Implementing the CIS 20 Critical Security Controls: Delving into More Sophisticated Techniques

Corden Pharma needed a standardized security program to meet customer requirements. Link3 Technologies wanted to prioritize its network security improvements. Telenet was looking for a road map to implement its ISO-27000 compliance program. These three companies — a German pharmaceutical contract...

Qualys Cloud Suite 8.10.2 New Features

This new patch release of the Qualys Cloud Suite, version 8.10.2, includes updates to shared platform features, a new role for user management, and expanded Policy Compliance platform support. Feature Highlights Qualys Cloud Platform Limit number of external scanners – You can now limit the numbe...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

The Mythos Inflection Point: Dealing With the Upcoming Vulnerability Disclosure Avalanche and Compressed Exploitation Window

Having spent years at Qualys working on vulnerability risk and remediation management, I have watched the disclosure and remediation cycles from every angle. I have seen vulnerability researchers find a critical flaw in OpenSSH and the industry scramble to respond. I have seen organizations...

ROC vs. CTEM: How a Risk Operations Center Evolves Beyond Continuous Threat Exposure Management in 2026

Key Takeaways: The Essentials of ROC vs. CTEM What is a ROC? A risk operations center ROC is a centralized command hub that unifies cyber risk management across security, IT, and compliance. It uses agentic AI to provide a real-time view of business risk, prioritize what matters, and then automat...

Top 10 Cloud Compliance Tools for Enterprise Security and Audit Readiness in 2026

Key Takeaways Cloud compliance has shifted from periodic audits to a continuous operating requirement as hybrid and multi-cloud environments change faster than traditional controls can keep pace. Modern cloud compliance solutions provide continuous, automated compliance monitoring across AWS,...

Microsoft and Adobe Patch Tuesday, January 2026 Security Update Review

Starting the year on a security-first note, Microsoft's January 2026 Patch Tuesday resolves several vulnerabilities that could impact enterprise environments. Here's a quick breakdown of what you need to know. Microsoft Patch Tuesday for January 2026 This month's release addresses 115...

Battle Compliance Confusion and Security Fatigue with Qualys and ServiceNow

Once upon a time, your biggest worry was whether Dave in Accounting would click on a suspicious link. Today, you wish Dave were your only worry. You’re likely balancing four major clouds, including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle, plus on-premises, hybrid environments, thousands of ephemeral...

What Security Teams Need to Know as PHP and IoT Exploits Surge

Attack automation is accelerating, widening the window between detection and response. Qualys TRU telemetry reveals how these attacks unfold and what defenders can do next. The Qualys Threat Research Unit TRU has identified a sharp increase in attacks targeting PHP servers, IoT devices, and cloud...

Microsoft and Adobe Patch Tuesday, September 2025 Security Update Review

It's the second Tuesday of September, and Microsoft has rolled out its latest security updates. Microsoft's September 2025 Patch Tuesday has arrived, bringing a fresh wave of security fixes to help organizations stay ahead of evolving threats. Here's a quick breakdown of what you need to know...

The State of Cyber Risk 2025: Business Context Needed

The cyber risk conversation is changing. Momentum is growing for formal cyber risk programs. However, despite rising investments, evolving frameworks, and more vocal boardroom interest, new data reveals that most organizations remain immature in their risk management programs, and cyber risk is...

Powering the Future of Cyber Risk Management: Welcoming Our First mROC Alliance Members

Organizations today face a growing challenge: fragmented security tools, a flood of risk findings, and limited visibility across environments. But perhaps the biggest challenge of them all is the disconnect between cybersecurity efforts and the business value at risk. Without the ability to...

Introducing Qualys Policy Audit, the New Standard for Audit Readiness

Do you know how audit ready you really are? What if you could answer that question with confidence—at any moment, across every system, for every framework that matters to your business? In today’s rapidly shifting regulatory landscape, audits are no longer a periodic event—they’re a continuous...

Qualys TRU Discovers Three Bypasses of Ubuntu Unprivileged User Namespace Restrictions

The Qualys Threat Research Unit TRU recently disclosed three security bypasses in Ubuntu's unprivileged user namespace restrictions. Qualys responsibly disclosed these vulnerabilities to the Ubuntu Security Team on January 15, 2025, and has been working with Ubuntu since then. Qualys TRU uncovere...

Securing Dynamic Cloud Environments: Best Practices for Comprehensive Scanning

As organizations increasingly adopt cloud-native development, the complexity of securing dynamic environments continues to grow. Vulnerability scanning remains a cornerstone of cloud security, enabling organizations to identify and address risks effectively. However, with the increasing prevalenc...

