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Why The Vulnerability Backlog Is About To Get Worse

Recorded Future analysis says AI-driven vulnerability discovery and faster weaponization will grow the triage backlog while shrinking defenders' response windows.

Disclosed vulnerabilities rose from roughly 21,000 in 2021 to nearly 50,000 in 2025, while Recorded Future assessed only 446 as actively exploited in 2025. VulnCheck found nearly 29% of 2025 KEV entries were exploited on or before CVE publication. The authors argue AI-assisted discovery and automated exploit development will multiply credible reports, cut disclosure-to-exploit time toward minutes, and force re-evaluation of medium-severity flaws as exploit-chain components.

Recorded Future · 21d agoResearch

What Zero-Day Response Should Be in the Post-Mythos Era

Picus Security outlines a zero-day response playbook where defenders simulate exploit technique chains before public PoCs exist.

The article uses PaperCut NG/MF's August incident — exploitation in the wild before any patch, with the first emergency fix bypassed the same day and a third landing September 1 — as the template for AI-accelerated vulnerability response. It walks through a hypothetical CVE-2026-1001 (explicitly made up) to argue defenders should map CVEs to ATT&CK technique chains and simulate them against NGFW, WAF, EDR, endpoint hardening, and SIEM controls within minutes of disclosure. It notes disclosure-to-exploitation time has fallen from 21.5 days to hours.

BleepingComputer · 1d agoResearch in the wildCVE-2026-1001

Metasploit Wrap Up: This One Goes to Sixteen!

Metasploit adds 16 modules including 10 exploits, five covering CISA KEV vulnerabilities in Cisco, SonicWall, PaperCut, JetBrains and Langflow.

Rapid7's weekly Metasploit update ships 16 new modules, 10 of them exploit modules, with five targeting CISA KEV entries. New exploits cover Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center auth bypass (CVE-2026-20079), a SonicWall SMA1000 SSRF-to-root RCE chain (CVE-2026-83548/CVE-2026-83549), JetBrains TeamCity deserialization RCE (CVE-2026-63077), PaperCut NG/MF chain (CVE-2026-81578/CVE-2026-82078), and Langflow authenticated RCE (CVE-2026-19295). The SonicWall and PaperCut chains were reported as actively exploited zero-days, and a new ESC8 relay module exploits CVE-2026-20929 against AD CS Web Enrollment.

Rapid7 Blog · 5d agoTools in the wildCVE-2025-66516CVE-2025-54988CVE-2026-20929+8 CVEs1

Weekly Cybersecurity Newsletter – Top 50 Biggest Cybersecurity Stories of the Week

GBHackers weekly digest rounds up 50 stories including Microsoft's 973-CVE patch drop, exploited Cisco FMC flaws, and Claude agent attacks.

GBHackers' September 7-12, 2026 newsletter summarizes the 50 biggest cybersecurity stories of the week. Highlights include Microsoft patching a record 973 CVEs with two exploited zero-days, active exploitation of Cisco FMC, Check Point VPN and Ivanti flaws, China-linked crews chaining Chrome and Windows zero-days, AI agents mass-exploiting PaperCut to compromise 440 servers, and the emergence of Panzer cross-platform ransomware. It also covers Anthropic and OpenAI agentic AI incidents and CrowdStrike's SafeMind launch.

GBHackers · 1d agoIndustry in the wild

AI Changed the Exposure Problem. Validation Needs to Change With It.

Picus Security argues vulnerability validation must combine exploitability, control validation, and agentic pentesting as AI accelerates disclosure volume.

Picus Security reports 35,853 CVEs were published in H1 2026, roughly 49% more than the prior year, while only 495 were catalogued as exploited in the wild and 116 were attacked on disclosure day. The vendor argues CVSS-based triage is inadequate and promotes combining exploitability validation, security control validation, and agentic pentesting into one program. The post also cites Anthropic data showing Mythos-class models surfaced 26,153 open-source vulnerability candidates with only 421 patched upstream, and promotes Picus's Validation Summit '26 on October 14-15.

