• An AI tool called Raven can cross-reference fixtures, fittings, and other interior details to find the location of a property
• It pinpoints properties using data scraped from Airbnb and other sites
• Raven was previously known as GeoSpy and was initially conceived to identify locations based on landmarks

A new AI tool that can identify a property’s location using interior photos has been publicized online. Already in use by law enforcement agencies in Florida and California, Raven uses AI to match fixtures and fittings and decorative elements from photos with information sourced online.

Following the publication of a video demonstrating the software, Raven has attracted attention from some of the websites it apparently uses to acquire the information it uses. The sites – which include Airbnb – seem to have concerns about how the data and images they collect is being used.

Raven’s existence could potentially be used to find the location of any property – assuming that its address and similar images already exist online.

Innocent? Your home is safe

Raven has been used by the LAPD and the Miami-Dade Sheriff's Office in Florida. Its main purpose so far has been in tackling human trafficking, but the software represents obvious privacy challenges which its creators seem to be sidestepping at this stage.

The most important takeaway is that as long as your home (or business premises) hasn’t been used for criminal activities and photos of its interior aren’t online, then you have nothing to worry about.

Daniel Heinen of Raven developers Graylark described the product as “purpose-built AI for the people working to find answers and protect lives.”

However, some of the websites that Raven uses to gather information have expressed concern. The video of Raven in action appears to show the software using both Zillow, Vrbo, and Airbnb, with the latter reviewing the situation. Zillow stated scraping its data was against its ToS.

These issues could prove to be a challenge to the successful use of Raven across a wider area.

Matching interiors

Raven essentially breaches privacy by providing the location of an interior photo. Assuming a similar photo of the same interior exists online with an address attached – such as on Airbnb or a property site – then Raven should be able to identify it.

Heinen doesn’t mention the privacy challenges in his LinkedIn post about Raven, instead focusing on the software’s “ability to geolocate interior images across millions of short-term rental units worldwide.”

While highlighting the use of short-term rentals for human trafficking, the post focuses on Raven’s USP: “For investigators, a photo or video from inside a property may be a critical lead, but without an address or location tag, knowing where to start can be difficult. Raven helps investigators match interior imagery to potential properties, turning visual clues into location leads they can review and verify.”

It would seem likely that for Raven to be embraced successfully by other police departments in the US and beyond, it would need to accept regional privacy laws and build partnerships with the companies it appears to be scraping.

• Critical PHP2Shell flaws also impact internet-exposed NAS devices and PHP-based Docker workloads
• Major vendors are still releasing patches, leaving some Synology, QNAP, and other systems exposed
• Researchers urge immediate updates, removal of public exposure, and VPN-only remote access

Websites and web servers are apparently not the only products affected by the php2shell vulnerability - Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices are at risk, too - and to make matters worse, some of the most popular manufacturers have not yet released a patch, despite the flaws being actively abused in the wild.

Research by Apple Insider noted that the flaw also affects software maintained by NAS manufacturers, as well as applications running independently in Docker containers, with NAS devices that are reachable through the public internet also at risk.

What's particularly concerning is that some of the biggest NAS manufacturers have said to be working on a fix, but the work is yet to be done. Synology, for example, released a new security advisory saying PHP versions 7.3 - 8.4, Mail Station, and Synology Calendar are all affected and adding that it released updated PHP packages to address the flaws. Those running Synology NAS products should head over to the company’s Package Center and download archive and look for updated PHP 8.2 and PHP 8.4 packages.

Twofold risk

The company also stressed that there is a difference between installed PHP packages and PHP components within DiskStation manager, and added that its built-in PHP isn’t exposed to the public internet, therefore most likely not at risk.

Another major NAS manufacturer, QNAP, confirmed a wide range of affected products, including QTS 5.2.11 and older, QTS 6.1.9, QuTS hero and QuTScloud, and Note Station 3. It said it was currently working on a fix, but did not give a timeline on when the patch might become available. So far, there is no evidence of in-the-wild attacks, but the company does recommend removing the devices from the open internet, disabling unnecessary port forwarding, UPnP, and remote-access services.

Other manufacturers are also currently working on a fix, including TerraMaster, Ugreen, and Asustor, Apple Insider found. “NAS owners should check their manufacturer's security notices and available updates for their specific models,” the publication said.

For NAS owners, the risk is twofold, since PHP is found in both the operating system and Docker containers.

Those running PHP-based services in Docker should check if their container images are running affected versions of PHP, and update them as soon as humanly possible.

There is also the problem of running older devices that have reached end-of-life and are, as such, no longer supported with patches. These, security experts agree, should be removed from public access. Unsolicited inbound connections should be blocked, and the device should be kept accessible only locally. Remote access should be achieved through a secure VPN, instead of forwarding NAS management ports.

P2PShell?

PHP2Shell is a name for a pair of vulnerabilities - CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619 - that were recently discovered in the PHP programming language. They are considered critical and allow malicious actors to take over websites, steal data, deploy malware, and more. However, the story that has so far revolved around internet sites and web apps is now expanding into NAS devices, too.

PHP2Shell is shaping up to be the biggest security incident of the year, and possibly longer, arguably rivaled only by the Spectre/Meltdown flaws from eight years ago.

The pair of vulnerabilities - both critical in severity and both allowing for remote code execution - affects the vast majority of websites and web apps in existence today.

Knowledge of the flaws leaked four days before the patches were released, according to Amazon, and the number of exploitation attempts went from a few hundred 10 hours before publication, to millions today.

However, most of these attempts seem to have been unsuccessful. Analysis is ongoing as to why that is the case, with some researchers thinking code execution needs to get past ASLR, which is a difficult thing to do remotely. However, breaking in only seems to be a matter of time, which is why the security community urges manufacturers to release a fix as soon as possible, and owners to apply them without delay.

• Evidence suggests PHP2Shell exploitation began days before public disclosure, indicating prior attacker knowledge
• Researchers say real-world attacks remain limited, though exploitation attempts rapidly surged after disclosure
• Millions of PHP systems remain exposed, with experts urging immediate patching of supported versions

The exploitation of php2shell began four days before the vulnerabilities were made public, Amazon has claimed, meaning someone knew well in advance about the bugs in the popular software.

The company has released its own analysis which shows that the attacks actually started several days earlier.

“Amazon Threat Intelligence identified a PHP2Shell exploitation attempt dating to Oct. 17, 2026, in MadPot telemetry, four days before public disclosure of CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619,” the company said in an advisory. “The exploit attempt originated from an IP address associated with a commercial anonymization network. While the vulnerability was under embargo, the targeting of a honeypot from an anonymized IP address suggests the activity was conducted by a threat actor, though it remains unclear how the actor acquired exploit information prior to disclosure.”

