Autonomous Remediation Is Already Running at Enterprise Scale

The following is a guest blog by ITSPmagazine, based on their interview of Qualys President & CEO Sumedh Thakar at Black Hat USA 2026. Sumedh Thakar has watched the same clock compress for 23 years. He joined Qualys as an early software engineer on the scanner, when organizations scanned once eve...

Lessons from Microsoft Patch KB5002907: Two Layers of Patch Control in Qualys TruRisk Eliminate

How reliability scoring keeps risky patches out of zero-touch jobs, and how one blocking rule stops a paused update across your environment. Executive Summary Microsoft has paused the rollout of KB5002907, an optional Microsoft 365 Apps update that left some Office 2016 and Office 2019...

The Developer is the New Perimeter: How Supply Chain Attacks Are Becoming Cloud Breaches

Key Takeaways Malicious packages can steal cloud credentials during installation, before applications run. Stolen credentials turn developer workstations and CI/CD pipelines into gateways to cloud resources. Restrict installation scripts, minimize credential privileges, protect metadata access, a...

CISA BOD 26-04 Timelines for Three Linux Kernel CVEs

Executive Summary CISA added three actively exploited Linux kernel vulnerabilities: CVE-2025-39682, CVE-2026-53266, and CVE-2025-39964 to its KEV Catalog on September 18, 2026, triggering a 3-day remediation deadline that passed on September 21. Under CISA BOD 26-04, a 3-day window applies to...

The End of Point-in-Time Compliance: Why Continuous Audit Readiness Matters to You in the AI Era

Key Takeaways Periodic audits provide a point-in-time assessment, but they cannot demonstrate whether controls remain effective between audit cycles. Qualys platform data shows 10.5 billion configuration findings across customer environments but only 1.6% represent meaningful exposure and under 1...

The Autonomous Engine Behind Remediation, and What Finally Makes It Safe

Executive Summary Vulnerability exploitation now happens at a speed that manual, ticket-based remediation can 't match. Qualys's Enterprise TruRisk Management Platform closes that gap with autonomous remediation: exposures are prioritized by threat, business, and environmental context, then...

Oracle Critical Security Patch Update, September 2026 Review

Oracle released its September edition of Critical Security Patch Update. The update received patches for 673 security vulnerabilities. Some of the vulnerabilities addressed in this update impact more than one product. These patches address vulnerabilities in various product families, including...

Before You Patch. Why Patch Reliability Matters for Confident Deployment

Executive Summary Microsoft’s September 2026 security updates,KB5124008 and KB5124012 , have been linked to USB audio failures on some Windows systems, highlighting the operational risk that can accompany security patching. Qualys TruRisk Eliminate classified both updates as Low Reliability ,...

Automate Asset Isolation: Your Last Resort to Meet Remediation Deadlines

Executive Summary Remediation deadlines slip for reasons outside your control: a patch does not exist yet, a patch is delayed, or a remediation attempt fails. The outcome is the same either way: the host stays unpatched and stays on the network. TruRisk Eliminate closes that window by isolating t...

What Is ISPM? How It Differs from IAM, PAM, IGA, and IDaaS

Key Takeaways Identity Security Posture Management ISPM is the continuous risk and posture layer of the identity stack not a replacement for Identity and Access Management IAM, Privileged Access Management PAM, Identity Governance and Administration IGA, or Identity-as-a-Service IDaaS, but the...

The Models That Found 10,000 Zero-Days Broke Into Three Companies Using Weak Passwords

The question of whether a Frontier AI model could find vulnerabilities that no human researcher had found was settled in April. Claude Mythos Preview identified thousands of previously unknown flaws across every major operating system and browser, including a 27-year-old denial-of-service conditi...

Microsoft and Adobe Patch Tuesday, September 2026 Security Update Review

Microsoft kicks off September with its monthly Patch Tuesday release, delivering fixes for security vulnerabilities affecting its products. The security updates are packed with security fixes, providing organizations with important updates to help protect their environments from emerging threats...

4 Questions to Ask When Evaluating an Exposure Management Platform

Executive Summary Exposure management platforms are increasingly evaluated based on post-detection actions rather than detection itself. This piece sets out four questions to ask when evaluating one: whether it narrows vulnerabilities to the exploitable using environment context rather than...

