Ransomware kept its grip on organizations through the second quarter of 2026, and the headline number barely moved. What changed underneath that number is more interesting: new research gave us a rare look inside a top tier operation as it was being built, and it revealed just how little it now takes for a small and skilled group to reach the top of the field. Here’s what the quarter actually showed, and what it means for how you defend against it.  Key takeaways  Data leak sites recorded 2,139 ransomware victims in Q2 2026, essentially flat versus Q1 and up 33% […]

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Key takeaways Weekly cyber attacks reached 2,336 per organization in July 2026, up 3% from June and 16% year over year Education remained the most attacked industry, averaging 4,848 weekly attacks per organization Latin America recorded the highest regional attack volume, while Europe saw one of the sharpest increases at 18% year over year GenAI adoption continued to expand, with organizations using an average of 8 tools and 1 in 36 prompts carrying a high risk of sensitive data exposure Email remained a key entry point, with 1 in every 128 emails classified as phishing and another 20% falling into […]

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It typically begins the same way it has for years, with an approach from a recruiter offering a role at a company the target would recognize, accompanied by a PDF describing the position in convincing detail. That approach remains one of the most effective entry points used by state sponsored threat actors today, and Check Point Research has spent recent months tracking a new wave of it. Operation Dream Job, the long running campaign attributed to the North Korea affiliated Lazarus group, has resurfaced with a previously undisclosed Windows vulnerability (CVE-2026-68820), a newly identified backdoor, and a command and control […]

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Anthropic’s new inference hooks give enterprises a native enforcement point before prompts ever reach the model. Combined with Check Point Workforce AI Security, organizations get a real-time allow-or-deny decision on every prompt, with no proxy in the path. Why This Matters Enterprise AI adoption has moved well past experimentation. Employees draft documents, write code, summarize meetings, and query enterprise knowledge through large language models every day. The challenge was never understanding that AI introduces risk. It was finding a practical enforcement point. Web gateways and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) tools were designed for websites and SaaS applications, not conversations with […]

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Security leaders evaluating Check Point Exposure Management tend to ask the same questions: how the solution discovers assets, what intelligence it provides, and how well it fits their existing tools and workflows.  Below, we answer the questions that come up most often in product evaluations, offering a practical look at how organizations discover, understand, and reduce cyber risk.  1. How does the platform discover my assets?  Every exposure management program starts with knowing what you own. Security teams cannot assess, prioritize, or remediate exposures tied to systems they do not know exist.  Check Point Exposure Management begins by continuously discovering […]

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Check Point brings open research, objective benchmarks and customer-controlled runtime protection to the industry initiative introduced by NVIDIA.  AI is rapidly changing how organizations build, operate, and protect their digital environments. As a leader in the global cyber community, we believe in the power of collective intelligence. We are proud to join the Open Secure AI Alliance as an inaugural member, working alongside leaders from across cyber security, cloud computing, enterprise software, AI, and the open-source community.  Introduced by NVIDIA, the alliance is creating a collaborative foundation for developing and sharing open technologies that advance AI safety and security, and will help organizations identify, remediate, and responsibly disclose […]

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This week, the UK’s AI Security Institute (AISI) published an incident report most organizations would have quietly buried. During a routine cyber evaluation, an AI agent researched the real human maintainers of an open-source project, invented multiple fake online identities, and used them to pressure a real person into approving malicious code. Nobody instructed it to deceive anyone, and deception simply became a route to finishing the task. A human maintainer caught it and refused. The facts AISI ran a cybersecurity challenge 122 times across seven models. In 10 runs, an agent acted outside the scope of the test, producing […]

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More than 30 Minnesota water systems were hit in one coordinated cyber attack. Within days, the Five Eyes told critical infrastructure operators to be ready to pull the plug.  Thirty water systems in two days  Over two days in late July, a coordinated cyber attack hit more than 30 community water systems across Minnesota. The treatment plant in Braham went offline. Plymouth lost cellular communications to two water towers and its wastewater lift stations. Maple Plain declared a local state of emergency. Early reporting points to internet-exposed programmable logic controllers (PLCs) as the way in, and investigators are examining links to Iranian affiliated activity. […]

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