Galactic Research: Articles & Insights
Threat Thursday: June 18th, 2026
Welcome to Threat Thursday, Galactic's weekly threat intelligence roundup. Every Thursday we break down the cybersecurity stories that matter most for protecting your organization, with each item split into what happened, what it could mean for you, and what to ...
AI Security
OpenClaw's Marketplace Got Stuffed With Malware. Here's Why That Was Always Going to Happen.
What a Malware-Filled AI Agent Marketplace Tells Us About How the Industry Keeps Making the Same Mistake I've spent the better part of my career watching organizations adopt new technology faster than they can secure it, and documenting what happens ...
The Deepfake Was Convincing. So Was My Backpack.
Why Social Engineering Still Works, Why AI is Making it Sharper, and the One Habit that Stops it In early 2024, an employee at Arup, a global engineering firm, joined a video call with several colleagues, including someone who appeared ...
The Invisible Workforce
The Shadow AI Running Inside Your Clients' Environments and How MSPs Can Get Ahead of It It's Monday morning. A client's controller is on the phone. She spent Friday afternoon cleaning up the vendor list inside their accounting platform's new ...
Threat Intelligence
Threat Thursday: June 18th, 2026
Welcome to Threat Thursday, Galactic's weekly threat intelligence roundup. Every Thursday we break down the cybersecurity stories that matter most for protecting your organization, with each item split into what happened, what it could mean for you, and what to ...
Threat Thursday: June 11th, 2026
Welcome to Threat Thursday, Galactic's weekly threat intelligence roundup. This week's stories share one theme: the gap between a vulnerability becoming public and a working exploit existing is collapsing toward hours, and the coordinated disclosure process meant to give defenders ...
Threat Thursday: June 4th, 2026
Welcome to Threat Thursday, Galactic's weekly threat intelligence roundup. This week's stories have a clear pattern: attackers didn't find obscure entry points or novel techniques but instead went after the things you were already using and already trusting. As always, ...
Security Education
Vulnerabilities Are Now the #1 Way In. The Window to Fix Them Is Closing.
Most of the time, I didn't break into a network so much as let myself in through something with a fix already out (just not installed yet): the VPN concentrator three versions behind, the firewall with a known vulnerability fixed ...
Your OSINT Reality Check: Here’s What an Attacker Is Finding in 30 Minutes or Less
Today’s connected, AI-driven digital ecosystem has made it easier than ever to build a professional brand, network with peers, and share ideas with a wider audience. It’s opened doors for businesses that simply didn't exist before: new customers, new partnerships, ...
Part 2: Threat Actors Don't Pick You. You Just Happen to Be There.
In Part 1, we established that Handala didn't pick Stryker off a strategic target list and then figure out how to break in. They found access, recognized the value, and used it. That's still a deliberate, damaging attack—it just means ...
Strategy & Leadership
Building Trust in Executive Relationships: Lessons from King Lear
A Framework for Establishing the Kind of Trust that Survives Budget Season Imagine the curtain going up and a group of players act out the opening scenes of Shakespeare's King Lear, just for you. An aging king sits in his ...
Your Jokes Were Funny. They Still Didn't Renew.
How MSPs Build the Kind of Client Rapport That Survives a Budget Review You walked out of the meeting feeling good. The handshake was firm, the small talk landed, and you even got a laugh with the printer joke. You ...
Value That Converts: Why Your vCSO Pitch Keeps Getting Pushed to IT
You walked out of that meeting feeling like a closer. Your credentials were on point. You covered the whole stack: EDR, SIEM, MDR, quarterly risk assessments, tabletop exercises, NIST alignment. Your vCSO offering was solid. You even had a phased ...
All Articles
New Malware Can Spy On You In Scary Ways
There's a new strain of malware in the wild. It is targeting Android devices and disguised as an innocuous chat app. Researchers at Trend Micro have discovered it in two different apps ...
Phishing Emails Are Becoming Even Harder To Identify
According to data collected by Microsoft, phishing emails accounted for 0.62 percent of all inbox receipts in September 2019. That's up from 0.31 percent just one year prior to that. The increase ...
Ransomware Is Getting Smarter. Are You?
One prolific ransomware virus variant is getting smarter. That’s right—one particular strain of the Ryuk ransomware is now working smarter than first expected. It has a decision process that doesn’t wait for large files to get encrypted. Instead, it encrypts ...
FBI Considers Aging App To Be A Counterintelligence Threat
FaceApp is in the news again, and as before, not for a good reason. Several months ago, watchdog groups around the world sounded the alarm about the Russian-made app, which raised curious ...
Be Careful Holiday E-cards Could Contain Malware Or Viruses
There's a war on Thanksgiving and Christmas, but it's taking a very different form than what commonly gets reported in the news media. This war is being waged by hackers and scammers, ...
Adobe Acquired Magento Marketplace Suffers Data Breach
Recently, the Magento Marketplace was acquired by Adobe and suffered a breach that exposed a limited amount of user data to an unknown third party. When Adobe discovered evidence of the breach, ...
Watch Out For Large Amounts of Scams This Holiday Season
The 2019 Holiday Season is officially upon us, and unfortunately, that means that scammers around the world are ramping up for another busy season. Deals are abound on Black Friday and Cyber ...
Security Issues Found In Several VNC Applications
Microsoft RDP has its share of problems. That simple truth has sparked the rise of a number of open-source VNC (Virtual Network Computing) applications, which allow a user to remotely control another ...
New Cryptomining Malware Targets Windows Computers
Since October 2018, Microsoft engineers have been tracking a new strain of malware specifically designed to target Windows machines. As malware goes, this one isn't particularly dangerous. It's not designed to mass ...
Google’s Cloud Print May Be Discontinued
Are you a fan of Google's Cloud Print service? It's fantastic because it allows you to print from anywhere to anywhere, which makes it utterly invaluable. Like so many great services Google ...
New T-Mobile Data Breach Compromised Customer Info
Recently the US branch of the global telecom company T-Mobile disclosed a security breach that impacted a small percentage of its customer base. Specifically, the breach revealed certain information belonging to a ...
New Ransomware Called DeathRansom Hits The Scene
Early in 2019, a new strain of ransomware appeared. Called "DeathRansom," its bark was initially much worse than its bite. Researchers quickly discovered that the new strain only pretended to encrypt a ...
