News – Help Net Security

Attackers are breaking into business email accounts with short messages asking whether a company can quote on an upcoming project, the kind of request sales and procurement staff answer every week. Cadence Riddle, a cybersecurity researcher at Fortra, tracked a 12-fold increase in malicious emails mentioning “RFQ” (request for quotation) between October 2025 and September 2026. In nearly 73% of cases, the lure led to a page built to steal login credentials. “RFQ communication is … More → The post Hackers disguise phishing as promising business opportunities appeared first on Help Net Security.

Three weeks before Americans vote in the 2026 midterm election, fraudsters are borrowing candidate names, logos and slogans to collect fake donations and harvest personal data, the FBI warned. “The FBI warns the public that scammers could exploit the 2026 US Midterm Election to perpetrate financial fraud schemes,” reads the public service announcement, which adds that these schemes target victims throughout the country and “have previously exploited state and local elections.” The alert updates a … More → The post Scammers clone candidates’ voices to steal cash and voter data ahead of 2026 midterms, FBI warns appeared first on Help Net Security.

Arch Linux users who mistyped yay or paru while installing the package helpers from the Arch User Repository (AUR) may have given a stranger root access to their machine. AUR is a popular community package source for Arch Linux and related distributions, hosting user-submitted build scripts for proprietary programs, beta builds and older software versions that the official repositories do not carry. Yay and paru, known as AUR helpers, search the AUR for software and … More → The post Fake Arch Linux AUR packages exploit typos to run malware with root privileges appeared first on Help Net Security.

Google’s new scam protections cover Google Messages and third-party messaging apps, with an enhanced protection mode, expanded scam alerts and safeguards against call-forwarding and screen-sharing scams. “With scams growing harder to spot, it’s nearly impossible for users to catch every red flag themselves. That’s why Android’s built-in defenses actively intercept these threats before they reach you,” Alberto Pastor Nieto, Senior Product Manager at Google Messages, and Shaifali Bhandari, Product Manager at Android, explained. Scam alerts … More → The post Android adds AI-powered scam alerts, hangs up on bank impostors appeared first on Help Net Security.

David Fuhr, CTO at intcube, talks about a security cohort for public administration, where 27 municipalities hardened Windows Server and Active Directory together over 12 weeks. This Help Net Security interview covers how a cohort works, with weekly sessions, homework and measurements at the start and end. He explains how the group handled settings that can break systems, such as SMB signing, LDAP signing and Kerberos hardening, how changes were tested in a lab, and … More → The post Why Active Directory weaknesses stay open for years in teams with one or two admins appeared first on Help Net Security.

US employers posted 235,786 cybersecurity jobs from January through September 2026. That is the lowest total for those months in the four years that staffing and workforce intelligence firm CyberSN has tracked. They pulled the listings from job data provider JobSpikr, removed duplicates and sorted each one by the security work it described. The postings that remain have drifted toward governance, risk and compliance (GRC), the teams that track an organization’s risk and answer to … More → The post The cyber talent shortage? Job postings just hit a four-year low appeared first on Help Net Security.

A seller on a restricted criminal forum is marketing an autonomous hacking tool that runs on stolen OpenAI, Anthropic and Google API keys, so the key’s owner pays for the scans. Bitsight’s threat intelligence team tracked the shift across thousands of posts on 16 underground forums from February through August 2026. Over that window, mentions of AI agents, indirect prompt injection and the Model Context Protocol (MCP) rose 67 percent. Two groups are exposed. A … More → The post Stolen AI API keys are paying for hackers’ autonomous scans appeared first on Help Net Security.

More than 9.1 million DDoS attacks were recorded globally between January and June 2026, an increase of nearly a quarter year over year, according to Netscout’s DDoS Threat Intelligence Report. Large attacks and distributed targeting strain defenses Attacks exceeding 1 Tbps or 1 Gpps increased 1,286% year over year. Much of that growth came from botnet operators associated with Aisuru, Kimwolf, Jackskid, and their successors. That means attackers need fewer devices to launch large attacks. … More → The post DDoS attacks can knock services offline before links reach capacity appeared first on Help Net Security.

Here’s a look at the most interesting products from the past week, featuring releases from NinjaOne, Qualys, Scytale, and SolarWinds. NinjaOne combines Katana AI and MCP server to accelerate IT problem resolution NinjaOne has announced Katana AI, an agentic AI technician that supports and elevates IT workers, and the NinjaOne MCP server, an agentic orchestration connector that extends the platform’s governed access to the AI tools teams already use. Katana AI analyzes device telemetry, history, … More → The post New infosec products of the week: October 16, 2026 appeared first on Help Net Security.

Fastfetch is a system information tool written mainly in C that runs on Linux, macOS, Windows 8.1 and later, Android and several BSDs. The fastfetch project removed QuickJS scripting and changed what its Disk, Command and Shell modules report in version 2.70.0, released October 14. Configs written for older versions may print different values or stop working. Disk fields changed The Disk custom format drops {size-available}. {size-free} now reports whichever of free or available space … More → The post Fastfetch 2.70.0 changes how Disk free space is reported appeared first on Help Net Security.