AI-based assistants or “agents” — autonomous programs that have access to the user’s computer, files, online services and can automate virtually any task — are growing in popularity with developers and IT workers. But as so many eyebrow-raising headlines over the past few weeks have shown, these powerful and assertive new tools are rapidly shifting the security priorities for organizations, while blurring the lines between data and code, trusted co-worker and insider threat, ninja hacker and novice code jockey.

The new hotness in AI-based assistants — OpenClaw (formerly known as ClawdBot and Moltbot) — has seen rapid adoption since its release in November 2025. OpenClaw is an open-source autonomous AI agent designed to run locally on your computer and proactively take actions on your behalf without needing to be prompted.

If that sounds like a risky proposition or a dare, consider that OpenClaw is most useful when it has complete access to your digital life, where it can then manage your inbox and calendar, execute programs and tools, browse the Internet for information, and integrate with chat apps like Discord, Signal, Teams or WhatsApp.

Other more established AI assistants like Anthropic’s Claude and Microsoft’s Copilot also can do these things, but OpenClaw isn’t just a passive digital butler waiting for commands. Rather, it’s designed to take the initiative on your behalf based on what it knows about your life and its understanding of what you want done.

“The testimonials are remarkable,” the AI security firm Snyk observed. “Developers building websites from their phones while putting babies to sleep; users running entire companies through a lobster-themed AI; engineers who’ve set up autonomous code loops that fix tests, capture errors through webhooks, and open pull requests, all while they’re away from their desks.”

You can probably already see how this experimental technology could go sideways in a hurry. In late February, Summer Yue, the director of safety and alignment at Meta’s “superintelligence” lab, recounted on Twitter/X how she was fiddling with OpenClaw when the AI assistant suddenly began mass-deleting messages in her email inbox. The thread included screenshots of Yue frantically pleading with the preoccupied bot via instant message and ordering it to stop.

“Nothing humbles you like telling your OpenClaw ‘confirm before acting’ and watching it speedrun deleting your inbox,” Yue said. “I couldn’t stop it from my phone. I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb.”

There’s nothing wrong with feeling a little schadenfreude at Yue’s encounter with OpenClaw, which fits Meta’s “move fast and break things” model but hardly inspires confidence in the road ahead. However, the risk that poorly-secured AI assistants pose to organizations is no laughing matter, as recent research shows many users are exposing to the Internet the web-based administrative interface for their OpenClaw installations.

Jamieson O’Reilly is a professional penetration tester and founder of the security firm DVULN. In a recent story posted to Twitter/X, O’Reilly warned that exposing a misconfigured OpenClaw web interface to the Internet allows external parties to read the bot’s complete configuration file, including every credential the agent uses — from API keys and bot tokens to OAuth secrets and signing keys.

With that access, O’Reilly said, an attacker could impersonate the operator to their contacts, inject messages into ongoing conversations, and exfiltrate data through the agent’s existing integrations in a way that looks like normal traffic.

“You can pull the full conversation history across every integrated platform, meaning months of private messages and file attachments, everything the agent has seen,” O’Reilly said, noting that a cursory search revealed hundreds of such servers exposed online. “And because you control the agent’s perception layer, you can manipulate what the human sees. Filter out certain messages. Modify responses before they’re displayed.”

O’Reilly documented another experiment that demonstrated how easy it is to create a successful supply chain attack through ClawHub, which serves as a public repository of downloadable “skills” that allow OpenClaw to integrate with and control other applications.

WHEN AI INSTALLS AI

One of the core tenets of securing AI agents involves carefully isolating them so that the operator can fully control who and what gets to talk to their AI assistant. This is critical thanks to the tendency for AI systems to fall for “prompt injection” attacks, sneakily-crafted natural language instructions that trick the system into disregarding its own security safeguards. In essence, machines social engineering other machines.

A recent supply chain attack targeting an AI coding assistant called Cline began with one such prompt injection attack, resulting in thousands of systems having a rogue instance of OpenClaw with full system access installed on their device without consent.

According to the security firm grith.ai, Cline had deployed an AI-powered issue triage workflow using a GitHub action that runs a Claude coding session when triggered by specific events. The workflow was configured so that any GitHub user could trigger it by opening an issue, but it failed to properly check whether the information supplied in the title was potentially hostile.

