of least privilege to restrict access, replace passwords as a precaution and protect every login with multi-factor authentication.”

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Cybersecurity researchers at Forescout are drawing attention to the risks posed by exposed refrigeration control systems, warning that weaknesses in operational technology (OT) could have serious consequences for food supplies, business continuity and other temperature-sensitive operations.

The warning comes following cyberattacks against French supermarkets in October 2026, which reportedly disrupted refrigeration systems at hundreds of stores. Attackers were able to interfere with cooling operations, resulting in temperature fluctuations, spoiled stock and significant disruption.

The incidents have raised concerns about the security of internet-connected refrigeration equipment, particularly where older systems, exposed management interfaces and inadequate access controls leave operational technology vulnerable to interference.

Unlike conventional IT attacks, which frequently focus on stealing data or disrupting digital services, attacks against refrigeration controllers can directly affect physical processes.

These systems are responsible for maintaining temperatures across supermarkets, food storage facilities and other environments where consistent cooling is essential.

If attackers gain sufficient access, they may be able to manipulate temperature settings, interfere with defrost cycles or disrupt equipment operations. The consequences can extend beyond IT downtime to include damaged stock, financial losses and potential safety risks.

The issue also extends beyond food retail. Refrigeration and temperature-control systems are used in healthcare, pharmaceuticals, manufacturing and logistics, making their security an important consideration across several industries.

Internet Exposure Creates Opportunities for Attackers

One of the central concerns is the accessibility of operational technology that was not originally designed to withstand direct exposure to the internet.

Remote management capabilities allow engineers and third-party maintenance providers to monitor and adjust refrigeration equipment without visiting individual sites. However, these connections can introduce security weaknesses if they are poorly configured or inadequately protected.

Research into industrial control systems has identified publicly accessible management interfaces, outdated firmware and weak authentication as recurring problems.

In some cases, organisations may not have complete visibility of the equipment connected to their networks, particularly where systems have been installed and maintained by external contractors.

Forescout Finds Nearly 13,000 Exposed Refrigeration Services Worldwide

New research from Forescout’s Vedere Labs has identified 12,976 internet-exposed service observations across ten product groups, associated with 6,017 distinct public IP addresses in 99 countries and territories.

The findings suggest that the weaknesses highlighted by the French supermarket attacks are part of a much wider global problem.

The largest number of observations involved Copeland/Dixell XWEB services, with 7,075 recorded, followed by 4,697 Danfoss StoreView services. Researchers also identified 551 Copeland Site Supervisor services, 513 Carel pCOWeb services and 140 observations across six other product groups.

Importantly, these figures represent exposed services rather than confirmed compromised devices. A single IP address may host multiple services, while one management interface may control several downstream systems.

The researchers also found that 3,762 Danfoss StoreView service observations, representing 80% of the total, were running firmware older than version 4.3.1, making them potentially vulnerable to two previously disclosed security flaws.

Hacktivists Have Targeted Refrigeration Before

Forescout’s research suggests that attacks against refrigeration systems are not a new development.

According to a technical bulletin published by Danfoss, hacktivist attacks in 2022 affected 16 Russian supermarkets and 40 stores in Israel.

Forescout has also tracked more than 20 claimed attacks against refrigeration systems since January 2026, with pro-Russian hacktivist groups Z-Pentest Alliance and NoName057(16) among the most active.

Targets have included supermarkets, wineries, fruit storage facilities and agricultural businesses across Europe.

However, the researchers stress that the initial access methods and identities of those responsible for the recent French attacks have not been confirmed.

Securing the Cold Chain

Forescout is urging organisations to review how refrigeration management systems are connected to the internet and who is authorised to access them.

Recommendations include removing publicly accessible management interfaces, replacing unsupported equipment, applying available security updates and introducing secure remote access for maintenance contractors.

The researchers also recommend multifactor authentication, individual user accounts and continuous monitoring to identify suspicious changes to temperature settings, defrost schedules and alarms.

The challenge is that attackers do not necessarily need to deploy malware to cause disruption. Once they gain sufficient access, they may be able to misuse legitimate management functions, making malicious activity harder to distinguish from routine maintenance.

The research highlights a broader issue for operational technology security: organisations need visibility not only of connected devices, but also of who can access them, what changes they can make and how those changes affect physical operations.

Read the full research here: Cold Chain, Open Control: Exposed Refrigeration Systems Reveal Global Risk

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Keeper Security has introduced a new AI-powered phishing protection feature designed to prevent users from entering their credentials on fraudulent websites.

Available through the Keeper Browser Extension, the new Phishing Protection capability uses a local AI engine to detect look-alike domains, spoofed websites and brand impersonation attempts. By identifying suspicious login pages directly in the browser, the feature aims to prevent credential theft before sensitive information reaches cybercriminals.

The launch comes as credential-based attacks continue to pose a significant threat to organisations. According to the 2026 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, credential abuse was involved in nearly 40% of breaches.

Meanwhile, cybercriminals are increasingly using generative AI to create convincing fraudulent websites and login portals that imitate legitimate services, making phishing attempts more difficult for users and traditional security tools to identify.

Unlike conventional phishing detection tools that may rely on cloud-based analysis, Keeper’s new feature uses machine learning that operates entirely on the user’s device. Built on Keeper’s zero-knowledge security architecture, the technology analyses websites locally without sharing user data.

“Phishing attacks are no longer simple email scams; they are highly automated, AI-driven operations designed to trick users into handing over sensitive credentials and information,” said Darren Guccione, CEO and Co-founder of Keeper Security.

“When an adversary sets up a look-alike domain, form field or unofficial login portal, traditional security controls often fail to identify the threat until the damage is done. By embedding zero-knowledge AI into our browser extension, Keeper stops credential harvesting at the point of entry, giving individuals and organisations greater security and control.”

Detecting Phishing Attempts at the Point of Entry

Keeper’s Phishing Protection feature automatically examines web pages for characteristics commonly associated with credential-harvesting attacks.

These include typosquatting techniques, where attackers use domains that closely resemble legitimate websites, as well as suspicious IP addresses, unusual URL structures and unauthorised websites requesting password information.

When a potential threat is identified, the extension displays a warning explaining the suspicious activity and the specific indicators detected.

Users can review the warning, dismiss it or disable Keeper on the affected website. They can also manage previously blocked sites and restore autofill functionality where appropriate.

The feature is designed to provide an additional layer of protection against phishing attacks that evade existing email security gateways and web filtering technologies.

Privacy and Administrative Control

Keeper has also emphasised the privacy-focused design of the new capability, with its AI engine processing website information locally rather than transmitting sensitive data to external servers.

“Security controls have to work at machine speed, and they cannot come at the expense of the zero-knowledge guarantees our customers depend on,” said Craig Lurey, CTO and Co-founder of Keeper Security.

“We engineered this AI engine to execute entirely on the local device using the customer’s private key. It delivers continuous, proactive verification of web assets, ensuring that autofill is protected against sophisticated domain spoofing without creating a privacy trade-off.”

The feature is optional and disabled by default. Enterprise IT administrators can enable and manage it centrally through the Keeper Admin Console, while individual users can configure their preferences directly within the browser extension.

Keeper Phishing Protection is available now as an opt-in feature in version 18.2.0 of the Keeper Browser Extension.

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Organised by Eskenzi PR, the tenth annual awards ceremony took place at St Barts Pub in London, bringing together cybersecurity professionals, educators, industry leaders and advocates to recognise those whose work often goes unnoticed.

Unlike many industry awards, the Security Serious Unsung Heroes Awards are free to enter and attend. The initiative celebrates individuals and teams going above and beyond to protect businesses, communities and individuals, while also championing diversity, wellbeing, education and the next generation of cybersecurity talent.

This year’s event was sponsored by CultureAI, Filigran, OneAdvanced and The Zensory, with additional support from CyberASAP and Pulse Conferences. Media partners included Computer Weekly, Information Security Buzz and IT Security Guru.

Yvonne Eskenzi, Director of Eskenzi PR and Founder of the awards, said: “The Security Serious Unsung Heroes Awards are all about recognising the incredible people working tirelessly behind the scenes to keep our businesses, communities and country safe.

“Cybersecurity can often be a thankless profession, with the dedication and achievements of those working in the industry going largely unnoticed. These awards give us the opportunity to shine a spotlight on those individuals who consistently go above and beyond, while also celebrating the fresh perspectives and diverse talent shaping the future of the industry.

“It was fantastic to bring the cybersecurity community together once again to recognise these remarkable individuals. A huge congratulations to all our nominees and winners!”