Qualys Unveils mROC: The Industry’s First Managed Risk Operation Center To Help Partners Scale Risk Management Services

The launch of Enterprise TruRisk Management ETM, the world’s first Risk Operations Center ROC in the cloud, in October 2024 has met with an overwhelmingly positive reception from customers. They see the potential of a unified approach to managing cyber risk. We recognize that setting up and...

Securing Cloud Environments Against Potential Extortion Threats

Introduction With the growing reliance on cloud infrastructure, organizations must be vigilant against potential extortion threats targeting misconfigurations and weak access controls. Unfortunately, extortion threats are a huge problem. According to the Verizon 2024 Data Breach Investigations...

Steps to TruRisk—Insight to Action with VMDR

Shifting from Vulnerability Management to Business-Focused Risk Reduction In cybersecurity, numbers can be deceptive. The sheer volume of vulnerabilities does not equate to risk. Instead, resilience depends on understanding which vulnerabilities pose the greatest threat to your business—and actin...

Elevate Cyber Defense with Qualys Advanced Hunting

Introduction In today’s cyber threat landscape, proactive approaches such as threat hunting have become key in any organization’s defense strategy, identifying and tackling threats before they become an incident. That is why Qualys is delighted to introduce Advanced Hunting , our threat-hunting...

Addressing Cloud Identity Risks With TotalCloud CIEM

As organizations continue to embrace multi-cloud environments, leveraging platforms such as Amazon Web Services AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform GCP, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure OCI, the complexity of cloud security has increased exponentially. In cloud environments, machines are...

Cybersecurity at a Crossroads: New Implications on Business Risk

During our 2023 Qualys Security Conference QSC taking place in Orlando, Florida, November 6-9, 2023, I unveiled an exciting new milestone for the company – the release of our new Qualys Enterprise TruRisk Platform, marking a seismic shift for the future of Qualys as a leader in managing and...

Qualys Expands Cloud Platform for First-Party Application Risk Detection and Remediation

Have you faced the need to identify & respond to open-source package vulnerabilities like log4shell, openSSL, etc, in production from Day Zero? Are you using first-party, homegrown applications and are worried the risk introduced by those applications is not seen or addressed? Qualys new...

QSC 2022 Kickoff: Quantifying and Qualifying Digital Cyber Risks

Qualys’ annual security conference returned to a live-only event this week at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, and the keynote addresses started things off on a very practical note… about selling coconuts, toasters, and carbon monoxide detectors. The first two keynotes featured speeches from both...

Prioritize Remediation with a Perceived-Risk Approach to Strengthen CyberSecurity Effectiveness

Minimizing Time To Remediate TTR is becoming one of the key metrics of security program effectiveness. This holistic measure represents many capabilities and is a good validation of your risk mitigation capacity because it captures how quickly you can respond to the most critical vulnerabilities...

If You Think File Integrity Monitoring is Boring, Think Again

You’ll be hard pressed to find file integrity monitoring on any list of cool, emerging, cutting-edge cybersecurity technologies. But if you choose to ignore this mature, foundational technology, it’ll be at great risk. File integrity monitoring, or FIM, plays a key role in critical security and...

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...

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...

Achieve Federal-Grade M365 Security: Governing with Qualys SSPM and SCuBA

Qualys SaaS Security Posture Management SSPM introduces native support for the Secure Cloud Business Applications SCuBA compliance framework, bringing CISA's toughest M365 security benchmarks directly into your continuous posture monitoring workflow. Key Takeaways CISA’s Secure Cloud Business...

Qualys TotalAI Achieves FedRAMP Moderate (FedRAMP Certified Class C) Authorization

Key Takeaways Federal AI adoption is accelerating faster than governance and approved security tooling. Risk now spans models, infrastructure, and the software supply chain. AI threats often mimic normal usage, which makes it difficult to detect with static methods. Meeting mandated federal...

Converge Connect: Unlock Lower Premiums with Proven Qualys Security

Key Takeaways Qualys, in collaboration with Converge, has launched an offering that ties your security posture to your cyber insurance costs. The Qualys Converge Connect Insurance Report CCIR supplements manual insurance questionnaires with objective, platform-generated, real-time security data...

Signals from the Cloud Security Forecast 2026: Cloud Risk Is Scaling through Design, Not Disruption

Key Takeaways Identity and permissions now determine what is reachable, making them the primary drivers of cloud risk. Runtime exposure, not individual findings, determines how low-risk issues combine into real impact. SaaS and OAuth integrations extend the control plane and amplify blast radius...

