Tenable Blog

Tenable Cloud Security unifies visibility across code, build, and runtime stages. It correlates vulnerabilities, identities, and misconfigurations to prioritize exploitability and automate containment — helping teams detect, control, and remediate risks across multi-cloud and hybrid environments.

Key takeaways:

1. Vulnerabilities can emerge at any point in multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments — and the potential blast radius of exposure can jeopardize accounts, workloads and data.
    
2. Siloed security tools can’t give teams the visibility they need across every layer of the cloud environment, including code, build, registry, and runtime. This results in overlooked vulnerabilities, duplicated efforts, and delayed remediation.
    
3. Tenable Cloud Security gives teams a seamless and unified view across CI/CD pipelines, image registries, and multi-cloud environments. Findings are enriched with insight into exploitability, privilege, and exposure. The result? A clear picture of where the next breach could begin and how widespread its impact could be.

Modern cloud environments move fast. Code is built, tested, and deployed across containers, registries, and workloads in minutes. Yet vulnerabilities can emerge at any point — from an unpatched library in a CI/CD pipeline to an image in production. Without holistic visibility across every stage of the software lifecycle, it’s easy for critical risks to slip through the cracks. Once they do, the potential blast radius of exposure can expand rapidly across accounts, workloads, and data.

The challenge: Reducing the blast radius

Many security teams still rely on point tools or siloed scans. They might scan during CI/CD testing but lose sight of what happens after deployment — or focus on runtime protection without securing earlier stages.

The result? Missed exposures, duplicate work, and delayed remediation — all of which increase the chance that vulnerabilities reach production and propagate across environments. To effectively reduce the blast radius, organizations need end-to-end visibility that connects every layer of the environment — code, build, registry, and runtime — into a single, contextual view. That’s what Tenable Cloud Security, part of the Tenable One Exposure Management Platform, delivers.

A new approach to cloud security for multi-cloud and hybrid environments

Tenable Cloud Security connects the dots between vulnerabilities, identities, misconfigurations, and data exposure to show not just what’s vulnerable, but why it matters — and how to contain it before attackers can exploit it.

Instead of juggling data from disconnected tools, teams gain one unified view that integrates seamlessly across CI/CD pipelines, image registries, and multi-cloud environments. Every finding is enriched with insight into exploitability, privilege, and exposure, creating a clear picture of not only where the next breach could begin but how widespread its impact could be — and steps you can take to proactively reduce the risk of a breach happening in the first place.

Shrink the blast radius in the cloud with Tenable Cloud Security

 

Tenable Cloud Security brings clarity and control to complex cloud environments through continuous visibility, context-driven prioritization, and automated containment. Teams can view vulnerabilities across all cloud accounts and workloads in a single interface, filtering by account, exploit maturity, or exposure level to focus on remediating the risks that matter most.

Using Tenable’s Vulnerability Priority Rating (VPR) and the Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS), the platform dynamically adjusts vulnerability priorities based on active exploit data and real-world threat intelligence. This ensures that response efforts are always focused on the vulnerabilities most likely to be weaponized.

It goes beyond traditional scanning by correlating vulnerabilities with network exposure, identity privileges, and data sensitivity — exposing toxic combinations such as a publicly accessible workload with administrative permissions and a critical CVE. With this context, teams can pinpoint not only which vulnerabilities are exploitable but also how an attacker might move laterally once inside.

Through deep workload analysis, security teams can drill down into connected identities, network paths, and activity logs. Automated guardrails then restrict risky access, enforce segmentation, and isolate affected workloads before threats can spread.

And because it’s part of Tenable One, these insights extend beyond the cloud, unifying visibility across IT, identity, and on-prem environments in a single exposure graph. Vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and entitlements are correlated into one dynamic risk model, making it easier than ever to see and contain potential attack paths.

The bottom line: Discover, control, and remediate 

With Tenable Cloud Security, vulnerabilities no longer become open invitations for attackers. Security and DevOps teams can detect exposures early, prioritize them intelligently, and contain them automatically before they spread.

By unifying discovery, context, and control, Tenable Cloud Security transforms vulnerability management from a reactive exercise into proactive containment. The result is a smaller blast radius, faster remediation, and greater confidence in the security of your cloud-native applications.

Ready to learn more? Click here to see how Tenable Cloud Security can help you mitigate vulnerabilities across your entire pipeline, from development through runtime.

As DoD agencies accelerate cloud-native adoption under DOGE efficiency mandates, securing containerized workloads is essential to mission assurance. Learn why deployment-time scanning and admission controller enforcement are critical to reduce risk, meet compliance, and modernize security

Key takeaways:

1. Deployment-time scanning ensures containers are evaluated in the context of the environment they’ll be running in, not just how they were built.
    
2. Kubernetes admission controllers are a critical capability in deployment-time scanning. Admission controllers play a vital role in enforcing the strict runtime policies and compliance standards required in DoD environments.
    
3. Purpose-built for highly secure environments, like classified or air-gapped networks, Tenable Enclave Security reduces cyber risk by helping agencies see the risk in every IT asset and container image. It’s also available as a fully managed service for agencies requiring FedRAMP High or Impact Level 5 authorization.

Modern defense operations increasingly rely on cloud-native applications and containerized workloads to accelerate mission delivery, support agile development, and enhance scalability. In the wake of efficiency mandates driven by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), cloud-native applications offer a foundation for accelerating innovation, increasing efficiency, optimizing costs, and modernizing federal infrastructure.

However, like many emerging technologies, container adoption brings new challenges, particularly for federal agencies. Containers move fast, change frequently, and introduce new risks that traditional security tools weren’t built to handle. When you add the burden of compliance requirements, classified workloads, and strict security protocols, adoption becomes significantly more complex.

For the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), these risks are more than just theoretical. A single misconfigured or vulnerable container image can create a foothold for adversaries to steal sensitive data, disrupt critical systems, or compromise national security across multiple running containers. As DoD agencies adopt DevSecOps practices and shift security left, it’s critical that they mature container security capabilities from static, point-in-time assessments to continuous protection across the software lifecycle, including at deployment.

Why deployment-time scanning matters

Most security teams are familiar with scanning container images during development or in registries, but that’s only part of the picture. Once a container is deployed into a runtime environment, new risk factors emerge, such as:

• Changes to configurations or environment variables
• Inherited vulnerabilities from base images
• Drift from approved builds or hardened baselines

Deployment-time scanning ensures containers are evaluated in the context of the environment they’ll be running in, not just how they were built. This provides more accurate risk assessments, enforces compliance with DoD security frameworks, and enables rapid remediation of issues before they can be exploited. For mission-critical systems, this added layer of visibility and control is vital.

Enforcing security at the gate: The role of admission controllers

A critical capability in deployment-time scanning is the use of Kubernetes admission controllers. These are policy-enforcement points that evaluate containers before they’re allowed to run. Think of them as a security gatekeeper: they intercept deployment requests and check each request against your security policies, automatically blocking containers that don’t meet your predefined security criteria, which indicate they are non-compliant images.

For DoD environments, admission controllers play a vital role in enforcing strict runtime policies and compliance standards by:

• Preventing unauthorized or risky containers from being deployed
• Enforcing baseline security policies across development teams
• Reducing the risk of human error or misconfiguration in production
• Providing auditable controls aligned to the DoD Risk Management Framework and to the DoD’s DevSecOps guidance

In short, admission controllers help ensure that only secure, approved workloads make it into mission-critical environments, without slowing down the pace of innovation.

Tenable Enclave Security: Elevating container security to meet DoD mission demands

Tenable is excited to share that Container Security in Tenable Enclave Security now supports container-deployment scanning, giving defense and intelligence organizations powerful insight into container vulnerabilities in real time and directly in operational environments.

Tenable Enclave Security drives modernization in defense and intelligence agencies with core vulnerability management integrated with agile and flexible container-image scanning, playing a crucial role in agency efforts to innovate securely, accelerate mission delivery, support agile development, and enhance scalability.

Purpose-built for highly secure environments, like classified or air-gapped networks, Tenable Enclave Security reduces cyber risk by helping agencies see the risk in every IT asset and container image, and by delivering context-based intelligence and prioritized remediations across the infrastructure. And now, for agencies requiring FedRAMP High or Impact Level 5 authorization, it’s also available as a fully managed service, which simplifies deployment and operations for agencies with limited security resources or infrastructure.

Whether you’re running mission-critical applications in air-gapped networks or classified cloud enclaves, Tenable Enclave Security helps ensure your containerized workloads remain secure, compliant and ready to support the mission.

To learn more about how Tenable Enclave Security can help your agency, check out our webpage and the white paper “Checklist: Securing containers from development to runtime.”

An AI acceptable use policy can help your organization mitigate the risk of employees accidentally exposing sensitive data to public AI tools. Benchmark your organization’s policy against our best practices and discover how prompt-level visibility from Tenable AI Exposure eases policy enforcement.

Key takeaways:

1. An AI acceptable use policy governs the appropriate use of generative AI tools for employees. It defines the specific tools employees can and can't use and provides guidelines for the secure, responsible, and ethical use of AI.
    
2. An AI acceptable use policy should include rules on data classification, approved tools, usage guidelines, and accountability.
    
3. Tenable AI Exposure, part of the Tenable One Exposure Management Platform, provides security leaders with tools to enforce their AI acceptable use policy, including discovery of all generative AI usage throughout the organization, deep visibility into what data is being exposed, and enforcement capabilities.

OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT in November 2022 was a seismic event. Built on the GPT 3.5 large language model (LLM), ChatGPT quickly became the fastest growing consumer product ever, according to UBS, with 100 million monthly users in 60 days. In a similar span of time, the risks of this groundbreaking technology also became apparent.

In early 2023, two employees of an electronics company shared confidential source code with ChatGPT, effectively making their source code part of the LLM’s training data without realizing it. The incident, which was widely reported in the media, prompted many organizations to ban public AI tools. This was not an isolated incident. A global survey conducted by the University of Melbourne in early 2025 showed that 48% of employees had uploaded sensitive information to public generative AI tools and 44% had knowingly violated corporate AI policies.

All of this highlights the urgency for organizations to develop and implement a clear and robust AI acceptable use policy.

What is an AI acceptable use policy (AUP)?

An AI acceptable use policy provides guidelines on the correct, ethical, and legal use of AI technologies within your organization. An AI governance council, led by a senior member of the IT team and including stakeholders from across the organization, should manage the policy.

An AI acceptable use policy should include: 

• A list of approved tools (including tools approved for companywide use and those approved for specific business units)
• Types of data that can and can’t be shared
• Rules that govern data handling
• Guidelines for using AI to generate content
• Consequences for policy violations.

Watch the video below for guidance on creating an AI acceptable use policy.

 

An AI acceptable use policy helps you manage the risk of data exposure and intellectual property loss by clearly defining what employees can and can’t do. It can also help you maintain compliance with the data handling provisions of regulatory requirements, such as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).

Instead of functioning as an onerous rulebook, a well-crafted AI acceptable use policy should empower employees to take advantage of the benefits of AI while keeping risks in check — whether they’re using work devices or their own personal ones. 

View the on-demand webinar Securing the Future of AI in Your Enterprise and download our one-page AI Acceptable Use Policy guide

The core components of an AI acceptable use policy

You know you need a guide to help govern AI usage. But what should it include? Based on many conversations with customers that have wrestled with this very issue, we encourage AI governance councils to include these core components in their AI acceptable use policies:

• Data classification: This is about what data you permit and prohibit to use with AI tools. Your policy should clearly state what employees can’t use in AI, such as customer personally identifiable information (PII), source code, financial records, and M&A strategy documents. Spell this out in detail because your company’s needs are probably unique. But don’t limit it to things employees can’t do. Tell them the kinds of tasks they can do.
• Approved tools: Provide employees with a complete list of sanctioned and approved AI applications (e.g., tools like Grammarly, ChatGPT Enterprise, and Zoom AI are often approved while DeepSeek, which is banned by several US states and government agencies, is often not approved). For approved tools, tell employees the use cases for each one and include internal or vendor-provided training videos. Maybe one is good for coding and another for image creation. Along the way, make it clear in your policy that unsanctioned tools are not permitted. In addition, provide a mechanism for employees to request approval of AI tools.
• Usage guidelines: You should clearly define appropriate business use cases (drafting marketing copy might be a good example) and inappropriate ones (summarizing sensitive meeting notes is probably not a good idea).
• Accountability: What happens if there’s a policy violation? Outline the consequences and be specific. If there is a violation, there are a number of ways of handling it. But we suggest a stepped approach.
  • For example, on a first violation, give the user a gentle warning and refer the user to your AUP. Also, ask for justification for the tool and share the process for submitting a request for review to the AI governance council. If justification for the tool is clear, let the user know that the tool will go through an approval process (including budget and security assessments). Subsequent to that, the council will update the policy and notify users.
  • For a second violation, you should block the user (and other employees) from accessing the tool.
  • If there’s a third violation, you should monitor repeated attempts and let the employee's manager know. Offer the employee training and awareness resources for acceptable use of AI tools.

Benchmark your AI acceptable use policy against best practices

Ensure your organization’s AI acceptable use policy covers the following elements:

The use of AI toolsEnsure you have a list of approved and prohibited tools that is readily available. Provide a mechanism for employees to submit requests for tools they would like the organization to consider for approval.Ethical principlesOutline your organization’s view on accountability, transparency, fairness, safety, privacy, and security.Requirements for AI useLay out the three categories of AI use: permitted (use is unrestricted), prohibited (use is not allowed), and controlled (use requires authorization). Employee responsibilitiesMake employee responsibilities for using AI clear, including checking for accuracy and bias and labeling any code appropriately. Above all, make it clear to employees that the organization will not tolerate unlawful or unethical uses of AI (i.e., disinformation, manipulation, discrimination, defamation, invasion of privacy).Data privacy and securityCreate guidelines that respect privacy rights and protect the security of data regardless of the AI use case within the organization. Training and awarenessInclude information that underscores your commitment to training on the risks and why you don't permit the use of unsanctioned AI tools, including concerns about data exposure, privacy, third-party tracking, security (i.e., vulnerable or unsafe AI tools that are easily compromised, and malicious threat actors that can use an AI tool to gain a foothold in your organization). Make sure all employees review and understand available training resources.

Source: Tenable, October 2025

How to enforce your AI acceptable use policy

Now that you understand the risk and you have an acceptable use policy in place that you’ve communicated to employees, what’s next? You need to enforce it. This can be a challenge. But let us guide you through it because it’s important to get this step right.

Here are two keys to ensuring your policy works:

• Continuous training: Educate employees on the why behind the policy, focusing on real-world risks. There are many examples of employees sharing source code, meeting recordings, and other confidential information with public AI tools without realizing the consequences of their actions, but because we don’t want to shame anyone, we’re not going to list them here.
• Proactive monitoring and visibility: This is the technical core. You can't enforce a policy you can't see. You’ll need to move quickly beyond simply blocking an app to having granular visibility of what employees are doing, as well as the AI platforms and AI agents they’re using. You’ll also need to know the third-party tools and AI workflows (both vetted and unvetted) they access to determine risks at the input (the prompt), operations (what the AI tool does as a result of the prompt), and the output (the result produced by the AI tool). You have to be able to know all of this to understand if someone is violating a policy. An employee might be asking for help with Python or they might be copying and pasting your company’s proprietary algorithm. Only this level of visibility will allow you to discern the difference.

An AI acceptable use policy without enforcement is just a document. To truly secure your organization, you need to combine a clearly articulated policy with a proactive exposure management program that provides complete visibility into how your team is using these powerful new tools.

How Tenable AI Exposure can help you monitor compliance with your organization’s AI acceptable use policy

You have to secure AI to manage your organization’s risk. And you need to understand how your employees are using AI. So, how do you gain the visibility, context, and control you need to manage it all? And how can you govern AI usage, enforce policies, and prevent exposures?

Tenable AI Exposure directly addresses these challenges. It provides the essential capabilities needed to protect sensitive information and enforce acceptable use policies:

• Discovery: Comprehensive identification of all generative AI usage throughout the organization, including shadow AI instances that might otherwise go undetected. This ensures a complete understanding of where AI is being leveraged, both intentionally and unintentionally.
• Deep visibility: Crucial, prompt-level analysis to reveal precisely what data is being exposed when employees interact with generative AI tools. This granular insight enables organizations to understand the nature of the information being shared and identify potential risks.
• Enforcement: Delivers the necessary data to effectively enforce your organization's acceptable use policy and safeguard sensitive information. By providing actionable intelligence, Tenable AI Exposure helps security teams implement and uphold governance rules, preventing data leakage and misuse.

With these capabilities, you gain a proactive approach to managing the complexities of generative AI within the enterprise. As a result, organizations can embrace innovation while maintaining robust security for AI and compliance standards.

If you’re a Tenable One customer and you’re interested in getting an exclusive private preview of Tenable AI Exposure, fill out the short form on the Tenable AI Exposure page. We’ll get right back to you. This offer is limited to Tenable One customers.

Learn more 

• View the on-demand webinar: Securing the Future of AI in Your Enterprise
• Read the guide, AI Acceptable Use Policy

At Tenable, we believe the next generation of great CISOs and security leaders will arise from those vulnerability management professionals who are driving the shift to exposure management today.

Key takeaways:

1. Vulnerability management is crucial for the evolution toward a more strategic, business-aligned approach to cybersecurity — that’s why these professionals are best positioned to lead the shift to exposure management.
    