Security Serious Unsung Heroes Awards 2026: The Winners

This year’s winners represented a broad cross-section of the cybersecurity industry, from frontline security professionals and ethical hackers to educators, content creators and community advocates.

The full list of winners is as follows:

• Cyber Correspondent: Phil Muncaster
• Godfather of Security: Andy James, Founder and CEO of Custodian360
• Godmother of Security: Dr. Emma Philpott, CEO of IASME
• Data Guardian: Peter Slevin, Cyber Engagement Senior Technical Lead at Bank of Ireland
• CISO Supremo: Andrea Litherland, CISO at Domestic & General
• Security Avengers: Revenge Porn Helpline
• Best Educator: Dr. Chidimma Opara, Senior Lecturer in AI at The Manchester Metropolitan University
• Best Ethical Hacker/Pen Tester: Dominic Mortimer, Head of Red Team at WorkNest Secure
• Channel Champion: Olly Carter, Senior Channel Sales Director, EMEA and APJ, at Forescout
• Senior Leader/Mentor: Meera Tamboli, DFIR Analyst at AVEVA
• Cybersecurity Wellbeing Advocate: Nikki Webb, Director at Custodian360
• Best Security Awareness Campaign: Cyber Local, a collaboration involving Cyber Innovations Ltd., Bournemouth University, Cybexer, Dorset Mind, Dorset Chamber and local authority stakeholders
• Diversity Champion: Segan Ebenezer Olaniyan, Information Security Analyst II at Kraken Technologies
• Apprentice/Rising Star: Jordan Daglish, Acumen Cyber
• Cyber Scribe: Dr. Runli Guo, Reducing Blast Radius LinkedIn newsletter
• Voice of Security: Cyber Agony Aunts podcast and Ant Davis, creator of The Awareness Angle
• Best Academic Entrepreneur: Dr. Peter Garraghan, CEO of Mindgard

Winners Highlight the Importance of Community and Collaboration

Among those recognised was Olly Carter of Forescout, who received the Channel Champion Award for his contribution to the cybersecurity channel ecosystem.

Carter said: “It’s a real honour to be recognised with the Channel Champion Award, but the truth is that nobody achieves anything in the channel alone! I’m incredibly fortunate to work alongside such a talented, passionate, and committed team at Forescout, and some truly fantastic partners.

“For me, the channel has always been about people, relationships, trust and working together to achieve something special.”

The Voice of Security Award was jointly awarded to the Cyber Agony Aunts podcast, hosted by Rebecca Taylor and Amelia Hewitt, and cybersecurity content creator Ant Davis.

Taylor and Hewitt said: “Cyber Agony Aunts comes from a very real place for us – it’s all about community, honesty and reminding people that behind the technology, cyber is ultimately about people.

“We’ve had some incredibly open conversations, plenty of laughs and a few tears along the way, so to see the podcast recognised like this is something we’re incredibly proud of. This award belongs just as much to our guests and the community as it does to us.”

Nikki Webb, Director at Custodian360, was recognised as Cybersecurity Wellbeing Advocate for her work supporting people across the industry.

Webb said: “Our industry asks a lot of people, long hours, high pressure, and the weight of protecting others. Looking after the people behind the screens matters just as much as the technology itself, and I’m so proud to see that recognised.”

Recognising Education, Innovation and Awareness

The awards also highlighted the importance of making cybersecurity more accessible through education, awareness and research.

Dr. Chidimma Opara received the Best Educator Award for her contribution to inspiring the next generation of cybersecurity professionals.

Reflecting on her win, Opara said: “What makes this award so special is knowing that the work I love doing as an educator is making a meaningful difference in motivating the next generation of cybersecurity professionals.

“If my students leave my classroom feeling valued, believing in themselves a little more, and inspired to reach their potential, then I know I am doing something worthwhile.”

Meanwhile, Cyber Local received the Best Security Awareness Campaign Award, recognising a collaborative initiative involving academic institutions, local organisations and cybersecurity specialists.

Emily Rosenorn-Lanng, CEO and Co-Founder of Cyber Innovations Ltd., as well as pioneer of the Cyber Local project, said: “Ours has always been about helping people feel confident and supported when something goes wrong online, so to win Best Security Awareness Initiative, in a category full of such strong work, means a huge amount to me, to the Cyber Innovations team and to everyone who worked on it with us.”

The newly introduced Cyber Scribe category was awarded to Dr. Runli Guo for her LinkedIn newsletter, Reducing Blast Radius, which explores emerging cybersecurity challenges, particularly those associated with agentic AI.

Guo explained: “Agentic AI is quickly becoming the most discussed topic in cybersecurity, yet the associated threats and risks aren’t always fully understood. With the rapid rate of change in this space, CISOs and architects simply don’t have the time to read every update.”

She added that her work focuses on sharing practical insights and hands-on demonstrations to help security professionals understand and reduce the potential impact of emerging threats.

Dr. Peter Garraghan, CEO of AI security company Mindgard, was also recognised with the Best Academic Entrepreneur Award, highlighting the role of academic research and commercial innovation in addressing new cybersecurity challenges.

A Decade of Celebrating Cybersecurity’s Unsung Heroes

The ceremony was hosted by Yvonne Eskenzi and Clive Room, Director of Pulse Conferences, with winners selected by a judging panel comprising representatives from across the cybersecurity industry, academia and media.

This year’s judges included Alex Scroxton of Computer Weekly, Sam Soares of CultureAI, Joe Pettit of Bora, Emma Fadlon of CyberASAP, Beth Maundrill of Infosecurity Magazine, Stuart Coulson of HiddenText and Holly Foxcroft of OneAdvanced, alongside Eskenzi and Room.

The evening also raised £250 for NSPCC Childline through a charity raffle.

Now in its tenth year, the Security Serious Unsung Heroes Awards continues to recognise the individuals whose contributions extend beyond technical expertise, celebrating mentorship, collaboration, community engagement and the people helping to make cybersecurity a more inclusive and supportive profession.

Further information about the awards is available at www.securityserious.com.

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Nearly half (49.8%) of organisations have confirmed or suspected that an AI agent took an unintended, unexpected or unauthorised action in the past year, according to new research from Salt Security.

The findings, published in the company’s State of Agentic AI and API Security 2H 2026 report, highlight growing concerns around the security of autonomous AI systems as enterprises increasingly integrate agents into everyday operations.

Based on a survey of more than 380 security and technology professionals, alongside Salt Labs production telemetry from hundreds of customer environments, the research suggests that AI adoption is outpacing organisations’ ability to monitor, govern and contain agent activity.

Among respondents who reported confirmed or suspected unintended agent actions, more than half experienced an unauthorised external API call or transaction, while over 40% reported an agent modifying or deleting data.

The research also found that AI agents are now firmly embedded in enterprise environments, with 86.4% of respondents reporting at least one operating within their organisation and 59.5% running more than ten. Furthermore, 76.8% reported agents capable of chaining actions across other agents, tools and APIs, creating complex sequences that may not have been anticipated by individual teams.

Despite this widespread adoption, visibility remains limited. Just 12.5% of organisations can consistently trace an agent’s complete journey, from its initial instruction through the tools and APIs it accesses to the final outcome. More than 60% would require hours or days of manual investigation to reconstruct an agent’s activity from the previous day.

The ability to respond to unexpected behaviour is similarly concerning. Only 17.5% of respondents said their organisation could automatically stop an AI agent behaving unexpectedly in production. For the majority, intervention remains a manual process, potentially requiring an application to be taken offline.

“The data shows a gap that is already producing real operational consequences,” said Roey Eliyahu, CEO of Salt Security. “Organisations are deploying agents and granting them access to enterprise data, APIs, and services before they can trace what those agents are doing or stop them automatically when something goes wrong.”

Shadow AI Infrastructure and AI-Generated Code Raise Further Concerns

The report also identified emerging risks associated with Model Context Protocol (MCP) infrastructure, which enables AI systems to interact with external tools and data sources.

Nearly a third (32.9%) of respondents reported discovering an unauthorised, shadow or misconfigured MCP server in the past year, while 54.3% had either confirmed or suspected encountering one.

Salt Labs’ own telemetry revealed that MCP-related infrastructure was detected in 21.6% of customer environments in August 2026, compared with 16.7% in January, representing a relative increase of approximately 30%.

Meanwhile, AI-generated code is introducing additional application security challenges. Some 83.5% of respondents estimated that AI-generated or AI-assisted code contributed to at least some of their application security findings.

However, just 6.8% reported resolving these issues directly within coding assistants at the point of generation, leaving vulnerabilities to be identified during subsequent code reviews, testing or after deployment.

