Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Top tips is a weekly column where we highlight what's happening in the tech world and list practical ways to navigate these developments. This week, we're looking at an everyday cybersecurity concern that often goes unnoticed: the amount of access apps have to our data and devices. We install apps to make life easier. A navigation app needs our location, a messaging app needs access to contacts, and a video-conferencing app may need the microphone and camera.

Copilots and assistants shipped into apps you own, agents reaching in through MCP servers and OAuth tool grants, and the service accounts and tokens they all run as. Almost none of it went through a review. This Reco + Seemplicity integration closes the gap between finding an exposed agent and fixing it. Reco discovers every agent operating across your apps, what data it reaches, and what actions it takes.

AI coding agents produce authorization logic that compiles, passes review, and enforces the wrong policy. Broken access control ranks first in the OWASP Top 10:2025, where 100% of applications tested showed some form of it, across 1,839,701 recorded occurrences, the highest count of any category on the list. One part of that category is also the part that pattern-based scanning was never built to reach.

Here's a test you can run in about five minutes. Pull up a privileged account in your directory, one that was used in a session yesterday. Is the account still there? Does it still hold the same privileged group memberships it had yesterday? I'd bet good money the answer to both is yes. That's not a criticism of your PAM tool. It's what traditional credential rotation was built to do, and more importantly, what it was never designed to do.

HIPAA compliance requires healthcare providers and their business associates to safeguard protected health information (PHI) through privacy and security rules, risk assessments, and breach notifications. Covered entities must implement administrative, technical, and physical safeguards, including access controls, encryption, auditing, and workforce training. Noncompliance can result in steep fines and reputational damage, making strong data governance and adherence to NIST-aligned safeguards essential.

Cybersecurity research, threat intel, and novel findings produce no shortage of information. Every day brings new vulnerabilities, malware campaigns, proof-of-concept exploits, threat reports, headlines, and predictions about what comes next. But what has proven difficult is sorting through the noise to determine what's worth following. That's a big part of my role as Manager of the SpiderLabs Communications team at LevelBlue.

A critical remote code execution vulnerability was disclosed in Next.js on September 22, 2026, and an out-of-band security update was released to fix it. CVE-2026-94545 is a remote code execution vulnerability in next/og, the feature Next.js applications use to generate images on demand. The GitHub advisory rates it 9.5 on CVSS v4.0. An unauthenticated attacker can reach it over the network, and the root cause is an upstream SVG-escaping vulnerability that applications inherit without realizing it.

WordPress patched CVE-2026-87902 on September 22, 2026. Attackers were exploiting it the same day. Within hours of disclosure, attackers progressed from reconnaissance to active exploitation attempts, including attempts to write malicious PHP files to disk. The vulnerability is critical, with a CVSS v4.0 score of 9.2. Unauthenticated attackers can exploit it remotely. A public scanning template is already in circulation, and CISA has added the vulnerability to its KEV catalog.

Let’s catch up on the more interesting vulnerability disclosures and cyber security news gathered from articles across the web this week. This is what we have been reading about on our coffee break! Lucky find for him then!