Welcome to this week’s edition of the Threat Source newsletter. 

Lately I've found myself thinking a lot about the Australian TV series Mr. Inbetween (IMDb 8.7/10) — not because I'm a hitman for hire, but because I literally feel in-between. Specifically, in-between what I'd call the "pre-Mythos" and “post-Mythos” eras. We've crossed a capability threshold, and it's not just one model family driving that — Codex 5.3 and GPT-5.5 deliver comparable or better performance, and Tulongfeng or GLM-5.2 (an incredibly powerful open-weight model, MIT-licensed) show the frontier isn't limited to closed models anymore. 

On the other side of that line, real-world impact hasn't caught up yet and we're living in an artificial buffer zone. For me, defining the “pre-” and “post-” status comes down to the gap between "vulnerability discovery" and "vulnerability publication." 

Last week’s Patch Tuesday gave a signal of change, as Joe pointed out, so maybe the buffer zone has come to an end. 

Let's dive into the 2026 Q2 stats.

As in past years, we're seeing a steeper curve than the year before — a solid 49% YoY growth, though still not the hockey-stick moment I keep waiting for. By the end of June we were tracking close to 200 CVEs per day. 

Using the keyword methodology described here, I found 452 AI-related CVEs this calendar year. If "openclaw" is added to the keyword list, that number jumps by another 536 — a reminder that these counts are sensitive to keyword drift. Given how much the keyword list keeps changing, I'm reconsidering whether to keep publishing this particular metric going forward.

KEVs, by contrast, "only" grew 13% — a small April spike aside, it's fairly flat relative to total CVE growth. Networking-gear-related CVEs continued their climb, now accounting for 24% of KEV-related vulnerabilities (up from 20% in Q1) — consistent with the trend I flagged last quarters.

As in previous quarters, CVEs from 2024 or earlier still make up about 24% of everything we're tracking. More strikingly, even though the standard enterprise patch cycle is described  to run 30–90 days, 181 days into 2026, 46% of today's actively-exploited (KEV) CVEs still trace back to 2025 or earlier. 

Old vulnerabilities don't retire, new ones keep arriving, and machine-speed vulnerability discovery is going to keep outpacing human-speed patching. Which brings me back — once again — to EPSS as a tool for prioritizing patching against this dataset.

If you patched purely by CVSS 9+, you'd be urgently chasing ~3,700 CVEs — but 95% of those sit below 5% EPSS, meaning the real-world odds of exploitation are tiny. 

Of the 32 CVSS 9+ CVEs with EPSS ≥ 50%, 25 are already on CISA's KEV list. The remaining seven outliers are still high-probability by EPSS but haven't made KEV yet — worth watching. 

Ray Shoesmith (Mr. Inbetween) once told his therapist, "You know, if I hit somebody, I generally got a pretty good reason." 

Same principle applies to patching. Don't swing at everything — swing at what you have good reason to believe is coming for you. 

The one big thing 

Cisco Talos has discovered "msaRAT," a new Rust-based remote access trojan (RAT) deployed by the Chaos ransomware group. Built on the Tokio asynchronous runtime, it establishes a covert command-and-control (C2) channel by hijacking Chrome or Edge browsers via the Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP). The infection starts with a deceptive MSI file masquerading as a Windows update that loads the payload directly into memory, paving the way for ransomware deployment. 

Why do I care? 

This RAT is a master of evasion, living off the browser to build its C2 infrastructure without ever directly touching the network. By routing traffic through legitimate browser processes and trusted services, msaRAT easily bypasses traditional network-based detections. Additionally, its use of the Tokio runtime enables highly efficient, parallel execution of malicious tasks, accelerating the attacker's ability to establish persistence and deploy double-extortion ransomware. 

So now what? 

Defenders should monitor for unusual curl commands, especially those downloading MSI files to the ProgramData directory or sending plain HTTP traffic over port 443. Scrutinize unexpected MSI files impersonating Windows updates and watch for unauthorized Chrome or Edge manipulation. Finally, implement behavioral monitoring to catch Chrome DevTools Protocol abuse and unauthorized WebRTC connections. Read the full blog for complete coverage and indicators of compromise (IOCs). 