The Hacker News · 2d agoIndustry

$536 and 8 Hours: AI Learns to Attack a Different PLC

Forescout used Claude to port a WAGO PLC exploit for $536 in 8 hours, and an AI-generated payload later permanently bricked the test device.

Forescout researchers used Claude Code with Ghidra, terminal access, and physical hardware to port CVE-2021-31886, a pre-authentication buffer overflow in the Nucleus FTP server, from a WAGO 750-852 PLC to the WAGO 750-831 without source code or debugger access. The final RCE development stage cost $535.74 in API fees over an 8-hour, 32-minute session (2.6k input and 1.3M output tokens) and required heavy researcher guidance. Claude produced working ICMP and UDP beacon exploits in 12 minutes after identifying that normal FTP command completion was overwriting its shellcode, fixed by omitting the CRLF terminator. A follow-up session extending the payloads toward a C2 implant wrote to flash-mapped memory and permanently bricked the PLC, underscoring the risks of autonomous agents operating against physical infrastructure.

Security Affairs · 14d agoResearchCVE-2021-318861

Linux Detection Engineering - Local Privilege Escalation

Elastic details a layered detection framework for Linux local privilege escalation, covering 2026's copy-on-write bug wave and LLM-assisted discovery.

Elastic Security Labs describes how most Linux local privilege escalations share a common host flow — an unprivileged process launched from a writable path becoming root — and proposes layered detections combining general outcome-based rules with per-technique rules in Elastic Defend and Auditd. It tracks 13 recent LPE disclosures, seven of which share a copy-on-write/zero-copy bug class, including Copy Fail, DirtyFrag, Fragnesia, DirtyDecrypt, DirtyClone, pedit COW, and RefluXFS. Qualys attributes RefluXFS to an LLM-assisted research effort with Anthropic using Claude Mythos Preview, and another bug is credited to an LLM-assisted workflow. Detection and endpoint rules are published in Elastic's detection-rules and protections-artifacts repositories.

Elastic Security Labs · 5d agoResearch

Top 10 Best Patch Management Software in 2026

Roundup ranks 2026 patch management software, favoring Automox, Action1's free tier and Tanium, and warns buyers to vet patching platform security.

This buyer's guide ranks ten patch management tools for 2026, placing Automox first for cloud-native patching, Action1 for a genuinely free small-estate tier and Tanium for patching hundreds of thousands of endpoints. It contextualizes the category with the 2021 Kaseya VSA ransomware supply-chain incident and the 2020 SolarWinds Orion compromise, arguing the security of the patching platform itself must be part of evaluation. It also notes Ivanti products have repeatedly appeared in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog.

Cyber Security News · 7d agoIndustry

Recorded Future Announces Automated Signature Creation, Accelerating Vulnerability Prioritization

Recorded Future launched Automated Signature Creation in ASI, turning new CVEs into deployable detection signatures in as little as 31 minutes.

Recorded Future announced Automated Signature Creation within its Attack Surface Intelligence product, autonomously generating production-ready detection signatures for newly surfaced vulnerabilities in as little as 31 minutes. The platform correlates an organization's internet-facing assets, live threat activity (malware, ransomware, actor intent), and vulnerability intelligence to prioritize which CVEs warrant detection. The company reports a tenfold increase in in-platform signatures and maps the capability to the four prioritization criteria in CISA's June 2026 directive on risk-based vulnerability mitigation.

Recorded Future · 12d agoToolsCVE-2025-0994

Security Affairs newsletter Round 594 by Pierluigi Paganini – INTERNATIONAL EDITION

Weekly Security Affairs newsletter aggregates top stories including Cisco FMC exploitation, Qilin ransomware, Chrome zero-days, and Berlin leak.

Pierluigi Paganini's Security Affairs newsletter Round 594 (International Edition) rounds up the week's security headlines. Topics include attackers exploiting a critical Cisco FMC flaw to deploy Qilin ransomware, SonicWall mass exploitation linked to a UK council attack, multiple CISA KEV additions, Chrome zero-days used by four nation-state actors, a $320 million Liquid Network theft, and a Berlin ransomware data leak. It also covers AI security items such as agent sandbox failures and distillation campaigns by Chinese AI firms.

