Forward Networks is proud to announce that we have been recognized again for our industry-leading security capabilities—winning the Global InfoSec Award for the third consecutive year and the Security Today Govies Award for the second year in a row. This year, Cyber Defense Magazine honored Forward Networks with the Trailblazer Compliance Award in its 13th Annual Global InfoSec Awards.

Recently, I covered a T-Mobile scam where a friend of mine narrowly avoided losing money. In that scam, the attackers called up pretending to be from T-Mobile offering him a cannot-pass-up 30% discount on future T-Mobile bills. While he was initially suspicious of the unexpected callers, they gained his confidence by repeating the amounts of his last two T-Mobile bills, billing address, and knew that his wife was also on the account.

Each year on World Password Day, most password managers will remind you that sticky notes are no place for storing passwords, to avoid using “password123,” or to stop repeating passwords across multiple accounts. That is all sound advice, but we’re in 2025. Passwords are still everywhere, but our relationship with them has evolved — or rather, devolved.

Email is still the most common attack vector for cyber threats, according to a new report from Barracuda. The researchers found that one in four emails during February 2025 was either malicious or spam. HTML attachments were the most common file type used in phishing emails. “One of the most striking findings from the report is that 23% of HTML attachments are malicious, making them the most weaponized type of text file,” Barracuda says.

Passwords remain the most widely used and weakest authentication method in the enterprise. They’re still responsible for the majority of breaches, and IT teams spend an outsized amount of time simply managing them. It’s no wonder that security leaders are shifting toward passwordless authentication, a more secure and phishing-resistant approach that replaces traditional credentials with biometrics, passkeys, and FIDO2-compliant sign-ins.

The rapid adoption of AI coding assistants is transforming software development in ways both good and bad. Developers can produce more code faster than ever with AI, and 96% of developers report using AI coding assistants to streamline their work. AI code generation is becoming mainstream, and in late 2024, Google reported that AI writes more than 25% of its code. While GenAI tools increase productivity, they’re also creating more work for application security teams.

Banking & Financial Services (BFS) firms are shouldering a uniquely heavy share of the global threat load. The newly released Indusface State of Application Security 2025 study paints a stark picture: Why the laser focuses on finance? Strict regulations mean banks generally run strong perimeters, so adversaries pivot to bots, API abuse, and nuanced business-logic exploits that slip past ‘default’ defences.