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.

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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.

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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.

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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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It’s that time again! Global cybersecurity PR agency Eskenzi PR has opened nominations for its tenth annual Security Serious Unsung Heroes Awards. The awards celebrate the UK’s most extraordinary cybersecurity professionals who work to make the industry not only more secure, but also more diverse, healthier and better informed about current events. Key sponsors include CultureAI, OneAdvanced and The Zensory. The awards are also supported by Computer Weekly, Information Security Buzz and IT Security Guru. 

The awards celebrate the cybersecurity professionals who go above and beyond to make a difference, often behind the scenes. They recognise educators who are fostering the next generation of cyber talent, those who are fighting cybercrime head-on, and mentors who are guiding others in the field. The awards also acknowledge those who are making cybersecurity a more inclusive space (Diversity Champion) and those who prioritise the wellbeing of their peers (Cybersecurity Wellbeing Advocate).

For 2026, three new categories have been introduced:  

• Cyber Scribe: This category celebrates the cybersecurity industry’s best and most insightful cyber blogs and newsletters, including those published on Medium, Substack or LinkedIn.

• Voice of Security: This category celebrates the industry’s best podcasts and vodcasts.   

• Channel Champion: This category celebrates the unsung heroes of the channel, from distributors and resellers to vendors with a strong channel presence.

Entries are now open, which includes filling in a short form detailing why the person deserves the award. Nominations will remain open until 5pm on the 16th of September 2026, before closing for review by an esteemed (soon-to-be-announced) panel of judges. 

Nominees, nominators, and their guests are then invited to a celebratory evening in London in October, to coincide with Cybersecurity Awareness Month. Thanks to its sponsors, the Security Serious Unsung Heroes Awards are free to enter and to attend.

Sam Soares, CRO at CultureAI, said:  “CultureAI is proud to support the tenth Security Serious Unsung Heroes Awards, celebrating the cybersecurity professionals who protect their organisations without fanfare, even as the threat, technology and governance landscapes shift. As AI adoption outpaces governance, these teams are absorbing an entirely new category of risk alongside everything they already carry. Recognising that work is long overdue, and we’re pleased to play a part in it.” 

“As we celebrate the 10th year of the Security Serious Unsung Heroes Awards, I’m incredibly proud of what these awards have come to represent. Over the past decade, we’ve had the privilege of recognising hundreds of remarkable people whose dedication, kindness and expertise have helped make our industry stronger, safer and more inclusive,” said Yvonne Eskenzi, Co-Founder and Director at Eskenzi PR. “I encourage everyone across the cybersecurity community to take a moment to nominate a colleague, mentor, teammate or friend who deserves to be recognised. Their contribution matters, and together we can make sure their achievements are celebrated as part of this very special milestone year.” 

  Categories this year include:

• Cyber Correspondent (for cyber journalists, broadcasters and writers)
• Godparent of Security
• Data Guardian
• CISO Supremo
• Security Avengers – Best Team
• Best Educator
• Best Ethical Hacker/Pentester
• Rising Star
• Security Mentor
• Best Security Awareness Campaign
• Diversity Champion
• Cybersecurity Wellbeing Advocate
• Cyber Scribe (for blogs/newsletters)
• Voice of Security (for podcasts/vodcasts) 
• Channel Champion

You can make nominations or find out more information here.

To see previous winners, click here.

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An experimental AI agent powered by OpenAI models has successfully compromised part of Hugging Face’s infrastructure during a controlled cybersecurity evaluation, offering a glimpse into the evolving offensive capabilities of advanced AI systems.

The incident, first disclosed by Hugging Face last week, has now been confirmed by OpenAI to have involved a combination of its models, including GPT-5.6 Sol and a more capable pre-release model with cyber safety restrictions temporarily relaxed for testing. According to both companies, the AI agent was evaluated as part of an internal benchmark designed to measure the cyber capabilities of frontier AI models.

OpenAI said the breach was quickly detected and contained, with no impact on customers or production systems. However, the company acknowledged that incidents involving increasingly autonomous AI agents are likely to become more common as models become more capable. This has raised alarm among cyber professionals. 

