Here’s an overview of some of last week’s most interesting news, articles, interviews and videos:
SmokedMeat: Open-source tool shows what attackers do inside CI/CD pipelines
Boost Security has released SmokedMeat, an open-source framework that runs attack chains against CI/CD infrastructure so engineering and security teams can see what an attacker would do in their specific environment.
NGate NFC malware targets Android users through trojanized payment app
NFC-based payment fraud is expanding geographically and operationally. A campaign active since November 2025 is targeting Android users in Brazil using a new variant of the NGate malware family, this time embedded in a trojanized version of HandyPay, a legitimate NFC relay application available on Google Play since 2021. ESET Research identified the campaign and attributed two separate NGate samples to the same threat actor.
A single platform powers SIM farm proxy networks across 17 countries
Racks of phones and 4G modems, connected to carrier networks and rented out as commercial mobile proxy services, are operating across at least 94 locations in 17 countries. An investigation by infrastructure intelligence firm Infrawatch traced a large portion of those deployments to a shared software platform called ProxySmart, built and operated out of Minsk, Belarus.
Ransomware, fraud, and lawsuits drive cyber insurance claims to new peaks
The 2026 InsurSec Report from At-Bay, covering more than 100,000 policy years of claims data, documents a 7% year-over-year rise in overall claim frequency and an all-time high average severity of $221,000. Ransomware severity reached $508,000, up 16% from the prior year, making it the costliest incident type by a wide margin.
Scenario: Open-source framework for automated AI app red-teaming
Enterprises running customer service bots, data analytics agents, and other AI-driven applications in production handle sensitive records and connect to core business systems every day. LangWatch has released Scenario, an open-source framework that runs automated red-team exercises against AI agents using multi-turn attack techniques that mirror how adversaries operate in the wild.
A year in, Zoom’s CISO reflects on balancing security and business
In this Help Net Security interview, Sandra McLeod, CISO at Zoom, reflects on her first year in the role. She talks about moving from reactive firefighting to business strategy, and what she heard from engineers, the board, and customers during her early months. McLeod discusses how she prepared for incident management, the dual job of handling crises and explaining them afterward, and her experience as a woman in technical leadership at Zoom.
AI is speeding up nation-state cyber programs
In this Help Net Security interview, Kaja Ciglic, Senior Director, Cybersecurity Policy and Diplomacy at Microsoft, discusses how nation-state cyber programs have changed over three years. Cyber has become a core instrument of state power, integrated with military, economic, and diplomatic tools. Ciglic argues that responses like sanctions and indictments need broader strategies, including conditional economic pressure and state accountability for ransomware havens.
Ubuntu 26.04 LTS delivers memory-safe system tools and live patching for Arm servers
Linux distributions have spent the past few years absorbing GPU vendor toolchains, Rust-based system components, and more stringent encryption defaults. Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, codenamed Resolute Raccoon, pulls most of those threads together into a single release that will receive standard security support until April 2031.
AI platform ATHR makes voice phishing a one-person job
For $4,000 and a cut of the take, a lone criminal can now run a fully automated voice-phishing operation via ATHR, a plaform that spoofs emails alerts from Google, Microsoft, and Coinbase, buries a phone number in each message, and when the victim calls back, hands them off to either a human scammer or an AI voice agent.
Vercel breached via compromised third-party AI tool
Cloud deployment and hosting platform Vercel has suffered a security breach that resulted in attackers accessing some of its internal systems and compromising Vercel credentials of a “limited subset of customers”.
CISA flags another Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Manager bug as exploited (CVE-2026-20133)
CISA added eight new vulnerabilities to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, including a Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Manager vulnerability (CVE-2026-20133) that Cisco has yet to flag as exploited.
Progress Software fixes sneaky WAF bypass vulnerability (CVE-2026-21876)
Progress Software has fixed a slew of high-severity vulnerabilities in MOVEit WAF and LoadMaster, including a flaw (CVE-2026-21876) that may allow attackers to bypass firewall detection.
