Article
Top Tips to Improve Cybersecurity Today
Arete Analysis
By Kevin Baker
When I work with clients, I mention a good many things they can do to improve their security. Sometimes I’ll advise on an area I think they need to understand about their company. Sometimes I’ll suggest implementing specific security controls. Some things I propose are very important; others are “nice to haves.” And while my recommendations may change based on the attributes of the client company and the skill level of those involved in fighting the good fight, there are always six things I tell every client.
1: Clean up accounts
Clean up the accounts in your Windows domain by eliminating every account that doesn’t have a valid business purpose — and that includes both human identity and service (aka machine identity) accounts. Software on your servers uses service accounts to perform a specific function, often with a high level of privilege.
“Stale” accounts create unneeded risk and only up the chances of attackers succeeding in their mission. If you don’t understand why an account exists, either justify its existence or carefully remove it.
2: Ditch unnecessary data
Understand what sensitive data is for your company and locate every instance of what you deem sensitive across both your corporate and cloud environments. Most companies think they know where sensitive data is because they’ve asked the subject matter experts (SMEs). Nothing against SMEs, but the best practice is to examine and verify the file stores and network.
Rarely have I seen assumed inventory be accurate. What we think we have is usually orders of magnitude less than what is ultimately discovered.
As with stale accounts, stale data and unneeded or unknown copies of data create big risk. When a breach happens, the accumulation of stale data across file servers, public drives, and email clients will only make a bad day that much worse. So, if you don’t need it, get rid of it.
3: Use multifactor authentication
Passwords are no longer enough to guarantee protection and should be considered table stakes. Why? Because billions of passwords have been lost in breaches of high-profile companies, and people are prone to re-using passwords. A lost password in one place usually exposes multiple accounts and locations.
What’s more, supercomputing and artificial intelligence (AI) can eventually crack nearly every password. For this reason, multifactor authentication (MFA) is one of the best ways to protect your identity, your data, and your reputation. It’s well worth the time, effort, and expense to use MFA.
4. Make cybersecurity everyone’s responsibility
Step one in building an information security training program: Set expectations. Companies need to be clear with regards to employee responsibility around use of company systems and data. Though words cannot protect us directly, policies, standards, and guidelines are useful in setting a standard of due care that employees can clearly understand.
While there are many good security-awareness programs and resources available that teach social-engineering resistance and good security practices, they may not be worth the time or investment without a clear mandate from the company stating expectations of behavior and technical conditions.
Set a simple, but powerful policy: “Every employee is responsible for protecting the data entrusted to our company.”
5. Write an incident response plan
It’s an oft repeated phrase because it’s true: Breaches are not a matter of if, but when. So, don’t wait until it’s too late. Write an incident response plan now and don’t be caught flat-footed at a most critical moment.
And remember, security is not solely a technology problem, it’s also a business problem. IT plays a big role and may drive most of the actions during a breach, but they cannot effectively handle response alone. Everyone in the company is a stakeholder and every department should have a representative on the incident response (IR) team. Thus, make sure your plan assigns specific people to respond, including IT, management, and business representatives.
Inter-departmental communication is key to a swift response and should be part of what you practice. For example, who will talk to the news crews out front? Be sure to media-train personnel or have a crisis communication firm on speed dial. In fact, be sure to have all key contacts listed in your IR plan, including those for all related services or vendors. And regardless of how many venders you use, be sure to have clarity on the internal team as to who will coordinate the response and look after your company’s best interests.
Once you write your plan, practice it — again and again. You’ll improve every time, building muscle memory for fast detection and fast reaction to events that help ensure your success, not the bad guy’s. At a minimum, a good response will greatly minimize an event’s impact and, even if not wholly prevented, still add up to thousands of dollars saved.
6. Have a solid backup plan
Make sure you have a solid back up plan that includes offline copies.
Ransomware is a modern plague that’s costing the United States trillions of dollars per year. That money is going to fund organized crime, human trafficking, and terrorism. The bad actors will not stop what they are doing, and they will get around to you eventually.
As technology advanced, the use of backup tapes fell off, replaced by backups made to storage systems, the cloud, or both. If those online copies are protected by a Windows domain password, you will probably lose them. The first thing the threat actors will do is crack all the admin passwords and log into wherever you store those backups and encrypt them. Next, they’ll encrypt your endpoints, laptops and servers, and send a ransom note.
Expect to be attacked and prepare for it, not only by backing up your data, but also by having at least one offline copy of every critical system. An offline copy that cannot be accessed from any network will ensure that even if you are faced with a massive cleanup of encrypted systems, you’ll avoid having to pay a ransom.
Ransoms often cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and may even run into the millions, so the cost of a solid disaster recovery plan, including offline copies, is peanuts by comparison.
Don’t make it easy on the bad guy
Like water, cybercriminals often take the path of least resistance. So, move, morph, and make your company a harder target to hit.
Want to see an immediate impact? Implement MFA. Want to harden your security over time? Find out and continue to track where your crown jewels reside.
These six steps are all within reach of every company. Start today, and get it done.
