This Week's Top Five Stories in Cyber
JadePuffer: Sysdig Sniffs Out the First Agentic Ransomware
Ransomware was already disruptive as it is when researchers discovered something even worse – agentic ransomware.
The Sysdig Threat Research Team (TRT) has uncovered the first ever documented case of agentic ransomware, which it elaborates as “a complete extortion operation driven end-to-end by a large language model (LLM)”.
The threat actor, dubbed JadePuffer, is the first documented instance of what Sysdig calls an agentic threat actor (ATA).
With the ATA successfully gaining access to the victim’s database server, executing flawlessly all the steps from reconnaissance, initial access to server takeover and even correcting itself at machine speed when steps go wrong, this fully agentic attack is an unwelcome development in a world already plagued with a growing number of cyber threats.
Sophos Flags Vect-TeamPCP Cybercriminal Ransomware Alliance
As big tech and businesses pool their resources for better outcomes, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that organised cybercriminal gangs that are increasingly operating like modern businesses are banking on partnerships too.
Research from the Sophos X-Ops Counter Threat Unit (CTU) has uncovered a new partnership between ransomware group Vect and cybercriminal outfit TeamPCP, heralding a major evolution in the cybercrime landscape.
Stacking their collective criminal expertise, the collaboration combines TeamPCP's capabilities in credential theft and supply chain compromise with Vect's ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) infrastructure to create a highly efficient cyberattack pipeline.
“Threat groups are increasingly operating like businesses, collaborating to combine respective specialist capabilities and build new attack pipelines,” says Rafe Pilling, Director of Threat Intelligence at Sophos.
IBM & Red Hat: How Lightwell Can Lock Up AI-Era Open Source
Major cyber disruptions seen in 2026 – be it Trivy, TanStack or XZ Utils – have two things in common. They are open-source and they have hundreds of thousands of users, leading to an easy win for attackers as they poison the software supply chain, affecting millions of downstream users.
Guarding enterprises against this very challenge, IBM and Red Hat have launched Lightwell, a new platform designed to help secure open source code at scale.
“Lightwell represents a fundamental structural shift in how we secure all enterprise software,” says Matt Hicks, President and CEO at Red Hat.
“By pairing automated remediation with our deep engineering heritage, we aim to deliver the trusted infrastructure required to consume open source reliably, sustainably and at AI speeds.”
BT and Ivanti Partner on Secure by Design, Remote e-SIM
Swapping a physical SIM from a mobile phone is a relatively quick task, but imagine having to change thousands of SIMs across dozens of countries.
That idea is now not as far-fetched as it might seem. With mobile device management (MDM) platforms, it is possible to configure eSIM connectivity remotely across thousands of Android devices without any manual intervention.
BT Business and Ivanti have worked with Android to create this very capability, allowing IT security teams to provision network access through the same systems they use to enforce security policies and application controls.
The solution addresses one of the more time-consuming aspects of deploying corporate mobile devices. Organisations no longer need to physically handle each handset or guide users through manual setup processes that could introduce configuration errors.
Cisco Research Stresses AI's Enterprise Networking Challenge
The AI readiness conversation seems to have a massive blind spot, a recent Cisco and Foundry research has revealed.
Beyond infrastructure, GPUs and cyber threats, the report titled No time to wait: The accelerating impact of AI on campus and branch networks, discusses the “extraordinary pressure” AI is placing on enterprise networking.
Surveying more than 3,400 IT and networking decision-makers across 15 countries, the research sounds the alarm on the rapidly increasing strain on networks with rampant adoption of generative, agentic and physical AI.
“This new research finds that campus and branch environments are fundamentally mismatched with the scale, speed and variability of AI-driven traffic now moving across enterprise networks,” the report notes.
Executives
Matt Hicks
CEO
Rafe Pilling
Director of Threat Intelligence - X-Ops - Counter Threat Unit (CTU)
