The Iranian Cyber Capability 2026

The Iranian Cyber Capability 2026 By John Fokker and Ernesto Fernández Provecho · March 5, 2026 Introduction In 2024, we published an assessment of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s cyber capabilities, outlining the structure, tradecraft, and strategic intent of Iranian-aligned threat actors. The co...

Understanding Iranian Capabilities and Hacktivist Activities

Understanding Iranian Capabilities and Hacktivist Activities By John Fokker · June 23, 2025 As geopolitical tensions flare again in the Middle East, cyber operations are increasingly becoming an extension of physical conflict. State-aligned threat actors, patriotic hackers, and ideologically...

Asymmetry by Design: Boosting Cyber Defenders with Differential Access to AI

As AI-enabled cyber capabilities become more advanced, we propose "differential access" as a strategy to tilt the cybersecurity balance toward defense by shaping access to these capabilities. We introduce three possible approaches that form a continuum, becoming progressively more restrictive for...

Evaluating AI Cyber Capabilities with Crowdsourced Elicitation

As AI systems become increasingly capable, understanding their offensive cyber potential is critical for informed governance and responsible deployment. However, it's hard to accurately bound their capabilities, and some prior evaluations dramatically underestimated them. The art of extracting...

Kaspersky Exits U.S. Market Following Commerce Department Ban

Russian security vendor Kaspersky has said it's exiting the U.S. market nearly a month after the Commerce Department announced a ban on the sale of its software in the country citing a national security risk. News of the closure was first reported by journalist Kim Zetter. The company is expected...

Chinese Hackers Targeting Russian Military Personnel with Updated PlugX Malware

A China-linked government-sponsored threat actor observed striking European diplomatic entities in March may have been targeting Russian government officials with an updated version of a remote access trojan called PlugX. Secureworks attributed the attempted intrusions to a threat actor it tracks...

A deep dive into an NSO zero-click iMessage exploit: Remote Code Execution

Posted by Ian Beer & Samuel Groß of Google Project Zero We want to thank Citizen Lab for sharing a sample of the FORCEDENTRY exploit with us, and Apple’s Security Engineering and Architecture SEAR group for collaborating with us on the technical analysis. The editorial opinions reflected below ar...

The future of cyberconflicts

The ever-increasing role of technology in every aspect of our society has turned cybersecurity into a major sovereignty issue for all states. Due to their asymmetrical nature, offensive cyber-capabilities have been embraced by many countries that wouldnt otherwise have the resources to compete on...

Heightened Awareness for Iranian Cyber Activity

Iranian cyber threat actors have been continuously improving their offensive cyber capabilities. They continue to engage in more conventional offensive cyber activities ranging from website defacement, distributed denial of service DDoS attacks, and theft of personally identifiable information PI...

Israel Neutralizes Cyber Attack by Blowing Up A Building With Hackers

The Israel Defense Force IDF claims to have neutralized an "attempted" cyber attack by launching airstrikes on a building in Gaza Strip from where it says the attack was originated. As shown in a video tweeted by IDF, the building in the Gaza Strip, which Israeli fighter drones have now destroyed...

4 Predictions for the Cybersecurity Landscape in 2018

Targeted attacks are on the rise, and the dark web isn’t helping curb that trend. To compound this, the recent revelations on Shadow Brokers and CIA Vault 7, as well as burgeoning nation-state cyber capabilities aren’t helping either. It’s only a matter of time before more attack methods are...

Attributing Advanced Attacks Remains Challenge For Researchers

Amid the connections being made between the Russian government and the attack on the Democratic National Committee DNC, researchers on Tuesday reminded us of the challenges security experts have in correctly attributing advanced attacks. In a wide-ranging Reddit AMA, members of Kaspersky Lab’s...

US Government: North Korea Behind Sony Hack

The United States government is expected to attribute the damaging and embarrassing hack of Sony Pictures Entertainment to the government of North Korea. Various mainstream media outlets quoting anonymous government sources said North Korea is “centrally involved” in the attack, which NBC News sa...

Air Force Classifies Some Cybersecurity Tools as Weapons

The United States government for years has been developing and deploying offensive cyber capabilities, most of it done without much in the way of public notice. That’s been changing of late, as government and military officials have become more open in discussing these capabilities and under what...