Recent Manus Vulnerability Highlights Agentic AI Risks

The findings follow recent research from Salt Labs, which demonstrated how a single malicious email could be used to hijack the Manus agentic AI platform and potentially access a user’s connected email, cloud storage and code repository accounts.

The attack did not require a stolen password or the victim to click a malicious link. Although the platform’s guardrails detected the malicious activity, they were unable to prevent the code from executing.

The vulnerability was responsibly disclosed and has since been remediated.

According to Salt Security, the incident demonstrates how traditional detection mechanisms may struggle to keep pace with autonomous systems capable of executing multiple actions before human intervention is possible.

“The Manus research and this survey data are two views of the same problem,” said Yaniv Balmas, Head of Research at Salt Security.

“In the field, we showed how an agent can be weaponised through a single malicious email, how the guardrail detected the attack at exactly the right moment, and still could not stop the code from running. The survey quantifies how widespread that architecture is.”

The findings underline the need for organisations to strengthen visibility into agent activity, establish appropriate governance controls and develop automated containment capabilities as AI agents gain greater autonomy and access to critical enterprise systems.

The full State of Agentic AI and API Security 2H 2026 report includes sector-specific findings, recommendations for CISOs and further analysis of Salt Labs production telemetry.

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Tines has been announced as the headline sponsor of CSIDES 2026, a community-focused cyber security event taking place at the Grand Pier in Weston-super-Mare on the 9th October.

Organised by not-for-profit organisation Defend Together CIC, CSIDES aims to make cyber security more accessible to individuals, families, businesses and educators, while inspiring the next generation of cyber professionals.

Tines, an intelligent workflow platform used by security and IT teams, joins a roster of sponsors including 4FOX Security, Consultants Like Us, Punk Security, Darktrace, Utopian Knight, PPRO and IASME.

The event, described by its organisers as the UK’s first not-for-profit cyber security event built by and for a coastal community, will bring together industry experts and local residents for a day of talks, practical workshops and community engagement.

Tackling Cybercrime in Coastal Communities

The event comes amid growing concerns about the impact of cybercrime and fraud on local communities.

According to figures cited by the organisers, 1,728 victims of cybercrime were reported to law enforcement through Report Fraud in the Avon and Somerset region between March 2025 and March 2026, with reported losses exceeding £130,000.

Fraud figures were significantly higher, with 7,803 reports accounting for £57.8 million in losses during the same period.

Against this backdrop, CSIDES aims to equip local residents and small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) with practical knowledge to protect themselves against online threats, including email scams and cybercriminal activity.

The event will offer accessible, jargon-free advice alongside opportunities for attendees to engage directly with cyber security professionals.

Tines to Deliver Hands-On Automation Workshop

As part of its headline sponsorship, Tines will host an interactive workshop introducing attendees to security automation. The session will guide participants through building their first ‘Tines Story’, demonstrating how automated workflows can help streamline everyday tasks.

Jennifer Cox, Director of Solutions Engineering at Tines, will also deliver the opening welcome address alongside CSIDES co-founders Hazel McPherson and Jess Matthews.

Cox will additionally moderate the event’s Main Stage programme, which will feature speakers including Threat Intelligence Manager Sophia McCall and representatives from the South West Regional Economic and Cyber Crime Unit.

Sessions throughout the day will explore topics ranging from local scams and artificial intelligence to digital wellbeing and bias in security.

Hazel McPherson, Co-Founder of CSIDES, said: “CSIDES exists to open cyber security to everyone, not just those already in the room. We couldn’t do that without the support of organisations like Tines. Tines and our other sponsors are helping us to create a truly inclusive and hands-on event that’s built with the community at its core. We cannot thank them enough.”

Jennifer Cox, Director of Solutions Engineering at Tines, added: “We’re so excited to support CSIDES, an event that not only connects security practitioners but also brings practical security knowledge to the local community. I can’t wait to meet attendees, hear their questions, and help people build their first Tines story at our workshop.”

Making Cyber Security Accessible to Everyone

Beyond its technical sessions, CSIDES seeks to address barriers that can prevent people outside the cyber security industry from accessing reliable advice and support.

Led by local residents, the event is designed to create opportunities for people of all backgrounds to learn about digital safety, connect with experts and explore potential careers in cyber security.

Organisers also hope the community-led approach can provide a model for similar initiatives in coastal communities across the UK.

CSIDES 2026 takes place on Friday, 9 October, at the Grand Pier in Weston-super-Mare. Last minute tickets can be found here.

The post Tines Named Headline Sponsor of CSIDES 2026 in Weston-super-Mare appeared first on IT Security Guru.

Over the past few years, AI has gone from something understood and used by a select few to a cornerstone of almost every organisation. As businesses race to adopt new models, tools and autonomous agents, security and governance are struggling to keep up.

Recent incidents involving AI agents behaving in unexpected ways have offered an early glimpse of what could happen as these systems are given greater autonomy. Closer to home, organisations face a more immediate problem: employees are adopting AI tools faster than many security teams can identify, assess or control them, a point CultureAI’s Founder and CEO, James Moore, made in a recent interview with the Guru.

That raises two questions: who is responsible for AI security and governance, and do organisations really know the full extent of their AI risk?

The IT Security Guru spoke to Oliver Simonnet, Lead Cybersecurity Researcher at CultureAI, about models escaping their sandbox, shadow AI, why people overshare with LLMs, who should be holding the industry accountable, and what organisations should put in place before the next wave of adoption.

Q: How are the advances in AI changing the cyber threat landscape for attackers and defenders?

There’s nothing particularly novel happening in the AI space outside of the recent cases of models escaping their sandbox and being used to attack other organisations. Even then, it’s mostly an acceleration of what already existed.

For attackers, there’s the more typical stuff: AI lowering the bar to entry for cybercriminals and helping them become more efficient as the models become more capable. Cybercriminals are using the more traditional LLMs to speed up malware development, and to build AI capability into malware for command and control or for modifying code.

On the defence side, it’s a double-edged sword. We’ve got people rushing to adopt AI to solve problems and to aid investigations. But each time we adopt another AI technology, or embed something in an organisation, we’re also opening up all of that risk of the unknown. No one really knows how any of this works, typically, unless people want to do the due diligence and the research. You can do that, but at the speed people are adopting things, you adopt it, you deploy it, and then you hope for the best.

You adopt it, you deploy it, and then you hope for the best.

So, it’s hard for defenders to adopt and leverage these technologies without putting themselves at too much risk, or causing too many complications.

That said, AI is being incorporated into everything now, and it very clearly helps with speeding up incident response and investigations, fixing bugs in code, removing vulnerabilities and getting AI to assess things automatically.

It’s a very different world to the one we were in a couple of years ago.

Q: Why do people feel so comfortable putting sensitive information into an LLM, as opposed to a search engine?

The difference is that a traditional search engine like Google, at least before Google Search was also AI-driven, doesn’t rely on a large amount of information. The typical way we learned to use search engines was concisely, if anything. Single words at best. You put in exactly what you want, the minimum amount of typing, and ideally you get the result you’re after.

Whereas the way AI has evolved in the LLM space, it thrives, and is most efficient, when it’s given the most information it can possibly get.

So it encourages a feedback loop. Users give it as much information as they can because they know that gets them the best answer, and if the answer is not as good, they’ll probably give it even more. The less information you give it, the less reliable the outcome is ultimately going to be.

That creates a practice of, one, giving it a lot of information. And two, I think the conversational nature of it, from a psychological perspective, creates a level of trust or familiarity with the technology that lowers people’s guard considerably. It gets you chatting away, forgetting what the implications are of what’s actually going on.

You’re just more willing to have a full-blown conversation about your personal issues on your business ChatGPT account, without thinking about the fact that you’re putting all of that into third-party infrastructure, and doing it through your business account.

Then what happens one day if that information is accessed and compromised? It’s a lot worse. You probably don’t want your Google searches compromised, I’m sure, but you definitely don’t want your ChatGPT logs compromised.

Q: Employees are being encouraged to innovate and experiment with AI. How can organisations enable that without simply blocking everything?

Having visibility of what AI is being used, and how it’s being used, is key. Without that information, organisations can’t see what’s going on, know whether they’re at risk, or understand whether the tools people are using are any good.

Without visibility, they can’t quantify the risk either. Someone could ask you what risks you think you have in your business from AI adoption, but if you’ve got nothing to go by outside of “well, people are using it and everyone seems happy”, you’re going to say the risk is basically nothing, because everything seems fine.