Security Affairs · 3d agoIndustry in the wildCVE-2026-42016CVE-2026-42018CVE-2026-82329+1 CVEs1

Severity Is Not a Strategy: What CISA BOD 26-04 Means for the Future of Federal Software Security

CISA's BOD 26-04 replaces severity-based federal patching with risk-based remediation deadlines of 3, 14, or 60 days.

CISA's Binding Operational Directive 26-04, released June 10, 2026, replaces BOD 19-02 and BOD 22-01 for Federal Civilian Executive Branch agencies and shifts remediation prioritization from CVSS scores to risk context. Agencies assess four factors: public exposure, KEV listing, exploit automatability, and whether exploitation grants partial or total asset control, resulting in 3-, 14-, or 60-day remediation windows or next-upgrade fixes. In CISA's first review at a large civilian agency, only 1% of vulnerabilities required three-day remediation while over 60% could wait for future system upgrades. The directive also requires forensic analysis when exploitation is suspected, and Checkmarx argues the same risk-based logic must extend upstream into software development and SBOM-driven exposure management.

Checkmarx · 7d agoPolicy & legal

VEX-Bench: Benchmarking LLM Agents for Assessing Exploitability of Software Supply Chain Vulnerabilities

Introduces VEX-Bench, 75 expert-labeled real-world cases testing whether LLM agents can assess supply chain vulnerability exploitability; frontier models reach about 80% F1.

VEX-Bench is the first benchmark evaluating LLM agents on assessing whether upstream dependency vulnerabilities are exploitable in downstream projects, with 75 real-world expert-labeled cases across Python, Java, and Go mined from GitHub. Nine models across three agent harnesses were evaluated; GPT-5.5 and Claude Opus 4.6 reach approximately 80% F1 on binary vulnerability-status classification, but only GPT-5.5 surpasses 70% macro-F1 on fine-grained justification classification. The gap highlights the difficulty of moving beyond binary exploitability calls to explaining exploitability reasons, unlike prior benchmarks targeting zero-day settings.

arXiv cs.CR · 8d agoResearch1

Why federal cyber defense demands an offense-driven mindset

Opinion piece argues federal agencies should prioritize exploitability and autonomous penetration testing over static CVSS-based patching, citing CISA's BOD 26-04 and NSA's CAPT program.

The author argues that static CVSS-driven patching leaves federal agencies exposed because vulnerable does not equal exploitable, and adversaries chain misconfigurations and stolen credentials instead of burning zero-days. The piece cites CISA's BOD 26-04 and the NSA's Continuous Autonomous Penetration Testing (CAPT) program, which logged 28,282 completed pentests across 822 Defense Industrial Base organizations and closed 71% of critical findings within 30 days. It recommends defining risk by exploitability and mission impact and augmenting human pentesting with autonomous validation and verification.

CyberScoop · 8d agoIndustry

AI AppSec tools agree on just 5% of security findings

Contrast Security report finds 42 confirmed exploit attempts per application monthly and three AI scanners agreeing on only 5% of findings.

Contrast Security's AppSec Overflow 2026 report, drawing on telemetry from hundreds of thousands of production applications and APIs, found adversaries touch the average application every four minutes with 42 confirmed viable exploit attempts per application monthly, led by untrusted deserialization, path traversal, and method tampering. Legacy flaws Log4Shell and Spring4Shell remain widespread, mean time to exploit fell from over two years in 2018 to under three weeks for most 2025 exploited vulnerabilities, and average critical fix time is 92 days. Three AI scanners set on the same codebase agreed on only 5% of findings, and triaging a 2-million-line codebase scan cost roughly $128,000 versus $315 in API charges. Among exploited CVEs in the dataset, 82% of KEV-listed entries carried EPSS scores of 90% or higher, while CVE-2006-1547 and CVE-2023-38180 were confirmed exploited despite EPSS scores under 25%.

