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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.
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ChatGPT’s new feature could give infostealers a map of your Mac activity
OpenAI's Computer History feature for macOS ChatGPT logs app and website activity into memories, raising prompt injection and infostealer privacy risks.
OpenAI's Computer History builds timelines of Mac activity from interaction events and macOS accessibility data, turning them into memories for ChatGPT and Codex. The feature is opt-in, requires Memories, runs only in the ChatGPT macOS desktop app, and is unavailable in the EEA, Switzerland, and the UK. Raw event files stay on-device and are deleted after 48 hours, but generated Markdown memory files are unencrypted and persist until manually deleted. OpenAI itself flagged unencrypted files and prompt injection risks, and security experts warned infostealers could use the logs as a ready-made map of someone's workday.
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Researchers open-source a Wi-Fi cyber range for security training
NTNU and Aegean researchers open-source a software-emulated Wi-Fi cyber range using mac80211_hwsim with LLM-assisted scenario building.
Researchers from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and the University of the Aegean published a design and prototype for a cyber range dedicated to IEEE 802.11 security training, emulating access points and clients with mac80211_hwsim, Linux namespaces, hostapd, wpa_supplicant, dnsmasq, and FreeRADIUS. The platform bundles Aircrack-ng, Wireshark, and custom tools WPAxFuzz and Bl0ck, and can convert plain-language scenario descriptions into deployable definitions via a locally hosted Llama model. A working prototype covering scenario creation and deployment is on GitHub; monitoring, access control, and orchestration zones remain future work.
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Production data in testing is still common, and Tricentis' CISO wants it gone
Tricentis CISO Erika Dean urges keeping production data out of test environments and describes red-teaming that caught a prompt injection gap.
In a Help Net Security interview, Tricentis CISO Erika Dean recommends keeping production data out of QA and testing environments, even in finance and healthcare, where weaker QA controls create risk. Her team red-teamed an agentic chatbot before launch, found a prompt injection gap, and held the release for a week until it was fixed. She says vendors who cannot explain data residency, retention, and model training use are disqualified regardless of product quality.
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AI supply chain risk is showing up in developer workflows first
Zentera Systems CEO says AI supply chain attacks currently hit developer workflows first, advising segmentation over tooling and citing the Phantom Raven campaign.
In an interview, Zentera Systems CEO Dr. Jaushin Lee argues that most active AI supply chain incidents target developer workflows and open-source package repositories, while poisoned model weights, compromised MCP servers, and poisoned vector stores remain largely in research and demos. He cites the active 'Phantom Raven' campaign, where attackers register AI-hallucinated package names in public repositories with malicious payloads that silently infect vibe-coding build pipelines. He recommends software-defined segmentation, semiconductor-style project enclaves with egress controls, and warns that self-hosting models without agent sandboxing leaves exposure unchanged.
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What happens when AI agent governance is missing at scale
meshIQ engineering head Gourab Basu argues AI agent governance must inspect proposed tool calls in-flow, since prompts alone cannot control nondeterministic agents.
In a Help Net Security interview, Gourab Basu, Global Head of Engineering at meshIQ, argues that prompt instructions are an insufficient control boundary for nondeterministic AI agents. He advocates a framework-independent governance engine that inspects proposed tool calls and parameters before execution, citing an example of pausing refunds above $100 for human approval. He warns that scaling from ten to a thousand agents makes manual oversight and destination-side controls unworkable, so governance must sit inside the agent execution flow across frameworks such as FastMCP.
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Ransomware negotiation tactics have turned into a business process
Intel 471's Dave Ross details ransomware negotiation tactics, with demands typically set at 1-5% of annual revenue and specialized criminal service roles.
In a Help Net Security video, Intel 471 Senior Director Dave Ross explains how ransomware groups research a victim's revenue and insurance coverage, run test decryptions to prove they hold a working key, and set demands at roughly 1% to 5% of annual revenue. He describes negotiation dynamics with shifting deadlines and a criminal service economy supplying language skills, data review, and legal analysis. Multi-extortion methods include data theft, DDoS attacks, and direct contact with customers and journalists.
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A five-part inventory for your AI agent credentials
Orchid's CEO recommends inventorying five attributes of AI agent credentials to rein in over-privileged OAuth tokens and service accounts.
In a Help Net Security video, Orchid co-founder and CEO Roy Katmor argues that AI agents accumulate OAuth tokens, API keys, service accounts, and borrowed human credentials that sit outside normal identity review, leading to authority well beyond the agent's original purpose. He proposes treating each agent as an application and documenting owner and purpose, reachable tools, credentials, effective authority, and runtime behavior. Teams can then compare approved intent with observed behavior and apply scoped controls, including targeted kill switches.
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Scareware ads keep running on Google's transparency tool, even after they're reported
NYU and Radboud researchers built AdLens, which found 238 scareware and 3,346 false-claim ads in Google's ad archive; reported ads often stayed live.
The AdLens tool, built by NYU and Radboud University researchers, mined Google's Ads Transparency Center and screened 188,000 software ad creatives using similarity search plus a panel of open-source language models, finding 238 scareware ads, 3,346 false-claim ads, and 258 anonymity-avoiding ads with over 100 million impressions in Europe. Reporting ads through Google's standard flow produced inconsistent removals: some ads acknowledged as violations stayed live, and after one takedown tied to the TamperedChef malware domain, 41 other ads pointing to the same domain kept running. The pipeline runs entirely on open-weight models at low cost (a $96 DigitalOcean VM plus $1.57/hour L40S inference) and is designed to extend to Meta and Amazon ad libraries.
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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.
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The cybercrime supply chain has five stages, each with a price
Vigilant's CEO outlines the five-stage cybercrime supply chain, from $5-$50 credential logs through RaaS affiliates to laundering, plus cookie-based MFA bypass.
In a Help Net Security video, Vigilant CEO Chris Nyhuis argues the lone ransomware attacker image is 15 years out of date and describes five businesses inside the cybercrime supply chain. The stages are infostealer harvesters, brokers who verify and resell access, ransomware-as-a-service operators, affiliates who run intrusions, and launderers. He notes stolen credential logs sell for $5 to $50, broker listings stay under $1,000, and stolen session cookies let attackers bypass multi-factor authentication.
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Building a risk-based vulnerability management program that scales
Asimily CEO Shankar Somasundaram outlines a risk-based vulnerability management approach using inventory, attack paths, KEV and EPSS data.
In a Help Net Security video, Asimily CEO Shankar Somasundaram argues patching everything is infeasible as AI-driven attacks inflate vulnerability counts, with one customer finding a thousand unknowns for each known one. He recommends building a full inventory of devices, applications, and data flows, mapping attack paths for reachability, and prioritizing with KEV, EPSS, and business impact. Mitigations include patching, virtual patching via NACs and firewalls, segmentation, and configuration snapshots to detect drift.
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Post-quantum migration gets harder when every user holds a key
Quantus CEO Christopher Smith discusses post-quantum migration pitfalls, including oversized keys breaking IPsec, SSH and TLS, and hard-to-migrate blockchain user keys.
Quantus CEO Christopher Smith describes post-quantum migration findings from banks and hospitals, including forgotten default passwords, orphaned admin keys held by former employees and hidden password hashes on user devices. Larger post-quantum keys and signatures break size assumptions in IPsec, SSH, TLS and libp2p, while migrating blockchain user keys remains hard because every user must act. He argues boards should fund quantum migration like insurance by quantifying cryptographic failure risk, and warns a silent quantum break would be difficult to detect from outside.
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