Attacks four days prior

On the day of the patch release, four days into the disaster, Amazon Threat Intelligence discovered multiple proof-of-concept (PoC) exploits, and since the payloads and choices in anonymization infrastructure varied, it was most likely the work of multiple threat actors. The company is currently analyzing the payloads to see if they would have been successful in the wild or not.

Together with a handful of partners, PHP Foundation was working on a fix for two critical vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619 and nicknamed ‘php2shell’. Both have a severity score of 9.2/10, and both can be used for full website takeover. Given that PHP is a programming language used to write a significant majority of all websites in existence, the bugs were quite dangerous, and required carefully coordinated disclosure and patching.

The patch was supposed to be released on October 21, and those who were aware of it, were asked not to disclose the details until it was released. However, a few hours before that embargo were to be lifted, security outfit Chainguard allegedly published container images containing fixes for the flaws. At approximately the same time, news started breaking that cybercriminals were actively exploiting php2shell to target websites.

All hell broke loose - many major government, education, and healthcare websites around the world preventively shut down, while PHP Foundation issued an alert telling admins to prepare and apply the patch as soon as it becomes available.

What is ASLR and why is it important for p2pshell?

One of the reasons why we’re yet to see many successful exploitation attempts is apparently ASLR. Short for Address Space Layout Randomization, it is a security feature that randomly changes where a program’s code and data are stored in memory every time it runs. This is according to Yotam Perkal, Director of Security Research at Pluto Security.

“PHP2Shell doesn't seem trivial to exploit. I believe that part of the reason we’ve yet to see successful exploitation is that reliable code execution requires getting past ASLR, a memory protection that randomizes where code sits in memory,” Perkal said. “That's hard to do remotely, and most of the public PoCs floating around (many of them vibe coded) simply don't work reliably on real systems.”

“I wouldn't count on it staying that way, though. Exploits will get better, and most PHP servers out there are still unpatched, so teams should patch and restart their PHP workers now. But compared with all the drama before and after the release, real-world exploitation so far looks pretty limited.”

At the same time, Cloudflare has said the number of attacks launched in the hours after disclosure was staggering and growing at an unprecedented rate. Company CEO Matthew Prince said in a post on X that the team saw thousands of exploitation attempts in the 10 hours before the patch was announced. This grew to tens of thousands within an hour of disclosure, and hundreds of thousands within two hours. Now, it’s gone into the millions.

To make matters worse, different threat actors are approaching the flaws in different ways and are adapting on the go. According to Cloudflare, some threat actors were modifying their payloads based on feedback from blocked requests, all in order to find a way past web application firewalls (WAF).

Via The Register

• Capcom discloses breach affecting 11.7 million CAPCOM ID users, primarily exposing email addresses
• A small number of accounts also lost personal details, and attackers reset passwords on 196 accounts
• Company secured the platform, notified authorities, and warned users about phishing attempts

Japanese gaming behemoth Capcom just confirmed suffering a data breach that exposed sensitive information on more than 11.7 million people. Almost all had their emails compromised, with a small subset also losing birthdays and locations, as well as passwords changed.

Capcom is a super popular video game developer and publisher, behind mainstream names such as Resident Evil and Street Fighter. One of its services is called CAPCOM ID - it offers a free, unified account that lets users access various games and online services.

Currently, CAPCOM ID has more than 10 million users and the company recently published a new security advisory on its Japanese site, saying the service was accessed by a third party, “resulting in the leakage of some customer information to external parties”..

Changing passwords

“We deeply apologize for the great inconvenience and concern caused to our customers and all stakeholders,” the machine-translated warning reads.

Capcom said the breach triggered its security protocols, and that the CAPCOM ID service has been secured. It continues to be available for use, and there is no impact on gameplay in any of the games.

However, the analysis of the breach determined that the threat actors obtained 11,774,247 user email addresses, as well as system-specific identification information: account creation date and time, last login date and time, number of login counts, and client IP at last login

For a handful of users - 43 of them - the threat actors also obtained dates of birth, gender information, nicknames, and data on their country and region. For 196 people, the attackers managed to change their passwords, in an attempt to lock legitimate users out of their accounts. The passwords themselves weren’t leaked, and Capcom said it triggered the password reset process and that the accounts were restored to their rightful owners.

“We will contact eligible customers individually in order. Please note that credit card information is not included in the leak target,” the company concluded.

Capcom did not discuss the identity of the attackers, or the nature of the breach. Therefore, we don’t know if the attackers stole an employee’s login credentials via phishing, or broke in using a vulnerability such as the php2shell flaw that everyone is scrambling to patch right now. We also don’t know if the attackers tried to make contact or attempted to extort Capcom for money, in exchange for deleting the data.

No threat actors have yet claimed responsibility for the attack on the dark web and have not shared samples or leaked the full database. Capcom said it notified the police and other relevant authorities, and that the investigation continues.

Targeted again

Capcom has had cybersecurity incidents in the past. In November 2020, the company fell prey to the infamous Ragnar Locker ransomware group, which managed to walk away with a terabyte of sensitive data. A few months later, the company said the attackers broke in through an old VPN device, and confirmed the breach affected 390,000 people.

Capcom also builds and runs gaming machines and has, as of March 2026, employed almost 4,000 people worldwide. In fiscal 2025 its games sold 51.87 million units, and two titles - Resident Evil and Street Fighter - are currently making great strides in movie theaters around the world. For fiscal 2026, the company’s annual revenue reached $1.3 billion.

Just having someone’s email address is not enough for a serious cyberattack, but it is a good start towards a highly tailored phishing email which can result in ransomware infections, infostealers, or business email compromise (BEC). Capcom is now urging users to be vigilant and wary of incoming email messages, especially those containing references to the company.

Via BleepingComputer

• Microsoft collaborated with the Japanese National Police Agency to tackle Chinese-language cybercrime “app stores”
• The YAM Store, CoGUI, and Iron Man have targeted people in more than 150 countries
• Microsoft is working with law enforcement agencies worldwide to take down illegal operations that target businesses and individuals

Microsoft has announced a successful operation with the Japanese National Police Agency in which a collection of cybercrime app stores were disrupted. Investigating fraudulent, scam messages targeting Japanese businesses and citizens, the operation uncovered a multi-faceted criminal marketplace, with three key elements.

