Qualys Cloud Platform 2.31 New Features

This release of the Qualys Cloud Platform version 2.31 includes updates and new features for AssetView, Cloud Agent, EC2 Connector, Web Application Scanning, Web Application Firewall, and Security Assessment Questionnaire, highlights as follows. AssetView Use custom severities in AV searches and...

Countdown to GDPR: Get 20/20 Visibility Into Your IT Assets

Anyone questioning the importance of IT asset visibility in an organization’s security and compliance postures ought to review the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation GDPR, which goes into effect next year. With the severe requirements the GDPR places on how a business handles the personal da...

Adobe Fixes Half a Dozen Flash Vulnerabilities and More

Flash has been the top target for exploit kits and we have observed that defender behavior, i.e. how fast patches are applied along with other factors in the threat landscape could have led to a decline in the number of Flash vulnerabilities being weaponized in exploit kits. In 2016, the time to...

Steps to TruRisk™ – 2: Measuring the Likelihood of Vulnerability Exploitation

Cybersecurity programs rely on various methods to measure the risk associated with vulnerabilities for prioritization, such as CVSS, EPSS, CISA KEV, or even internally developed systems that combine multiple approaches. While these methods help assess whether a specific vulnerability exists on an...

Measuring, Communicating, and Eliminating Risk With TruRisk™ in Qualys Web Application Scanning (WAS)

In an era where cyber threats loom larger and more complex than ever, organizations demand not just defense but intelligent, cohesive strategies for managing cyber risks. With the Enterprise TruRisk Platform, Qualys reaffirmed its commitment to these needs by focusing its cybersecurity solutions ...

Verizon’s 2024 DBIR Unpacked: From Ransomware Evolution to Supply Chain Vulnerabilities

As we delve into cybersecuritys complex and evolving landscape, the Verizon 2024 Data Breach Investigations Report DBIR offers crucial insights into the mechanisms and motives behind the latest wave of cyberattacks. Qualys is once again proud to contribute to the report, helping to dissect these...

WordPress LayerSlider Plugin: SQL Injection Vulnerability

On March 25th, 2024, a critical security vulnerability was discovered in the LayerSlider plugin for WordPress, marked as CVE-2024-2879. The plugins have more than 10 lakh active installations. This flaw, rated with a CVSS score of 7.5 out of 10.0, is identified as an SQL injection vulnerability...

PCI DSS 4.0: How to Ensure Full Compliance with New Requirements

The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard PCI DSS is one of the oldest mainstream requirements for compliance, originating in 2004. The PCI Security Standards Council manages the standard to ensure security for the global payment system. It globally applies to all entities that store,...

BitRAT Now Sharing Sensitive Bank Data as a Lure

Introduction In June of 2022 Qualys Threat Research Unit TRU wrote an in-depth report on Redline, a commercial off the shelf infostealer that spreads via fake cracked software hosted on Discord’s content delivery network. Since then, we have continued to track similar threats to identify their...

Introducing CyberSecurity Asset Management 2.0 with Natively Integrated External Attack Surface Management

Qualys is introducing Qualys CyberSecurity Asset Management 2.0, which now delivers natively integrated External Attack Surface Management EASM to enable Cybersecurity teams to identify any and all assets visible on the internet, including previously unknown assets and any potential security...

Ukrainian Targets Hit by HermeticWiper, New Datawiper Malware

The Ukrainian Government has been targeted by HermeticWiper, a new ransomware-like data wiper. Its aim is not simply to encrypt the victim’s data, but rather to render a system essentially unusable. In this blog, our Research Team details our analysis of how this aggressive new malware works. The...

The Unbearable Lightness of Unaudited Supply Chains

An acute need expressed by a majority of CISOs at a roundtable in Italy sparks an idea to use one of our lesser-known compliance apps to manage supply chain security assurance efforts. In the 1984 novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, author Milan Kundera ponders the fleeting nature of man’s...

Webcast Q&A: DevSecOps – Building Continuous Security Into IT and App Infrastructures

As organizations adopt DevOps to create and deliver software quickly and continuously — a key step for supporting their digital transformation initiatives — they must not overlook security. In DevOps, development and operations teams add agility and efficiency to software lifecycles with automati...

Case Study: Cisco Group Bakes Security into Web App Dev Process

“To know what is right and not do it is the worst cowardice.” That phrase was uttered by Confucius 2,500 years ago, but reflects the spirit behind a recent revamp of a Cisco web app development process that made it more effective and secure. “This is important as we talk about the secure software...

Webcast Q&A: Automating the CIS Critical Security Controls

Qualys Product Management Director Tim White and SANS Institute Analyst John Pescatore did a deep dive into the Center for Internet Security’s Critical Security Controls during a recent webcast, and answered questions from audience members about these 20 foundational security practices, and about...