2. As the primary source of exposure insights for CISOs, chief risk officers, business leaders, and IT and security teams, you will play the pivotal role in improving communication, driving efficiency, guiding investments, and strengthening the organization's risk posture.
    
3. The deep understanding of assets, risks, and prioritization you get with exposure management puts you in line to be a next-generation security leader.

As a vulnerability management professional you already possess deep knowledge of assets and risk across the attack surface. Add in the ability to provide rich exposure context, and suddenly you’re in a position to deliver strategic, business-aligned insights that can help the entire organization improve risk posture and drive better outcomes. You are better equipped than other security professionals to lead this evolution toward holistic exposure management. 

With all the instruments at play, security organizations are a lot like an orchestra. When separate musicians, each one reading their own sheet music, play without awareness of each other, it sounds like a cacophony. There's music in there somewhere, but it's impossible to hear through the noise. 

Think about each one of those musicians as a different security silo in your organization. They have their own skills and “instruments” — but lack relational context — so the outcome is less than ideal.

Consider the common attack chain. A simple misconfiguration in a cloud environment may seem harmless in isolation. But if it directly leads to a critical database vulnerability, it exposes sensitive client records. Similarly, a basic web application flaw that provides access to an administrator account without multi-factor authentication (MFA) can give away the keys to the entire kingdom. Attackers expertly exploit these gaps in visibility and context.

As a vulnerability management professional, you know the drill. You may have paved the way for richer context through risk-based vulnerability management (RBVM), factoring in external accessibility, exploitability, and asset criticality. This experience uniquely positions you to step up and orchestrate the future of security.

By becoming an exposure management expert, you can take center stage as the conductor. Exposure management platforms allow you to unify data across siloed tools and access deep relationship context — the connections between assets, identities, risks, and the business.

Armed with the attacker’s view of viable attack paths leading to your organization’s most critical assets, you can help your colleagues in security and IT to focus their remediation efforts on closing off critical choke points.

This context empowers you to deliver business aligned exposure metrics, streamlining communication across constituents — your peers, your department leaders, your CISO, and your business-side colleagues. Everyone will be able to understand how security investments can best improve risk posture. These are essential elements in the toolkit of tomorrow’s security leaders.

As the conductor, you’ll expand your value, influence, and expertise 

It’s easy to talk about how exposure management evolves the scope and focus of vulnerability management teams. But what does that really mean for you and your relationships with security and IT peers, the business, and other leaders? 

Let’s look at a variety of roles and their struggles. Equally important, we’ll contrast that with how you, as the conductor, can transform the daily lives of your colleagues while increasing your value, visibility, and impact across the organization. 

RoleStrategic challengeYour impactChief information security officer (CISO)CISO board reporting is often hampered by confusing CVE metrics and patch counts that lack business relevance.You empower CISOs to communicate business-aligned risk posture and exposure metrics the board easily understands.Chief risk officer (CRO)CROs are forced to rely on fragmented technical reporting that lacks risk and compliance alignment.You provide the unified, business- and framework-aligned reporting CROs need to maintain the effectiveness of their governance, risk, and compliance program.Business unit leadersLeaders struggle to understand security exposure and where to place limited staff and funds.You provide business unit leaders access to transparent exposure metrics and business-aligned views to justify and prioritize their security investments.

Siloed security teams

(including cloud, operational technology, identity, etc.)

Siloed teams are inundated with endless low-priority findings, which leads to alert fatigue.You give siloed teams the tools they need to surface the most exploitable and impactful exposures first.IT adminsAdmins are overwhelmed by excessive tickets that are siloed and lack context and remediation guidance.You reduce IT admin ticket noise with choke point prioritization and clear AI-driven remediation guidance.DevelopersDevelopers receive vague fix requests without understanding urgency or business impact.You provide clear guidance on priority and business-impacting exposures, along with needed remediations-as-code. Security investigation teamsTeams manually stitch together telemetry data from countless different security and IT tools during investigations.You provide high-fidelity technical and business context in one place, so teams can speed up investigations and disrupt ongoing attacks.Purple teamsPurple teams have no visibility into asset and risk relationships, and the high-value targets they need to prioritize for testing. Teams gain a prioritized view of actual attack paths that lead to crown jewels for focused testing of the things that matters most.

Source: Tenable, October 2025

Where do I start? The key to becoming the next great security leader 

This moment represents a defining opportunity for vulnerability management professionals. By driving the evolution to holistic exposure management, you become the conductor of the “security orchestra.” The guidance you provide can align security and IT teams, business leaders, and executives with the shared goal of reducing actual business exposure.

We recognize change isn’t easy and building a career path takes time. So, where do you start? Here are two actions you can take beginning today that can help you lead the way from vulnerability management to exposure management: 

1. Reframe the problem for security leadership

Tip: Traditional vulnerability management focuses on volume — patch counts, CVSS scores, SLA metrics — without clearly surfacing what truly matters. Exposure management flips the script by prioritizing exploitable risks with real business impact. Use attack path visualizations, crown jewel targets, and risk-to-business narratives to shift the conversation from noise to clarity. Show how exposure management enables board-level reporting with exposure metrics that align with continuity, trust, and regulatory pressure.

2. Connect exposure management to strategic objectives

Tip: Executives care about outcomes: reducing risk, boosting efficiency, supporting compliance, and enabling transformation safely. Exposure management isn’t another tool.It’s a strategic capability that integrates siloed data, applies shared risk context, and drives informed action across teams. Position exposure management as an evolutionary step that respects existing investments while empowering smarter decisions through unified, business-aligned context.

The next post in this series will show you how to apply this strategy pragmatically. We’ll address four of the most pressing challenges facing security programs today: tool and vendor sprawl, blind spots across the external attack surface, unmanaged risks from rapid tech adoption, and the growing burden of alert fatigue. 

Learn more

See how an exposure management platform like Tenable One can help you overcome these issues by balancing immediate priorities with long-term objectives — without blowing up your budget or disrupting your teams, tools, and processes.

As organizations eagerly adopt AI, cybersecurity teams are racing to protect these new systems. In this special edition of the Cybersecurity Snapshot, we round up some of the best recent guidance on how to fend off AI attacks, and on how to safeguard your AI systems.

Key takeaways

1. Developers are getting new playbooks from groups like OWASP and OpenSSF to lock down agentic AI and AI coding assistants.
    
2. Hackers are broadly weaponizing AI, using conventional LLMs to scale up phishing and new agentic AI tools to run complex, automated attacks.
    
3. To fight fire with fire, organizations are unleashing their own agentic AI tools to hunt for threats and boost their cyber defenses.

In case you missed it, here’s fresh guidance for protecting your organization against AI-boosted attacks, and for securing your AI systems and tools.

1- OWASP: How to safeguard agentic AI apps

Agentic AI apps are all the rage because they can act autonomously without human intervention. That’s also why they present a major security challenge. If an AI app can act on its own, how do you stop it from going rogue or getting hijacked?

If you’re building or deploying these “self-driving” AI apps, take a look at OWASP’s new “Securing Agentic Applications Guide.”

Published in August, this guide gives you “practical and actionable guidance for designing, developing, and deploying secure agentic applications powered by large language models (LLMs).”
 

It's a guide aimed at the folks in the trenches, including developers, AI/ML engineers, security architects, and security engineers. Topics include:

• Technical security controls and best practices
• Secure architectural patterns
• Common threat mitigation strategies
• Guidance across the development lifecycle (design, build, deploy, operate).
• Security considerations for components such as LLMs, orchestration middleware, memory, tools, and operational environments

It even provides examples of how to apply security principles in different agentic architectures.

For more information about agentic AI security:

• “Frequently Asked Questions About Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Integrating with AI for Agentic Applications” (Tenable)
• “Cybersecurity in 2025: Agentic AI to change enterprise security and business operations in year ahead” (SC World)
• “How AI agents could revolutionize the SOC — with human help” (Cybersecurity Dive)
• “Three Essentials for Agentic AI Security” (MIT Sloan Management Review)
• “Beyond ChatGPT: The rise of agentic AI and its implications for security” (CSO)

2 - Anthropic: How an attacker turned Claude Code into a master hacker

Think that OWASP guide is just theoretical? Think again. In a stark example of agentic AI's potential for misuse, AI vendor Anthropic recently revealed how a sophisticated cyber crook weaponized its Claude Code product to “an unprecedented degree” in a broad extortion and data-theft campaign.

It’s a remarkable story, even by the standards of the AI world. The hacker used this agentic AI coding tool to:

• Automate reconnaissance.
• Harvest victims’ credentials.
• Breach networks.
• Make tactical and strategic decisions, such as choosing which data to steal, and crafting “psychologically targeted” extortion demands.
• Crunch stolen financial data to set the perfect ransom amounts.
• Generate “visually alarming” ransom notes.

The incident takes AI-assisted cyber crime to another level.

“Agentic AI has been weaponized. AI models are now being used to perform sophisticated cyberattacks, not just advise on how to carry them out,” Anthropic wrote in an August blog post.

This new breed of agentic AI abuse makes security exponentially harder because the tool is autonomous, so it adapts to defenses in real time.
 

(Image generated by Tenable using Google Gemini)

By the time Anthropic shut the attacker down, at least 17 organizations had been hit, including healthcare, emergency services, government, and religious groups.

Anthropic says it has since built new classifiers – automated screening tools – and detection methods to catch these attacks faster.

This incident, which Antropic labeled “vibe hacking,” is just one of 10 real-world use cases included in Anthropic’s “Threat Intelligence Report: August 2025” that detail abuses of the company’s AI tools.

Anthropic said it hopes the report helps the broader AI security community strengthen their own defenses.

“While specific to Claude, the case studies … likely reflect consistent patterns of behaviour across all frontier AI models. Collectively, they show how threat actors are adapting their operations to exploit today’s most advanced AI capabilities,” the report reads.

For more information about AI security, check out these Tenable Research blogs:

• “Frequently Asked Questions About DeepSeek Large Language Model (LLM)”
• “Frequently Asked Questions About Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Integrating with AI for Agentic Applications”
• “Frequently Asked Questions About Vibe Coding”
• “AI Security: Web Flaws Resurface in Rush to Use MCP Servers”
• “CVE-2025-54135, CVE-2025-54136: Frequently Asked Questions About Vulnerabilities in Cursor IDE (CurXecute and MCPoison)” 

3 - CSA: Traditional IAM can’t handle agentic AI identity threats

The Anthropic attack, in which an agentic AI tool stole credentials, highlights a fundamental vulnerability: managing identities for autonomous systems. What happens when you give these autonomous AI systems the keys to your organization’s digital identities?

It’s a question that led the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) to develop a proposal for how to better protect digital identities in agentic AI tools.

In its new paper "Agentic AI Identity and Access Management: A New Approach," published in August, the CSA argues that traditional approaches for identity and access management (IAM) fall short when applied to agentic AI systems.
 

“Unlike conventional IAM protocols designed for predictable human users and static applications, agentic AI systems operate autonomously, make dynamic decisions, and require fine-grained access controls that adapt in real-time,” the CSA paper reads.

Their solution? A new, adaptive IAM framework that ditches old-school, predefined roles and permissions for a continuous, context-aware approach.

The framework is built on several core principles:

• Zero trust architecture
• Decentralized identity management
• Dynamic policy-based access control
• Continuous monitoring

The CSA’s proposed framework is built on “rich, verifiable” identities that track an AI agent’s capabilities, origins, behavior, and security posture.

Key components of the framework include an agent naming service (ANS) and a unified global session-management and policy-enforcement layer.

For more information about IAM in AI systems:

• “A New Identity: Agentic AI boom risks busting IAM norms” (SC World)
• “Exposure Management in the realm of AI” (Tenable)
• “A Novel Zero-Trust Identity Framework for Agentic AI: Decentralized Authentication and Fine-Grained Access Control” (researchers from several universities and companies, including MIT and AWS, via Arvix.org)
• “Tenable Cloud AI Risk Report 2025” (Tenable)
• “Enterprises must rethink IAM as AI agents outnumber humans 10 to 1” (VentureBeat)

4 - OpenAI: Attackers abuse ChatGPT to sharpen old tricks

While agentic AI attacks illustrate novel AI-abuse methods, attackers are also misusing conventional AI chatbots for more pedestrian purposes.

For example, as OpenAI recently disclosed, attackers have recently attempted to use ChatGPT to refine malware, set up command-and-control hubs, write multi-language phishing emails, and run cyber scams.

In other words, these attackers weren’t trying to use ChatGPT to create sci-fi-level super-attacks, but mostly trying to amplify their classic scams, according to OpenAI’s report “Disrupting malicious uses of AI: an update.”

“We continue to see threat actors bolt AI onto old playbooks to move faster, not gain novel offensive capability from our models,” OpenAI wrote in the report, published in October.
 

The report identifies several key trends among threat actors:

• Using multiple AI models
• Adapting their techniques to hide AI usage
• Operating in a "gray zone" with requests that are not overtly malicious

Incidents detailed in the report include the malicious use of ChatGPT by: 

• Cyber criminals from Russian-speaking, Korean-language, and Chinese-language groups to refine malware, create phishing content, and debug tools
• Authoritarian regimes, specifically individuals linked to the People's Republic of China (PRC), to design proposals for large-scale social media monitoring and profiling, including a system to track Uyghurs
• Organized scam networks, likely based in Cambodia, Myanmar, and Nigeria, to scale fraud by translating messages and creating fake personas
• State-backed influence operations from Russia and China to generate propaganda, including video scripts and social media posts

“Our public reporting, policy enforcement, and collaboration with peers aim to raise awareness of abuse while improving protections for everyday users,” OpenAI wrote in the statement “Disrupting malicious uses of AI: October 2025.”

For more information about AI security, check out these Tenable resources:

• “2025 Cloud AI Risk Report: Helping You Build More Secure AI Models in the Cloud” (on-demand webinar)
• “Cloud & AI Security at the Breaking Point — Understanding the Complexity Challenge” (solution overview)
• “Exposure Management in the realm of AI” (on-demand webinar)
• “Expert Advice for Boosting AI Security” (blog)
• “AI Is Your New Attack Surface” (on-demand webinar)

5 - Is your AI coding buddy a security risk?

Hackers aren't the only ones using AI to code. Your own developers are, too. But the productivity gain they get from AI coding assistants can be costly if they’re not careful.

To help developers with this issue, the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) published the “Security-Focused Guide for AI Code Assistant Instructions.”

“AI code assistants are powerful tools,” reads the OpenSSF blog “New OpenSSF Guidance on AI Code Assistant Instructions.” “But they also create security risks, because the results you get depend heavily on what you ask.”
 

 The guide, published in September, provides developers tips and best practices on how to prompt these AI helpers to reduce the risk that they’ll generate unsafe code.

Specifically, the guide aims to ensure that AI coding assistants consider:

• Application code security, such as validating inputs and managing secrets
• Supply chain safety, such as selecting safe dependencies and using package managers
• Platform or language-specific issues, such as applying security best practices to containers
• Security standards and frameworks, such as those from OWASP and the SANS Institute

“In practice, this means fewer vulnerabilities making it into your codebase,” reads the guide.

For more information about the cyber risks of AI coding assistants:

• “Hackers setting traps for vibe coders: AI assistants can deliver malware” (Cybernews)
• “Cybersecurity Risks of AI-Generated Code” (Georgetown University)
• “Security risks of AI-generated code and how to manage them” (TechTarget)
• “AI-generated code risks: What CISOs need to know” (ITPro)
• “GitLab's AI Assistant Opened Devs to Code Theft” (Dark Reading)

6 - PwC: Cyber teams can’t get enough AI

Finally, here’s how organizations are fighting back. They’re leaning heavily into AI to strengthen their cyber defenses, including by prioritizing the use of defensive agentic AI tools.

That’s according to PwC’s new “2026 Global Digital Trust Insights: C-suite playbook and findings” report, based on a global survey of almost 4,000 business and technology executives.

“AI’s potential for transforming cyber capabilities is clear and far-reaching,” reads a PwC article with highlights from the report, published in October.

For example, organizations are prioritizing the use of AI to enhance how they allocate cyber budgets; use managed cybersecurity services; and address cyber skills gaps.

With regards to respondents' priorities for AI cybersecurity capabilities in the coming year, threat hunting ranked first, followed by agentic AI. Other areas include identity and access management, and vulnerability scanning / vulnerability assessments.
 

AI security capabilities organizations will prioritize over the next 12 months

Meanwhile, organizations plan to use agentic AI primarily to bolster cloud security, data protection, and security operations in the coming year. Other agentic AI priority areas include security testing; governance, risk and compliance; and identity and access management.

“Businesses are recognising that AI agents — autonomous, goal-directed systems capable of executing tasks with limited human intervention — have enormous potential to transform their cyber programmes,” reads the report.

Beyond AI, the report also urges cyber teams to prioritize prevention over reaction. Proactive work like monitoring, assessments, testing, and training is always cheaper than the crisis-mode alternative of incident response, remediation, litigation, and fines. Yet, only 24% of organizations said they spend “significantly more” on proactive measures.
 

Other topics covered in the report include geopolitical risk; cyber resilience; the quantum computing threat; and the cyber skills gap.

For more information about AI data security, check out these Tenable resources:

• “Harden Your Cloud Security Posture by Protecting Your Cloud Data and AI Resources” (blog)
• “Tenable Cloud AI Risk Report 2025” (report)
• “New Tenable Report: How Complexity and Weak AI Security Put Cloud Environments at Risk” (blog)
• “Securing the AI Attack Surface: Separating the Unknown from the Well Understood” (blog)
• “The AI Security Dilemma: Navigating the High-Stakes World of Cloud AI” (blog)

Check back here next Friday, when we’ll share some of the best AI risk-management and governance best practices from recent months.