The YAM Store, CoGUI, and Iron Man had targeted 75,000 organizations across more than 150 countries worldwide, sent over one billion malicious communications promoting scams, and generated millions of dollars for the criminals behind them. Furthermore, 750 million messages were aimed at Microsoft’s own customers.

Alongside the Japanese authorities, Cloudflare, Oracle, Proofpoint, Resecurity, and TRM Labs were also involved in the operation.

Impersonation templates

Exploring the cybercrime ecosystem targeting Japanese businesses, investigators found the trio of the YAM Store, CoGUI, and Iron Man. Investigators found these provided a route into a cybercrime ecosystem for cybercriminals.

The environment was providing criminals with pre-fabricated fake websites and messages, designed to be used to fool targets into thinking they were interacting with the genuine article. Amazon was among the faked sites, on sale so scammers could simply host convincing pages to steal login and payment credentials, without any need to hire their own coder. Other spoofs on sale included government agencies, financial institutions, and other well-known companies.

Security filtering software was initially unable to handle the CoGUI phishing-as-a-service (Phaas) framework as it employed some sophisticated methods to avoid detection, including browser fingerprinting and geofencing.

What is interesting to note is the role these facilities played for the distribution of cybercrime assets. CoGUI was apparently targeting Japan and US victims, but during the course of the investigation, was replaced by a new service, Iron Man.

The YAM Store

While all three components were already known to Microsoft and the authorities, it took a concerted effort to infiltrate the network of cybercriminals using the services. They were hosted in a wholly Chinese-language environment, requiring native-speakers to be added to the investigating team, and gain access to the underground cybercrime marketplace known as the YAM Store.

Microsoft assigned a tracking number Storm-3119 to the marketplace, which it describes as an “Initial Access Broker.” It was set up to provide its customers with “compromised or fraudulently obtained environments in providers like Microsoft and Google.”

While it may be expected for compromised software to be on the radar of its publishers, the creator(s) of the YAM Store had a workaround. It was able to keep its inventory fresh by using automation. This identified “expired environment or organization names and leverages legitimate customer information associated with them to help circumvent existing detections.”

Microsoft has seized domains associated with the YAM/CoGUI/Iron Man infrastructure, and either blocked or redirected them.

• Anthropic used Claude to analyze 25 open source projects and uncovered nearly 500 security issues
• Research found exposed pre-authentication code paths, conflicting security settings, and long-hidden flaws
• AI identified attack-surface reductions that removed unnecessary code exposure before vulnerabilities could be exploited

Anthropic recently used Claude to analyze 25 major open source projects written in C, C++, Java, PHP, and Python, in search of security issues. It found almost 500 of them, including security controls turned off by conflicts in settings, sensitive code accessible before authentication, and even a vulnerability that sat in the code for 21 years.

This wasn’t a standard hunt for vulnerabilities. In its report, Anthropic argues that looking for individual vulnerabilities is a Sisyphean task that scales poorly and never guarantees security. Instead, it thinks defenders should turn towards reducing software attack surfaces by restricting unnecessary access to potentially exploitable code.

“A defender who reduces unnecessary attack surface in their code reduces the risk from all of the unknown vulnerabilities in that code at once—including any that are already being quietly exploited,” Anthropic said.

The 25 projects it scanned contained more than five million lines of code. Claude created an inventory of more than 17,000 configuration options, 3,842 of which related to security-relevant controls and features.

Misconfigured security controls

The company’s research focused on three ways code may get unnecessarily exposed: features accessible in the default configuration when they’re not needed, different settings which, when combined, erode security, and unnecessarily complex and sensitive code running before security checks.

The analysis showed all 11 projects, which were designed to serve authenticated users, contained code that was reachable when it shouldn’t have been. These include 93 pre-authentication attack surfaces in default configurations, 37 instances of code executing before authentication, and 61 combinations of different configurations that eroded pre-authentication controls.

In total, the 25 analyzed projects contained 162 configuration combinations that were accepted without their documentation explaining how they were supposed to behave. In some cases, security controls were being disabled. In others, there were various inconsistencies and problems.

One configuration flaw was sitting undetected for more than two decades, Anthropic found. While one setting made clients prove their identity through certificates, another one disabled it entirely (even though it was designed to delay the check, not kill it). Even though these were conflicting options, they were accepted without warning.

OpenSSH exposed thousands of lines of code

Anthropic singled out OpenSSH as its case study for the report. The software, widely used to provide secure remote access, contained a daemon that could reach 4,500 lines of experimental code that implements a post-quantum signature algorithm before checking if it was permitted by the server’s configuration to begin with.

As it turned out, the algorithm was disabled by default, but its parsing code was accessible to unauthenticated clients. Anthropic disclosed its findings to OpenSSH, who came back with a fix in version 10.6, in which some 20% of the code was now unreachable by unauthenticated clients.

The company said it combined these techniques into a reusable Claude skill which will soon be integrated into OSS-Scanner, its free, opt-in security scanning service for open-source projects. The skill will examine default configurations, code that is reachable before security checks, as well as settings configurations that are in conflict with one another.

Anthropic added that the system will validate the findings through a dynamic program tracing, and will test proposed changes against existing behavior. Potentially disruptive changes will be left for humans to review.

“It is perhaps impossible to measure how many unknown vulnerabilities are in any given codebase,” the researchers concluded. “And there is plenty of data that shows attackers can and will find those vulnerabilities with enough time (particularly if equipped with frontier AI models).” Therefore, AI could help developers systematically limit unnecessary exposure, making software that much harder to attack.

• Researchers found 22.7TB of exposed data from AI aggregator 302.ai, including chat logs and personal information
• Leaked records contained user prompts, AI responses, metadata, and sensitive corporate documents
• Incident highlights the risks of sharing confidential data with third-party AI platforms and services

Security experts who were screaming “don’t share sensitive data with public AI” from the rooftops have been properly vindicated by an AI aggregator called 302.ai.

Researchers from Cybernews claim this company leaked terabytes of sensitive user and corporate data, including personally identifiable information (PII), confidential business documents, and a lot more.

Every hacker's dream

An AI aggregator is a platform that brings together multiple AI models and tools in one place. Users then get to switch between them without having to visit each provider separately.

For example, an AI aggregator might let a user start with Chat-GPT and switch to Claude with a push of a button, all through a single interface and a single subscription or API.

Although there are different use cases for AI aggregators, the number one is being able to compare the responses quickly and easily.

302.ai was launched six years ago by a company called Univerads Technology Limited, based in Hong Kong.

