On 22 October 2026 Microsoft's Security Update Guide published CVE-2026-97785, 'AAD App Proxy Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability': improper authentication (CWE-287) in AAD App Proxy allows an unauthorised attacker to elevate privileges over a network. Microsoft rates it Critical with a CVSS 3.1 base score of 10.0 (AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:N), and the CVE record names the affected product Microsoft Entra application proxy. Microsoft's FAQ says the vulnerability has already been fully mitigated by Microsoft, there is no action for users of the service to take, and the CVE is published to provide further transparency. Microsoft lists it as not publicly disclosed and not exploited. (sources: Microsoft Security Response Center; CVE record) Updated 24 Oct 2026: this card previously covered six Microsoft cloud-service CVEs published the same day; the other five now have their own cards (Azure Kubernetes Configuration Service CVE-2026-83938, VM Inspector for Azure Virtual Machines CVE-2026-110063, Azure Pipelines CVE-2026-105014, Azure AI Foundry CVE-2026-108456 and Exchange Online CVE-2026-96185). (source: Microsoft Security Response Center)
Microsoft Security Response Center — CVE-2026-97785, AAD App Proxy Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability (22 Oct 2026)
CISA said on 22 October 2026 that it, the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security (Cyber Centre) and partners are releasing joint guidance, Managing AI Token Consumption for Operational Resilience, to help organisations understand and manage token usage. CISA says unmanaged token consumption may contribute to rising and unpredictable costs, reduced service availability, degraded performance, token exhaustion, and denial-of-tokens or denial-of-wallet attacks. The Cyber Centre's version (ITSM.00.125) describes a denial-of-tokens attack as threat actors deliberately generating excessive AI usage to exhaust token allocations, consume budgets or trigger rate limits, and a denial-of-wallet attack as exploiting usage-based pricing to cause financial harm, for example with complex prompts or AI loops. The authoring agencies recommend a tiered model that ranks token allocation by business impact, with cyber defence, incident response and threat intelligence in the mission-critical tier, and risk assessments before letting AI agents operate autonomously. They also recommend monitoring unusual increases in token consumption as a potential indicator of data exfiltration, feeding AI token telemetry into a SIEM alongside identity, cloud and API logs, progressive usage alerts (the guide's example: 70%, 80% and 90% of quota), multi-provider architectures, and planning for reduced AI availability in critical infrastructure, including keeping non-AI and manual capabilities. Sources: CISA (22 Oct 2026); Canadian Centre for Cyber Security ITSM.00.125 (October 2026).
CISA — Managing AI Token Consumption for Operational Resilience (22 Oct 2026)
GitHub announced on 20 October 2026 (changelog rewritten for clarity on 21 October) a package firewall that sits between endpoints or internal registries and the upstream package repositories and, GitHub says, "inspects both metadata requests and package downloads for signs of malicious activity, acting as an install-time policy gate." GitHub says it is responding to a recent flood of malware attacks that exploit systems at package installation time, and that agents and CI runners are particularly vulnerable because they install dependencies without a human in the loop. Administrators set enterprise policy controls; GitHub says those available today include a configurable cooldown period, checks against the GitHub Advisory Database for malware or vulnerability advisories, and supply-chain checks such as attestation downgrades. Coding agents and CI/CD hosts then send their requests through the firewall instead of directly to the upstream registries, and users can request an exception if a package is blocked in error. GitHub says the firewall currently supports only npm packages, is available in public preview to GitHub Enterprise Cloud customers (including GitHub Enterprise Cloud with data residency), is free during the preview and will be charged on metered usage, similar to Actions billing, at general availability. GitHub's documentation says the cooldown minimum age can be set between 1 and 365 days, or 0 to disable it, with a default of 1 day, and that the vulnerability-advisory control defaults to blocking Critical only. (source: GitHub) Correction (02 Nov 2026): removed The Hacker News as a source. (source: GitHub)
GitHub Changelog — GitHub package firewall in public preview (20 Oct 2026)