It seems pretty obvious: If an attacker can exploit a vulnerability before you can patch it, your organization is at risk. Yet the gaps between different phases of the vulnerability disclosure process continue to leave security teams in the dark. 

Key takeaways:

1. Of the 63,862 CVEs issued between Jan. 1, 2024 and Sept. 30, 2025, 2.6% had a public proof-of-concept (PoC) published.
    
2. More than half of these (56%) had a PoC published in less than seven days.
    
3. Yet, it takes on average 15 days for a vulnerability to be published to the National Vulnerabilities Database, which is used as the core data source for a number of scanning tools, leaving security teams at risk.

Vulnerability management is often described as a race against the attackers. If an attacker can exploit a vulnerability before you can patch it, the results can be devastating.. This is why the time lapse between vulnerability disclosure to exploitation is critical; the longer defenders go without visibility into new vulnerabilities, or awareness that those vulnerabilities are being exploited, the greater the risk that their organizations will be compromised.

There are several key phases in the typical vulnerability timeline that are worth noting: 

• Publication of a vulnerability advisory, at which time the common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVE) number issued by a CVE Naming Authority is typically initially made public. The CVE catalog is managed by MITRE.
• Publication to the National Vulnerabilities Database (NVD). While a CVE number can be assigned immediately upon publication of an advisory, more detail is needed before it can be evaluated by NIST and assigned a score on the NVD.
• The publication of a proof-of-concept (PoC), often considered an important first step in a vulnerability being leveraged by attackers.
• Disclosure of a functional exploit to one of the major exploit frameworks.
• Disclosure of known exploitation.

The gaps in time between when a CVE is made public, when it appears in MITRE, and when that CVE is published on NVD create blind spots for cybersecurity organizations. Additional risk lurks in the time lapses between each of the subsequent phases of a vulnerability's lifecycle.

In this article, we look at timelines for CVEs from 2024 and 2025, analyzing key points along those timelines and showing how Tenable is often at the leading edge of visibility whether a vulnerability is newly disclosed or being exploited in the wild or at any point in between.

Between Jan. 1, 2024 and September 30, 2025 there were 63,862 CVEs disclosed. Of these:

• 774 received a CVSSv3 severity rating of High and 478 were Critical
• 2.6% (1,665) have a known public PoC published — specifically exploit code that has been publicly disclosed.
• .5% (314) have documented evidence of active exploitation in the wild, slightly more than the 253 in the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog.

Relying on disclosure to NVD introduces risky gaps

While NVD is used by a number of scanning tools as a core data source and it is sometimes seen as the starting point in disclosure, in reality it is typically at the tail end of CVE publication. It is only after a CVE has been reserved by a CNA, issued by that CNA, published to MITRE, and then further analyzed by NIST that it is then published to NVD.

It is true that progress has been made on this process, particularly for some vendors, but our analysis of CVEs published in 2024 and 2025 shows there is still a fairly significant lag. For this analysis, we focused on CVEs that Tenable covered, as these will typically have better data on initial disclosure. We found that the average delay from initial vulnerability disclosure to NVD was 15.2 days. This means anyone dependent on NVD for vulnerability information is over two weeks behind the curve, on average, before they learn about a vulnerability.

This lag becomes even more concerning when we look at the time between disclosure and PoC or, even worse, exploitation in the wild — both events that correspond to a significant increase in risk.

Disclosure to PoC puts attackers on alert

One of the major events that can occur in the lifecycle of a vulnerability is the publication of a PoC. The reality is that a vast majority of published CVEs never have a PoC published and even fewer are actually exploited, with our analysis showing evidence of PoC for 1,665 of the CVEs in the set we analyzed. The publication of a PoC is often considered an important first step in a vulnerability being leveraged by attackers. PoC code, no matter how rudimentary it is, can provide details about the vulnerability and how to exploit it. Attackers can take this code, adjust it, improve it, then use it as part of an attack.

The lag time to NVD is even more concerning when we consider how quickly PoCs are published. More than half (56%) of the 1,665 CVEs we analyzed had a PoC published in less than seven days. That's half the time, on average, that it takes for CVEs to be published to NVD.

On average, it took 43 days for a PoC to be published, but that number is heavily skewed by the small set of vulnerabilities that did not see a PoC published until many months after initial disclosure.

Source: Tenable Research, October 2025 Disclosure to functional exploit: less common, no less concerning

We consider an exploit to be functional in cases where it is added to one of the major exploit frameworks but not necessarily being actively exploited in the wild. The disclosure of a functional exploit is another maturity step that lowers the bar for attackers because the code for these is typically more mature and has a higher success rate. Interestingly, both the average and median time to functional exploit is significantly lower than the time to PoC, but this is likely because far fewer vulnerabilities get a functional exploit, skewing the results. The average time between publication of a CVE and publication of a functional exploit is around 21 days while the median is only three days.

Disclosure to known exploitation: the most significant risk

Most critically, the active exploitation of a vulnerability is where we see the most significant risk. This means that the vulnerability is being leveraged in active attacks, as opposed to simply having published exploit code that may or may not function.

For this analysis we looked at two data sets — the widely known CISA KEV as well as Tenable’s own Vulnerability Intelligence database, which is curated independently of CISA. For each, we looked at the average time between when a vulnerability is first disclosed and when it is identified as having known exploitation in the wild.

SourceDaysAverage time to Tenable Known Exploited42Average time to CISA Known Exploited50Median time to Tenable Known Exploited5Average time to CISA Known Exploited10

Source: Tenable Research, October 2025

The above table reflects the fact that some CVEs skew the average number of days quite high. If we look at the median, we see it took 10 days for a CVE to be added to the CISA KEV; this means that, for those relying on NVD, a vulnerability could have been actively exploited a full five days before it appeared in the NVD.

Further, based on our own tracking, we can see that active exploitation often happens even sooner than when the CVE is added to the CISA KEV catalog. The Tenable KEV shows that the median time to active exploitation for the CVEs we analyzed was only five days.

The bottom line? If you are driving your vulnerability management programs off NVD you may not even be aware of the existence of a vulnerability before it is exploited in the wild.

What this all means for security teams

With time-to-exploitation taking days, not weeks, timely awareness of vulnerabilities and the risk they present is critical. Because Tenable drives its coverage directly from vendor advisories, a majority of our coverage is available within 12-24 hours of the initial disclosure of a vulnerability. This ensures that, with the exception of zero days, Tenable customers have the ability to find and remediate vulnerabilities much more quickly, thereby reducing risk. Tenable Research is constantly monitoring the threat landscape to ensure that we identify the most critical vulnerabilities — those with known active exploitation — as soon as that exploitation begins.

Learn more

Relying on EDR for Exposure Management: What You Need to Know

Study: Tenable Offers the Fastest, Broadest Coverage of CISA's KEV Catalog

Mind the Gap: How Waiting for NVD Puts Your Organization at Risk

Tenable has been named a Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) Leader in Latio’s 2025 Cloud Security Market Report. This recognition is based on rigorous product testing conducted by Latio founder and lead analyst James Berthoty.

Key takeaways:

1. Latio’s 2025 Cloud Security Market Report confirms what Tenable has been saying for years: The future of cloud security isn’t about building another isolated platform.
    
2. Tenable is recognized as a leader in hybrid cloud CTEM solutions, highlighting our ability to standardize infrastructure risk management across on-premises and cloud systems.
    
3. While we’re honored to be recognized alongside other strong vendors in the hybrid cloud CTEM space, what we believe makes Tenable Cloud Security unique is how it fits into the Tenable One Exposure Management Platform.

Latio’s recognition of Tenable as a hybrid cloud CTEM leader in its 2025 Cloud Security Market Report validates our strategy with the Tenable One Exposure Management Platform. As a cloud security thought leader, Latio approaches analysis from a practitioner’s perspective. Their motto says it all: “The only analyst firm that tests products, so you can find the right one.”

According to the report, CTEM leaders are “building the future of doing vulnerability management at scale by taking data from multiple sources and unifying it into a single vulnerability management tool. These tools provide teams the ability to ingest, prioritize, and deliver remediations across several teams.”

The 2025 Cloud Security Market Report discusses the evolution of cloud security beyond cloud native application protection platform (CNAPP) tools. It includes a buyer’s guide as well as findings from a survey of cloud security practitioners at organizations ranging in size from 10 to tens of thousands of employees. While over 70% of organizations’ CNAPP tools are owned by their cloud security team — with the remainder dispersed between product security or vulnerability management teams — the report predicts that “the evolution of cloud security into larger vulnerability management programs will be a continuing trend.”

What Latio predicts for the cloud security market

The report states that “the future of cloud security will not be defined by a single [CNAPP] platform offering a set of capabilities. Instead, organizations will move towards more consolidated cloud vulnerability management programs which sit alongside their security operations programs. These two programs will drive results focused respectively on proactive risk mitigation, and fast reactions to ongoing security incidents.”

“The future of cloud security tooling is moving beyond CNAPP as an ‘everything security’ platform.”

— James Berthoty, Latio founder and lead analyst

Latio’s emphasis on proactive risk mitigation aligns with what Tenable has been saying for years: The future of cloud security isn’t about building another isolated platform. It’s about giving organizations a holistic view of their entire attack surface, including vulnerability management, identities, cloud, operational technology (OT), internet of things (IoT), and AI, so they can build a navigable map of their environment, showing the attack paths teams simply can’t see from inside their functional silos. And it’s about empowering organizations to proactively find and fix the exposures that pose the greatest risk to their environment.

As James Berthoty, Latio founder and lead analyst, writes in the report: “The future of cloud security tooling is moving beyond CNAPP as an ‘everything security’ platform.”

The report goes on to note: “Increasingly, enterprise security teams need to build complicated workflows for getting vulnerabilities fixed. These tools need to span across all of an organization’s assets in order to create consistent and scalable vulnerability programs. Cloud security no longer happens in isolation.”

The report identifies three emerging categories:

• Application Security Testing (AST) for developers
• Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) for unified vulnerability management
• Cloud Application Detection and Response (CADR) for runtime protection

Latio positions CTEM as the critical integration layer — the platform that brings everything together. This is exactly what we built Tenable One to be.

Where Tenable fits in: Hybrid cloud CTEM leader

Latio's recognition of Tenable as a leader in hybrid cloud CTEM solutions highlights our ability to standardize infrastructure risk management across on-prem and cloud systems. It explicitly calls for solutions that provide “hybrid cloud vulnerability management,” bringing the innovations of cloud security to on-premises and hybrid environments.

"Cloud security no longer happens in isolation."

— Latio 2025 Cloud Security Market Report

What makes this recognition special is the acknowledgment of Tenable’s unique position. We’re not a cloud-native vendor trying to retrofit on-premises support, nor are we bolting cloud capabilities onto a legacy scanner. We’re a unified exposure management platform that treats your entire attack surface — cloud, on-premises, identity, containers — as one ecosystem.

This is precisely why Tenable Cloud Security exists as part of Tenable One, not as a standalone product.

The CTEM category

Latio’s articulation of the CTEM category closely aligns with Tenable’s exposure management vision. The report shows how CTEM integrates multiple data sources to produce three critical outputs:

• Attack paths
• Prioritizations
• Remediations

Source: 2025 Cloud Security Market Report, Latio, October 2025 What makes Tenable’s approach to cloud security unique

Tenable One brings together data from across your attack surface, applying sophisticated prioritization that considers threat intelligence, asset criticality, and business context, and helps you drive remediation workflows. We believe Tenable is unique in four key ways:

• We’re outcome-focused. As the report notes, many practitioners prefer using “best in class scanners” with “an aggregation layer.” Tenable Cloud Security can be that best-in-class scanner, or we can be the aggregation layer. We’re focused on outcomes, not vendor lock-in.
• We understand both worlds. Unlike vendors who started as cloud-native solutions and are now adding on-premises support, Tenable has deliberately built a platform for hybrid environments from the start.
• We’re focused on the right problem.The report makes a critical observation: “A misconfiguration is just another kind of vulnerability.” We couldn’t agree more. Your CISO doesn’t care whether a risk comes from an unpatched server or a misconfigured S3 bucket — they care about what’s most likely to lead to a breach. Tenable One helps answer that question.
• We enable flexibility. The report’s decision tree for buyers shows that different organizations have different needs based on their architecture, team size, and security maturity. Tenable One is designed to meet organizations where they are, integrating with the tools they’ve chosen while providing unified visibility and prioritization.

Learn more

• Read the Latio 2025 Cloud Security Market Report
• See how Tenable Cloud Security fits into our exposure management vision. Visit our cloud security page: https://www.tenable.com/products/tenable-cloud-security 

Think you know all there is to know about cybersecurity? Guess again. Shadow AI is challenging security leaders with many of the same issues raised by other “shadow” technologies. Only this time, it’s evolving at breakneck speed.

Key takeaways:

1. The vast majority of organizations (89%) are either using AI or piloting it.
    
2. Shadow AI lurks beyond these sanctioned deployments — and beyond the view of security teams.
    
3. Exposure management gives you a unified view of the entire attack surface, so you can find and mitigate AI risks across endpoints, networks, cloud, data, and AI platforms.

Cybersecurity Awareness Month, led every October by the U.S. National Cybersecurity Alliance (NCA) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), is aimed at teaching employees and the general public how to stay safe online.

Security leaders and practitioners working on the frontlines every day may rightfully believe they’ve heard it all already. But I’ve got news for you: we’re in the midst of a technology transformation that will make the early days of shadow IT seem like a walk in the park.

I’m talking about shadow AI.

While you’re reading this, some of your employees are probably using AI to paste sensitive information into tools like Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini so they can do their jobs faster. Some of your developers are likely using it for “vibe coding,” sending the output straight to production without quality control. Business managers are probably using large language models to make strategy recommendations for their next quarterly business review meeting.

The vast majority of organizations are formally embracing AI. A recent study commissioned by Tenable and developed in collaboration with the Cloud Security Alliance found that 89% of organizations are either using AI (55%) or piloting it (34%).

In the best of circumstances, organizations are rolling out sanctioned AI deployments accompanied by clear usage guidelines and education about best practices. Even so, the CSA study found a third of organizations (34%) have already suffered an AI-related breach. While some of these breaches are the result of security flaws or model manipulation specific to AI itself, many are caused by the same old issues that have plagued us for years: exploited software vulnerabilities and insider threats.

Even when your organization has an approved list of AI tools available for employees, odds are they’re also making use of shadow AI. That’s because AI is a core driver of business innovation and, like the cloud and smartphones and every innovative technology that came before it, nothing is going to hold AI back from being an enabler of business.

For security leaders, AI is redefining the modern attack surface, with new models, agentic actions, and complex data flows constantly surfacing. The velocity of AI creates too many new exposures, too quickly, because AI agents are taking actions with no human supervision, making this an even faster evolution than any that have come before.

Security teams lack visibility into what AI tools are being used. They often have no inventory of AI models, agents, data inputs and outputs, or integrations, making it nearly impossible to monitor or enforce controls effectively. The complexity of modern AI ecosystems further increases risk for organizations that build AI. AI stacks rely on layered cloud services, APIs, and vector databases, introducing misconfigurations, over-permissioned roles, and inherited vulnerabilities. Plus, AI workloads are particularly exposed; a study by Tenable Cloud Research found that 70% contain at least one unpatched critical flaw, compared to 50% for non-AI workloads.

Addressing shadow AI requires a proactive approach

Security, historically a reactive function, is playing catch-up. The traditional cycle of finding and patching individual vulnerabilities is too slow to handle the exponential growth of AI. To close this gap, security needs to move from a reactive posture to a preventative one focused on proactive exposure management.

With exposure management, you get:

• A unified view of the entire attack surface, so you can find and mitigate AI risks across endpoints, networks, cloud, data, and AI platforms;
• The ability to understand how employees interact with tools like ChatGPT Enterprise and Microsoft Copilot, including what data is involved, how AI assistants and AI agents behave, and which workflows those interactions trigger across the organization’s environment;
• A way to spot and disable prompt manipulation techniques like direct and indirect prompt injection or jailbreaks; and
• A means of protecting against malicious actions triggered by AI agents, whether accidental or attacker-driven, while also uncovering misconfigurations, unsafe workflows, or tools connected to risky external systems.

In short, you get the ability to predict likely attack paths. Including those targeting AI, so you can proactively secure AI before it is compromised.

It’s time to be aware of shadow AI as a new category of enterprise risk, one we ignore at our own peril. The lesson here is that AI security is not optional. It is not a future concern. It is not someone else’s problem. It is the next frontier of enterprise risk, and security leaders have a responsibility to educate themselves and implement programs like exposure management to reduce risk.

Learn more

• Download the Tenable Cloud AI Risk Report 2025 and the State of AI and Cloud Security 2025
• Read the blog Introducing Tenable AI Exposure: Stop Guessing and Start Securing Your AI Attack Surface
• Visit the Exposure Management Resource Center

Oracle addresses 170 CVEs in its final quarterly update of 2025 with 374 patches, including 40 critical updates.

Background

On October 21, Oracle released its Critical Patch Update (CPU) for October 2025, the fourth and final quarterly update of the year. This CPU contains fixes for 170 unique CVEs in 374 security updates across 29 Oracle product families. Out of the 374 security updates published this quarter, 10.7% of patches were assigned a critical severity. Medium severity patches accounted for the bulk of security patches at 46.3%, followed by high severity patches at 39.0%.

