Xbox-eigenaar Microsoft heeft naar verluidt een nieuwe versie van de Xbox-controller goedgekeurd. De controller moet zelf een wifiverbinding kunnen maken, wat beter zou zijn bij gebruik van Xbox Cloud Gaming.

The post Cyber and Physical Risks Targeting the 2026 Winter Olympics appeared first on Flashpoint.

And their toolkit includes a new, Linux kernel rootkit

A state-aligned cyber group in Asia compromised government and critical infrastructure organizations across 37 countries in an ongoing espionage campaign, according to security researchers.…

Microsoft announced today that the Exchange Web Services (EWS) API for Exchange Online will be shut down in April 2027, after nearly 20 years. [...]

The distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) botnet known as AISURU/Kimwolf has been attributed to a record-setting attack that peaked at 31.4 Terabits per second (Tbps) and lasted only 35 seconds. Cloudflare, which automatically detected and mitigated the activity, said it's part of a growing number of hyper-volumetric HTTP DDoS attacks mounted by the botnet in the fourth quarter of 2025. The

De Nederlandse gamestudio Guerrilla kondigt de Horizon-spin-off Horizon Hunters Gathering aan, een co-opactiegame. De game moet voor de PlayStation 5 en pc uitkomen en ondersteunt cross-play. Er is nog geen releasedatum bekendgemaakt.

Rome's "La Sapienza" university has been targeted by a cyberattack that impacted its IT systems and caused widespread operational disruptions at the educational institute. [...]

Every conversation I have with information security leaders tends to land in the same place. People understand what matters. They know the frameworks, the controls, and the guidance. They can explain why identity security, patching, and access control are critical. And yet incidents keep happening for the same reasons.

Successful cyberattacks rarely depend on something novel. They succeed when basic controls are missing or inconsistently applied. Stolen credentials still work. Legacy authentication is still enabled. End-of-life systems remain connected and operational, though of course not well patched.

This is not a knowledge problem. It is an execution and follow through problem. We know what we’re supposed to do, but we need to get on with doing it. The gap between knowing what matters and enforcing it completely is where most real-world incidents occur.

If the basics were that easy to implement, everyone would have them in place already.

That gap is where cyberattackers operate most effectively, and it is the gap that Operation Winter SHIELD is designed to address as a collaborative effort across the public and private sector.

Why Operation Winter SHIELD matters

Operation Winter SHIELD is a nine-week cybersecurity initiative led by the FBI Cyber Division beginning February 2, 2026. The focus is not awareness or education for its own sake. The focus is on implementation. Specifically, how organizations operationalize the real security guidance that reduces risk in real environments.

This effort reflects a necessary shift in how we approach security at scale. Most organizations do not fail because they chose the wrong security product or the wrong framework. They fail because controls that look straightforward on paper are difficult to deploy consistently across complex, expanding environments.

Microsoft is providing implementation resources to help organizations focus on what actually changes outcomes. To do this, we’re sharing guidance on controls, like Baseline Security Mode that hold up under real world pressure, from real world threat actors.

What the FBI Cyber Division sees in real incidents

The FBI Cyber Division brings a perspective that is grounded in investigations. Their teams respond to incidents, support victim organizations through recovery, and build cases against the cybercriminal networks we defend against every day. This investigative perspective reveals which missing controls turn manageable events into prolonged incident crises.

That perspective aligns with what we see through Microsoft Threat Intelligence and Microsoft Incident Response. The patterns repeat across industries, geographies, and organization sizes.

Nation-sponsored threat actors exploit end-of-life infrastructure that no longer receives security updates. Ransomware operations move laterally using over privileged accounts and weak authentication. Criminal groups capitalize on misconfigurations that were understood but never fully addressed.

These are not edge cases. They are repeatable failures that cyberattackers rely on because they continue to work.

When incidents arise, it is rarely because defenders lacked guidance. It is because controls were incomplete, inconsistently enforced, or bypassed through legacy paths that remained open.

The reality of execution challenge

Defenders are not indifferent to these risks. They are certainly not unaware. They operate in environments defined by complexity, competing priorities, and limited resources. Controls that seem simple in isolation become difficult when they must be deployed across identities, devices, applications, and cloud services that were not designed at the same time.

In parallel, the cyberthreat landscape has matured. Initial access brokers sell credentials at scale. Ransomware operations function like businesses. Attack chains move quickly and often complete before the defenders can meaningfully intervene.

Detection windows shrink. Dwell time is no longer an actionable metric. The margin for error is smaller than it has ever been before.

Operation Winter SHIELD exists to narrow that margin by focusing attention on high impact control areas and showing how they can help defenders succeed when they are enforced.

Each week, we’ll focus on a high-impact control area informed by investigative insights drawn from active cases and long-term trends. This is not about introducing yet another security framework or hammering back again on the basics. It is about reinforcing what already works and confronting, honestly, why it is so often not fully implemented.

Moving from guidance to guardrails

Microsoft’s role in Operation Winter SHIELD is to help organizations move from insight to action. That means providing practical guidance, technical resources, and examples of how built-in platform capabilities can reduce the operational friction that slows deployment.

A central theme throughout the initiative is secure by default and by design. The fastest way to close implementation gaps is to reduce the number of decisions defenders must make under pressure. Controls that are enforced by default remove reliance on error-prone configurations and constant human vigilance.

