Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

First made famous by Bear Bryant in the 1970s, “defense wins championships” has since become a popular sports adage that’s at times overused. But when it comes to the sprawling attack surface of modern athletic events, like the tri-hosted 2026 World Cup or the Super Bowl, that cliché applies just as much to cybersecurity as it does to the playing field. Modern sports franchises are no longer just athletic clubs.

Threat actors are increasingly abusing workplace collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams to launch social engineering attacks, according to researchers at Palo Alto Networks’s Unit 42. Attackers are sending Teams messages that impersonate IT personnel, asking users to approve a multifactor authentication prompt. Both criminal and nation-state threat actors are using this social engineering technique to compromise organizations’ environments.

When 48 teams, 104 matches, 16 host cities, and a broadcast audience approaching half the planet converge across six weeks, something else converges at the same time: opportunity for the people trying to exploit it. The 2026 FIFA World Cup is the most complex digital event in history, and the security challenge it creates is not limited to the tournament organizers.

Sharing applications with the world is no easy task. Developers struggle to ensure compatibility across different platforms, vendors continually search for new channels to showcase and distribute their software, and users often encounter hurdles when installing and updating the applications. To help solve this challenge, Microsoft offers multiple solutions including its Microsoft Store, the native Windows Installer component (.msi packages), and a lesser-known but powerful option: ClickOnce technology.

Following our deep dive into the internals of ClickOnce application deployment in Part 1 of this two-part blog series, let’s focus on the security implications of this technology. In this blog, we examine how threat actors can weaponize ClickOnce features, and we reveal what we believe to be a new abuse that security teams need to be aware of.

On June 17th we detected a large-scale supply chain attack targeting the entire @mastra npm scope, a popular open-source AI agent framework. An attacker republished 141 packages in a burst between 01:15 and 02:00 UTC, silently injecting a malicious dependency into every one of them. The affected packages include @mastra/core, which has 918K weekly npm downloads, as well as mastra and create-mastra.