This quarter’s update includes 40 critical patches across 12 CVEs.

SeverityIssues PatchedCVEsCritical4012High14657Medium17391Low1510Total374170Analysis

This quarter, the Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database product family contained the highest number of patches at 73, accounting for 19.5% of the total patches, followed by Oracle Spatial Studio at 64 patches, which accounted for 17.1% of the total patches.

A full breakdown of the patches for this quarter can be seen in the following table, which also includes a count of vulnerabilities that can be exploited over a network without authentication.

Oracle Product FamilyNumber of PatchesRemote Exploit without AuthOracle TimesTen In-Memory Database7347Oracle Spatial Studio6446Oracle Construction and Engineering3329Oracle E-Business Suite2017Oracle Insurance Applications187Oracle Java SE187Oracle JD Edwards1814Oracle Retail Applications163Oracle Secure Backup92Oracle Communications Applications96Oracle Supply Chain90Oracle Enterprise Manager85Oracle HealthCare Applications85Oracle Hyperion86Oracle MySQL88Oracle Commerce77Oracle Health Sciences Applications74Oracle Database Server62Oracle GoldenGate62Oracle Analytics53Oracle Hospitality Applications55Oracle Essbase42Oracle Communications32Oracle Financial Services Applications31Oracle Fusion Middleware33Oracle Siebel CRM32Oracle Graph Server and Client10Oracle REST Data Services10Oracle PeopleSoft11Oracle E-Business Zero-Day Vulnerabilities

As part of its CPU release for October, Oracle noted the publication of two separate out-of-band Security Alerts for its E-Business Suite (EBS) to address two zero-day vulnerabilities, CVE-2025-61882 on October 4, and CVE-2025-61884 on October 11, that were exploited in the wild. For more information about these EBS zero-day vulnerabilities, please refer to our FAQ blog post, CVE-2025-61882: Frequently Asked Questions About Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) Zero-Day and Associated Vulnerabilities.

Solution

Customers are advised to apply all relevant patches in this quarter’s CPU. Please refer to the October 2025 advisory for full details.

Identifying affected systems

A list of Tenable plugins to identify these vulnerabilities will appear here as they’re released. This link uses a search filter to ensure that all matching plugin coverage will appear as it is released.

Get more information

• Oracle Critical Patch Update Advisory - October 2025
• Oracle October 2025 Critical Patch Update Risk Matrices
• Oracle Advisory to CVE Map

Join Tenable's Research Special Operations (RSO) Team on Tenable Connect and engage with us in the Threat Roundtable group for further discussions on the latest cyber threats.

Learn more about Tenable One, the Exposure Management Platform for the modern attack surface.

F5’s breach triggers a CISA emergency directive, as Tenable calls it “a five-alarm fire” that requires urgent action. Meanwhile, OpenAI details how attackers try to misuse ChatGPT. Plus, boards are increasing AI and cyber disclosures. And much more!

Key takeaways

1. A critical breach at cybersecurity firm F5, attributed to a nation-state, has triggered an urgent CISA directive for federal agencies to patch vulnerable systems immediately.
    
2. A new report from OpenAI reveals that threat actors try to use ChatGPT to refine conventional attacks.
    
3. As cyber attacks skyrocket, corporate boards are significantly increasing their oversight and disclosures related to both cybersecurity and AI risks.

Here are five things you need to know for the week ending October 17.

1 - Code red: CISA directs fed agencies to patch F5 vulnerabilities

When a cybersecurity company gets hacked, it's bad. When a nation-state steals some of its most sensitive data, it’s a catastrophe. 

That’s what happened this week, when F5 disclosed 40-plus vulnerabilities and announced that a nation-state attacker stole proprietary, confidential information about its technology and its security research, triggering an urgent U.S. government alert.

In response to F5’s announcement, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued Emergency Directive ED 26-01, ordering federal agencies to inventory F5 BIG-IP products, determine if they’re exposed to the public internet, and patch them.

Specifically, CISA is directing agencies to patch vulnerable F5 virtual and physical devices and downloaded software, including F5OS, BIG-IP TMOS, BIG-IQ, and BNK / CNF, by October 22, and follow the instructions in F5’s “Quarterly Security Notification.”

All organizations, not just federal civilian agencies, should prioritize mitigating the risk from F5’s breach and vulnerabilities, which can be exploited with “alarming ease” and can lead to catastrophic compromises, CISA Acting Director Madhu Gottumukkala said in a statement.

“We emphatically urge all entities to implement the actions outlined in this Emergency Directive without delay,” he said.
 

The F5 breach is “a five-alarm fire for national security,” Tenable CSO and Head of Research Robert Huber wrote in a blog, adding that F5’s technology is foundational “to secure everything,” including government agencies and critical infrastructure.

“In the hands of a hostile actor, this stolen data is a master key that could be used to launch devastating attacks, similar to the campaigns waged by Salt Typhoon and Volt Typhoon,” Huber wrote in the post “F5 BIG-IP Breach: 44 CVEs That Need Your Attention Now.”

“We haven’t seen a software supply chain compromise of this scale since SolarWinds,” he added.

To get all the details about the F5 breach and about how Tenable can help, read Huber’s blog, as well as the Tenable Research blog “Frequently Asked Questions About The August 2025 F5 Security Incident.”

For more information about the unfolding F5 situation:

• “Confirmed compromise of F5 network” (U.K. National Cyber Security Centre)
• “F5 Hit by ‘Nation-State’ Cyberattack” (TechRepublic)
• “Hackers stole source code, bug details in disastrous F5 security incident – here’s everything we know and how to protect yourself” (ITPro)
• “Nation-state hackers breached sensitive F5 systems, stole customer data” (Cybersecurity Dive)
• “Source code and vulnerability info stolen from F5 Networks” (CSO)

2 - OpenAI: Attackers abuse ChatGPT to sharpen old tricks

Creating and refining malware. Setting up malicious command-and-control hubs. Generating multi-language phishing content. Carrying out cyber scams.

Those are some of the ways in which cyber attackers and fraudsters tried to abuse ChatGPT recently, according to OpenAI’s report “Disrupting malicious uses of AI: an update.”

Yet, OpenAI, which detailed seven incidents it detected and disrupted, noticed an overarching trend: Attackers aren’t trying to use ChatGPT to cook up sci-fi-level super-attacks. They’re mostly trying to put their classic scams on steroids.

“We continue to see threat actors bolt AI onto old playbooks to move faster, not gain novel offensive capability from our models,” OpenAI wrote in the report.
 

The report identifies several key trends among threat actors:

• Using multiple AI models
• Adapting their techniques to hide AI usage
• Operating in a "gray zone" with requests that are not overtly malicious

Incidents detailed in the report include the malicious use of ChatGPT by: 

• Cyber criminals from Russian-speaking, Korean-language, and Chinese-language groups to refine malware, create phishing content, and debug tools.
• Authoritarian regimes, specifically individuals linked to the People's Republic of China (PRC), to design proposals for large-scale social media monitoring and profiling, including a system to track Uyghurs.
• Organized scam networks, likely based in Cambodia, Myanmar, and Nigeria, to scale fraud by translating messages and creating fake personas.
• State-backed influence operations from Russia and China to generate propaganda, including video scripts and social media posts.

“Our public reporting, policy enforcement, and collaboration with peers aim to raise awareness of abuse while improving protections for everyday users,” OpenAI wrote in the statement “Disrupting malicious uses of AI: October 2025.”

For more information about AI security, check out these Tenable resources:

• “2025 Cloud AI Risk Report: Helping You Build More Secure AI Models in the Cloud” (on-demand webinar)
• “Cloud & AI Security at the Breaking Point — Understanding the Complexity Challenge” (solution overview)
• “Exposure Management in the realm of AI” (on-demand webinar)
• “Expert Advice for Boosting AI Security” (blog)
• “AI Is Your New Attack Surface” (on-demand webinar)

3 - Anthropic: Poisoning giant LLMs is shockingly easy

Bigger isn’t better when it comes to the security of large language models (LLMs).

Conventional wisdom held that bigger models were harder to poison. Well, that ain’t so, according to a study by Anthropic.

The study, titled “Poisoning Attacks on LLMs Require a Near-Constant Number of Poison Samples,” found that an attacker doesn't need to control a huge percentage of an LLM’s training data. A small, fixed amount is enough to create a backdoor.

“Creating 250 malicious documents is trivial compared to creating millions, making this vulnerability far more accessible to potential attackers,” reads the Anthropic article “A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size.” 

If anything, data-poisoning attacks against LLMs become easier as models scale up and their datasets grow. “The attack surface for injecting malicious content expands proportionally, while the adversary’s requirements remain nearly constant,” the study reads.

The study, conducted jointly with the U.K. AI Security Institute and the Alan Turing Institute, focused on a likely innocuous type of backdoor attack: Tampering with the LLM so that it generates gibberish text when a user inputs a specific phrase.

The researchers inserted the trigger phrase <SUDO> into a small number of training documents. They found that while 100 poisoned documents were insufficient, 250 or more were enough to reliably create a backdoor across all tested model sizes, which ranged from 600 million to 13 billion parameters.
 

(Source: Anthropic article “A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size,” October 2025.)

It is unclear if the study’s findings will hold for more complex behaviors, such as bypassing safety guardrails or generating malicious code.

“Nevertheless, we’re sharing these findings to show that data-poisoning attacks might be more practical than believed, and to encourage further research on data poisoning and potential defenses against it,” the article reads.

While the study didn’t focus on ways to defend LLMs against this type of attack, it does offer some mitigation recommendations, pointing to “clean training” practices as a way to remove backdoors in some settings.

“Defences can be designed at different stages of the training pipeline such as data filtering before training and backdoor detection and elicitation once the model has been trained to detect undesired behaviours,” the study reads. 

For more information about protecting AI systems against cyber attacks:

• “Understanding the risks - and benefits - of using AI tools” (U.K. NCSC)
• “Hacking AI? Here are 4 common attacks on AI” (ZDNet)
• “Best Practices for Deploying Secure and Resilient AI Systems” (Australian Cyber Security Centre)
• “Adversarial attacks on AI models are rising: what should you do now?” (VentureBeat)
• “OWASP AI Security and Privacy Guide” (OWASP)
• “How to manage generative AI security risks in the enterprise” (TechTarget)

4 - Report: AI and cyber risks hit the boardroom

In a sign of the growing impact of AI and cybersecurity for enterprises, Fortune 100 boards of directors have boosted the number and the substance of their AI and cybersecurity oversight disclosures.

That’s the conclusion EY arrived at after analyzing proxy statements and 10-K filings submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) by 80 of the Fortune 100 companies in recent years.

“Companies are putting the spotlight on their technology governance, signaling an increasing emphasis on cyber and AI oversight to stakeholders,” reads the EY report “Cyber and AI oversight disclosures: what companies shared in 2025.”
 

What’s driving this trend? Cyber threats are becoming more sophisticated by the minute, while the use of generative AI — both by security teams and by attackers — is growing exponentially.

Key findings from the report about AI oversight include:

• Nearly half (48%) of the analyzed companies now specifically mention AI risk in their board's enterprise risk oversight, a threefold increase from 2024.
• AI expertise on boards has also grown, with 44% of companies now mentioning AI in their description of director qualifications, up from 26% last year.
• 40% of companies have formally assigned AI oversight to a board committee, most commonly the audit committee.
• The number of companies disclosing AI as a standalone risk factor has more than doubled, from 14% to 36%.

Meanwhile, cybersecurity oversight practices have also matured:

• The vast majority of companies (78%) continue to assign this responsibility to the audit committee.
• There is a clear trend towards aligning with external cybersecurity frameworks, with 73% of companies now doing so, up from 57% in 2024 and from a mere 4% in 2019.
• Cybersecurity preparedness is also being taken more seriously, with 58% of companies now conducting simulations and tabletop exercises, compared to only 3% in 2019.
• The demand for directors with cybersecurity expertise remains high, with 86% of companies highlighting it as a skill that either a director has or that the board seeks.

“Board oversight of these areas is critical to identifying and mitigating risks that may pose a significant threat to the company,” the report reads.

For more information about cybersecurity and AI in the boardroom and the C-suite:

• “Governance of AI: A critical imperative for today’s boards” (Deloitte)
• “AI Governance In The Boardroom: Strategies For Effective Oversight And Implementation” (Forbes)
• “The Hidden C-Suite Risk Of AI Failures” (Harvard Law School)
• “How Board-Level AI Governance Is Changing” (Forbes)
• “Competitive advantage through cybersecurity: A board-level perspective” (McKinsey)
• “How AI Impacts Board Readiness for Oversight of Cybersecurity and AI Risks” (National Association of Corporate Directors)

5 - NCSC: Severe cyber attacks hitting U.K. at “alarming pace”

Cyber attacks with national reverberations have shot up to four per week in the U.K., a stat that’s a wake-up call not only for all British cyber defenders but also for all business leaders.

That’s according to the U.K. National Cyber Security Centre’s (NCSC) 2025 annual review, titled “It’s time to act: Open your eyes to the imminent risk to your economic security” and covering the 12-month period ending in September 2025.

“Cyber risk is no longer just an IT issue — it’s a boardroom priority,” reads the report.

These “nationally significant” cyber incidents more than doubled, climbing to 204 from 89 in the previous 12 months.
 

The severity of the attacks is also on the upswing. The report reveals a nearly 50% increase in "highly significant" incidents, which are those with the potential to severely impact the central government, essential services, many people, or the economy.

“Cyber security is now a matter of business survival and national resilience,” Richard Horne, Chief Executive of the NCSC, said in a statement.

“Our collective exposure to serious impacts is growing at an alarming pace,” he added.

The NCSC attributes many of these attacks to sophisticated advanced persistent threat (APT) actors, including nation-states and highly capable criminal organizations. It identifies the primary state-level threats as China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. 

In response to this escalating threat, the NCSC is urging British businesses to prioritize their cybersecurity measures, saying that cybersecurity “is now critical to business longevity and success.”

To aid in this effort, the NCSC has launched a new "Cyber Action Toolkit" aimed at helping small organizations implement foundational security controls. 

It is also promoting the "Cyber Essentials" certification, which indicates an organization has security in place against most common cyber threats and opens up the opportunity to obtain free cyber insurance.

Partnering with an EDR vendor after a nation-state has already stolen your source code isn’t innovation — it’s a gamble. You don’t build a fire extinguisher while the house is burning. You find every spark before it becomes the next inferno.

Key takeaways:

1. F5’s BIG-IP is used to secure everything from government agencies to critical infrastructure.
    
2. The theft of BIG-IP source code and undisclosed vulnerabilities by a nation-state actor is a five-alarm fire for national security and puts all organizations at risk.
    
3. We provide detailed steps Tenable customers can take immediately, as well as general guidance on how organizations can protect themselves now and in the long term.

The breach of F5’s BIG-IP product development environment is a five-alarm fire for national security and once again raises doubts about the safety of the software supply chain.

Among the data stolen in the nation-state attack: source code for BIG-IP networking solutions as well as undisclosed security vulnerabilities that were under investigation. According to F5’s October 15 8-K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), some of the exfiltrated files from its knowledge management platform contained configuration or implementation information for a small percentage of customers. The company also rotated its signing certificates and keys on October 13.

F5’s BIG-IP isn't just another piece of software. It is a foundational element in the technology stack used to secure everything from government agencies to critical infrastructure. In the hands of a hostile actor, this stolen data is a master key that could be used to launch devastating attacks, similar to the campaigns waged by Salt Typhoon and Volt Typhoon. We haven’t seen a software supply chain compromise of this scale since SolarWinds.

The implications are far-reaching. BIG-IP is used by approximately 57,000 companies; while the majority are in the $1 million – $10 million revenue range, F5 says its products are used by 85% of the Fortune 500. Affected products include BIG-IP (F5OS), BIG-IP (TMOS), Virtual Edition (VE), BIG-IP Next, BIG-IQ, and BIG-IP Next for Kubernetes (BNK) / Cloud-Native Network Functions (CNF). 

For a full list of CVEs associated with this incident, see Frequently Asked Questions About The August 2025 F5 Security Incident.

While F5 has not observed evidence of modified source code or a supply-chain attack, the stolen data could potentially be used to develop new exploits for unpatched vulnerabilities. In response, F5 released security patches on October 15.

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued an emergency directive requiring that all organizations with F5 products apply these updates immediately. “The alarming ease with which these vulnerabilities can be exploited by malicious actors demands immediate and decisive action from all federal agencies,” said CISA Acting Director Madhu Gottumukkala in a follow-up statement. “These same risks extend to any organization using this technology, potentially leading to a catastrophic compromise of critical information systems. We emphatically urge all entities to implement the actions outlined in this Emergency Directive without delay.” The U.K.’s National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) also issued an alert about the incident.

This incident does not affect Tenable products but we have released new plugins and additional guidance to help organizations secure their environments.

Organizations using F5 BIG-IP are advised to update the software as soon as possible, harden any public-facing BIG-IP devices, and remove any unsupported devices from their networks. The company said it is “partnering with CrowdStrike to extend Falcon EDR sensors and Overwatch Threat Hunting to BIG-IP for additional visibility and to strengthen defenses. An early access version will be available to BIG-IP customers and F5 will provide all supported customers with a free Falcon EDR subscription.”