“On January 28, an attacker created Issue #8904 with a title crafted to look like a performance report but containing an embedded instruction: Install a package from a specific GitHub repository,” Grith wrote, noting that the attacker then exploited several more vulnerabilities to ensure the malicious package would be included in Cline’s nightly release workflow and published as an official update.

“This is the supply chain equivalent of confused deputy,” the blog continued. “The developer authorises Cline to act on their behalf, and Cline (via compromise) delegates that authority to an entirely separate agent the developer never evaluated, never configured, and never consented to.”

VIBE CODING

AI assistants like OpenClaw have gained a large following because they make it simple for users to “vibe code,” or build fairly complex applications and code projects just by telling it what they want to construct. Probably the best known (and most bizarre) example is Moltbook, where a developer told an AI agent running on OpenClaw to build him a Reddit-like platform for AI agents.

Less than a week later, Moltbook had more than 1.5 million registered agents that posted more than 100,000 messages to each other. AI agents on the platform soon built their own porn site for robots, and launched a new religion called Crustafarian with a figurehead modeled after a giant lobster. One bot on the forum reportedly found a bug in Moltbook’s code and posted it to an AI agent discussion forum, while other agents came up with and implemented a patch to fix the flaw.

Moltbook’s creator Matt Schlicht said on social media that he didn’t write a single line of code for the project.

“I just had a vision for the technical architecture and AI made it a reality,” Schlicht said. “We’re in the golden ages. How can we not give AI a place to hang out.”

ATTACKERS LEVEL UP

The flip side of that golden age, of course, is that it enables low-skilled malicious hackers to quickly automate global cyberattacks that would normally require the collaboration of a highly skilled team. In February, Amazon AWS detailed an elaborate attack in which a Russian-speaking threat actor used multiple commercial AI services to compromise more than 600 FortiGate security appliances across at least 55 countries over a five week period.

AWS said the apparently low-skilled hacker used multiple AI services to plan and execute the attack, and to find exposed management ports and weak credentials with single-factor authentication.

“One serves as the primary tool developer, attack planner, and operational assistant,” AWS’s CJ Moses wrote. “A second is used as a supplementary attack planner when the actor needs help pivoting within a specific compromised network. In one observed instance, the actor submitted the complete internal topology of an active victim—IP addresses, hostnames, confirmed credentials, and identified services—and requested a step-by-step plan to compromise additional systems they could not access with their existing tools.”

“This activity is distinguished by the threat actor’s use of multiple commercial GenAI services to implement and scale well-known attack techniques throughout every phase of their operations, despite their limited technical capabilities,” Moses continued. “Notably, when this actor encountered hardened environments or more sophisticated defensive measures, they simply moved on to softer targets rather than persisting, underscoring that their advantage lies in AI-augmented efficiency and scale, not in deeper technical skill.”

For attackers, gaining that initial access or foothold into a target network is typically not the difficult part of the intrusion; the tougher bit involves finding ways to move laterally within the victim’s network and plunder important servers and databases. But experts at Orca Security warn that as organizations come to rely more on AI assistants, those agents potentially offer attackers a simpler way to move laterally inside a victim organization’s network post-compromise — by manipulating the AI agents that already have trusted access and some degree of autonomy within the victim’s network.

“By injecting prompt injections in overlooked fields that are fetched by AI agents, hackers can trick LLMs, abuse Agentic tools, and carry significant security incidents,” Orca’s Roi Nisimi and Saurav Hiremath wrote. “Organizations should now add a third pillar to their defense strategy: limiting AI fragility, the ability of agentic systems to be influenced, misled, or quietly weaponized across workflows. While AI boosts productivity and efficiency, it also creates one of the largest attack surfaces the internet has ever seen.”

BEWARE THE ‘LETHAL TRIFECTA’

This gradual dissolution of the traditional boundaries between data and code is one of the more troubling aspects of the AI era, said James Wilson, enterprise technology editor for the security news show Risky Business. Wilson said far too many OpenClaw users are installing the assistant on their personal devices without first placing any security or isolation boundaries around it, such as running it inside of a virtual machine, on an isolated network, with strict firewall rules dictating what kinds of traffic can go in and out.

“I’m a relatively highly skilled practitioner in the software and network engineering and computery space,” Wilson said. “I know I’m not comfortable using these agents unless I’ve done these things, but I think a lot of people are just spinning this up on their laptop and off it runs.”

