The IT Nerd

SafeBreach today announced it has been approved for both leading frontier AI security programs: Anthropic’s Cyber Verification Program (CVP) and OpenAI’s Daybreak Blue (Trusted Access for Cyber). These identity-verified frameworks unlock the use of frontier models, including GPT-5.6-Cyber and Claude Opus and Sonnet, for the legitimate offensive-security research the SafeBreach attack content team and AI-assisted tooling utilize to provide faster, more realistic attack content for customers. 

Anthropic and OpenAI each review an organization’s legitimacy and the nature of its security work before approving specific accounts for advanced security research. Anthropic’s CVP covers what it calls “High-Risk Dual Use” research, such as vulnerability research and security testing. OpenAI’s Daybreak Blue covers defensive security work such as malware analysis, detection engineering, and incident response.

SafeBreach Labs can apply frontier models from both labs to threat analysis and attack-behavior research, shortening the path from new adversary research to production-safe validation content in the SafeBreach CTEM Platform. Every attack scenario is still written, tested, and validated by SafeBreach Labs before it ships.

The SafeBreach CTEM Platform is utilized by some of the largest financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, and transportation organizations in the world to enable a true closed-loop exposure management program that provides measurable risk reduction and enhanced cyber resilience. The SafeBreach CTEM Platform is grounded in the company’s award-winning adversarial exposure validation (AEV) capabilities and is powered by SafeBreach Helm, the AI infrastructure layer that orchestrates three purpose-built AI agents designed to operationalize the full CTEM lifecycle. Users engage with the platform via SafeBreach Helm’s intuitive, natural-language interface to continuously identify, validate, and resolve exposures. Together, the SafeBreach CTEM Platform and SafeBreach Helm help organizations evolve from fragmented, reactive practices to a unified, intelligence-driven exposure management program grounded in proven AEV and elevated by AI.

To learn more about the SafeBreach CTEM Platform, SafeBreach Helm and SafeBreach Labs, visit:

• SafeBreach CTEM Platform product page 
• SafeBreach Helm product page
• SafeBreach Labs research page

SafeBreach today announced a strategic integration with Anvilogic, the leading Agentic SecOps platform. The two-way integration utilizes the real-world attack simulation results from the SafeBreach CTEM Platform to reveal where security controls fall short, while the Anvilogic platform transforms those findings into deployable, tuned detections and hands off to the customer’s existing response tools to close the loop. SafeBreach then continuously validates those detections against the same attack simulations, creating a closed-loop workflow that helps security teams identify security gaps, improve detection quality, and measurably reduce operational risk.

As security teams accelerate their adoption of AI-powered SOC capabilities, the challenge they face has evolved: it’s no longer just about creating detections faster, but rather ensuring those detections are working and effective against real threats. Up to now, attack simulations surfaced gaps, detections were built separately, and validation was time-consuming and manual. In an AI-driven SOC where detections are autonomously generated and deployed, the lack of a validation process capable of keeping pace creates a critical blind spot, leading to a security strategy that is based on assumptions rather than proof.

The SafeBreach–Anvilogic integration addresses this challenge directly by providing a closed-loop workflow that seamlessly connects attack simulation, detection engineering, and continuous validation.

How the Integration Works

1. Validate: The SafeBreach CTEM Platform validates an organization’s production security controls against 33,000+ real attack methods to identify critical gaps in control coverage.
2. Trigger: The validated findings automatically trigger the Anvilogic Continuous Detection Validation Blueprint—Anvilogic’s agentic automation layer that converts a SafeBreach finding into a high-fidelity production detection.
3. Review & Confirm Coverage: The Blueprint reviews the finding against Anvilogic’s library of thousands of MITRE ATT&CK–mapped detections, checks which already fire on the technique, and builds new coverage only where a real gap exists.
4. Create, Test & Tune: Where a gap is real, the Blueprint authors a new detection, tests it, and tunes it against the environment—across an organization’s SIEM, data lake, or a hybrid stack.
5. Deploy with Approval: The tuned detection is prepared for production behind a human approval gate, so nothing proceeds without an explicit sign-off.
6. Re-Validate & Close the Loop: The SafeBreach CTEM Platform re-runs the simulations to confirm the control now catches the attacks.

