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16-31 August 2026 Cyber Attacks Timeline Infographic
Hackmageddon mapped 110 confirmed cyber incidents from August 16-31, 2026, with cybercrime driving 78.2% and malware the top technique.
The biweekly timeline aggregates 110 confirmed incidents across 64 countries, with 86 attributed to cybercrime, 16 to espionage and 4 to hacktivism. Exploitation of public-facing applications (T1190) was the leading initial access vector with 33 incidents, followed by spearphishing attachments with 13. The United States was the most targeted country with 38 incidents, and information and communication was the top sector with 29.
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Phishing Research Challenges Conventional Security Awareness Testing
Pistachio's 2.47 million phishing simulations across 1,200 organizations show click rates alone mislead, with 30% of IT staff clicking and leak rates more predictive.
Between June 2025 and May 2026, Pistachio sent 2.47 million simulated phishing attempts to more than 123,000 employees at over 1,200 organizations, analyzing click, credential-leak and reporting behavior. Click rates ranged from 26% in Design to 41% in Construction; 30% of tech development and IT staff clicked at least once, while financial services were the most resilient sector. The report argues that click rate alone creates a false sense of security and that combined click, leak and report trends are better resilience indicators.
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Recent Trends in Internet Threats: Common Industries Impersonated in Phishing Attacks, Web Skimmer Analysis and More
Unit 42 analyzed 67 million malicious URLs and domains in H2 2022, a 52% increase, highlighting phishing impersonation and web skimmer trends.
Unit 42 observed more than 67 million unique malicious URLs, domains and IPs between July and December 2022, a 52% increase over the first half of the year. Malicious JavaScript detections grew 99.3%, with over 4 million malicious JS samples hosted on 4.8 million URLs. Over 85% of hosting infrastructure was concentrated in eight countries, led by the United States, Brazil and China. The report also analyzes industries spoofed in phishing pages and includes a web skimmer case study on a Tranco top 1 million website.
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Risky Bulletin: Academics find source code overlaps between Geedge and China's Great Firewall
Academics linked Chinese vendor Geedge Networks' Tiangou Secure Gateway source code to one of the Great Firewall's three traffic filtering capabilities.
US researchers presenting at USENIX Security reconstructed Geedge Networks' Tiangou Secure Gateway firmware from over 100,000 leaked files, including Git repositories with commit history, and matched its filtering behavior to sections of China's Great Firewall. They found only 1 of 3 characterized DNS injectors matched Geedge code, noted the system relies on memory-unsafe C components and copied third-party code, and said its bugs could aid future circumvention tools. Geedge also exports censorship tools to Kazakhstan, Ethiopia, Pakistan, and Myanmar. The newsletter additionally rounds up multiple breaches.
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Risky Bulletin: Expired cards can be used for new transactions
Researchers show expired Visa contactless cards can be revived via NFC man-in-the-middle relay to run fraudulent transactions; roundup also covers major breaches.
University of Massachusetts Amherst researchers built an NFC man-in-the-middle rig that updates a card's expiration date in transit and relays the modified payment to POS terminals, reviving expired contactless cards; Visa terminals and the backends of all five banks studied failed to catch the manipulation. The same roundup reports Iranian hackers shut down a small UK power plant for four days, Lazarus breached South Korea's Presidential Office as part of a campaign exceeding 100 victims, and French telecom SFR suffered a breach affecting over 2.1 million customers.
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