Top security headlines of the week 

Introducing Antares: Highly efficient open weight AI models for vulnerability localization 
This week, Cisco introduced Antares, a family of security small language models (SLMs) purpose-built for pinpointing where known vulnerabilities exist within a codebase. (Cisco) 

Hacker wipes European country’s entire land registry database, paralyzing real-estate market 
A hacker wiped Romania’s entire land registry database after an unsuccessful extortion attempt. The attack halted all property transactions, preventing notaries from authenticating sales or registering mortgages nationwide. (Cybernews) 

"WP2Shell” opens millions of WordPress sites to remote takeover 
Barely three days after disclosure, attackers are widely chaining together CVE-2026-60137 and CVE-2026-63030 to lob exploit attempts against one of the largest attack surfaces on the Internet. (DarkReading) 

Progress tells ShareFile customers to shut down Storage Zone Controllers over security threat  
Only the Storage Zone Controller is affected, not standard cloud-only ShareFile accounts. The controller is a server that a company runs itself, so files can stay on its own storage while it still uses ShareFile's cloud to share and manage them. (The Hacker News) 

Microsoft SharePoint under attack via new exploit 
Researchers warned that patching is not enough to address the deserialization flaw and that security teams “should rotate credentials on any assets that may have been exposed.” (Cybersecurity Dive) 

Can’t get enough Talos? 

[Video] Where protection starts: Cisco Talos Intelligence Integrations 
Every day, defenders make high-consequence decisions with incomplete information. Learn how Cisco Talos Intelligence Integrations help reduce uncertainty by turning the latest threat intelligence into proactive protections across Cisco technologies. 

The Hunter's Paradox: Is it time to embrace automated threat hunting? 
Humans can no longer keep up with the volume and velocity of security data on their own, but AI can't be fully trusted. David discusses the merits of both and what the future might look like. 

The serpent’s tongue: Luring the Python out of its den 
Protect your development environment from rising Python supply-chain threats by understanding the package installation lifecycle and implementing these essential defensive strategies. 

Keeping up with the cybercriminals 
In this episode of Beers with Talos, Hazel, Bill, Dave and Joe are joined by Kendall McKay to dive into the soap opera of modern cybercrime. Turns out, every ransomware operation is one passive-aggressive group chat message away from falling apart. 

Upcoming events where you can find Talos 

• Black Hat USA (Aug. 1 – 6) Las Vegas, NV 
• DEF CON 34 (Aug. 6 – 9) Las Vegas, NV 

Most prevalent malware files from Talos telemetry over the past week 

SHA256: 9f1f11a708d393e0a4109ae189bc64f1f3e312653dcf317a2bd406f18ffcc507  
MD5: 2915b3f8b703eb744fc54c81f4a9c67f  
Talos Rep: https://talosintelligence.com/talos_file_reputation?s=9f1f11a708d393e0a4109ae189bc64f1f3e312653dcf317a2bd406f18ffcc507  
Example Filename: VID001.exe  
Detection Name: Win.Worm.Coinminer::1201** 

SHA256: 9896a6fcb9bb5ac1ec5297b4a65be3f647589adf7c37b45f3f7466decd6a4a7f  
MD5: 38de5b216c33833af710e88f7f64fc98  
Talos Rep: https://talosintelligence.com/talos_file_reputation?s=9896a6fcb9bb5ac1ec5297b4a65be3f647589adf7c37b45f3f7466decd6a4a7f  
Example Filename: SECOH-QAD.exe  
Detection Name: Win.Tool.Procpatcher::1201 

SHA256: e60ab99da105ee27ee09ea64ed8eb46d8edc92ee37f039dbc3e2bb9f587a33ba  
MD5: dbd8dbecaa80795c135137d69921fdba  
Talos Rep: https://talosintelligence.com/talos_file_reputation?s=e60ab99da105ee27ee09ea64ed8eb46d8edc92ee37f039dbc3e2bb9f587a33ba  
Example Filename: u165714.dat  
Detection Name: W32.Variant:MalwareXgenMisc.29d4.1201 

SHA256: 633bd79d1efd3730234d907a2a0d98e3e253a5f0e222e4e4bf3badb3fd6aea0a  
MD5: 770dbe473180366d7b539ff2c188e551  
Talos Rep: https://talosintelligence.com/talos_file_reputation?s=633bd79d1efd3730234d907a2a0d98e3e253a5f0e222e4e4bf3badb3fd6aea0a  
Example Filename: server_tcp.exe  
Detection Name: W32.Trojan.27oc.1201 

SHA256: 90b1456cdbe6bc2779ea0b4736ed9a998a71ae37390331b6ba87e389a49d3d59 
MD5: c2efb2dcacba6d3ccc175b6ce1b7ed0a 
Talos Rep: https://talosintelligence.com/talos_file_reputation?s=90b1456cdbe6bc2779ea0b4736ed9a998a71ae37390331b6ba87e389a49d3d59  
Example Filename: tmp00055df5.dll  
Detection Name: Auto.90B145.282358.in02 

Welcome to this week's edition of the Threat Source newsletter. 