Cybernews says it kept an unencrypted, non-password-protected, publicly available Azure storage bucket that contained 17.6 million files. The entire archive was 22.72TB heavy, most of which went on image files (almost 9TB). Video took up 7.7TB, while audio took up 5.6TB. The rest - around 500GB, were user chat logs.

Totaling more than 144,000, these logs were stored in .json files and exposed plenty of personal information, including user prompts, replies from the AI bot, which model was used, how much it cost in tokens, timestamps, and other metadata. Users also seem to have provided plenty of data themselves, including their names, birth dates, genders, postal addresses, and other contact information.

Some of the information leaked this way was quite embarrassing, too. “What we found was that some companies used the service for enterprise tasks. For example, we found multiple chat logs from a customer support chatbot owned by a prominent sex doll manufacturer,” the team wrote.

This kind of private, even intimate, data is a goldmine for cybercriminals. They can use it to create highly customized and personalized phishing emails, knowing exactly which company to impersonate, what kind of context to mention, and how to phrase the lure email, to get the victim to react. That reaction usually ends up in business email compromise, wire fraud, or ransomware infections.

Database gets locked down

Cybernews’ researchers reached out to Univerads Technology, but did not hear back. In the meantime, the company locked down the database and it is no longer leaking sensitive files.

However, key questions remain unanswered: Does Univerads maintain this database, or was the job outsourced to a third party? When did the company first start collecting this data? How long did the archive stay unprotected? Cybernews found it in early August 2026, and saw it locked down a month later. Did anyone else find it before the Cybernews team did? Are there any indications that the files were copied or viewed by a third party? Is there any evidence of misuse or data spilling into the dark web?

It is highly unlikely these questions will be answered. Given the company’s prompt response and the closure of the database, it’s safe to assume that there was no ill intention, and that the leak is purely unintentional.

Accidental data spills such as this one are, unfortunately, very common. Many organizations either don’t know, or simply forget, that it is their responsibility to secure the data they generate and store in the cloud. As a result, new reports of large leaks emerge almost every week, some of which affect entire populations of certain countries, such as Brazil.

You've probably heard about PHP2Shell and how this freshly emerged security issue affects a ton of websites, as well as warnings on how website owners need to urgently apply patches to fix this.

It sounds like a big deal – and it is – so you've likely got questions. Maybe for starters: what is PHP2Shell exactly and what does it affect? And what does it mean for you as someone using a web browser today – is it not safe to visit some websites now?

This article aims to provide answers to the common questions about PHP2Shell and explain all the key points that you need to know about this vulnerability (well, actually it's two vulnerabilities to be precise).

What is PHP2Shell?

PHP2Shell is the name given to a security flaw in the PHP programming language that's used by many websites and web applications across the globe. In fact, PHP is used by almost 70% of websites as Wikipedia estimates, and it's employed in the likes of WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and other common systems that drive websites – which is why the possible impact is so widespread.

It consists of two separate memory-related vulnerabilities labelled CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619. These flaws in the way PHP works could be exploited by a malicious attacker to compromise a site that's using PHP (which is the majority of the web, as noted), and potentially this could lead to the ability to remotely execute code.

It's a serious incident with these vulnerabilities being rated as 9.2 out of 10 for severity.

What happens if an attacker manages to exploit a website using these vulnerabilities?

Sergey Lozhkin, Head of Research Center for APAC and META at Kaspersky GReAT, explained to TechRadar: "The potential impact is considerable: if successfully exploited, this vulnerability could enable remote code execution, one of the most serious forms of cyber compromise. In practical terms, attackers could potentially execute malicious code on affected systems, including the deployment of web shells, thereby gaining control over vulnerable servers."

In other words, the attacker could run their own code and alter the content of a website to nefarious ends (stealing data for example), or redirect you to their own malicious site for phishing purposes (or even directly installing malware).

Has PHP2Shell been exploited yet?

PHP2Shell has been a trickier customer than expected because these vulnerabilities were disclosed before the official announcement of the security issue was made. As we reported yesterday, someone leaked the details of these flaws on the Hacker News forum before the embargoed announcement happened, leaving security experts scrambling to get defenses in place more quickly than they anticipated.

This meant that there were early attempts to exploit PHP2Shell, and indeed one of those dates back to before the flaw was even leaked (let alone announced). According to Amazon Threat Intelligence, an attempt at exploitation was made as early as October 17, although it "remains unclear how the actor acquired exploit information prior to disclosure."

As Malwarebytes points out, Dane Knecht, the chief technology officer at Cloudflare, reported "early attacks emerging" too, before the PHP team rolled out patches to fix the security holes.

Amazon Threat Intelligence warns that: "PHP2Shell is now being broadly exploited in the wild."

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The target

The attack starts with a server running vulnerable versions of PHP. PHP is a core programming language used to power millions of web applications and servers worldwide, making any runtime vulnerability here exceptionally dangerous.

Malicious request

An unauthenticated attacker (meaning they don't need valid login credentials or prior access) sends a specially crafted, unauthorized payload request directly to the PHP web server.

Exploitation

A critical flaw in the core PHP runtime allows this incoming payload to hijack the ongoing backend process. As the PHP backend processes the code, an execution error or breakout occurs.

System takeover

Because the runtime is hijacked, the attacker could successfully execute remote commands, giving them access to the user's operating system, compromising the entire device.

Explore

So is this fixed now, and am I safe from the exploit?

Patches have indeed been deployed to seal up these exploits. The PHP team issued emergency security updates yesterday for PHP 8.5, 8.4, 8.3, and 8.2 – the relevant fixed versions are 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36, and 8.2.35.

Of course, having the patch ready is just the first move – the owners of the affected websites must then apply it. They may need to install the update themselves, or contact their hosting provider to ensure that this has been done.

Obviously given the urgency of the situation, this patching work should have been done by now – and you should be safe on any given website in theory. However, the caveat here is that there's no cast-iron guarantee, and you need to bear this in mind.

It's worth noting that in terms of taking action, there's nothing you need to do yourself as a person browsing the web. These aren't patches for web browsers – this is something website owners have to sort out. (Although if you do run a website using, say, WordPress, then you must check with your hosting provider that PHP has been updated to the fixed versions noted above).

In terms of practical realities, what should I be aware of when browsing the web today?

For starters, you may encounter websites which are down for maintenance because they are busy applying the mentioned patch to fix the PHP2Shell vulnerabilities. That's a potential annoyance, but a short-term one, and obviously it's a good thing (these patches need to be installed). At this point, though, major websites who are affected and use PHP are likely to have done this work already (given the urgency).