Optimizing Risk Discovery and Remediation with Qualys Gateway Service (QGS)

Unpatched vulnerabilities remain one of the largest drivers of cyber risk, accounting for nearly 60% of cyber compromises. Modern security programs are therefore measured not only by how quickly they discover risk, but also by how efficiently they remediate it. As organizations scale vulnerabilit...

Threat Research Report: The Broken Physics of Remediation

The race most security programs are built around — patch faster than the attacker can exploit — was designed for a threat landscape that no longer exists. The data shows defenders are falling behind in the vast majority of cases. Across the most critical, actively weaponized vulnerabilities of th...

Zero-Day Zero: The AI Attack That Just Ended the Era of the Forgiving Internet

Why the Exploit Window Has Collapsed and How CISOs Must Pivot to Survive For decades, cybersecurity was a game of time. We banked on the buffer between a vulnerability’s disclosure and its widespread exploitation. We relied on the forgiving internet, where human attackers needed days or weeks to...

GenAI: Harness the Power, Eliminate the Risk — A Practical Playbook for Securing AI from Day One

Enterprises everywhere are racing to leverage AI to gain sharper insights, automate workflows, and deliver richer customer experiences. Based on an assessment conducted by Bain & Company, generative AI adoption is soaring, with 95% of US companies using it, up 12 percentage points in just a year...

Microsoft Patch Tuesday, November 2025 Security Update Review

Microsoft released its November Patch Tuesday Security Updates. Here's a quick breakdown of what you need to know. Microsoft Patch Tuesday for November 2025 This month's release addresses 68 vulnerabilities, including five critical and 59 important-severity vulnerabilities. In this month's update...

Qualys ETM Identity — The First True Quantification of the Identity Perimeter

Security has always been about controlling who can do what and where. In 2025, that control is mediated entirely by identity. When an attacker “logs in,” not "breaks in", they inherit legitimate permissions, blend into normal telemetry, and pivot across AD, Entra/Okta, SaaS, and cloud, driving...

Subscription Health Dashboard 2025 Update

Deployment health is mission-critical in today’s digital environment. Duplicate records, ghost hosts, and stale data obscure insights, slow decisions, and erode confidence. Building on last year’s Subscription Health Dashboard blog and best practices, the 2025 update delivers cleaner visibility,...

Built-in Runtime Security for Containers

Security teams struggle with visibility into behaviors inside their running containers. Qualys is today announcing general availability of Container Runtime Security CRS to provide industry-leading visibility for running containers using an approach that is container-engine agnostic and layered...

Lessons from Qilin: What the Industry’s Most Efficient Ransomware Teaches Us

Qilin has quietly become one of the most active and impactful ransomware operations in the world today. If it’s not already on your threat radar, now is the time to take notice. This blog unpacks how Qilin operates, why it’s gaining traction across cybercriminal networks, and what steps security...

Qualys VMDR Wins at 2025 SC Awards Europe for Best Vulnerability Management Solution

We’re excited to share that Qualys VMDR Vulnerability Management, Detection, and Response has won the Best Vulnerability Management Solution for 3 years in row at 2025 SC Awards Europe , recognizing its market-leading innovation and measurable impact in reducing cyber risk for businesses worldwid...

The Efficiency Imperative: How Federal Agencies Can Streamline Cybersecurity Operations

With increasing scrutiny on government spending, federal agencies face mounting pressure to optimize IT budgets while fortifying cybersecurity defenses. However, the unchecked proliferation of security tools has led to inefficiencies, reduced visibility, and increasing total cost of ownership. A...

Independent Analyst Firm: Qualys Recognized as a Leader in Attack Surface Management

As the modern attack surface continues to grow in complexity, the need for simplified asset discovery and risk assessment has never been more acute. In 2021, Qualys introduced CyberSecurity Asset Management CSAM, a visionary ASM offering designed to bolster the customer’s coverage of the attack...

Qualys Performance Tuning Series: Remove Stale Compliance Data for the Best Performance

In our first post in the Performance Tuning Series, we talked about removing stale assets to improve performance. In this installment, we will address the benefits of removing data once it becomes stale. Why does data become stale? The IT environment of any enterprise is very dynamic, and more so...

HHS OIG Report Underscores Challenges of Securing the Cloud

On July 22, 2024, HHS Health and Human Services OIG published a report identifying a need for the Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Secretary HHS OS to improve key security controls to better protect cloud information systems. The report, while focused on HHS OS, underscores...

Qualys FIM: Be Compliance Ready with Intuitive, Ready-to-Use File Monitoring Profiles

Requirements for file-level security are often set by laws, regulations, and audit standards. These include identification of what must be protected, the various controls required to implement security, and outcomes required to successfully pass audits for compliance. This blog describes these an...