While we applaud F5’s transparency and efforts to help organizations respond to the incident, this is not the time for experimentation. You don’t build a fire extinguisher while your house is burning. Likewise, waiting for an endpoint detection and response (EDR) vendor to build a solution after a threat actor has already accessed your most sensitive environment is ill-advised. The nation-state actor has been embedded in F5’s environment for some time, with access to highly sensitive data. They can act on what they’ve accessed at any time. Moreover, threat actors have repeatedly demonstrated their ability to disable EDR tools, thereby evading endpoint-based detection methods and rendering them largely useless.

The following key actions required by CISA in its mitigation guidance extend well beyond the capabilities of EDR:

• Inventory: Identify all instances of F5 BIG-IP hardware devices and F5OS, BIG-IP TMOS, Virtual Edition, BIG-IP Next, BIG-IP IQ software, and BNK / CNF.
• Harden public-facing hardware and software appliances: Identify if physical or virtual BIG-IP devices exposed to the public internet provide public access to the networked management interface.
• Update instances of BIG-IP hardware and software applications:  Apply the latest vendor updates by Oct. 22, 2025, for the following products: F5OS, BIG-IP TMOS, BIG-IQ, and BNK / CNF — validate the F5 published MD5 checksums for its software image files and other F5 downloaded software. For other devices, update with the latest software release by Oct. 31, 2025, and apply the latest F5-provided asset hardening guidance.
• Disconnect end-of-support devices: Disconnect all public-facing F5 devices that have reached their end-of-support date. Report mission-critical exceptions to CISA.
• Mitigate against cookie leakage: If CISA notifies an agency of a BIG-IP cookie leakage vulnerability, the agency shall follow CISA’s accompanying mitigation instructions.
• Report: Submit a complete inventory of F5 products and actions taken to CISA by 11:59 p.m. EDT, Oct. 29, 2025.

We cannot stress enough the importance of finding and fixing the 44 CVEs associated with this incident immediately. Doing so requires visibility into areas of your infrastructure that can’t be reached by the “good enough” vulnerability scanning tools available from endpoint vendors. The immediate need is for effective triage.

Below, we provide detailed guidance on steps Tenable customers can take immediately. (Non-Tenable customers can start a free trial of Tenable Vulnerability Management today to see where they’re impacted so they can swiftly take action.)

Longer term, organizations need to prepare for the likelihood of nation-state actors leveraging additional F5 vulnerabilities for initial access, after which they will pivot to Living off the Land techniques to stealthily execute commands, establish persistence, move laterally, and escalate privileges. We’ve seen examples of such activity with Salt Typhoon and Volt Typhoon. Once it occurs, it becomes very difficult to detect and eradicate the actor. More guidance on preventive measures can be found below in the section “How do I protect my organization from the long-term impact of the F5 BIG-IP breach?”

I’m a Tenable Vulnerability Management customer. What should I do today?

Here are two examples of how to use Tenable Vulnerability Management to quickly find F5 BIG-IP in your environment and identify the related CVEs. A full list of CVEs associated with this incident can be found here. The inventory plugin for remote BIG-IP Web Management Interface is available here. 

The screenshot below shows how you can quickly filter for the F5 BIG-IP version using plugin id: 76940 . This allows you to quickly see the version and the installed modules of your F5 device.

Source: Tenable, October 2025

The screenshot below shows how you can see all known vulnerabilities for your F5 device. You can filter for CVEs and export the data to engage the various teams for remediation.

Source: Tenable 2025 How do I protect my organization from the long-term impact of the F5 BIG-IP breach?

In addition to applying the urgent mitigations above, organizations need to be on alert for any infiltration attempts. Organizations are urged to take the following actions:

• Inventory all F5 assets in your environments. Tenable Vulnerability Management can provide a detailed and comprehensive inventory of your F5 assets as part of its network-wide scanning. It identifies F5 devices through methods like active scanning, passive monitoring, and credentialed scans, collecting detailed information about the asset, including its configuration and vulnerabilities. This granular level of discovery goes beyond simple asset lists to give you a clear, actionable view of every F5 device on your network.
• Continuously monitor assets in cloud, IT and OT environments. Tenable Vulnerability Management offers continuous monitoring across diverse environments, including IT, cloud, and OT. By deploying Tenable agents on transient devices, performing active scans on traditional IT assets, and using passive monitoring for sensitive OT systems, Tenable Vulnerability Management ensures you have an always-on, real-time assessment of your security posture, regardless of where the assets reside.
• Correlate data from asset inventories, vulnerability assessments, and security operations for a unified view of risk. Tenable Vulnerability Management is designed to be a central hub for vulnerability data. It correlates data from its own asset discovery and vulnerability assessments to provide a unified view of risk. It can also integrate with other security tools and CMDBs to enrich asset data and streamline remediation workflows.
• Incorporate threat intelligence feeds to understand which threats are most likely to be exploited and what risks they pose to your unique environment. Tenable utilizes a risk-based prioritization approach to help you focus on the most dangerous threats. It combines its Vulnerability Priority Rating (VPR) with your unique environmental context to provide a single, dynamic score that reflects the true risk of a vulnerability. This allows you to move beyond static, generic scores like CVSS and focus remediation efforts on the issues that are most likely to be exploited in the wild, enabling you to reduce your organization's overall cyber risk more effectively.

Learn more

• Join Tenable's Research Special Operations team to discuss the F5 incident in our Tenable Connect: Threat Roundtable.
• Start a free trial of Tenable Vulnerability Management today. 

Tenable Research found two flaws in SimpleHelp’s remote-support tool that can be chained together to gain remote code execution on clients' devices. SimpleHelp has patched them: CVE-2025-36728 in version 5.5.11 and CVE-2025-36727 in version 5.5.12.

Key takeaways

1. Make sure SimpleHelp is on the latest version to stay protected.
    
2. Only download support tools from trusted sources.
    
3. Watch for unusual activity when using remote support tools.

Remote support tools are essential software that allow IT professionals to remotely access and control devices for technical assistance and maintenance. While they offer features like screen sharing and file transfer, they are a major security risk, as their compromise could grant attackers widespread access and privileges across an entire network.

In this blog, we’ll describe our discovery of two vulnerabilities in SimpleHelp’s eponymous remote support tool. When chained, these vulnerabilities could provide a direct path from a click on a malicious URL to remote code execution (RCE). Here’s how these vulnerabilities work and how they can be connected together to achieve RCE on devices of IT support staff and end users.

How does SimpleHelp work?

At a high level, here’s how SimpleHelp works:

1. Server component: Organizations run a SimpleHelp web server (on-premises or hosted) that brokers connections.
2. Technician console: IT staff use the Technician Console desktop app to connect, transfer files or take remote control.
3. Customer client / installer: End users download a support app via a link, which then connects back to the SimpleHelp server.
4. Unattended access: Persistent agents can be installed for always-on access.
5. Update and installer distribution: The platform regularly fetches binaries and config files from the server to bootstrap sessions.

This design makes SimpleHelp convenient, but it also creates a critical trust boundary around installers and configuration files. Let’s look at how clients obtain the remote-support installers and how those applications interact with the server.

Cross-site request forgery in hostname parameter (CVE-2025-36728)

If a client wants to get remote support, they are directed to the /customer path, where they will see a “Download Remote Support” button. If we click on this, we are directed to this URL: https://<SERVER-ADDRESS>/customer/Remote%20Support-windows64-offline.exe?language=en&hostname=https%3A%2F%2F<SERVER-ADDRESS>
 

SimpleHelp client download portal

When we first saw this, it seemed unusual for there to be a hostname parameter that specifies a URL. This made us think of previous server-side request forgery (SSRF) vulnerability findings that involved a URL parameter accepting an address that the server would then reach out to.

 By changing this value to that of a webserver we controlled on a different address, we noticed that when the installer was run, it would connect to our fake server and start requesting resources to carry out the installation.
 

Python3 http.server logs

From this, it became clear that the hostname parameter accepts custom values which determine where the installer reaches out for additional files required for the installation of the client software. An attacker could craft a link that silently redirects the client to their own server where they can host their own malicious files.

In order to impersonate a SimpleHelp server, we leveraged Python's http.server module. Note that our server responded with “404” error codes because the resources were not found. We will change this later.

Inclusion of functionality from untrusted control sphere (CVE-2025-36727)

When a user downloads a support or technician binary and runs it, a number of files are downloaded, as we can see from the logs from our python3 server below.

Serving HTTP on 0.0.0.0 port 8000 (http://0.0.0.0:8000/) ... <CLIENT-ADDRESS> - - [09/Sep/2025 11:57:50] code 404, message File not found <CLIENT-ADDRESS> - - [09/Sep/2025 11:57:50] "GET /customer/JWrapper-Windows64JRE-version.txt?time=791858819&platform=windows-intel-64&osid=w10-0-22631 HTTP/1.1" 404 - <CLIENT-ADDRESS> - - [09/Sep/2025 11:57:50] code 404, message File not found <CLIENT-ADDRESS> - - [09/Sep/2025 11:57:50] "GET /customer/JWrapper-Windows64JRE-version.txt?time=791858819&platform=windows-intel-64&osid=w10-0-22631 HTTP/1.1" 404 - <CLIENT-ADDRESS> - - [09/Sep/2025 11:57:50] code 404, message File not found <CLIENT-ADDRESS> - - [09/Sep/2025 11:57:50] "GET /customer/JWrapper-Windows64JRE-version.txt?time=791858819&platform=windows-intel-64&osid=w10-0-22631 HTTP/1.1" 404 - <CLIENT-ADDRESS> - - [09/Sep/2025 11:57:52] "GET /customer/JWrapper-Remote%20Support-version.txt?platform=windows-intel-64&osid=w10-0-22631&guv=00114155471 HTTP/1.1" 200 - <CLIENT-ADDRESS> - - [09/Sep/2025 11:57:53] "GET /customer/JWrapper-JWrapper-version.txt?platform=windows-intel-64&osid=w10-0-22631&guv=00114155471 HTTP/1.1" 200 - <CLIENT-ADDRESS> - - [09/Sep/2025 11:57:53] "GET /customer/JWrapper-Remote%20Support-version.txt?platform=windows-intel-64&osid=w10-0-22631&guv=00114155471 HTTP/1.1" 200 - <CLIENT-ADDRESS> - - [09/Sep/2025 11:57:53] "GET /customer/Remote%20Support-windows64-offline.exe?hostname=http%3A%2F%2F<SERVER-ADDRESS>%3A8000&platform=windows-intel-64&osid=w10-0-22631 HTTP/1.1" 200 -

There did not appear to be any validation that the retrieved files were from a legitimate source, since we were able to spoof all of them.

Most notably Remote Support-windows64-offline.exe was downloaded and executed without any verification.

For our proof of concept, we created a custom executable in C that executes calc.exe, put it in the spoofed server’s directory and named it Remote%20Support-windows64-offline.exe.

Once the client ran the binary, it loaded our custom executable, executed calc, and displayed our system alert.
 

PoC output on client device

Chained attack: From link to RCE

Individually, each flaw was limited in terms of how an attacker could exploit it. For example, in the case of CVE-2025-36727, an attacker would have to carry out a man-in-the-middle attack to intercept the client-to-server requests, and those requests would also have to be unencrypted.

Chained together, they form a viable attack path:
 

Defensive guidance

Recent research from Tenable highlights how attackers often abuse vulnerabilities in remote-access tools like SimpleHelp and recommends strategies to strengthen defense strategies, including:

• Maintain an inventory of authorized RMM tools and flag and block unauthorized installations.
• Audit RMM session activity, review logs for unexpected or abnormal behavior.
• Monitor network traffic for RMM patterns, installer downloads, unexpected connections or proxy use.
• Scan the environment to look for listening services that are linked to known RMM tools.

Closing thoughts

This chain demonstrates how two vulnerabilities, which on their own may appear difficult to exploit, can be combined into a viable critical RCE scenario. Attackers rarely rely on a single bug; they often stack different vulnerabilities until they create a path to full system compromise.

The Tenable research cited earlier shows that threat actors are actively abusing legitimate RMM tools to persist, escalate privileges and blend into normal IT operations. The flaws discovered in SimpleHelp fit squarely into this trend, giving attackers another way to hijack trust in remote support software.

The key takeaway: Security teams and vendors must evaluate not only how issues behave in isolation, but also how they interact and how adversaries exploit trusted tools to achieve their goals.

We wish to thank SimpleHelp for acknowledging and responding to our notification of the vulnerabilities and for fixing them. 

Click here to learn how the Tenable One Exposure Management Platform gives you full visibility across your entire attack surface.

Frequently asked questions about the August 2025 security incident at F5 and the release of multiple BIG-IP product patches.

Update October 17: The blog has been updated to include additional Tenable product coverage details.

View Change Log

Background

Tenable’s Research Special Operations (RSO) team has compiled this blog to answer Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) regarding a recently disclosed security incident affecting F5. Alongside the disclosure of the security incident, F5 also released its October 2025 Quarterly Security Notification.

FAQ

What is the F5 Security Incident?

Starting August 9, 2025, F5 learned that a nation-state threat actor gained and maintained access to certain systems within their environment. This included access to F5’s BIG-IP product development systems and “engineering knowledge management platforms.” On October 15, F5 released knowledge base (KB) article K000154696 providing current details on the known impacts of the breach, including an acknowledgement that they have not observed further unauthorized activity and believe they have successfully contained the breach.

What data was stolen in this breach?

According to F5, files from their BIG-IP engineering knowledge management systems and product development environments were accessed by the threat actor. The stolen data included details on undisclosed security vulnerabilities that were currently being investigated by F5 as well as source code for its BIG-IP product.

What is the risk of undisclosed vulnerability data being stolen?

With access to vulnerability reports and source code, the threat actor could use that information to develop exploits for issues that have not yet been patched or remediated. While F5 states they “have no knowledge of undisclosed critical or remote code vulnerabilities, and we are not aware of active exploitation of any undisclosed F5 vulnerabilities,” the risk remains that the attackers could use the stolen data to identify other vulnerabilities.

Was any source code modified? Is there a risk of a supply-chain attack?

According to F5, they have “no evidence of modification” to its supply chain, source code, including NGINX source code, build and release pipelines and the F5 Distributed Cloud Services or Silverline systems. These findings have reportedly been independently verified by two security research firms, NCC Group and IOActive.

What are the vulnerabilities associated with the breach?

At this time, F5 has not indicated that any vulnerabilities were exploited by the threat actor in order to gain access to their systems. However, on October 15, in conjunction with its security incident notice, F5 released several patches in KB article K000156572: Quarterly Security Notification (October 2025). While there is no notice in these security advisories that any of the CVEs have been exploited, we strongly recommend applying all available patches.

Additionally, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) released emergency directive (ED) 26-01: Mitigate Vulnerabilities in F5 Devices on October 15, which includes recommendations to apply all available updates. While the ED is aimed at Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agencies, the guidance should be applicable to any organization with F5 devices or software in their environment.

What actions should I take if my environment contains F5 software/devices?

According to both F5 and the CISA ED, inventorying and updating all affected BIG-IP instances is of utmost importance. While it’s always recommended that security updates are applied quickly, in light of the breach, F5 urges “updating your BIG-IP software as soon as possible.” In addition, guidance from CISA suggests hardening any public facing BIG-IP devices and removing any unsupported devices from your network.

Which threat actors are responsible for this attack?

While no specific threat actor has been linked to the F5 breach, F5 says this incident involved a “highly sophisticated” nation-state threat actor.

Are patches or mitigations available for the F5 October Quarterly Security Notification?

Yes, F5 released its quarterly security notification for October 15, which includes fixes for the following products:

BIG-IP (All Modules):

F5 KB ArticleAssociated CVEsK000151902CVE-2025-53868K000139514CVE-2025-60016K000150614CVE-2025-48008K000150637CVE-2025-59781K000151309CVE-2025-61951K000151611CVE-2025-46706K000156707CVE-2025-53856K000156733CVE-2025-61974K000156746CVE-2025-58071K000156912CVE-2025-61990K000156691CVE-2025-58096K000156642CVE-2025-59481K000154647CVE-2025-61958K000151308CVE-2025-59269K000151658CVE-2025-58153K000156800CVE-2025-59483K90301300CVE-2025-59268K000156801CVE-2025-54755K000151297CVE-2025-58424

F5OS-A

F5 KB ArticleAssociated CVEsK000156767CVE-2025-61955K000156771CVE-2025-57780K000149820CVE-2025-47150K000156796CVE-2025-60015K000154661CVE-2025-60013K000148625CVE-2025-53860

F5OS-C

F5 KB ArticleAssociated CVEsK000156767CVE-2025-61955K000156771CVE-2025-57780K000151718CVE-2025-59778K000149820CVE-2025-47150K000156796CVE-2025-60015

BIG-IP Product Specific

ProductF5 KB ArticleAssociated CVEsBIG-IP APM

K000156741

K000156597

K000156602

K44517780

K000148816

K000156596

CVE-2025-53521

CVE-2025-61960

CVE-2025-54854

CVE-2025-53474

CVE-2025-47148

CVE-2025-61933

Advanced WAF/ASM

K000156624

K000156621

K000154664

K000150752

K000148512

CVE-2025-61938

CVE-2025-54858

CVE-2025-61935

CVE-2025-55669

CVE-2025-58474

SSL Orchestrator

K000150667

K000151368

K000148816

CVE-2025-41430

CVE-2025-55036

CVE-2025-47148

BIG-IP PEMK000151475CVE-2025-54479BIG-IP AFM

K000152341

K000150010*

CVE-2025-59478

*This KB article represents a BIG-IP AFM Security Exposure and is not associated with a CVE.

