CISA added the Brotli flaw to its KEV catalog, and two honeypot operators logged attempts, including one that used a broken exploit.
The post CISA Warns of Node2Shell Exploitation as Honeypots Log Attack Attempts appeared first on SecurityWeek.
Every security operations center now claims to be “AI-powered.” For MSSPs, saying anything else risks being labeled old school. So what does an agentic AI SOC actually look like in production?
Jay Bavisi, founder of EC-Council and host of The Cybersecurity Podcast, put that question to Jeremy Hehl, Chief Cybersecurity Evangelist at Foresite Cybersecurity, where he leads the company’s Google SecOps partnership. Their 40-minute conversation covered the limits of autonomy, the future of the SIEM, the fate of L1 analysts, ISO 42001, and the post-quantum risk that keeps Hehl awake at night.
Hehl sees real promise in autonomous security operations. Investigation, triage, data aggregation, enrichment and correlation can already be handled by agents “pretty seamlessly,” he said. The hurdle is risk determination: deciding whether something actually matters to the business.
“The question I always ask customers who come to us and say that they want a fully autonomous SOC is: who do we fire when something goes wrong? Do we just dismiss the agent?”
Foresite’s approach treats agents as force multipliers rather than replacements. Hehl compared it to handing analysts a tricorder, a tool that scans and characterizes a threat instantly so the human can decide what to do. Bavisi summed up the model as “agents compute, human decides,” and Hehl agreed, adding that the risk call is the deciding factor.
Asked why Foresite’s Google work matters when most premier SIEMs already ship with AI built in, Hehl pointed to a coming paradigm shift in where data lives. Data sovereignty, regulated industries and ever-growing telemetry volumes are straining the traditional model.
Today, a SIEM aggregates logs into a central plane, normalizes them into fields, and runs detection logic over the result. Hehl expects that to change. Logs will increasingly stay where they reside, in a hyperscaler such as Google, Azure or AWS, and agents will synthesize the raw telemetry in place.
“The idea of a SIEM may become something that is deprecated pretty rapidly.”
He likened the economics to cell phones in the 1990s, when minutes and text messages became commoditized. Data storage will become an assumption, and providers will bill for agent activity and “token burn” instead. Keeping telemetry in BigQuery, he noted, is far cheaper than keeping it hot in a separate SIEM. “The technology has to support it, and we’re not quite there yet,” he added.
The platform is also open by design. Foresite builds primarily on Google’s Vertex AI and Gemini, but Hehl said almost any model, including Claude, can be wired in through APIs and credentials. Agents are, in effect, privileged users, though wiring in other models takes real engineering, parsing and upkeep.
Bavisi raised a trend seen worldwide: L1 roles vanishing, then L2, leaving only L3. Is that simply where agentic technology is heading?
Hehl said Foresite’s experience runs the other way. “We haven’t eliminated jobs. We’ve only grown,” he said. Adding agents to triage, threat hunting and analysis has let analysts handle 10 to 15 times the workload. They dismiss false positives quickly and spend the time saved on learning and more meaningful work.
He invoked the Industrial Revolution in England and France, when coal-powered textile machinery drew a Luddite backlash and even riots. Over time, workers using the machines became far more productive, and business owners demanded more output. This is the pattern known as Jevons Paradox, and Hehl sees agentic AI in the SOC following the same path.
Having started his own career red-teaming banks and working in a SOC, Hehl knows the burnout of triaging the same alert queue “over and over and over again.” Agents that correlate alerts into single cases, surface heuristic patterns and flag statistical outliers do that work “really, really well,” he said. The drudgery goes away; the analyst does not.
The few vendors promising fully autonomous SOC operations, he added, are narrow and tightly focused. Agents that reach a decision and enforce an action must be rigorously tested and simulated, and without clean data they hallucinate. Removing human control over security posture “is pretty unlikely in the next decade or so.”
Bavisi pressed on a core engineering problem. Ask a frontier model the same question five times and you may get five different answers. How do you build a SOC on that without hallucinations and with consistent results?
Hehl’s answer: a measured, staged deployment. Start with narrow, targeted use cases where machines clearly beat humans, such as data manipulation, API access, running queries and writing code. Then build up capability and maturity step by step.
In enterprise engagements, Foresite first gets data normalization to “basically four nines.” Only then do agents go into the automation playbooks. Hehl argued that calling an agent today is not much different from calling a cloud function that once sat as Python inside a SOAR playbook.
“If you set up markdowns and guidelines and files and restrict the identity of the agent to only do very prescriptive things, as opposed to being all-encompassing, those are the outcomes that customers are looking for.”
He also described three types of MSSP customer. Some just want their brand and stakeholders protected. Some want an extension of their blue team bench. Others come to learn the “massive wall of knobs and levers” in Google’s security portfolio. Mid-market and SMB clients mostly treat agentic capability as part of the service. Enterprises usually already run agents elsewhere in the business and need a careful path to using them for security.
The industry has swung from “fire all humans and buy all the tokens” to “fire all the tokens and hire all the humans,” Bavisi observed, and is now wobbling in the middle. Where does AI governance fit for customers?
Hehl called it “the next real frontier” for managed security providers, with ISO/IEC 42001 emerging as the benchmark in the US. As public sector bodies adopt hyperscale platforms with agentic capabilities built in, they will need observability into what fleets of agents with permissive access are doing and saying to each other. That raises hard questions: where the harness sits, what protocols apply, and how to read intent from prompts and agent behavior.
“There’s a difference between an agent that sits there and does a prescriptive task … and when we start allowing agents to quantify risk and call other tools.”
He cited Wiz, which maps every model and agent in an environment and the lines of communication between them, and partner Safe AI for observability of agent activity. The CISO’s real dilemma, he said, is simple: “I’m being told I have to deploy AI. I am deploying AI. How do I secure this?”
Bavisi divided the world into three tiers. The top 5%, such as Google, Salesforce and Microsoft, have ISO 42001, red teams and consultants. At the other end are organizations that think two ChatGPT subscriptions make them an AI company. The vast majority sit in the middle. They know AI is more than chatbots but don’t know how to adopt, defend or govern it, and they cannot afford tier-one observability tools that may cost a million dollars.
How, he asked, should a business in Hokkaido, Jordan or New Zealand handle intent drift, blast radius, agent-to-agent communication and the transfer of governance between agents?
Hehl noted a related trap. Niche AI startups often build a narrow agentic product, only for the next frontier model or hyperscaler update to build that feature in and make the company irrelevant. For the mid-market, he argued, the answer is partnership: managed providers that deliver governance and observability as part of the service, “a Sherpa through the valley.”
Bavisi pointed out that ISO 42001 has more than 190 controls, and as with ISO 27001, holding the certificate and operating by it are two different things. Do organizations show compliance for regulators while running with serious gaps?
“All the time,” Hehl said. Agentic adoption remains limited in US classified environments (IL-4 to IL-6) and in multinational bodies such as the European Space Agency, a Foresite client. In the commercial world, the most governed vertical with the largest gap is healthcare and life sciences, which holds sensitive patient data and research.
His prescription is to move telemetry into the cloud. Once workloads move from physical data centers into a hyperscaler, “the policies are native by default. And when agents are deployed, they’re governed by default.” The next big push, he said, is identity and privileged access management for agents, treating them as users. Bavisi added temporal context as another layer to solve.
Bavisi argued the industry has a duty to bring along the businesses “where the actual civilization exists.” How? Hehl’s one-word answer: consolidation.
By around 2035, he expects hyperscalers such as Google, Microsoft and AWS, along with CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks, Cisco and to some extent Oracle, to keep absorbing companies and technologies. That will make enterprise-grade tooling usable by businesses of every size from one platform. Startups will keep flourishing, and Israeli startups will stay disruptive, but Hehl predicts acquisition values will fall as vibe coding lets almost anyone build a product. He also sees Chinese and Indian AI models closing the gap with American ones, with major implications for global security over the next 20 years.
On Anthropic’s Mythos, Hehl was blunt: it is “the greatest sales tool ever created.” It has stirred fears of boogeyman vulnerabilities, but he said it is genuinely capable of discovering zero-days and attack paths that need fixing. That in turn creates business for defensive tools such as Google’s CodeMender. None of it changes the basic discipline: find attack paths, shore them up, test, repeat. “We’re never really more than 99% of the way there.”
The other barrier for the middle market is cost predictability. Token-based pricing is not yet predictable. Hehl admitted Foresite once ran an accidental $250,000 query on Gemini during iterative testing and had to ask Google for forgiveness. Predictable pricing, he said, is what will let more customers lean in.
Asked about the biggest obstacle to moving an organization from traditional security to an AI-era culture, Hehl named three:
Winning them over is part of the “trust motion,” he said, and some will never make the shift because of requirements that keep them where they are.
What keeps Hehl up at night is machine-speed attacks, which he said “are absolutely accelerating,” and frontier models built explicitly to break software and create new attacks. Beyond that is the prospect of cryptography being cracked faster than it can be rotated.
Bavisi shared the concern. He sees cracks already forming in encryption and fears the day “the dam breaks, and we’re not ready for a PQC world.” Hehl pointed to the downstream effects on blockchain, financial systems and energy grids, and the limits of what any single defender can do.
“There’s nothing we could do as an MSSP or a security practitioner to reset global cryptography … to reset the keys that we hold dear in order for us to maintain those chains of custody, privacy, and command over those systems.”
The takeaway from the conversation, Bavisi said in closing, is that the agentic SOC “is not just in the labs. It’s already in production.” The open question is whether governance, cost models and the cryptographic foundations underneath can keep up.
Jeremy Hehl, Chief Evangelist at Foresite Cybersecurity
Jeremy Hehl is Chief Evangelist at Foresite Cybersecurity, a Google Cloud Premier Partner and the 2026 Google Cloud Security Partner of the Year.
The post Who Do We Fire When the Agent Gets It Wrong? Inside the Agentic AI SOC appeared first on CISO MAG | Cyber Security Magazine.
Yesterday, two critical vulnerabilities were disclosed in PHP, the scripting language used by many websites and online services: CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619. Attackers can exploit them to remotely execute commands on any server running PHP, with no authentication required. The exploit has been dubbed PHP2Shell.
The PHP security team announced an upcoming emergency update on October 20 and released patches fixing the vulnerabilities the following day.
We’ve already covered the technical details of these vulnerabilities and explained what companies and server administrators should do. You may have safely skipped that news because you don’t run any servers — but unfortunately, the issue is not limited to businesses.
Nearly 70% of websites run on PHP, including services we use every day: wikis, online stores, smart devices with web interfaces, home network-attached storage (NAS), smart-home controllers, and much more.
Today, we explain how these vulnerabilities could affect you personally and what you can do to reduce the risks.
The vulnerability allows an attacker to steal authentication tokens from server memory. These tokens essentially act like electronic passes — telling a website that the user has already signed in. As a result, an attacker may be able to access someone else’s account without entering a password or two-factor authentication code, putting messages, documents, delivery addresses, order histories, and other confidential information at risk.
