In September 2023 two extortion crews — Rhysida and the short-lived Ransomed.vc — both posted Sony data claims, complete with a Bitcoin auction and a leaked code-signing certificate. Sony investigated; the claimed 6TB scale never verified.
In September 2023 Cisco rushed out patches for CVE-2023-20237, a critical authentication bypass in BroadWorks' single-sign-on flows that could let attackers authenticate as any user. With evidence of active scanning, carrier admins ran an emergency patch marathon.
In September 2023 Scattered Spider vished the MGM helpdesk, pivoted through Okta to ESXi, and detonated ALPHV ransomware — a $100M quarter for MGM while Caesars paid up. The reference incident for helpdesk verification, MFA fatigue, and pay-vs-rebuild economics.
CVE-2023-4863, a heap overflow in libwebp's Huffman decoding, let the BLASTPASS chain install Pegasus via a zero-click iMessage image — and forced every browser, OS, and Electron app on earth to patch the same line of C.
A London jury convicted the teenage LAPSUS$ hackers whose SIM swaps, MFA-fatigue pushes, and helpdesk manipulation breached Nvidia, Microsoft, Okta, Uber, and Rockstar — closing the criminal case that proved identity is the real perimeter.
CVE-2023-38831 let a crafted WinRAR archive execute attacker code off a decoy file click — and researchers proved APT campaigns had been exploiting the 2004-era parser flaw for months before the August 2023 fix.
Roughly 100,000 Discord.io user accounts were dumped for sale in August 2023 — and the confusion with Discord itself proved that brand-adjacent third parties are breach surface for your users even when your systems are never touched.
August 2023's dual CPU side-channel reveals — Downfall on Intel and Inception on AMD — proved transient execution is a permanent tax on modern computing, payable in microcode updates and measured performance regressions.
The SEC's July 2023 cybersecurity rule put public companies on a four-business-day material-incident filing clock — turning breach disclosure into a rehearsed, enforceable, executive-owned security capability.
The July 2023 NetScaler ADC/Gateway pre-auth RCE hit government networks as a true zero-day — and post-patch webshell persistence taught defenders that appliance remediation means rebuild, not upgrade.
July 2023's WormGPT — a GPT-J-derived, alignment-free chatbot marketed on criminal forums for BEC and phishing — proved offensive automation had hit commodity pricing, killing the bad-grammar phishing tell forever.
China-linked Storm-0558 forged Azure AD tokens with a stolen Microsoft consumer signing key and read email at ~25 organizations including the State and Commerce departments — exposing vendor key hygiene, token scope validation, and log-tiering as board-level security questions.