Anatomy of a Silent Domain Takeover

Key Takeaways Modern AD attacks use legitimate protocols end-to-end, no malware, no exploit, nothing for signature tools to fingerprint. The evidence is already in the logs; what is missing is the narrative linking five benign-looking Windows events into a single attack. A full domain takeover ca...

PCI DSS 4.0.1: Application Requirements You’re Being Assessed On in 2026

Key Takeaways Since March 31, 2025, all 51 former “best practice” requirements in PCI DSS 4.0 have been fully scored. Every 2026 assessment covers them. A large share of the new weight sits in the PCI DSS 4.0.1 application requirements , concentrated in Requirements 6 and 11: inventory of custom...

When an AI Agent Turned Attacker: What Qualys Sees Across Every Phase of the Hugging Face Kubernetes Intrusion

A phase-by-phase detection mapping of the first publicly documented autonomous agent intrusion against production infrastructure — including the phases where no product in our category sees anything at all. Executive Summary On July 9, 2026, an autonomous AI agent running inside an OpenAI...

Beyond Patching: What IT Teams Need to Know About Unfixable Exposures

Executive Summary Most IT teams still operate under a false binary:patch or accept risk. That assumption creates unnecessary operational pressure. Patchless remediation is real and production-proven. Mitigate, Uninstall, Run Custom Scripts, Isolate ; close exposure when no reliable patch exists...

CVE-2026-69414 ShieldBreak Zero-Day: No Patch, and CISA BOD 26-04 Gives You 14 Days

Executive Summary ShieldBreak CVE-2026-69414 is a zero-day elevation-of-privilege vulnerability in the Microsoft Malware Protection Engine used by Microsoft Defender, allowing a low-privilege local attacker to escalate to SYSTEM. A public PoC was released on August 12, 2026, and Microsoft assigne...

Oracle Critical Patch Update, August 2026 Security Update Review

Oracle released its August edition of Critical Patch Update. The update received patches for 943 security vulnerabilities. Some of the vulnerabilities addressed in this update impact more than one product. These patches address vulnerabilities in various product families, including third-party...

CVE-2026-68820 is in KEV. Here Is What CISA BOD 26-04 Actually Requires Now

Executive Summary CVE-2026-68820 is an actively exploited Windows vulnerability listed in CISA’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities KEV Catalog, with a remediation deadline as suggested by CISA BOD 26-04. CISA BOD 26-04 introduces risk-based remediation timelines ranging from 3 to 14 days, increasin...

Why API Discovery Is Critical for Modern AppSec Programs

Hidden API Estate And AI-speed Recon Are Reshaping Modern Application Risk Key Takeaways Unknown APIs create unattributed exposure , and such exposure rarely gets tested. Attackers build their own inventory through live reconnaissance; they do not wait for your spreadsheet. API discovery must pul...

Qualys Introduces Real-Time Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) for Faster Risk Detection and Remediation

Key Takeaways Cloud environments change continuously, while security still relies on periodic scans, leaving gaps where risks go undetected. That gap becomes exposure. Qualys Real-Time CSPM monitors cloud changes as they happen, while still supporting periodic scans for environments that require...

Microsoft and Adobe Patch Tuesday, August 2026 Security Update Review

The August 2026 Microsoft Patch Tuesday release delivers security fixes for vulnerabilities affecting a wide range of Microsoft products and services. As attackers continue to exploit unpatched vulnerabilities, timely patching remains critical for reducing exposure and strengthening enterprise...

Audit Fix: Audit Readiness for the Post-Mythos Era

Key Takeaways Human-speed compliance is dead. Attackers utilizing modern, autonomous AI tools can chain enterprise misconfigurations and weaponize vulnerabilities in under 25 minutes, rendering manual, periodic audit cycles completely obsolete. The "Configuration Gap" is your biggest blind spot...

Zero-Day Remediation Meets Operational Resiliency

Executive Summary In the Frontier AI era, the number of CISA-known exploited vulnerabilities has increased by 6.5x over the past four years, and time-to-exploitation has collapsed to -7 days. Traditional monthly patch cycles cannot keep up. Organizations need a new operating model that detects at...