Otherwise, take some extra care about where you're browsing for the rest of this week – though you should always be cautious and bear in mind basic internet safety principles as a matter of course – and be on the lookout for anything that feels suspicious. Be especially careful if you're suddenly redirected to another website, or something obviously suspect happens like a download firing up out of nowhere. In such an eventuality, close the website (and browser) and don't go back, then fire up your antivirus and run a scan.

If you can, it's advisable to steer clear of the potentially less well-maintained corners of the web, too, as a hidden danger is sites which are still running versions of PHP that aren't officially supported (meaning 8.1 or older). Due to that lack of support, these won't get the relevant security updates piped through until the PHP version is upgraded to one that's supported. Those running PHP 8.1 (or earlier) who can't organize such an upgrade are being advised in some cases to take their website offline for the time being (or at least use mitigations as a stopgap, as per a post from the NCSC in the UK).

Is AI to blame for this?

No, but if you've heard AI mentioned in connection with PHP2Shell, it's because these days, AI is more broadly making life easier for would-be malicious actors when they catch wind of fresh exploits like this.

Amazon Threat Intelligence explains: "In the past, most exploitation we observed came after a public proof of concept was released. A small number of capable actors built exploits, and everyone else waited for them. That dependency is weakening. AI-assisted analysis makes it cheaper to turn a patch diff or advisory into a working exploit. As a result, more actors can act within hours or even minutes once technical details of a vulnerability are disclosed."

The other side of the coin is that AI is being used in defending against the bad actors out there, too, but the worry remains that in the longer run, it's likely to cause more harm than good in terms of accelerating how emerging vulnerabilities are capitalized on.

• A major PHP vulnerability has affected scores of websites
• Many popular sites have gone offline or restricted their operations
• Government sites across Europe have also been affected

A major flaw found in the PHP coding language that powers an untold number of websites across the internet has seen scores of sites taken offline as they attempt to patch out the severe vulnerability.

If you’ve found your favorite website has been unavailable over the last few days, there’s a chance it’s related to this security incident.

Here, we’ve put together a list of as many affected websites as we can find, along with reasoning given by the sites where possible. You can also follow all the latest news in our PHP crisis liveblog.

Global sites

1. Wikimedia / Wikipedia

The Wikimedia Foundation said it had taken some services offline to patch the PHP security vulnerability.

The group runs popular websites like Wikipedia and said in a blog post that “You may see outages for our wikis as we work on this, and we have deliberately taken many of our supporting services offline until they can be safely patched.”

The organization said this includes services such as Toolforge and Cloud VPS, while a separate post said that Wikimedia Cloud Services and other tools were affected.

2. Internet Archive

The Internet Archive, which backs up pages across the internet, was offline on October 21. The organization posted on X to say that “Archive.org is currently offline. We are working to restore service now,” although this was not definitively linked to the PHP incident.

Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle called his organizations operations staff “heroes” due to their actions in limiting the damage.

3. Orange Telecom

The telecommunications giant Orange has announced thats it's "temporarily" suspended access to several of its websites and apps that use PHP.

That move affects dozens of countries, mostly in Europe but also Africa and the Middle East. Orange called it a "precautionary" measure and that each country would communicate which sites have been affected locally.

That could cause a lot of confusion in some regions — for example, in France Orange has over 34 million customers. Orange said it "apologizes to impacted customers and users for any inconvenience caused".

Other popular sites

Many other high-traffic websites were affected or taken offline in response to the PHP crisis. That included several of the BBC news site’s pages, message board 4chan, school community site Pinboard, wiki hosting site Miraheze, and mapping tool OpenStreetMap all either went offline or restricted their operations.

Some major sites paused operations without mentioning PHP. That included the likes of Nintendo, productivity tool Asana, language-learning platform Duolingo, and games storefront GOG.

And several games also went offline, such as Pokémon Sleep, Umamusume: Pretty Derby, Granblue Fantasy, and Princess Connect! Re:Dive.

UK sites

A UK minister has revealed that 32 government services are currently offline due to the PHP security threat, while a spokesperson added: "Our work has begun with OpenAI and NCSC to fix vulnerabilities in government systems".

Meanwhile, the country’s Office for Budget Responsibility took to X on October 21 to announce that “Consistent with guidance from the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), we have taken our website offline in view of the critical security issues affecting PHP. We will continue to follow further guidance.” As of October 22, the Office’s website is back online.

The National Cyber Security Centre also warned organizations to identify where PHP was used across their systems and update to the latest version of the coding language as soon as possible. It added that “If you are unable to apply the temporary mitigations, or applying them would take too long, you should consider taking the system offline until it can be fully mitigated.”

Several local government websites also went offline in the UK, including those of Edinburgh Council, Oxfordshire County Council and Hillingdon Council.

Europe

A large number of European governmental and commercial websites have been taken offline while patches are rolled out for the PHP vulnerability. That includes those below:

• Belgium: The Foreign Ministry
• Czechia: The national government website
• Denmark: Municipal IT company Kombit
• Finland: Public government service websites
• France: Local government (prefecture) websites run by the Interior Ministry
• Germany: The federal IT service provider ITZBund
• Netherlands: The National Cyber Security Centre
• Netherlands: The Port of Rotterdam
• Netherlands: Government website Overheid.nl
• Netherlands: National football association KNVB
• Netherlands: The ‌websites of ⁠the five largest political parties
• Netherlands: The websites of many national hospitals

• PHP released fixes for two critical remote code execution flaws and urged immediate patching
• Security researchers and Cloudflare reported early exploitation attempts before patches became available
• Millions of internet-facing PHP installations may be at risk, especially unsupported legacy versions

PHP has released patches for two critical remote code execution (RCE) vulnerabilities and “strongly encouraged” all users to apply them as soon as possible, as hackers are starting to abuse the flaws in real-life attacks.

PHP issued a new security advisory saying it addressed CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619 with a patch. The former is an out-of-memory handling bug, while the latter is a use-after-free memory error. Both were assigned a severity score of 9.2/10 (critical).

The vulnerabilities were addressed in PHP versions 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36, and 8.2.35. Users can download the versions from PHP’s downloads pages, with Windows source and binaries being on the same page. Linux distributions and LTS vendors received the patches in advance, it was said, so users should check with their vendors for updated packages.

Shaking the internet’s foundations

PHP is among the most popular programming languages for websites and web applications in the world, so when remote code execution zero-days are found, it’s a big deal.