Baseline Security Mode reflects this approach in practice. It enforces protections that harden identity and access across the environment. It blocks legacy authentication paths. It requires phish-resistant multifactor authentication for administrators. It surfaces legacy systems that are no longer supported. And it enforces least-privilege access patterns. These protections apply immediately when enabled and are informed by threat intelligence from Microsoft’s global visibility and lessons learned from thousands of incident response engagements.

The same guardrail model applies to the software supply chain. Build and deployment systems are frequent intrusion points because they are implicitly trusted and rarely governed with the same rigor as production environments. Enforcing identity isolation, signed artifacts, and least-privilege access for build pipelines reduces the risk that a single compromised developer account or token becomes a pathway into production.

These risks are not limited to technical pipelines alone. They are compounded when ownership, accountability, and enforcement mechanisms are unclear or inconsistently applied across the organization.

Governance controls only matter when they translate into enforceable technical outcomes. Requiring centralized ownership of security configuration, explicit exception handling, and continuous validation ensures that risk decisions are deliberate and traceable.

The objective is straightforward. Reduce the distance between guidance and guardrails. We must look to turn recommendations into protections that are consistently applied and continuously maintained.

What you can expect from Operation Winter SHIELD

Starting the week of February 2, 2026, you can expect focused guidance on the controls that have the greatest impact on reducing exposure to cybercrime. The initiative is not about creating new requirements. It is about improving execution of what already works.

Security maturity is not measured by what exists in policy documents or architecture diagrams. It is measured by what is enforced in production. It is measured by whether controls hold under real world conditions and whether they remain effective as environments change.

The cybercrime problem does not improve through awareness. It improves through execution, shared responsibility, and continued focus on closing the gaps threat actors exploit most reliably. You can expect to hear this guidance materialize on the FBI’s Cybercrime Division’s podcast, Ahead of the Threat, and a future episode of the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Podcast.

Building real resilience

Operation Winter SHIELD represents a focused effort to help organizations strengthen operational resilience. Microsoft’s contribution reflects a long-standing commitment to making security controls easier to deploy and more resilient over time.

Over the coming weeks and extending beyond this initiative, we will continue to share practical content designed to support organizations at every stage of their security maturity. Security is a process, not a product. The goal is not perfection, the goal is progress that threat actors feel. We will impose cost.

The gap between knowing what matters and doing it consistently is where threat actors have learned to operate. Closing that gap requires coordination, shared learning, and a willingness to prioritize enforcement over intention.

Operation Winter SHIELD offers an opportunity to drive systematic improvement to one control area at a time. Investigative experience explains why each control matters. Secure defaults and automation provide the path to implementation.

This work extends beyond any single awareness effort. The tactics threat actors use change quickly. The controls that reduce risk largely remain stable. What determines outcomes is how quickly and reliably those controls are put in place.

That is the work ahead. Moving from abstract ideas to real world security. Join me in going from knowing to doing.

To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions, visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us on LinkedIn (Microsoft Security) and X (@MSFTSecurity) for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.

The post The security implementation gap: Why Microsoft is supporting Operation Winter SHIELD appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.

Een ransomwaregroep heeft gegevens van het personeel van het Veenkoloniaal Museum in Veendam, die begin dit jaar werden ...

Breach-tracking site flags dataset following impersonation-based intrusion

Breach-tracking site Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) claims a cyberattack on Betterment affected roughly 1.4 million users – although the investment company has yet to publicly confirm how many customers were affected by January's intrusion.…

De Algemene Rekenkamer wil af van de mail- en kantoorsoftware en clouddiensten van Microsoft. Dat komt erop neer dat de Rekenkamer wil stoppen met het afnemen van Microsoft 365. Het is nog niet bekend wanneer dit zou moeten gebeuren of naar welke alternatieve software.

De Amerikaanse dienstverlener Conduent heet de gegevens van tientallen miljoenen Amerikanen gelekt. In eerste instantie werd ...

Google zegt dat dit jaar veel meer Android-telefoons Apple AirDrop-compatibel worden. Tot nu toe is de functionaliteit om snel bestanden uit te wisselen met iPhones, iPads en MacBooks voorbehouden aan Pixel 10-telefoons, maar dat gaat veranderen.

OpenAI heeft Frontier uitgebracht, een tool om AI-agents binnen bedrijven te beheren. Daarbij kunnen bedrijven de AI-agents context meegeven en aangeven wat ze wel en niet mogen binnen de systemen van het bedrijf.

Snapchat bereikt nog steeds 90 procent van de Nederlandse jongeren, zo zegt het bedrijf zelf. Het gaat om gebruikers tussen 13 en 24 jaar. Intussen is het aantal maandelijkse gebruikers in Nederland gegroeid naar zes miljoen.

Conpet, Romania's national oil pipeline operator, has disclosed that a cyberattack disrupted its business systems and took down the company's website on Tuesday. [...]

The hacker claims to have stolen nearly 700,000 Substack user records, including email addresses and phone numbers.

The post Substack Discloses Security Incident After Hacker Leaks Data appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Nintendo kondigt samen met partners verschillende Switch 2-releases aan. Zo is Hollow Knight voor de Switch 2 nu uit, eventueel als gratis upgrade voor eigenaren van de Switch-versie. Daarnaast komen Valheim, Fallout 4 en Final Fantasy VII Rebirth dit jaar voor de console uit.

De ANWB zegt dat de laadpalen in het Limburgse Nederweert het goedkoopst zijn, met een gemiddeld laadtarief van 0,33 euro per kWh. De duurste staan juist in het Zuid-Hollandse Oegstgeest, waar ze gemiddeld 0,70 euro per kWh kosten. Dit kan op jaarbasis honderden euro's extra kosten.