Field notes from the edge.
What our engineers learned this week. Hands-on technical deep-dives, postmortems, and strategy frameworks.
AI Scramble Drives Cybersecurity M&A Boom
Welcome to another gangbuster year for strategic M&A activity in cyber, with 117 deals announced in the latest quarter. What's different: Many of the buyers are not your typical cybersecurity firms.
What We Missed: FBI Strikes Back at ShinyHunters
In this video conversation, Dark Reading editors discuss some of the news they didn't get a chance to cover, from the arrest of a suspected ShinyHunters operative to the compromise of a Pentagon-run data center.
Security Threats Don't Stop at the Office: Why Executives' Families Need Training Too
Those closest to executives must match their security postures because the weakest link in a family becomes the entry point for attacks.
Social Engineering AI Agents: The New BEC for 2026
As AI agents gain authority over business systems, attackers can manipulate them like business email compromise (BEC) victims.
'AgentCorruption' Puts AWS Environments At Risk With Single Prompt
A now-patched vulnerability in AWS Bedrock AgentCore could allow an attacker to use one AI chatbot to take over an organization's entire fleet.
Venezuelan Cartel's Malware Honcho Nabbed for ATM Jackpotting
The first cybercriminal to ever make the FBI's "10 Most Wanted Fugitives" list allegedly infused Tren de Aragua's violent criminal operations with cash.
Russian Spies Give 'MatchBoil' Malware a Stealthy Facelift
Cyber-espionage actor UAC-0099 has been steadily refining its flagship dropper in campaigns targeting Ukrainian organizations.
Writing the Next Chapter
Dark Reading is about to begin a new decade in its storied history, and we have some breaking news of our own to share.
Citizen Lab Slams Trump Administration, 'Techno-Fascist' Executives
The Citizen Lab's Ron Deibert warns the US government is pushing for pervasive surveillance and says certain technology executives are all too happy to help.
Australian Gov't Weighs Mandatory AI Incident Reporting
In the wake of an agentic attack against its own Medicare systems, Australia's government is feeling out what regulations might look like for frontier AI companies.
Anthropic Gives Vetted Defenders Fewer Claude Guardrails
Anthropic has merged Project Glasswing into a tiered access program for its advanced cyber LLMs, including Opus, Sonnet, and Mythos.
OpenAI Agent Escape Causes Wikimedia Service Outage
Autonomous agents also tried to abuse other websites and services hosted by the foundation, using them as proxies for unauthorized activities.
Critical Healthcare Systems Aren't Quantum-Ready
A study of 2.5 million devices across 50 healthcare organization suggests the sector has a long way to go in getting ready for the post-quantum cryptography era.
ClickFix Attacks Evolve to Better Hide Malicious Payloads
Threat actors are now hiding payloads by using DNS TXT records and browser cache pre-fetching, making it tougher to spot early attack stages.
IANS' Kakolowski: How AI Is Reshaping CISO Budgets & Security Teams
In this video interview, Nick Kakolowski, senior director for CISO research at IANS, talks AI: budgets, ROI, and changes inside security teams.
'BigDiskBuster' Leaves Microsoft Defender Running While Blocking Updates
Not quite an EDR-killer, but the proof-of-concept cyber technique creates a silent virus detection gap while service runs normally, no exploit required.
Google's PageBreak AI Agent Finds 500 Flaws in Its Web Apps
The situation illustrates a trend toward using AI and deterministic validation to identify flaws and exploitability, and provide a risk assessment.
ClingSTUN Turns Vulnerable IoT Devices Into Proxy Nodes
The Linux backdoor exploits 24 known flaws to compromise IoT devices and uses legitimate public STUN servers to obscure communications.
Chinese Hackers Impersonate US Officials for AI Cyber Espionage
An emerging threat group known as TA419 established seemingly legitimate professional relationships with AI policy experts working for US think tanks, universities, and legal organizations.