Oliver Simonnet, Lead Cybersecurity Researcher at CultureAI, said: “It’s not just the sophistication of the attack, but what it says about where we are with AI capability, as this wasn’t just a model executing a predefined exploit chain. It seemingly identified obstacles, discovered new attack paths, pivoted through multiple environments, and remained relentlessly focused on achieving its objective, even after leaving its sandbox.”

The evaluation was intended to help researchers better understand how advanced AI systems behave in realistic cybersecurity scenarios and to improve future safeguards. OpenAI said it has now restored the affected safety protections on the models used during the testing.

Kieran B, Head of Technical Services at Bridewell, noted: “OpenAI deserves credit for being transparent about what happened, disclosing the vulnerability responsibly and working with the affected parties to remediate the issue. That openness will help the wider industry learn from the incident. However, it also serves as a reminder that this was a controlled research scenario. If an attacker sought to exploit weaknesses in enterprise deployments using the new advanced AI models, the consequences could be far more significant.” 

The incident is likely to fuel ongoing discussions around AI security, agentic AI and the need for robust governance as organisations increasingly deploy autonomous AI systems. It also highlights the importance of rigorous testing and responsible disclosure as AI models gain the ability to perform increasingly sophisticated cyber tasks, even within tightly controlled research environments.

Cyber experts have weighed in on the incident. Sai Molige, Senior Manager of Threat Hunting at Forescout, said: “The required security posture is not ‘trust the model unless it misbehaves.’ It is to assume that a capable agent will discover every reachable path that advances its objective and to ensure that no such path grants unintended authority.”

Kevin Kirkwood, CISO at Exabeam, said: “The practical fix is to treat every dataset, model, plugin, and AI-processing job as untrusted code. Run it in a disposable sandbox with no standing cloud credentials, no direct access to production systems, and tightly restricted network egress. The goal is not to assume every malicious payload will be caught. The goal is to make sure a compromised worker has nowhere useful to go.”

“Next, remove the blast radius. Use short-lived workload identities, strict network segmentation, and separate trust zones for processing, production, internal datasets, and secrets. A worker handling user-supplied content should never inherit broad cluster access or reusable credentials. If one node is compromised, the incident should end at that node instead of becoming a tour of the company’s infrastructure.”

“Finally, build detection and response for machine-speed abuse. Monitor for rapid credential discovery, unusual service-account activity, cross-cluster access, abnormal API sequences, and large internal data pulls. Pair that with automated token revocation and fast worker rebuilds. ” Kevin continued. 

Roey Eliyahu, CEO and Co-Founder of Salt Security, said: “Every AI agent needs to be treated like a new identity with its own privileges, its own behavioral baseline, and continuous oversight. The question security teams should be asking right now is simple: do you have visibility into what your agents are calling, what systems they are reaching, and whether that behavior is what you sanctioned? Because if an agent starts making API calls it was never supposed to make, to systems it was never supposed to reach, you need to know before the breach happens, not after.”

Oliver Simonnet from CultureAI concluded: “This incident really highlights the challenges of building AI systems that are powerful enough to strengthen cyber defence whilst also ensuring they remain contained during development and testing. Being able to securely evaluate these systems is just as important as securing the systems they’re designed to protect.”

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The 25th July 2026 marks one year since the Online Safety Act’s landmark child safety duties came into force, making it a natural moment to assess what’s changed, what’s worked and what challenges remain. Although the Act itself received Royal Assent in October 2023, its requirements were introduced in phases, with 25th July 2025 being the date many of the most visible obligations on platforms took effect.

The child safety duties require platforms likely to be accessed by children to introduce stronger protections, including effective age assurance, child risk assessments and measures to reduce exposure to harmful content. 

One year on, has the Online Safety Act fundamentally changed the internet for UK users, or has it simply shifted the challenges elsewhere? We spoke to cybersecurity experts for a short series of reports to find out more.  