Recently, Martin closed his introduction with a warning: Ready or not, the time of much patching is coming. I've been chewing on that one for a while because I'm rethinking my own enrichment pipelines along these lines, and the questions Martin raised are the ones I keep running into — with one or two ideas on what practitioners can actually do about it. 

Honestly speaking, most of us are still prioritising the wrong way. CVSS has been the default for over a decade — but it only answers one question: How bad could this be in theory? It's a severity score, not a risk score. A CVSS 9.8 on something nobody is exploiting (and nobody ever will) is a very different problem from a CVSS 7.2 that's being weaponised in the wild this morning. If your patch queue is sorted purely by CVSS, you'respending finite operations capacity on hypotheticals. 

This is where EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System) earns its place next to CVSS. EPSS is a probability — between 0 and 1 — that a given CVE will be exploited in the next 30 days, based on real-world signals. The two answer different questions:

CVSS tells you how bad it would be if exploited. EPSS tells you how likely it is to actually happen to you soon. Used together, a high CVSS and a high EPSS is your "drop everything" pile, while a high CVSS and a very lowEPSS can probably wait behind a medium with an EPSS of 0.7. That single change in triage logic can meaningfully shrink the patch backlog without weakening your posture. 

The second ingredient is knowing what is actually being exploited — and here, many teams default to CISA's KEV catalog. KEV is excellent, and I've quoted KEV numbers in this newsletter more times than I can count. CISA contributes as an Authorized Data Publisher (ADP) in the CVE Program, enriching records alongside the original CNA's data. That model works well, but it's also why KEV is structurally centralized, conservative in what it admits, and naturally scoped to what U.S. federal visibility surfaces. For a global practitioner — and writing this from Germany, I notice — "Is this being exploited?" deserves a broader lens. 

That broader lens is starting to take shape with GCVE (Global CVE), a decentralized approach to vulnerability identification and enrichment. Two properties matter for the surge that's coming: 

1. Speed of enrichment. Because GCVE is decentralized, enrichment data — references, affected products, exploit indicators — doesn't have to wait in a single queue. In practice, actionable context arrives meaningfully faster than the traditional NVD pipeline, which has visibly struggled with backlog over the past two years. 
2. Broader exploitation signal. Rather than a single authoritative list of what is being exploited, GCVE makes room for multiple sources of exploitation evidence to surface against the same identifier. That gives defenders outside the U.S. (and frankly, inside it too) a more complete picture than KEV alone. 

Pair that with EPSS on top of CVSS, and you end up with a triage stack that is faster, broader, and probability-informed rather than only severity. 

None of this removes the patching workload that is coming, but it does change which patches you sprint on at 2:00 a.m. and which ones can ride the normal cycle. Before the surge arrives, that's a worthwhile thing to get right.

The one big thing 

Cisco Talos released EvidenceForge, a new open-source tool designed to generate highly realistic, correlated synthetic security logs. This tool solves the chronic shortage of high-quality, labeled datasets needed to train threat hunters and validate detection logic. By using a single canonical event model and AI-assisted scenario authoring, EvidenceForge ensures causal and temporal consistency across more than 20 log formats. 

Why do I care? 

Relying on heavily scrubbed public datasets or red team engagements often leaves security teams with incomplete telemetry. While most synthetic generators spit out independent events that fail to tell a coherent story, EvidenceForge injects realistic background noise, red herrings, and proper causal sequencing into the mix. This allows your team to work with synchronized datasets that (more) accurately mimic real-world network visibility without the compliance headaches of using production data. 

So now what? 

Security teams can head over to GitHub to clone the EvidenceForge repository and use its guided conversation feature to build custom attack scenarios. Defenders can then use these newly generated datasets to build robust SOC analyst training programs, stress-test a new SIEM, and validate detection pipelines before they touch a production environment. You can find the full details and the link to the open-source repository in the blog post. 

