cybersecurity
White House authorizes private US companies to hack foreign criminal networks
President Trump signed a National Security Presidential Memorandum on August 12 allowing vetted private companies to run offensive cyber operations against foreign threat …
Four corporate investigation mistakes organizations make under pressure
In this Help Net Security video, Christine Gadsby, VP and Chief Security Advisor at BlackBerry, explains why corporate investigations go wrong before the forensic team …
DDoS attacks hit record scale as 1 Tbps+ campaigns become more common
DDoS attacks grew in scale during the first half of 2026, bringing larger traffic floods, shorter attack durations, and increasingly automated campaigns. Cloudflare’s H1 …
Product showcase: Is this image real? Slop or Not investigates
Slop or Not is an AI text and image detector for iPhone and Mac that runs entirely offline, with no account required. It uses on-device AI models powered by the Apple Neural …
A stranger has been reading Salesforce and ServiceNow portals worldwide for 17 months
Most security stories start with something broken. This one starts with everything working as designed. Researchers at Reco have been tracking a campaign they call City-Forum, …
Signal’s new security feature checks if your encrypted chats were tampered with
Signal has introduced a feature called automatic key verification, giving users a new way to confirm that nobody has secretly interfered with their encrypted chats. “Signal is …
Chrome’s anti-abuse protections block 7 billion unwanted Android notifications daily
Google Chrome’s latest measures against abusive web push notifications include automatically revoking notification permissions for inactive and suspicious websites, …
Post-quantum migration gets harder when every user holds a key
In this Help Net Security interview, Christopher Smith, CEO of Quantus, discusses what cryptographic inventories turn up in banks and hospitals, including default passwords …
PentestGPT: Open-source automated penetration testing agentic framework
PentestGPT is an open-source penetration testing agent that points a large language model at a target and lets it work. In its default mode it runs recon, then exploit, then …
338 million attack simulations reveal the state of enterprise defense
First, a bit of good news: Enterprise defenses are recovering. However, it’s a narrow recovery, with a twist. Today, organizations are better at stopping loud attacks but have …
AI deployments are stretching enterprise security to its limits
CISOs and CTOs expect AI deployments to increase their organizations’ attack surface by an average of 14% over the next year. Nearly all lack visibility into AI …
Malicious SIMs can hijack smartphones, steal files, and lock them onto 2G
Researchers have found that compromised or malicious SIM cards can issue commands to some smartphones and cellular-connected devices, allowing attackers to steal information, …