Say Hello to Agent Insta: Closing the Detection Gap in Exposure Management at Machine Speed

Executive Summary Frontier AI has turned CVE weaponization timelines to hours, making scan-bound detection a growing compliance and breach-risk challenge. Agent Insta powers InstaScan to deliver scanless detection by transforming existing inventory, telemetry, and threat intelligence into validat...

Operationalize AI Governance Across Shadow GenAI, MCP, and Agentic Workloads with Qualys TotalAI

Key Takeaways AI adoption has outpaced enterprise controls, with AI and LLM workloads appearing faster than security teams can inventory or approve them. AI governance has become an evidence problem. Policies, questionnaires, and risk registers cannot prove that AI systems are safe. Traditional...

Qualys Expands Serverless Security with Vulnerability Scanning for AWS Lambda

Key Takeaways Qualys now delivers automated AWS Lambda vulnerability scanning , extending serverless security beyond posture checks CSPM into workload-level risk visibility. CSPM alone only catches misconfigurations excessive permissions, exposure, logging, encryption — it can't detect vulnerable...

The Sub-10-Minute Cloud Takeover: How Exposed IAM Keys, Misconfiguration and AI Are Rewriting the Rules of Cloud Breaches

Key Takeaways Two real-world cloud attacks reached meaningful impact in less than ten minutes despite pursuing entirely different objectives. Both attackers treated the environment as a connected system, using existing permissions and relationships to expand their reach. Reconnaissance increasing...

RefluXFS: A Linux Kernel Local Privilege Escalation to Root in XFS (CVE-2026-64600)

Executive summary Qualys Threat Research Unit TRU identified CVE-2026-64600, a race condition in the Linux kernel’s XFS filesystem copy-on-write path. An attacker with an ordinary local account can exploit this race condition to overwrite protected files on disk and gain host root privileges on...

Oracle Critical Patch Update, July 2026 Security Update Review

Oracle released its third quarterly edition of this year’s Critical Patch Update. The update received patches for 1449 security vulnerabilities. Some of the vulnerabilities addressed in this update impact more than one product. These patches address vulnerabilities in various product families,...

Manual Patching Can’t Outrun AI. Automated Remediation Can.

Executive Summary AI is rapidly transforming vulnerability discovery, outpacing many security teams ' ability to adapt. Microsoft's July 2026 Patch Tuesday addressed a record 622 vulnerabilities, an early signal of AI-accelerated discovery at scale compounding an already-large backlog that manual...

CVE-2026-8933: Local Privilege Escalation in Set-Capabilities snap-confine

The Qualys Threat Research Unit TRU has identified a Local Privilege Escalation LPE vulnerability in snap-confine CVE-2026-8933. This flaw allows an unprivileged local user to gain full root access on default installations of Ubuntu Desktop 24.04, 25.10, and 26.04. The issue stems from a security...

Top Five Compliance Audit Software and Tools: Mastering Modern Regulatory Risk

Executive Summary Manual audit preparation no longer scales across hybrid, cloud, endpoint, and application environments. Compliance monitoring software must move from checklist validation to continuous control monitoring. The strongest platforms connect evidence collection with risk...

Microsoft and Adobe Patch Tuesday, July 2026 Security Update Review

Microsoft's July 2026 Patch Tuesday delivers security updates for a broad range of products and services, including several vulnerabilities that pose significant risks to enterprise environments. As attackers continue to target unpatched systems, the timely deployment of these updates remains one...

How Qualys ETM Identity Detects Identity-Based Attacks Faster

Key Takeaways Identity-based attacks are among the fastest and most effective intrusion methods because valid credentials let attackers operate as trusted users. Techniques like Pass-the-Hash, Kerberoasting, Domain Controller Synchronization DCSync, and Authentication Server Response Roasting...

How to Meet a 3-Day Remediation SLA & Comply with CISA BOD 26-04

Key Takeaways CISA BOD 26–04 mandates remediation of the publicly exposed, highest-risk, known-exploited vulnerabilities within 3 days. The directive applies a risk-based model evaluating exposure, KEV status, automation potential, and technical impact. Most high-risk vulnerability instances resi...

When AI-Accelerated Discovery Outruns Patching, Exploitability Proof Decides What Gets Fixed First

Why Qualys joined the Athena coalition, and what it means for how you prioritize risk. Qualys is proud to have joined Athena, the industry coalition Chainguard launched to coordinate the defense of open source software. It’s a cause we strongly support, because the problem Athena is working to...