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Europol Disrupts AudiA6 Crypto Laundering Service
European authorities have dismantled AudiA6, a major cryptocurrency laundering service linked to ransomware groups and broader cybercriminal networks. Between 2022 and 2025, the platform is believed to have processed over €336 million in illicit funds, enabling threat actors to obscure financial trails and monetize cybercrime proceeds. Its operators are also suspected of running Dark2Web, a dark web forum that facilitated collaboration, services, and connections among cybercriminals globally. This development underscores the expanding role of sophisticated, large-scale cryptocurrency laundering services in sustaining the cybercrime economy, enabling threat actors to obscure illicit funds and evade regulatory controls.
What’s Notable and Unique
Following law enforcement disruption of Cryptex and Garantex, AudiA6 emerged as another platform involved in financial activities linked to ransomware groups. Investigators believe that AudiA6 became a central hub for cybercriminals seeking to launder stolen digital assets while obscuring the transaction trail from authorities.
On June 10, 2026, a coordinated operation resulted in two arrests in Georgia, the dismantling of key infrastructure (30+ servers, 25 domains), the freezing or seizure of over €778,000 in crypto, and the takedown of the AudiA6 and Dark2Web platforms.
Analyst Comments
Ransomware groups and cybercriminal networks are increasingly leveraging sophisticated techniques, including chain-hopping, decentralized exchanges, and mixer-as-a-service platforms, to rapidly move illicit cryptocurrency across multiple blockchains, effectively obscuring transaction trails. Concurrently, the widespread use of fraudulent exchange accounts, mule wallets, and privacy-enhancing tools has elevated cryptocurrency laundering to a core enabler of the cybercrime ecosystem, allowing actors to bypass anti-money-laundering controls at scale. This investigation identified over 6,000 KYC records linked to money-mule accounts, many of which were tied to Russian-speaking intermediaries specifically recruited to facilitate the movement of illicit proceeds. These threat actors systematically used both commercial and domain-controlled email services to establish mule accounts across multiple cryptocurrency platforms. Collectively, these findings underscore the growing scale, coordination, and professionalization of cryptocurrency-enabled crime, highlighting the critical need for sustained, intelligence-led, and internationally coordinated efforts to disrupt these evolving financial ecosystems.
Sources
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Threat Actors Leverage AI for EDR Evasion
A threat actor has developed and deployed a ransomware attack toolkit enhanced with AI-assisted development workflows, enabling automated Active Directory (AD) discovery and improved EDR evasion capabilities. The toolkit leverages agent-based AI systems, such as Claude’s Opus and Cursor agents, for iterative malware development, testing, and refinement.
What’s Notable and Unique
Researchers have highlighted that this toolkit can not only generate ransomware code but also bypass sophisticated security defenses and identify AD networks for malware distribution.
The framework incorporates multiple capabilities, including automated AD discovery and reconnaissance mechanisms, iterative EDR testing environments to refine evasion techniques, and a command-and-control (C2) infrastructure that leverages Telegram APIs and Cloudflare redirectors for stealth.
Additionally, some agents were tasked with checking security research and technical posts for various bypass techniques. The agents recognized what was required for reproduction, extracted the techniques, mapped them to the MITRE ATT&CK knowledge base of adversary behaviors, set up a test lab, carried out the methodology, and reported the results.
After a few repetitions, the modules seemed to avoid nearly all EDR solutions, despite the agent’s initial suggestion of a high failure rate. Although researchers found no evidence that AI was embedded in deployed malware or was operating independently in victim environments, the technology was still used to accelerate the iterative process of developing, testing, and refining payloads against security products, shortening the period between the publication of offensive security research and its practical implementation by threat actors.
Analyst Comments
AI-driven tools like this could accelerate the pace and sophistication of ransomware attacks, enabling even relatively inexperienced actors to launch high-impact campaigns. This development underscores the urgent need for security solutions to adapt to AI-assisted threats. Organizations must respond by strengthening detection engineering, improving visibility across environments, and maintaining robust security fundamentals.
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CMS Vulnerability Leads to ClickFix Campaign
Threat actors compromised at least 700 education and technology websites in a recent ClickFix campaign by exploiting a critical SQL injection flaw (CVE-2026-26980) in the Ghost content management system (CMS). Adversaries combined the vulnerability with the ClickFix social engineering tactic to steal admin keys and inject a malicious JavaScript that delivers a fake Cloudflare or CAPTCHA verification pop-up, tricking victims into copying and pasting a malicious command into their systems.
What’s Notable and Unique
Rather than targeting the end user first, this campaign is unique in its initial exploitation of the system, followed by social engineering attempts. This hybrid attack style is likely being leveraged to bypass traditional defenses.
This recent campaign also highlights how trusted web properties can be weaponized at scale and coupled with unpatched CMS vulnerabilities. Rather than using the CMS compromise to perpetrate a single attack, threat actors turned it into a supply-chain attack that ultimately affected over 700 trusted websites.
Analyst Comments
As network defenders and their tools enhance threat detection capabilities, adversaries increasingly seek methods to bypass these defenses. By combining vulnerability exploitation, social engineering techniques, and staging for ancillary attacks, this campaign successfully bypassed traditional defenses and inflicted significant impact. Defending against hybrid cyberattacks requires comprehensive security controls beyond simply patching vulnerabilities. Organizations should focus on limiting movement within the environment, detecting abuse of trusted applications, and preventing end-user manipulation.
Sources
700+ education and tech websites hijacked in huge ClickFix malware campaign
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