New Mirai variants target routers and DVRs in parallel campaigns
Hidden inside newly discovered botnet malware is an unusual message from its creator: “AI.NEEDS.TO.DIE”. Dubbed “tuxnokill” by researchers at Akamai, the malware is one of two fresh Mirai botnet variants documented this month by major cybersecurity firms and, judging by the aforementioned hard-coded string, this particular variant might have been coded the old-fashioned way.
Apple fixes iPhone bug that let FBI retrieve deleted Signal messages(CVE-2026-28950)
Apple has rolled out security updates for iPhones and iPads that fix CVE-2026-28950, a logging issue in Notification Services that made devices unexpectedly retain notifications marked for deletion. The vulnerability was patched following a recent report about the FBI accessing a suspect’s Signal message notification content on their iPhone, despite Signal being deleted from the device.
With AI’s help, North Korean hackers stumbled into a near-undetectable attack
For many years, state-sponsored hacking was defined by human expertise in finding security holes, writing malware and exploits, pulling off social engineering and phishing attacks, and much more. Since the advent of LLM-powered AI assistants and tools, less skilled attackers have been able to carry out attacks and compromises that might otherwise have been out of their reach.
New Cisco firewall malware can only be killed by pulling the plug
Suspected state-sponsored attackers are using a custom backdoor to persistently compromise Cisco security devices (firewalls), the US CISA and the UK National Cyber Security Centre warned on Thursday. CISA also shared threat hunting rules US federal civilian agencies should use to search for evidence of the malware on their own systems.
Indirect prompt injection is taking hold in the wild
The open web is slowly but surely filling up with “traps” designed for LLM-powered AI agents. The technique, known as indirect prompt injection (IPI), involves hiding (more or less) covert instructions inside ordinary web pages, waiting for an AI agent to read them and carry out the author’s commands.
How to spot a North Korean fake in a job interview
North Korean operatives are getting hired at companies by passing job interviews using fake identities and AI tools. In this Help Net Security video, Adrian Cheek, a senior cybercrime researcher at Flare, outlines several ways organizations can catch these attempts before extending an offer.
EU pushes for stronger cloud sovereignty, awards €180 million to four providers
The European Commission is stepping up efforts to strengthen the EU’s digital sovereignty by awarding a cloud services tender worth up to €180 million over six years. The initiative gives EU institutions and agencies access to sovereign cloud services delivered by a group of Europe-based providers.
Researchers build an encrypted routing layer for private AI inference
Organizations in healthcare, finance, and other sensitive industries want to use large AI models without exposing private data to the cloud servers running those models. A cryptographic technique called Secure Multi-Party Computation (MPC) makes this possible. It splits data into encrypted fragments, distributes them across two or more servers that do not share information with each other, and lets those servers compute an AI result without either one ever seeing the raw input.
Scattered Spider hacker pleads guilty to stealing $8 million in cryptocurrency
A British national tied to the Scattered Spider cybercrime group pleaded guilty to hacking multiple companies via SMS phishing and stealing over $8 million in virtual currency from US victims.
Ransomware negotiator admits role in attacks he was hired to resolve
A Florida man, formerly employed as a ransomware negotiator, pleaded guilty to conspiring to carry out ransomware attacks against US companies.
Apple Intelligence flaw kept stolen tokens reusable on another device
Apple claims that Apple Intelligence, a GenAI service provided on its operating systems, is designed with an extra focus on user security and privacy through a two-stage authentication and authorization system using anonymous access tokens. However, researchers from The Ohio State University have identified vulnerabilities in this design, demonstrated on macOS 26.0 (Tahoe), that allow attackers to steal and reuse these tokens.
Tencent’s QClaw AI agent app arrives on Windows and macOS
Tencent has opened an international beta of QClaw, an AI agent application aimed at consumers in Canada, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and the United States. The first wave is capped at 20,000 users. Additional markets are scheduled to follow.
Claude Mythos finds 271 Firefox flaws, Mozilla believes it shifts security toward defenders
The Mozilla Foundation tested Claude Mythos, an Anthropic AI model that has stirred debate in the cybersecurity community. Before granting access to Mythos, Mozilla scanned Firefox using Opus 4.6, which led to fixes for 22 security-sensitive bugs in Firefox 148. For instance, Mythos identified 271 vulnerabilities in Firefox 150.
