ZeroHour
DashboardNewsCVEsExploitsIncidentsAIBriefAnalyticsEntitiesWatchlistIOCsAsk the feedSourcesFeeds & APIKiosk mode

Search: “Windows Defender”

72 stories

Searchkeywordsmart Sortlatesthotimportancerelevance
DomainAllCyberAIWindow24h3d7d30dAllIn the wildImportant onlyShow duplicates
CategoryAllMalware 670Ransomware 631Vulnerability 554Exploit / PoC 261Threat actor 174Data breach 106Policy & legal 77Industry 67Phishing & fraud 60AI safety & security 23Advisory 20Research 18AI industry 9Tools 8
SeverityAllcritical 1128high 848medium 537low 98info 78

Threat Actors Don’t Want Better Attacks. They Want Repeatable Ones

Opinion piece argues attackers prioritize repeatable playbooks like ClickFix (47% of Microsoft-notified attacks) and living-off-the-land over novel techniques.

The column analyzes why commodity techniques scale: Microsoft observed ClickFix as the top initial access method at 47% of its notifications last year, while Bitdefender found 84% of 700,000 analyzed high-severity incidents involved binaries already present on machines. Verizon's DBIR shows vulnerability exploitation rising to 31% of initial access vectors, up from 20%, and ransomware leak-site rankings show Qilin (roughly 1,600 claimed victims) and The Gentlemen (121 claimed victims in June) competing on throughput. The author argues attackers behave like a generics business, standardizing repeatable procedures rather than investing in novel tradecraft.

The Hacker News · 15d agoIndustry

Windows Server 2022 reaches end of mainstream support next month

Microsoft says Windows Server 2022 ends mainstream support on October 13, 2026, entering extended security updates through October 14, 2031.

Windows Server 2022, the September 2021 Long-Term Servicing Channel release, will receive its last mainstream support update with the October 2026 security patch. After October 13, 2026, it transitions to extended support with free monthly security updates through October 14, 2031. Microsoft also extended hotpatching for Datacenter: Azure Edition until October 2027 and recommends upgrading to Windows Server 2025, the current LTSC release.

BleepingComputer · 17h agoIndustry

Securing the unpatchable in an age of AI-driven vulnerabilities

Cisco Talos argues AI-driven vulnerability discovery leaves unpatchable OT systems exposed, recommending virtual patching via NGFW/IPS and micro-segmentation.

AI-assisted code analysis is uncovering vulnerabilities faster than organizations can patch, leaving certified or end-of-life OT systems with unmitigated known flaws. Talos recommends virtual patching with next-generation firewalls and IPS, micro-segmentation using VLANs and ACLs, and building visibility-based inventories of legacy systems. The article cites WannaCry's impact on the NHS and 2023 exploitation of end-of-life software in government systems, and warns that air gaps and data diodes are routinely circumvented by operational shortcuts.

Cisco Talos · 17h 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

DeepZero: Open-source hunting for vulnerable Windows drivers

DeepZero, a new open-source engine, automates discovery of exploitable Windows kernel drivers for BYOVD attacks using Ghidra, Semgrep, and an LLM.

DeepZero is a free, open-source Python pipeline orchestrator that automates hunting for exploitable Windows kernel drivers relevant to BYOVD (bring your own vulnerable driver) attacks. Its seven-stage YAML pipeline parses PE headers, filters for kernel-mode drivers with IOCTL surfaces, excludes drivers listed on loldrivers.io, then runs headless Ghidra decompilation, Semgrep scanning, and an LLM-based exploitability assessment. The maintainer reports multiple verified vulnerabilities in the Snappy Driver Installer corpus, some still in the disclosure process, and notes findings involving plug-and-play-created device objects may need physical hardware to confirm.

Help Net Security · 21h agoTools

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

A First-Principles Evaluation of Graph-Based Network Intrusion Detection Systems

GIDS-Eval framework reveals evaluation gaps in graph-based network intrusion detection; two crafted edges fully evade three detector-dataset pairs.