PHP was supposed to work on a solution in silence, not to give cybercriminals a head start on exploitation. However, information about the vulnerabilities leaked on the internet two days in advance, causing serious panic, and according to Reuters multiple government, healthcare, and education websites across Europe decided to temporarily shut down to prevent being targeted.

Different sources made different claims. For example, Florian Roth, Head of Research at Nextron Systems, said both flaws would be given a 10/10 severity score, which did not happen. He also said only PHP 8 would be patched, which turned out to be true, despite other sources claiming PHP down to version 5 being fixed.

This, too, is a huge deal, since it’s safe to say that millions of websites are running older, end-of-life PHP versions, and could now be targeted with relative ease. Citing VirusTotal, BleepingComputer said more than 5.1 million PHP hosts are currently exposed online, with some 3.8 million having at least one port open.

According to PHP, “all PHP installations serving web requests, including PHP-FPM, Apache with mod_php, php-cgi, FrankenPHP and LiteSpeed,” are at risk.“We consider the risk highest for mod_php, with a demonstrated exploit where an unauthenticated request can trigger the attack before any application code runs.”

Unsupported versions

PHP 8.1 and older will not be fixed, so if you’re running any of those versions, you’re in danger. Cloudflare’s CTO, Dane Knecht, said the company is “seeing early attacks emerging” and is updating mitigations as new vectors show up. This was a few hours before PHP released the fixes. “Given the severity of these vulnerabilities, the PHP security team provided minimal source-backports for PHP 7.4, PHP 8.0, and PHP 8.1 to help people building from source or without access to an LTS vendor,” PHP added.

The safest play here is to update PHP. For those that cannot do that immediately, PHP recommends a few mitigations, but stresses that these are not a complete solution. For the out-of-memory flaw, the maintainers recommend setting memory limits appropriately, and restricting the size of incoming requests, including file uploads, to reduce the risk of memory-related attacks. Admins can use container limits to prevent a vulnerable worker from affecting the wider system, it was said.

For the use-after-free one, PHP says admins can disable session upload progress tracking and turn on fatal-error backtraces (on PHP 8.5). They should also fix application errors that could trigger crashes or timeouts and avoid outdated settings that generate error messages before the app is fully initialized.

Via BleepingComputer

• PHP discloses two critical remote code execution vulnerabilities that could enable website takeover and data theft
• Details leaked before patch release, prompting an early security advisory and urgent upgrade warning
• Researchers confirmed the flaws are real, with widespread impact expected across multiple PHP versions

PHP, arguably the most popular programming language for websites and web applications in the world, contains two critical-level vulnerabilities that could expose countless sites to remote code execution (RCE) attacks, the provider has revealed.

The flaws could lead to website takeovers, data theft, malicious redirects, and a whole swathe of similarly sinister situations.

Security rush hour

PHP published a new security advisory, giving admins a “heads up” on an incoming patch.

“The PHP security team would like to give advance notice of an upcoming security release,” the advisory reads.

“It is scheduled for Wednesday, 21 October 2026 at 14:00 UTC. It addresses two critical vulnerabilities, both rated CVSS v4.0 9.2. All PHP users are encouraged to prepare now so they can upgrade as soon as the release is available. We reserve the right to release earlier should details of either vulnerability become public, or should evidence of active exploitation appear in the wild.Full details, affected versions, and the fixed versions will be published with the release.”

If you’re thinking the announcement is rather unorthodox and that PHP might as well just released the patch - you’re absolutely right. The problem is that someone spilled the beans on the vulnerabilities before the official embargo was lifted, having the cybersecurity community scrambling for answers.

That ‘someone’ is a person with an alias ‘petecooper’, who published a new post on Y Combinator’s Hacker News forum earlier this week. In the post, they claimed PHP would disclose two remote code execution bugs on October 22 2026.

The post has since been deleted so we couldn’t independently verify it, but BleepingComputer says the post claimed the bugs carried CVSS scores of 10.0 and affected PHP versions dating back to PHP 5.

The post also labeled the bugs as CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, which was subsequently confirmed. Therefore, the only thing that’s wrong is the CVSS score which seems to be 9.2, not 10.0.

Among the people who knew about the flaw and the upcoming patch were watchTowr, and Florian Roth, Head of Research at Nextron Systems.

The embargo on the news was set for October 20, with the patch due a day later, on October 21. However, yesterday Roth posted on X, saying “Okay, since the news is already out: an RCE vulnerability in PHP core, CVSS 10.0. Further details are scheduled for release on October 20. Only PHP 8 will receive patches.”

Leaking the zero-days

This forced PHP’s hand, not just to release the advisory, but also to send a notice to its ANNOUNCE mailing list, according to BleepingComputer.

Security researchers watchTowr confirmed the news, saying the bugs are tracked as CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, and that the duo is being nicknamed “php2shell” by the community. Obviously, technical details are being withheld to protect users, but most likely affect PHP versions 5, 6, 7, and 8.

"In the last hour, two remote code execution vulnerabilities in PHP have been leaked. These vulnerabilities were previously scheduled under embargo and due for release on Thursday at 11 am ET," watchTowr CEO Benjamin Harris told BleepingComputer.

"While we are not able to share technical information at this point for obvious reasons, given the sensitivity, we can confirm that these vulnerabilities are indeed real. Both of them are CVSS10 and are understood to affect PHP versions 5, 6, 7, and 8."

The researchers also told the publication they managed to successfully reproduce CVE-2026-109618, confirming the flaws actually work. Good news is, there are still no confirmed reports of the flaws being used as zero-days in the wild.

• State Bank of India is investigating a suspected dark web data leak affecting thousands of customer records
• Exposed information reportedly includes personal details, loan-related data, and customer identifiers
• Bank has launched a forensic investigation but has not yet confirmed the source or authenticity of the leak

The State Bank of India (SBI) has confirmed losing sensitive data on thousands of its users, and worryingly said that it doesn’t yet know when or where the leak took place.

SBI is India’s largest public-sector bank, and one of the country’s biggest financial institutions. Its majority owner is the Indian government, and it provides services such as personal and business banking, loans, credit cards, and similar.

The company has filed a new report with the country’s stock exchange, saying it experienced “an incident involving the loss of certain data.” In the filing, it said that in mid-October 2026 it was contacted by its Threat Intelligence Service Provider, the Defence Cyber Agency, and CERT-In, in response to an alert regarding data leaking into the dark web.

Leaking PII

375,000 records were apparently made available on the dark web, among which were 3,897 bank customer records containing Personally Identifiable Information (PII).