The loop runs daily, providing continuous board-ready, audit-grade evidence that identified gaps are not only closed, but remain so over time. As a result, security teams experience one unified workflow that accelerates detection maturity and measurably reduces risk with:

• Coverage that is validated, not assumed: Proven against 33,000+ real-world attack methods within the SafeBreach CTEM Platform with an evidence trail tying each gap to its deployed fix.
• Gaps that are closed, not queued: Findings no longer die in a backlog; the loop runs daily and converts validated gaps into deployed detections.
• Teams that scale without staffing: The remediation work that previously required additional detection engineers runs as a Blueprint, expanding coverage without adding headcount.

Visit SafeBreach booth #1364 at Black Hat USA from August 1-6, where SafeBreach and Anvilogic product experts will be on hand to demonstrate this integration. Schedule a time to connect at https://www.safebreach.com/black-hat-usa-2026/

SafeBreach Labs has uncovered a new one-click sandbox escape technique in Windows 11 that allows an attacker to achieve escalated code execution and arbitrary write from a low-integrity process with nothing more than a single user click.

The research shows how multiple legitimate Windows features can be chained together to achieve arbitrary write outside the sandbox, including COM objects, toast notifications, Snipping Tool URI handlers, Microsoft Teams, and Chromium’s remote debugging functionality. The attack requires only a single user click on a spoofed notification and does not rely on dropping traditional malware or third-party tools.

The SafeBreach Labs team is available to discuss:

• How undocumented COM AppID flags allowed low-integrity processes to launch medium-integrity server processes.
• The abuse of Windows notifications and URI handlers to execute attacker-controlled actions outside the sandbox boundary.
• How Microsoft Teams and Chromium debugging functionality were leveraged to achieve arbitrary write using only native Windows applications.
• Why chaining together legitimate operating system components creates dangerous attack paths that are difficult for defenders to detect.

Click Or Trick (CVE-2025-59199): Escaping the Sandbox with Windows URIs: https://www.safebreach.com/blog/click-or-trick-cve-2025-59199-escaping-the-sandbox-with-windows-uris/

SafeBreach today announced the launch of its AI-powered Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) solution. This solution is designed to help organizations move beyond siloed security activities toward a complete, closed-loop CTEM program that continuously identifies, prioritizes, and remediates cyber risk at scale.

As enterprises struggle with challenges like AI-generated threats, tool fatigue, and alert overload, traditional reactive security measures are no longer sufficient. Organizations are increasingly turning to the five-phased CTEM framework developed by Gartner™ as a more proactive way to manage exposures, but this has historically required the manual integration of disparate tools, datasets and processes.

SafeBreach is changing that with a unified solution that operationalizes the full CTEM lifecycle. The solution is grounded in the SafeBreach Exposure Validation Platform, which provides the safe, scalable adversarial exposure validation (AEV) capabilities that underpin the entire CTEM framework. Building on this foundation, the SafeBreach Helm AI Agent unifies the platform’s AEV capabilities with data and insights from a customer’s existing security ecosystem to provide a complete 360-degree CTEM solution that ensures exposures are not only identified but continuously validated and resolved.

SafeBreach Helm accomplishes this with a specialized set of capabilities aligned to each CTEM stage. Users query Helm with simple, conversational prompts to initiate each CTEM phase:

1. The Scoping Phase: SafeBreach Helm leverages contextual data from Threat Intelligence (TI) tools to identify critical assets, business priorities, and relevant segments of the attack surface.
2. The Discovery Phase: SafeBreach Helm continuously aggregates and correlates exposure data across internal and external environments, using Vulnerability Management (VM) and External Attack Surface Management (EASM) tools.
3. The Prioritization Phase: SafeBreach Helm uses asset context from the Discovery phase to precisely highlight the exposures that present the greatest risk, helping users cut through the noise. 
4. The Validation Phase: SafeBreach Helm utilizes the breach and attack simulation (BAS) of SafeBreach Validate and the attack path validation of SafeBreach Propagate to confirm the exploitability of the highlighted exposures and map realistic attack paths using real-world adversary techniques.
5. The Mobilization Phase: SafeBreach Helm uses SafeBreach’s AI Remediation technology to translate validated findings into actionable guidance that can be shared with Security Information and Event Management (SIEM); Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR); and other workflow management and ticketing tools—including ServiceNow and Jira— to enable teams to remediate risk efficiently and effectively.

