Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

CVE-2026-45185, nicknamed Dead.Letter, is a use-after-free vulnerability in the BDAT message body parsing path of Exim, the open-source Mail Transfer Agent that runs a large share of the internet's email servers. The flaw lives in the GnuTLS-backed TLS path, where Exim can free its internal transfer buffer during a TLS shutdown while the SMTP state machine still holds a reference to it.

Globally, schools and universities now face over 4,300 cyberattacks per week on average, marking a 40% year-over-year increase and making the education sector a prime target for disruptive DDoS attacks. Most educational institutions operate with lean IT teams responsible for infrastructure, user support, and security. This resource constraint makes it difficult to withstand prolonged or application-layer DDoS attacks that can quickly disrupt learning platforms and administrative systems.

SMBs absorbed approximately 894 million attacks in 2025, a 71% year-over-year increase — and DDoS drove 85% of that volume, nearly three times the enterprise rate. API DDoS on SMB platforms surged 1,122% in a single year, according to the Indusface State of Application Security 2026 report. With most SMB security operations run by teams of fewer than five people managing both infrastructure and security simultaneously, cybercriminals increasingly view smaller businesses as soft targets.

We just got back from Atlassian Team '26 in Anaheim. Three days, thousands of attendees, and Atlassian's biggest push yet toward human-AI collaboration. The Founder Keynote set the tone, Rovo agents got smarter, and the Teamwork Collection took center stage. It was a packed, high-energy week. But the most interesting part of our three days wasn't on stage. It was at Booth.

AI is introducing a new class of threats that don’t look like traditional attacks and can’t be detected with conventional tools. The AI applications that organizations deploy in the cloud interact with large language models (LLMs) through prompts and responses. This prompt layer has emerged as a new attack surface, where risks like prompt injection and sensitive data leakage can go unnoticed.

The cybersecurity industry has long relied on a simple idea: find vulnerabilities, patch them, and measure success by how fast you close the gap. “Time-to-patch” became a badge of honor. That model no longer holds. The rise of Mythos-class Frontier AI Models introduces a different kind of threat. AI-driven, agentic attacks operate continuously, discover weaknesses automatically, and execute at a scale no human team can match.

MSPs want to grow. Yet the cost of growth keeps eating the margin that extra growth was supposed to deliver. Traditionally, more customers means more endpoints, more tools, more alerts, more billing entities, more compliance frameworks. Headcount scales with the work, but margins don't seem to keep up. That problem has a new shape now. AI is changing how every IT environment is built, run and protected and the speed at which they are done.

Managed service providers (MSPs) rely on Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud to protect customers, manage operations efficiently and automate routine work. However, billing, one of the most critical operational processes, often remains manual, fragmented and error prone. This is why Acronis has now introduced a free, automated billing module which is available to all Acronis partners natively within the platform.

A DDoS attack costs businesses an average of $6,130 per minute. Beyond service disruption, these attacks often create operational pressure that exposes login systems, APIs, and payment workflows to additional threats such as credential stuffing and account takeover attempts while security teams work to restore availability.