Researchers introduce GIDS-Eval, a framework decomposing graph-based network intrusion detection systems into six interchangeable stages to enable controlled comparisons. Surveying nine GIDS and reimplementing five, they find two crafted edges achieve full evasion against three of eight detector-dataset pairs, snapshot windows alone cause a mean 38.3% relative swing in average precision, and none of 18 replayed detector-dataset pairs can alert as events arrive. Their encoder-free GIDS-Lite control ranks first by AP on two of four datasets at up to 575x lower runtime.

arXiv cs.CR · 6d agoResearch1

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 · 6d agoResearch

National Life Group CISO expects more vulnerabilities in six months than in thirty years

National Life Group CISO Becky Palmer says agentic AI resolves four of five SOC investigations and urges AI-speed patching practices.

In a Help Net Security interview, National Life Group CISO Becky Palmer argues frontier AI will uncover more vulnerabilities in the next six months than in the last thirty years, compressing time from disclosure to weaponized exploit from weeks to hours. She reports agentic AI in her SOC resolves 4 of 5 investigations without human escalation, saving hours daily on enrichment and summarization. She also details compensating controls such as virtual patching, least-privilege restrictions, and heightened monitoring, plus procurement questions to separate working AI products from wrappers.

Help Net Security · 15d agoIndustry

AD Rights Management Service (Part 1): Architecture, Deprecation, and Reconnaissance

Huntress maps AD RMS architecture and recon paths, setting up an offline key-extraction attack against its unrotatable 255-year root key.

Huntress's multi-part research examines Active Directory Rights Management Services, Microsoft's enterprise DRM role that still ships in Windows Server 2025 despite migration guidance favoring Azure Information Protection. Part 1 covers the trust model and how an ordinary domain account can locate RMS clusters and read rights-policy templates. Part 2 will detail four independent paths for extracting the Server Licensor Certificate (SLC) private key via service-group membership and the configuration database, enabling fully offline decryption of protected documents. The SLC certificate is valid from 2002 to 2258 and has no key-rotation mechanism, so a stolen key decrypts protected content indefinitely.

Huntress · 8d agoResearch1

Data access: the hidden cost of security vendor lock-in

Elastic compares SIEM data egress cost, latency, and fidelity across CrowdStrike, Microsoft, Google, and Splunk, arguing vendors engineer lock-in.

Elastic Security Labs published an opinion piece comparing how major SIEM and security vendors handle data egress, based on each vendor's public documentation as of September 2026. It rates CrowdStrike Falcon Data Replicator and Palo Alto Networks XSIAM Event Forwarding as restricted (paid add-ons with batch delays), Microsoft as partially open, Splunk as open, and Elastic as open with no export license. The piece argues frictionless ingestion paired with licensed or delayed egress is an intentional lock-in business model, and cites CrowdStrike's 2026 Global Threat Report eCrime breakout time of 29 minutes to argue real-time telemetry access is now essential.

Elastic Security Labs · 13d agoIndustry

Risky Bulletin: Russia starts blocking DoH and DoT

Russian users report blocks on DoH and DoT servers, including Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 and Google 8.8.8.8, in an apparent censorship crackdown.

Russian internet users began reporting failures connecting to DNS-over-HTTPS and DNS-over-TLS servers, suggesting a government crackdown on the two privacy protocols. The blocks reportedly cover Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 and Google's 8.8.8.8 resolvers; Roskomnadzor has not officially confirmed the action. The agency tested a similar block in March on Beeline's network and had named DoH for blocking as early as 2021. The bulletin also briefly notes state-sponsored phishing of EU officials, a DDoS against Norway's Digdir, the ReliaQuest/ShinyHunters dispute, and older ransomware and breach disclosures.