If you have network-attached storage (NAS) or a video surveillance system at home that uses a vulnerable PHP version, it may also be at risk. Depending on what level of access they gain, attackers could potentially copy, delete or encrypt files they can access.
If an attacker gains access to a vulnerable website, they can use it in virtually any way they want: trick visitors into downloading a malicious file or clicking on a phishing link, display dangerous instructions, replace payment forms or login pages with malicious ones — the list goes on and on. As a result, someone visiting a legitimate website could not only lose access to their account, but also lose money or accidentally infect their device with malware.
Below are examples of services directly affected by the vulnerabilities.
Jeedom is a smart-home platform that lets users control lighting, sensors, heating, blinds and home IoT devices. Attackers could abuse this in many ways: they could disable the alarm, track when the homeowner is away, access video from the door intercom, and more.
The developers confirmed that the new vulnerability affects their application, and have already released an emergency update — Jeedom 4.6.2. Users need to run the update twice for it to work. The developers say a fully fixed version for home users will be released in the coming days.
As mentioned above, PHP is used by roughly 70% of websites. This doesn’t mean every one of them is vulnerable: it depends on the PHP version in use and whether the site owners have already updated it. Many government websites in Europe have already suspended operations because of the new vulnerability.
Unfortunately, a website may still be vulnerable even if it appears to be working normally. An attacker could potentially take control of any legitimate website whose server hasn’t been patched yet. They could fake payment or login pages, host malicious files, or persuade users to download an “urgent update” that is actually malware.
Ordinary users have no reliable way to check whether such instructions or files are safe, so be sure to use reliable anti-phishing and antivirus protection. If you suspect that your data may have been stolen, check the active sessions in your account settings. If you spot suspicious activity or devices you don’t recognize, sign out of all active sessions and change your password. Use a password manager — it can generate a truly strong, unique password that you won’t have to memorize yourself.
Bad news for gamers: some video games whose servers use PHP are also at risk. If you don’t want attackers to get hold of your accounts, be sure to update the passwords for your gaming platforms, stores and accounts.
To buy time for updates, some developers temporarily took their services offline. Final Fantasy XIV, Pokemon Champions, games from Bandai Namco Entertainment, Uma Musume: Pretty Derby, Granblue Fantasy, Shadowverse: Worlds Beyond, and many others went into emergency maintenance. Nintendo Switch Online and the GOG and Steam stores were also affected.
Unfortunately, there’ve also been more drastic consequences. Yesterday, the developers of World Quest announced that the game would shut down permanently after 15 years: it relied on outdated infrastructure that would have been extremely difficult and costly to fix. For the same reason, the mobile game Please Save My Pandemonium! shut down after more than ten years of operation.
“Home clouds” have become popular in recent years for good reason: many users prefer to keep backups of their data at home rather than online. A number of companies make NAS devices, and at least three — QNAP, Synology and ASUSTOR — have said the vulnerabilities affect their products. An update has also been released for Unraid, an operating system for home servers, network storage and media servers.
The manufacturer confirmed that the vulnerabilities affect several versions of its NAS operating systems — QTS and QuTS hero — as well as applications including QuMagie, Note Station 3 and certain versions of QVR Surveillance. A successful attack could put photos, documents, notes and camera recordings at risk.
At the time of publication of this blogpost, QNAP is still preparing updates, so the main priority is to temporarily disconnect NAS from the internet. QNAP recommends disabling port forwarding on the router — to prevent NAS from automatically opening ports — and allowing access to the management panel only from the home network or through a VPN.
Both vulnerabilities have been officially confirmed in PHP packages 7.3, 7.4, and 8.0–8.4, as well as in Mail Station and Synology Calendar. Fixes have already been released for PHP, starting from version 7.4, as well as for Mail Station and Synology Calendar. PHP 7.3 won’t be fixed. The company separately notes that the PHP component built into its operating system cannot be reached from outside the device, so the risk of attack is very low.
ASUSTOR also officially confirmed both vulnerabilities, and immediately removed PHP 7, 7.3, 7.4, and 8.1 packages from App Central. The company recommends immediately backing up your data, removing older PHP packages, and using PHP 8.3 or 8.4.
In today’s operating-system update, PHP was upgraded to version 8.4.27 with fixes for the vulnerabilities. The developers recommend that all users update to Unraid 7.3.4. Containers with their own PHP installation must be updated separately: the new PHP version in the operating system doesn’t replace PHP inside containers.
At the time of publication, we haven’t found public confirmation from other major manufacturers (such as TerraMaster, UGREEN, Buffalo, or Western Digital) that their devices are affected by these vulnerabilities — only user discussions on forums.
But the fact that only some NAS manufacturers have confirmed the problem so far doesn’t guarantee that your devices are safe — especially if they’re fairly old or come from a lesser-known or defunct manufacturer. In that case, first disconnect the devices from the internet while keeping them accessible only on the local network, and then investigate whether they’re vulnerable.
Nextcloud is a free, open-source platform for creating your own cloud storage, serving as an alternative to Google Drive, Dropbox, and Microsoft OneDrive. It lets you store and synchronize files across devices, share them with other users, and work with documents, photos, calendars and contacts. The data can be stored on your own server or NAS rather than on a third-party company’s servers.
If you store important data in Nextcloud, check how your cloud instance is configured. If you use Nextcloud All-in-One, update to version 14.4.1 where the vulnerability has already been fixed.
If your Nextcloud installation is configured differently, you need to update PHP yourself on the device or server.
What other risks can your home devices face? Read our articles:
Detection engineering is both a role and an activity. It’s the discipline of building and maintaining the logic that identifies malicious or risky behavior within your organization. It’s where security analysis meets software engineering, turning raw logs and telemetry into actionable detections that defenders can rely on.
Detection engineers bridge the gaps between security operations, threat intelligence, and infrastructure. They understand how attackers operate, how defenders respond, and how systems generate the data that supports those detections. A well-built detection can mean the difference between an alert that matters and one that drowns in noise.
Every detection faces a trade-off between precision and recall.
Precision measures how much you can trust your alerts: of everything that fired, how much was actually malicious? High precision = fewer false positives = analysts trust the tool.
Recall measures how much you’re catching: of everything malicious that happened, how much did you detect? High recall = fewer blind spots = threats don’t slip through.
Detection engineering lives in the tension between the two: too much precision risks missing subtle threats; too much recall floods analysts with false positives. The goal is calibration through testing, iteration, and feedback.
Start with intent. What are you trying to detect, and why? Define the threats, behaviors, or assets that matter most, then align your work with frameworks such as MITRE ATT&CK®. Evaluate risk and value to determine which detections provide the highest impact for the effort required. Prioritize based on business importance and available telemetry.
Great detections rely on great data. Keep inventory of your logs. Validate that each contains the data you need. Normalize and enrich your logs so detections remain consistent across tools and environments. Understanding how logs are generated is essential to writing logic that fits your environment.
This is where hypothesis meets code. Write queries or rules that detect behaviors, not just static indicators. Combine multiple approaches:
Use adversary emulations or frameworks like Atomic Red Team to verify that your detections actually fire and your logging is working. Measure quality through precision, recall, and additional factors like confidence (how certain you are it’s malicious) and criticality (how severe the impact would be).
Monitor performance, including trigger frequency, false positive rates, and analyst response time. Detection engineering is iterative and ongoing, not “write once and done.”
Good detections come with context. Record what the detection looks for, why it matters, what data it uses, and how it was tested. Version control your rules using Git and promote collaboration so analysts, hunters, and engineers can learn from one another. Playbooks and detection libraries ensure institutional knowledge does not disappear when staff change roles.
Track measurable outcomes such as coverage across ATT&CK® techniques, number of validated detections, false positive rates, and mean time to detect. Regularly retire stale detections, update ones that drift, and automate validation wherever possible. Detection-as-Code practices keep everything maintainable and scalable.
Detection engineering requires a strong foundation in logging, security tooling, and incident response. You should understand when it’s best to detect, when to block, and how to use data sources effectively.
Whether you’re building your first rule or managing hundreds, the mindset remains the same: test everything, learn constantly, and make each detection better than the last.
Explore resources like:
detectionengineering.net and SigmaHQ.
Follow community leaders like:
Zack Allen (Detection Engineering Weekly) and Haider Dost (Threat Detection Maturity Framework).
Study detections and see how others approach logic design at:
Read:
Practical Threat Detection Engineering.
For more resources check out:
Eight compromised eMudhra intermediate CA private keys risk unauthorized TLS signing and MitM interception. Read our analysis and containment guide.
The post EMudhra Intermediate CA Certificates Compromised appeared first on Unit 42.
Anonymous imageboards have long been places where users could chat under pseudonyms without revealing their real names. But now people on these forums are discussing and testing AI tools for doxing — that is, for finding, matching, and publishing users’ data without their consent. Often this goes hand in hand with stalking the victim, hacking their accounts, bullying, and blackmail, and ultimately leads to a damaged reputation or even worse.
In this post, we explain how artificial intelligence helps malicious actors leak other people’s data — and how to stand up for your right to online privacy.
Analysts at Open Measures have reported that, since October 2025, users of Soyjak.party, an imageboard popular with young people on the far right, have been discussing and using AI to deanonymize other users. Their victims are often activists, bloggers, and members of other “hostile” forums.
The tools the experts found run right in the browser, and automate almost the entire process of collecting information about a victim. They can search open sources and leak databases, and they use any new leads — for example, an email address linked to a username — to dig even deeper. They also extract metadata from photos and videos, estimate a person’s approximate location from IP addresses they find, and finally put everything together into one huge digital dossier. These Soyjak.party tools are no longer functional, but similar ones have been spreading across other imageboards.
In February 2026, researchers demonstrated that sometimes ordinary forum chatter is enough to reveal who you are. They put together summaries of posts by 338 Hacker News users, removed names, usernames, and social media links, and then asked AI to work out who was behind them. The AI compared details about jobs, interests, and personal background with information available online — and correctly identified 226 of the people, or about two-thirds of the sample. The price of deanonymization turned out to be laughably low — at between US$1 and US$4 per user.
To be fair, people knew how to build digital dossiers even before the generative AI boom. For starters, there are OSINT tools that search for data in open sources. Journalists and investigators were the first to use them, but, as you might guess, malicious actors soon mastered these tools too. Unlike AI models and agents, traditional OSINT services follow set scripts and can’t “think” or make decisions on the fly.
If you think doxing always needs a person with ill intent, we’ve bad news: sometimes the one settling scores can be… artificial intelligence itself.
Here’s a story that started out innocuously enough. An AI agent running on the much-hyped OpenClaw platform suggested an improvement for Matplotlib, a popular tool for building graphs and charts. But the project’s rules said that code submitted by AI agents wasn’t accepted. One of the project’s volunteers, Scott Shambaugh, simply turned down the AI’s suggestion.