BIG-IP Next

ProductF5 KB ArticleAssociated CVEsBIG-IP Next SPK

K000139514

K000150614

K000151611

K000156623

K000156733

K000156912

K000154614

K000151596

CVE-2025-60016

CVE-2025-48008

CVE-2025-46706

CVE-2025-58120

CVE-2025-61974

CVE-2025-61990

CVE-2025-55670

CVE-2025-54805

BIG-IP Next CNF

K000139514

K000150614

K000150637

K000151475

K000151611

K000156623

K000156733

K000156746

K000156912

K000154614

K000151596

CVE-2025-60016

CVE-2025-48008

CVE-2025-59781

CVE-2025-54479

CVE-2025-46706

CVE-2025-58120

CVE-2025-61974

CVE-2025-58071

CVE-2025-61990

CVE-2025-55670

CVE-2025-54805

BIG-IP Next for Kubernetes

K000151475

K000156623

K000156733

K000156746

K000156912

K000154614

K000151596

CVE-2025-54479

CVE-2025-58120

CVE-2025-61974

CVE-2025-58071

CVE-2025-61990

CVE-2025-55670

CVE-2025-54805

Other F5 Products

ProductF5 KB ArticleAssociated CVEsNGINX App Protect WAFK000148512CVE-2025-58474F5 Silverline

K000156733

K000151297

CVE-2025-61974

CVE-2025-58424

Has Tenable released any product coverage for these vulnerabilities?

A list of Tenable plugins for these vulnerabilities can be found on the individual CVE pages as they’re released:

• CVE-2025-53868
• CVE-2025-60016
• CVE-2025-48008
• CVE-2025-59781
• CVE-2025-61951
• CVE-2025-46706
• CVE-2025-53856
• CVE-2025-61974
• CVE-2025-58071
• CVE-2025-61990
• CVE-2025-58096
• CVE-2025-59481
• CVE-2025-61958
• CVE-2025-59269
• CVE-2025-58153
• CVE-2025-59483
• CVE-2025-59268
• CVE-2025-54755
• CVE-2025-58424
• CVE-2025-61955
• CVE-2025-57780
• CVE-2025-47150
• CVE-2025-60015
• CVE-2025-60013
• CVE-2025-53860
• CVE-2025-59778
• CVE-2025-53521
• CVE-2025-61960
• CVE-2025-54854
• CVE-2025-53474
• CVE-2025-47148
• CVE-2025-61933
• CVE-2025-61938
• CVE-2025-54858
• CVE-2025-61935
• CVE-2025-55669
• CVE-2025-58474
• CVE-2025-41430
• CVE-2025-55036
• CVE-2025-54479
• CVE-2025-59478
• CVE-2025-58120
• CVE-2025-55670
• CVE-2025-54805

This link will display all available plugins for these vulnerabilities, including upcoming plugins in our Plugins Pipeline.

Additionally, customers can utilize Tenable Attack Surface Management to identify public facing F5 devices by using the following subscriptions:

Were Tenable products impacted?

No, no Tenable products or systems have been impacted by the Security Incident reported by F5 on October 15, 2025, nor by the vulnerabilities detailed in F5's Quarterly Security Notification (October 2025) published on that date.

Change Log

Update October 17: The blog has been updated to include additional Tenable product coverage details.

Get more information

• F5: K000154696: F5 Security Incident
• F5: K000156572: Quarterly Security Notification (October 2025)
• CISA: ED 26-01: Mitigate Vulnerabilities in F5 Devices

Join Tenable's Research Special Operations (RSO) Team on Tenable Connect and engage with us in the Threat Roundtable group for further discussions on the latest cyber threats.

Learn more about Tenable One, the Exposure Management Platform for the modern attack surface.

The true cost of cyber risk is a human one. Siloed tools and disjointed operations aren’t just endangering your business, they’re also taking a real toll on your teams. It’s long past time to take the friction out of cybersecurity with a unified, proactive approach.

Key takeaways:

1. Security teams are overwhelmed by the number of tools, manual processes, and volume of data required to do their jobs.
    
2. While organizations struggle to get a clear picture of risk, attackers see a map of attack paths.
    
3. Exposure management takes the friction out of cybersecurity, empowering your teams to focus on proactively defending your environment.

While we often talk about cyber risk in business terms, the impact of a cyber attack ultimately affects people’s lives. Think of patients who can’t get life-saving medical treatments because their hospital suffered a ransomware attack. Passengers stranded at airports. Families that can’t close on new homes. The financial and emotional costs associated with fraud and identity theft. People ultimately pay the price for all of these outcomes in one way or another.

Those on the frontlines of your cyber defenses are acutely aware of the human toll of cyber risk. And they’re paying a price too. 

Security teams are burning out. They are staffed with brilliant, dedicated experts in cloud, OT, and IT but are forced to work in silos. The cloud admin is overwhelmed. The OT engineer is terrified of a production shutdown caused by an ill-timed patch. The vulnerability management team is drowning in “critical” alerts. The results? Friction, wasted efforts, and a constant fear that the real, business-ending threat is lurking in the gaps.

Here’s a look at the scope of the challenges security teams are dealing with:

• Up to 83 security tools from 29 vendors
  • each requiring one or more data connectors
• 300,000 CVEs tracked by MITRE since inception
  • instances of unpatched vulnerabilities projected to reach 515 billion by year’s end1
  • 670 OT-impacting vulnerabilities disclosed in first-half 2025
• AI everywhere — 89% of orgs are either using AI or piloting it
  • 34% have suffered an AI-related breach
• Dynamic cloud environments — 82% work in hybrid cloud environments
  • 63% juggle two or more cloud providers

I could go on, but you get the picture. When they most need clarity, teams are hobbled by fractured visibility, disjointed action, and uncertainty. Managing vulnerabilities and exposures across all the silos of IT, OT, cloud, AI, and beyond remains far too complex and manual. Teams spend hours — sometimes days — consolidating reports, correlating vulnerabilities, assigning remediation tasks, and trying to figure out what it all means for their organization’s overall risk exposure. They lack a way to connect, unify, and analyze the flood of security data they’re facing on a daily basis.

And when a CEO or board of directors asks a CISO, “Are we exposed?” too often there’s no confident, data-backed answer.

Security teams and the executives they report to are drowning in data, but starving for clarity.

Disjointed defense performed by overwhelmed and dispirited teams is the attacker’s greatest advantage. While your teams struggle to work across silos and get a clear picture of risk, attackers see one interconnected landscape of opportunity in your environment. By chaining together seemingly unrelated weaknesses between vulnerability management, identities, cloud, and operational technology (OT), they build a navigable map of your environment with attack paths your teams simply can’t see from inside their functional silos. Threat actors are waging a unified campaign against your scattered defenses.

Don’t your cyber defenders deserve a unified front?

Cybersecurity isn’t won by individual heroes fighting isolated battles. It’s won with a united front, capable of seeing the entire battlefield as clearly as the enemy does. That’s where exposure management comes in.

Exposure management is a strategic approach to proactive security designed to unify siloed teams, tools, and data. It gives IT and security teams the ability to see the entire attack surface, so they can home in on the greatest threats to your business. With exposure management, you get:

• A single, unified view of the attack surface
• A single, consolidated source of security data
• A consistent approach to risk scoring across security domains
• Capabilities to prioritize and remediate exposures based on business impact and technical context

Together, these capabilities empower you to see how seemingly disparate vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and excessive permissions combine to create attack paths leading to your organization’s most critical systems and data. With this visibility and insight, you can proactively cut off these exposures at the pass.

See the way exposure management has transformed Tenable’s own security team.

Cybersecurity burnout is a business risk

A Lancaster University study of responsible cybersecurity emphasizes the wellbeing of the people in cybersecurity roles as a key consideration in an organization's security strategy. Study participants reported a high level of burnout, which the researchers say presents risks not only to the individuals but to their organizations and society at large.

It’s long past time to take the friction out of cybersecurity. Your teams deserve a new approach that reduces noise, gives them accurate prioritization guidance, and helps them to reduce risk without burning themselves out. Exposure management gives your teams the strategy and structure, along with the visibility, insight, and action, to join forces and present a unified front.

1 Source: Tenable Research estimate based on telemetry scan data.

Learn more

Get ahead of cyber threats with exposure management.

1. 7Critical
2. 158Important
3. 2Moderate
4. 0Low

Microsoft addresses 167 CVEs in its largest Patch Tuesday to date, including three zero-day vulnerabilities, two of which were exploited in the wild.

Microsoft patched 167 CVEs in its October 2025 Patch Tuesday release, its largest Patch Tuesday release to date, with seven rated critical, 158 rated important, and two rated moderate. Our counts omitted 27 vulnerabilities, including 14 Chromium CVEs, three MITRE CVEs, one GitHub CVE, one CERT/CC CVE, and eight cloud CVEs that Microsoft published advisories for on October 9.

This month’s update includes patches for:

• .NET
• .NET,.NET Framework, Visual Studio
• Active Directory Federation Services
• Agere Windows Modem Driver
• ASP.NET Core
• Azure Connected Machine Agent
• Azure Entra ID
• Azure Local
• Azure Monitor
• Azure Monitor Agent
• Azure PlayFab
• Confidential Azure Container Instances
• Connected Devices Platform Service (Cdpsvc)
• Copilot
• Data Sharing Service Client
• Inbox COM Objects
• Internet Explorer
• JDBC Driver for SQL Server
• Microsoft Brokering File System
• Microsoft Configuration Manager
• Microsoft Defender for Linux
• Microsoft Exchange Server
• Microsoft Failover Cluster Virtual Driver
• Microsoft Graphics Component
• Microsoft Office
• Microsoft Office Excel
• Microsoft Office PowerPoint
• Microsoft Office SharePoint
• Microsoft Office Visio
• Microsoft Office Word
• Microsoft PowerShell
• Microsoft Windows
• Microsoft Windows Search Component
• Microsoft Windows Speech
• Network Connection Status Indicator (NCSI)
• NtQueryInformation Token function (ntifs.h)
• Remote Desktop Client
• Software Protection Platform (SPP)
• Storport.sys Driver
• Virtual Secure Mode
• Visual Studio
• Windows Ancillary Function Driver for WinSock
• Windows Authentication Methods
• Windows BitLocker
• Windows Bluetooth Service
• Windows Cloud Files Mini Filter Driver
• Windows COM
• Windows Connected Devices Platform Service
• Windows Core Shell
• Windows Cryptographic Services
• Windows Device Association Broker service
• Windows Digital Media
• Windows DirectX
• Windows DWM
• Windows DWM Core Library
• Windows Error Reporting
• Windows ETL Channel
• Windows Failover Cluster
• Windows File Explorer
• Windows Health and Optimized Experiences Service
• Windows Hello
• Windows High Availability Services
• Windows Hyper-V
• Windows Kernel
• Windows Local Session Manager (LSM)
• Windows Management Services
• Windows MapUrlToZone
• Windows NDIS
• Windows NTFS
• Windows NTLM
• Windows PrintWorkflowUserSvc
• Windows Push Notification Core
• Windows Remote Access Connection Manager
• Windows Remote Desktop
• Windows Remote Desktop Protocol
• Windows Remote Desktop Services
• Windows Remote Procedure Call
• Windows Resilient File System (ReFS)
• Windows Resilient File System (ReFS) Deduplication Service
• Windows Routing and Remote Access Service (RRAS)
• Windows Server Update Service
• Windows SMB Client
• Windows SMB Server
• Windows SSDP Service
• Windows StateRepository API
• Windows Storage Management Provider
• Windows Taskbar Live
• Windows USB Video Driver
• Windows Virtualization-Based Security (VBS) Enclave
• Windows WLAN Auto Config Service
• Xbox
• XBox Gaming Services

Elevation of Privilege (EoP) vulnerabilities accounted for 47.9% of the vulnerabilities patched this month, followed by Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerabilities at 17.4%.

ImportantCVE-2025-24052 and CVE-2025-24990 | Windows Agere Modem Driver Elevation of Privilege Vulnerabilities

CVE-2025-24052 and CVE-2025-24990 are EoP vulnerabilities in the third party Agere Modem driver. Both CVEs were assigned CVSSv3 scores of 7.8 and rated as important. Microsoft reports that CVE-2025-24990 has been exploited in the wild and CVE-2025-24052 was disclosed prior to a patch being made available. Successful exploitation would allow an attacker to gain administrator privileges on an affected system.

The ltmdm64.sys driver has historically shipped natively with supported Windows operating systems, but will no longer be supported following the October update. Microsoft notes, that ltmdm64.sys-dependent hardware will no longer work on Windows, and recommends users remove existing dependencies.

ImportantCVE-2025-59230 | Windows Remote Access Connection Manager Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability

CVE-2025-59230 is an EoP vulnerability affecting Windows Remote Access Connection Manager. According to Microsoft, this vulnerability has been exploited in the wild. It was assigned a CVSSv3 score of 7.8 and is rated as important. Exploitation of this vulnerability involves improper access control in Windows Remote Access Connection Manager and could allow a local attacker to gain SYSTEM privileges.

Including CVE-2025-59230, there have been 22 reported and patched vulnerabilities for the Windows Remote Access Connection Manager service (RasMan) since January 2022. CVE-2025-59230 is the first reported RasMan CVE to be exploited as a zero-day.

CriticalCVE-2025-59287 | Windows Server Update Service (WSUS) Remote Code Execution Vulnerability

CVE-2025-59287 is a RCE in the Windows Server Update Service (WSUS). It was assigned a CVSSv3 score of 9.8 and rated critical. It has been assessed as “Exploitation More Likely” according to Microsoft’s Exploitability Index. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability to gain RCE by sending a crafted event that leads to a deserialization of untrusted data.

This is just the third WSUS vulnerability patched as part of Microsoft Patch Tuesday since 2023, when Microsoft patched two WSUS EoP vulnerabilities (CVE-2023-32056, CVE-2023-35317) in the July 2023 Patch Tuesday, but the first RCE and to be assessed as more likely to be exploited.

CriticalCVE-2025-59227, CVE-2025-59234 | Microsoft Office Remote Code Execution Vulnerability

CVE-2025-59227 and CVE-2025-59234 are RCE vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office. Both vulnerabilities were assigned a CVSSv3 score of 7.8, rated critical and assessed as “Exploitation Less Likely.” An attacker could exploit these flaws through social engineering by sending the malicious Microsoft Office document file to an intended target. Successful exploitation would grant code execution privileges to the attacker.

Despite being flagged as “Less Likely” to be exploited, Microsoft notes that the Preview Pane is an attack vector for both CVEs, which means exploitation does not require the target to open the file.

ImportantCVE-2025-55680 | Windows Cloud Files Mini Filter Driver Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability

CVE-2025-55680 is an EoP vulnerability in the Windows Cloud Files Mini Filter Driver. It was assigned a CVSSv3 score of 7.8, rated important and assessed as “Exploitation More Likely.” A local, authenticated attacker would need to win a race condition in order to exploit this vulnerability. Successful exploitation would allow the attacker to elevate to SYSTEM privileges.

This is the 17th vulnerability in the Windows Cloud Files Mini Filter Driver since 2022. Microsoft patched two in 2022, six in 2023, six in 2024, and three in 2025. As part of its November 2023 Patch Tuesday release, Microsoft patched CVE-2023-36036, another EoP flaw, that was exploited in the wild as a zero-day.

Windows 10 End of Support

As of October 14, Windows 10 has reached its end of support. This means that no new security updates will be released for Windows 10 without being enrolled in the Extended Security Updates (ESU) program. To identify unsupported versions of Windows 10, customers can use plugin ID 192814.

Additionally, Long-Term Servicing Branch (LTSB) support for Windows 10 Enterprise 2015 LTSB and Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSB 2015 also ended as of October 14. Plugins to identify these versions are as follows:

VersionPlugin IDWindows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSB 2015192775Windows 10 Enterprise 2015 LTSB213883Additional Microsoft Products End of Support

As of October 14, several Microsoft Products have reached end of support or extended support. Since these products will no longer receive security updates, we recommend upgrading to supported versions as soon as possible.

• Exchange Server 2016
• Exchange Server 2019
• Outlook 2016
• Skype for Business Server 2015
• Skype for Business 2016
• Skype for Business Server 2019
• Windows 11 Enterprise and Education Version 22H2
• Windows 11 IoT Enterprise Version 22H2

Tenable Solutions

A list of all the plugins released for Microsoft’s October 2025 Patch Tuesday update can be found here. As always, we recommend patching systems as soon as possible and regularly scanning your environment to identify those systems yet to be patched.

For more specific guidance on best practices for vulnerability assessments, please refer to our blog post on How to Perform Efficient Vulnerability Assessments with Tenable.

Get more information

• Microsoft's October 2025 Security Updates
• Tenable plugins for Microsoft October 2025 Patch Tuesday Security Updates

Join Tenable's Research Special Operations (RSO) Team on Tenable Connect and engage with us in the Threat Roundtable group for further discussions on the latest cyber threats.

Learn more about Tenable One, the Exposure Management Platform for the modern attack surface.

Endpoint detection and response tools may serve you well when it comes to handling incident response. But, when used for exposure management, they can leave you blind to large portions of your attack surface.

Key takeaways:

1. Exposure management is fundamentally a proactive security discipline. Therefore, tools designed for reactive security can’t give you the visibility and context you need to prevent incidents.
    
2. EDR tools lack the deep vulnerability intelligence and exposure context security teams need to understand where attackers are most likely to go after they enter your environment.
    
