Company
Proofpoint is a cybersecurity company providing email security and threat intelligence to protect organizations from phishing and malware.
Proofpoint has agreed to acquire Varonis in an all-cash deal valued at about $6.3 billion, or $49.75 a share. Varonis expects the deal to close in the first half of 2027, and until then the two companies stay independent.
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Proofpoint, owned by Thoma Bravo, agreed to buy Varonis for about $6.3 billion on the argument that AI agents and employees now touch the same data. By our estimate the price is 14% above the last close and 2.7 times the April low.
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Proofpoint will ship four Microsoft 365 security features to MSP partners in the fourth quarter, led by a tenant permission-risk map. Its argument is that oversharing and stale guest accounts need cleaning up before customers switch on AI tools, so the partner's first job is a cleanup.
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North Korea's Kimsuky targeted Ukrainian diplomacy and security experts with fake conference invitations, Genians reported Monday. Most observed attempts failed, and Genians' researchers say the aim may be intelligence on the war.
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Microsoft says attackers chained V8 Maglev code-execution bugs with V8 sandbox escapes against Edge and Chrome users who lacked the fixes. Chrome Stable's matching update arrived four days after Edge's, on 8 September.
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Just 474 of the 1,000 most popular websites set DMARC to reject spoofed mail, a dev.to survey of their DNS found. Thirty-two months after Google and Yahoo began requiring DMARC from bulk senders, 84.5% of the sites publish a record, but only 69.4% apply an enforcing policy to all their mail.
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Yubico and Okta's survey of 1,890 tech and security professionals found 23% work where multifactor login is not required on every application. With 88% still rating their company secure, at least one respondent in nine gave both answers.
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Proofpoint says China-aligned TA419 has posed as a former White House official and an Anthropic employee to phish AI policy experts since at least April 2025. The first approach asks for nothing; the credential-stealing link follows only after a target replies.
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Proofpoint says China-aligned TA419 has phished US AI policy experts since April 2025 with a proxy that captures Microsoft session cookies and bypasses MFA. Its fix is passkeys plus out-of-band checks on unsolicited expert outreach.
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Microsoft says Star Blizzard has sent fake event invitations to more than 100 organizations since January, many from hacked WordPress and cPanel sites. The group, long known for stealing email passwords, now uses the messages to install a Windows backdoor.
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Proofpoint says China-aligned TA419 posed as two former US officials and an Anthropic employee to phish AI policy experts' Microsoft accounts. Two recipients flagged the Parker emails by checking with her through another channel, a habit teams fielding advisory requests can adopt.
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Microsoft says Russia's FSB-linked Star Blizzard sent fake event invitations to more than 100 organizations since January 2026. The lures pose as Chatham House and Atlantic Council events and carry a new Python backdoor, CosmicPulse, aimed at people working on Ukraine.
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Microsoft's record September release fixed up to 997 CVEs, including two local escalations to SYSTEM that attackers used before the patch shipped. A 7.8 score understates the step that turns a phishing foothold into control of the machine, so both go ahead of the 9.8 remote flaws.
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Recorded Future says filtering, verification and training still blunt most AI phishing, with deepfaked voice and video the exception. Its advice is to stop treating a familiar face or voice on a call as proof of identity.
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Canada's Cyber Centre says attackers are exploiting CVE-2026-48842, a no-login SQL injection in Roundcube's virtuser_query plugin rated 8.1. Only unpatched servers running that plugin are exposed, and Shadowserver flags 10 vulnerable hosts out of more than 523,000 online.
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Proofpoint says at least four China-linked espionage groups fired the same BlueMoon code at different victims during the four weeks a Chromium fix took to reach stable Chrome, and two more groups probably did too.
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Volexity attributes September 1 spear-phishing at multiple NGOs to the Chinese cluster UTA0560. The chain used two Chrome flaws and one in Windows ALPC, and a second China-nexus actor ran the same chain.
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LastPass traced a fake Authenticator hosted on GitHub to a months-long impersonation campaign that spoofed at least 40 organizations, including its own brand. The server steering victims to the download was still being updated in September.
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Proofpoint says an unknown actor sprayed over 5,700 M365 accounts in Chile and breached only seven, all dormant service accounts at one retailer. Employee logins held, and those seven unused accounts still gave the attacker mail, Teams chats, OneDrive files and, in one case, the Azure portal.
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Have I Been Squatted found Corp MDM, a small Android implant that takes newly arriving SMS and switches on call forwarding, sharing one hard-coded address with the credential phishing and Windows malware aimed at the same sector.
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Security · September 21, 2026 · Confirmed3 publishers
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