Key Offerings of the CTEM by SafeBreach Solution:

• SafeBreach Helm: The AI CTEM Agent that unifies data from sources including AEV, TI, VM, EASM, SIEM, SOAR, and other workflow management and ticketing tools into a single, intelligent interface for proactive risk management.
• AEV: The SafeBreach Exposure Validation Platform, which combines SafeBreach Validate to test control effectiveness and SafeBreach Propagate to reveal how adversaries could traverse environments to reach critical assets.
• AI Remediation: Provides context-aware, AI-driven guidance and integrates with SIEM, SOAR, and ticketing systems to operationalize remediation workflows and accelerate risk reduction.
• Breach Studio: Advanced capabilities to design custom attack scenarios, including a VS Code extension for environment-specific testing.
• Exposure Hub (Upcoming): A centralized hub that correlates data from VM, EASM, and other tools to provide comprehensive visibility into the attack surface.

Built for large, distributed environments, the CTEM by SafeBreach solution empowers organizations to evolve from fragmented, reactive security practices to a unified, AI-driven CTEM program—grounded in proven AEV and elevated by SafeBreach Helm—to deliver continuous, measurable risk reduction aligned to real-world attacker behavior.

To learn more about the CTEM by SafeBreach solution or the SafeBreach Helm Agent: 

• Visit the CTEM by SafeBreach solution page
• Schedule a customized demo 

Read the recent blog about SafeBreach Helm

Happy Monday. You may want to keep an eye on CVE-2026-24061 which is a critical telnetd authentication bypass flaw that attackers are actively exploiting to gain root access: New research from SafeBreach Labs deepens the story with the first full root cause analysis and proof-of-concept exploit that explains exactly how this vulnerability works—and why it’s highly dangerous and easy to exploit. 

The researchers have also released tooling and simulation artifacts that allow organizations to test exposure. 

The full research blog available here.

SafeBreach has released its 2026 State of the Breach Report, analyzing results from millions of real-world attack simulations conducted by large, global enterprises over a 12-month period using the SafeBreach Exposure Validation Platform.

The report provides never-before-seen insights about how enterprises fared against 2025’s high-profile threats by examining how security controls actually performed under real attack conditions, moving beyond traditional metrics such as alerts generated, patches applied, or tools deployed. Drawing on more than 1.8 million high-fidelity simulations executed throughout 2025, the data shows where modern enterprise defenses are performing well, where threats continue to evade controls, and how outcomes differ across industries, threat actors, and MITRE ATT&CK techniques.

Key findings show that attacks like ransomware were consistently prevented, while stealthy, identity-driven campaigns continue to evade enterprise defenses. The data highlights persistent gaps in credential abuse, post-compromise activity, and lateral movement, with more than 60% of organizations exposing harvestable credentials during testing. The report also finds that industries with integrated, centralized security stacks demonstrate stronger resilience, while fragmented IT/OT and endpoint-heavy environments fail regardless of budget or tool count.

You can read the report here: https://www.safebreach.com/white-papers/safebreach-2026-state-of-the-breach-report/

The U.S. government recently issued two critical cybersecurity alerts: AA25-141A and AA25-141B. These alerts highlighted a surge in sophisticated threat activity, from Russian state-sponsored campaigns to the rise of LummaC2 malware. SafeBreach recently published in-depth breakdowns of both alerts, offering insights into the attack chains and how enterprises can validate their defenses against them.

Links to the related blog posts can be found here:

• AA25-141A
• AA25-141B

 SafeBreach today announced the launch of its enhanced Managed Security Service Provider (MSSP) program, an expanded element of the company’s successful “Elevate” partner initiative that was unveiled in 2024. The new MSSP program is specifically designed to support service providers who host, manage, or resell SafeBreach’s continuous security validation solutions, enabling them to deliver greater value to their clients while accelerating their own business growth.

Following the recent launch of the SafeBreach exposure validation platform in February, this new MSSP program represents the company’s continued commitment to empowering partners with the tools, resources, and support needed to address the evolving cybersecurity challenges that organizations face today.

The enhanced MSSP program builds on the strengths of SafeBreach’s previous partner framework, incorporating industry best practices to enhance growth, scalability, and reliability. The program provides a clear framework for partners to establish consistent client engagement expectations, ensuring successful deployment and ongoing management of SafeBreach’s security validation solutions.

SafeBreach empowers partners to accelerate business growth by expanding their client services portfolio with advanced, continuous security validation. Through scalable and automated simulations, partners can help their clients better understand, detect, and defend against cyber threats.