One important model for managing risk with AI agents involves a concept dubbed the “lethal trifecta” by Simon Willison, co-creator of the Django Web framework. The lethal trifecta holds that if your system has access to private data, exposure to untrusted content, and a way to communicate externally, then it’s vulnerable to private data being stolen.

“If your agent combines these three features, an attacker can easily trick it into accessing your private data and sending it to the attacker,” Willison warned in a frequently cited blog post from June 2025.

As more companies and their employees begin using AI to vibe code software and applications, the volume of machine-generated code is likely to soon overwhelm any manual security reviews. In recognition of this reality, Anthropic recently debuted Claude Code Security, a beta feature that scans codebases for vulnerabilities and suggests targeted software patches for human review.

The U.S. stock market, which is currently heavily weighted toward seven tech giants that are all-in on AI, reacted swiftly to Anthropic’s announcement, wiping roughly $15 billion in market value from major cybersecurity companies in a single day. Laura Ellis, vice president of data and AI at the security firm Rapid7, said the market’s response reflects the growing role of AI in accelerating software development and improving developer productivity.

“The narrative moved quickly: AI is replacing AppSec,” Ellis wrote in a recent blog post. “AI is automating vulnerability detection. AI will make legacy security tooling redundant. The reality is more nuanced. Claude Code Security is a legitimate signal that AI is reshaping parts of the security landscape. The question is what parts, and what it means for the rest of the stack.”

DVULN founder O’Reilly said AI assistants are likely to become a common fixture in corporate environments — whether or not organizations are prepared to manage the new risks introduced by these tools, he said.

“The robot butlers are useful, they’re not going away and the economics of AI agents make widespread adoption inevitable regardless of the security tradeoffs involved,” O’Reilly wrote. “The question isn’t whether we’ll deploy them – we will – but whether we can adapt our security posture fast enough to survive doing so.”

After a decade and a half of service, the current certificates will expire, and new ones will be rolled out.

The post Microsoft to Refresh Windows Secure Boot Certificates in June 2026 appeared first on SecurityWeek.

The news comes after the Department of Energy conducted its annual Liberty Eclipse cybersecurity exercise.

The post 5 Bills to Boost Energy Sector Cyber Defenses Clear House Panel appeared first on SecurityWeek.

OpenClaw (aka Moltbot and Clawdbot) is vulnerable to one-click remote code execution attacks.

The post Vulnerability Allows Hackers to Hijack OpenClaw AI Assistant  appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Poland’s CERT has published a report on the recent attack, providing new details on targeted ICS and attribution.

The post Default ICS Credentials Exploited in Destructive Attack on Polish Energy Facilities appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Sandworm/Electrum hackers targeted communication and control systems at 30 sites.

The post ICS Devices Bricked Following Russia-Linked Intrusion Into Polish Power Grid appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Russia's current isolation from the Olympics may lead to increased cyberthreats targeting the 2026 Winter Games. We discuss the potential threat picture.

The post Understanding the Russian Cyberthreat to the 2026 Winter Olympics appeared first on Unit 42.

Indurex was founded by Jalal Bouhdada, who previously led industrial cybersecurity company Applied Risk.

The post Indurex Emerges From Stealth to Close Security Gap in Cyber-Physical Systems appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Accelerating the Migration to the Post-Quantum Era

The promise of quantum computing brings an unprecedented paradox. While it will unlock revolutionary breakthroughs in science, materials discovery and medicine, it simultaneously poses an existential threat to the mathematical foundations of modern cybersecurity.

For decades, the global economy has relied on public key cryptography to safeguard everything from personal privacy to national security. This cryptography is built on mathematical problems that are computationally infeasible for classical computers to solve but that quantum computers can solve efficiently, rendering today’s cryptographic protocols obsolete.

Using Shor’s algorithm, a sufficiently powerful quantum computer could factor the large prime numbers that underpin public key cryptography, in minutes. These are tasks that would take today’s most advanced supercomputers a millennium to crack. This capability would effectively turn our strongest digital defenses into open doors, creating a period of vulnerability leading up to Q-Day – the day today’s encryption is broken.

The Migration Crisis: Why Traditional Strategies Fail

For CISOs and technical leaders, the transition to post-quantum cryptography (PQC) is not a simple patch-and-deploy exercise. It is a multiyear transformation that requires updating cryptography across every device, application, certificate and infrastructure component in the enterprise.