In reality, if you have the visibility and you can see that people are sending your confidential information out left, right and centre, or disclosing private medical information into third-party applications and breaking regulations in the process, then your perceived risk is going to skyrocket, and you’re going to be worried about a fine.

Someone could ask you what risks you have from AI adoption, but if you’ve got nothing to go by, you’re going to say the risk is basically nothing, because everything seems fine.

So, adopting tools that give you visibility of general AI use matters, as does anything people can do to contain agents or deploy things locally.

Organisations also need to show some restraint when they adopt things, and not get caught up in the excitement. Take a beat, establish your controls and processes first, and then you’ve got something in place rather than immediately exposing yourself to a higher amount of risk.

Q: Who should ultimately be responsible for ensuring organisations are prepared for these risks: businesses, regulators or governments?

AI is a global problem, which makes governance particularly complicated.

The issue with established frameworks, compliance regimes and standards is that organisations can decide to adopt them or not at their own risk, depending on things like their own exposure and how public they are. Frameworks establish a baseline, but they aren’t a legal requirement.

Some industries rely heavily on mandates. Financial organisations know that during due diligence, potential partners will check for certain certifications and baseline standards before working with them. If you decide you want to be a payment processor, even if you’re just an individual, you need to make sure you’re following all the right approaches. Global standards like PCI DSS exist to protect payment card data and govern how cardholder information is handled, and if you don’t adhere to them as a financial organisation, you can be heavily fined.

I feel like there should be something like that for AI. We need one of the central bodies, whether that’s a government or an individual trade body, making firmer decisions on AI security and holding the wider industry accountable.

Whether it ends up with government depends on how the industry responds. If nobody takes the voluntary route, that’s the point at which the government should probably step in and legislate on what the outcomes are if you’re negligent in this space.

It’s slightly too early to say where that lands. I think there’s still enough time for industry regulation and standards to keep up. In the meantime, though, organisations are responsible for making sure they do everything right.

Q: Looking towards 2027 and beyond, what do you expect the next stage of AI to look like?

It’s a horrible question, to be honest, because it’s difficult to predict. If you’d asked me two years ago, I wouldn’t even have thought agents would be a thing, and now they’re basically dominating.

Right now, we’re at the early stage of them. Or maybe, in AI terms, we’re already in the late stage of them. Either way, it wasn’t something I foresaw happening so quickly.

Agentic technology will probably develop significantly further and be used a lot more. At the minute it’s still tied to certain things, whether that’s individual ecosystem services or people building agents into specific areas like development. But more general agents that are just off doing their own thing seem plausible.

Artificial general intelligence, the end goal everyone’s after, still feels like a potential fairy tale. But with the speed everything is going, I wouldn’t be surprised if it happened within the next few years. At that point, who knows. That would be a whole different universe we’re living in.

It’s going to be crazy, potentially. You could take it in any fantasy direction and it seems relatively plausible, so I’m trying to keep it as grounded as I can.

Final thoughts

Simonnet’s argument starts with a sequencing problem. Organisations are adopting AI faster than they can see it, and an organisation that cannot see what its people are using has no way to judge whether its risk is negligible or severe. It will usually assume the former, because nothing appears to be going wrong.

The behaviour underneath it is not carelessness either. LLMs work better the more they are told, and they are conversational by design, so oversharing is a product of how the technology is built rather than a failure of employee discipline. That makes it a problem to be managed with visibility and controls, rather than one to be solved with a policy reminder.

On who fixes it, he is more patient than some. Industry standards still have time to catch up, and if they don’t, legislation on negligence follows. Either way, the responsibility in the meantime sits with organisations themselves, which brings the question back to whether they can see enough of their own AI usage to act on it.

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Security researchers have uncovered a now-fixed vulnerability in agentic AI platform Manus that could have allowed attackers to hijack an AI agent through a single malicious email and potentially access a user’s connected accounts.

Researchers at Salt Labs, the research arm of Salt Security, found that Manus could interpret malicious instructions embedded within an incoming email and execute them when asked by a user to check their messages.

Manus is a general-purpose agentic AI platform capable of independently carrying out multi-step tasks including research, data analysis, content creation and software development. The platform can also connect to third-party services such as email, cloud storage and code repositories.

According to Salt Labs, this connectivity created an opportunity for an indirect prompt injection attack, in which malicious instructions contained within external content are interpreted by an AI system as commands.

During testing, researchers initially sent an email containing a direct malicious command. Manus detected and flagged the instruction, suggesting its existing guardrails were capable of recognising the attack.

However, researchers were subsequently able to disguise the command using an obscure JavaScript obfuscation technique. Manus decoded and executed the hidden code and, while the platform produced a security warning, Salt Labs said the warning appeared only after the code had already executed.

The researchers were then able to establish a reverse shell within the environment and locate credentials and tokens associated with third-party services connected to the test account.

According to Salt Labs, a successful real-world exploitation of the vulnerability could therefore have potentially enabled an attacker to reach services including a victim’s email, cloud storage and code repositories.

Significantly, the attack chain did not require the victim to click a malicious link, download a file or hand over their password. Researchers said it required just two events: a malicious email arriving in the victim’s inbox and the user subsequently asking Manus to check their messages.

The vulnerability was responsibly disclosed and has since been resolved, meaning the attack described by Salt Labs is no longer exploitable.

However, the researchers argue the findings demonstrate a wider security challenge facing agentic AI systems: detecting malicious activity may not be enough if an autonomous agent has already performed the action before a human can intervene.

As organisations increasingly give AI agents access to business applications, APIs and sensitive data, Salt Labs said security controls will need to extend beyond inspecting prompts and model behaviour to governing what agents are permitted to do across connected systems.

“The agentic domain is relatively new, and the industry is still learning how to use it correctly, and so are attackers,” said Yaniv Balmas, Head of Research at Salt Security.

“Guardrails are an important part of any agentic system that handles untrusted input, but they are often simply not enough. Anyone designing an agentic system should build robust, layered defenses rather than trusting guardrails to provide all the protection, exactly as we learned to do with traditional services.”

Balmas added that as adoption of agentic AI grows, he expects attacks targeting these systems to become an increasingly common threat vector.

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In 2026, the Cyber Security Academic Startup Accelerator Programme (CyberASAP), which is funded by the UK Government’s Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and delivered by Innovate UK, celebrates its 10th anniversary. Over the past decade, the programme has bridged the gap between academia and industry, accelerating the commercialisation of cutting-edge cyber technologies from inside UK universities. So far, programme alumni have raised well over £75m in follow-on investment, resulting in 45 cyber companies, including 30 spin-out companies formed, four acquisitions and multiple licences to industry. The success of the programme is evident, as DCMS has committed a further £10m over the next four years in additional funding to CyberASAP.

On the 1st October 2026, at the QEII Centre in Westminster, London, government, industry, academia, investors and innovators will come together to celebrate the programme. The anniversary event will showcase CyberASAP’s achievements over the last decade, celebrate the success of its alumni and explore the future of cyber security innovation in the UK. Attendees can look forward to a keynote address by Baroness Gustafsson of Chesterton CBE. Baroness Gustafsson was part of the team who founded Darktrace in 2013 and most recently was Minister of State (Minister for Investment) jointly in the Department for Business and Trade and HM Treasury.

CyberASAP is uniquely positioned within the cyber innovation ecosystem as the UK’s only pre-seed cyber security accelerator dedicated to academics. For ten years, the programme has helped researchers transform cutting-edge cyber security ideas into commercial ventures, enabling innovations with the potential to make the UK safer, more secure and more resilient. At a time when close attention is being paid to digital sovereignty, CyberASAP is critical for growing the next generation of British cyber businesses.

Emma Fadlon, Director of CyberASAP, said “a decade is a significant milestone for any programme, let alone a pre-seed cyber security accelerator. CyberASAP has stood the test of time and delivered some exceptional results, as the statistics show. What’s truly unique about CyberASAP is its ability to give academics the chance to develop and commercialise tech that has the potential to create real change nationally and beyond.”

One pertinent CyberASAP success story is AI security company Mindgard. A spinout from Lancaster University, Mindgard was co-founded by Dr Peter Garraghan and took part in CyberASAP’s Year 6 cohort in 2022. Since graduating from the programme, Mindgard has raised several multi-million-pound and dollar funding rounds, including £3 million in 2023 and $8 million in 2024. Most recently, in August 2026, the company announced that it had closed a $30 million Series A financing led by Album VC, with participation from Karma Ventures and existing investors .406 Ventures, Atlantic Bridge, IQ Capital and Lakestar. According to Mindgard, the Series A followed accelerated deployment of its technology among Fortune 2000 companies and AI innovators across financial services, pharmaceuticals, gaming, digital services, semiconductors and healthcare.