“The exposed information reportedly included customers’ registered mobile numbers, dates of birth, names, gender, email addresses, residential addresses, branch and CIF identifiers, lead IDs, and metadata associated with loan/lead records and other related files,” the filing says.

So far, the bank does not know if the leak is authentic, who leaked it, or how they obtained the data. It kicked off a detailed investigation to determine the source and extent of the exposure, and assess any associated risks. Cyber incident response and containment protocols were triggered, and an independent CERT-In-empanelled cybersecurity agency was brought in for forensic analysis.

The bank stressed that the leak does not have a material impact on its business operations, and that it expects to continue functioning as usual.

In the meantime, an X account called CyberPulse56 flagged a dark web forum post, made on October 16 2026 by a threat actor called Siriusim. In the post, the actor claimed to have 375,000 CSV rows and 2,722 PDF documents belonging to the bank. They allegedly contained personal customer information, loan applications and supporting documents, account-opening applications, and address and other application-related details.

The Free Press Journal later established that the post was made on BreachForums, one of the most popular dark web cybercrime forums, and concluded that at least some of the data found there was authentic. It found that a WhatsApp profile picture associated with one number matched the passport-size photograph on that person’s KYC document, and it also found that the shared sample was primarily related to loans and contained KYC fields.

No clear connection to SBI

However, there was no information connecting the data to SBI, any of its subsidiaries, or third-party providers in its supply chain. Therefore, we cannot conclude if SBI was actually breached or not. There are a number of ways this data might have wound up on the dark web - it could originate from an older breach, it could be from an entirely different entity, or it could be a recycling of multiple older breaches - something cybercriminals are known for doing.

However, if the data is confirmed authentic, it could be a major risk for the bank’s customers. Information such as postal addresses, CIF identifiers, and loan records, can be used to create highly convincing phishing emails, through which the victims could end up downloading malware, or sharing vital login credentials with the attackers.

This type of stage-two compromise can then lead to ransomware or BEC attacks, which could cause severe disruptions, trigger class-action lawsuits, and result in brand erosion. SBI users should be wary of incoming email messages, especially those claiming to be from the bank, carrying a sense of urgency, or threatening account closure or funds displacement.

Via The Hacker News

• Cybercriminals use antidetect browsers to disguise devices, hijack accounts, and evade fraud detection systems
• Stolen session cookies, fake identities, and AI automation help scale scams and account abuse
• Researchers warn AI-integrated antidetect tools are lowering barriers for large-scale fraud operations

Cybercriminals have started using antidetect browsers as part of their tech stack, helping them evade detection while deploying session cookies, creating thousands of fake accounts, and passing Know Your Customer (KYC) checks. This is according to a new in-depth report published by security experts Check Point Research (CPR), in which it says that Russian, Iranian, and Chinese hackers are spearheading these activities.

What are antidetect browsers?

When users log into services like Facebook or TikTok using regular browsers, they leave behind digital fingerprints - screen resolution, operating system, fonts. This information can be used to identify and track a device across online sessions, and if a single entity (for example, a digital marketing agency) tries logging into multiple accounts from the same browser, it might trigger a security alert (or simply go against certain terms of service).

Hence the need for antidetect browsers - specialized software whose key feature is the ability to create isolated profiles with different digital fingerprints, making multiple accounts appear to originate from separate devices.

They are generally used to manage social media accounts, advertising, and e-commerce accounts, or to run web scraping operations or test websites across environments.

Antidetect browsers are not malicious by design, and are mostly used by digital marketing agencies and affiliate marketers. However, just as many other good things, these browsers are actively used by cybercriminals to exploit the tech and run fraudulent accounts.

Many competing tools are available today, but a handful stand out - Kameleo, AdsPower, Multilogin, GoLogin, and Dolphin Anty.

According to CPR, underground forums are full of discussions on using antidetect browsers for different fraudulent activities. These mostly originate from Chinese, Iranian, or Russian hackers, and generally revolve around Kameleo, AdsPower, and Multilogin.

“We selected these specifically on the basis of documented references across underground forums and criminal marketplaces, indicating active adoption beyond their stated commercial purposes,” CPR explained.

Analyzing these discussions, CPR discovered that the threat actors primarily use antidetect browsers to leverage stolen session cookies. When they steal a cookie, they can inject it into a clean browser profile to assume control of the account and operate it unabated. Banking accounts and cryptocurrency wallets are the most popular targets.

AI seasoning

Besides banks and crypto wallets, threat actors are also using these browsers to test payment credentials across e-commerce platforms without triggering any alarms. They’re also using them to apply for loans under fabricated identities, and to create fake accounts in bulk, which are then used to generate advertising revenue at scale.

At the same time, Artificial Intelligence is making these operations easier to scale, CPR says. AdsPower, for example, offers integration with Large Language Models (LLM) through a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, allowing AI-powered workflows to connect with browser profiles. Through automation marketplaces, it also offers different templates for things like commenting, liking, or sending messages across multiple accounts.

A combination of antidetect browsers, AI account management, and AI generated content creates a powerful concoction that allows threat actors to run large, coordinated campaigns with minimal involvement. This allows them to build and “warm up” fake accounts over time, which then appear more credible and are easier to use in scam and fraud attacks.

“The antidetect browser ecosystem represents a sophisticated, commercially mature, and increasingly AI-driven infrastructure that has fundamentally lowered the barrier to running scam and fraud operations, as well as coordinated inauthentic operations at scale,” CPR warns. “These commercially maintained tools are available in dozens of languages, backed by customer support teams, tested daily against the world’s largest social media platforms, and are now integrated with LLM pipelines that remove the human operator from the execution layer.”

The researchers advise security teams to look beyond account behavior and focus on the infrastructure, including residential proxies, browser fingerprint inconsistencies, and unusual session-cookie patterns. Social media platforms should start analyzing antidetect browsers to better understand how they bypass their detection mechanisms, while companies should review whether their security systems can detect account takeovers involving session cookies.

• Block Blast allegedly adjusts difficulty to encourage players to watch advertisements
• The free puzzle game reportedly generated $127 million from advertising in five months
• Hidden gameplay mechanisms may turn player frustration into advertising revenue

A developer known as Ayoships has reverse-engineered the code of Block Blast, a puzzle app by Hungry Games, revealing deliberate tricks that push players toward ads.

The app costs nothing to download, yet it earned close to $127 million from ads in five months from January through May 2026.

According to the developer, the app allegedly adjusts its difficulty based on what each player is worth to the developers rather than the skill of that player

How free games allegedly manipulate your patience

The game's code reportedly contains mechanisms that assess players using data such as smartphone models, geographical locations, and previous ad interactions.

