Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

The Middle East, especially the UAE and Saudi Arabia, has become a priority market for cloud service providers (CSPs) as governments accelerate digital transformation across public and private sectors. The opportunity is real, but so is the complexity. In our work with clients and regulators, Coalfire has seen that market entry often hinges less on commercial certifications and more on meeting strict data sovereignty and cybersecurity requirements.

Last summer we found a critical vulnerability in Teleport, our first in a decade. It was assigned CVE-2025-49825. This vulnerability allowed Teleport SSH certificates, issued to users of a cluster, to sign other SSH certificates which would then be incorrectly accepted by Teleport as valid. Once you can sign your own certificates, you can escalate privileges and bypass authentication controls. This is why we classified it as a critical vulnerability.

Payment and banking infrastructure continues to grow. Bare-metal servers and mainframes now sit alongside Kubernetes clusters, microservice architectures, and CI/CD pipelines running across multiple clouds and on-prem data centers. Every new environment adds its own accounts, tokens, and access paths to manage. But because this infrastructure powers live transactions, there is no room for downtime or disruptions.

Most organizations start with a VPN when they need to give employees access to internal web applications. The VPN places the user on the internal network, and from there, they can reach the app. This approach works when the user base is small and the number of internal apps is limited. But as teams grow, compliance requirements increase, and the mix of technical and non-technical users increases, a VPN’s network-level connectivity introduces new operational and security challenges.

What's scarier than an engineer with prod access? An agent with the same access that never sleeps, never asks, and runs a thousand sessions while you're at lunch. Last year we solved the problem of visibility in the Identity Chain, the concept is that identities are fragmented and it’s hard to get a view from Identity Providers to Infrastructure. Within a year, two things have changed. First, teams are using LLMs & Tools to perform actions on their behalf - fully delegating work to AI Agents.

Fleets of robots, drones, EV chargers, and sensors now run K3s or MicroK8s on the device itself, bringing container orchestration to hardware deployed in warehouses, cell towers, and customer sites around the world. Engineers need kubectl to debug and manage containerized workloads on those devices in the field. But because each cluster requires a kubeconfig file, and every kubeconfig file is a shared static credential, risk grows with each new device added to the fleet.