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Enterprise Defenses Recovered at the Edge and Collapsed Inside
Picus Labs' Blue Report 2026 finds perimeter prevention at 69% but post-compromise prevention just 37%, with reconnaissance blocked only 10% of the time.
Picus Labs' Blue Report 2026, based on 434,000+ simulated attacks across client production environments in H1 2026, found perimeter prevention effectiveness rose from 62% to 69% while the Post-Compromise Prevention Rate was only 37%. Quiet techniques fared worst: reconnaissance was blocked 10% of the time, registry-based credential access less than 1%, and the alert score stayed at 14% despite logging at a four-year high of 58%. IOC-based prevention fell to 50% from 71% in 2024, and Mimikatz's LSASS path was blocked about 94% while alternative credential-read paths went nearly undetected.
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Threat Brief: Maze Ransomware
Unit 42 issued a threat brief on Maze ransomware, noting an uptick across industries and exploitation of Pulse VPN and IE flaws for initial access.
Palo Alto Networks detected an uptick in Maze ransomware samples across finance, healthcare, government, and other sectors. Maze, a variant of ChaCha ransomware first seen in May 2019, is distributed via weaponized Word/Excel attachments and the Spelevo exploit kit leveraging CVE-2018-15982 and CVE-2018-4878, and has used CVE-2019-11510 (Pulse VPN) and CVE-2018-8174 (Internet Explorer). Operators establish a foothold, escalate privileges, move laterally, and exfiltrate files before encryption for extortion leverage.
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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.
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H1 2026 Malware Vulnerability Trends
Recorded Future's H1 2026 report finds 215 actively exploited CVEs, RAT dominance, NFC payment fraud, and AI-augmented but not autonomous tradecraft.
Recorded Future's Insikt Group identified 215 actively exploited CVEs in H1 2026, up 34% from 161 in H1 2025, with the most impactful flaws combining network reachability, no authentication, and code execution. AsyncRAT was the top malware family, with AsyncRAT, Cobalt Strike, XWorm, Stealc, and REMCOS remaining top-ten staples; Android NFC malware like NFCShare and NGate enabled payment card theft and ATM cash-outs. AI-enabled attacks remained additive to established tradecraft, concentrated in Levels 1-3 of Recorded Future's AIM3 maturity model, with AI-assisted vulnerability research (e.g., Claude Mythos fixing 271 Firefox bugs in Firefox 150) inflating NVD disclosure volumes 43% above the prior six-month average. The report urges defenders to prioritize remotely exploitable RCE flaws, behavioral detection, developer credential security, and third-party oversight.
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The Top 4 Threats We Found by Investigating Every Alert for a Quarter
Prophet Security's quarterly threat report finds identity attacks made up roughly half of confirmed malicious activity, with stolen authenticated sessions bypassing conditional access controls.
Between May 1 and July 31, 2026, Prophet Security investigated every alert in customer environments immediately on arrival; about 7% of completed investigations were confirmed malicious. Direct account/session attacks made up roughly 18% of confirmed activity, with replayed authenticated sessions bypassing conditional access since no re-authentication occurs. Infostealer activity affected about a quarter of investigated organizations, mostly delivered via browsers through compromised websites, malicious ads, sponsored search results and ClickFix fake CAPTCHA gates, with payloads including Lumma Stealer, Vidar, HijackLoader and AsyncRAT. Credential phishing was the largest category at about 28%, with adversary-in-the-middle relays revealed by seconds-long MFA approvals from distant countries and MFA fatigue attacks exploiting automatic unlock policies.
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Microsoft Patches Eight Zero
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Unit 42 Researchers Discover Multiple Espionage Operations Targeting Southeast Asian Government
Unit 42 attributes three espionage clusters targeting a Southeast Asian government to Stately Taurus, Alloy Taurus, and Gelsemium APTs.
Unit 42 investigated espionage attacks starting in late 2022 against multiple governmental entities in a Southeast Asian country, including critical infrastructure, public healthcare, financial administrators, and ministries. Analysis revealed three distinct clusters: CL-STA-0044 attributed to Stately Taurus (Mustang Panda), CL-STA-0045 to Alloy Taurus (GALLIUM), and CL-STA-0046 to Gelsemium. The first cluster used a ToneShell backdoor variant, ShadowPad, China Chopper web shells, Impacket, and credential dumping tools across roughly Q1 2021 to Q3 2023. All three operated with distinct tools, infrastructure, and long-term surveillance tradecraft consistent with APTs.
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Hackers Turn Windows Shadow Copies Into a Tool for Credential Theft and Ransomware
Attackers abuse Windows VSS shadow copies to delete recovery points before ransomware and to extract NTDS.dit/SAM credentials, demanding context-aware detection.
Threat actors are weaponizing the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) for two purposes: destroying local recovery points via vssadmin.exe, wmic.exe, diskshadow.exe, wbadmin.exe, and bcdedit.exe before encryption, and accessing static copies of locked files such as NTDS.dit and SAM for credential theft. Ransomware families tied to shadow-copy removal include Akira, Black Basta, BlackCat, Conti, LockBit, Qilin, RansomHub, REvil, Ryuk, and WannaCry. Huntress's analysis of the Nightmare-Eclipse tool showed the BlueHammer technique chaining a Windows Defender timing issue with a VSS snapshot to dump the SAM database and decrypt NT hashes. Defenders should correlate VSS operations with parent process, hive access, and subsequent encryption activity, and maintain immutable off-host backups.
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