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...

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...

Microsoft and Adobe Patch Tuesday, February 2026 Security Update Review

Microsoft's February 2026 Patch Tuesday focuses on closing security gaps that attackers could exploit, reinforcing the importance of timely patching in enterprise environments. Here's a quick breakdown of what you need to know. Microsoft Patch Tuesday for February 2026 This month's release...

Qualys TRU Discovers Two Vulnerabilities in OpenSSH: CVE-2025-26465 & CVE-2025-26466

The Qualys Threat Research Unit TRU has identified two vulnerabilities in OpenSSH. The first, tracked as CVE-2025-26465, allows an active machine-in-the-middle attack on the OpenSSH client when the VerifyHostKeyDNS option is enabled. The second, CVE-2025-26466, affects both the OpenSSH client and...

Navigating Evolving Cybersecurity: Recent Trends and Future Outlook

“Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it." - Winston Churchill While Churchill may not have been the first person to use a variation of this quote, the essence of its meaning rang true then and still does today. In this spirit, and so that we may collectively learn and evolve...

Building an AppSec Program with Qualys WAS – Additional Configurations and Review & Confirm

Part 4 - Configuring a Web Application or API: Additional Configurations Now that we have completed the basic information, crawl settings, and default scan configurations, we can shift our attention to additional configurations designed to optimize scanning and provide granular control over how...

Leveraging AI-informed Cybersecurity to Measure, Communicate, and Eliminate Cyber Risk

Dilip Bachwani, Qualys CTO, shares the Qualys AI strategy with TruRisk AI at QSC 2023. The threat landscape is constantly evolving, and so are the implications of cyber risk across any organization. As attacker tactics become more sophisticated and persistent, cybersecurity strategies must grow...

Ensuring Compliance with DORA: How Qualys Solutions Can Help

Introduction The Digital Operational Resilience Act DORA is a new regulation implemented by the European Union to ensure the stability and security of the financial sector. Coming into effect in 2022, DORA mandates enhanced cybersecurity and operational resilience standards for financial...

Qualys Performance Tuning Series: Qualys Cloud Agent Configuration Best Practice

The following blog is part of our Qualys Performance Tuning Series. The first blog covered the topic of optimizing performance through the removal of stale assets. This series aims to provide you with comprehensive guidance on how to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of your Qualys...

Implications of Windows Subsystem for Linux for Adversaries & Defenders (Part 2)

This post is the second of a multi-part blog series that explores and highlights the different risks that Windows Subsystem for Linux WSL poses to an enterprise IT environment. Here we examine different TTPs that abuse WSL and assess different methods to defend against such threats. ← Go to Part ...

A Modern Approach to Risk Management and Compliance

For far too long, organizations had to rely on traditional Governance, Risk and Compliance GRC tools -- with their modular and siloed approach -- to address their risk management and reporting compliance posture. With an increasing number of organizations looking at the Integrated Risk Management...

Detect Unauthorized Processes Making Changes in Your Environment with Qualys File Integrity Monitoring

With the average cost of a data breach exceeding $3.5 million as per Cost of a Data Breach Report, almost all organizations these days adopt stringent policies in order to safeguard their confidential business and customer information. Strong RBAC-driven systems have certainly made it difficult f...

Announcing New Customer Support Portal and Unified Search

Qualys is rolling out new unified search and an improved online customer support experience, along with Support content integrated directly into Qualys Community. It's coming in January 2020. These new features are part of our efforts to enable customer success with an integrated community...

Bugcrowd Integration Now Available in Qualys Web Application Scanning

The new version of Qualys Web Application Scanning, WAS 5.7, adds an integration with Bugcrowd for centralized viewing and triaging of both WAS automated vulnerability detections and vulnerabilities submitted by Bugcrowd's approved security researchers. Qualys WAS customers running a bug bounty...

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...

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...

Enterprise Remediation Benchmark: How Does Your Organization Compare?

Executive Summary In the last 12 months, enterprises deployed millions of patches, yet many organizations remain exposed due to delayed remediation and unpatched third-party software. Key benchmarks from global enterprise environments: Over 8 million Google Chrome patches were deployed. Visual C+...

Qualys Achieves 100% Major Step Detection in the 2024 MITRE ATT&CK Evaluations, Enterprise

How Qualys Transformed from Risk Leader to EDR Powerhouse In today’s rapidly evolving threat landscape, ransomware continues to dominate as one of the most significant cybersecurity challenges. To help organizations evaluate their defenses against these sophisticated threats, the MITRE ATT&CK...

Our Takeaways From 2024 Gartner Market Guide for Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP): Insights and Market Evolution

Are your cloud-native applications and multi-cloud infrastructure adequately protected against evolving threats? How confident are you in your current security measures for cloud workloads and containerized environments? The recent Gartner Market Guide for Cloud-Native Application Protection...