You’d think that would be the end of it. Think again! The AI agent decided the rejection deserved some publicity, so it published an “exposé” about the developer on its blog (yes, you read that right: the agent had its own blog). It gathered information about Shambaugh from open sources, studied his public activity, and accused him of being biased against AI. It even started speculating about the developer’s psychological motives, and suggested he was afraid of competition from artificial intelligence.
Once this “private” conversation between Shambaugh and the AI agent went public, other users rallied behind the developer — and the agent had to publish an “apology” post.
It’s a pretty absurd story, but it teaches a good lesson: always read the privacy policy of any AI service carefully, and steer clear of new models from unknown sources.
If AI speeds up searches and connects the dots between details that used to be scattered across dozens of websites, the next logical question is: what can you do to shrink your digital footprint?
Disappearing from the internet completely is almost impossible. So protecting your data isn’t so much about leaving as few traces as possible, but cutting the number of links that can be used to piece together your identity. If you’re an advanced user, we recommend reading our post, How to disappear from the internet, in addition to the tips below.
The more websites that know your email, the more often it will show up in advertising profiles and potential leaks. For one-time and minor sign-ups, you can use an email masking service. All Apple users get this feature by default (Hide My Email). If you use another OS, you could try Firefox Relay, for example.
The service then creates a separate proxy email address for the website where you’re trying to sign up. Messages sent to that address are automatically forwarded to your real inbox, but the website never sees your real email address.
If you want to go all in, you can try splitting your digital life into several sub-personas by hand. Create several email addresses for different purposes. For example, use one for online stores, banks, and government services, a second for public social media, and a third for forums and social networks where you want to stay anonymous.
Keep in mind that all this is a challenge: you’ll need to keep coming up with new nicknames, and make sure your sub-personas never overlap. If you use an email address for an anonymous profile, don’t link it to services that already have your real details, and don’t use it as a backup email for a public account. One accidental link can easily undo all your effort.
If you’ve recently broken up with a partner, make sure you check which parts of your shared digital life they can still access. Sadly, it’s very often ex-partners who become doxers or stalkers — spying on their former other half and stopping at nothing to do so. For more details on exactly what to do in this situation, read our article Post-breakup digital hygiene: what to check and shut down.
Many countries have a right-to-be-forgotten law. It lets you ask search engines to remove links to pages that contain your personal data.
You can send the links to those pages, explain why you want them hidden, and request that they be removed from search results. Keep in mind that the page with your data isn’t deleted. Other search engines may still show it, and it may still turn up for other search queries.
To submit a request like this, use the dedicated forms from Google or Bing. But remember that a search engine can turn you down if it decides the information is in the public interest, or that the law requires it to be published.
There are more effective, though more time-consuming, ways to remove your data from the internet. We covered them in detail in our post, Why data brokers build dossiers on you, and how to stop them doing so.
Looking for more ways to protect your digital identity? Check out our other posts:
Imagine you’ve ordered a small paper unicorn from an online marketplace. You clicked “Buy”, received a cheerful notification, and expect a courier to bring the box tomorrow. If the unicorn is delayed by a day, it will be annoying but not catastrophic: an apology, a discount promo code — and the incident is forgotten.
Now let’s multiply one late unicorn by several hundred thousand orders.
Packages start heading to the wrong cities. The website shows an item is in stock, even though the required bin is empty. Conveyors stop, boxes get stuck between floors, the cargo piles up with no freight manifest. Trucks line up at the gates, and every minute of downtime turns into blown schedules, support tickets, fines, and lost sales.
It is at exactly this scale that a cyberincident in a warehouse becomes a problem for the entire business. A modern warehouse is no longer just a big building with shelving. It is a tightly interconnected hybrid system: web applications, radio channels, and an automated factory. Physical processes here depend on data, and errors in data have very physical consequences. Examples include an outage that affected warehouse management systems at the grocery giant Morrisons, and the 2025 Form 10-K annual report of United Natural Foods, Inc. (UNFI), which confirmed unauthorized activity on information technology systems that impacted order fulfillment. More recently, reports emerged that a cyberattack disrupted eight CEVA Logistics warehouses across Europe and exposed customer delivery data.
This paper follows a single order through a warehouse to show where the operation is vulnerable, the stages it traverses, the systems that drive it, and the points where an attacker can reach them. We then set out the threat model: what is at risk, who is in a position to take it, and how each risk lands on the business. From there, we look at how an attacker gets in, and what reaching the warehouse management system costs in practical terms: orders unshipped, inventory records nobody can trust, and an operation that stops. We close with recommendations on where the controls that matter actually sit.
A modern warehouse is a sequence of stages involving many machines and people, all working together to keep the business process stable so that, in the end, your order gets delivered. This process consists of eight main stages, shown in the figure below.
Stages of order fulfillment
So let’s assume we’ve ordered our paper unicorn and are waiting for it at home. Let’s follow our order through all the main stages, from its arrival at the warehouse to the final stop on its journey.
All eight stages are coordinated by the WMS. It looks like a large web application, but in its role it’s closer to the operating system of the entire warehouse: it knows which goods exist, where they’re located, who or what should move them, and where they go next, linking employees, inventory levels, storage addresses, tasks, and orders. It also exchanges data externally: with ERP systems, transport platforms, marketplaces, dark stores, and external carriers.
Surrounding the WMS is an even larger digital ecosystem: identity services, databases, APIs, printers, carrier systems, technicians’ laptops, video surveillance, access control, fire and gas alarms, power supply, and a building management system (BMS).
That is why a single “warehouse network” doesn’t really exist. As we’ve seen, there are many overlapping technologies — IT infrastructure, OT systems, radio, cloud services, building security, and automation — layered on top of one another. A lone vulnerability scanner will never tell you whether a warehouse is secure.
Securing an environment such as a warehouse requires a comprehensive security assessment covering all of its interconnected systems. This involves identifying vulnerabilities across each system and understanding how weaknesses can be combined into attack paths that a real attacker could exploit. But a vulnerability only matters in proportion to what it exposes and who is able to reach it, so before looking at the weaknesses themselves, we need to understand what an attacker in this environment is actually after, because in a warehouse, the blast radius extends well beyond data. Everything we just traced — the systems, the devices, and the people operating them — exists to keep goods moving, and attacks in various parts along that chain can affect the business differently. The chart below shows what is at risk in the warehouse and where those risks land for the business. The segment on the left groups them under the three core security properties: integrity, availability, and confidentiality. The segment on the right maps each property to the business outcomes a failure can cause.
Warehouse risks
The first area at risk is integrity. Inventory counts, locations, orders, and shipment data must stay in sync with the physical world. Corrupting a record silently desynchronizes the operation, and because the eight stages form a dependency chain, one falsified entry early on is inherited downstream, surfacing later as stockouts and mis-shipments. In its deliberate forms, this lets an attacker redirect goods, release stock, and perform other actions on behalf of the platform’s vendors under cover of legitimate records. Integrity is also a safety concern: when people or machines act on information that no longer reflects the physical environment, a data failure can become a physical incident. This is why integrity is the only property linked to all five outcomes, including harm to people.
The second is availability, the warehouse’s ability to keep goods moving. Halting a conveyor, a sorter, label printing, or the WMS stops orders from shipping, and in a business built on speed, every hour of downtime means delayed deliveries and broken promises. Ransomware can bring the whole warehouse to a standstill. The impact shows up as operational disruption, lost revenue, and reputational damage.
The third is confidentiality. Customer data, business records, and system credentials are valuable targets. Their exposure leads to legal liability and reputational damage, and stolen credentials often open the door to further attacks. Where the WMS connects to financial or ERP processes, the risk extends to theft of funds.
Knowing what is at risk tells us what an attacker stands to gain; the next question is who is in a position to take it. Threat actors differ in the access they already hold. For example, an attacker may be authenticated and privileged, have limited physical or remote access, or have no legitimate access to the environment at all. Based on their relationship with the warehouse and their level of access, threat actors can generally be divided into two categories:
Combining these threat actors and their access levels with the risks identified earlier, the vulnerabilities present in each system, the resulting attack surfaces, and the potential attack paths between them provides a threat model for the warehouse environment. This allows an organization to understand how different systems and people could be targeted, how individual weaknesses could be combined, and where security controls are most needed.
Knowing what is at risk and who might come after it still leaves the most practical question open: how they would actually get in, and how far they could go once they did. The diagram below sets out the warehouse’s attack surface: every point where an attacker can get in, organized by the access that reaching each point requires.
Warehouse attack surface
On the left are the attacker categories discussed above, distinguished by where they stand and what access they already hold. Each reaches the environment through a different set of entry points, and the impact of a successful attack can land on several systems, from the WMS to OT systems such as robots, sorters, and physical access control system (PACS). The WMS is highlighted because it is the most significant of these: it coordinates the OT systems, so compromising it can affect the entire operation rather than a single process.
Next, we will cover the initial access vectors, the points a threat actor can use to reach the warehouse environment. Following that, we turn to the impact on the logistics processes themselves, focusing on the WMS, since its compromise affects every logistics operation that depends on it.
Remote access through internet-facing services, third-party connections, and corporate networks gives an external attacker a foothold on the warehouse network infrastructure. It is a well-covered problem and not specific to this environment, so we note it here as an entry point but will not examine it further.
Wi-Fi connects handhelds, tablets, printers, cameras, and workstations. Bluetooth serves scanners, headsets, and positioning beacons. Zigbee and similar low-power protocols run lighting, sensors, and building automation, while LoRaWAN carries telemetry over long distances. Cellular provides a backup channel for kiosks and contractor equipment, and proprietary protocols control industrial panels and specialized machinery.
Radio passes through windows, gates, roofing, and thin external panels, so a network built for receiving and processing goods may be reachable from the parking lot and, with a directional antenna, from considerably farther away.
That reach matters in two ways. It gives an external attacker a place to start, as proximity alone is enough to reach the Wi-Fi and the low-power protocols, and from there to gain an initial foothold in the warehouse networks.
However, radio does not only lead into the network. It also connects directly to the field devices and carries the live control traffic of warehouse operations, which makes availability a first-order concern. If hundreds of handhelds lose their connection at once, picking stops. If an AGV loses its control channel, the safe reaction may be to halt in place, and a stopped machine can block an entire route.
The scale of the warehouse itself is part of the attack surface. A fulfillment warehouse can run up to tens of thousands of square meters, with racking climbing several stories and walkways threading through it. Structured cabling runs along that racking, cameras and access points are mounted on that, and wall jacks sit behind pallets that have not moved in months. Almost none of it is in anyone’s line of sight.
That gives a person in the warehouse something a normal office does not: unsupervised access to live network infrastructure. Unplugging a ceiling camera leaves an active port. An unused jack behind a shelf leaves another. Neither requires tools, credentials, or any interaction with a system that logs anything. And since the camera or access point sits on the same segment as the rest of the site, the compromised port, not being isolated, opens a path to the network core.
Barcode scanners are everywhere in a warehouse. They are the main tool workers use to tell the system what is moving and where, supporting receiving, picking, packing, and inventory management. A typical setup has handheld scanners communicating with a base station, which is in turn connected to a workstation or another business system.