Most enterprises today are constrained by cryptographic debt – years of accumulated, undocumented and deprecated encryption protocols buried deep within legacy applications, third-party software libraries and unmanaged IoT devices. This creates a vast and largely invisible attack surface that traditional vulnerability scanners were never designed to detect.

The challenge is compounded by the absence of a unified source of truth. Existing tools offer a fragmented "outside-in" view of the environment. They may identify devices on the network, but they lack visibility into cryptographic libraries embedded within live traffic. Without a real-time Cryptographic Bill of Materials (CBOM), security teams are forced to rely on manual, point-in-time audits that become outdated almost immediately. Spreadsheets cannot scale to this problem.

This visibility gap makes it impossible to prioritize remediation, leaving sensitive data exposed to harvest now, decrypt later (HNDL) attacks. In these attacks, adversaries intercept and store encrypted data today with the intent of unlocking it once quantum computing capabilities mature.

Operationally, traditional migration approaches are equally unworthy. Manually updating cryptography across thousands of global endpoints and branch offices often requires disruptive rip and replace strategies that threaten uptime and demand specialized expertise that is in extremely short supply. Organizations need a way to bridge today’s classical infrastructure with a quantum-resilient future without disrupting business operations or exhausting IT resources.

At Palo Alto Networks, we believe global enterprises cannot afford to wait. Our new Quantum-Safe Security solution is designed to remove these operational roadblocks by making cryptographic discovery, risk assessment and transition both continuous and actionable. We empower enterprises to gain real-time visibility into cryptographic risk and begin building agentic resilience at enterprise scale by integrating with existing security and infrastructure systems, including security information and event management (SIEM), load balancers, endpoint detection and response (EDR), as well as Application Vulnerability Management (AVM) tools.

The Four Stages of Cryptographic Inventory & Remediation

Palo Alto Networks Quantum-Safe Security is built around four foundational stages.

1. Continuous Discovery through Ecosystem Ingestion

Visibility is the first line of defense, but in a complex enterprise, true visibility requires more than a periodic scan. It requires continuous, high-fidelity ingestion of cryptographic intelligence across the environment.

Our solution acts as a central nervous system for your cryptographic posture, ingesting telemetry and logs directly from PAN-OS NGFW and Prisma® Access, enriched with data from a broad ecosystem of third-party security solutions, simplifying Day 0 onboarding. By leveraging your existing network infrastructure as sensors, we provide a comprehensive view of the cryptographic behavior of all assets without the operational friction of deploying new software.

To eliminate blind spots, we go beyond our own telemetry to ingest critical information from your existing systems you rely on. This includes syncing with configuration management database (CMDB) and asset management platforms to align cryptographic data with business inventories, integrating with EDR and access control solutions to monitor endpoint behavior, and aggregating data from network clouds and log platforms. The result is a unified intelligence layer that reflects how cryptography is actually used across the enterprise.

By synthesizing these data streams, we deliver a multidimensional view of cryptographic exposure:

• Discovery – Identification of every application, user device, infrastructure component and IoT device.
• Behavior – Analysis of traffic metadata, including protocols, key exchange mechanisms, encryption algorithms, hashes, certificates and tunnels.
• Context – Precise attribution of hardware models, cryptographic libraries (such as deprecated OpenSSL versions), and browser versions in use.

2. Risk Assessment & Prioritization

Not all data is created equal, and a successful migration requires a surgical focus on where the exposure is most acute. Our Quantum Safe Security solution quantifies risk by correlating cryptographic strength with business criticality, providing a clear, prioritized view of current risk and where remediation matters most.

Assets are categorized into strategic zones, starting with immediate exposure risks caused by deprecated protocols that are vulnerable to classical exploitation today. From there, the solution addresses long-term harvest now, decrypt later threats. As threat models evolve, the risk engine is designed to expand to emerging vectors like identity and authentication integrity, anticipating risks such as “Trust Now, Forge Later" attacks that could undermine digital trust at scale.

At the same time, the solution validates and tracks quantum-secure assets that have successfully transitioned to post-quantum or hybrid-PQC algorithms. By correlating this intelligence with business criticality and data shelf-life, security leaders can make informed decisions. For example, a crown jewel asset containing data that must remain confidential for a decade or more, is flagged as a high HNDL risk today and elevated to the top of the migration queue.

