Top 5 Cybersecurity Headlines to Know this Month
BARR Advisory Senior Consultant Kevin Lewis has picked out five security and compliance headlines from the past month that you need to know. Take a look to find out what our consulting team has been reading this January—plus, scroll to see Kevin’s CISO Pick of the Month for his top new resource for security and compliance professionals this month.
FBI Warns of North Korean Quishing Attacks
The FBI is alerting organizations to a surge in “quishing”—phishing attacks using malicious QR codes—conducted by the North Korean state-sponsored group Kimsuky. These campaigns target think tanks and government entities by embedding QR codes in spear-phishing emails to bypass traditional security measures like URL inspection and sandboxing. By forcing victims to scan the codes with mobile devices, attackers often capture session tokens to bypass multi-factor authentication (MFA) and hijack cloud identities. To mitigate these risks, the FBI recommends implementing mobile device management (MDM) and transitioning to phishing-resistant MFA for all remote access.
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Patch Now: n8n Faces “Ni8mare” Exploit
Nearly 60,000 unpatched instances of n8n, a popular open-source workflow automation platform, are currently exposed to a maximum-severity vulnerability dubbed “Ni8mare.” The flaw allows unauthenticated attackers to exploit improper input validation to bypass authentication, steal stored secrets, or execute arbitrary commands. Because n8n often serves as a central hub for API keys and database credentials, administrators are urged to upgrade to version 1.121.0 immediately.
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Anthropic Brings Claude to Healthcare
Anthropic is expanding Claude’s capabilities into the healthcare sector, allowing providers and payers to utilize the platform for sensitive medical purposes. The new initiative is designed to automate complex tasks like prior authorizations and medical coding. By integrating human oversight into these tools, clinicians can significantly reduce the time spent on manual data cross-checks while maintaining high accuracy. These HIPAA-ready tools aim to streamline the entire revenue cycle, from verifying provider credentials to correcting medical billing errors.
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New Multi-Stage Attack Targets Businesses
Cybersecurity researchers have identified a new campaign that they’re calling SHADOW#REACTOR, which uses a multi-stage attack to deploy a remote administration tool called Remcos RAT. The process evades detection by reconstructing fragmented, text-based payloads in memory and abusing legitimate Windows binaries like MSBuild.exe. This modular framework is designed to frustrate analysts and bypass antivirus signatures to establish persistent remote access.
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Misconfigured AI Servers in the Crosshairs
Honeypot data captured by GreyNoise detected a massive surge in automated scanning targeting large language model (LLM) infrastructure, with over 91,000 attack sessions recorded as of early January 2026. Professional threat actors are systematically probing more than 70 different model endpoints, including OpenAI and Google Gemini, to find misconfigured servers that leak access to commercial AI APIs. These attackers use simple text queries to fingerprint active systems and build target lists for future exploitation.
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CISO Pick of the Month:
Webinar: A Clear Path to CMMC 2.0
CMMC 2.0 is no longer a problem for the future. For businesses in the defense supply chain, it’s quickly becoming an operational requirement. Aaron Hamlin, practice leader of cybersecurity consulting at BARR, is teaming up with experts at Drata and A-LIGN next week to discuss how to scope, document, and maintain compliance for Levels 1 and 2—without overextending your team.
Register for the webinar now ➡️
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