Help Net Security · 16d agoResearch in the wildCVE-2006-1547CVE-2023-381801

AIs Compress Exploit Timeline

Schneier argues AI agents can find working exploits from mere rumors of a vulnerability, forcing changes to open source embargo practices.

Bruce Schneier reports that AI agents can locate and develop exploits for vulnerabilities given only a rumor or rough description of the issue, potentially before the public patch ships. He and commenters Simon Willison and Anil argue this discovery speed is incompatible with existing open source embargo practices for coordinated disclosure. The piece calls for redesigned security response processes to keep open source communities safe.

Schneier on Security · 6d agoAI safety & security

Countering misuse of AI: September 2026 / Anthropic

Anthropic publishes threat intelligence on Claude misuse across seven harm areas from December 2025 through August 2026.

Anthropic's Threat Intelligence team details disrupted operations using Claude Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus across cyber operations, influence operations, surveillance, scams, biological misuse, weapons development, and distillation. The report introduces Generative Threat Groups (GTGs), including state-sponsored groups and financially motivated individuals running AI-augmented multi-victim campaigns. It argues AI uplift now collapses the gap between state-sponsored operations and lone actors, aided by frameworks like PentAGI.

Lobsters · securityupdated · 8h agofirst · 5d agoAI safety & security 18 sources1

GPT-6 Astra Scores 100% on ExploitBench as OpenAI Blocks PoC Exploit Requests

OpenAI releases GPT-6 Astra, scoring 100% on ExploitBench, but restricts it to secure code review by blocking PoC exploit generation.

OpenAI officially unveiled GPT-6 Astra days after the model reached the "Critical" cybersecurity capability threshold under its Preparedness Framework. The model claims 100% on ExploitBench (versus 78.5% for GPT-5.6 Sol), 98% on FrontierMath Tier 4, and 99.9% on ARC-AGI-3, and demonstrated exploit development including on two zero-days disclosed between June and August 2026. The released version is limited to secure code review and patching and refuses proof-of-concept exploit requests, with less restrictive safeguards planned via OpenAI Daybreak. OpenAI also launched a $1 billion "Daybreak for Frontline Defenders" program for critical infrastructure sectors and a pilot with the US MS-ISAC for public sector and water system defenders.

The Hacker News · 12d agoModel release1

CTEM Is Not About the Stages. It’s About the Outcome.

Horizon3 argues CTEM programs should measure continuously reduced exposure rather than mapping technologies to Gartner's five stages.

Horizon3 contends that Continuous Threat Exposure Management should be judged by one outcome: continuously reducing attacker-reachable exposure, not by mapping a technology to each of Gartner's five stages. The post argues validation and verification, not visibility or closed tickets, provide evidence that attack paths are actually broken. It describes a Discover, Validate, Prioritize, Remediate, Verify, Repeat motion as its operationalization of CTEM.

Horizon3.ai · 14d agoIndustry

Week in review: Compromised Zimbra servers, previously patched Citrix NetScaler flaw exploited

Help Net Security's weekly digest highlights 274 compromised Zimbra servers, Gitea and Citrix NetScaler KEV additions, a PaperCut zero-day, and a suspected Iran-linked power plant attack.

The roundup reports at least 274 internet-facing Zimbra instances compromised via CVE-2026-73570, critical Gitea CVE-2026-60004 added to CISA's KEV catalog after exploitation began, and previously patched Citrix NetScaler flaw CVE-2026-8452 exploited in the wild. It also covers PaperCut NG/MF zero-day attacks, a suspected Iran-linked shutdown of a UK power plant, an FBI seizure of domains tied to a China-linked group that hit NASA, DOJ and the Senate, a cyberattack disrupting Boston Scientific, and the Manchester Airports Group breach. Additional items include Chameleon SEO poisoning phishing, Android car head unit proxy botnet malware, ReliaQuest social engineering by ShinyHunters, fake OpenAI Codex macOS malware, and AI-related workforce and supply chain interviews.

Launching managed CRA Article 14 reporting for open source maintainers

EU Cyber Resilience Act Article 14 reporting obligations begin, requiring 24-hour exploit and incident reports; Patchstack launches managed compliance for open-source maintainers.

