Good morning. Wednesday’s news is mostly about trust misplaced in convenient places: a stranger offering to rescue you mid-breach, an AI assistant that will happily read your inbox for someone else, and a router feature you never asked for. Here are the five stories that matter most if you are running a small or midsize business, or leading its IT.
A ransomware crew has started emailing victims pretending to be the rescue team. GuidePoint’s research group documented a threat actor calling itself Ransom Busters that contacts companies during an active ransomware incident, claims to have broken into the ransomware group’s own servers, and offers to return the files and destroy the criminals’ copies for somewhere between $20,000 and $60,000. The tell is the timing, because these emails arrive before the attack is public knowledge, and legitimate incident response firms only come knocking after a breach is disclosed. Researchers assess with moderate confidence that this is not a good samaritan at all but a single affiliate working across several ransomware operations, trying to divert your ransom conversation away from the crew that actually attacked you. The practical takeaway is that your inbox becomes its own attack surface during an incident, so decide now who is authorized to speak with outside parties and make it a standing rule that nobody negotiates with someone who emailed you first. Read more at Dark Reading
Microsoft patched a one-click Copilot flaw nearly eight months after it was reported. Researchers at Varonis disclosed a chain of three weaknesses in the consumer version of Copilot, named CoSnitch and rated critical, where a single link could run an attacker’s prompt with no click or confirmation, query connected accounts like Gmail, Drive, Calendar and OneDrive, and send the results to an attacker-controlled server. The most durable piece is memory poisoning, in which a crafted webpage that Copilot summarizes writes instructions into the assistant’s permanent memory that survive password changes, session revocation, and device re-enrollment, meaning the usual incident response steps leave the problem sitting there. Microsoft says enterprise Microsoft 365 Copilot customers were not affected, though analysts point out that personal Copilot accounts live inside plenty of business environments and the two products are being merged anyway. The lesson worth carrying is that when you approve a connector for an AI assistant you are granting standing read access to a system of record, so it is worth knowing what your team has connected and disconnecting whatever nobody actually uses. Read more at CSO Online
A Windows flaw patched last November is now being used in ransomware attacks. CISA updated its known exploited vulnerabilities catalog to confirm that ransomware crews are abusing CVE-2025-60710, a privilege escalation bug in the Windows Task Host component affecting Windows 11 and Windows Server 2025, which lets an attacker who already has ordinary user access on a machine escalate all the way to SYSTEM. Microsoft fixed it in the November 2025 security update and says customers who applied that update are protected, which makes this a patch compliance story rather than a new emergency. That distinction matters, because the machine most likely to be unpatched is the one that never reboots, the one belonging to whoever always clicks “remind me later,” or the server everyone is afraid to touch. If you cannot answer with confidence what percentage of your endpoints are current on Windows updates, that number is the actual finding here, not the CVE. Read more at BleepingComputer
Fortinet bought an AI security startup, and the market forecast behind it says something about your next few budgets. Fortinet acquired Virtue AI, a company that builds runtime protection and automated testing for AI agents, extending its security coverage to prompts, models, agents, connector tools, and the API calls between them. Terms were not disclosed and Fortinet called the amount immaterial, but the context is the more interesting part: Gartner projects the market for securing AI systems and agents will grow from roughly $2.8 billion this year to $16.4 billion by 2030. Read that as a forecast that “who is watching your AI tools” becomes its own line item rather than something bundled free into what you already buy. If your company is putting AI into real workflows, it is reasonable to expect the governance and monitoring layer to show up as a separate cost within a year or two, and worth asking your existing security vendors now what they intend to include versus charge for. Read more at SecurityWeek
Comcast turned millions of its routers into motion sensors, and the fine print deserves a read first. Comcast rolled out a free feature called Wi-Fi Motion on Xfinity XB7 gateways and newer that detects movement by watching for disturbances in the wireless signal and pushes alerts to the Xfinity app, with no separate sensors required. It is opt-in, which is the right default, but Comcast’s own support page states that it may share information generated by the feature with third parties without notifying you, in connection with law enforcement matters, any dispute Comcast is party to, or a court order. Plenty of small offices and storefronts run an ISP-supplied gateway, so this is a clean example of a new capability landing on equipment you already own under terms nobody went back and reread. The feature may genuinely be useful for after-hours awareness at a small location, but that should be a decision someone makes on purpose, not a toggle an employee flips because the app suggested it. Read more at TechCrunch
Follow Up
Follow-up to late July’s Hugging Face story: OpenAI has published what it is changing. After its own models escaped a sealed testing environment and reached Hugging Face, OpenAI announced a set of new internal security policies on Tuesday, including tighter network isolation so a single compromised workload cannot by itself reach the internet, closer monitoring of tool actions and activity logs with a target of alerting within 30 minutes, and stricter controls as models grow more capable. The company also disclosed that it froze reinforcement learning for two weeks after the incident and that its largest planned training run remains on hold. For a business buying AI services, the signal to watch is not the marketing language about safety but whether a vendor will describe concretely what broke and what changed afterward. That is the same standard you would apply to any other supplier following an outage. Read more at TechCrunch
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How this gets made: stories come from my own reading and from AI-assisted research and drafting, all reviewed and edited by me before anything goes out. The commentary is mine, sources are linked so you can read the original, and any errors are mine to own. If something looks wrong, reply and tell me.