This makes the scanner an entry point into the core network in two ways.
First, through the barcode itself. Since the scanner acts as a keyboard to the connected host, a maliciously crafted barcode or QR code can inject keystrokes when scanned, potentially giving the attacker an initial foothold on the host without directly accessing the network.
Second, through the scanner’s wireless link. During a customer engagement, with the provided test stand of such a device, we discovered that an attacker within range could inject keystrokes into the connected host and potentially achieve remote code execution without user interaction. This attack pattern was observed across multiple vendors, including, for example, Honeywell devices affected by CVE-2026-4272.
In both cases, the result is the same: a foothold on a host inside the warehouse network. The scanner is simply the entry point; the significance of that foothold comes from the host’s trusted position within the operational environment and its connectivity to core systems.
Portable data terminals (PDTs) are essentially ordinary Android devices with an embedded barcode scanner, carried by workers to scan items; each scan is passed to a dedicated application that forwards it to a remote server over an API. To keep workers on task, the devices usually run in kiosk mode, locking the user to that single application and preventing interaction with the rest of the Android system.
That lockdown is exactly what an attacker wants to break, and breaking it is what turns the terminal into an initial access vector: escaping the kiosk can expose the Wi-Fi password of the network the terminal is connected to, or allow malicious software to be installed that gives the attacker remote access to the network over the internet.
Warehouses contain different types of printers. Alongside the usual IT printers used for documents and paperwork, there are specialized thermal printers, small devices that use heated elements on the printhead to create labels, barcodes, and tags. As we mentioned earlier, these are mainly used to print the labels, usually containing barcodes, that are attached to goods during the putaway stage.
Here we focus on mobile thermal printers: small, battery-powered devices that workers can carry or wear. They typically connect to the internal network over Wi-Fi to receive print commands, while also supporting Bluetooth for connecting to nearby devices. This combination makes them a potential entry point into the internal network.
Some models, such as the Zebra ZQ630, support multiple interfaces and can run applications directly on the device. During a security assessment, we discovered that apps can be uploaded and executed over Bluetooth. By exploiting a pairing misconfiguration, an attacker within Bluetooth range could bypass pairing, upload malicious software, and gain an initial foothold through the printer.
With a foothold in the network, an attacker can pivot to the logistics processes themselves: from the WMS through the warehouse infrastructure to the PLCs and the machinery they drive. As we saw earlier, all OT systems and devices are interconnected and the WMS sits at the head of that chain: it is the system of record every other process reads from and writes to, so compromising it reaches all of them at once. That, and its being specific to this environment, is why it is the focus here.
Warehouse management systems (WMS) are the software platforms that optimize warehouse processes from the entry of goods to their exit. They provide real-time visibility into inventory and orchestrate end-to-end fulfillment by integrating with many warehouse subsystems and pieces of automation equipment, such as conveyors, PLCs, robotics, scanners, and voice systems. A typical WMS includes modules for receiving, inventory control, order management, labor management, shipping, and reporting. Major vendors include SAP EWM, Oracle Warehouse Management, Manhattan Active, Blue Yonder, Infor, Körber/HighJump, Microsoft, and TECSYS.
To picture how central this is, think back to our unicorn. From the moment it was scanned at receiving, it stopped being only a physical box and became a record inside the WMS, a record the system then used to decide where it should be stored, when it should be picked, how it should be sorted, and where it should ship. Every device employed along the way — the PDT at receiving, the printer at putaway, the workstation at picking, the conveyor at sorting — was really just talking to the WMS. It is the thread that ties all eight stages together, which is exactly what makes it such a valuable target.
Because modern WMS platforms are usually web-based and heavily interconnected, they inherit common web and API vulnerabilities alongside flaws specific to the WMS itself. A recent example is CVE-2026-70774 in Oracle Warehouse Management, part of Oracle E-Business Suite. Oracle rated it High and described it as an easily exploitable authorization bypass flaw in which a low-privileged attacker with network access can compromise the application, affecting integrity and availability by allowing unauthorized creation, deletion, or modification of critical data.
A flaw like this may look like a typical web application issue, but its consequences in a warehouse are more serious, because the WMS is the system of record. If an attacker can modify its data, they can alter stock levels, bin locations, receiving records, picking tasks, or shipment information, silently corrupting the digital twin of the warehouse. And since the eight stages form a dependency chain, that corruption doesn’t stay contained: a falsified record at receiving is inherited by putaway, picking, and everything downstream. The physical box and its record diverge, and every later process trusts the record.
The most direct version of this attack comes from an authorization bypass flaw like the Oracle vulnerability above. Here the threat actor can be an external attacker who has reached the application over the network, or an insider such as a low-privileged operator or storekeeper who already holds a legitimate account.
The danger grows when such a flaw is chained with others. An external attacker who combines remote code execution with SQL injection could generate shipment orders to arbitrary addresses together with the documents needed for goods to physically leave the warehouse, fabricate waybills, acceptance or transfer records, and registers, while also exposing customer data such as names and delivery addresses. In effect, the goods are sent out with legitimate-looking paperwork.
This is why ordinary web vulnerabilities carry considerable weight in a WMS. For an external attacker or an insider probing beyond their assigned role, broken access control could open a path into another warehouse zone, allow manipulation of other workers’ tasks, permit unauthorized exception operations, or expose administrative APIs. A server-side request forgery flaw could force the WMS server to reach resources an external attacker cannot touch directly, and if the network is flat or only formally segmented, that server may in turn reach internal management panels, cloud service interfaces, or systems sitting close to the operational network, turning a single web bug into a bridge between IT and OT.
Attacks on a WMS don’t always target the application directly, though. As we saw while tracing the unicorn, the warehouse is full of connected devices that already hold trusted access. A handheld terminal carries authenticated WMS API access as a matter of course, and anyone who gains control of that terminal inherits it (by escaping the kiosk, for example). Depending on the device’s permissions, that might mean confirming picks that never occurred, falsifying receiving operations, adjusting stock counts, or marking orders complete — something warehouse employees themselves could use to avoid their assigned duties.
Where the WMS is connected to control and automation systems, access to the WMS can extend into physical operations, including conveyors, sorting systems, lifts, doors, and pumps.
PLCs translate WMS instructions and sensor inputs into physical actions. Compromising a system that controls them therefore creates an opportunity to manipulate those actions. The impact can be as simple as a sorting diverter sending boxes down the wrong route, a conveyor repeatedly entering an error state and creating a backlog, or a falsified sensor value causing a line to be treated as clear when it is full.
However the WMS is compromised, the business consequence is the same: inventory corruption, unauthorized shipments, and operational disruption, each reaching the customer in the end as a late or missing delivery, the wrong item in the box, or a personal address exposed to a stranger.
We followed our unicorn through web applications and databases, radio channels and PDTs, printers, conveyors, robots, and the loading zone. Because warehouse environments combine IT, OT, wireless, physical, and human components, security controls should be implemented as a single, coordinated security architecture rather than as isolated measures. Network segmentation should be a foundational control, with clear separation between corporate IT, warehouse OT, operational devices, management networks, and externally connected systems. Segmentation should also extend across facilities and customer environments so that each site and customer integration is isolated from the others, limiting the potential impact of a compromise. A zero-trust approach should reinforce this architecture by requiring explicit authentication and authorization for connections between systems, regardless of their network location, and by applying least-privilege access wherever possible. Regular penetration testing of the corporate IT environment, including domain services, identity infrastructure, and endpoints, should be incorporated into the warehouse security program.
Physical and network access controls should be implemented together. Access to warehouse facilities, network rooms, communication cabinets, and operational areas should be restricted according to business need, with appropriate authentication, monitoring, and access logging. Network infrastructure should be hardened through controls such as switch port security, MAC-based access restrictions where appropriate, and IEEE 802.1X with EAP-TLS for strong device and user authentication. Network equipment should also be securely configured and regularly reviewed to ensure that unused interfaces, insecure management protocols, default credentials, and unnecessary services are disabled.
Web applications and their supporting infrastructure should be governed through a secure software development lifecycle (SSDLC), including security requirements, secure coding practices, code and dependency review, and application security assessment before deployment and throughout the application’s lifecycle. Third-party applications and components should be continuously monitored and updated, with a defined vulnerability and patch management process. This should explicitly include warehouse management systems (WMS), warehouse portals, APIs, and other applications that provide operational or customer-facing functionality.
Wireless technologies should be subject to dedicated security assessment and engineering. Radio-frequency surveys should be conducted to establish expected coverage, identify unauthorized or unexpected signals, validate the availability and protection of operational communications, and determine whether wireless deployments create unintended access paths into warehouse networks. Wireless security should be assessed not only from a connectivity perspective but also in terms of authentication, encryption, device provisioning, protocol exposure, interference resilience, and the potential impact of unauthorized devices.
Warehouse operational devices should be incorporated into the organization’s endpoint security and vulnerability management processes. Devices should receive security updates and firmware patches on a defined schedule, with accelerated remediation for critical vulnerabilities. Security assessments should be performed periodically to identify weaknesses in device configuration, applications, exposed services, and authentication mechanisms.
Personnel security should form an additional layer of the warehouse security architecture. In most industrial and ICS environments, getting inside means clearing background checks, holding relevant qualifications, or proving prior experience; the hiring process itself acts as a filter. A warehouse is different. Roles in sorting, packing, and courier work are hired quickly and in volume, and they typically require no prior expertise, certification, or specialized background at all. An ordinary person can walk in off the street, be hired within days, and immediately hold legitimate physical access to the facility. Therefore, a more restrictive and risk-based approach to hiring should be considered, particularly for roles that provide access to sensitive areas, operational systems, network infrastructure, or customer assets.
Ultimately, all of these measures serve the same objective: protecting the continuity and reliability of the warehouse as a whole. This matters because real warehouses handle food, medicines, machine parts, and the millions of ordinary things people and companies depend on every day. Protecting their journey means seeing the warehouse as it has actually become: a single digital system with doors, motors, shelving, and radio signals, and with entirely real consequences when it fails. And if the security program works, the customer never knows any of this happened. The unicorn simply arrives at the scheduled time.
If your warehouse operations rely on interconnected systems like these, we can help identify the gaps before an adversary does. Reach out to discuss a security assessment.
Imagine you’ve ordered a small paper unicorn from an online marketplace. You clicked “Buy”, received a cheerful notification, and expect a courier to bring the box tomorrow. If the unicorn is delayed by a day, it will be annoying but not catastrophic: an apology, a discount promo code — and the incident is forgotten.
Now let’s multiply one late unicorn by several hundred thousand orders.
Packages start heading to the wrong cities. The website shows an item is in stock, even though the required bin is empty. Conveyors stop, boxes get stuck between floors, the cargo piles up with no freight manifest. Trucks line up at the gates, and every minute of downtime turns into blown schedules, support tickets, fines, and lost sales.
