Kirsten Doyle

Organisations faced an average of 1,994 cyberattacks per week in August. This was revealed by Check Point’s Global Threat Intelligence Report for August 2025. That’s slightly down from July, just 1%, but still 10% higher than a year ago.   The picture is clear: cyber threats remain persistent and intense. Industries Under Pressure Education remained the hardest hit. Schools and universities saw 4,178 attacks per week, a 13% rise year-on-year. The reasons are familiar. Digital expansion has widened the attack surface. Security budgets lag behind. Attackers know it.  Telecoms were next. Providers endured 2,992 weekly attacks, up 28% from last year.…

Security Operations Centers (SOCs) are drowning in noise. The average company now generates close to a thousand alerts a day. For very large enterprises, the number surges past 3,000. Close to half (40% never get fully investigated. Some turn out to be critical.  This is outlined in Prophet Security’s new report, “State of AI in Security Operations 2025”. Based on a survey of 282 security leaders at large organizations, the study maps out the rising pressure on SOCs, the limits of human-led operations, and the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence as a lifeline. The Alert Tsunami Organizations run on a…

Bad actors are stepping up. FortiGuard Labs has uncovered a phishing campaign that installs MostereRAT, a remote access trojan built to evade defenses and seize full control of a machine. The path is familiar. A phishing email lands in the inbox of a Japanese user. It looks like a business inquiry, routine and harmless. A click leads to a download. A Word document appears. Inside, a simple instruction: open the archive, run the file.  That file unlocks the rest. The malware unpacks encrypted tools, hides them in system directories, and uses a custom RPC client to bypass standard Windows controls.…

A newly disclosed vulnerability in SAP S/4HANA has been rated critical, with security researchers warning that exploitation is already underway. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2025-42957, carries a CVSS score of 9.9 and affects S/4HANA systems running S4CORE versions 102 through 108, both in private cloud and on-premise deployments. According to the official CVE record published by SAP SE, the issue stems from a function module exposed via Remote Function Call (RFC) that allows attackers with low-level user privileges to inject arbitrary ABAP code, bypassing authorization checks. In effect, it functions as a backdoor, exposing the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of…

Qantas has cut short-term bonuses for its top executives by 15% in response to a customer data breach, even as the airline reported a strong year of profits. CEO Vanessa Hudson saw her bonus reduced by about AUD 250,000 under the 2025 remuneration decisions, with the airline saying the adjustment reflected shared accountability across the leadership team. Despite the cut, Hudson’s total pay package rose to roughly AUD 6.3 million for the year, up from AUD 4.4 million in 2024, due to increases in base salary and other components. The bonus reductions follow a cyber incident in late June 2025,…

Bad actors are exploiting Grok AI to push malware through promoted ads on X, in a scheme researchers are calling “Grokking.”  The method, uncovered by Guardio Labs researcher Nati Tal, takes advantage of how Grok parses hidden fields in ads. Malvertisers post videos with adult content baits, but avoid direct links in the main body to bypass filters. Instead, the link is buried in the small “From:” metadata field under the video card, a spot the platform doesn’t scan for malicious content. Once the ad is live, the actors reply to their own post with a simple question for Grok:…

In July 2025, Darktrace researchers detected an attempted cryptojacking incident on a retail and e-commerce network.   A desktop device initiated an HTTP connection to a rare endpoint, 45.141.87[.]195 over port 8000. Embedded in the request was a PowerShell script, infect.ps1. The script’s behavior flagged an immediate anomaly: a new PowerShell user agent making an unusual outbound connection. Analysis revealed the script dropped an obfuscated AutoIt loader. The loader injected NBMiner into a legitimate Windows process, charmap.exe. The attack chain began with three encoded data blobs in the PowerShell script. The first blob, XOR’d with 97, produced an AutoIt executable stored…

The European General Court has backed the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework (DPF). The ruling clears legal uncertainty for organisations moving data across the Atlantic. It upholds the European Commission’s adequacy decision, and confirms that the framework protects personal data while still enabling cross-border digital activity. ITI and its members welcomed the decision. It provides clarity for entities of all sizes, from the largest multinationals to their SME counterparts. It also sees that personal data is protected under Europe’s strong privacy standards. “This ruling sends a clear signal: the Data Privacy Framework stands on solid legal and rights-based foundations,” said ITI…

WhatsApp has disclosed a zero-day flaw that was used in precision attacks against Apple users. The bug, tracked as CVE-2025-55177 with a CVSS score of 8.0, involved incomplete authorization of linked device sync messages. In practice, that meant an attacker could trick a device into processing content from arbitrary URLs. The issue affected WhatsApp for iOS before version 2.25.21.73, WhatsApp Business for iOS before 2.25.21.78, and WhatsApp for Mac before 2.25.21.78.  According to WhatsApp’s advisory, the flaw appears to have been paired with another Apple vulnerability, CVE-2025-43300, in a sophisticated campaign aimed at select targets. Apple patched CVE-2025-43300 on August…

Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) has fallen victim to a cyber-attack. In a statement JLR said: “JLR has been impacted by a cyber incident. We took immediate action to mitigate its impact by proactively shutting down our systems. We are now working at pace to restart our global applications in a controlled manner.” The company, owned by India’s Tata Motors, said at this time there is no evidence any customer data has been stolen but its retail and production activities have been severely disrupted.  It said it moved fast to contain the breach and is working to bring systems back online. …