Today, we’re examining the unintended consequences of the Act… 

Professor George Loukas, Head of Centre for Sustainable Cyber Security, University of Greenwich, said: “Ofcom has moved from consultation to enforcement. Naturally, the larger adult sector platforms have been the most visible early targets, and there have been lots of discussions on whether that led to a shift to more VPN usage as well as to non-compliant adult websites. These were all predictable though.”

Uptick in VPN Usage 

For many, the enforcement date signalled a natural (if not predictable) shift towards VPN usage to get around age verification tests. The evidence backs up this hypothesis: Proton VPN’s 2025 end of year report revealed that one of the biggest spikes in VPN sign-ups globally was seen in the UK from the 25th July. 

Konstantin Levinzon, co-founder of Planet VPN, noted that the real issue is people seeking out ‘free’ or not reputable VPNs, posing a significant security risk: “The biggest unintended consequence has been pushing people towards less secure tools, not more careful online behaviour. Age verification requirements have driven a significant increase in VPN adoption, but many users don’t seek out reputable providers – they simply download the first free VPN they find. Those services are often the ones leaking DNS requests, harvesting telemetry or relying on weak security practices, creating a worse privacy outcome than the legislation was designed to prevent.”

Sanjeev Malhotra, chief information security officer at TSG, emphasised the security risk: “People engaging with unvetted VPNs are potentially opening themselves up to serious risks, including malware infections, phishing attempts and personal data harvesting. At the end of the day, it’s still going through a server somewhere, and most people don’t stop to think about who’s operating it, where that data is going or what safeguards are actually in place. In some cases, people may be trading one privacy concern for another without realising it.”

A Lack of Measurable Outcomes? 

But is the ban on children accessing adult sites actually working? Some experts argue that there’s no hard evidence to back it up.

Elle Todd, Partner and Co-chair of the Entertainment & Media Industry Group at Reed Smith LLP, said:  “Ofcom’s recent age assurance report found that the proportion of children encountering harmful content online has not substantially improved despite widespread implementation efforts. The uncomfortable truth is that, based on this report, significant investment in compliance and technologies has not yet translated into measurable improvements in safety outcomes.”

Brian Higgins, Security Specialist at Comparitech, noted that, despite some non-compliance fines being handed out, there are still notable enforcement gaps: “Stats from Ofcom summarising their activities during the first twelve months of the Online Safety Act include the launch of 30 investigations, and fines for statutory violations in the region of £4 million GBP. Unfortunately they have also identified ‘enforcement gaps’ where AI and algorithmic content are concerned.”

“This item, in particular, could be a precursor to more widespread enforcement action in the future but a brief investigation into the facts reveals that their twelve-month fine collection figure only stands at £55,000. Couple that with their fairly embarrassing skirmish with the American platform 4chan, where their interjurisdictional service of a £520,000 financial penalty notice was rather infamous met with a picture of a hamster and a heavy dose of internet ridicule and it becomes rather obvious that they aren’t performing particularly well.”

Examining Data Storage and Verification System Security

Boris Cipot, principal security engineer, Black Duck, argues that we should be looking beyond whether checks are working and to whether the software behind the systems doing those checks is actually secure: “For many organisations, the focus has been on whether age checks are working. But an equally important question is whether the software behind those systems is secure and properly maintained. If a vulnerability, misconfiguration or compromised third-party component allows age checks to be bypassed, then this is not just a cybersecurity problem anymore but can quickly become a regulatory one as well.”

Sarah Bone, Co-Founder of YEO Messaging, notes the growing number of specialist identity providers: “The biggest unintended consequence has been a shift in where trust actually sits. Before the Online Safety Act, platforms largely carried the responsibility for verifying users themselves. Now we’ve got a growing ecosystem of specialist identity providers, each holding highly sensitive personal information. That’s strengthened online safety, but it’s also concentrated trust into fewer organisations, which makes them increasingly attractive targets for attackers.”

So what should age verification providers be doing?