3. Comprehensive Remediation

Moving from a vulnerable state to quantum resilience is a structured journey. Our comprehensive remediation framework guides organizations through three critical stages, supported by automated workflows and prioritized recommendations at every step.

• Current State to Quantum Ready: The first stage focuses on infrastructure modernization. Using continuous discovery insights, the solution provides hardware and software recommendations required to support next-generation cryptographic protocols. An asset reaches a Quantum Ready state once it has the underlying hardware and OS capabilities to support post-quantum algorithms, even if those protocols are not yet activated.
• Quantum Ready to Quantum-Safe: Transitioning to a Quantum-safe state requires activation and configuration of post-quantum defenses. Our solution provides data configuration and certificate compliance guidance to enable PQC/Hybrid-PQC algorithms to be correctly implemented across the estate.
• Virtual Patching via Cipher Translation: For all current and especially legacy systems or IoT devices that cannot be upgraded, we provide an accelerated path to quantum-safety. Through Cipher Translation, the infrastructure acts as a proxy, providing agentic remediation that reencrypts vulnerable traffic into quantum-safe standards (such as ML-KEM) in real-time at the network edge. This approach instantly moves legacy assets from a high-risk current state to a Quantum-safe posture without a single line of code change.

4. Governance: Continuous Crypto-Hygiene & Global Compliance

Quantum readiness is not a one-time event; it is a strategic enterprise transformation that requires continuous oversight to prevent the re-emergence of vulnerabilities. Our governance framework provides the guardrails for your migration through two critical layers of management:

Continuous Crypto-Hygiene & Ongoing Management: Maintaining high-fidelity visibility is essential to preventing the accumulation of "crypto-debt." Our solution automates real-time mapping of all cryptographic dependencies, ensuring your CBOM remains dynamic and accurate as your environment evolves. Furthermore, we introduce Active Drift Detection, which automatically detects and can even block the use of weak or noncompliant ciphers in real-time, preventing developers or third-party services from accidentally introducing insecure protocols.

Global Crypto-Compliance Enforcement & Reporting: As regulatory pressure from governments (like the US Commercial National Security Algorithm Suite 2.0) mounts, organizations must demonstrate measurable progress. Our solution will provide Automated Framework Auditing, offering continuous, native mapping of your environment against global standards, including NIST, FIPS 140-3, and DORA.

Architecting a Quantum-Resilient Enterprise

The transition to quantum-safe security is far more than a technical upgrade. It represents a fundamental shift in how organizations protect the longevity and integrity of their digital assets. Achieving quantum resilience is a multiyear effort that requires both advanced technology and strategic partnership.

That's why Palo Alto Networks has established Integrated Quantum Practices, bringing together technology, partners and professional services to help organizations navigate the complexity of this transition with confidence. By combining deep cryptographic visibility with intelligent, agentic remediation, organizations can systematically retire their cryptographic debt and build resilience into their security architecture over time.

This proactive approach does more than mitigate emerging risk. It establishes a foundation of digital trust that is resilient against the threats of tomorrow, enabling your most sensitive intellectual property to remain secure for its entire shelf life, even as cryptographic standards evolve.

Secure Your First-Mover Advantage: The Quantum Readiness Assessment

Don’t let the complexity of the quantum transition stall your organization’s progress. Begin your path to resilience with a Quantum Readiness Assessment, a focused engagement to clarify current exposure and identify the most critical areas for action. To go deeper, watch the Quantum-Safe Summit on demand for expert perspectives on cryptographic risk and quantum readiness.

The Palo Alto Networks Quantum-Safe Security solution is expected to be generally available to customers on January 30, 2026, with additional integration enhancements planned for April 2026.

Forward-Looking Statements

This blog contains forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions, including, without limitation, statements regarding the benefits, impact or performance or potential benefits, impact or performance of our products and technologies or future products and technologies. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance, and there are a significant number of factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from statements made in this [blog. We identify certain important risks and uncertainties that could affect our results and performance in our most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K, our most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q, and our other filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission from time-to-time, each of which are available on our website at investors.paloaltonetworks.com and on the SEC's website at www.sec.gov. All forward-looking statements in this blog are based on information available to us as of the date hereof, and we do not assume any obligation to update the forward-looking statements provided to reflect events that occur or circumstances that exist after the date on which they were made.