Top security headlines of the week 

Lawmakers demand answers as CISA tries to contain data leak 
Lawmakers are demanding answers from the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) after a contractor intentionally published AWS GovCloud keys and a vast trove of other agency secrets on a public GitHub account. (KrebsOnSecurity) 

Over 5,500 GitHub repositories infected in “Megalodon” supply chain attack 
The campaign relies on GitHub Actions workflows containing a payload designed to steal credentials, keys, tokens, and other secrets. The workflows were injected through over 5,700 malicious commits pushed to the impacted repositories on May 18. (SecurityWeek) 

Authorities seized 800 servers of hosting company used to launch cyber attacks 
The investigation centers on a web hosting company established on Feb. 10, 2022, weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine. The infrastructure was allegedly used to support cyber attacks, disinformation campaigns, and sanctions evasion linked to Russia. (CyberSecurityNews) 

Content delivery exploit opens websites to brand hijacking 
The Underminr domain-fronting attack allows threat actors to modify web requests and leverage trusted websites to cloak malicious activity. (Dark Reading) 

Cisco’s risk-based vulnerability disclosure in the age of AI 
Cisco is adapting its vulnerability disclosure practices, focusing on increasing the visibility of detailed technical information for vulnerabilities that are critical, actively exploited, or have a higher likelihood of exploitation. (Cisco blog) 

Can’t get enough Talos? 

DICOM, Pydicom, GDCM, and Orthanc: A technical tour of what really happens in the heap 
Hospitals rely on DICOM-based PACS systems, and those systems often automatically ingest files received over the network. Our latest white paper presents a concrete case study demonstrating the creation of a heap overflow vulnerability through the exploitation of the DICOM file format. 

MediaArea heap-based buffer overflow vulnerabilities 
MediaArea produces digital media analysis open-source software, as well as support tools for file investigation. Talos discovered four vulnerabilities in MediaInfoLib, which provides a UI for technical and tag data for video and audio media files.

Breaking things to keep them safe with Philippe Laulheret 
From his memorable experiment using a green onion to bypass a biometric fingerprint reader to his experience on the frontlines of cybersecurity, Philippe shares the journey that led him to vulnerability research. 

Upcoming events where you can find Talos 

• Cisco Live U.S. (May 31 – June 4) Las Vegas, Nevada 

Most prevalent malware files from Talos telemetry over the past week 

SHA256: 9f1f11a708d393e0a4109ae189bc64f1f3e312653dcf317a2bd406f18ffcc507  
MD5: 2915b3f8b703eb744fc54c81f4a9c67f  
Talos Rep: https://talosintelligence.com/talos_file_reputation?s=9f1f11a708d393e0a4109ae189bc64f1f3e312653dcf317a2bd406f18ffcc507 
Example Filename: VID001.exe  
Detection Name: Win.Worm.Coinminer::1201** 

SHA256: 9896a6fcb9bb5ac1ec5297b4a65be3f647589adf7c37b45f3f7466decd6a4a7f 
MD5: 38de5b216c33833af710e88f7f64fc98  
Talos Rep: https://talosintelligence.com/talos_file_reputation?s=9896a6fcb9bb5ac1ec5297b4a65be3f647589adf7c37b45f3f7466decd6a4a7f 
Example Filename: sample.exe  
Detection Name: Win.Tool.Procpatcher::1201 

SHA256: 5e6060df7e8114cb7b412260870efd1dc05979454bd907d8750c669ae6fcbcfe 
MD5: a2cf85d22a54e26794cbc7be16840bb1 
Talos Rep: https://talosintelligence.com/talos_file_reputation?s=5e6060df7e8114cb7b412260870efd1dc05979454bd907d8750c669ae6fcbcfe 
Example Filename: a2cf85d22a54e26794cbc7be16840bb1.exe  
Detection Name: W32.5E6060DF7E-100.SBX.TG 

SHA256: afc8a00883a4ea07df2dc1d4ed02f8a23b35c9456413b438a2d9ce3ae5076638 
MD5: cc4d231df34e57f59eb970353c7d9de2 
Talos Rep: https://talosintelligence.com/talos_file_reputation?s=afc8a00883a4ea07df2dc1d4ed02f8a23b35c9456413b438a2d9ce3ae5076638 
Example Filename: AutoPico.exe 
Detection Name: PUA.Win.Tool.Kmsactivator::1201