Martin Wegrostek, Cyber Security Portfolio Manager at cybersecurity specialist OryxAlign, said: “Businesses should work on the assumption that breaches are a matter of when, not if. The question is whether providers have built their services with security and privacy by design. That means collecting the minimum amount of information needed to verify age, encrypting data both in transit and at rest, enforcing strong access controls, continuously monitoring for suspicious activity and having a well-rehearsed incident response plan. Organisations relying on third-party age-assurance services should also carry out regular security assessments and review the resilience of their supply chain, rather than assuming a compliant provider is automatically a secure one.”

On Trust and Risk

The conversation should also focus on human risk, said Tim Ward, CEO and co-founder, Redflags: “Content moderators, trust and safety teams, and customer support staff at in-scope platforms are, for the first time, routinely processing government ID documents, facial scans, and other highly sensitive data belonging to minors as part of their everyday work. That’s a substantial new category of human risk, from simple mishandling to targeted social engineering aimed at staff with access to this data, and it’s had almost no public discussion compared to the technical side of compliance.”

“Organisations that have spent the past year focused on the verification system itself should be asking whether the humans downstream of it have had the same level of scrutiny and support,” Ward noted. 

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The Forescout 2026 H1 Threat Review found that more than 37,000 vulnerabilities were published during the first six months of the year, representing a 51% increase year on year. More than half were classified as high or critical severity, while ransomware attack claims rose by 25% to 4,544 incidents, averaging 25 attacks every day.

The report, published by Forescout Research – Vedere Labs, analysed more than 37,000 vulnerabilities, over 1,000 tracked threat actors and thousands of cyberattacks observed between January and June 2026. Researchers found that rapid advances in AI, alongside growing geopolitical tensions, are increasing the pressure on security teams already struggling to prioritise risk.

Among the report‘s key findings, researchers discovered that nearly half of all additions to CISA’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalogue related to vulnerabilities published before 2026, reinforcing the continued risk posed by older, unpatched flaws. The number of active ransomware groups also increased to 103, while China, Russia and Iran collectively accounted for almost a third of tracked threat actors with significant activity during the reporting period.

The research also highlights the growing use of AI by threat actors to accelerate attacks, alongside increasingly sophisticated software supply chain compromises. At the same time, attackers continue to focus on network infrastructure, operational technology, IoT and IoMT devices, many of which receive less security oversight than traditional endpoints.

“AI is dramatically increasing the speed and scale of cyberattacks,” said Daniel dos Santos, VP of Research at Forescout.

“In observing attack patterns and threat actor activity, we can see that AI is helping threat actors discover and exploit vulnerabilities faster than security teams can realistically remediate them. At the same time, geopolitical conflicts are fuelling waves of opportunistic and state-aligned cyber activity, with organisations in critical infrastructure sectors increasingly at risk.”

He added that organisations need a better understanding of the assets connected to their networks so they can prioritise risk and contain threats before attackers can move laterally into critical systems.

The report also examines the evolution of Iranian cyber operations, noting that the distinction between state-sponsored actors, hacktivist groups and cybercriminal organisations is becoming increasingly blurred. Researchers found these groups are using a mix of espionage campaigns, ransomware and attacks targeting critical infrastructure and operational technology.

Barry Mainz, CEO of Forescout, said organisations must extend their focus beyond traditional endpoints to address unmanaged assets and connected devices.

“As attack surfaces continue to expand, security teams can no longer focus exclusively on traditional endpoints,” he said.

“Many organisations still have significant blind spots across unmanaged assets and IoT, OT, and IoMT devices. Threat actors understand this and are increasingly exploiting those gaps.”

The report recommends that organisations should continuously identify vulnerable assets, strengthen network segmentation, prioritise the highest-risk systems and accelerate response capabilities to reduce exposure across increasingly complex environments.

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Today (20 July 2026), Andy Burnham became Prime Minister of the UK, succeeding Sir Keir Starmer. While there is not yet a detailed ‘Burnham tech strategy’, pre-transition briefings and reports over recent weeks suggest a strong focus on AI, including plans for a dedicated AI Minister, the scrapping of the hotly debated digital ID programme, and the potential reorganisation of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), with its responsibilities redistributed across other government departments.