Alumni of CyberASAP remain part of the Innovate UK ecosystem after graduating, benefitting from opportunities, such as mentorship and trips to showcase abroad. This year, for example, six alumni attended RSAC in San Francisco to showcase some of Britain’s most exciting early-stage cyber innovations.

The 10th cohort started the programme in April 2026 and the final 14 teams selected for the final phase of the programme are developing Proofs of Concept to address cyber security in sectors ranging from Critical National Infrastructure to FinTech, AI Security to IoT. In February 2027, the cohort will pitch to investors and industry at its annual Demo Day.

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CSIDES has unveiled its full agenda for its 2026 cybersecurity community event, with more than 25 industry speakers and a programme of talks, workshops and hands-on activities set to take over Weston-super-Mare’s Grand Pier.

Returning on 9th October following its inaugural event in 2025, CSIDES aims to make cybersecurity more accessible to the wider public while encouraging more people to consider careers in the industry.

Among those taking to the Main Stage will be threat intelligence manager and award-winning cyber expert Sophia McCall, who will open the event with a session on understanding and managing your personal attack surface.

Ant Davis, founder of Risky Creative and a popular cybersecurity content creator, will explore what security awareness professionals can learn from some of history’s most manipulative cult leaders. Matt Treadwell, also known as “The Cybrarian”, will meanwhile reimagine modern digital infrastructure as a Victorian information network.

The South West Regional Economic and Cyber Crime Unit (SWRECCU) will also join the line-up to discuss the latest online scams and digital trends targeting people in the region, alongside practical advice on how residents can protect themselves.

SWRECCU will additionally host a Cyber Escape Room designed for non-technical attendees, using gamification to make cybersecurity concepts more engaging and accessible.

Elsewhere, an ‘Ask Me Anything’ area will give members of the public the opportunity to put their cybersecurity questions directly to industry professionals.

A dedicated careers track will also feature speakers from across the sector discussing both traditional and unconventional routes into cybersecurity. The sessions will highlight opportunities beyond purely technical positions, demonstrating the range of roles available within the industry.

Several hands-on workshops are scheduled throughout the day. Punk Security will run an introduction to hacking session exploring common vulnerabilities that security testers can overlook, while Wayne May of Scam Survivors will take attendees behind the scenes of efforts to identify and fight online scams.

Lisa de-Laune will also deliver a workshop on building a strong cyber risk control environment.

Cybersecurity training company Immersive will bring a bespoke 90-minute crisis simulator to the Grand Pier, giving attendees an opportunity to experience what happens during a cyber incident.

Hazel McPherson, Co-Founder of CSIDES, said: “CSIDES exists to open up cyber security to everyone, not just those already in the room. Bringing it back to Weston-super-Mare is about giving people real, practical ways to stay safe online and showing that a career in cyber is possible, whatever your starting point.

“It’s inclusive, it’s hands-on, and it’s built with the community at its core.”

Jess Matthews, Co-Founder of CSIDES, added: “We are delighted to bring CSIDES back following the success of our inaugural event in October 2025. While a year has passed, our mission remains the same: to create an inclusive, accessible event for everyone who joins us on the Grand Pier in Weston-super-Mare.

“It’s the spirit of the community that makes it truly special, and we look forward to welcoming everyone for another inspiring day in this iconic seaside setting.”

The 2026 event is sponsored by Tines, 4FOX Security, Consultants Like Us, Punk Security, PPRO and IASME.

CSIDES will also support local charity Weston Hospicecare, with profits from merchandise sales, a raffle and a game of ‘guess the crab’s birthday’ going towards the hospice, which provides free care for people with life-limiting illnesses and their families across Somerset and North Somerset.

CSIDES 2026 takes place at The Grand Pier, Weston-super-Mare, on 9th October 2026. Tickets are on sale now.

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Huntress researchers have uncovered two phishing attacks that combined convincing fake browser windows with legitimate remote management software to establish persistent access to victims’ devices.

Both incidents, observed in August, began with phishing messages directing victims to attacker-controlled websites. The attackers then used a browser-in-the-browser (BiTB) technique to create what appeared to be a legitimate Adobe webpage, before convincing victims to download malicious software disguised as an Adobe Reader update.

Rather than deploying conventional malware, the attackers installed rogue instances of ScreenConnect, legitimate remote monitoring and management (RMM) software, giving them continued remote access to compromised endpoints.

Fake browser makes phishing harder to spot

BiTB attacks create a fake browser window inside a webpage using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The window can replicate familiar features including an address bar, padlock and legitimate-looking URL, making traditional advice such as checking the web address less effective.

In the first attack, detected on 25 August, a victim clicked a link in a phishing email and was taken to a fake CAPTCHA page. They were subsequently presented with blurred documents and told they needed to download Adobe PDF Reader to view them.

The fake browser page appeared to show Adobe’s legitimate get.adobe.com address. However, the supposed Reader installer was actually ScreenConnect.

Once installed, the attackers deployed two rogue ScreenConnect clients, providing redundant routes for maintaining access. They then executed HideCursor.exe, a defence-evasion tool designed to conceal on-screen activity. Huntress intervened before the attack could progress further.

Second attack follows same playbook

Huntress identified another incident on 31 August involving the same Adobe Reader lure.

This time, the victim interacted with a malicious link delivered through AT&T Office@Hand, a legitimate communications service powered by RingCentral. The attackers again disguised ScreenConnect as an Adobe Reader update and installed two unauthorised instances.

The second ScreenConnect session was used to execute another defence-evasion binary, HideUL.exe. Microsoft Defender detected part of the activity, but the rogue ScreenConnect client still completed its installation before Huntress shut down the attack.

Legitimate tools remain attractive to attackers

The attacks demonstrate how threat actors can combine familiar phishing techniques with trusted software to make malicious activity harder to identify.

RMM abuse is a growing problem. Huntress’ 2026 Cyber Threat Report found RMM abuse increased 277% year on year and appeared in nearly a quarter of the incidents investigated by the company.

Huntress recommends organisations restrict who can install remote management tools, maintain an approved inventory of RMM software and monitor for new or unauthorised ScreenConnect clients. Employees should also be wary of unexpected software updates or file-viewing prompts, even when a webpage appears to display a legitimate address.

Read the full research here. 

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An AI-assisted platform has been used to test whether Viasat’s satellite communications links can meet operational thresholds under interference and adversarial jamming. 

Announced this month, the work with Atalanta has renewed scrutiny of the vulnerabilities exposed by Russia’s 2022 attack on Viasat’s KA-SAT network, which disrupted communications across Ukraine and several European countries. 

Gil Baram, PhD, is a cybersecurity strategy and policy researcher specialising in cyber warfare, intelligence and space security. She is a Senior Lecturer and Associate Professor at Bar-Ilan University and formerly led the Cyber and Space Research Group at Tel Aviv University. 

In this exclusive interview for the IT Security Guru conducted by the Cyber Security Speakers Agency, Gil explains how states use cyber operations to compete below the threshold of open war, why long-life satellites present a distinct security challenge, and how an attack on space-based communications could disrupt everyday life on Earth. 

How have state cyber capabilities blurred the threshold between strategic competition and armed conflict? 

Gil Baram: “I think the greatest change that cyber warfare and cyber capabilities have created is that states can compete without crossing this imaginary red line: if you cross it, then it’s a war. 

“They don’t do that, but they still compete on and on, causing damage to one another, disrupting civilians’ lives and interfering in elections. But still, that doesn’t lead to an open war. That’s something very unique to this type of technology.” 

Why does securing space-based infrastructure present a different cyber challenge from defending terrestrial systems? 

Gil Baram: “When we talk about that, the first thing we have to have in mind is the distance. For many years, security contractors were the ones building big satellites for states and launching them. Have it in mind that these satellites should be in space for 20 or 25 years, and that’s a lot. 

“If you have a cyber risk, it’s very hard to patch a system that is flying far away from you and that was launched a decade ago. It created a lot of questions: how do you deal with cyber security in space? 

“In the past, we started seeing what we call the new space: startups and technology companies that started building satellites and building space capabilities. These are not the big security contractors. 

“We started seeing that these companies do have security by design, or cyber security by design, when they design their products and before they’re launching them to space. That’s a big shift we’ve seen today.” 

How exposed is civilian life to a successful cyberattack on satellite communications infrastructure? 

Gil Baram: “My feeling is that sometimes we don’t realise how much we depend on space capabilities, even for chatting today, using our internet or our cell phones, and navigating with GPS. Many things that we take for granted couldn’t happen without satellites and space satellite communication. 