Cyberattack on French government agency triggers phishing alert
France Titres, a French government agency, has disclosed a data breach that may have exposed user data from its online portal. According to the agency, the incident was detected on Wednesday, April 15, and remains under investigation, with multiple data types potentially exposed for an undisclosed number of individuals.
Google’s Workspace Intelligence promises privacy while running on your data
Security and data governance are among the key considerations in Google’s latest AI update, which introduces Workspace Intelligence within Google Workspace. Google describes the feature as “a secure, dynamic system that inherently understands complex semantic relationships within your Workspace apps (such as Docs, Slides, or Gmail) content, your active projects, your collaborators, and your organization’s domain knowledge.”
GDPR works, but only where someone enforces it
A new measurement study of web tracking across ten countries offers a reality check for anyone working on privacy compliance. Researchers crawled the same set of globally popular websites from virtual machines located in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, India, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, and California. The results show that European privacy law does reduce tracking, and that most of the reduction happens in the two jurisdictions where regulators bring cases.
OpenAI tackles a bad habit people have when interacting with AI
Since people tend to paste personal data into AI tools such as ChatGPT, OpenAI has released Privacy Filter, an open-weight model designed to detect and redact personally identifiable information (PII) in text. The model is available under the Apache 2.0 license on Hugging Face and GitHub.
If cyber espionage via HDMI worries you, NCSC built a device to stop it
A new cybersecurity device developed by the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) should be a helpful solution for protecting governments and businesses from malicious activity carried through display connections. Called SilentGlass, the plug-and-play tool is designed to protect HDMI and DisplayPort links from potential cyberattacks.
Hacker with a special interest in breaching sports institutions ends behind bars
French police have arrested a suspected hacker linked to a series of data breaches affecting organizations in the country. Citing authorities, Le Parisien reported that the suspect, a 20-year-old man using the alias ‘HexDex,’ was taken into custody on April 22, 2026, in the Vendée region, western France.
OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 is out with expanded cybersecurity safeguards
Competition to release stronger AI models is accelerating, and just weeks after the release of GPT-5.4, OpenAI has introduced GPT-5.5, pointing to expanded safeguards in the new model.
Compromised everyday devices power Chinese cyber espionage operations
China-linked threat actors have shifted from individually procured infrastructure to large-scale covert networks, botnets built from compromised routers and other edge devices, the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) warns. To help organizations address this threat, the NCSC, together with the Cyber League and partner agencies, has issued an advisory.
Users advised to drop passwords and make room for passkeys
In a decisive move that could reshape how users log in online, the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) is urging consumers to abandon passwords in favour of passkeys, positioning them as the future of authentication. Since most breaches start with stolen or compromised login details, adopting passkeys is viewed as a reliable defence against phishing attacks.
Product showcase: Syncthing for secure, private file synchronization
Syncthing is a free and open-source application that synchronizes files directly between your devices. Instead of uploading data to a central server, it uses a peer-to-peer approach, transferring files whenever peers are online. This decentralized model ensures that your data remains private and under your control.
Meta and PortSwigger drive offensive security further to find what others miss
Meta Bug Bounty and PortSwigger have formed a partnership to help security researchers sharpen their skills, collaborate more closely, and improve vulnerability discovery. The initiative combines Meta’s bug bounty program with PortSwigger’s Burp Suite, reflecting a shared focus on improving both tooling and education for the global security community.
OpenAI’s Chronicle feature lets Codex read your screen, raising privacy concerns
OpenAI’s Chronicle is a feature designed to help Codex, an AI-powered coding assistant, better understand what users are working on by capturing context directly from their screens. It uses recent screen activity to build memories, allowing Codex to interpret references, identify relevant sources, and pick up on the tools and workflows users rely on, without requiring them to restate context in every prompt.
