CyberSecure Specialist

17 Jul

Podcast: Broken Governance, Agentic AI, and the MindStone Agent Exclusive

Information, News, Uncategorized

[embedded content] In this exclusive SecurityWeek interview, Brian “SchleiF” Schleifer sits down with Clint Bodungen, Director of AI/ML Engineering at Arcovo, founder of ThreatGen, and one of the industry’s leading voices in industrial cybersecurity. Together they tackle why traditional governance often fails practitioners, how cybersecurity has evolved over the past two decades, and why the biggest vulnerability is still people not technology. Clint also shares, for the first time publicly, the story behind the MindStone…

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17 Jul

Beacon Security Raises $13 Million for Security Data Platform

Information, News

Cybersecurity startup Beacon Security has announced raising $13 million in a seed funding round led by Notable Capital. AlphaDrive Ventures, Holly Ventures, Jefferies Family Office, SVCI, and dozens of angel investors also participated in the investment round. Based in New York, Beacon was founded in 2024 by IDF veterans Gal Tal-Hochberg (CEO), Or Mattatia (CPO), and Iddo Israely (CTO). Beacon is providing organizations with a agentic security data platform that enables defenders to prevent, detect,…

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16 Jul

Legacy Systems, Real-World Impacts: The Reality of OT Security

Information, News

I’m here today to write about one particularly thorny area of operational technology (OT) and security that I run into somewhat routinely. Given my own particular interests as an incorrigible vulnerability-gazer, and my professional role as vice president of security research at runZero, I deal with OT security issues more often than the average bear. I’ve noticed that there’s definitely a vibe of, “IT be like this, but OT be like that” going on in…

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15 Jul

Forgotten UEFI shims undermining Secure Boot

Information

ESET researchers identified 11 old and forgotten UEFI shim bootloaders at versions 0.9 and below that can be used to bypass UEFI Secure Boot on any UEFI-based machine that trusts Microsoft’s Microsoft Corporation UEFI CA 2011 third-party UEFI certificate authority (CA) certificate, regardless of the installed operating system (OS). Reported shims can be exploited to execute untrusted code during system boot, enabling attackers to deploy malicious UEFI bootkits (such as Bootkitty, HybridPetya, or BlackLotus) even…

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15 Jul

Unpatched Cursor Vulnerability Exposes Users to Code Execution

Information, News

An unpatched vulnerability in Cursor on Windows can be triggered for code execution when a developer opens a repository in the application, Mindgard reports. Cursor is one of the most popular AI-assisted development environments, with more than 7 million active users. The security defect, Mindgard says, is straightforward: when opening a repository, Cursor would automatically execute a malicious git.exe binary in the project’s root without warning the user or asking for approval. “The vulnerability is…

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14 Jul

Microsoft Patches a Record 570 Security Flaws

Information, Insights

Microsoft Corp. today released software updates to plug at least 570 security holes in its Windows operating systems and other software, almost triple the number of vulnerabilities the software giant fixed in its record-smashing Patch Tuesday release last month. Microsoft attributed the burgeoning patch counts to vulnerability discoveries aided by artificial intelligence. Nearly 60 of the bugs quashed in July’s Patch Tuesday earned a “critical” severity rating, meaning miscreants or malware could use them to…

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14 Jul

Microsoft Patches Record 622 Vulnerabilities, Including Two Exploited Zero-Days

Information, News

Microsoft on Tuesday announced patches for a record-breaking 622 vulnerabilities, including two bugs in Active Directory and SharePoint Server that have been exploited in the wild as zero-days. Tracked as CVE-2026-56155, the exploited AD flaw affects Federation Services (AD FS) and could allow attackers to elevate their privileges locally to administrator. Also leading to privilege escalation, the SharePoint Server flaw is tracked as CVE-2026-56164 and can be exploited over the network without authentication. Another security…

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14 Jul

CISA Urges SharePoint Hardening After New Exploitations

Attacks, Insights, Malware

CISA is aware of active exploitation of vulnerabilities CVE-2026-32201, CVE-2026-45659, and CVE-2026-56164, enabling cyber threat actors to gain unauthorized access to on-premises SharePoint Server instances. These vulnerabilities affect all supported on-premises SharePoint Server versions (Subscription Edition, 2019, and 2016) and involve establishing remote code execution (RCE) and post-exploitation activities, such as stealing Internet Information Services (IIS) machine keys and performing deserialization techniques, to gain persistence and deploy malware. Organizations should monitor affected SharePoint Servers closely…

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13 Jul

Lessons Learned from CISA’s Recent GitHub Leak

Data Breaches, Information, Insights

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has issued a postmortem on a recent data leak in which a contractor published dozens of internal CISA credentials — including AWS Govcloud keys — in a public GitHub repository for almost six months before being notified by KrebsOnSecurity. Experts say the gaps identified in the agency’s initial response provide important lessons that all security teams should absorb. On May 15, 2026, the security firm GitGuardian asked for…

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13 Jul

Hacker Conversations: Jesse McGraw (GhostExodus), From Blackhat Hacker to Redemption

Information, News

Jesse McGraw isn’t a hacker; at least, not by his own definition. He accepts he was a hacker, and a blackhat hacker, and that he still retains the mindset of a hacker. But he is no longer a hacker, he says. Early days He realized he was a hacker while in high school. “My one and only friend was a hacker, and I had never seen anything like what he did.” Before then, McGraw had…

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