E-Business
HP Threat Research Shows Attackers Exploiting Zero-Day Vulnerability Before Enterprises Can Patch
HP Inc. has released its latest global HP Wolf Security Threat Insights Report, providing analysis of real-world cybersecurity attacks. By isolating threats that have evaded detection tools and made it to user endpoints, HP Wolf Security has a unique insight into the latest techniques being used by cybercriminals.
The HP Wolf Security threat research team found evidence that cybercriminals are mobilizing quickly to weaponize new zero-day vulnerabilities.
Exploits of the zero-day CVE-2021-40444 – a remote code execution vulnerability that enables exploitation of the MSHTML browser engine using Microsoft Office documents – were first captured by HP on September 8, a week before the patch was issued on September 14.
By September 10 – just three days after the initial threat bulletin – the HP threat research team saw scripts designed to automate the creation of this exploit being shared on GitHub.
Unless patched, the exploit enables attackers to compromise endpoints with very little user interaction. It uses a malicious archive file, which deploys malware via an Office document.
Users don’t have to open the file or enable any macros, viewing it in File Explorer’s preview pane is enough to initiate the attack, which a user often will not know has happened. Once the device is compromised, attackers can install backdoors to systems, which could be sold on to ransomware groups.
Other notable threats isolated by the HP Wolf Security threat insight team include a rise in cybercriminals using legitimate Cloud and web providers to host malware, JavaScript malware slipping past detection tools, and targeted campaign found posing as the Ugandan National Social Security fund. The team also that switching to HTA files spreads malware in a single click.
“The average time for a business to apply, test and fully deploy patches with the proper checks is 97 days, giving cybercriminals an opportunity to exploit this ‘window of vulnerability’.
While only highly capable hackers could exploit this vulnerability at first, automated scripts have lowered the bar for entry, making this type of attack accessible to less knowledgeable and resourced threat actors.
This increases the risk to businesses substantially, as zero-day exploits are commoditized and made available to the mass market in venues like underground forums,” explains Alex Holland, Senior Malware Analyst, HP Wolf Security threat research team, HP Inc.
“Such novel exploits tend to be effective at evading detection tools because signatures may be imperfect and become obsolete quickly as the understanding of the scope of an exploit changes.
“We expect threat actors to adopt CVE-2021-40444 as part of their arsenals, and potentially even replace common exploits used to gain initial access to systems today, such as those exploiting Equation Editor.”
“We are also seeing major platforms like OneDrive allowing hackers to conduct ‘flash in the pan’ attacks.
While malware hosted on such platforms are generally taken down quickly, this does not deter attackers because they can often achieve their objective of delivering malware in the few hours the links are live,” Holland continues. “Some threat actors are changing the script or file type they are using every few months.
“Malicious JavaScript and HTA files are nothing new, but they are still landing in employee inboxes, putting the enterprise at risk. One campaign deployed Vengeance Justice Worm, which can spread to other systems and USB drives.”
The findings are based on data from the millions of endpoints running HP Wolf Security. HP Wolf Security tracks malware by opening risky tasks in isolated, micro Virtual Machines (micro VMs) to understand and capture the full infection chain, helping to mitigate threats that have slipped past other security tools.
This has let customers click on over 10 billion email attachments, web pages, and downloads with no reported breaches. By better understanding the behavior of malware in the wild, HP Wolf Security researchers and engineers can bolster endpoint security protection and overall system resilience.
“We can’t keep relying on detection alone. The threat landscape is too dynamic and, as we can see from the analysis of threats captured in our VMs, attackers are increasingly adept at evading detection,” comments Dr. Ian Pratt, Global Head of Security for Personal Systems, HP Inc.
“Organizations must take a layered approach to endpoint security, following zero trust principles to contain and isolate the most common attack vectors like email, browsers, and downloads. This will eliminate the attack surface for whole classes of threats, while giving organizations the breathing room needed to coordinate patch cycles securely without disrupting services.”
Opay, a financial technology (fintech) firm, is working with Citigroup Inc., Deutsche Bank AG, and JPMorgan Chase & Co. for an initial public offering (IPO).
According to a report by Bloomberg on Friday, sources said the platform, backed by SoftBank Group Corp., is considering a listing in the United States and is targeting a valuation of about $4 billion.
They added that the company could proceed with the share sale later this year, although the timing and size of the offering are yet to be finalised.
Opay is one of Africa’s fastest-growing fintech firms, offering mobile payments, transfers, and other financial services across Nigeria.
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The fintech company, Citi, Deutsche Bank, and JPMorgan have not publicly commented on the IPO plans.
Like Opay, Flutterwave, a major fintech company in Africa is planning an IPO.
By Olumide Balogun
There was a time when using a search engine felt like cracking a code. You typed two or three carefully chosen keywords, hoped the machine understood, and waited to see what came back. People had to learn the language of machines, shrinking complex needs into stilted phrases.
Olumide Balogun, Director, West and East Africa at Google.
That era is ending. Today, a person can ask a question the same way they would ask a colleague, and the technology is finally learning to respond in kind. Nowhere is this shift more visible than in Nigeria, where a young, mobile-first population expects tools to keep pace with how they actually think and speak.
This change carries weight far beyond convenience. It is reshaping how Nigerian businesses reach customers and how customers find what they need.
