With October coming to a close, ESET Chief Security Evangelist Tony Anscombe reviews some of the top cybersecurity stories that made the news over the month. At the same time, he offers insights that the latest wave of incidents hold for your company's, or your own, cyber-defenses. Here's Tony's rundown of some of what stood out most in October:
- Over the past ten days, the cybersecurity news cycle has been dominated by two critical vulnerabilities in PHP, a server-side scripting language powering some 70 percent of websites globally. Here's what you should know more about the pair of flaws known as PHP2Shell, as well as related topics – and we also dived into the issues in this video and this blog post.
- Cyberattackers broke into refrigeration controllers at up to 700 French supermarkets and raised the temperature of refrigerators and freezers to as high as 50 degrees Celsius.
- A data breach at Denmark’s Central Population Register (CPR) has exposed the personal information of 8.8 million people. The person claiming responsibility for the hack claims to have gained access through a third-party provider's account that was 'protected' by the password ‘123456’.
- Malware preinstalled on thousands of cheap Android phones that can generate fraudulent ad revenue and potentially turn infected devices into parts of larger botnets – a problem that we also wrote about a while back.
What are the lessons that businesses should take away from the latest cybersecurity news? Watch Tony's video to find out, and be sure to check out the September 2026 edition of his monthly security news roundup for more insights.