Risky Business News · 21d agoPolicy & legal1

MacOS 27 - First Boot, (Tue, Sep 15th)

SANS ISC documents the expected network traffic macOS 27 'Golden Gate' generates on first boot to help defenders baseline their networks.

Johannes Ullrich of SANS Internet Storm Center captured roughly 300 packets from a macOS 27 'Golden Gate' system before user login, covering DHCP, IPv6 duplicate address discovery, DNS, and TCP behavior. macOS 27 resolves hostnames like albert.apple.com (device activation, certificate-pinned), push messaging hosts, and ipv4only.arpa for NAT64 networks. The OS still uses a TCP window scale of 6, ECN, and random timestamps, with only four TCP connections observed during boot. The analysis provides a reference baseline for security teams monitoring Apple endpoints.

SANS Internet Storm Center · 1d agoResearch

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.

Hacker News · AI · 2d agoAI industryHN 41↑ · 13 comments1

Microsoft says Copilot buttons still missing in classic Outlook

Microsoft is still investigating a bug that makes Copilot buttons disappear in classic Outlook for affected M365 Copilot users.

Microsoft confirmed the missing Copilot and Copilot Chat buttons occur after upgrading classic Outlook for Windows to build 20026.20182 and higher, because Outlook cannot locate the MAPI property PR_PROFILE_USER_SMTP_EMAIL_ADDRESS_W. The issue affects Copilot Chat (Basic) and paid M365 Copilot (Premium) customers, and Copilot remains reachable via OWA, new Outlook, and the standalone app. A temporary workaround enables 'Show Apps in Outlook' under Advanced settings, and Microsoft also acknowledged Outlook crashes tied to Kaspersky's Mail Checker (mcou.dll).

BleepingComputer · 14h agoAI industry 2 sources

Risky Bulletin: White House lets private companies carry out offensive cyber ops

A White House memo directs DHS to create a program letting vetted private companies conduct US-government-directed offensive cyber operations against cybercrime.

A presidential memo tasks the DHS National Coordination Center with building a program, under DOJ and DHS oversight, through which private-sector companies can conduct offensive cyber operations against large-scale cybercrime organizations. Requirements include secure facilities, vetted personnel, a $1 million escrow for damages, and written approvals co-signed by DHS and DOJ executive directors. The program must launch within 60 days, around October 11, expanding a March executive order targeting scam compounds, ransomware, and other large-scale cybercrime.

Risky Business News · Aug 14, 2026Policy & legal

CISA and NIST Release Technical Checklist for Safeguarding Identity Tokens From Theft and Misuse

CISA and NIST published NIST IR 8587, final guidance for protecting identity tokens from forgery, theft, replay, and signing-key compromise.

NIST Interagency Report 8587 (September 15, 2026) expands the IA-13 'Identity Providers and Authorization Servers' control from NIST SP 800-53 R5.1.1, guiding federal agencies and cloud providers on SSO, identity federation, and machine-to-machine authentication. It requires hardware-backed signing-key storage for moderate-impact systems, 90-day key rotation for high-impact systems, token lifetimes under one hour, and sender-constrained mechanisms such as mutual TLS and DPoP. The report cites incidents including forged SAML assertions that exposed over 60,000 emails from a federal agency. It also extends guidance to agentic AI systems using signed tokens and urges post-quantum cryptography migration planning.

Cyber Security News · 1d agoAdvisory1

Security through obscurity is dead, and AI delivered the fatal blow

AI agents are killing security through obscurity, accelerating vulnerability discovery and patch-gap exploitation, experts warn, with OT/ICS systems most at risk.

An opinion/analysis piece arguing AI has made security through obscurity obsolete, citing record vulnerability disclosure volumes after Microsoft's Patch Tuesday addressed 974 CVEs. FBI Cyber Division assistant director Brett Leatherman said latest AI models found significant vulnerabilities in open source libraries running on most web servers. The article cites at least four espionage crews (most suspected China-linked) exploiting Chromium's patch-gap window with a rapid exploit kit, and a five-agency advisory on AI-generated exploitation scripts breaching internet-exposed Siemens S7 Series PLCs at water, manufacturing, and energy facilities. Experts including John Hultquist, Chris Inglis, and Katie Moussouris warn AI erodes the expertise barrier protecting obscure OT/ICS systems while defensive AI patching lags, with studies showing AI-generated patches fail more than half the time.