The post Introducing Palo Alto Networks Quantum-Safe Security appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.

More than 20 vulnerabilities were found and patched in Dormakaba physical access control systems.

The post Access System Flaws Enabled Hackers to Unlock Doors at Major European Firms appeared first on SecurityWeek.

10 years after disrupting the Ukrainian power grid, the APT targeted Poland with data-wiping malware.

The post Russian Sandworm Hackers Blamed for Cyberattack on Polish Power Grid appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Other noteworthy stories that might have slipped under the radar: Cloudflare WAF bypass, Canonical Snap Store abused for malware delivery, Curl terminating bug bounty program

The post In Other News: €1.2B GDPR Fines, Net-NTLMv1 Rainbow Tables, Rockwell Security Notice appeared first on SecurityWeek.

To all those who are fighting the good fight in the world of cyber, keep collaborating to ensure our world never succumbs to the chaos of the Upside Down.

The post The Upside Down is Real: What Stranger Things Teaches Us About Modern Cybersecurity appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Claroty has raised a total of roughly $900 million and its valuation has reportedly reached $3 billion.

The post Claroty Raises $150 Million in Series F Funding appeared first on SecurityWeek.

The Embedded Systems Threat Matrix (ESTM) aims to help organizations protect critical embedded systems. 

The post MITRE Launches New Security Framework for Embedded Systems  appeared first on SecurityWeek.

US officials told The New York Times that cyberattacks were used to turn off the lights in Caracas and disrupt air defense radars.

The post New Reports Reinforce Cyberattack’s Role in Maduro Capture Blackout appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Researchers found a method to steal data which bypasses Microsoft Copilot’s built-in safety mechanisms.  

The attack flow, called Reprompt, abuses how Microsoft Copilot handled URL parameters in order to hijack a user’s existing Copilot Personal session.

Copilot is an AI assistant which connects to a personal account and is integrated into Windows, the Edge browser, and various consumer applications.

The issue was fixed in Microsoft’s January Patch Tuesday update, and there is no evidence of in‑the‑wild exploitation so far. Still, it once again shows how risky it can be to trust AI assistants at this point in time.

Reprompt hides a malicious prompt in the q parameter of an otherwise legitimate Copilot URL. When the page loads, Copilot auto‑executes that prompt, allowing an attacker to run actions in the victim’s authenticated session after just a single click on a phishing link.

In other words, attackers can hide secret instructions inside the web address of a Copilot link, in a place most users never look. Copilot then runs those hidden instructions as if the users had typed them themselves.

Because Copilot accepts prompts via a q URL parameter and executes them automatically, a phishing email can lure a user into clicking a legitimate-looking Copilot link while silently injecting attacker-controlled instructions into a live Copilot session.

What makes Reprompt stand out from other, similar prompt injection attacks is that it requires no user-entered prompts, no installed plugins, and no enabled connectors.

The basis of the Reprompt attack is amazingly simple. Although Copilot enforces safeguards to prevent direct data leaks, these protections only apply to the initial request. The attackers were able to bypass these guardrails by simply instructing Copilot to repeat each action twice.

Working from there, the researchers noted:

“Once the first prompt is executed, the attacker’s server issues follow‑up instructions based on prior responses and forms an ongoing chain of requests. This approach hides the real intent from both the user and client-side monitoring tools, making detection extremely difficult.”

How to stay safe

You can stay safe from the Reprompt attack specifically by installing the January 2026 Patch Tuesday updates.

If available, use Microsoft 365 Copilot for work data, as it benefits from Purview auditing, tenant‑level data loss prevention (DLP), and admin restrictions that were not available to Copilot Personal in the research case. DLP rules look for sensitive data such as credit card numbers, ID numbers, health data, and can block, warn, or log when someone tries to send or store it in risky ways (email, OneDrive, Teams, Power Platform connectors, and more).

Don’t click on unsolicited links before verifying with the (trusted) source whether they are safe.

Reportedly, Microsoft is testing a new policy that allows IT administrators to uninstall the AI-powered Copilot digital assistant on managed devices.

Malwarebytes users can disable Copilot for their personal machines under Tools > Privacy, where you can toggle Disable Windows Copilot to on (blue).