So, what does the cyber community hope Burnham will do in the realm of cybersecurity, AI and tech as Prime Minister? We asked the industry…    

Charlotte Wilson, Head of Enterprise at Check Point said: “Britain’s AI department is at the forefront of the country’s productivity strategy, playing a crucial role in how the technology will be developed and rolled out to drive wider economic growth and defence.”

“Incoming policymakers should take heed; artificial intelligence is the gorilla in the room and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Any suggestion of redeployment or downsizing could send the wrong signal to businesses and cyber criminals about how seriously we take the most transformational technology in living memory,” Wilson continued. 

Dray Agha, Senior Manager of Security Operations at Huntress, added: “Smart infrastructure beats a spending war, and fortunately the UK can’t outspend the US or China on AI models anyway, so the new Prime Minister must focus on where we can win: secure public datasets and targeted sovereign compute.”

“Safely unlocking NHS data while fortifying our energy grid will build real domestic leverage without compromising national security. With guaranteed access to US tech currently on ice, relying solely on Washington is no longer a viable security strategy. The UK must leverage our AI Security Institute to build a ‘middle-power’ tech coalition with NATO and Commonwealth allies, pooling resources to ensure collective cyber resilience.”

Additionally, Muhammad Yahya Patel, vCISO and Cybersecurity Advisor for EMEA at Huntress, noted: “The UK doesn’t need to win the frontier model race; it needs to be a serious, trustworthy place to deploy AI at scale. That’s a more achievable and arguably more valuable position. The ally-pooling argument on sovereign compute and cloud interoperability is sensible from both an economic and security standpoint.”

“The UK’s convening credibility on this particularly through the AI Security Institute is a genuine asset that Burnham should be using. Unlocking health data for AI R&D is genuinely valuable but it’s only responsible if the security and governance infrastructure around that data is built first, not retrofitted after the damage is done. Right now the ambition is ahead of the security maturity.”

Jake Taylor, Head of Government NEMEA at Filigran, said:  “If the new government wants to bring more critical national infrastructure under public ownership, cybersecurity has to become part of that conversation from day one. National resilience isn’t just about protecting individual organisations anymore. It’s about ensuring energy providers, government, suppliers and operators can share intelligence, understand emerging threats and coordinate their response before disruption spreads.”

“The biggest challenge isn’t a lack of security tools. Most critical infrastructure organisations already have those. The challenge is breaking down the silos that still exist between organisations and turning threat intelligence into something that informs operational decisions, rather than simply generating more alerts. As the geopolitical environment becomes increasingly volatile and nation-state activity continues to rise, collaboration will be every bit as important as technology.”

Taylor continued, “the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill is an important step because it moves the conversation towards common standards and greater coordination. If public ownership expands, cybersecurity needs to evolve from a collection of individual security programmes into a genuinely national capability, where intelligence sharing and continuous threat exposure management become fundamental to protecting essential services.” 

Andy Burnham’s long-term plans for the UK’s cyber, AI and technology sectors are still taking shape. The Guru team will be keeping a close eye on developments as his new government begins to set out its agenda.

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The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has unveiled plans for Cyber Shield, an ambitious initiative that aims to use agentic artificial intelligence to transform the nation’s cyber defenses and counter increasingly sophisticated cyber threats. The proposal forms part of a broader effort by the NCSC and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) to build a national scale, AI powered cyber defense capability that can detect, analyze, and eventually respond to attacks at machine speed.

According to the NCSC, Cyber Shield will initially focus on using AI to identify vulnerabilities and detect threats before progressing toward automated mitigation, coordinated threat intelligence sharing, and national level response capabilities. The initiative is intended to help defenders keep pace with attackers who are increasingly using artificial intelligence to accelerate reconnaissance, vulnerability discovery, and exploitation.

AI changes the cyber defense equation

Rik Ferguson, Vice President of Security Intelligence at Forescout, believes the proposal reflects the reality of today’s threat landscape.

“The NCSC’s Cyber Shield proposal feels like a logical and necessary step, especially if we view it through the lens of ‘Assume Autonomy,'” Ferguson said.

