- Mycomputerspot Security Newsletter
- Posts
- Market & Momentum - 01/19/2026
Market & Momentum - 01/19/2026
From AI red-team breakthroughs to fresh zero-day exploits, this week’s threat forecast shows offense and defense racing neck-and-neck. Here’s what to watch—and what to fix—before the gap closes.
J.W. Croley
January 19, 2026
In partnership with
Why AI Isn’t Replacing Affiliate Marketing After All
“AI will make affiliate marketing irrelevant.”
Our new research shows the opposite.
Levanta surveyed 1,000 US consumers to understand how AI is influencing the buying journey. The findings reveal a clear pattern: shoppers use AI tools to explore options, but they continue to rely on human-driven content before making a purchase.
Here is what the data shows:
Less than 10% of shoppers click AI-recommended links
Nearly 87% discover products on social platforms or blogs before purchasing on marketplaces
Review sites rank higher in trust than AI assistants
In the past 72 hours, cybersecurity reporting has been dominated by critical authentication bypass and impersonation flaws in enterprise-wide SaaS platforms and large-scale data theft claims impacting consumer broadband subscribers.
These developments aren’t niche… they hit commonly used infrastructure and services, meaning risk is widespread. As teams return from holiday cadence, the opportunity window for attackers is unusually large due to delayed patching, stale sessions, and unvalidated identity trust paths.
Trend (Macro) | Likelihood | Direction | Executive Signal |
|---|---|---|---|
Authentication/impersonation abuse in SaaS platforms | 78% | 🔺 Rising | AI-driven identity exploits shorten detection time. |
Large-scale extortion and data theft claims | 70% | 🔺 Rising | Claims of 1M+ customer records at risk drive fraud pressure. |
Post-event phishing & credential stuffing | 64% | ➡ Stable | Recycled data fuels secondary attacks. |
Operational patch lag in enterprise SaaS | 69% | 🔺 Rising | Delayed winter patch cycles create broader exposure windows. |
High-impact vulnerability exploit chatter | 60% | ➡ Stable | Technical vectors (zero-days) resurface alongside authentication weaknesses. |
Enterprise-targeted malicious extensions found in Chrome — Security providers uncovered multiple malicious Chrome extensions impersonating HR and finance apps to hijack sessions, credentials, and tokens. These add-ons are often installed under the guise of productivity tools and can bypass ordinary web filtering.
ServiceNow “BodySnatcher” authentication bypass disclosed — Researchers revealed an auth flaw that allows attackers to impersonate any user without credentials, bypassing MFA and SSO protections in some configurations. See ServiceNow impersonation vulnerability for details.
Major U.S. mobile service outage highlights dependency risk — A widespread Verizon network outage disrupted voice, text, and data services across the United States, underscoring that critical communications infrastructure is as much a security and operational risk as it is an availability problem. See coverage on the Verizon outage.
Net-NTLMv1 rainbow tables released by Mandiant — Mandiant published a dataset of NTLMv1 rainbow tables, significantly lowering the bar for offline credential cracking against legacy authentication protocols still present in many enterprise environments. See work on rainbow tables.
Weekly security summaries highlight broad threat activity — Industry recaps point to continued exploitation attempts across firewalls and cloud services as well as evolving malware delivery mechanisms, which should signal heightened vigilance for defenders. See weekly cybersecurity roundup
We’re running a super short survey to see if our newsletter ads are being noticed. It takes about 20 seconds and there's just a few easy questions.
Your feedback helps us make smarter, better ads.
Browser trust vectors are hot again — and bigger than before. Add-ons for mainstream browsers are being weaponized to persist inside enterprise sessions with little detection visibility.
Authentication bypasses don’t need exploitation stories — just trust paths. Flaws that allow impersonation or session takeover — even without active exploitation evidence yet — compress the defender response window because trust has already been granted.
Operational availability and security are inseparable. Outages in critical communication infrastructure can mask or magnify attack signals, complicating incident response and increasing exposure to follow-on threats.
Old protocols still matter. Releases of cracking tools like rainbow tables for NTLMv1 remind defenders that legacy tech remains a viable attacker target and often requires compensating controls.
Patterns are becoming multi-vector. Threat recaps show that attackers are blending proficiency in tooling with opportunistic leverage of systemic weaknesses, not just chasing zero-days.
Browser extension risk: Enforce a browser extension allow-list; disable auto-install of third-party add-ons; monitor for unusual extension approvals across enterprise tenants.
Authentication safety: Prioritize ServiceNow environments for immediate review of MFA and session-token handling; revoke stale sessions and require re-auth for sensitive workflows.
Infrastructure resilience: Validate alternate communication paths (VoIP, backup carriers) in preparedness exercises; treat mobile network outages as part of your DR-IR table-top scenarios.
Legacy authentication hardening: Audit presence of NTLMv1 or older auth protocols; deprecate or segment them behind more secure access controls; monitor for offline cracking attempts.
Trend correlation: Correlate weekly threat recaps with internal telemetry (firewall logs, anomaly detection, web logs) to proactively identify multi-vector intrusion sequences.
This week’s momentum isn’t about discovery… it’s about execution.
The attackers are using established mechanisms (extensions, legacy auth, trusted SaaS logic), not exotic new code. That means defense depends on timely enforcement and visibility, not luck.
Your security posture isn’t measured by what you haven’t seen; it’s defined by what you assume is happening in silence.
J.W.
(P.S. Check out our partners! It goes a long way to support this newsletter!)
The Future of Shopping? AI + Actual Humans.
AI has changed how consumers shop, but people still drive decisions. Levanta’s research shows affiliate and creator content continues to influence conversions, plus it now shapes the product recommendations AI delivers. Affiliate marketing isn’t being replaced by AI, it’s being amplified.