VirtualBox 7.2.8 is out with Linux kernel 7.0 support and crash fixes
Oracle shipped VirtualBox 7.2.8 on April 21, 2026, as a maintenance release covering crashes, networking problems, clipboard issues, and extended Linux kernel compatibility. The update touches the VMM layer, NAT networking, graphics, UEFI, and both Linux and Windows guest support.
Thunderbird 150 arrives with encrypted message search and OpenPGP improvements
Released today, Thunderbird 150.0 brings eight new features, a round of bug fixes, and security patches that cover the web engine underlying the email client. Thunderbird 150.0 runs on Windows 10 or later, macOS 10.15 or later, and Linux with GTK+ 3.14 or higher.
Shadow AI, deepfakes, and supply chain compromise are rewriting the financial sector threat playbook
Financially motivated attacks continued to drive the bulk of cyber incidents against banks, insurers, and payment processors in 2025. Approximately 90% of breaches affecting financial institutions carried a financial motive, with data breaches accounting for roughly 64% of incidents and ransomware making up the remaining 36%. The average cost of a data breach in the sector reached $5.56 million per incident, placing finance second among all industries by breach cost.
PentAGI: Open-source autonomous AI penetration testing system
Penetration testers have long relied on collections of specialized tools, manual coordination, and documented runbooks to work through a target assessment. PentAGI, an open-source project from VXControl, attempts to automate that entire workflow using a multi-agent AI system that plans, researches, and executes penetration tests with minimal human direction.
OneDrive updates focus on AI, access control, and compliance
Microsoft OneDrive’s recent updates focus on improving intelligence, collaboration, and administrative control. New enhancements also enable the generation of documents, presentations, spreadsheets, and other structured outputs from content stored in SharePoint.
Phishing reclaims the top initial access spot, attackers experiment with AI tools
Phishing returned as the leading method attackers used to break into organizations in the first quarter of 2026, accounting for over a third of engagements where initial access could be determined, according to Cisco Talos. It is the first quarter phishing has led the category since Q2 2025, when exploitation of public-facing applications took over following widespread attacks against on-premises Microsoft SharePoint servers
GopherWhisper APT group hides command and control traffic in Slack and Discord
Attackers continue to lean on everyday collaboration platforms to hide command and control traffic inside normal enterprise noise. A newly identified China-aligned APT group pushes that trend further, running its operations through Slack workspaces, Discord servers, Outlook drafts, and the file.io sharing service.
Google brings instant email verification to Android, no OTP needed
Google has introduced cryptographically verified email credentials for Android through the Credential Manager API. This API aligns with the W3C Digital Credential API standard. It provides a unified way for apps to request and retrieve user credentials for authentication and authorization.
Where AI in CI/CD is working for engineering teams
Developers have folded AI into daily coding work. Still, the same tools remain largely absent from the systems that validate and ship software. New research from JetBrains points to a widening gap between how engineers write code on their own machines and what runs inside continuous integration and delivery pipelines.
IT spending to hit $6.31 trillion record, thanks to AI
Global spending on IT is expected to reach $6.31 trillion in 2026, according to the latest quarterly forecast from Gartner, marking a 13.5% increase from the previous year. The forecast shows that growth is spread across all major segments, though not evenly.
A study of 1,000 Android apps finds a privacy policy logging gap
Android developers write log statements for the same reasons they always have: debugging crashes, tracing performance issues, and understanding how features behave in production. Legal and privacy teams, working from templates and regulatory checklists, draft policies describing what the app collects from users. These two workflows rarely intersect inside the same company. A new study of 1,000 Android apps shows what that disconnect looks like at scale, and the gap has implications for GDPR and CCPA exposure.
Meta is overhauling how you sign in, manage settings, and protect your accounts
Meta Account gives users of Meta apps and devices a simpler way to access and manage their accounts. Accounts Center will automatically be updated to a Meta Account as part of a gradual rollout over the next year. Users will be notified when the change occurs.
Cybersecurity jobs available right now: April 21, 2026
We’ve scoured the market to bring you a selection of roles that span various skill levels within the cybersecurity field. Check out this weekly selection of cybersecurity jobs available right now.