3. Without visibility and context, you can’t effectively close off attack paths before they’re exploited.

We get it: your teams are drowning in security alerts and data and you’re under pressure to demonstrate ROI with the tools you have. Who can blame you for wanting to keep things simple? Turning to your endpoint detection and response (EDR) vendor to try and meet your exposure management needs is tempting. After all, those EDR tools serve you well when it comes to handling incident response. So why wouldn’t a single-agent approach for managing exposure work equally well for preventive security?

In reality, when used for exposure management, EDR solutions leave organizations blind to vast areas of the attack surface because they only scan endpoints instrumented with their agents. As a result, EDR tools can’t give you visibility into all the other devices — including routers, switches, firewalls, VPNs, OT/IoT devices, and unmanaged assets — that threat actors exploit to gain access and move laterally across your network. Think of the way Salt Typhoon and other threat actors have exploited flaws in network devices to gain initial access: EDR tools wouldn’t see that.

We summarize the key challenges of using EDR for exposure management in the video below. 

Even when they’re built with network scanning capabilities for vulnerability assessment, EDR solutions pale in comparison to Tenable for both vulnerability and exposure management. In a head-to-head analysis, Tenable detected 40% more vulnerabilities and 16% more CVEs than a competing EDR solution. Meanwhile, the EDR solution failed to detect weak cipher suites, known remote desktop protocol (RDP) exposures, and SQL flaws. These are glaring oversights, given how frequently attackers exploit weak encryption, open RDP, and SQL, and given that the ability to detect weak encryption is a requirement for compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

EDR for exposure management and the myth of cost savings

EDR providers will tell you that their single-agent architecture will save you money and simplify complexity. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Organizations that have turned to their EDR provider for vulnerability or exposure management have seen cost and complexity skyrocket. Why? Because EDR solutions require extensive integrations to provide the minimum scanning coverage and remediation capabilities to function as a vulnerability or exposure management solution.

Beware of EDR solutions branded “exposure management” 

Exposure management is a proactive security practice that requires deep vulnerability intelligence as a foundational component. Vulnerability data drawn from multiple sources, including CVE data, threat intelligence, and behavioral analysis, gives you the context you need to assess risk. Detection needs to extend beyond package versions to include registry settings and misconfigurations so you can fully understand the potential impact in your environment. False positives should be kept to a minimum and, when they do occur, you need the ability to flag and suppress them so you can fine-tune the detection logic over time.

Data transparency is also key. CVE coverage should be fully visible within the tool and publicly accessible. EDR solutions are often insufficiently invested in vulnerability intelligence and CVE coverage is typically not published. Even when CVE data and threat intelligence are used, they’re primarily limited to agent-based deployments.

Most importantly, EDR can’t reveal gaps in your coverage and give you the context you need to understand where attackers are most likely to go once they enter your environment. Without that knowledge, you can’t effectively close off attack paths before they’re exploited.

Here are 10 essential exposure management criteria and how Tenable’s offerings compare to an EDR-centric approach.

How exposure management with Tenable compares to EDR-centric toolsCapabilityTenable EDR-centric toolsIncident preventionProactive exposure management with full visibility into the entire attack surface; actionable reporting and dashboards aid in remediationReactive alerts, incident response driven Attack surface coverageIT, cloud, OT, IoT, networks, web apps, AI solutions, identity systems, third-party apps; multiple detection technologies, including agents, passive monitoring, scan engines, DAST, and OT sensorsEndpoints with agent deployed; limited network scanningData accuracy and contextValidated assessments performed by interrogating vulnerabilities to confirm presence and exploitability, reducing false positives Assumptive detection, leading to more false positives; can overlook key issues such as weak ciphers, open RDP, and SQL flawsVulnerability intelligence and transparencyGranular vulnerability intelligence from Tenable Research, tracking vulnerability history and analyzing more than 50 trillion data points; CVE coverage is fully visible within the platform and available publicly.Malware-centric intelligence; CVE coverage is not typically published, reducing transparencyCompliance coverage Wide variety of compliance frameworks across multiple operating systems; covers 84% of CIS benchmarksLimited; for example, some EDR tools may only cover CIS benchmarks on WindowsUnified viewUnified, fully customizable dashboard with consolidated view of exposures across cloud, web apps, OT assets, containers, identity systems like Active Directory, AI, and attack surface management; extensive integration with other existing security tools in your portfolioFragmented across multiple dashboards, requiring users to navigate separate views to access different data setsTransparent prioritizationOpenly publishes how Vulnerability Priority Rating (VPR) works to pinpoint the most critical exposures. VPR uses static and dynamic variables and is combined with Asset Criticality Rating (ACR) to calculate an Asset Exposure Score (AES) for prioritization. Includes Attack Path Analysis to highlight attacker routes, using generative AI for step-by-step explanations of potential compromisesRisk-scoring methodology is often a black boxRemediation guidance and workflowsAdvanced guidance, including patch supersedence and combined exposure solutions; reduces exposure windows from weeks to hours; integrates with ServiceNow, Jira, Slack, Teams, and other tools, automating workflows and tracking remediation progress through customizable projects and SLAsEach CVE is addressed individually; limited remediation guidanceReporting and customizationGlobal and custom exposure cards in Exposure View provide a unified, business-aligned look at your security posture. This allows you to combine Tenable insights with data from third-party security tools to assess cross-domain risk, elevate reporting to leadership and easily track your overall Cyber Exposure Score and its trendsLacks broad customization capabilities; limited flexibilityPeer benchmarking and trendlinesComparison of cyber risk to industry peers to quickly identify shortcomings and strengthsNot available

Source: Tenable, October 2025

Conclusion

Tenable helps organizations move from reactive firefighting to proactive exposure management. By going beyond endpoints and malware alerts, it delivers complete visibility and clear guidance, giving you the clarity and confidence you need to stay ahead of threats.

Tenable delivers full attack surface coverage with faster time to detection, deeper compliance, and richer intelligence so you can know, expose, and close risk everywhere it lives. It aggregates data across dozens of security tools, providing pre-defined templates, customizable reports, and benchmarking against sector standards to support mixed regulatory and audit requirements. It covers 84% of CIS Benchmarks and natively supports major compliance frameworks, including CIS, NIST, and DISA STIG. Partners like Vanta offer integrations for full compliance evaluations and certification workflows.

With Tenable, security teams can act with confidence, not uncertainty.

Learn more

• Read the blog: Exposure Management Beyond the Endpoint
• View the on-demand webinar: Beyond the Endpoint: Exposure Management That’s Proactive
• Request a demo: https://www.tenable.com/try
• Visit the resource page: https://www.tenable.com/lp/campaigns/25/compare/tenable-vs-crowdstrike/

Want recruiters to show you the money? A new report says AI skills are your golden ticket. Plus, cyber teams are all in on AI, including agentic AI tools. Oh, and please patch a nasty Oracle zero-day bug ASAP. And get the latest on vulnerability management, IoT security and cyber fraud.

Key takeaways

1. Eager to stand out when seeking your next cyber job? Robert Half says one way is to become skilled at using AI for vulnerability management and other cyber tasks.
    
2. On a related note, PwC is reporting that the use of AI for cyber defenses continues to grow, including agentic AI tools.
    
3. Attackers are exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in Oracle’s E-Business Suite (EBS), so install the update with the fix now.

Here are six things you need to know for the week ending October 10.

1 - Report: Cyber pros with AI security skills are in high demand

Looking to give your cybersecurity career and salary a boost? Develop AI security skills.

The intel comes from Robert Half’s recently-released “2026 Salary Guide.” If you know how to use AI for things like managing vulnerabilities, automating security, or hunting for threats, you're going to be "highly sought."

“Many employers look for candidates who can work with AI programs or models, such as neural networks and natural language processing, for predicting and mitigating cyber risks,” Robert Half wrote in an article about the guide titled “What to Know About Hiring and Salary Trends in Cybersecurity.”

Cyber hiring managers are also eager for candidates with AI-related certifications, like Microsoft’s AI-900 and Google Cloud’s Machine Learning Engineer. 

Of course, AI skills aren’t the only game in town. Having experience in these areas will also make your resume shine:

• Cloud security
• Data security
• DevSecOps
• Ethical hacking
• Network security
• Risk management

Having certain credentials also makes you a more attractive candidate for hiring managers, including:

• Certified Cloud Security Professional (CCSP)
• Certified Data Privacy Solutions Engineer (CDPSE)
• Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH)
• Certified Information Security Manager (CISM)
• Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA)
• Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP)
• CompTIA Security+

 

Just remember to work on your people skills, too. The report reminds us that things like good communication and critical thinking are critical for cybersecurity roles.

And here’s Robert Half’s average salaries for “midpoint” cyber pros – meaning, those with a moderate amount of experience in these roles who meet most requirements and may possess relevant certifications:

• Cybersecurity analyst: $122,250
• Cybersecurity engineer: $144,000
• Data security analyst: $149,500
• Network security administrator: $130,000
• Network security engineer: $145,500
• Security architect: $157,250
• Systems security administrator: $134,750
• Systems security manager: $172,500
• CISO: $220,750

Bottom line: It’s a good time to be in cyber: 53% of U.S. employers are willing to open their wallets wider for candidates with the right skills.

To get more details, check out:

• Robert Half’s full “2026 Salary Guide”
• The report's section on technology salaries, where you can find the cybersecurity salary ranges for various roles
• The announcement “Robert Half Releases 2026 Salary Guide Highlighting Key Compensation Trends Amid a Complex Job Market”

2 - PwC: Cyber teams can’t get enough AI

Organizations are leaning heavily into AI to beef up their cyber defenses, including by prioritizing the use of agentic AI tools that can execute tasks with minimal human guidance.

That’s a key — albeit not unsurprising — discovery from PwC’s new “2026 Global Digital Trust Insights: C-suite playbook and findings” report, based on a global survey of almost 4,000 business and technology executives.

“AI’s potential for transforming cyber capabilities is clear and far-reaching,” reads a PwC article with highlights from the report.

For example, organizations are prioritizing the use of AI to improve how they allocate cyber budgets; use managed cybersecurity services; and tackle cyber skills gaps.

With regards to respondents' priorities for AI cybersecurity capabilities in the coming year, threat hunting ranked first, followed by agentic AI. Other areas include identity and access management, and vulnerability scanning / vulnerability assessments.

AI security capabilities organizations will prioritize over the next 12 months

Meanwhile, organizations plan to use agentic AI primarily to boost cloud security, data protection and security operations in the coming year. Other agentic AI priority areas include security testing; governance, risk and compliance; and identity and access management.

“Businesses are recognising that AI agents — autonomous, goal-directed systems capable of executing tasks with limited human intervention — have enormous potential to transform their cyber programmes,” reads the report.

Beyond AI, the report also calls on cyber teams to prioritize prevention over reaction. Proactive work like monitoring, assessments, testing, and training is always cheaper than the crisis-mode alternative of incident response, remediation, litigation, and fines. Yet, only 24% of organizations said they spend “significantly more” on proactive measures.

Other topics covered in the report include geopolitical risk; cyber resilience; the quantum computing threat; and the cyber skills gap.

For more information about AI data security, check out these Tenable resources:

• “Harden Your Cloud Security Posture by Protecting Your Cloud Data and AI Resources” (blog)
• “Tenable Cloud AI Risk Report 2025” (report)
• “New Tenable Report: How Complexity and Weak AI Security Put Cloud Environments at Risk” (blog)
• “AI Is Your New Attack Surface” (on-demand webinar)
• “Securing the AI Attack Surface: Separating the Unknown from the Well Understood” (blog)
• “The AI Security Dilemma: Navigating the High-Stakes World of Cloud AI” (blog)

3 - Experts: Patch nasty Oracle zero-day bug – yesterday

Hackers are exploiting a critical zero-day vulnerability in Oracle's E-Business Suite (EBS), and cyber experts including the U.K. National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) are urging organizations to patch affected systems ASAP.

The vulnerability, CVE-2025-61882, exists in the BI Publisher Integration component of Oracle Concurrent Processing in versions 12.2.3 to 12.2.14 of Oracle EBS. 

Attackers can exploit the vulnerability remotely without authentication. Once exploited, the vulnerability can grant an attacker the ability to execute code remotely on breached EBS systems and completely compromise them, Oracle said in its security advisory.

Indications about the zero-day exploits surfaced on October 2 via reports that the Cl0p ransomware gang was telling Oracle customers it had swiped data from their EBS systems, as Tenable Research explains in its FAQ blog about CVE-2025-61882. 
 

Exploits of this EBS vulnerability may have started in July or August, according to various reports published this week.

NCSC recommendations for organizations running vulnerable versions of Oracle E-Business Suite include:

• Install the latest update for EBS, which fixes the vulnerability.
• Use the indicators-of-compromise provided by Oracle to assess your exposure.
• Continuously monitor your network and hunt for threats.
• Deploy the EBS following Oracle’s guidance, in order to limit its exposure to the public internet to the minimum level required.

To get more information, read:

• “CVE-2025-61882: Frequently Asked Questions About Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) Zero-Day and Associated Vulnerabilities” (Tenable)
• “Oracle Security Alert Advisory - CVE-2025-61882” (Oracle)
• “Exploitation of Oracle EBS Zero-Day Started 2 Months Before Patching” (SecurityWeek)
• “Clop raid on Oracle E-Business Suite started months ago, researchers warn” (The Register)
• “Google Says Oracle EBS Extortion Campaign Possibly Targeted Thousands, Could Date Back To July” (CRN)

4 - Tenable polls webinar attendees on vulnerability management practices

During our recent webinar “Beyond the endpoint: Exposure management that's proactive,” we polled attendees on their vulnerability management processes and challenges. Check out what they said.

(Source: Tenable webinar poll of 57 respondents, Beyond the Endpoint: Exposure Management That’s Proactive, October 1, 2025)

(Source: Tenable webinar poll of 63 respondents, Beyond the Endpoint: Exposure Management That’s Proactive, October 1, 2025)

Watch the webinar on-demand to learn why endpoint-first vulnerability management falls short and how Tenable closes the gaps across IT, cloud, OT, identity and more.

5 - NIST updates security guidance for IoT device manufacturers

This one is for vendors of internet-of-things (IoT) products that are interested in improving the cybersecurity of these wares.

The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has released a revised draft of its “Foundational Cybersecurity Activities for IoT Product Manufacturers” publication, which seeks to ensure IoT products meet customer security expectations.

Here’s some of what’s new in the updated document, which incorporates feedback from over 400 participants through workshops, written comments and forums: 

• The guidance is now better organized for clarity.
• There's a much stronger focus on proactive security, urging makers to think about threat modeling and risk assessments early in the product development lifecycle.
• The guidance also now includes more references to established standards, such as the NIST Cybersecurity Framework, to promote consistency across the industry.

NIST is actively seeking public feedback on this draft until October 31, 2025, and is developing a "worked example" to demonstrate the practical application of the guidance. 

“We are committed to advancing IoT cybersecurity and fostering a secure ecosystem for connected product technologies across industries,” reads the NIST blog “Updating Foundational Activities for IoT Product Manufacturers.”

For more information about IoT security, check out these Tenable resources:

• “How to Remediate Risk to Critical OT/IoT Systems without Disrupting Operations” (blog)
• “Blackbox to blueprint: a security leader’s guide to managing OT and IT risk” (ebook)
• “How To Secure Your IT, OT and IoT Assets With an Exposure Management Platform: Complete Visibility with Asset Inventory and Discovery” (blog)
• “The Invisible Bridge: Recognizing The Risk Posed by Interconnected IT, OT and IoT Environments” (webinar)
• “How to Unlock Advanced IoT Visibility for Cyber-Physical Systems” (blog)

6 - Report: Fraudsters are cashing in on weak identity security

Fraud is costing businesses a fortune, as scammers exploit the poor protection of customers’ digital identities.

That’s the urgent message from TransUnion’s report “H2 2025 Update: Top Fraud Trends: Digital Identity Risk Accelerates Fraud Losses” published this week.

“Fraudsters are exploiting every digital touchpoint, from account creation to login and transaction. The financial impact is staggering, and organizations must rethink how they verify identity and secure customer interactions,” Steve Yin, Global Head of Fraud at TransUnion, said in a statement.
 

Here are key takeaways from the report, which is based on TransUnion proprietary data and surveys of business leaders in six countries and consumers across 18 countries:

• Fraud cost global businesses an average of 7.7% of their annual revenue over the past year – a total of $534 billion.
• The primary drivers of these losses are scams, synthetic identity fraud and account takeover (ATO), with ATO volume surging a whopping 141% since 2021.
• The riskiest stage for digital consumers is new account creation – 8.3% of all attempts in H1 2025 were flagged as fraudulent – driven by a vast supply of stolen credentials.

So what can organizations do about this threat? The report’s recommendations include:

• Adopt a proactive, enterprise-wide approach to fraud prevention. It’s key to unify fragmented systems and data silos to create a holistic view of customer identity.
• Bolster every defensive layer — from identity verification and session monitoring to authentication — with better risk signals and advanced analytics.
• Shift away from simple passwords toward more secure methods like biometrics and one-time passcodes. 

As the report bluntly states: “You must assume a security posture that all identity data and credentials presented to your organization are compromised.”

For more information about identity and access management (IAM) security, check out these Tenable blogs:

• “Identity Is the New Battleground: Why Proactive Security Is the Way Forward”
• “Identity-First Security: Mitigating the Cloud’s Greatest Risk Vector”
• “Stronger Cloud Security in Five: Securing Your Cloud Identities”
• “How Identity Plays a Part in 5 Stages of a Cyber Attack”
• “Service Accounts in Active Directory: These OG NHIs Could Be Your Weakest Link”

Relying on an endpoint-centric approach to exposure management can leave you with blind spots that increase risk. You need to see your environment like an attacker does.

