Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Phishing is a form of social engineering that has evolved beyond simple lures into complex, multi-stage attacks exploiting trusted software, cloud identities and business platforms to bypass traditional security. Attackers leverage these campaigns to deliver trojans capable of stealing credentials and also establishing remote code execution, which might serve as a gateway for lateral movement.

A new report commissioned by IBM has found that one in four breaches is now AI-enabled, up 56% from last year. “Most AI-driven attacks reported in the study targeted critical infrastructure sectors (62%), with financial services and energy organizations experiencing the highest concentration, raising the risk of broader systemic disruption,” the report says. “Financial services breaches were reported to cost on average $6.3 million, while energy breaches cost on average $5.2 million.

For years, cybersecurity has had a familiar villain: the external attacker. The hacker breaking through the firewall, stealing credentials or exploiting an unpatched vulnerability. It is the scenario we have trained for, built defenses around and spent decades trying to prevent. But the next major breach may not begin with someone breaking into your environment at all, it may begin with an AI agent that already has access.

For years, ransomware was treated mostly as a malware problem. A user clicked something bad, files were encrypted, a ransom note appeared and everyone had a very bad week. That version still exists, of course, because cybercriminals love recycling old hits. But ransomware has changed significantly over the last year.

Vietnam has emerged as a cornerstone of the global digital economy, but this rapid digitization has come with a significant surge in sophisticated cyber threats. As the country transitions into a more mature technological landscape, the methods used to protect its most critical asset, the workforce, must also evolve. We are witnessing a pivotal move away from traditional, checkbox in-person training toward modern, automated and AI-driven digital resilience.

Researchers at Microsoft warn that phishing emails are still the top initial access vector, with more than 2 billion phishing threats detected each month during the second quarter of 2026.

Like many, the travel and tourism industry has undergone a radical digital transformation over the last few years. From AI-curated itineraries and biometric check-ins to interconnected booking engines and smart room tech, the modern “Digital Guest Journey” is more seamless than ever before. However, this rapid innovation has come at a steep price.

You cannot protect what you do not know exists. That statement has been true throughout the history of cybersecurity, but it has become even more important as organizations adopt new technologies and employees gain access to powerful AI tools. While many organizations focus on defending against external threats, they often overlook a growing problem much closer to home: devices, applications, and services operating within their environment that nobody knows about.

Threat actors are increasingly abusing trusted workflows to carry out attacks, according to a new report from Gen Digital. “ are not only sending malicious links or dropping malware,” the report says. “They are abusing context, sessions, workflows, brands, update systems, advertising platforms and delegated authority.

Attackers are using compromised hotel Wi-Fi routers to redirect users to Microsoft 365 phishing sites, according to researchers at ReliaQuest. The attacks were observed in multiple U.S. cities, as well as across India and Saudi Arabia. These types of DNS poisoning attacks can send users to phishing sites with very little evidence that something suspicious has taken place.

As a CISO advisor, I am observing a familiar pattern gaining a new, critical dimension. What we historically identified as "Shadow IT", the use of unapproved SaaS and tools, is rapidly evolving into "Shadow AI." Employees are increasingly leveraging AI bots for drafting, analysis, code generation and strategic decision-making.

An initial access broker for ransomware gangs is targeting organizations with voice phishing (vishing) attacks through Microsoft Teams, according to researchers at Zscaler’s ThreatLabz. “From January through June 2026, ThreatLabz examined a cluster of related campaigns that used Microsoft Teams vishing and Quick Assist for initial access, followed by PowerShell-based staging,” the researchers write.

AI agents offer unprecedented capabilities, speed, automation, deep context, and hyper-personalization, that will transform how we work. However, these same capabilities make AI agents significantly more dangerous than traditional software when hijacked by cybercriminals. You simply cannot rely on yesterday's risk management playbooks to handle today's AI-driven threats.

A survey from Trustmi found that most employees believe they’d be able to spot a social engineering attack, but those same employees still rely primarily on outdated guidance to spot red flags. Generative AI has given attackers the ability to craft extremely convincing, error-free phishing emails.

Sir Robert Peel defined good policing as "the absence of crime and disorder, and not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them." Gregory Francis of the Netherlands National Police quoted this at the INTERCOP conference held at INTERPOL headquarters, and this principle framed the entire event. Young people are increasingly drawn into cybercrime through the platforms where they already spend their time — Discord, Telegram and gaming servers.

Attackers are getting smarter. AI is making social engineering more convincing, more personalized, and harder to spot than ever before. Training the digital workforce, employees and agents, to recognize threats is necessary, but even the most security-conscious users can still make a mistake at the moment of risk. Workforce risk is a behavior change problem, and effective behavior change requires knowledge, pressure-tested application and real-time reinforcement all working together.

By Shikhar Dalela and Jeewan Singh Jalal The operators named the kit themselves. Buried inside compromised legitimate websites, the hidden staging directory is sometimes literally called “/.bulletproof”, and the PHP session cookie the kit sets on every visitor is named “bp_redir_sess.” The “bp” stands for bulletproof, which is an unusual degree of candor from a threat actor whose entire design philosophy is concealment.

This year National Social Engineering Day falls on Aug. 6. This day is designed to give us an opportunity to remind people that cybercriminals do not always need sophisticated malware, an undisclosed vulnerability or a dark room filled with glowing monitors, sometimes, all they need is a good story. Social engineering existed long before computers. Confidence tricks, impersonation, false authority and appeals to greed or fear have been used for centuries.

When we first introduced Agent Risk Manager, the response was clear: many security teams are actively looking for a way to secure the AI agents already running in their environment and how they can confidently adopt AI across their organization. AI agents now operate inside organizations with real access to email, files and business systems, often with little visibility for the teams responsible for securing them. That’s exactly the problem Agent Risk Manager was built to solve.

On World Wide Web Day (August 1), it’s worth celebrating what the web has made possible. It enabled remote work to function at scale, SaaS platforms to deliver capabilities in days instead of months and instantaneous collaboration through shared docs, chats, whiteboards and task tools that update in real time.