It is at exactly this scale that a cyberincident in a warehouse becomes a problem for the entire business. A modern warehouse is no longer just a big building with shelving. It is a tightly interconnected hybrid system: web applications, radio channels, and an automated factory. Physical processes here depend on data, and errors in data have very physical consequences. Examples include an outage that affected warehouse management systems at the grocery giant Morrisons, and the 2025 Form 10-K annual report of United Natural Foods, Inc. (UNFI), which confirmed unauthorized activity on information technology systems that impacted order fulfillment. More recently, reports emerged that a cyberattack disrupted eight CEVA Logistics warehouses across Europe and exposed customer delivery data.
This paper follows a single order through a warehouse to show where the operation is vulnerable, the stages it traverses, the systems that drive it, and the points where an attacker can reach them. We then set out the threat model: what is at risk, who is in a position to take it, and how each risk lands on the business. From there, we look at how an attacker gets in, and what reaching the warehouse management system costs in practical terms: orders unshipped, inventory records nobody can trust, and an operation that stops. We close with recommendations on where the controls that matter actually sit.
A modern warehouse is a sequence of stages involving many machines and people, all working together to keep the business process stable so that, in the end, your order gets delivered. This process consists of eight main stages, shown in the figure below.
Stages of order fulfillment
So let’s assume we’ve ordered our paper unicorn and are waiting for it at home. Let’s follow our order through all the main stages, from its arrival at the warehouse to the final stop on its journey.
All eight stages are coordinated by the WMS. It looks like a large web application, but in its role it’s closer to the operating system of the entire warehouse: it knows which goods exist, where they’re located, who or what should move them, and where they go next, linking employees, inventory levels, storage addresses, tasks, and orders. It also exchanges data externally: with ERP systems, transport platforms, marketplaces, dark stores, and external carriers.
Surrounding the WMS is an even larger digital ecosystem: identity services, databases, APIs, printers, carrier systems, technicians’ laptops, video surveillance, access control, fire and gas alarms, power supply, and a building management system (BMS).
That is why a single “warehouse network” doesn’t really exist. As we’ve seen, there are many overlapping technologies — IT infrastructure, OT systems, radio, cloud services, building security, and automation — layered on top of one another. A lone vulnerability scanner will never tell you whether a warehouse is secure.
Securing an environment such as a warehouse requires a comprehensive security assessment covering all of its interconnected systems. This involves identifying vulnerabilities across each system and understanding how weaknesses can be combined into attack paths that a real attacker could exploit. But a vulnerability only matters in proportion to what it exposes and who is able to reach it, so before looking at the weaknesses themselves, we need to understand what an attacker in this environment is actually after, because in a warehouse, the blast radius extends well beyond data. Everything we just traced — the systems, the devices, and the people operating them — exists to keep goods moving, and attacks in various parts along that chain can affect the business differently. The chart below shows what is at risk in the warehouse and where those risks land for the business. The segment on the left groups them under the three core security properties: integrity, availability, and confidentiality. The segment on the right maps each property to the business outcomes a failure can cause.
Warehouse risks
The first area at risk is integrity. Inventory counts, locations, orders, and shipment data must stay in sync with the physical world. Corrupting a record silently desynchronizes the operation, and because the eight stages form a dependency chain, one falsified entry early on is inherited downstream, surfacing later as stockouts and mis-shipments. In its deliberate forms, this lets an attacker redirect goods, release stock, and perform other actions on behalf of the platform’s vendors under cover of legitimate records. Integrity is also a safety concern: when people or machines act on information that no longer reflects the physical environment, a data failure can become a physical incident. This is why integrity is the only property linked to all five outcomes, including harm to people.
The second is availability, the warehouse’s ability to keep goods moving. Halting a conveyor, a sorter, label printing, or the WMS stops orders from shipping, and in a business built on speed, every hour of downtime means delayed deliveries and broken promises. Ransomware can bring the whole warehouse to a standstill. The impact shows up as operational disruption, lost revenue, and reputational damage.
The third is confidentiality. Customer data, business records, and system credentials are valuable targets. Their exposure leads to legal liability and reputational damage, and stolen credentials often open the door to further attacks. Where the WMS connects to financial or ERP processes, the risk extends to theft of funds.
Knowing what is at risk tells us what an attacker stands to gain; the next question is who is in a position to take it. Threat actors differ in the access they already hold. For example, an attacker may be authenticated and privileged, have limited physical or remote access, or have no legitimate access to the environment at all. Based on their relationship with the warehouse and their level of access, threat actors can generally be divided into two categories:
Combining these threat actors and their access levels with the risks identified earlier, the vulnerabilities present in each system, the resulting attack surfaces, and the potential attack paths between them provides a threat model for the warehouse environment. This allows an organization to understand how different systems and people could be targeted, how individual weaknesses could be combined, and where security controls are most needed.
Knowing what is at risk and who might come after it still leaves the most practical question open: how they would actually get in, and how far they could go once they did. The diagram below sets out the warehouse’s attack surface: every point where an attacker can get in, organized by the access that reaching each point requires.
Warehouse attack surface
On the left are the attacker categories discussed above, distinguished by where they stand and what access they already hold. Each reaches the environment through a different set of entry points, and the impact of a successful attack can land on several systems, from the WMS to OT systems such as robots, sorters, and physical access control system (PACS). The WMS is highlighted because it is the most significant of these: it coordinates the OT systems, so compromising it can affect the entire operation rather than a single process.
Next, we will cover the initial access vectors, the points a threat actor can use to reach the warehouse environment. Following that, we turn to the impact on the logistics processes themselves, focusing on the WMS, since its compromise affects every logistics operation that depends on it.
Remote access through internet-facing services, third-party connections, and corporate networks gives an external attacker a foothold on the warehouse network infrastructure. It is a well-covered problem and not specific to this environment, so we note it here as an entry point but will not examine it further.
Wi-Fi connects handhelds, tablets, printers, cameras, and workstations. Bluetooth serves scanners, headsets, and positioning beacons. Zigbee and similar low-power protocols run lighting, sensors, and building automation, while LoRaWAN carries telemetry over long distances. Cellular provides a backup channel for kiosks and contractor equipment, and proprietary protocols control industrial panels and specialized machinery.
Radio passes through windows, gates, roofing, and thin external panels, so a network built for receiving and processing goods may be reachable from the parking lot and, with a directional antenna, from considerably farther away.
That reach matters in two ways. It gives an external attacker a place to start, as proximity alone is enough to reach the Wi-Fi and the low-power protocols, and from there to gain an initial foothold in the warehouse networks.
However, radio does not only lead into the network. It also connects directly to the field devices and carries the live control traffic of warehouse operations, which makes availability a first-order concern. If hundreds of handhelds lose their connection at once, picking stops. If an AGV loses its control channel, the safe reaction may be to halt in place, and a stopped machine can block an entire route.
The scale of the warehouse itself is part of the attack surface. A fulfillment warehouse can run up to tens of thousands of square meters, with racking climbing several stories and walkways threading through it. Structured cabling runs along that racking, cameras and access points are mounted on that, and wall jacks sit behind pallets that have not moved in months. Almost none of it is in anyone’s line of sight.
That gives a person in the warehouse something a normal office does not: unsupervised access to live network infrastructure. Unplugging a ceiling camera leaves an active port. An unused jack behind a shelf leaves another. Neither requires tools, credentials, or any interaction with a system that logs anything. And since the camera or access point sits on the same segment as the rest of the site, the compromised port, not being isolated, opens a path to the network core.
Barcode scanners are everywhere in a warehouse. They are the main tool workers use to tell the system what is moving and where, supporting receiving, picking, packing, and inventory management. A typical setup has handheld scanners communicating with a base station, which is in turn connected to a workstation or another business system.
This makes the scanner an entry point into the core network in two ways.
First, through the barcode itself. Since the scanner acts as a keyboard to the connected host, a maliciously crafted barcode or QR code can inject keystrokes when scanned, potentially giving the attacker an initial foothold on the host without directly accessing the network.
Second, through the scanner’s wireless link. During a customer engagement, with the provided test stand of such a device, we discovered that an attacker within range could inject keystrokes into the connected host and potentially achieve remote code execution without user interaction. This attack pattern was observed across multiple vendors, including, for example, Honeywell devices affected by CVE-2026-4272.
In both cases, the result is the same: a foothold on a host inside the warehouse network. The scanner is simply the entry point; the significance of that foothold comes from the host’s trusted position within the operational environment and its connectivity to core systems.
Portable data terminals (PDTs) are essentially ordinary Android devices with an embedded barcode scanner, carried by workers to scan items; each scan is passed to a dedicated application that forwards it to a remote server over an API. To keep workers on task, the devices usually run in kiosk mode, locking the user to that single application and preventing interaction with the rest of the Android system.
That lockdown is exactly what an attacker wants to break, and breaking it is what turns the terminal into an initial access vector: escaping the kiosk can expose the Wi-Fi password of the network the terminal is connected to, or allow malicious software to be installed that gives the attacker remote access to the network over the internet.
Warehouses contain different types of printers. Alongside the usual IT printers used for documents and paperwork, there are specialized thermal printers, small devices that use heated elements on the printhead to create labels, barcodes, and tags. As we mentioned earlier, these are mainly used to print the labels, usually containing barcodes, that are attached to goods during the putaway stage.
Here we focus on mobile thermal printers: small, battery-powered devices that workers can carry or wear. They typically connect to the internal network over Wi-Fi to receive print commands, while also supporting Bluetooth for connecting to nearby devices. This combination makes them a potential entry point into the internal network.
Some models, such as the Zebra ZQ630, support multiple interfaces and can run applications directly on the device. During a security assessment, we discovered that apps can be uploaded and executed over Bluetooth. By exploiting a pairing misconfiguration, an attacker within Bluetooth range could bypass pairing, upload malicious software, and gain an initial foothold through the printer.
With a foothold in the network, an attacker can pivot to the logistics processes themselves: from the WMS through the warehouse infrastructure to the PLCs and the machinery they drive. As we saw earlier, all OT systems and devices are interconnected and the WMS sits at the head of that chain: it is the system of record every other process reads from and writes to, so compromising it reaches all of them at once. That, and its being specific to this environment, is why it is the focus here.
Warehouse management systems (WMS) are the software platforms that optimize warehouse processes from the entry of goods to their exit. They provide real-time visibility into inventory and orchestrate end-to-end fulfillment by integrating with many warehouse subsystems and pieces of automation equipment, such as conveyors, PLCs, robotics, scanners, and voice systems. A typical WMS includes modules for receiving, inventory control, order management, labor management, shipping, and reporting. Major vendors include SAP EWM, Oracle Warehouse Management, Manhattan Active, Blue Yonder, Infor, Körber/HighJump, Microsoft, and TECSYS.
To picture how central this is, think back to our unicorn. From the moment it was scanned at receiving, it stopped being only a physical box and became a record inside the WMS, a record the system then used to decide where it should be stored, when it should be picked, how it should be sorted, and where it should ship. Every device employed along the way — the PDT at receiving, the printer at putaway, the workstation at picking, the conveyor at sorting — was really just talking to the WMS. It is the thread that ties all eight stages together, which is exactly what makes it such a valuable target.
