Cybersecurity, compliance, and technology guidance from the ISM team — practical takes to help you protect and grow your business.
On the night of October 11, attackers set the fridges and freezers at hundreds of European supermarkets to defrost. They got in through a controller managed remotely by a maintenance contractor, the kind of device most IT departments have never inventoried.
Microsoft’s October 2026 Patch Tuesday fixed 1,413 CVEs, more than all of 2025 combined. Only one is confirmed to be under active exploitation, and it works by removing the warning banner from a file someone was emailed. At this volume, patching stops being a task and becomes a triage discipline.
A PAN-OS authentication bypass patched back in May is still landing ransomware in October. The detail worth your attention is not the VPN flaw itself but where attackers go next: vCenter, ESXi and the backup server, where almost nobody is watching.
Microsoft’s October 14 research on the YAM Store ecosystem answers a question a lot of businesses ask: why us? The answer is that nobody picked you. Someone bought a subscription, a target list and a thousand ready-made templates.
Europol took control of the KillSec ransomware group’s leak site on September 30th 2026, securing at least 110 terabytes of stolen data. The arrests are good news. The bigger problem for most businesses is that a takedown does not “un-steal” data, and few firms could produce a list of what was stolen.
Citrix disclosed eight NetScaler vulnerabilities and two are already being exploited. Because attackers moved weeks before the patch existed, applying the update is only part of the response. Here is what to ask your IT team about every device you have facing the internet.