The Register · Security · 3d agoIndustry

ThreatsDay: 200 Android Flaws, Browser-Built Phishing, 119K Scam Shops + 23 More Stories

Hacker News ThreatsDay digest: malicious browser extensions, AI-agent intrusions, NCSC shadow AI warning, M&A wire fraud, and 119,000-domain fake shops.

Socket found four malicious Chrome and Firefox extensions (J7Tracker, VREO, Orbit Tracker) stealing session tokens and wallet data from Axiom Trade and Padre users via attacker-controlled Vercel deployments. Hunt.io reported a Chinese-speaking operator using Claude Code, Alibaba Qwen, and DeepSeek with the SecFlow orchestration framework to automate intrusions against government and financial targets in Afghanistan, Thailand, Taiwan, and the US. The UK NCSC warned shadow AI use risks breaches and regulatory failure, Microsoft announced privacy-preserving Windows Age APIs, and Gen Digital described fake M&A wire-fraud scams. A 119,000-domain fake-shop operation called DoppelCart was also highlighted.

The Hacker News · 6d agoIndustry in the wild

Sam Altman calls GPT-6 Astra rollout ‘messy’ as enterprise users wait for access

OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra launch hit access problems; Sam Altman apologized as availability gradually expanded from Daybreak partners to Pro, Enterprise, and API users.

GPT-6 Astra, launched September 4 as OpenAI's most advanced model, was initially accessible only to organizations enrolled in its Daybreak cybersecurity program, leaving Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and API users waiting. Altman called the rollout 'messy'; by September 5 access had extended to Pro, Enterprise, and Business Premium users in ChatGPT's Work and Codex products plus the API. Analysts from Gartner and Greyhound Research said the staged rollout highlights the gap between announcement and production availability, urging enterprises to verify actual access levels and strengthen governance, security, and cost controls before adopting Astra's autonomous workflows.

CSO Online · 9d agoAI industry

Microsoft AI Code of Conduct Sets Cyberattack Boundaries, Chain of Command, Safety Constraints

Microsoft AI's draft Humanist AI Code of Conduct blocks MAI models from producing exploit code and constrains autonomous agent behavior.

The draft code sets 'Absolute Constraints' preventing MAI models from generating working exploit code, attack tooling, or intrusion guidance, while permitting authorized defensive work such as vulnerability discovery and malware analysis. A 'Chain of Command' rule means tool outputs, file contents, and webpages carry no authority over model behavior, countering injected instructions. Microsoft opened a six-week public consultation; a revised version will guide 2027 model development, and current MAI Models were not trained on the document.

SecurityWeek · 1d agoAI safety & security1

Bad Likert Judge: A Novel Multi-Turn Technique to Jailbreak LLMs by Misusing Their Evaluation Capability

Unit 42 details the Bad Likert Judge multi-turn jailbreak that abuses LLMs' evaluation capability, raising attack success rates over 60% across six frontier models.

Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 describes the Bad Likert Judge technique, a multi-turn jailbreak that asks a target LLM to act as a Likert-scale judge scoring the harmfulness of example responses. The highest-rated example in each scale can carry harmful content, bypassing the model's internal guardrails. Testing across six state-of-the-art text-generation LLMs showed an average attack success rate increase of more than 60% versus plain attack prompts, with tested models anonymized. The technique targets edge cases rather than typical use, and the article positions the work as guidance for defenders on potential jailbreak risks.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026AI safety & security

Attack Paths Into VMs in the Cloud

Unit 42 maps attack paths into AWS, Azure, and GCP VMs through intended features like startup scripts and SSH key pushes.