Because modern WMS platforms are usually web-based and heavily interconnected, they inherit common web and API vulnerabilities alongside flaws specific to the WMS itself. A recent example is CVE-2026-70774 in Oracle Warehouse Management, part of Oracle E-Business Suite. Oracle rated it High and described it as an easily exploitable authorization bypass flaw in which a low-privileged attacker with network access can compromise the application, affecting integrity and availability by allowing unauthorized creation, deletion, or modification of critical data.
A flaw like this may look like a typical web application issue, but its consequences in a warehouse are more serious, because the WMS is the system of record. If an attacker can modify its data, they can alter stock levels, bin locations, receiving records, picking tasks, or shipment information, silently corrupting the digital twin of the warehouse. And since the eight stages form a dependency chain, that corruption doesn’t stay contained: a falsified record at receiving is inherited by putaway, picking, and everything downstream. The physical box and its record diverge, and every later process trusts the record.
The most direct version of this attack comes from an authorization bypass flaw like the Oracle vulnerability above. Here the threat actor can be an external attacker who has reached the application over the network, or an insider such as a low-privileged operator or storekeeper who already holds a legitimate account.
The danger grows when such a flaw is chained with others. An external attacker who combines remote code execution with SQL injection could generate shipment orders to arbitrary addresses together with the documents needed for goods to physically leave the warehouse, fabricate waybills, acceptance or transfer records, and registers, while also exposing customer data such as names and delivery addresses. In effect, the goods are sent out with legitimate-looking paperwork.
This is why ordinary web vulnerabilities carry considerable weight in a WMS. For an external attacker or an insider probing beyond their assigned role, broken access control could open a path into another warehouse zone, allow manipulation of other workers’ tasks, permit unauthorized exception operations, or expose administrative APIs. A server-side request forgery flaw could force the WMS server to reach resources an external attacker cannot touch directly, and if the network is flat or only formally segmented, that server may in turn reach internal management panels, cloud service interfaces, or systems sitting close to the operational network, turning a single web bug into a bridge between IT and OT.
Attacks on a WMS don’t always target the application directly, though. As we saw while tracing the unicorn, the warehouse is full of connected devices that already hold trusted access. A handheld terminal carries authenticated WMS API access as a matter of course, and anyone who gains control of that terminal inherits it (by escaping the kiosk, for example). Depending on the device’s permissions, that might mean confirming picks that never occurred, falsifying receiving operations, adjusting stock counts, or marking orders complete — something warehouse employees themselves could use to avoid their assigned duties.
Where the WMS is connected to control and automation systems, access to the WMS can extend into physical operations, including conveyors, sorting systems, lifts, doors, and pumps.
PLCs translate WMS instructions and sensor inputs into physical actions. Compromising a system that controls them therefore creates an opportunity to manipulate those actions. The impact can be as simple as a sorting diverter sending boxes down the wrong route, a conveyor repeatedly entering an error state and creating a backlog, or a falsified sensor value causing a line to be treated as clear when it is full.
However the WMS is compromised, the business consequence is the same: inventory corruption, unauthorized shipments, and operational disruption, each reaching the customer in the end as a late or missing delivery, the wrong item in the box, or a personal address exposed to a stranger.
We followed our unicorn through web applications and databases, radio channels and PDTs, printers, conveyors, robots, and the loading zone. Because warehouse environments combine IT, OT, wireless, physical, and human components, security controls should be implemented as a single, coordinated security architecture rather than as isolated measures. Network segmentation should be a foundational control, with clear separation between corporate IT, warehouse OT, operational devices, management networks, and externally connected systems. Segmentation should also extend across facilities and customer environments so that each site and customer integration is isolated from the others, limiting the potential impact of a compromise. A zero-trust approach should reinforce this architecture by requiring explicit authentication and authorization for connections between systems, regardless of their network location, and by applying least-privilege access wherever possible. Regular penetration testing of the corporate IT environment, including domain services, identity infrastructure, and endpoints, should be incorporated into the warehouse security program.
Physical and network access controls should be implemented together. Access to warehouse facilities, network rooms, communication cabinets, and operational areas should be restricted according to business need, with appropriate authentication, monitoring, and access logging. Network infrastructure should be hardened through controls such as switch port security, MAC-based access restrictions where appropriate, and IEEE 802.1X with EAP-TLS for strong device and user authentication. Network equipment should also be securely configured and regularly reviewed to ensure that unused interfaces, insecure management protocols, default credentials, and unnecessary services are disabled.
Web applications and their supporting infrastructure should be governed through a secure software development lifecycle (SSDLC), including security requirements, secure coding practices, code and dependency review, and application security assessment before deployment and throughout the application’s lifecycle. Third-party applications and components should be continuously monitored and updated, with a defined vulnerability and patch management process. This should explicitly include warehouse management systems (WMS), warehouse portals, APIs, and other applications that provide operational or customer-facing functionality.
Wireless technologies should be subject to dedicated security assessment and engineering. Radio-frequency surveys should be conducted to establish expected coverage, identify unauthorized or unexpected signals, validate the availability and protection of operational communications, and determine whether wireless deployments create unintended access paths into warehouse networks. Wireless security should be assessed not only from a connectivity perspective but also in terms of authentication, encryption, device provisioning, protocol exposure, interference resilience, and the potential impact of unauthorized devices.
Warehouse operational devices should be incorporated into the organization’s endpoint security and vulnerability management processes. Devices should receive security updates and firmware patches on a defined schedule, with accelerated remediation for critical vulnerabilities. Security assessments should be performed periodically to identify weaknesses in device configuration, applications, exposed services, and authentication mechanisms.
Personnel security should form an additional layer of the warehouse security architecture. In most industrial and ICS environments, getting inside means clearing background checks, holding relevant qualifications, or proving prior experience; the hiring process itself acts as a filter. A warehouse is different. Roles in sorting, packing, and courier work are hired quickly and in volume, and they typically require no prior expertise, certification, or specialized background at all. An ordinary person can walk in off the street, be hired within days, and immediately hold legitimate physical access to the facility. Therefore, a more restrictive and risk-based approach to hiring should be considered, particularly for roles that provide access to sensitive areas, operational systems, network infrastructure, or customer assets.
Ultimately, all of these measures serve the same objective: protecting the continuity and reliability of the warehouse as a whole. This matters because real warehouses handle food, medicines, machine parts, and the millions of ordinary things people and companies depend on every day. Protecting their journey means seeing the warehouse as it has actually become: a single digital system with doors, motors, shelving, and radio signals, and with entirely real consequences when it fails. And if the security program works, the customer never knows any of this happened. The unicorn simply arrives at the scheduled time.
If your warehouse operations rely on interconnected systems like these, we can help identify the gaps before an adversary does. Reach out to discuss a security assessment.
Finding a job these days is playing on hard mode. You send your resume to a company, and a couple of minutes later, an automated rejection lands in your inbox. And then it happens again. And again. Sound familiar?
In this post, we look at how recruiting platforms work from the HR side. We also show how to use AI safely as a copy editor so you can prepare a resume for recruiters without turning it into a lifeless pile of keywords. At the end, we share a ready-made prompt to help you improve your resume’s structure and content.
Before you give your resume to a chatbot, remove all sensitive information: your name, phone number, home address, email, company names, and scans of documents. Any language model you chat with can sometimes memorize personal information contained in their training data. That means there’s always a chance the AI may accidentally “learn” to give your data to other users. On top of that, even the biggest services aren’t immune to glitches and leaks. For example, last year a researcher found a bug in Meta AI that let users gain access to other people’s conversations with the chatbot by changing their request ID.
The ability to read other people’s chats sometimes isn’t even a bug. For example, it recently came to light that Grok users who clicked the Share chat button to send a conversation to a friend or to themselves were also allowing search engines to index that conversation. As a result, thousands of conversations ended up in public view. These included personal data, requests to come up with complex passwords, complaints about health problems, trade secrets, and other information the chat owners clearly never meant to publish.
So before you use any chatbot, first check its privacy policy, and then go to the settings to turn off all the features you don’t need. Most importantly, turn off training the AI on your requests. And remember the golden rule: don’t send an AI anything you wouldn’t be okay with seeing on the internet.
If you work with sensitive information all the time, the safest option is to run language models locally right on your own computer. We previously explained how to do this, using DeepSeek as an example. The same approach works with any other open-weight model.
Finally, don’t feed your personal data to chatbots from unknown developers that promise to write you a flawless resume. Often, these are just slick wrappers around popular models. And you probably won’t ever find out who actually gets access to your data, where it’s stored, or what happens to it next.
Malicious actors can use this information for follow-up attacks. For example, they can send fake interview invitations and attractive job postings that match your work experience and career interests a little too well. From there, the scam can go in many directions: a malicious file disguised as a job invitation, a link to a phishing page that steals your account, a request to install “corporate software” or to continue the chat in a messaging app, and so on.
Most large and mid-sized companies have long used an applicant tracking system (ATS). This is specialized software for HR teams (human resources specialists or, put simply, recruiters) that collects and sorts job applications.
A company having an ATS doesn’t mean their applicants are scored automatically. It’s a fairly old type of system that dates back to when artificial intelligence looked very different. Then, as AI tech evolved, some companies started building AI modules into their ATS. But how common this is varies a lot from country to country and market to market. According to a LinkedIn study, 37% of HR leaders surveyed worldwide use AI in hiring, but only 11% actively integrate AI tools into their HR platforms.
The takeaway: you can optimize your resume for AI, but you still need to write it for a human. Even if your resume clears the AI screening, an HR person will read it next — and flat, machine-sounding prose will only hurt their impression of you.
Keep in mind that instant rejections don’t come only from AI. In some ATS, recruiters can set up automatic rejection rules by hand. For example, these rules can rely on a candidate’s answers about education, work authorization, required experience, licenses and certifications, ability to work the required schedule, and so on. So take a moment to check that your resume contains up-to-date and complete information relevant to the vacancy.
It’s ok to turn to AI for help, but the resume has to have substance, and a real person with real work experience has to shine through.
Start by writing your resume yourself. It doesn’t have to be perfect, and it can have mistakes. Only then ask AI for a fresh pair of eyes. Here, AI shouldn’t act as your personal biographer. It should act as a copy editor that polishes the wording and structure.
Unless the employer asks for something specific, skip the photos, tables, complex graphics, and custom fonts. And definitely don’t try to design something fancy in a graphic editor. Any of these can make your document unreadable for an ATS. The gold standard is a plain PDF or DOCX file with headings, a standard font, clear sections, and bulleted lists.
Copy the job description and ask a chatbot to work its key phrases into your resume. Don’t just sprinkle keywords around. Put them in context and back them up with examples from your experience. Remember: you should be able to prove every word in your resume.
Skip the generic phrases, personality labels, and bare lists of duties like “responsible”, “did data analysis”, or “prepared reports”. Both recruiters and AI look for specifics, ideally with numbers and timeframes. Show what you did your job for, not just what you did.