“I’ll give just one example. In the first day of the Russian invasion to Ukraine, the Russian conducted a cyberattack against Ukraine satellite communication capabilities. 

“The reports coming out from Ukraine: they didn’t have the needed communication at the very critical moments or hours of the beginning of the war. You can damage satellite communication and then hurt an entire country. 

“The main thing I hope audiences will take, and that’s my passion and goal, is to understand or realise that cyber, AI and cyber threats are relevant to our everyday lives. It’s not something that is out there, and not just something that we read in the news, but it’s relevant for everyday lives. 

“We don’t have to be technical people in order to understand that and in order to protect ourselves.”

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KnowBe4 has appointed cybersecurity channel veteran Kurt Mills as its new channel chief, as the company looks to strengthen its global partner ecosystem and expand its channel routes to market.

In the role, Mills will lead the evolution of KnowBe4’s global partner programmes and operations, with responsibility for supporting the company’s relationships across VARs, MSPs, systems integrators, distributors and technology partners.

Mills brings more than 25 years of channel experience to KnowBe4, having previously held executive channel and partner sales positions at Check Point Software Technologies, Mimecast, FireMon and Blue Coat Systems.

Throughout his career, he has focused on aligning partner strategies with wider business and revenue goals, building partner networks and channel teams through periods including IPOs, acquisitions and rapid market expansion.

“Partner ecosystem growth is central to our mission, and Kurt’s appointment reflects our continued investment in that strategy,” said Bryan Palma, CEO of KnowBe4. “Kurt’s deep channel expertise, proven ability to scale high-performing teams, and track record of building long-term partner value will be instrumental as we expand our market reach.”

Mills’ appointment follows a number of additions to KnowBe4’s channel leadership team, including Neill Burton and John Noha, who have both joined as vice president of channel to support the company’s global initiatives.

The expanded leadership team will focus on providing partners with the programmes, tools and resources needed to identify new opportunities and support customers throughout the security lifecycle.

KnowBe4 said the investment reflects the increasingly important role partners play in its global growth strategy and in delivering its digital workforce security offering to organisations worldwide.

“Joining the KnowBe4 team at this critical point in the company’s growth is an incredible opportunity,” said Kurt Mills, newly appointed channel chief at KnowBe4. “I’ve built my career on creating focused, measurable, and engaged teams that drive mutual success for organizations and their partners. I am thrilled to team up with everyone at KnowBe4 to scale our partner programs, deepen our relationships across VARs, MSPs, SIs, distributors, and tech partners, and fuel our next phase of global growth.”

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Manchester Airports Group (MAG) has suffered a major cyberattack in which data belonging to around 8.7 million customers was reportedly accessed, raising concerns about how the stolen information could now be exploited by cybercriminals.

The incident affected customer information associated with Manchester Airport, London Stansted and East Midlands Airport. Data connected to car park, lounge and Fast Track bookings, as well as airport Wi-Fi registrations, was reportedly accessed.

Email addresses, phone numbers, postcodes and vehicle registration details are among the information affected. However, payment information was not compromised, while airport operations, passenger safety and aviation security were unaffected.

While this limits the immediate operational impact, security experts warn that the combination of information exposed could prove particularly useful for targeted phishing, impersonation and social engineering.

Stolen data could make scams much harder to spot

Simon Pamplin, CTO at Certes, said the fact that operations were unaffected should not distract from the significance of the data exposure.

“Around 8.7 million customer records have reportedly been accessed, including email addresses, phone numbers, postcodes and vehicle registration details. Individually these may appear relatively innocuous, but together they create a detailed dataset that can be extremely useful for targeted phishing, impersonation and social engineering.”

The context surrounding the information could make it especially valuable. Criminals could potentially create fraudulent parking notices, travel communications or airport-related messages containing enough genuine information to appear legitimate.

Muhammad Yahya Patel, vCISO and cybersecurity advisor for EMEA at Huntress, described the combination of information as a “precise targeting profile” for criminals.

“Scammers now know you travelled, roughly when, and have two direct contact routes to reach you with a convincing story,” he said.

Carole Reeves, Director of Security Operations at ANS, agreed that the absence of payment information should not lead customers to underestimate the risk.

“Attackers do not always need financial credentials from the initial breach. They can use the information they have to impersonate a trusted organisation and manipulate someone into revealing further personal or financial details.”

Aviation sector faces growing cyber pressure

Graeme Stewart, Head of Public Sector at Check Point Software, said the incident should serve as a warning to the wider aviation industry.

“The absence of cancelled flights or queues at terminals does not make this a small cyber attack. The data reportedly taken can now be weaponised,” he said.

Knowledge of a customer’s relationship with an airport could potentially be used to create fake parking refunds, Fast Track problems or communications about the breach itself.

“Aviation needs to behave as though a sustained campaign has begun, because waiting for an attack that stops planes moving before treating this as serious would be a dangerous mistake,” Stewart added.

Complex airport ecosystems create additional risks

The attack also raises questions about the complex technology ecosystems supporting modern airports.

Nathan Davies-Webb, Principal Consultant at Acumen Cyber, said airport groups sit at the centre of numerous booking, parking, loyalty, payment and internet connectivity services, many of which can be operated by subsidiaries or third-party suppliers.

“That’s a sensible commercial model but it creates an uncomfortable reality for security. A breach like this one in a shared upstream system can expose customer data from multiple services at multiple airports simultaneously.”

Davies-Webb also highlighted the speed of MAG’s response, with public disclosure roughly 48 hours after it became aware of the incident.

“Either way, it’s a better disclosure posture than we’ve seen from organisations involved in some comparable incidents, and MAG will probably benefit from having been quick and open here,” he said.

Tim Williams, CEO at Quod Orbis, also pointed to the importance of visibility beyond an organisation’s core systems.

“While the systems targeted were car parking, lounge bookings and WiFi sign-ups, they were not responsible for flight operations; they formed part of the wider digital environment through which customers interact within the airport,” Williams said.

He argued that security teams need visibility across systems, applications and third-party services so that risks can be identified before they become incidents.

“Rapid response can contain an incident, but having visibility across the wider technology and third-party ecosystem can help organisations identify potential weaknesses earlier, understand their exposure and strengthen their defences before an incident occurs.”

Knowing what data was accessed matters

The breach also highlights the importance of understanding exactly what information has been exposed once an attacker gains access.

Jerry Caviston, CEO at Archive360, said good data governance can provide organisations with the traceability needed during an incident.

“Having good data governance is like having CCTV footage of what data was touched and when,” he said.

Maintaining an event audit history can help organisations trace compromised information back to its original source and provide affected customers with clearer information about the risks they face.

Pamplin argues organisations should go further by attaching security directly to the data.

“We have to work on the assumption that systems will eventually be accessed. The objective should be that when this happens, sensitive data remains encrypted and unusable outside its authorised context,” he said.

“If an attacker can steal information but cannot read or exploit it, the value of the breach changes fundamentally.”

Customers should prepare for follow-on attacks

The immediate concern for affected customers is what criminals could do with the information next.

Jamie Akhtar, CEO and Co-Founder of CyberSmart, advised customers to be particularly cautious of unexpected emails, calls or texts claiming to relate to airport or travel services.

“Avoid clicking links or sharing personal information in unsolicited messages and, where possible, verify communications independently through an organisation’s official website or app,” he said.

Shankar Haridas, UK Business Head at ManageEngine, warned that the original breach could be followed by attacks designed to exploit customers’ trust in MAG.

“A breach like this doesn’t end when the data is taken. A flood of cloaked attacks, dressed up in the airport’s name is next,” he said.

“With 8.7 million email addresses, phone numbers and postcodes now in criminal hands, every ‘confirm your booking’ or ‘update your car park payment’ message must be questioned.”

Brian Higgins, Security Specialist at Comparitech, added that AI is making it easier for criminals to aggregate breached information and find new ways of monetising it.

“As AI makes data aggregation swift and easy, consumers are waking up to the fact that criminals can monetise successful breaches in increasingly inventive ways,” he said.

For those potentially affected, the consequences of the MAG cyberattack may therefore continue long after the initial incident has been contained. Emails or messages referencing airport parking, lounge access, Fast Track services or travel details could contain genuine personal information, making the next wave of scams considerably harder to recognise.

The post Manchester Airports Group Cyberattack Exposes Data of 8.7 Million Customers appeared first on IT Security Guru.

Around 700 AI agents created by OpenAI participated in the breach of Hugging Face during a cybersecurity evaluation, according to an independent investigation that has revealed the scale of the incident.