Key takeaways:

1. Long remediation cycles and difficulty prioritizing risk are significant challenges for security teams.
    
2. Exposure management capabilities bolted onto existing security tools result in dashboard fatigue and manual processes that slow response time.
    
3. Unified exposure management gives teams the context and intelligence they need and integrates into existing systems of record to speed remediation times.

How do you scale with the threat landscape? That’s one of the greatest challenges facing security organizations.

An attacker’s entry point can be a critical vulnerability on a public-facing server, a severe misconfiguration in the cloud or an overprivileged permission in an identity system. Threat actors only need to exploit a single misconfiguration or vulnerability to gain a toehold into an environment, where they quickly pivot to living off the land techniques, using legitimate tools to perform lateral movement and privilege escalation. They’re leveraging a broad attack surface that includes AI, cloud environments, web applications, APIs, identity systems, operational technology (OT) and IoT. And overwhelmed security teams are over-rotating on an “assumed breach” mentality.

To understand the scope of the challenge, consider this: From 1999 to 2019, there were 124,000 registered CVEs tracked by MITRE. From 2019 to 2024 that number nearly doubled to 240,000 and it’s currently at 300,000.

Security tool vendors with expertise in a specific area, such as endpoint detection and response (EDR), may offer add-on vulnerability management or exposure management services to their offerings. It may seem easy to add these capabilities onto an existing deployment. But relying on such offerings to manage a complex environment can result in blind spots that increase risk.

In order to scale with the threat landscape, security teams need to be able to see their environment just as an attacker does.

Yet, 42% of respondents to a recent Tenable webinar poll combine multiple tools and a homegrown approach to secure their environments, while another 12% rely primarily on an endpoint security vendor’s tools.

Source: Tenable webinar poll of 57 respondents, Beyond the Endpoint: Exposure Management That’s Proactive, October 1, 2025

Modern attackers rarely focus on just one part of the infrastructure, and an endpoint-centric view creates dangerous blind spots that attackers can exploit. The Tenable webinar Beyond the Endpoint: Exposure Management That’s Proactive outlined the real-world gaps created by an endpoint-centric security approach, including missed exposures, reliance on vendor coverage, detection delays and compliance difficulties.

“You want to take an ‘assumed breach’ mindset? That doesn’t mean you have to have an ‘accept breach’ mindset,” said John Hendley, VP of Cybersecurity for Coalfire, a Tenable MSSP partner, during the webinar. “We don’t need to make it easier for folks to try to get in and do nefarious things.”

Hendley noted that he sees a lot of dashboard fatigue among customers who cobble together multiple tools and then struggle to attain a clear understanding of where they are most at risk.

“There are two constants in security: time and context,” said Raymond Carney, senior director, Tenable Research. “A lot of times we tend to think of security as a purely technical sort of acumen we’re applying. But to be successful we have to elevate it to business terms.” This requires understanding the potential impact a given vulnerability can have on the business, as well as being able to contextualize that for C-level executives who want to know if the business is at risk.

An endpoint-centric approach to security can’t provide the context organizations need to proactively reduce risk. Siloed tools not only increase dashboard fatigue, they make it difficult to integrate remediation workflows into IT systems of record such as Jira and ServiceNow.

More than a third of webinar attendees (38%) cited long remediation cycles as their biggest day-to-day challenge, while 31% have difficulty validating and prioritizing risk.

Source: Tenable webinar poll of 63 respondents, Beyond the Endpoint: Exposure Management That’s Proactive, October 1, 2025 

“What’s great about Tenable is that because it has such rich integrations, it can feed that data into your systems of record, where your data lives, where your teams go and fix things,” said Hendley. “That’s a really powerful force multiplier.”

5 factors that set Tenable exposure management apart

A unified exposure management platform like Tenable One gives security teams the context and intelligence they need to reduce risk across the complex attack surface. Here are five key ways Tenable One stands out:

1. Data sources: Many endpoint vendors pull in data from other sources, which can introduce lag times that can slow remediation efforts. The Research Special Operations team in Tenable Research analyzes over 50 trillion data points, allowing Tenable to provide coverage for over 40% more Windows server vulnerabilities and 16% more CVEs than competitors. An average of four plugin feeds are published daily.
2. Transparency: Tenable plugin pages clearly show what’s covered in the current feed, what’s in the pipeline and the audit and compliance coverage available.
3. Vulnerability intelligence: Tenable Research is constantly looking at observable evidence in the threat landscape, providing customers with the analyses and contextualized exposure intelligence required to manage risks to critical business assets. Their goal? Cut through the noise and deliver critical intelligence about the most dangerous cyber threats emerging right now. Since the beginning of 2024 our advisory content, vulnerability watches and emerging data has preceded the publication of the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog by an average of eight and a half days.
4. Prioritization: Being able to boil down the 300,000 published CVEs to the 800 flagged as critical by the Tenable Vulnerability Priority Rating and further to the 17 or 20 a year that are most impactful helps you focus in on the areas that we’re most likely to be subject to breach and the potential impact on the business.
5. Asset management: The Tenable platform is designed to help you identify the systems you didn’t know you had, so you have an attacker’s view of your environment. This is more important than ever with the increase in AI usage and the growth of shadow AI.

Conclusion

Endpoint-centric security is insufficient for the modern attack surface. Relying on EDR vendor tools can leave you with critical blind spots. Modern attackers exploit cloud misconfigurations, web applications, APIs, identity systems and OT/IoT, all of which endpoint tools were not built to see or assess.

Overcoming security challenges requires moving beyond dashboard fatigue and manual processes. Integrating a single exposure management platform into an organization’s existing systems of record (e.g., ServiceNow, Jira) automates ticket creation and routing, transforming data into efficient, trackable remediation workflows.

Effective exposure management makes it possible to home in on what matters most by providing explainable, contextual intelligence based on actual threat actor activity so you can focus on the highest-impact risks. Tenable's RSO team leverages massive data analysis to provide superior vulnerability coverage and crucial advanced warning of days or weeks on emerging threats, compared to relying on slower external sources like the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) or the CISA KEV.

A unified exposure management platform gives you a contextual view of risk that encompasses vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, overprivileged identities and other weaknesses so you can proactively identify and close gaps across the entire attack surface.

Learn more

View the on-demand webinar, Beyond the Endpoint: Exposure Management That’s Proactive

Cloud security teams are often blind to one of the biggest threats to cloud environments: a web of over-privileged identities that create pathways for attackers. Learn how to regain control of your cloud identities by automating the enforcement of least privilege across your environment.

Key takeaways

1. The gradual accumulation of excessive and unused cloud permissions, known as "permission creep," creates a dangerous attack surface that is difficult to manage manually.
    
2. Effectively enforcing least privilege requires a modern CNAPP integrated with an exposure management platform, combining identity discovery, context-aware risk prioritization and automated remediation.
    
3. By automating the enforcement of least privilege, organizations can significantly reduce their attack surface and simplify compliance without slowing down operations.

Here’s a common scenario: An organization has invested much effort and money to secure its multi-cloud environment, yet it has overlooked a critical area: excessive permissions. As a result, the cloud security team is blind to critical issues such as:

• Zombie admins: Remember the senior engineer who resigned earlier this year? Her account with AWS administration-level privileges is still active, providing a direct path to the organization’s most critical infrastructure.
• Ghost contractors: The third-party team hired to build a big-data analytics platform finished the project last year. They’re gone. But guess what’s is still around: Their role with read/write access to all datasets and storage buckets.
• The "just-in-case" service accounts: The CI/CD pipeline uses a service account to deploy new application instances. This account has permissions for AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), so it can not only create servers – it can also delete or modify any server in the entire account. Yikes.

In this blog post, we’ll look at why organizations struggle with excessive permissions, and we’ll explain how you can prevent this identity-management problem from endangering your multi-cloud environment.

The silent, pervasive problem of permission creep

If you have to protect an environment that’s partly on-premises and partly in multiple cloud platforms, identity is your new perimeter. Every human user, service account and third-party integration represents a potential entry point. When these identities accumulate more access rights than they need – a common yet severe problem – you end up with permission sprawl. Needless to say, attackers stand ready to exploit this massive, hidden attack surface.

The principle of least privilege – granting only the minimum permissions necessary for a task – represents the gold standard for securing these identities. But in dynamic, multi-cloud environments, adopting it is easier said than done.

Why preventing excessive permissions is such a challenge

Excessive permissions rarely happen intentionally. They build up over time through a process of "permission creep,” as illustrated by the hypothetical example we outlined earlier.

A single compromised account with standing, excessive privileges can be the starting point for a devastating attack. Attackers use these permissions to move laterally across your environment, escalate their own privileges and ultimately find and steal your most sensitive data. The worst part? Most organizations lack the visibility to even know it’s happening until it’s too late.

From manual chaos to automated control

If you’re trying to right-size permissions manually, you’re playing a frustrating and never-ending game of whack-a-mole that you’ll never win. With fragmented visibility across AWS, Azure, GCP and Kubernetes, it’s nearly impossible to answer a simple question: "Who has access to what, and do they actually need it?" Relying on multiple, siloed tools only exacerbates the problem, creating blind spots that attackers can easily exploit.

To truly enforce least privilege at scale, you need a new approach that combines comprehensive visibility with intelligent context and powerful automation. This is where a modern cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) becomes essential.

Achieve least privilege with Tenable Cloud Security

The goal isn't just to find risky permissions; it's to eliminate them proactively and systematically without slowing down your operations. Tenable Cloud Security, powered by the Tenable One Exposure Management Platform, provides the clarity, context and control needed to enforce least privilege across your entire hybrid, multi-cloud footprint.

It achieves this through three core pillars:

1. Comprehensive identity discovery: Tenable Cloud Security continuously and agentlessly maps every single identity across your environments. It identifies their effective permissions, detects orphaned accounts and flags unused roles, giving you a complete and always-current inventory of your identities.
2. Contextual risk correlation: A user with admin access to a non-critical development server is a concern. However, a service account with excessive permissions to a database containing sensitive customer data can trigger a crisis. Tenable One correlates identity risks with other exposures like software vulnerabilities, system misconfigurations and sensitive data locations. This provides crucial context, allowing you to focus on the most dangerous attack paths first.
3. Automated enforcement of least privilege: Tenable Cloud Security not only detects excessive permission problems; it helps you fix them at scale. You can define custom policies to restrict admin privileges or enforce multi-factor authentication. More importantly, it can automatically revoke unused permissions, tighten overly broad identity and access management (IAM) policies or trigger just-in-time (JIT) access workflows. This ensures privileges don't overstay their welcome, drastically reducing the window of opportunity for attackers.

Take back control of your cloud identities

In our hypothetical example, here’s how Tenable would immediately help the organization get a handle on their cloud identity chaos:

• Tenable instantly flags the zombie admin account as a high-risk, dormant identity with excessive privileges, and the cloud security team deactivates it with a single click.
• The contractor's role is identified as a critical threat to the cloud data stores. Using Tenable, the cloud security team generates a new, right-sized IAM policy based on the permissions required by the role. This policy becomes their template for all contractors.
• Every single permission in the CI/CD service account is surfaced, pinpointing the permissions it needs and the ones it doesn’t use, so they can be adjusted accordingly.

By transitioning from a state of persistent, excessive access to a model of "just enough, just in time" permissions, Tenable helps you boost your security posture by enforcing least privilege, yielding you benefits like:

• Reducing the attack surface: Eliminate the pathways attackers use for privilege escalation and lateral movement.
• Strengthening access control: Prevent data loss by ensuring no identity has more access than it absolutely requires.
• Simplifying compliance: Continuously demonstrate and enforce access governance against standards from organizations like the Center for Internet Security (CIS), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).
• Securing DevOps at scale: Embed entitlement checks directly into CI/CD pipelines so new identities start with secure, minimal permissions by default.

Don't let excessive permissions become the keys that attackers use to breach your cloud environment. Reclaim control over your cloud identity perimeter.

Ready to learn more? Click here to see how Tenable Cloud Security can help you discover, prioritize, and remediate risky permissions to achieve true least privilege at scale.

Part two of our Exposure Management Academy series on exposure management maturity explores how organizations like Drogaria Araujo, Tenable and Verizon have applied exposure management to strengthen their security postures. 

Key takeaways:

1. Case studies of Drogaria Araujo, Tenable and Verizon illustrate how exposure management provides tangible benefits to organizations of different sizes and security maturity levels.
    
2. The companies improved visibility, unified siloed data and prioritized risks that create attack paths leading to their organizations’ most critical assets.
    
3. Implementing exposure management principles is a crucial step for organizations aiming to enhance their security posture and mitigate cyber threats effectively.

In the first post in this series, we explored the five stages of the Exposure Management Maturity Model: Ad Hoc, Defined, Standardized, Advanced and Optimized. 

In this post, we explore three case studies to understand how an exposure management platform can help organizations advance their cybersecurity programs. We look at how the core principles of exposure management, supported via the implementation of an exposure management platform, helped these companies achieve better cybersecurity and compliance outcomes.

Drogaria Araujo uses exposure management to improve attack surface visibility 

Drogaria Araujo, a leading Brazilian pharmacy chain, turned to exposure management to improve attack surface visibility and gain the context the CISO needed to report on his company’s highest-risk exposures and demonstrate compliance with Brazil’s General Data Protection Law (LGPD). 

Drogaria Araujo relies on a geographically dispersed, hybrid infrastructure consisting of traditional IT systems and a rapidly growing cloud footprint. Prior to embracing exposure management, the company’s initial security practices depended on basic vulnerability assessment of their IT infrastructure. This resulted in a storm of noisy findings — and a lot of remediation tickets — which strained security and IT teams, despite the fact that these assessments didn’t pull in findings from cloud, identity or OT systems.

Typically, most organizations would look to evolve vulnerability assessment to a vulnerability management program, or maybe a more robust risk-based vulnerability management program. But the firm’s team set its sights on a holistic exposure management program that could better satisfy its needs, one that accounted for the expanding attack surface and encompassed all cybersecurity risks that lead to exposure. 

The company said it selected the Tenable One Exposure Management platform because it provides a unified view of the attack surface across on-premises, cloud, identity and OT environments. This enables the security team to spot cloud misconfigurations and identity-related weaknesses, in addition to traditional software vulnerabilities, that, when combined, create attack paths for threat actors.

Drogaria Araujo’s experience demonstrates how an organization can quickly and cost-effectively expand its visibility with an exposure management platform.

Tenable turns to exposure management to integrate and unify security data 

At Tenable, the need to consolidate security data from across more than 50 tools, improve prioritization and automate reporting were the catalysts for implementing an exposure management program. 

Tenable’s CSO began the exposure management journey by establishing a central team that could own all security policies across various security domains, including vulnerability management, cloud security, web application security and others. It made sense to extend the charter of the vulnerability management team to exposure management as the central control point. But this alone was not enough.

Tenable recognized it also needed to unify its asset and risk data across disparate tools, so it used the Tenable One Exposure Management Platform to aggregate data from Tenable-specific tools and provide rich relationship context, prioritization and KPIs. Following Tenable’s acquisition of Vulcan Cyber, the security team was able to feed data from third-party tools into Tenable One. 

Within the first 48 hours of turning on this new third-party data ingestion capability, Tenable was able to integrate and unify data from 15 third-party tools. Reporting, which previously took the security team an average of three days to manually create, became available in minutes. In addition, the exposure management team was able to extend its scope of visibility from less than 10,000 assets to more than 100,000, representing the entire attack surface, and reduce alert to ticket volume by 1,500 to 1 — all with the same number of staff. 

Assess your exposure management maturity

Do you have elements of an exposure management program in place? Take our exposure management maturity assessment to find out. 

Verizon uses exposure management to prioritize real-world risks and exploitable threats 

Global telecommunications leader Verizon faced the inherent challenges of managing one of the most vast and complex attack surfaces in the world. Like many large organizations, security teams at Verizon had traditionally operated in silos, each with its own specialized tools and priorities for areas like attack surface management, vulnerability scanning, identity exposure and cloud security. 

However, this siloed approach hindered efficient response and raised the potential for visibility gaps falling outside a team's specific area of responsibility or expertise. Recognizing that a reactive approach to managing risk wasn’t enough, Verizon shifted its cybersecurity focus to proactive exposure management. 

In a recent case study and blog post, Verizon said it chose to consolidate its proactive security efforts onto a single platform — Tenable One. This move enabled the integration of data from various security domains, providing a unified view of assets and associated risks. This consolidation was not just a technological shift but also an organizational one, requiring a change in how teams collaborated and shared data. Through transparent communication and demonstrating early value, Verizon was able to unify its security functions, including previously separate attack surface management, Active Directory, IoT and OT security teams.

A core principle of Verizon's new exposure management program is prioritizing real-world risks and exploitable threats rather than addressing every risk finding. The company prioritizes risks that are part of a realistic attack path leading to "crown jewel" assets. This approach enables it to strategically address the most significant exposures, enabling clearer communication with executives about what is at risk and the most urgent priorities, ultimately shifting from a compliance-driven to a risk-based security posture.

Harnessing the power of exposure management

These case studies illustrate the very real benefits of exposure management. Whether you're looking to unify siloed data or achieve the highest levels of proactive security, exposure management provides the framework.

Learn more

• Ready to understand where your organization stands and how to accelerate your journey? Take our exposure management maturity assessment. In less than five minutes, you’ll get a personalized report with recommendations tailored to your organization.