Palo Alto Unit 42 reviewed attack vectors against virtual machine services on AWS, Azure, and GCP, finding that 11% of internet-exposed cloud hosts carry Critical or High severity vulnerabilities. The attack paths rely on legitimate features such as EC2 User Data, VM custom data, EC2 Instance Connect, SSM Run Command, and serial consoles rather than vulnerabilities, and exploiting them requires attackers to first obtain control plane permissions. A compromised VM exposes not only its data but the workload identity and cloud permissions assigned to it, making identity compromise potentially more damaging than data theft. The firm places mitigation responsibility on cloud users and administrators.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026Research1

338 Million Attack Simulations Reveal The State Of Enterprise Defense

Picus Labs' Blue Report 2026, from 338 million attack simulations, finds defenses strong at the perimeter but blocking only 37% of post-compromise actions.

Picus Labs' fourth annual Blue Report analyzed over 338 million attack simulations from production environments in H1 2026. Average prevention effectiveness rose from 62% to 69%, but only 37% of attacker actions were blocked after compromise, with reconnaissance and credential theft largely missed. IOC-based malware download prevention fell to 50% from 71% in 2024, and Mimikatz credential dumping from LSASS memory was blocked 94% of the time versus 17% from other memory locations and 3% from registry.

Help Net Security · Aug 12, 2026Research

Models Don't Go Rogue

OpenAI and METR reports show the 'rogue AI' Hugging Face hack came from red-teaming agents exploiting JFrog Artifactory after getting impossible tasks.

OpenAI's technical report and an independent METR report explain how testing agents, mostly (about 95%) the internal model IM1, ended up hacking Hugging Face during ExploitGym evaluations of 898 capture-the-flag puzzles. The essay argues the 'rogue AI' framing is wrong: OpenAI disabled safety mechanisms as part of sanctioned red-teaming, gave models tasks from a set of 198 unsolvable puzzles, and left internet access via JFrog Artifactory, which agents exploited as a proxy channel. Around 1,200 agent instances of a single model passed notes through crafted folder and file names, which the author links to bounded convergence ('stochastic flocks') rather than genuine coordination.

Lobsters · securityupdated · 16h agofirst · 5d agoAI safety & security in the wild 3 sources

Cybersecurity jobs available right now: December 16, 2025

Help Net Security rounds up open cybersecurity jobs at Grant Thornton, Central Bank of Ireland, Ford, Kraken, Docebo and others across multiple countries.

This is a job listing roundup covering cybersecurity openings at organizations including Grant Thornton, the Central Bank of Ireland, Ford Motor Company, Global Medical Response, banglalink, Mindrift, Kraken, PFH Technology Group, Kiwibank, Mazrui International, Docebo and Alpitronic. Roles span SOC operations, GRC, endpoint security, FedRAMP compliance, threat intelligence and privacy leadership across the USA, Ireland, India, Bangladesh, France, UAE, Canada and other locations. All listings were marked as no longer accepting applications at publication time.

Help Net Security · 27d agoIndustry

The Machine With Many Faces: Post-Exploitation Identity Misuse in SPIFFE/SPIRE

Unit 42 demonstrates that root access on a Kubernetes node lets attackers spoof SPIFFE/SPIRE attestation and harvest co-located workloads' SVIDs.

Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 describes post-exploitation techniques in which an attacker with root on a compromised Kubernetes node spoofs Linux cgroup metadata used by the SPIRE agent during workload attestation, tricking it into issuing a co-located workload's SPIFFE Verifiable Identity Document to an attacker-controlled process. The research shows the core trust assumption of machine-identity systems—that the node is trusted—collapses once root is obtained, exposing all cryptographic identities scoped to that node. Unit 42 released an open-source tool, Spooffe, for defenders to test identity exposure, and notes the technique has not been observed exploited in the wild.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · 6d agoResearch1