Starting 11 September 2026, EU Cyber Resilience Act Article 14 requires manufacturers and open-source stewards to report actively exploited vulnerabilities and severe security incidents to ENISA via the EU Single Reporting Platform, with a 24-hour early warning, 72-hour notification, and final reports within 14 days or one month. Patchstack launched a free managed compliance service, acting as Assigned Representative for open-source maintainers and providing a managed VDP. The obligations apply retroactively to all products available on the European market. Patchstack, which has coordinated over 50% of known WordPress ecosystem vulnerabilities, already serves more than 1,000 open-source projects.

Patchstack · 5d agoPolicy & legal

What vulnerability prioritization looks like when KEV, EPSS, and CVSS disagree

Cohesity field CISO Joye Purser ranks KEV over EPSS over CVSS and urges 24-72 hour patching of exploited internet-facing systems.

In a Help Net Security interview, Cohesity Global Field CISO Joye Purser lays out a vulnerability prioritization framework that puts active exploitation (KEV) first, then exploit likelihood (EPSS), then technical severity (CVSS), adjusted for asset exposure, business criticality, and compensating controls. She endorses 24-72 hour remediation targets for critical exploited internet-facing vulnerabilities and describes the organizational tradeoffs and emergency procedures needed to hit them. The interview also covers honeypot failure modes when deception systems are over-connected or over-trusted, and budget guidance recommending OT/IT segmentation, phishing-resistant MFA, and tested recovery for a 400-person manufacturer.

Help Net Security · 16d agoIndustry

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.

Risky Business News · 26d agoResearch2

8,539 Reasons To Rethink How Vulnerabilities Get Patched

Rapid7 counted 8,539 high and critical CVEs in Q2 2026, double last year, with PoC availability up 76%.

Rapid7's Q2 2026 Threat Landscape Report tallied 8,539 high- and critical-severity vulnerability disclosures, twice the number recorded in Q2 2025, with newly disclosed flaws having public proof-of-concept code up 76% year over year. Of newly exploited vulnerabilities, 62% were network-exploitable and required neither authentication nor user interaction. Fake CAPTCHA and ClickFix social engineering accounted for 31.8% of incident response cases, the United States recorded 881 listed ransomware victims, and APT28 exploited SOHO routers for DNS hijacking while Iranian groups targeted US industrial control and OT systems.

Help Net Security · 27d agoResearch

CTEM Technology Evaluation Scorecard

Horizon3.ai releases a scorecard for evaluating CTEM technologies on demonstrated exploitability and remediation evidence.

Horizon3.ai published a downloadable CTEM Technology Evaluation Scorecard for assessing security technologies across the six-stage Continuous Threat Exposure Management operating model, from discovering exposure through verifying risk removal. The scorecard uses a 0-3 scale based on repeatable evidence demonstrated in the evaluator's environment rather than stated feature claims, with emphasis on validating exploitability and verifying remediation. It is vendor marketing material aimed at security leaders and evaluation teams.

Horizon3.ai · 4h agoIndustry 2 sources

ENISA: Frontier AI Is Changing the Speed of Cyberattacks. Europe Needs to Catch Up

ENISA warns frontier AI compresses attack lifecycles to minutes, with exploits possible within 15 minutes of disclosure and median 72-minute breach-to-exfiltration times.

ENISA's July 2026 paper 'ENISA's view on Cybersecurity in the Frontier AI Era' argues AI-assisted attackers may weaponize vulnerabilities within 15 minutes of disclosure and achieve initial-access-to-data-exfiltration in a median 72 minutes, creating a 'negative time-to-exploit' problem. The report cites one organisation whose CVE volume rose from roughly 80 in Q1 2025 to almost 500 in Q1 2026, then about 500 reports per day when frontier-AI tools were used. ENISA recommends machine-speed defence under 'Cybersecurity as Code', EPSS and VEX-based prioritisation, AI-assisted incident response with human oversight, and an assume-breached architecture.