Stick to the action + tool + result formula: “Automated report generation with Python and cut preparation time by 80%”, “Launched a new pricing model and grew annual revenue from US$400 000 to US$600 000 in 12 months”, “Developed a corporate messaging app that more than a thousand employees use today”. Don’t overdo the numbers. If you don’t have exact figures, or they don’t apply, don’t make them up.
Start with a short paragraph of two to three sentences that covers the key points and contains a link to your portfolio. Use it to give a brief overview of your work experience, skills, and key achievements. If you’re new to the field, write about your education and career goals instead.
List your work experience in reverse chronological order so your latest career achievements are the first thing people see.
You’ve got the tips — now it’s time to ask AI for help. Here’s a prompt that works. We’ve tested it on several chatbots:
More on how to use AI safely without compromising your privacy:
CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619 are Critical vulnerabilities in PHP, a scripting language used globally for web servers and CMS systems.
The post Threat Brief: Critical Vulnerabilities in PHP: CVE-2026-109618, CVE-2026-109619 (Updated October 29) appeared first on Unit 42.
Cybercriminals have been relying on the same trick for years: hide malicious content where traditional email security tools cannot easily inspect it. Password-protected attachments, QR-coded URLs, and redirector-wrapped links have often acted as convenient hiding places for attackers. But it's possible to stop these threats.
Many businesses still fear ransomware attacks. But is this threat still as relevant today? A few years ago, at the peak of ransomware’s popularity, the term “ransomware” was practically synonymous with malicious encryption of data. But in reality blocking access to information had long been little more than a symbolic gesture. In a May Securelist post on shifts in the ransomware threat landscape, our experts noted that in 2026, attackers are encrypting company data for ransom less and less frequently. Here’s a striking example: while investigating an incident, Kaspersky’s Global Emergency Response Team (GERT) uncovered the PAYLOAD extortion campaign, whose operators didn’t even bother using ransomware. They took a different route instead.
In this campaign, instead of using ransomware, the attackers seized control of the Active Directory environment, and created a malicious group policy object (GPO). They used it to deploy a ransom note, change wallpapers, and lock screens on workstations, and set up a banner to display at system login. Naturally, they also disabled local administrator accounts while they were at it. This move let the attackers demonstrate their presence in the compromised infrastructure and prove they’d accessed confidential information — just as effectively as encryption would have. Detailed information about this incident, along with indicators of compromise, can be found in the same Securelist post. What interests us more, though, is the trend of abandoning encryption.
Let’s start with the fact that in a large company with thousands of infected computers, decrypting data is an extremely effort-intensive process. Restoring data from backups, which has become common practice largely thanks to mass ransomware attacks, is far easier than waiting for criminals to hand over a key, hoping it’s genuine, and trusting that the ransomware itself didn’t have bugs that made the data unrecoverable. As a result, cybercriminals found it harder and harder over time to actually collect a ransom for the decryption key.
Attackers tried to adapt to this shift. Alongside encryption, they increasingly began stealing confidential data and threatening to publish it. Publishing confidential information puts a company’s reputation, its security, and the safety of its business partners at risk. This is especially true if the data includes people’s personal information: more than 140 countries around the world have data protection laws, so a leak puts an organization at a fairly high risk of a hefty fine. Sometimes that’s far scarier than simply losing data, and no backup can help with that.
Data exfiltration has another advantage from the attackers’ perspective: it’s usually much harder to detect than malware activity. File encryption, for instance, triggers a spike in disk activity that endpoint protection tools pick up fairly quickly. By contrast, data exfiltration is easy to disguise as normal traffic. This is precisely what the ShinyHunters group exploits, building its attacks around the standard OAuth mechanism. On top of that, attackers can steal data much quicker if they don’t bother with encryption, which also makes it harder to catch the threat in time.
As a result, encryption has become a kind of calling card — proof that the attackers had access to the data. So cybercriminals finally decided to drop this optional step altogether.
Standard cyberhygiene practices can help protect against a wide range of extortion schemes — regardless of whether or not they involve encryption:
Gamers around the world are holding their breath for November 19, 2026, the day Grand Theft Auto VI is expected to drop. Many of them have been waiting for the next installment in the hit series for over a decade. For die-hard fans, the final months before launch could prove especially agonizing. Sadly, scammers know all about this hotly anticipated release too, and they’ve decided to use it as a lure to launch all sorts of attacks on gamers. We’ve spotted a great many bait sites aimed at impatient GTA VI fans. Today, we walk you through exactly how these crooks try to trick gamers, and how you can avoid becoming their next target.
One site our experts found, called CyberLeek, claims to have an early build of GTA VI, and pretends to offer three different ways to get hold of the game before its official release. The first and priciest option is to buy the “full game” of GTA VI for US$1000. For that price, buyers are offered an early build of the game, exclusive content, and a direct download link. This is claimed to be a limited offer: only one copy per customer.
An alleged GTA VI leak advertised for US$1000
For those not ready to part with a thousand dollars, there’s a cheaper option: for a hundred dollars, users can get 24-hour access to the GTA VI demo.
Finally, the third option relies on crowdfunding. Playing modern-day Robin Hoods, the site’s creators claim they’ll raise $50,000 and then release the game to the public for free, with everyone who donates at least $100 getting priority early access. But dig into the fine print, and the fundraising goal for that paid early access suddenly jumps from $50,000 to $500,000. Looks like one of the scammers sat on their keyboard hit an extra zero by accident.
An urgent fundraiser for US$50,000 — or is it US$500,000? — to release a leaked GTA VI build, plus advertising opportunities for businesses
But CyberLeek’s lineup of tempting “offers” doesn’t stop there; there are also services for businesses. For US$5000, the site’s creators offer to place an ad right inside Grand Theft Auto VI: a logo, a product, or a brand mention that will supposedly show up in some unspecified “upcoming Grand Theft Auto video content”. What exactly that means is unclear: in-game clips or cutscenes, trailers, or just some gameplay footage. And honestly, the price seems suspiciously low for product placement in one of the most anticipated games in recent years.
This offer looks especially amusing next to the supposedly complete early build of the game with full access available on the same website. So, apparently, the game is already finished enough to sell in full, but you can still somehow slap ads into it.
One can only pay for all these incredible services with cryptocurrency. CyberLeek accepts Bitcoin, Ethereum, USDT, and Litecoin, and the site’s creators make a point of saying that all payments are final and no refunds are possible. Well, we weren’t expecting refunds anyway.
That said, this is just one example. CyberLeek started out as the nickname of the hacker behind both the recent Rockstar Games breach and GTA VI content leak. Later on, other cybercriminals began using that same name to build a whole bunch of fake sites. Despite having completely different designs, all of these sites attempt to project an association with CyberLeek, enticing users with (false) promises of access to “official” leaked versions of GTA VI. Whichever of these sites you come across, we’d strongly advise against using your own computer to check what’s actually hiding inside the archives and installers they hand out.
Another CyberLeek site offering access to a “leaked build” of GTA VI invites the user to download some unknown launcher, or “unlock” the full version of the game — whatever that means
This bait targets slightly more sensible gamers — the kind who aren’t trying to download GTA VI right this second but wouldn’t say no to grabbing a free preorder code ahead of time. Our experts found a site that is claiming to hand out a redeem code for the PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X|S. All one needs do is pick a platform and provide an email address.
To make it all look convincing, the site even shows off its own “statistics”: it supposedly has 3480 active users, and only 121 codes are still available as of today.
To get the “exclusive code”, the user is asked to pick a console and provide their email address
After picking a console, entering an email address, and clicking Reveal Code, the user lands on a new page. It shows the first four characters of a supposedly generated code, and to get the rest the user is asked to complete an additional check. They’re given 15 minutes to do so.
The site shows the first four characters of the coveted code, and promises to send the rest after an additional check, which the user has 15 minutes to complete
Nobody tells the gamer upfront what this check actually involves. But the next page, which opens after clicking Reveal Full Code, inexplicably turns out to be in German. Here, the user is asked to pass a “human verification”: download a free AI chat app for their computer, run it, and accept the terms of use.
The real point of this “verification” most likely boils down to driving traffic to third-party, often shady, or outright fraudulent sites, with GTA VI simply used as bait to pump up visitor numbers.
To get the rest of the “code”, the site demands that the user download and run an AI chat app and accept its terms of use
A simpler variation involves fake sites that simply collect money under the pretext of placing preorders for Grand Theft Auto VI. For example, a fake PlayStation Store site targeting Brazilian users offers preorders for R$449.9, which actually matches the official price in the real PS Store. The user can pay with a credit card or through Pix (Brazil’s instant payment system), but along with their money, they’d also have to hand over personal data, including their CPF — the Brazilian equivalent of a taxpayer identification number.
In Brazil, a fake PlayStation Store site collects money for GTA VI preorders at a price that looks legit
Some scammers don’t even bother with elaborate stories about leaks, beta tests, or preorder deals. They simply build websites that copy the look and feel of GTA, and invite users to start playing GTA VI right here, right now. We came across a few examples of these sites.
No leaks, no tests, no codes needed: visitors are simply invited to click Try GTA 6 and start playing
One of these sites tells users they can download GTA VI, as long as they first pick their platform. The range of options is surprisingly generous: a PC version as well as versions for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.
Users are invited to pick a version of GTA VI for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, or PC
Just to be clear, GTA VI’s official release is still more than a month away, so there’s no way one can download and install the game right now. Nobody knows exactly what users would be getting on their devices instead of the game if they download from one of these sites, but it’s definitely nothing useful. And no matter how carefully scammers copy GTA’s signature style and slap on the Rockstar logo, the address bar usually gives the game away: check the domain and compare it with the official Rockstar Games website address.
And finally, what would 2026 be without cryptocurrency? We found a site whose creators were probably inspired by the CyberLeek story and decided to ride the wave of GTA VI’s popularity to promote a token with the refreshingly straightforward name $GTAVI. The whole site is styled after GTA VI and Vice City.
The creators of the project have gone out of their way to highlight the perks of holding the token. They call $GTAVI “the only GTA VI coin that actually rewards its holders”. Whatever the meaning of that tagline, the project’s declared ultimate goal sounds even more tempting: every token holder will get access to Grand Theft Auto VI just by virtue of owning $GTAVI. Think about that for a second: it’s not exactly a direct promise of a free copy of GTA VI, but more like an aspiration on the part of the crypto developers.
The token’s creators claim that they’re striving to eventually provide every $GTAVI holder with access to GTA VI
To add a bit of credibility, the page also throws in some crypto stats. The claimed market cap of $GTAVI is 51,600 dollars, with a 24-hour trading volume of 7880 dollars. There’s also a mysterious metric called “Characters” with a value of 12, and what exactly it means is anyone’s guess. There’s also a separate mention of a certain $BOOBIE as the Top Gainer — apparently, this is how the site’s creators labeled whoever supposedly made the most money off $GTAVI. The site doesn’t explain where any of these numbers come from or how accurate they actually are.