“The core assumption should no longer be that autonomous cyberattacks are a distant or speculative problem. We should assume that adversaries will increasingly use AI agents to automate reconnaissance, vulnerability discovery, exploit development, credential attacks, lateral movement, and adaptation once inside an environment.”

Ferguson said security teams operating at human speed will struggle to defend against machine speed attacks, particularly across critical infrastructure, healthcare, and government networks.

“A national scale AI cyber shield is therefore not just about adding AI to existing security workflows. It is about building defensive systems that can detect, prioritize, and help contain threats at the same tempo at which AI enabled attackers can operate.”

However, he cautioned that autonomy must be implemented carefully.

“The opportunity is strongest where AI can improve visibility, correlation, triage, exposure management, and early intervention. The risk comes when automated systems act without sufficient context, governance, or operational guardrails.”

He added that AI alone cannot solve long-standing cybersecurity problems.

“AI can help defenders move faster, but it cannot compensate for poor asset visibility, weak segmentation, unpatched systems, or unclear ownership of cyber risk.”

Governance will be critical

Shane Barney, Chief Information Security Officer at Keeper Security, also welcomed the initiative but warned that the success of Cyber Shield will depend on strong governance.

“Cyber Shield is the right instinct, and it is arriving at a genuinely dangerous moment for both organizations and the wider public,” Barney said.

“Attackers are already using AI to compress reconnaissance and exploitation into minutes, and the NCSC is correct that human speed defense cannot keep pace with machine speed offense.”

Barney argued that many successful cyberattacks still rely on basic security weaknesses.

“Most successful attacks still exploit basic, preventable failures, including outdated systems, unpatched software, and weak access controls. No amount of agentic AI changes that equation if the underlying identity and access foundations are not solid.”

He also highlighted a potential new risk created by AI itself.

“Red and blue AI agents are themselves privileged non-human identities, granted authority to scan networks, share intelligence, and eventually remediate vulnerabilities autonomously.”

According to Barney, those AI agents will require the same security controls as privileged human administrators, including least privilege access, just in time provisioning, and complete visibility into their activity.

“An AI agent with unmanaged privileged access is not a defense. It is the next incident.”

A collaborative approach

The NCSC said Cyber Shield will rely on close collaboration between government, industry, academia, and critical infrastructure operators. Trusted information sharing and explainable AI will be central to the initiative as it evolves from vulnerability discovery toward coordinated national cyber defense.

While the idea of a Cyber Shield remains a long-term vision, security leaders broadly agree that AI will play an increasingly important role in defending against AI-driven cyberattacks. The challenge now will be ensuring those capabilities are introduced with the governance, transparency, and foundational security controls needed to make them effective.

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Synthetic media has moved from technical curiosity to mainstream threat in just a few years, with deepfakes now cheap enough to produce that a free app and a handful of seconds of scraped audio can generate convincing fakes. The consequences stretch well beyond political misinformation: corporate fraud running into tens of millions of dollars, biometric security checks being bypassed, and a largely under-reported epidemic of non-consensual intimate imagery. As regulation in the EU, UK and US begins to catch up with the scale of the problem, the question facing businesses and platforms alike is no longer whether synthetic media is a risk, but how quickly they can build the means to verify what they see and hear. 

We sat down with Ruth Azar-Knupffer, Co-founder of VerifyLabs.AI, to unpack the detection arms race, the regulatory landscape now taking shape, and why she believes treating verification as infrastructure rather than a single party’s responsibility is the only way organisations will stay ahead of the threat. 

How widespread is synthetic media on social platforms today, and how has that changed in the last two or three years?  

“It has gone from curiosity to a feature of the landscape. The most widely cited figures put roughly 500,000 deepfakes shared across social platforms in 2023, with estimates of around 8 million by the end of 2025 — close to 900% growth a year. Voice is the part most people underestimate: Pindrop recorded voice deepfakes rising nearly 700% year-on-year in 2024.  

The change over two or three years is not really about volume, though. It is about access and quality. Three years ago a convincing fake took skill, time and a decent machine. Today it takes a free app and a few seconds of someone’s voice scraped off a podcast or an earnings call. And the output now clears the bar where ordinary viewers can no longer tell. Studies consistently find that most people can no longer reliably distinguish a high-quality fake video from a real one. We have crossed from ‘spot the fake’ into ‘assume nothing.’” 