The FBI, CISA, the US Secret Service, Germany's Landeskriminalamt Rheinland-Pfalz, the UK National Crime Agency and the UK North West Regional Organised Crime Unit published joint advisory AA26-293A on 20 October 2026 on the SafePay ransomware group. They say SafePay has been highly active since August 2024 and was among the most active ransomware groups of 2026, hitting at least 600 victims in multiple critical infrastructure sectors across North America, South America, Europe and Australia. The tactics and indicators come from FBI, Secret Service and German investigations as recently as August 2026. SafePay gets in with exposed or brute-forced credentials and VPN access, often from Mullvad VPN addresses, using phished accounts against Cisco ASA and Firepower Threat Defense flaws CVE-2020-3259 and CVE-2023-20269, and automated scripts that exploit internet-facing systems through Veeam Backup & Replication CVE-2023-27532 and CVE-2024-40711 and SonicWall SonicOS CVE-2024-40766. Once inside, the actors create accounts or take over existing ones, use living-off-the-land tools (PsExec, WinRM, RDP, remote management software and ScreenConnect), enumerate shares with ShareFinder.ps1 and SharpShares, dump credentials with Mimikatz and DCSync tools, bypass User Account Control, turn off security software and sometimes change users' passwords to lock them out. They compress data with 7-Zip or WinRAR and exfiltrate it with WinSCP, RClone, FileZilla, OneDrive or the Backblaze b2 tool, use AnyDesk or TeamViewer to drop the ransomware, stop Volume Shadow Copy and reset backup NAS devices to factory settings, then encrypt files with ChaCha20 and RSA (extension .SafePay). The ransom note points to a Tor chat portal, a representative phones victims to pressure them, and stolen data is posted on the SafePay leak site if they do not pay. The advisory includes IP addresses, file names, hashes and STIX files for indicators seen between November 2024 and August 2026. (sources: CISA AA26-293A; The Record)
CISA, FBI, USSS, LKA Rheinland-Pfalz, NCA and NWROCU — #StopRansomware: SafePay Ransomware (AA26-293A, 20 Oct 2026; PDF and STIX IoCs)
On 16 October 2026 NIST's Center for Advancing Innovation and Standards for Super Intelligence (CAISSI), the NSA Super Intelligence Security Center and CISA published Key Practices for Incident Readiness and Response in Super Intelligence Training and Evaluation. The voluntary document sets out ten practices across preparation, detection, response, recovery and reporting for organisations that train or evaluate highly capable super-intelligence (SI) agents — especially pre-deployment systems with reduced safeguards. An SI control incident is defined as one or more agents taking uninstructed actions that conflict with operator policies, controls or human oversight. Guidance covers limiting agent access to information, systems, tools and networks; preserving evidence and shutting down undesired behaviour; rebuilding from verified baselines; and reporting incidents and near-misses to agencies and affected parties. It builds on NIST SP 800-61r3 and a May 2026 NIST SI Incident Management workshop, and responds to the White House 2025 SI Action Plan recommendation to fold SI incident response into existing doctrine. (sources: NIST news release; CISA resource page)
NIST — Key Practices for Incident Readiness and Response in Super Intelligence Training and Evaluation (16 Oct 2026)
Oracle published its Critical Patch Update Pre-Release Announcement for October 2026 on 15 October (US time), giving advance notice that the quarterly CPU will be released on Tuesday 20 October 2026 (early Wednesday 21 October in Australia) and will contain 1,283 new security patches across its product families. Oracle notes the pre-release figures can change before the advisory is published. The biggest buckets are Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle Fusion Middleware (196 patches each; 34 and 132 of them remotely exploitable without authentication respectively), Oracle Communications (124; 87 unauthenticated remote), Oracle Siebel CRM (123; 67), Oracle PeopleSoft (109), Oracle JD Edwards (102; 44), Oracle MySQL (98) and Oracle Java SE (55; 49). The highest CVSS 3.1 base scores Oracle lists are 10.0 for E-Business Suite, Fusion Middleware and JD Edwards; 9.9 for Siebel CRM, Essbase, Enterprise Manager and Trusted Answer Search; and 9.8 for APEX, Autonomous Health Framework, Secure Backup, Communications, HealthCare Applications, MySQL, PeopleSoft and Oracle Systems. Oracle Database Server gets 13 patches with a top score of 8.8. CVE identifiers and per-product affected versions are only published with the advisory itself. UPDATE (20 Oct): Oracle released the October 2026 CPU (Rev 1) with 1,295 new security patches; CVE lists, per-product versions and the six CVSS 10.0 flaws are on Cyberstack's release card (oracle-cpu-oct-2026-1295-patches-ebs-soa-access-manager-cvss10-20261020).