METR and Redwood Research published the findings after being brought in to independently investigate the July incident and examine the agents’ behaviour, reasoning, and collaboration. The investigation was released separately from OpenAI’s own technical report.

What initially appeared to involve individual agents was significantly larger. Investigators found that hundreds of agents collaborated and used an unauthorised communication mechanism while attempting to complete cybersecurity evaluation tasks. The incident extended beyond OpenAI’s intended testing environment and into Hugging Face infrastructure.

The findings have renewed questions about what happens when increasingly capable AI agents are given the autonomy, tools and access required to complete complex tasks.

From one compromised system to multiple clusters

Ben Bernstein, cybersecurity advisor at Huntress, said the most significant development is not necessarily the techniques used, but the speed and coordination demonstrated by the agents.

“The underlying tactics are not new. These agents relied on standard server-side request forgery and exposed API tokens, which are the exact same hygiene failures human attackers abuse every single day,” Bernstein said.

“What is genuinely novel is the velocity and autonomous coordination. Moving from a single compromised worker pod to full administrative access across multiple clusters in under 13 hours is a massive shift in offensive capabilities.”

The independent investigation found evidence of agents communicating and collaborating as they worked towards their objectives.

AI becomes a new kind of insider risk

Adam Ely, GM of AI Security at Check Point, said organisations need to start thinking differently about the access given to AI.

“Companies deploying AI for their employees and customers now realise AI can be both a powerful tool and an insider threat that must be managed to prevent cybersecurity events and maximise value,” Ely said.

Julie Nicholson, director of cyber resilience solution sales at Advania, pointed to the behaviour demonstrated by the agents as particularly concerning.

“The agent didn’t simply execute technical tasks; it chose to deceive people, create false identities, build credibility and attempt to influence others in the aim to hit its objective,” Nicholson said.

She argued that organisations adopting AI agents should introduce clear access controls, human approval for high-risk actions, monitoring and auditing of AI activity, restrictions on external communications and clearly defined policies governing how agents can operate.

Agents find unexpected ways to collaborate

Nathan Davies-Webb, Principal Consultant at Acumen Cyber, highlighted the way agents used infrastructure in unexpected ways to communicate.

“My personal interest stems from how various agents interacted with each other using OpenAI’s package repository,” Davies-Webb said. “It leveraged it as a communication channel, where I doubt the majority of organisations would monitor for abuse in this manner.”

That creates a challenge for defenders. Organisations may understand the systems and communication channels that humans typically use, but autonomous agents could discover alternative ways of exchanging information that security teams have never considered monitoring.

Davies-Webb also questioned what happens when multiple agents begin making decisions collectively.

“When operating as a swarm, [it] shows just how non-deterministic ethical decisions are. It’s a demonstration that unfiltered AI ethical reasoning cannot be relied upon to align with human norms.”

The problem of reward hacking

A central issue highlighted by the reports is “reward hacking.” Some evaluation tasks were considered extremely difficult or potentially impossible, and OpenAI said this appears to have encouraged agents to pursue unintended methods of achieving their objectives.

Davies-Webb said this demonstrates the difficult balance between giving an AI freedom to accomplish a task and ensuring the methods it chooses remain acceptable.

“If the goal becomes the sole priority, we have to expect that AI is going to achieve this in unpredictable ways,” he said.

For security teams, that makes visibility into agent behaviour increasingly important.

As AI becomes more autonomous, organisations will need security guardrails, governance and accountability frameworks that develop alongside the technology. The Hugging Face incident shows that the question is no longer simply what an individual AI model can do, but what can happen when hundreds of agents are given tools, access, and objectives and begin working together at machine speed.

The post 700 AI Agents Linked to Hugging Face Security Breach appeared first on IT Security Guru.

A cyberattack reportedly linked to Iran forced a small UK energy generator offline for four days, raising fresh concerns about the security of the country’s critical infrastructure and smaller operators that may sit outside existing regulatory thresholds.

The UK government has confirmed that a small-scale generator was affected by a cyber incident in July. It stressed that the facility represented a tiny proportion of overall generation capacity and that the wider UK energy system was never at risk.

The government has not publicly attributed the attack or named the affected site. However, reports have linked the incident to hackers affiliated with Iran.

Following the incident, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) and National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) have been engaging with energy companies over the cyber threat facing the sector.

Small target, bigger security questions

While the facility itself was small, cybersecurity experts warn that its size should not distract from the fact that a cyber incident reportedly caused several days of operational disruption.

Muhammad Yahya Patel, vCISO and cybersecurity advisor for EMEA at Huntress, said attackers are unlikely to care whether an operator meets the threshold to be considered critical infrastructure.

“If it can be disrupted, it can be targeted,” Patel said. “The significance isn’t the size of the facility, but that a cyberattack turned into four days of real-world operational disruption.”

Patel said the incident raises questions about whether smaller operators have sufficient monitoring, containment and recovery capabilities.

“There is also a potential visibility gap. If smaller energy operators fall outside mandatory cyber-reporting thresholds, we risk underestimating how frequently this part of our infrastructure is being targeted or successfully compromised.”

Attribution remains uncertain

Despite reports linking the incident to Iran, Cian Heasley, Principal Consultant at Acumen Cyber, cautioned against concluding before further evidence emerges.

“Attribution for the incident is by no means concrete; the Iran link originates from press reporting while the UK government has declined to attribute blame or name the site affected,” Heasley said.

He argued that the more important lesson for the energy sector is what the incident demonstrates about the potential vulnerability of smaller energy assets.

“The significance of this incident lies in the precedent rather than the impact. A successful, if limited, intrusion into a power-generating asset demonstrates intent and a degree of capability against British energy infrastructure.”

Heasley said operators should focus on OT security fundamentals, including removing industrial controllers from direct internet exposure, strengthening credential management, separating IT and OT environments, and testing manual fallback and recovery procedures.

Graeme Stewart, head of public sector at Check Point, said the incident should concern organizations responsible for keeping essential services running.

“The fact that this was a relatively small generator and the wider grid was unaffected does not remove the threat,” Stewart said. “The far more serious point is what the attackers appear to have demonstrated: an ability to get inside UK energy infrastructure and stop it working.”

He warned that the bigger question is what happens if a future target is larger or more deeply connected to essential services such as electricity, water, transport, or communications.

“We cannot build our resilience around the assumption that every attacker will be stopped at the door,” he said. “Operators of essential services need to know exactly how they keep functioning when systems are compromised, how quickly an attack can be contained and how they recover without allowing disruption to spread.”

The distributed energy system creates new risks

Martin Riley, Chief Technology Officer at Bridewell, said the small size of the facility is precisely why the incident deserves attention.

“The reported attack on a UK gas-fired peaker plant should not be dismissed because the site was small. It should be studied because the site was small,” Riley said.

The UK’s energy system increasingly depends on smaller generators, renewable energy assets and battery storage systems. Many are unmanned and remotely operated.

Riley warned that capacity thresholds mean some smaller operators can fall outside formal cybersecurity regimes even as their collective importance to the energy system grows.

“In an energy system that is deliberately becoming distributed, reliant on thousands of smaller, unmanned, remotely operated generators, secure by design and defence in depth cannot remain conference slideware.”

Neena Sharma, Cybersecurity Expert at Filigran, made a similar point, arguing that critical infrastructure risk is becoming increasingly distributed.

“Critical infrastructure risk isn’t concentrated at the ‘crown jewel’ substations anymore, it’s distributed across hundreds of smaller, less-monitored assets that scale with the energy transition,” Sharma said.

Weak credentials remain a concern

The exact attack path used against the UK generator has not been disclosed.

However, Sai Molige, Senior Manager of Threat Hunting at Forescout, pointed to a familiar weakness seen in attacks against industrial environments.

“Two countries and two sectors faced the same underlying condition: a controller is reachable from the internet and protected by weak, default, or unchanged credentials,” Molige said.

He argued that one of the continuing challenges for operators is translating broad security warnings into an accurate understanding of whether their own environments contain vulnerable or exposed technology.

Supply Chain Risk Adds Another Layer

The incident also comes as the UK looks to tighten security across energy supply chains, where dependence on individual suppliers and technologies can create additional risks.

Jamie Akhtar, CEO and Co-founder of CyberSmart, said supply chain risk is not simply about whether an individual supplier can be compromised.

“If one vendor, country or narrow group of manufacturers underpins equipment that operators cannot quickly replace, that dependency can become a national-security issue,” Akhtar said.

This can be particularly difficult in operational technology environments, where equipment may remain in use for decades and replacing it can require complex integration work.