As deepfake generation gets more sophisticated, how do verification technologies keep pace? Is it a winnable race?  

“It is winnable, but not in the way people want it to be. There is no finish line where deepfakes are ‘solved.’ It is an arms race in the same sense that anti-virus or spam filtering is — you win by staying operationally ahead, not by ending the contest.  

The mistake is to chase artefacts alone — the tell-tale blink, the warped ear, the audio glitch. Those tells close fast with every new model. The more durable approach is layered: detection models that look at signals humans cannot, combined with provenance — knowing where a piece of content came from and whether it has been altered since capture. Standards like C2PA and the content-labelling rules now coming through regulation push verification upstream, to the point of creation. Detection at the point of consumption will always matter, but if the only defence is catching fakes after they spread, you are permanently a step behind”. 

Beyond political misinformation, what are the most damaging real-world consequences that people might not be thinking about?  

“Politics get the headlines; the money and the harm are elsewhere.  

The corporate one is fraud. The Arup case — a finance employee in Hong Kong wired roughly $25.6 million after a video call in which every “colleague,” including the CFO, was synthetic — is the example everyone cites, and it will not hold the record for long. Deloitte projects generative-AI-enabled fraud in the US alone rising from around $12 billion in 2023 to $40 billion by 2027.  

Then there is an identity. Deepfakes are now used to defeat the biometric checks banks rely on; bypass attempts on liveness detection have jumped more than 700%.  

But the consequence people think about least is the most personal. A vast and under-reported category of malicious deepfakes is non-consensual intimate imagery, which overwhelmingly targets women and girls. The recent investigations into “nudify” tools are a glimpse of the scale. That is the human cost that rarely makes cybersecurity panel”. 

Where does the burden of detection fall — platforms, users, or third-party verifiers? Who should own this problem? 

“No single party can own it, and pretending otherwise is how it falls through the cracks.  

Platforms have to carry detection and provenance at scale, because that is where content travels and they are the only ones with the reach. Independent verifiers — and yes, that includes us — exist because nobody should be asked to mark their own homework; you need assessment that is auditable and not conflicted by who owns the content. And users need tools simple enough to actually use, plus the basic literacy to know the question is worth asking.  

Think of it as infrastructure rather than ownership. Nobody ‘owns’ road safety — you have manufacturers, regulators, and drivers, each responsible for a layer. Verification is the same. The failure mode is everyone assuming someone else has it covered”. 

Even without a specific viral incident, does the existence of the technology erode trust in authentic content?  

“Yes, and this is the part that worries me most. You do not need a single famous fake to do the damage. Once people know convincing fakes are possible, the ground shifts under everything.  

The sharper danger is the inverse of what most people picture. It is not only that false things get believed — it is that true things get dismissed. Real footage of genuine wrongdoing can now be waved away with ‘that’s a deepfake.’ Researchers call it the liar’s dividend, and it is corrosive precisely because it requires no technical skill at all. The World Economic Forum has ranked AI-amplified misinformation among the top global risks for good reason: when audio and video stop being trusted by default, a shared basis for facts starts to dissolve”. 

In a breaking-news environment where content spreads in minutes, how do you balance verification speed with the accuracy to make a call with confidence?  

“You stop pretending the answer is binary. The honest output of any serious system is a probability with evidence attached, not a stamp that says ‘fake’ or ‘real.’ 

In a fast-moving story we work in tiers. An initial automated assessment can return in seconds and is enough to flag something as warranting caution. A higher-confidence judgement — the kind you would attach your name to — takes longer and may involve human review. The skill is being explicit about which one you are giving and never letting speed inflate certainty.  

The cost of getting it wrong runs both ways. Miss a fake and it spreads; wrongly brand something authentic as synthetic and you have manufactured a different harm. In breaking news the responsible move is often a clearly labelled provisional read, openly updated, rather than a confident verdict you cannot yet support”.  