All in all, this looks like an attempt to hype up yet another meme coin by riding the wave of GTA VI’s popularity. Projects like this often end up following the classic pump-and-dump playbook: the token gets promoted for a while to drive its price up, and then the insiders and major holders cash out, leaving everyone else stuck with heavily devalued crypto. As for the stated goal behind $GTAVI — letting every token holder get a copy of GTA VI just for owning it — the site gives us no reason to believe that’s actually going to happen.
Unfortunately, we don’t know of a legitimate way to get early access to GTA VI, and honestly, we doubt anyone else does either. It looks like we’ll all just have to wait until November. To make sure you don’t fall for tempting scam offers in the meantime, here’s what we recommend:
What other tricks do scammers pull to fool even the tech-savviest gamers? Find out in our other posts:
ClingSTUN operates as a back-connect proxy backdoor, sets up persistence, and contains exploits for self-propagation.
The post Linux Backdoor Abuses STUN Protocol, Exploits Dozens of Flaws appeared first on SecurityWeek.
Flashpoint’s monthly analysis of insider threat recruitment, illicit access advertising, and threat actor activity targeting enterprise environments.
Table Of ContentsUnknowingly, a member of key personnel is living two separate lives. On the clock, they are a highly-trusted systems administrator, but in their personal time, they moonlight on the deep and dark web, advertising their trust and access to the highest bidder. One day, they get a simple offer: $15,000 in the crypto of their choice to approve a single push notification at 2 AM. They accept. By morning, the attacker walks away with active domain admin credentials without the need for malware or cracking firewalls.
This is just one example of how insider threats lead to modern enterprise breaches. As perimeter security, EDR coverage, and other security tools mature, threat actors continue to target the human element, seeking employees and contractors willing to provide access to corporate systems or facilitate fraudulent activity.
In a threat landscape where identity is becoming the primary attack surface, monitoring illicit marketplaces and recruitment efforts is critical. This new monthly report leverages Flashpoint’s Primary Source Collection (PSC) to analyze insider threat tactics, tracking active recruitment and advertising on dark web forums and encrypted networks.
In September 2026, Flashpoint analysts identified a total of 9,787 insider-related posts across 1,216 channels and 1,778 authors. While the volume of observed activity decreased, threat actors continued to actively seek and advertise insider access, particularly within industries where legitimate employee privileges can be exploited to facilitate fraud. These communications included threat actors attempting to recruit insiders at target organizations, insiders advertising their services, and general discussions involving insider-related threat activity.
Of these communications, Flashpoint observed 857 unique posts between September 1 and September 30, 2026.
The majority of these posts appeared in mid-tier English-language Telegram channels, where threat actors sought or advertised insider access to organizations across several industries. Much of the observed activity focused on recruiting insiders to facilitate fraud operations.
Retail, telecommunications, and financial services remained prominent targets for insider threat activity in September 2026. However, a significant portion of the observed activity could not be attributed to a specific industry.
Flashpoint found that 45.7% of unique insider posts fell into the “Unknown” category, meaning analysts could not determine the targeted organization or industry. Among posts with an identifiable industry, retail accounted for the largest share, followed by telecommunications, financial services, and technology.
Together, these four industries accounted for 419 unique posts, or nearly 49% of all unique insider-related activity observed during the month.
The concentration of activity in retail, telecommunications, and financial services reflects continued threat actor interest in insiders who may be positioned to facilitate fraud, provide access to customer accounts, or exploit legitimate organizational privileges.
The following table shows a breakdown of unique insider posts by industry in September 2026:
| Industry | Posts |
| Other | 392 |
| Retail | 135 |
| Telecom | 116 |
| Financial | 85 |
| Technology | 83 |
| Public Sector | 41 |
| Healthcare | 3 |
| Media | 2 |
| Total | 857 |
Active insider threats generally involve two types of activity: an insider is recruited by a malicious outside party, or an insider advertises their access and services to interested threat actors. These arrangements can enable adversaries to exfiltrate sensitive data, install malware, compromise accounts, or carry out fraudulent activities such as SIM swaps.
In September 2026, Flashpoint analysts identified 15 notable insider recruitment and advertising posts across underground communities and chat forums. Of these, nine involved threat actors attempting to recruit insiders, while six involved actors advertising insider services.
Telecommunications accounted for the largest number of notable posts, with five instances of recruitment or advertising. Retail and technology followed with three each, while financial services and the public sector accounted for two each.
These examples illustrate how threat actors continue to seek access across industries, with particular interest in employees and contractors who can facilitate fraud or provide privileged access to organizational systems.
Flashpoint also observed numerous insider solicitations repeated across multiple discussion threads, often with limited details about the access or services being offered. Analysts could not independently verify the legitimacy of the recruitment and advertising claims.
Insider threats are inherently difficult to detect using internal security controls alone because the malicious activity relies on valid credentials and legitimate access privileges. Relying solely on internal logs means security teams often only detect an insider threat after data exfiltration or system sabotage has already occurred.
Flashpoint protects organizations against insider threats through our Primary Source Collection (PSC) and specialized intelligence platforms:
To learn more about how Flashpoint can help protect your enterprise from insider risk and monitor illicit underground communities, Request a Demo Today.
What is the Flashpoint Insider Threat Report?
The Flashpoint Insider Threat Report is a monthly intelligence brief that analyzes trends, volume, targeted industries, and tactics surrounding insider threat recruitment and illicit access advertising on the deep web, dark web, and encrypted chat channels.
How does Flashpoint collect insider threat data?
Flashpoint collects data using its Primary Source Collection (PSC) engine, which actively monitors thousands of dark web forums, illicit marketplaces, and underground chat networks where threat actors and malicious insiders communicate.
What is the difference between insider recruitment and insider advertising?
Insider recruitment occurs when an external cybercriminal attempts to entice a corporate employee into assisting with a cyberattack. Insider advertising occurs when an employee or contractor proactively lists their legitimate access or services for sale on illicit marketplaces.
The post Insider Threat Report: Dark Web Recruitment & Access Trends appeared first on Flashpoint.
Noteworthy stories that might have slipped under the radar: Kiteworks patches over 100 vulnerabilities, Microsoft publishes 2026 Digital Defense Report, AI finds 24 Android app flaws.
The post In Other News: $15K iCloud Spoofing Bugs, AI Policy Experts Phished, Adblocker Spies on AI Chats appeared first on SecurityWeek.
The dropper “carries a complete universal Mach-O inside itself, roughly 756 KB in the development build, and extracts it at runtime.
The post macOS Users Targeted by Fake Zoom Installer Carrying CloudSyncD Backdoor appeared first on SecurityWeek.
On September 15 this year, Google published details of patches for 110 vulnerabilities in its own Google Pixel smartphones. Among all the disclosed flaws, CVE-2026-58704 stands out the most, for it appears that this zero-day is being exploited in targeted attacks.
In today’s post, we talk about what’s so special about the Google Pixel, and why these devices get security updates all of their own – separate from regular Android updates. We also cover the vulnerabilities addressed in this latest update, with a special focus on the mentioned, most dangerous one – CVE-2026-58704 – and wrap up with tips on how to both protect your device and avoid becoming a victim of cyberattack on it.
The reader might reasonably wonder: I’ve already installed this month’s Android security updates on my Google Pixel. Isn’t that the same thing? Google Pixel does run on Android and receives those security updates, which are detailed in the monthly Android Security Bulletin. However, manufacturers of Android-based devices use different sets of hardware and software components. That’s why, alongside vulnerabilities common to all Android devices, there are security issues specific to individual manufacturers’ devices.
For its own smartphones, Google publishes separate security updates, covered by a dedicated Pixel Update Bulletin. Rather than replacing the Android Security Bulletin, this document complements it by detailing vulnerabilities specific to devices manufactured by Google. Other Android smartphones also receive similar updates from their manufacturers.
The Pixel Update Bulletin for September 2026 clearly shows why Google needs separate updates for its smartphones in the first place. Many of the vulnerabilities it fixes affect specific Pixel hardware (or hardware-related) components: the modem, bootloader, GPU, fingerprint scanner components, and other parts of the device. On smartphones from other manufacturers, these features might rely on entirely different hardware and software components, so the fixes listed in the Pixel Update Bulletin don’t apply to those phones.
That said, these vulnerabilities could still be relevant for Pixel owners who’ve flashed their devices with custom ROMs. Switching to a different OS doesn’t alter the device’s hardware components, and may not replace the firmware. Therefore, the vulnerabilities themselves may persist, but whether patches are available, and how they’re installed, depends on the specific OS.
Now let’s look closer at the specific vulnerabilities Google fixed in September. The most significant one is the above-mentioned CVE-2026-58704.
This vulnerability affects the Cellular Modem component, which handles the smartphone’s communication with cellular networks. It stems from a logic error in the code, which, under certain conditions, allows bypassing the intended permission check.
Successful exploitation of CVE-2026-58704 lets attackers escalate privileges on the smartphone to gain broader access to its functions and data. Note that the attack takes place over a cellular network and the threat actors need low-level privileges on the targeted device to start with.
In practice, this means attackers can’t exploit CVE-2026-58704 to attack a Pixel from just anywhere over the internet, as they’d apparently need to either compromise the cellular network the target smartphone is already connected to or, more likely, force it to connect to a malicious base station under their control.
Google hasn’t disclosed all the details of this vulnerability yet, and the related report is not publicly accessible. As a result, the technical details that would show how easy it is for attackers to exploit CVE-2026-58704 remain unknown pending installation of the patches on all devices.
Nevertheless, Google claims that there are signs of limited exploitation of CVE-2026-58704.
Of the remaining 109 vulnerabilities found in Google Pixel devices, only one is rated moderate; the others are either high (62) or outright critical (46). Nine of these flaws fall into the RCE (remote code execution) category. This means that if an attacker successfully exploits one of these vulnerabilities, they can remotely force the device to run malicious code. The exact conditions for the attack depend on the specific vulnerability.
Another 88 vulnerabilities fall into the elevation of privilege (EoP) category. These let an attacker who’s already gained a certain level of access to the device expand their privileges. The CVE-2026-58704 vulnerability discussed above falls into this same category, which is why the September bulletin lists 89 EoP vulnerabilities in total.
Finally, 10 vulnerabilities can lead to information disclosure (ID), and two more to denial of service (DoS). In short, that’s a hefty list of flaws, so Google Pixel owners shouldn’t wait around to install the patches.
Google Pixel owners can install the update that fixes the vulnerabilities covered in this post by following this path: Settings → Security & privacy → System & updates → Security update → Install. Keep in mind that the phone will automatically restart to finish installing the update.
To keep your phone secure we recommend the following general measures:
The China-based hacking group has been exploiting SharePoint vulnerabilities since July 2025.
The post Warlock Expands SharePoint Exploitation in Critical Infrastructure Attacks appeared first on SecurityWeek.
The attacks targeted the US Department of Education and Library and Archives Canada, and researchers linked some agents to OpenAI.
The post AI Agents Aimed SQL Injection at US and Canadian Government Sites appeared first on SecurityWeek.
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