Security Affairs · 2d agoAdvisory

Notes on gotchas while migrating 35kb preprompts from Opus to self-hosted Ollama

Opinion piece urges migrating 35KB preprompts from Anthropic/OpenAI to self-hosted Ollama, citing session privacy risks and safety filters blocking security research.

The author documents gotchas migrating 35KB preprompts from Claude Opus to self-hosted Ollama, motivated by fears that frontier providers train on user sessions, citing the OpenAI Navier-Stokes controversy. The piece argues inference providers cannot audit their own retention or training pipelines and that only self-hosted hardware offers verifiable privacy. It also criticizes frontier safety filters for refusing vulnerability research tasks and calls for models that support exploitability testing in CI/CD pipelines.

OpenAI Builds ‘Defense Factory’ as AI Agents Gain Ability to Chain Cyber Exploits

OpenAI unveiled a Defense Factory using AI agents to continuously discover, validate, patch, and verify vulnerabilities, warning the defender's window against agentic attackers is shrinking.

OpenAI describes a Defense Factory workflow where AI agents integrate source control, scanners, issue trackers, and secret stores to discover, reproduce, patch, and verify vulnerabilities under human oversight. The approach responds to agentic attackers that can retain knowledge across sessions and chain vulnerabilities into multi-stage attack paths faster than human triage can respond, which OpenAI calls a shrinking defender's window. During an internal security sprint involving 250+ people across 100+ service areas, agents closed 53 urgent or high-priority issues on day one, achieved 90.6% ownership-routing acceptance, cut 37% of findings as duplicates, and produced Codex-generated patches with a 0.53% rollback rate. Runtime validation reduced false positives to 0.81%, and each agent operates in isolated, reproducible environments with a control plane for policy and credentials.

GBHackersupdated · 6d agofirst · 6d agoAI safety & security 2 sources

Claude Mythos Executes End-to-End Intrusion From Initial Access to Full Domain Compromise

Anthropic's Claude Mythos Preview, its most cyber-capable model, autonomously completed an end-to-end enterprise intrusion simulation in restricted-access testing.

Anthropic's April 2026 system card describes Claude Mythos Preview as the first model to solve a private cyber range end to end and finish a corporate-network attack simulation an expert would need 10+ hours to complete. It scored 100% pass@1 on a 35-challenge Cybench subset and 0.83 on CyberGym versus 0.67 for Claude Opus 4.6. The model is limited to vetted partners under Project Glasswing; it failed an OT cyber range and could not find novel exploits in a fully patched sandbox.

GBHackers · 8d agoModel release1

We have a year to fix security everywhere

Blog post warns that cheap open-weight GLM 5.3-flash, once abliterated, could enable mass AI-driven vulnerability exploitation, urging industry-wide patching now.

An essay argues that Z.ai's open-weight GLM 5.3-flash—runnable locally on roughly $6k consumer hardware at 20-45 tokens/second—combined with 'abliterated' variants from groups like DeAlignAI that score 0% on HarmBench-320 puts dangerous hacking capability in nearly anyone's hands. GLM 5.3 scores 84.5% on CyberGym and 54.4% on ExploitBench, versus GPT-6 Astra's 100% and GPT-5.6 Sol's 78.5%, and the author cites evidence of frontier models exploiting real-world infrastructure. The author calls for using LLMs (Project Glasswing, Daybreak) to find and fix vulnerabilities industry-wide before adversaries weaponize cheap open models.

Frontier AI: Vulnerability Management's Systemic Revolution

Opinion: frontier AI like Anthropic's Mythos finds and exploits vulnerabilities at machine speed, forcing vulnerability and patch management programs to overhaul prioritization.

The author argues frontier AI models, exemplified by Anthropic's Mythos, can discover zero-days and chain exploits fast enough to overwhelm traditional vulnerability management. The piece recommends moving beyond CVSS, EPSS and KEV toward exposure management (CTEM) and automated, ring-based patch deployment. It also flags hard trade-offs between patching velocity and uptime requirements that organizations must resolve proactively.