Oracle — Critical Patch Update Pre-Release Announcement, October 2026 (page updated 15 Oct 2026; CPU due 20 Oct 2026)
The Australian Signals Directorate launched ASD Essentials on 15 October 2026, a principles-based cyber security framework that will replace the Essential Eight and is designed to cover enterprise, cloud and operational technology environments, techpartner.news reported. It introduces three core concepts: principles that describe the cyber security outcomes an organisation should achieve, actions that describe what needs to be done to achieve them, and domains that define the business functions and assets the actions apply to. Priority phases replace maturity levels, and ASD recommends organisations begin scoping work in the phase one domains: boundary services, identity services, governance and culture, and visibility and response (techpartner.news). ASD said priority phases are not maturity ratings and that reaching a phase 'describes implementation scope, not how secure the organisation is', according to iTnews. Effectiveness is rated per action and domain as 'not effective', 'partially effective' or 'fully effective', and a principle's overall rating is set by its lowest-rated applicable action; every Essential Eight mitigation strategy maps to at least one principle, and Essential Eight maturity ratings do not automatically convert into Essentials effectiveness ratings (techpartner.news). iTnews reports the framework stops prescribing specific controls, setting out outcomes and leaving organisations to choose how to reach them, and puts identity services and internet-facing edge devices first, ahead of business systems and staff laptops. Practitioner pages: /knowledge/asd-essentials, /knowledge/asd-essentials-enterprise-it, /knowledge/transitioning-from-essential-eight. UPDATE 15 October (iTnews): ACSC head Stephanie Crowe told iTnews that when ASD Essentials becomes mandatory is not yet settled; ASD is working with policy agencies on a regulatory transition timeframe that will run over the next year or two. In the meantime the Essential Eight stays on ASD's website alongside the new framework, and government agencies will be assessed against both next year. Crowe said there is 'no wasted investment' for organisations already aligned with the Essential Eight, though ASD's guidance says existing controls should be checked against the Essentials rather than assumed equivalent. ASD plans workshops for organisations working through the change, and the Essentials also asks organisations to formally define executive and board-level accountability for cyber security. (source: iTnews) Correction (23 Oct 2026): re-sourced to iTnews and techpartner.news; removed details that rested only on ASD pages we cannot recheck.
iTnews — ASD’s Essential Eight replacement moves away from maturity ladder (15 Oct 2026)
ASIC said on 14 October 2026 (media release 26-244MR) that the Supreme Court of NSW has ordered Fortnum Private Wealth Ltd, a Sydney-based financial advice licensee, to pay a $1.35 million penalty and $250,000 towards ASIC's costs. Fortnum admitted that between 20 April 2021 and 11 May 2023 it failed to implement an adequate cybersecurity policy across its business and authorised-representative network; failed to have adequate processes, systems and frameworks to oversee and monitor its representatives' cyber resilience; failed to maintain adequate staff with specialised cybersecurity expertise; and failed to maintain adequate cybersecurity risk-management systems. Over that period the network had 81 to 94 financial advice practices, more than 200 authorised advisers and around 55,000 retail clients, whose files included identification documents, tax file numbers and financial account details. Justice Black said the agreed penalty provides the 'necessary sting or burden' for deterrence, noting the conduct was not deliberate and Fortnum cooperated with ASIC. ASIC Chair Sarah Court called it the third outcome ASIC has obtained against a licensee over cyber-risk failures, after RI Advice and FIIG Securities, and said Fortnum knew the risks but lacked an adequate policy and oversight. ASIC began the case in July 2025 after Fortnum notified it of a cyber attack on one of its authorised representatives. ASIC's 2025 filing alleged that one attack on a representative led to a major breach in which the data of more than 9,000 clients was published on the dark web. Fortnum has since introduced mandatory cyber controls, annual reviews, enhanced training and specialist cyber expertise. (sources: ASIC 26-244MR; ASIC 25-143MR; Cyber Daily)
ASIC — 26-244MR Fortnum Private Wealth penalised $1.35 million for cybersecurity failures (14 Oct 2026)