Akhtar said operators need to consider whether a supplier creates an unacceptable security exposure, whether it can realistically be replaced and whether removing it could create a greater short-term risk to operations.

“The strategic aim should be resilience, not a compliance exercise or a change of logo on the equipment,” he added. “Operators need enough diversity, control and recovery capability to keep essential services running if a supplier is compromised, unavailable or deemed too risky to trust.”

Resilience becomes the priority

The incident comes as the UK looks to strengthen cyber resilience across its energy sector and address risks within increasingly complex supply chains.

For Patel, the central lesson is that organizations cannot judge resilience solely by whether an attacker successfully gains access.

“The real measure of cyber resilience is no longer simply whether you can prevent an intrusion,” he said. “It’s whether you can contain one quickly enough that a cyber incident doesn’t become an operational crisis.”

With the wider grid unaffected, the July incident was limited in impact, but the disruption provides a timely warning that smaller assets can still present attractive targets and that cyber resilience needs to extend beyond the largest operators in the UK’s energy infrastructure.

The post Iran-Linked Hackers Blamed for UK Energy Cyberattack appeared first on IT Security Guru.

AI has been transformational for the workplace, saving time on repetitive tasks and freeing skilled staff to focus on higher-value work. It has become so embedded in organisations that ISACA’s research recently found that 82% of European companies expressly permit the use of AI at work.

However, there is a difference between using AI and governing AI use safely. Only 42% of organisations have a formal AI policy in place, and one in five (20%) don’t know who would be accountable if an AI system caused harm.

To further complicate things, it turns out that Microsoft Copilot now sits inside 80% of organisations using AI at work, well ahead of ChatGPT (56%), Gemini (37%), and Claude (21%). That means the majority of companies using AI are depending on just one vendor as an executive assistant, IT support, and sounding board.

In practice, this means that most of the business world is leaning on a single AI provider, with little planning for what happens if that provider is compromised or experiences an outage.

We use AI professionally and personally so much that, for many organisations, it is easy for compliance to become an afterthought. A tool people rely on daily doesn’t feel like a security risk – even when it is.

Leadership needs to challenge this by asking: what happens if this tool goes down, and what happens if it’s compromised? Some analysts expect over 200 high-signal disruption days across AI platforms this year and the negative impact that this will have on organisations’ productivity is considerable. Once staff begin to rely on AI-generated first drafts and summaries, reverting to manual work isn’t impossible, but it isn’t frictionless.

An over-reliance on AI – particularly on individual AI tools – can create a false sense of security, and the AI governance gap only gets worse when things go wrong. Three-fifths (59%) of companies do not know how quickly their organisation could halt an AI system in the event of a security incident, and only a fifth (21%) said they could do so within half an hour.

When a tool people rely on every day goes down, staff don’t stop working – they improvise. More than a quarter (26%) of organisations use no risk framework for AI at all, so when something does go wrong, there’s often no process to fall back on. That often means turning to whatever other AI tool is at hand, personal accounts, unapproved apps, and work-arounds that nobody has checked, at exactly the moment when careful handling of data matters most. This is why the fallback plan must exist before it’s needed, rather than being invented on the fly. The outage isn’t really the risk – how people cope during the aftermath is.

EU regulators have recognised and begun to address the AI governance gap, formally naming major cloud and AI providers, including Microsoft, as critical services to finance under the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA). Other sectors should expect similar action in line with NIS2 and the UK Cyber Security and Resilience Bill as the concentration risk argument spreads beyond finance.

What can businesses actually do about the AI governance gap? Firstly, they should review their AI use and record which important day-to-day work depends on a single AI tool. Where possible, they should try to diversify their provider use in order to mitigate the knock on effect of an outage.

This should be done as early as possible, as swapping AI providers isn’t like switching a light-touch SaaS tool. Foundation model capability sits with a small number of providers, so diversifying means retraining workflows and testing outputs.

Businesses should then look at their continuity plan and consider what the next steps are should their AI tools suffer an outage. Every organisation using AI should have a designated team that is responsible for managing an AI outage. But assigning ownership alone isn’t enough. Organisations also need a structured, maturity-based approach that embeds governance, accountability and resilience into day-to-day AI operations. Frameworks such as CMMI AIM provide a practical way to assess current capabilities, identify gaps and improve governance over time. That is not a decision that should be made mid-crisis, but before anything happens.

A backup option is also essential for operations that can’t afford to be put on hold until the AI is operational. Staff should be made aware of this contingency plan so that if their usual AI tool is unavailable, they don’t reach for something less secure out of habit.

This kind of business foresight is what will prevent your most useful tool becoming your biggest cybersecurity oversight.

None of this is to say that businesses should not use AI – rather that AI should be treated like any other critical part of the business, with a plan for when things don’t go smoothly. A designated owner and a tested fallback plan won’t stop the next outage, but it will decide whether it’s a minor disruption or a major one.

The post The 80% Problem: Why AI resilience is more important than ever appeared first on IT Security Guru.

Keeper Security has urged schools, colleges and universities to strengthen their cyber defences ahead of the new academic year, warning that AI-powered phishing and a growing number of unmanaged machine identities are widening the education sector’s attack surface.

The identity security and privileged access management (PAM) provider said the annual rush to provision accounts, issue credentials and connect new devices creates a particularly attractive window for cybercriminals.

At the start of an academic year, IT teams can be responsible for onboarding thousands of students, faculty and staff while simultaneously enrolling devices and integrating third-party applications. Keeper warned that this combination can increase the likelihood of misconfigurations, stale credentials and excessive access going unnoticed.

Education institutions are already frequent targets for ransomware, credential theft and data breaches, in part because of the valuable information they hold, ranging from student and financial records to academic research.

Keeper said the threat is being compounded by relatively low levels of security awareness. Its research found that just 14% of schools mandate security awareness training, while almost one in five students and parents reported reusing passwords across personal and school accounts.

Artificial intelligence is adding another layer to the problem. AI-generated phishing messages can imitate communications from IT helpdesks, student funding departments and senior university figures with greater accuracy, potentially removing many of the spelling, grammar and formatting mistakes traditionally associated with phishing campaigns.

Deepfake technology also gives attackers the ability to impersonate trusted individuals through voice and video.

According to Keeper research, 52% of education leaders identify deepfake impersonation as a major concern, but only 26% are confident in their ability to recognise AI-enabled threats. The company also found that 41% of institutions reported being targeted by AI-generated phishing attempts or misinformation campaigns.

Beyond attacks targeting students and staff, Keeper highlighted what it describes as a less visible threat to education environments: non-human identities (NHIs).

These identities include service accounts used to synchronise student information and learning management systems, API keys connecting third-party EdTech applications, machine certificates authenticating connected equipment and cloud identities supporting automated workloads.

Increasingly, the category also includes AI agents and bots used for functions such as admissions, IT helpdesks and grading.

Keeper warned that credentials associated with these systems can be overlooked by conventional identity management practices. Service account passwords may remain unchanged for long periods, while API tokens belonging to applications that are no longer used can potentially remain active.

Cloud workloads can similarly accumulate permissions beyond those required for their function, while expired or incorrectly configured certificates can create additional security gaps.

Darren Guccione, CEO and co-founder of Keeper Security, said the education sector needed to broaden its approach to identity security.

“The conversation about education cybersecurity has historically focused on human accounts: students, teachers and administrators,” said Guccione. “But the real blind spot is the vast ecosystem of machine identities that power modern EdTech. Back-to-school is the right moment for education IT teams to take stock of every identity on their network, human and non-human alike.”

Keeper is recommending that education IT teams use the period before students return to review both human and machine access to their environments.

Among its recommendations is enforcing multi-factor authentication (MFA) across student, faculty and staff accounts, alongside deploying enterprise password management to reduce weak, reused and shared credentials.

Institutions should also audit privileged access and remove permissions associated with former employees, expired service accounts and applications that are no longer required, the company said.

For non-human identities, Keeper recommends creating an inventory covering service accounts, API keys, machine certificates, cloud identities and AI agents. Credential rotation policies should then be established, particularly for third-party EdTech integrations and AI systems introduced for the coming academic year.

The company also advised institutions to update phishing awareness programmes to account for increasingly convincing AI-generated communications.

Keeper said its zero-trust and zero-knowledge security platform can be used to discover, govern and rotate credentials belonging to both human and non-human identities. Its KeeperPAM platform additionally provides privileged access controls, session recording and audit capabilities.

As education environments become increasingly dependent on cloud services, connected equipment, third-party applications and AI, Keeper argues that knowing which identities have access (and whether they still require it) is becoming as important as protecting the students and staff behind traditional user accounts.

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