The Hacker News · 22d agoIndustry

What is Proactive Threat Intelligence? | Recorded Future

Recorded Future publishes a vendor explainer on proactive threat intelligence, arguing external adversary context helps teams act before alerts fire.

Recorded Future published a conceptual blog on proactive threat intelligence, describing how external context on adversaries, infrastructure, stolen credentials, and vulnerability exploitation helps security teams act before intrusions surface internally. The piece outlines a four-step program: defining intelligence requirements, collecting external sources including OSINT and dark web, analyzing relevance to the organization, and driving security actions. Use cases include prioritizing CVEs by real-world exploitation activity and identifying external exposure before it becomes an internal incident.

Recorded Future · 2d agoIndustry

Your Critical Vulnerabilities Might Not Be Your Biggest Risk

Autonomous penetration testing advocates prioritize exploitable attack paths over raw vulnerability severity for continuous security validation.

The article argues that scanner severity scores lack context: a critical flaw behind strong segmentation may be low priority, while a medium flaw on internet-facing systems can provide a foothold chained toward sensitive data. It positions autonomous penetration testing and attack path validation as the execution layer for continuous security validation, replacing point-in-time assessments. The piece is vendor-authored thought leadership rather than incident or vulnerability news.

The Hacker News · 5d agoIndustry1

Patch Tuesday to Pentest Wednesday: How an Equipment Rental Company Is Turning Continuous Testing Into Continuous Exposure Management

An equipment rental company uses Horizon3 NodeZero for continuous exposure management, surfacing an SSH key exposure in eight hours versus annual pentesting.

The company moved from periodic penetration testing to continuous exposure management using the NodeZero Proactive Security Platform, feeding telemetry into a Splunk-based CTEM pipeline via Horizon3 APIs. NodeZero exposed SSH RSA key pairs from a PHP web server change about eight hours after introduction and found more findings in 12 hours than a third-party engagement found in roughly 30 days. An Active Directory password audit of 15,000 passwords found about 300 identical or similar compromised passwords, driving a banned-password list, 12-character minimums, service desk changes, and self-service reset rollout; users with similar passwords later dropped from 880 to 209. NodeZero also validated a suspected Cisco vulnerability as exploitable.

Horizon3.ai · 7d agoIndustry

What breach and attack simulation needs to become in the AI era

Picus argues calendar-driven BAS is obsolete as AI compresses exploit timelines, citing 338 million simulations showing 69% prevention and a flat 14% alert score.

In a vendor opinion piece, Picus Security contends that with over 130 CVEs disclosed daily, fewer than 0.5% patched upstream, and disclosure-to-weaponized-exploit timelines near 10 hours, scheduled breach and attack simulation no longer keeps pace. The Picus Blue Report 2026, aggregating 338 million production simulations, found average prevention effectiveness of 69%, 58% of attack actions captured in the SIEM, an unchanged 14% alert score, and detection rule failures driven by performance issues (49%) and silent log collection gaps (41%). Picus proposes agentic BAS as a closed loop—simulate, validate, fix, verify—with AI-built threats and humans at decision gates.

Help Net Security · 7d agoIndustry

Drowning in CVEs and thirsty for answers? Try CTEM

Sponsored Register piece argues traditional vulnerability management cannot scale with CVE volume and promotes Continuous Threat Exposure Management via Horizon3's NodeZero.

The sponsored article cites surging CVE volumes, CVSS triage shortcomings, NVD backlog, and AI-driven discovery accelerating an asymmetric vulnerability cycle. It outlines Gartner's five CTEM steps - scoping, discovery, prioritization, validation, and mobilization - and describes how Horizon3's NodeZero automated pentesting validates exploitable attack paths with evidence. Horizon3 says NodeZero uses a deterministic machine learning expert system rather than general LLMs, limiting generative AI to scoped tasks via AWS Bedrock.

The Register · Security · 13d agoIndustry

OpenAI Astra Brings Autonomous Zero

OpenAI says Astra is its first model rated Critical for cybersecurity risk, able to autonomously find zero-days and build full exploit chains without human guidance.