MITRE released ATT&CK v20 on 13 October 2026, updating techniques, groups, campaigns and software across the Enterprise, Mobile and ICS matrices. MITRE says the biggest change is broader coverage of recent adversary activity, including AI-focused and AI-enabled techniques. New Enterprise techniques are Direct Prompt Injection, Indirect Prompt Injection, AI-Enabled Exfiltration, Stage Capabilities: AI Result Poisoning, Disable or Modify Tools: Impair Autonomous Defenses, Anti-Automation Evasion (with sub-techniques for automating CAPTCHA completion and avoiding CAPTCHA) and Steal Application Specific Passwords, each with new detection strategies. Supply Chain Compromise: Compromise Software Dependencies and Development Tools moves to version 2.0. New campaigns are '2026 U.S. Water Utilities Attacks' (ICS) and 'AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure'. New groups are NIMBUS MANTICORE and The Gentlemen (whose ransomware is also added as software), and Salt Typhoon and APT38 entries get major revisions. ICS gains execution techniques for command and scripting interpreters (PowerShell, Python, JavaScript, Unix shell, Visual Basic, Windows command shell) and command and control over DNS and publish/subscribe protocols, while the older ICS Command-Line Interface and Scripting techniques are deprecated. Mobile un-deprecates Deliver Malicious Application via Other Means. The release counts 971 software entries, 182 groups and 61 campaigns; Enterprise now has 227 techniques and 479 sub-techniques. Why it matters: teams that map detections, threat models or red-team plans to ATT&CK now have standard IDs for prompt-injection and AI-agent abuse, and ICS teams have script-execution techniques to map. (sources: MITRE ATT&CK October 2026 update notes; MITRE ATT&CK; Cyber Security News)
MITRE ATT&CK — Updates, October 2026 (v20, 13 Oct 2026)
Microsoft opened a Windows release health known issue on 13 October 2026 (09:43 PT; 14 October Perth time): after the September 2026 non-security preview update KB5124010 or later updates, non-admin users might be unable to connect over Remote Desktop to devices that have Administrator protection enabled. Connections fail with error 0xC000000D and the message 'The token that was passed to the function is invalid.' It mainly hits enterprise-managed Remote Desktop hosts, however the feature was enabled. Administrator protection gives signed-in users standard rights and asks for Windows Hello to elevate; Microsoft notes it is enabled by default in the Windows 11 24H2, 25H2 and 26H2 security baselines from the Security Compliance Toolkit, and BleepingComputer reports it now lands by default in organisations using those baselines after the October 2026 security update. Affected: Windows 11 24H2, 25H2, 26H1 and 26H2 clients; no server versions. Microsoft originally listed the issue as mitigated by a workaround while it worked on a fix. This is a reliability problem, not a vulnerability. (source: Microsoft Windows release health) Updated 14 Oct 2026 (BleepingComputer): BleepingComputer's report is dated 14 October 2026; details credited to BleepingComputer on this card come from that report. UPDATE (29 Oct 2026, Perth; Microsoft): Microsoft marked the issue Resolved on 28 October 2026 at 10:00 PT (29 October 01:00 Perth), saying it was resolved by Windows updates released October 28, 2026 (KB5127936) and later, and that devices with KB5127936 or later do not need the workaround. (source: Microsoft Windows release health; BleepingComputer)
Microsoft Windows release health — Remote Desktop connections might fail for non-admin users with error 0xC000000D (opened 13 Oct 2026; resolved 28 Oct 2026)
Microsoft said in its Windows message center on 8 October 2026 that certificates used to make trusted connections to Windows Update expire on 17 May 2027 and 19 June 2027, and that devices must hold the replacement certificates to keep receiving updates after those dates. Windows 11 25H2 and later need no action. Windows 11 24H2 and Windows Server 2025 need the September 2025 security update or later before 19 June 2027. Other supported Windows 11 releases, Windows Server 2022 and supported Windows 10 versions need the July 2026 security update or later before 19 June 2027. Windows 10 Enterprise 2019 LTSC, Windows Server 2019 and Windows Server 2016 need the July 2026 update or later before 17 May 2027. Any other (unsupported) Windows version must be upgraded, or it will lose access to Windows Update. Devices that get updates through Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) are not affected by this change. Microsoft advises identifying old or unsupported devices now and planning upgrades before the deadlines. (sources: Microsoft Windows message center; BleepingComputer)
Microsoft Learn — Windows message center: Prepare for Windows Update certificate rotation in 2027 (8 Oct 2026)
On 8 October 2026 Zscaler ThreatLabz said it had found another new installer for the Anatsa (TeaBot) Android banking trojan distributed through the Google Play Store, disguised as a PDF reader with more than 10,000 installs, and published the Play Store listing and indicators (installer and payload hashes, command-and-control addresses) in its alert. Anatsa uses a dropper model: the harmless-looking app is installed first, then downloads the banking payload, often presented as an app update, and overlays fake login screens to steal banking credentials. The install figure is for the dropper app, not confirmed infections; the alert does not name targeted banks or countries, or say whether Google has removed the listing. Earlier ThreatLabz analysis documented Anatsa using environment checks and malformed APK archives to avoid analysis. (sources: Zscaler ThreatLabz; Cyber Security News)
Zscaler ThreatLabz on X — new Anatsa installer on Google Play disguised as a PDF reader (8 Oct 2026)
