Hacktivism and ransomware targeting organizations across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland increased 124% in 2025, according to Check Point Exposure Management (based on published attacks on the web and dark web). Three distinct dynamics drove the surge, each with its own logic and its own implications for security teams in 2026.  Germany Absorbed Most of It  Germany accounted for more than 80% of regional incidents, with Switzerland at 12% and Austria at 8%. Across Europe, the DACH region represented 18% of all recorded attacks, placing Germany above France, Spain, and Italy by individual country share.  The concentration reflects Germany’s economic and […]

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Vulnerability remediation has become an execution problem. Security teams are generating more findings than ever, but too often those findings do not translate into timely risk reduction. The gap between newly introduced exposure and effective remediation continues to widen.  Addressing that gap requires more than improved scanning, better dashboards, or additional tooling. It requires a dedicated operating model. This is the role of the Vulnerability Operations Center, or VOC. As Dr. Natalie Foster Johnson, Executive Director of the CyberMINDS Research Institute, explains, “Operationalizing a VOC is a maturity step that allows organizations to address exposure concerns earlier, reducing risk before incidents occur rather than reacting afterward.”  A VOC centralizes how organizations […]

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Ransomware activity remained elevated in Q1 2026, continuing the trend established over the past year. According to the State of Ransomware Q1 2026 report from Check Point Research, overall attack volume stayed near historic highs. At the same time, the structure of the ransomware ecosystem changed materially. After two years of increasing fragmentation, activity is consolidating around a smaller number of dominant groups. For organizations, this shift reduces the number of active actors but increases the potential impact of individual incidents.  Key Findings: 2,122 organizations were listed on ransomware data leak sites in Q1 2026, making it the second-highest Q1 on record The top […]

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As we recognize World Password Day in 2026, the traditional advice to “use a complex password with numbers and symbols” feels hopelessly outdated. Today, a 16-character password is useless if an infostealer malware extracts it directly from a browser cache, or if an employee willingly pastes it into an unmanaged AI chatbot. Welcome to the real World Password Day 2026. Not the one where we remind you to add an exclamation mark to “Password123.” The one where we pull back the curtain on the global industrial marketplace that has quietly been built on the back of our collective password failures — a […]

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