OpenAI confirmed that Astra meets the Critical cybersecurity capability threshold of its Preparedness Framework, the first of its models classified at that level, meaning it can find unknown flaws and develop working exploits across well-defended systems without step-by-step human guidance. Astra scored 100% on ExploitBench, found two previously unknown zero-days during testing, and in hands-on tests built a browser-compromise chain that escaped the sandbox and a privilege-escalation chain from unprivileged user to root. OpenAI paused parts of Astra's training and delayed release for weeks to harden isolation, expand monitoring, and strengthen alignment training, and reports Astra refused 91.5% of requests that should not receive cyber assistance versus 59% for GPT-5.6 Sol. Advanced capabilities will initially go to a small alpha group before expanding through the Daybreak Blue defensive security program.

Security Affairs · 14d agoAI safety & security

F5 speeds up virtual patching to counter AI-driven threats

F5 added anomaly detection and agentic threat intelligence to its AI-powered WAF, enabling virtual patch enforcement against exploits within minutes.

F5 announced enhancements to F5 WAF for Distributed Cloud, adding anomaly detection that builds per-application traffic baselines and agentic threat intelligence built on technology from the Fletch acquisition. The AI-powered WAF scores each request in real time with a neural network risk engine, and internal testing claims 98% threat detection efficacy with false positives reduced to 1%. Automated virtual patching via Distributed Cloud Web App Scanning extends to F5 WAF for BIG-IP, letting teams block actively exploited vulnerabilities at the request level in minutes; agentic features are rolling out over coming months.

Help Net Security · 14d agoTools

Threat Intelligence Alone Won't Close the Exploitation Gap

Pentera argues threat intelligence alone leaves a validation gap, promoting threat-led penetration testing that auto-tests leaked credentials against real attack surfaces.

A contributed Pentera piece argues that threat intelligence signals such as leaked credentials and vulnerability advisories often sit unactioned in queues because teams lack the offensive capacity to validate them against live environments. It promotes threat-led penetration testing (TLPT) and highlights Pentera's integration with Recorded Future, which triggers automated validation of leaked credentials against an organization's external attack surface. Wyndham Hotels & Resorts cybersecurity VP Joseph Gothelf is quoted supporting the convergence of threat intelligence and security validation.

The Hacker News · 10h agoIndustry

ENISA launched the CRA Single Reporting Platform for actively exploited vulnerabilities

ENISA launched the CRA Single Reporting Platform, making EU manufacturers report actively exploited vulnerabilities and severe incidents through one portal.

ENISA switched on the Cyber Resilience Act's Single Reporting Platform on 11 September 2026, the same day CRA reporting obligations became binding on manufacturers. Reports require an early warning within 24 hours, a fuller notification within 72 hours, and a final report within 14 days (one month after notification for severe incidents). Filings go through an EU Login account with MFA, are routed to a coordinating CSIRT chosen by the manufacturer, and no API is available in the first release. Open-source software stewards fall under the same obligations from 11 December 2027.

Help Net Security · 2d agoPolicy & legal

CISA Warns Hackers Exploit 17 Active Directory Techniques to Gain Control of Enterprise Networks

CISA and Five Eyes agencies issued joint guidance detailing 17 Active Directory attack techniques like Kerberoasting and DCSync, with hardening and detection advice.

CISA, the NSA, and cyber agencies from Australia, Canada, the UK, and New Zealand released joint guidance on September 15 covering 17 techniques attackers use to compromise Active Directory, including AD CS, Certificate Services, and Federation Services attacks. Named techniques include Kerberoasting, AS-REP roasting, password spraying, DCSync, NTDS.dit dumping, Golden and Silver Tickets, Golden SAML, and Skeleton Key. Recommendations include minimizing SPN accounts, enforcing AES encryption, disabling NTLM, account lockout thresholds of five attempts, phishing-resistant MFA, and Tier 0 prioritization. The guide also lists Windows event IDs 4769, 4768, 4625, 4771, and 2889 for detecting Kerberoasting and password spraying on domain controllers.

GBHackers · 15h agoAdvisory