Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Valentine’s Day runs on emotion. Surprise, urgency, curiosity, trust, love. For threat actors, that combination is hard to beat. Every year in mid-February, security teams see the same pattern. Phishing campaigns pick up. Brand impersonation increases. Fraud attempts follow close behind. It is not because attackers suddenly developed new techniques.

Modern cyberattacks rarely start where defenders are looking. Instead of targeting the enterprise head-on, attackers increasingly move through sprawling ecosystems of vendors, suppliers, and partners, exploiting trust relationships, weak controls, and delayed visibility.

Apologies for the nested parentheses. This isn’t a joke. The project really has gone through this many names already! Check out why in their Naming Journey.

Security governance was never meant to be this manual. Yet for most security and third-party risk teams, governance work still means reviewing documents line by line, mapping controls by hand, interpreting evidence subjectively, and repeating the same processes across internal teams, subsidiaries, and vendors. These activities are critical, but they’re also slow, inconsistent, and difficult to scale. At Bitsight, we believe cybersecurity governance should move at the speed of risk.

As we enter 2026, security and risk leaders are navigating a landscape that is both increasingly complex and strikingly familiar. At Bitsight, we have spent the last year listening to our customers, synthesizing insights from the field, and preparing for what lies ahead. In a recent webinar with my colleague Vanessa Jankowski, we explored the forces shaping cyber risk in the year to come.

A critical vulnerability (CVE-2025-40551) has been identified in SolarWinds Web Help Desk, a widely used IT service management platform deployed across enterprise and public sector environments to manage support tickets, assets, and internal workflows. Successful exploitation could allow an unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary commands on the underlying host system.

John, a Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) analyst, turns to look at his CISO. He seems a bit rattled. John responds, “Yeah. Huge story.” “Massive. The board is worried and wants to know if this puts us at risk. We’re secure, right?” John hesitates.“Let me get back to you on that.” The CISO walks away. John races to his desk.

When threat actors target your vendors, they’re not just looking to exploit a system for a single attack. They’re looking for every opportunity to scale up their operations. This means seeking ways to push their compromises as far downstream into the supply chain as they can go.

In our previous two posts, The ABC’s of Ishing and From Lure to Breach, we broke down the foundational tactics used by cybercriminals to deceive users and gain unauthorized access. This follow-up report expands on that foundation by exploring three evolving phishing threats that go beyond traditional email lures: clone phishing, deepfake phishing, and Captcha phishing.

Exactly twelve years from now, on January 19, 2038, at 03:14:08 UTC an unpredictable amount of computer systems will think they have been teleported in time more than 100 years, back to December 13, 1901.