FortiBleed: Credential Reuse, Legacy Hashes, and the Risk of Internet-Exposed FortiGate Devices

Key Takeaways FortiBleed refers to June 2026 public reporting of large-scale credential exposure and abuse targeting internet-reachable FortiGate management and SSL-VPN gateways driven by credential reuse and brute-force, not a single new zero-day. Risk is highest for internet-exposed FortiGate...

Operationalizing Day Minus Seven: The Cloud-Native ROC

Summary Frontier AI models in the post-Mythos era are changing the speed and scale of exposure risk. Security teams are entering an era where AI can help discover, chain, and exploit weaknesses faster than traditional programs can absorb. The challenge is no longer finding more issues; it’s knowi...

Qualys Joins Cisco Cloud Control Studio as a Launch Partner to Bring Risk Intelligence to Agentic Operations

Key Takeaways Qualys is a launch partner in Cisco Cloud Control Studio, Cisco's new unified platform for agentic IT operations. Joint customers can access Qualys intelligence Unified Asset Inventory, TruRisk Prioritized Findings, and orchestrate remediation workflows directly within Cisco's AI...

Is Your AppSec Program Built to Close the OWASP Top 10 2025 Coverage Gap?

Key Takeaways Most AppSec programs treat API-layer coverage as a DAST extension, but BOLA, BFLA, and SSRF require authenticated multi-role testing that traditional scanners weren’t built to run at scale. Modern authentication flows OAuth2, JWT validation, MFA-protected sessions often fall outside...

CERT-In’s AI Vulnerability Blueprint: Why Indian CISOs Need Machine-Speed Risk Operations in the Post-Mythos Era

A Qualys India perspective on CERT-In 's blueprint, the post-Mythos threat landscape India faces, and why the operating model needs to change. Key Takeaways Mythos-class AI changes the vulnerability equation from CVE matching to autonomous exploit discovery, turning known, unpatched weaknesses in...

3 Paths to Upgrade Windows 11 before 24H2 End of Servicing (EOL)

Key Takeaways Windows 11 24H2 reaches the end of servicing on October 13, 2026, making timely enterprise upgrades critical. Enterprises often face version drift, with multiple Windows 11 builds across endpoints requiring different upgrade paths. Upgrade approaches vary based on system state and m...

CNAPP’s New Normal: Hyper-Prioritization and Autonomous Remediation at Cloud Scale

AI-powered detection has crossed a threshold. Security teams can now surface vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and active attack paths at a speed and scale that was unimaginable a few years ago. The problem is no longer finding or knowing risk; it’s closing it fast enough to matter. Cloud...

Oracle Critical Patch Update, June 2026 Security Update Review

Oracle released its third quarterly edition of this year’s Critical Patch Update. The update received patches for 245 security vulnerabilities. Some of the vulnerabilities addressed in this update impact more than one product. These patches address vulnerabilities in various product families,...

What Changed in OWASP Top 10 2025 and Recommendations for Each Category

Key Takeaways 1. The 2025 list introduces two new categories – Software Supply Chain Failures A03 and Mishandling of Exceptional Conditions A10 - reflecting attacks already happening in production. 2. Security Misconfiguration jumping from 5 to 2 signals that continuous deployment without...

How Federal Agencies Can Activate a Risk Operations Center (ROC) to Meet CISA BOD 26-04

Executive Summary Recognizing the ability of Frontier AI models to discover and exploit vulnerabilities at unprecedented speed and scale, CISA 's Binding Operational Directive BOD 26-04 marks a significant shift in federal vulnerability management. The directive introduces aggressive mandates,...

Turning Millions of Risks Into One Actionable List

Every security leader walks into Monday morning with the same question. The findings are there. The dashboards are running. But out of the thousands of critical vulnerabilities on that list, which ones can an attacker actually use against this organization today? Not in theory. Not in a lab. In...

Microsoft and Adobe Patch Tuesday, June 2026 Security Update Review

Every Patch Tuesday presents a race between defenders applying fixes and attackers seeking opportunities. Microsoft’s June 2026 release is no exception, delivering security updates for vulnerabilities that could significantly impact enterprise environments if left unaddressed. Microsoft Patch...