Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

This past month, the Vanta team launched new features to help you with:‍

When a cloud services provider wants to work with the federal government, they have to pass a rigorous audit to make sure they’re capable of properly securing the controlled information they would handle in the process. Achieving that Authority to Operate is done through the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program and is the biggest barrier to federal contracts, and the bar is high. As many as 60% of CSPs attempting to pass their ATO audit will fail.

An identity mule is someone who is compensated for sharing their identity. They may be asked for pictures of their identification documents and video selfies. Or, instructed to create an account and complete an identity verification flow before handing over the account’s credentials to a bad actor. The fraud cat-and-mouse game is taking a new turn. As organizations get better at detecting deepfakes, some bad actors are using real people’s identities to commit fraud.

Globally, companies lost an average of 7.7% of their annual revenue to fraud, according to TransUnion’s 2025 Digital Identity Risk Accelerates Fraud Losses report. In the US, companies reported revenue losses of 9.8%, a 46% increase from the previous year. That’s hundreds of billions of dollars heading into the hands of fraudsters. And those stats don’t account for the loss of trust, hit to brand reputation, and time and resources spent on mitigating and resolving the fraud.

On January 20, 2026, Oracle patched a maximum‑severity vulnerability in its Fusion Middleware suite affecting Oracle HTTP Server and the WebLogic Server Proxy Plug‑in, tracked as CVE‑2026‑21962. An unauthenticated remote threat actor can exploit this flaw to gain unauthorized creation, deletion, or modification access to critical data. The issue stems from improper handling of incoming requests by the WebLogic Server Proxy Plug‑ins for Apache HTTP Server and Microsoft IIS.

Scammers are increasingly using visually stylized QR codes to deliver phishing links, Help Net Security reports. QR code phishing (quishing) is already more difficult to detect, since these codes deliver links without a visible URL. Attackers are now using QR codes with colors, shapes, and logos woven into the code’s pattern. “Fancy QR codes further complicate detection,” Help Net Security says. “Their layouts no longer resemble the familiar black and white grid.

For many organizations, the network has quietly become one of the biggest barriers to growth. It is the almost invisible nervous system of the enterprise, yet when it fails or becomes overly complex, it is the only thing anyone talks about. As projects expand, offices multiply, and cloud adoption accelerates; IT teams are finding the network is an increasingly difficult piece of the puzzle, and hard to control.

If you received an unexpected password reset email from Instagram at the beginning of January 2026, you’re not alone. In early January, many Instagram users reported receiving password reset emails they did not request. This appears to have been the result of Instagram’s password reset functionality, resulting in widespread confusion about the legitimacy of those messages.

AI adoption has accelerated across sectors today as the technology becomes easier to access and deploy. Most organizations embed it in at least one aspect of their daily operations, but doing so has also introduced new risks, such as model bias and outcome drift. ‍ There’s a growing gap between AI use and responsible oversight, and keeping up demonstrable AI governance practices is a challenge.

Despite cybersecurity representing a strategic and even existential risk to organizations today, stakeholder transparency and a strategic vision to manage it are often lacking. Too frequently, transparency is achieved only after a significant security incident. This is a problem.