In general, be aware that using AI assistants still pose privacy risks. As long as there are ways for assistants to automatically ingest untrusted input—such as URL parameters, page text, metadata, and comments—and merge it into hidden system prompts or instructions without strong separation or filtering, users remain at risk of leaking private information.

So when using any AI assistant that can be driven via links, browser automation, or external content, it is reasonable to assume “Reprompt‑style” issues are at least possible and should be taken into consideration.

---

We don’t just report on threats—we remove them

Cybersecurity risks should never spread beyond a headline. Keep threats off your devices by downloading Malwarebytes today.

The attack bypassed Copilot’s data leak protections and allowed for session exfiltration even after the Copilot chat was closed.

The post New ‘Reprompt’ Attack Silently Siphons Microsoft Copilot Data appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Only a dozen new advisories have been published this Patch Tuesday by industrial giants. 

The post ICS Patch Tuesday: Vulnerabilities Fixed by Siemens, Schneider, Aveva, Phoenix Contact appeared first on SecurityWeek.

The intersection and evolution of operational technology (OT) and information technology (IT), as well as the cybersecurity risks associated with both are becoming increasingly critical business challenges for organisations of all sizes, across all geographies.

As digital transformation expands into OT environments, convergence with IT systems is inevitable. This convergence may generate exciting business opportunities, such as creating new sources of income and improving business outcomes, but it also presents new cybersecurity risks and complexities, for which many industry leaders are not prepared.

Why Is OT/IT Convergence So Complex?

There are many overlapping forces driving the OT and IT worlds together, creating a hairball of complexity from varying sources:

• People: OT and IT communities are historically different in many ways (technological, operational, regulatory and culturally) and have different priorities and focuses.
• Technology: The age of technology in OT environments means that legacy equipment and machinery are often incompatible with the latest IT software, increasing their vulnerability to cyberthreats.
• Mindsets: Historically, ‘secure by design’ has not been a focus in OT. System uptime and employee safety have traditionally been prioritised over cybersecurity in OT environments, unlike IT where cybersecurity is ingrained.

Understanding the Risk and Impact

OT/IT cybersecurity is a strategic issue, not just a technical requirement, and it must be designed into systems as early as possible. The consequences of not acting from the start far outweigh any advantages gained by disregarding the issue.

This is particularly true for critical infrastructure, such as water purification systems, power grids, air traffic control systems, communications networks and battlefield command-and-control systems, all of which are open to potential cybersecurity risk. Always assume that your adversaries are willing to exploit your Achilles heel when it comes to securing OT/IT systems.

Key Attention Areas in OT/IT Convergence

All senior business leaders should consider the following areas with OT/IT convergence and cybersecurity:

1. Mindset: Industry leaders need the right mindset to balance cybersecurity best practices with a seemingly endless number of new devices and data sources caused by OT/IT convergence.
2. Technology: Technologies, such as artificial intelligence, machine learning and cloud computing, represent both opportunities and threats in the world of OT/IT cybersecurity. Modern technology systems must be built with tomorrow’s security risks in mind.
3. Compliance: The NIS Directive and its follow-on NIS2 Directive outline the responsibility for organisations to take reasonable steps toward a solid cybersecurity posture. This applies to the increasingly digital OT world because of the classification of many OT systems as a critical infrastructure.
4. Teams: Organisations need to recognise and confront the cultural silo separating OT and IT teams in order to reduce complexity, promote collaboration and achieve a reliable, frictionless state of OT/IT cybersecurity.
5. The cloud, data and device proliferation: When digital OT systems are infected, the attacks easily and quickly move laterally over a mesh of intersecting networks, carrying ‘digital germs’ with them. The risk here is high, particularly with the huge proliferation of devices and data from converged workloads in the cloud.
6. The future: There is a growing urgency from business stakeholders to make OT systems more digitally driven to ensure agility and efficiency. Boards that are now prioritising OT/IT cybersecurity are making a strong statement about the business implications to this strategy.

Next Steps

To help you understand and prepare for the cybersecurity risks inherent at the intersection of OT and IT, we have captured insights and recommendations from forward-thinking industry experts in a new guide: Executive Edge: Peer Insights - Complexity at the intersection of IT and OT.

This Peer Insights guide for C-suite executives explores how to streamline security, reduce complexity, and anticipate threats across the IT/OT environment, ultimately helping you drive change within your organisation.

Download the Peer Insights guide.

The post The Strategic Imperative for OT/IT Convergence appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.