For years, marketing online meant wrestling with rigid keyword lists. A small business owner had to guess every possible phrase a customer might type. If you sold ankara dresses, you tried “ankara dress,” “Nigerian print fabric,” “traditional wear Lagos,” and a dozen variations, hoping you covered the gaps. Anything you missed was a missed customer
The new wave of conversational search makes those lists feel ancient. People now ask layered, specific questions: “Where can I find a sustainable tailor in Yaba who makes office wear?” Older systems would have stumbled on a query like that. Newer ones, powered by artificial intelligence, can read intent and stitch ideas together. They connect a question to a relevant local website that a basic keyword search might never have surfaced.
The shift is starting to show up in concrete tools. Google’s AI Max for Search ads, now a year old, is one of the more visible examples. In plain terms, it lets a business describe what it sells and who it serves in everyday language, and the system figures out which searches to match it to, instead of forcing the owner to write hundreds of keywords by hand. Early adopters report stronger revenue growth than peers, and users say results feel more useful because the technology connects ideas for them, often surfacing local sites that would not have appeared before.
There is a quieter benefit too. When advertising becomes more relevant, it stops feeling like an interruption. An ad that answers a real question is no longer noise; it is information. That changes the texture of the internet. The marketplace gets less cluttered, and people spend less time wading through results that do not fit what they were looking for.
None of this is automatic. The technology only works if it can understand human nuance, and human nuance in Nigeria is not the same as human nuance in California. A search for “owambe outfit” or “small chops for fifty people” demands cultural context, not just linguistic translation. Newer features try to bridge that gap. AI Brief, a part of the same Google toolkit, lets a business owner type plain instructions, like “focus on sustainable traditional wear, keep a premium tone,” and the system follows them. This is steering by intent, not by keyword bingo.
There are gains for businesses with deep catalogues too. A retailer with thousands of items no longer has to match every question to the right page by hand. Tools such as Google’s Final URL Expansion read the search and send the customer straight to the page that fits, in real time. In travel, finance, and healthcare, where compliance matters, the same systems can carry mandatory legal text into every ad automatically. Regulated industries can grow without cutting corners.
These are not abstract wins. They are the difference between a small business being found by a customer in Abuja at 9 p.m. and being lost in a sea of generic results, between a hospital reaching the right patient and a tailor in Surulere being discovered by a bride planning her wedding.
We should not pretend the transition is finished. AI is imperfect. It can misread context, amplify mistakes, and require careful oversight. Regulators, businesses, and users all have a role in shaping how it develops in our market. The broader direction, however, is clear, and it is one Nigeria should engage with rather than resist.
Nigeria is a nation of storytellers and traders. Our markets, physical and digital, have always been about conversation. The technology of search is finally beginning to mirror that. It is becoming less of a vending machine and more of a market stall, where you can ask a question, get a real answer, and discover something you did not know you needed.
That is the bigger story behind any single product launch. It is about how a country full of voices is finding new ways to be heard. For Nigerian businesses willing to adapt, the opportunity has never been clearer.
According to Kaspersky telemetry, almost 19,500 malicious packages were found in open-source projects by the end of 2025, representing a 37% increase compared to the end of 2024.
Modern software development is inseparable from open-source components. However, open-source software may contain intentionally hidden threats which can leave the products that use malicious packages vulnerable to manipulation, including supply chain attacks. According to a new Kaspersky global study, supply chain attacks have emerged as the most common cyberthreat facing businesses over the past year.
Kaspersky reminds about high‑profile supply chain attacks that have emerged recently: In April 2026, the official website for CPU-Z and HWMonitor, free tools used by hardware enthusiasts, IT administrators and system builders worldwide to monitor hardware performance was compromised, silently replacing legitimate software downloads with malware-laced installers.
Analysis from Kaspersky GReAT showed that the compromise window was approximately 19 hours. Kaspersky telemetry detected that more than 150 victims across multiple countries faced this attack. The majority were individual users, which is consistent with the consumer-facing nature of the compromised software. Affected organisations spanned retail, manufacturing, consulting, telecommunications and agriculture.
- In March 2026, Axios, one of the most widely used JavaScript HTTP clients, was compromised. The attackers hijacked a maintainer’s account and published poisoned versions of the package (1.14.1 and 0.30.4). The malicious releases contained no harmful code in Axios itself but introduced a phantom dependency that deployed a cross-platform RAT, contacted a C&C server, and then erased traces of itself for macOS, Windows and Linux. Both versions were removed within hours, and the dependency was quickly put under a security hold. Kaspersky GReAT confirmed that the attack was not standalone – it shared tactics, techniques and procedures with Bluenoroff’s GhostCall and GhostHire campaigns, presented at the Security Analyst Summit in 2025.
- In February 2026, the developers of Notepad++, a widely used open-source text and code editor, disclosed that their infrastructure had been compromised due to a hosting provider incident. Kaspersky GReAT researchers discovered that attackers behind the Notepad++ supply chain compromise had used at least three distinct infection chains and targeted a government organisation in the Philippines, a financial institution in El Salvador, an IT service provider in Vietnam and individuals across several countries.
“According to our survey, 31% of enterprise businesses have been impacted by a supply chain attack in the past 12 months. Nevertheless, the security level of open‑source projects is not necessarily lower than that of proprietary-vendor solutions. In some cases, an active open‑source community can quickly discover and remediate vulnerabilities, whereas proprietary systems often rely on internal teams for audits.
The open‑source community strives to monitor emerging risks, cybersecurity specialists conduct researches to find vulnerabilities and malicious code in open‑source software, promptly notifying their users and the community. Completely eliminating the potential risks is impossible, but they can be minimised also with the help of security solutions and automated code‑analysis tools,” comments Dmitry Galov, Head of Kaspersky GReAT Russia and CIS.
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