Navigating the EU NIS2 Directive

How Qualys Cybersecurity Solutions Ensure Compliance The European Union’s revised Network and Information Security NIS2 Directive is a comprehensive cybersecurity regulation aimed at bolstering the resilience of critical entities and essential services across the EU. As organizations grapple with...

Achieving NIST CSF 2.0 Top Tier Adaptable Status

An Overview of NIST CSF 2.0 The National Institute of Standards and Technology NIST recently updated its popular Cybersecurity Framework CSF to version 2.0 to help organizations reduce cybersecurity risks. Designed for virtually all industry sectors, from small to medium businesses SMBs to larger...

Qualys Named a Market Leader in GigaOm Radar Report for Application Security Testing

Qualys Web Application Scanning WAS has been named a leader in the GigaOm Radar Report for Application Security Testing, 2023. Web app security is critical for every organization, for attacks on this vector caused 25% of breaches, according to the Verizon 2023 Data Breach Investigations Report. T...

macOS Patching Is Here!

In the past few years, many of our customers have seen a sharp increase in the number of Mac devices introduced to their environment. All those new Mac devices introduce new vulnerabilities that must be remediated. To keep up with the new volume of vulnerabilities, organizations had to opt-in, bu...

Implement Risk-Based Vulnerability Management with Qualys TruRisk™: Part 3

In this final blog of the series, we will discuss the importance of implementing effective risk-based remediation strategies to reduce the risk of vulnerabilities being exploited in your environment. In the earlier blogs, we covered how to operationalize Qualys TruRisk and to effectively visualiz...

JSON Web Token (JWT) Weaknesses

JSON Web Tokens, or JWTs, are an encoded set of claims commonly seen in REST APIs and Single page web applications SPAs. These encoded claims are used to provide identification of the requester and other information related to accessing. It is a stateless mechanism, and the token is sent with eve...

An End-to-End Approach to Next-Gen Security for Web Applications & APIs

According to Verizon’s 2022 Data Breach Investigations Report, web applications remain both the top hacking vector and data breach pattern, accounting for roughly 70% of security incidents. This is because web applications are everywhere and easily probed for weaknesses. A vulnerability in any...

Defending Against Scheduled Task Attacks in Windows Environments

Scheduling tasks is one of the most popular attack techniques used by threat actors to establish persistence on a victim’s machine. The Qualys Research Team investigated different ways that attackers could use to conceal scheduled tasks. In this blog, we describe three new techniques to hide and...

Assessing Certificate Risk with Qualys VMDR

Digital certificates and SSL are everywhere. However, managing an accurate inventory of all current certificates in use across your enterprise is an ongoing challenge. This blog examines the scale of the problem, the shortcomings of some popular certificate tracking methods, and how Qualys VMDR’s...

Infographic: Log4Shell Vulnerability Impact by the Numbers

The full scope of risk presented by the Log4Shell vulnerability is something unprecedented, spanning every type of organization across every industry. Hard to find but easy to exploit, Log4Shell immediately places hundreds of millions of Java-based applications, databases, and devices at risk...

Meet FedRAMP Compliance with Qualys Cloud Platform

FedRAMP compliance is not without its challenges. Learn about some of the major security controls and how the Qualys Cloud Platform can help achieve FedRAMP authorization. What is FedRAMP? The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program FedRAMP is a U.S. government program that promotes the...

The Evolution of the Qualys Cloud Platform

The global pandemic has upended everything, and in the cyber security world in particular it has highlighted the need for organizations to have a cloud-based security and compliance platform, Qualys President and Chief Product Officer Sumedh Thakar said during his keynote Monday at the virtual QS...

Continuous Monitoring and Beyond

As security professionals, we struggle with the high volume of data we need to sort through while trying to parse out the critical alerts that are important for us to take immediate action upon. Being at the forefront of innovation for the past 20 years, Qualys offers 20 plus solutions which all...

Join us at Black Hat USA 2020!

Qualys is excited to present two sponsored sessions at the Black Hat USA 2020 virtual event, open to all attendees with the free Business Hall pass. Register or log in to Black Hat USA 2020, and then view and register for these free sessions. Join us to learn about our new multi-vector EDR soluti...

Product, API & Library Notifications Move to Notifications.qualys.com

Qualys has consolidated notifications of new product features, API changes, and policy library updates at Qualys Notifications to make it easier for our customers to track these changes in one place. Now you will find important notifications such as the latest new Qualys Cloud Platform app...

Implementing the CIS 20 Critical Security Controls: Building Upon Foundational Cyber Hygiene

Most successful cyber attacks exploit known vulnerabilities for which patches are available, or take advantage of weak configuration settings that could have been easily hardened. You can significantly lower the risk of being victimized by this type of common, preventable attack by adopting the...