Is verification a tool for journalists and enterprises, or does it need to reach everyday users to move the needle?  

“Both, but the needle only really moves at consumer scale. Newsrooms and enterprises are the early, high-stakes adopters, and they should be. They are not where the volume of harm sits.  

Most people encounter synthetic media on a phone, in a feed, in a message from a relative — not in a verification suite. If checking authenticity is harder than sharing, sharing wins every time. That is why we built VerifyLabs to be API-first and to work across iOS, Android and the browser: the verification has to live where people already are, not in a specialist tool they will never open. A capability locked inside enterprise contracts protects institutions while leaving the public exposed. Closing that gap is the actual job”.  

What does the regulatory landscape look like, and are laws keeping up?  

“It is moving faster than people assume, though unevenly.  

The EU is setting the pace. Under the AI Act, Article 50 requires AI-generated or substantially manipulated content to be clearly disclosed and machine-detectable, with the relevant obligations landing in August 2026. Breaching those transparency duties carries fines of up to €15 million or 3% of global turnover; the headline €35 million or 7% figure people quote applies to the Act’s prohibited practices, not to synthetic-media labelling. A Code of Practice on transparency — including a proposed common ‘AI’ label for synthetic content — is being finalised alongside it.  

The UK has gone further than disclosure. Sharing non-consensual intimate deepfakes was already criminal under the Online Safety Act; since February 2026 it has also been a criminal offence to create one, or to ask someone else to, under the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025. Creation, not just distribution, now carries liability. In the US there is no single federal framework, but the Take It Down Act mandates 48-hour removal of non-consensual intimate imagery, the Defiance Act — which would give victims a federal civil right of action — has passed the Senate and is awaiting the House, and more than 45 states have their own laws.  

Are laws keeping up? On disclosure and on naming harms, increasingly yes. On enforcement, no. A duty to label synthetic content means little if neither the regulator nor the platform has a reliable way to tell what is synthetic in the first place. Rules without the means to detect and prove manipulation are obligations on paper. The legislation needs detection infrastructure underneath it, or it has no teeth”. 

What happens when legitimate content gets flagged as synthetic, and how do you think about the reputational risk of a false accusation?  

“This is the hardest problem in the field, and the one I judge our own seriousness by.  

A false positive and a false negative are not symmetric in their consequences. Miss a fake and you have failed to catch something; wrongly brand a real video as fabricated and you have actively defamed someone and handed every genuine bad actor a ready-made excuse. The second error can be more damaging than the first.  

So the discipline is to never issue a bare ‘fake’ verdict. We return a confidence assessment with the evidence behind it, set conservative thresholds, route uncertain cases to human review, and treat the right to challenge a result as part of the product, not an afterthought. Verification that cannot show its working, or that hides behind a binary label, does not deserve to be trusted — and we do not want it to be”. 

What does the threat landscape look like in five years, and what should organisations be preparing for now that most aren’t?  

“Three things are coming. Real-time, interactive deepfakes good enough to hold a live video call — the Arup attack, but on demand and at scale. Fully synthetic identities engineered to pass the KYC and biometric checks that gate finance and onboarding. And provenance becoming default infrastructure, with content signed at the point of capture, much as HTTPS quietly became standard for the web.  

What most organisations are not doing yet is treating this as an operational risk rather than an awareness topic. Concretely: build verification and provenance into the workflows that matter; mandate out-of-band confirmation for payments and sensitive instructions, so no transfer is ever authorised on the strength of a voice or a face alone; and run drills, not slideshows — a face your employee recognises asking for money behaves nothing like an awareness module.  

The uncomfortable truth is that business has always run on a simple assumption: if I can see and hear someone, I know it is them. Payments, approvals, instructions, decades of compliance — all of it rests on that. Synthetic media breaks the assumption, and not at some distant point on the horizon but in the incident reports being filed right now. The organisations that come through this are the ones that stop treating their own eyes and ears as proof, and build the means to verify in their place”. 

The post Q&A: Solving Synthetic Media Challenges Before All Trust is Lost appeared first on IT Security Guru.