News

Exploits In Microsoft Exchange Used To Breach Over 30,000 Organizations

Published

6 years ago

March 8, 2021

exploit in microsoft exchange used to breach over 30000 organizations

Over 30,000 entities, including local governments, small businesses, defense contractors, and education institutions, have been breached because of unpatched exploits in Microsoft Exchange, reported journalist and investigative reporter Brian Krebs on his blog, KrebsOnSecurity.

“In each incident, the intruders have left behind a ‘web shell,’ an easy-to-use, password-protected hacking tool that can be accessed over the Internet from any browser. The web shell gives the attackers administrative access to the victim’s computer servers,” Krebs wrote.

According to Microsoft, the attack was orchestrated by notorious Chinese hacking group Hafnium, and they started on January 6^th, the day when rioters stormed the United States Capitol in a violent attack against the 117th United States Congress.

Microsoft released emergency security updates to patch the vulnerabilities on March 2^nd, which means that the attackers had nearly two months to infiltrate vulnerable systems. The tech giant has been working closely with the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), as well as other public and private organizations, to secure all unpatched servers running Exchange Server 2013, 2016, or 2019 (Exchange Online hasn’t been affected).

“The best protection is to apply updates as soon as possible across all impacted systems,” said Microsoft spokesperson in a written statement. “We continue to help customers by providing additional investigation and mitigation guidance. Impacted customers should contact our support teams for additional help and resources.”

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While most known victims of the attacks were located in the United States, breaches related to the Microsoft Exchange vulnerabilities were also detected on the other side of the Atlantic. For example, the Prague municipality and the Czech Ministry for Labor and Social Affairs were forced to shut down some of their systems and install emergency patches. No data was stolen during the attack, said Czech government officials.

Attacks like this one highlight the importance of timely patching and modern intrusion detection tools, which are able to detect unusual activity while it’s still time to act.

News

ESET Bets On Specialized Security AI At 0.5% The Training Cost

ESET says NeoCortex can estimate an attacker’s next move, with a kill switch and human oversight built in to keep it from going rogue.

Published

5 days ago

November 4, 2026

Dana Saadeh

eset bets on specialized security ai at 0.5% the training cost

A sign-in anomaly, a suspicious process launch and an unusual connection may look harmless alone. Together, they can describe an intrusion that is hard for security to teams to piece together.

To solve that problem, ESET announced ESET NeoCortex on November 4, 2026: a specialized foundational AI model for cybersecurity. It powers ESET LiveCortex, available within the ESET PROTECT Platform, which connects fragmented security signals and turns them into actionable incidents.

Filtering is the main selling point, with LiveCortex processing billions of raw telemetry events daily, and just 0.00111% of them contributing to incidents presented to customers. The aim is less alert fatigue and more analyst time spent on threats that matter.

NeoCortex is built on world-model architecture, learning how digital environments behave and how events relate. ESET says that lets it reconstruct missing incident context, recognize similar past cases and estimate an attacker’s likely next step – what the company calls “minus-one-day defense,” a chance to intervene before the next stage unfolds. ESET points to Black October, the week leading up to October 25, 2026, when critical security issues affecting PHP, Linux, GitLab and other key systems demanded rapid, prioritized responses, as the kind of moment where that context matters.

ESET’s internal research also suggests a specialized model like NeoCortex can be trained at up to 200 times lower cost than a large general reasoning model, while delivering more accurate, defense-focused results. The company credits optimized training, a focus on cybersecurity vocabulary, lower computing requirements and privately owned hardware.

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“AI is accelerating both cyberattacks and cyberdefenses. With ESET NeoCortex, we are applying our AI investment to develop specialized foundational cybersecurity intelligence that remains under our control and strengthens, rather than replaces, human expertise,” said Juraj Malcho, Chief Technology Officer at ESET.

As part of the design, NeoCortex forms part of a layered architecture combining specialized models, deterministic controls, correlation logic, validation, auditability and expert human oversight. Safeguards include restricted sandboxes, read-only tools, continuous monitoring, defined usage and token limits, a kill switch and human oversight of critical response decisions. The model is also developed and self-hosted on ESET’s own infrastructure, which the company says reduces exposure to shifts among third-party AI providers, including commercial and geopolitical ones.