Key benefits of the enhanced MSSP program include:

• Comprehensive Solution Portfolio: Partners can offer clients continuous security validation through SafeBreach’s Validate and Propagate solutions, providing a more holistic view of cyber risk
• Seamless Technology Integration: The SafeBreach ecosystem integrates into existing client technology stacks, giving partners confidence in compatibility and enhancing client satisfaction
• Accelerated Sales Cycles: By streamlining security vendor evaluations, SafeBreach enables clients to make faster, more informed product decisions
• Increased Revenue Opportunities: Partners can assess clients’ security postures and offer targeted recommendations, such as optimizing existing licenses or identifying opportunities for new security solutions

With traditional, point-in-time security control validation tactics like penetration testing and red teaming proving insufficient, organizations increasingly need comprehensive and continuous views of security performance combined with prioritized remediation of gaps. The SafeBreach exposure validation platform addresses this need with an innovative combination of breach and attack simulation (BAS) and attack path validation that provides enterprises with deeper insight into threat exposure and a more holistic view of cyber risk.

Through this enhanced MSSP program, SafeBreach partners can now more effectively help their clients combat the ongoing challenges of an evolving threat landscape. “The updates to the SafeBreach MSSP program and strategy build on the strengths of our previous program to position our partners as trusted advisors,” added Wilkinson. “As a result, they can better help their clients select, validate, and implement a comprehensive security validation platform.”

For more information on the Elevate MSSP program, visit https://www.safebreach.com/partners/. 

SafeBreach, the leader in enterprise security validation, today announced the launch of the SafeBreach exposure validation platform, which combines the power of its time-tested breach and attack simulation (BAS) product—now called Validate—and its new attack path validation product, Propagate. Together, they provide enterprise security teams with deeper insight into threat exposure and a more comprehensive view of cyber risk, a concept most recently described by Gartner® as “adversarial exposure validation.”

According to Gartner, “Adversarial exposure validation technologies offer offensive security technologies simulating threat actor tactics, techniques and procedures to validate the existence of exploitable exposures and test security control effectiveness.”

Attack path validation specifically can play a significant role in combatting the ongoing challenge of cyber attacks—including ransomware and nation-state attacks whose primary goal is to gain a foothold within large organizations and move laterally to steal critical information and assets. Products like SafeBreach Propagate can help enterprises proactively understand these real attack paths and take preemptive action to close them off. However, large enterprises have had legitimate concerns about the inherent risks that some solutions present to their environments.  

Facing increasingly severe cybersecurity incidents, tool fatigue, deployment complexity, and alert overload, enterprise CISOs need a single exposure validation platform that combines multiple critical security capabilities to provide a more holistic view of cyber risk and empower them to make data-driven decisions to manage it.

To address this need, SafeBreach has launched the SafeBreach exposure validation platform, a suite of exposure validation tools that provide end-to-end visibility into the effectiveness of security controls and the potential impact of a successful breach. The platform draws on SafeBreach’s ten-year history working with the world’s most mature enterprise organizations to offer: 

• Enterprise-Grade Safety: The platform is purpose-built to meet the stringent safety and privacy requirements of large enterprises, enabling comprehensive security testing without impacting customer environments.
• Predictable Scalability: Regardless of the environment or deployment model, the SafeBreach platform allows clients to get started with a breadth and depth of testing that provides immediate value—then scale up when they are ready. 
• World-Class Support: The SafeBreach platform is backed by world-renowned threat researchers and an award-winning customer success team who provide a level of service and support not available anywhere else. 

The SafeBreach exposure validation platform enables clients to leverage Validate to identify security gaps, then dig deeper with Propagate to understand what an attacker could accomplish by exploiting them to develop a more comprehensive understanding of cyber risk—all from one convenient management console.

Looking toward the future, SafeBreach plans to continue to develop not only its existing capabilities in Validate and Propagate, but also new capabilities within the SafeBreach exposure validation platform to continue serving the needs of the enterprise market.

Schedule a customized demo here.

In August of 2024, SafeBreach labs security researcher Alon Leviev discovered Windows Downdate, which was first presented at Black Hat USA 2024 and DEF CON 32 (2024), where he developed a tool to take over the Windows Update process to craft custom downgrades on critical OS components to expose previously fixed vulnerabilities. Using this downgrade ability, he discovered CVE-2024-21302, a privilege escalation vulnerability affecting the entire Windows virtualization stack.

While CVE-2024-21302 was patched because it crossed a defined security boundary, the Windows Update takeover, which was also reported to Microsoft, has remained unpatched because it did not cross a defined security boundary. Alon’s follow-up research exposes a severe flaw in Windows Update that allows the reactivation of the “ItsNotASecurityBoundary” Driver Signature Enforcement (DSE) bypass, permitting the loading of unsigned kernel drivers. This can be exploited to deploy custom rootkits, disable security features, and compromise system integrity.

You can read more here.