These indicators can help estimate users’ purchasing power and ad value, potentially influencing how the application manages their playing experience.

Owners of expensive smartphones may be considered more commercially valuable than users with older, cheaper devices.

Similarly, geographical information can provide clues about average consumer income, helping ad systems estimate which audiences might generate greater returns.

The reported techniques extend beyond identifying potentially valuable advertising audiences.

One mechanism used by the game is “Boost then kill,” which reportedly makes a round easier before introducing greater difficulty.

This sequence can encourage players to believe they are performing exceptionally well, motivating them to continue playing rather than abandon the game.

According to the investigation, gameplay can suddenly become exceptionally difficult, encouraging players to watch a video ad in exchange for another attempt.

This approach connects frustration directly to ad revenue by making continued progress appear dependent on accepting an ad offer.

The game reportedly includes additional mechanisms that secretly increase scores, making ad-related rewards appear more valuable than they otherwise might.

References in the code include “reward,” “bait,” and “moreCleanSuccessRound,” the latter reportedly describing an easier round designed to build confidence.

If these mechanisms operate as described, players may struggle to distinguish genuine achievements from software adjustments intended to influence their decisions.

Advertising revenue drives concerns about deceptive game mechanics

Block Blast illustrates the concerns surrounding ad-supported games when commercial incentives potentially influence difficulty, rewards, and progression.

Free access does not necessarily mean users pay nothing, since their attention and viewing time can become valuable sources of income.

Optional advertisements offering extra lives or additional attempts are common in mobile gaming.

However, deliberately increasing frustration to encourage ad consumption raises different ethical questions.

Ayoships develops AI-powered mobile applications himself; therefore, independent verification is important when assessing his interpretation of Block Blast’s code.

The available findings do not establish how frequently the alleged difficulty adjustments occur or whether every player experiences the same treatment.

They also leave open whether the mechanisms respond automatically to advertising opportunities or follow other conditions built into the software.

These distinctions matter when determining whether the observed behaviour constitutes deliberate manipulation rather than ordinary gameplay balancing.

Via minimachines

• Thousands of Danfoss refrigeration controllers were discoverable through public internet scanning
• A hidden daily code could bypass normal administrator password verification
• An email configuration flaw could enable operating system command execution

Thousands of Danfoss refrigeration management systems may face remote attacks after researchers uncovered authentication weaknesses and dangerous software flaws.

Security researchers at Claroty’s Team82 used Censys, a cybersecurity platform, to identify 2,765 publicly accessible systems.

Their investigation identified three vulnerabilities affecting the AK-SM 800A controller, which manages refrigeration equipment in supermarkets, warehouses and cold storage facilities.

Hidden passwords expose refrigeration management systems

The AK-SM 800A provides centralized monitoring and configuration of refrigeration equipment, including temperature settings, operating schedules, alarms, and notification services.

Its browser accessible management interface allows technicians to maintain installations remotely, but internet exposure can also give attackers direct access to vulnerable systems.

Team82 discovered an undocumented authentication mechanism that could allow attackers to circumvent the administrator password through a daily generated access code.

Designated CVE-2025-41450, the flaw involves an alternative verification process that checks a specially constructed credential against a value generated using the device’s current date.

Researchers reconstructed the algorithm responsible for generating this code by examining the controller’s firmware and authentication routines.

Anyone able to reproduce the algorithm could potentially obtain administrative access without knowing the legitimate password configured on the affected device.

That access could expose configuration settings and management functions normally reserved for authorized personnel.

The consequences extend beyond unauthorized account access because refrigeration controllers help operators maintain conditions required for preserving perishable products.

A second vulnerability, CVE-2025-41451, allows command injection through the controller’s email configuration functionality.

Researchers found that an email authentication password entered through the management interface could be incorporated into an operating system command without adequate sanitization.

Malicious input could therefore introduce additional shell commands, potentially enabling remote code execution after authentication.

Combined with the hidden daily password mechanism, this weakness could provide an attacker with a route from unauthorized login to execution of commands on the controller.

Configuration flaws threaten system availability

The investigation also identified CVE-2025-41452, which affects the controller’s externally accessible Nginx web server configuration.

Researchers discovered that an authenticated function could replace the headers.conf file and reload the server configuration without restarting the device.

An attacker with the necessary access could insert unauthorized routing directives, changing how the web server processes requests.

Team82 also found that requests reaching a maliciously configured route could trigger an unhandled exception in the sm_app process, disrupting the management interface.

Repeatedly triggering this failure could cause a denial of service, preventing legitimate operators from accessing the controller’s web management functions.

Such disruption could complicate monitoring and maintenance, although the researchers did not establish that every attack would cause refrigeration equipment to stop operating.

Claroty’s Team82 reported the vulnerabilities privately to Danfoss through coordinated disclosure, and the manufacturer released firmware version R4.3.1 to address the identified weaknesses.

Operators using affected AK-SM 800A controllers should upgrade to version R4.3.1 or later and restrict administrative interfaces to trusted management networks or protected VPN connections.

• Tencent says AI agents it used to evaluate third-party models showed "unintended" browsing behavior, the first such admission by a major Chinese firm
• Swarmchasers researchers logged more than 2,600 attempts by the Tencent Cloud fleet to pull entrance data from Alibaba's Amap
• Most attempts failed, but agents used a public scanner as a remote browser, and one leaked company API key returned real place data

Tencent has acknowledged that AI agents running on its infrastructure behaved unexpectedly after independent researchers caught a fleet of them repeatedly trying to pull data from Alibaba's Amap navigation service.

Reuters reports the company's AI unit, Tencent Hunyuan, said the agents were being used to evaluate third-party models, in what appears to be the first known case of rogue agent activity acknowledged by a major Chinese company.

In a post on X, the unit said the activity did not come from its own Hunyuan models, noting "During these evaluations, some agents exhibited unintended web-browsing behavior, but our review found no evidence of deliberate targeting or coordination," before adding that it was tightening network access controls and agent monitoring.

A lot of "unintended" effort for a zoo gate?

The admission follows a full report by Swarmchasers, a loose group of researchers who met at an AI hackathon. They counted more than 2,600 attempts to extract Amap data over 11 days, from September 28 to October 8 2026, traced the traffic to Tencent Cloud servers in Hong Kong, and then did something nobody appears to have done before: they talked to the agents while they were still running.

The tasks were almost comically mundane. A typical job asked which entrance of a place like Chengdu Zoo most Amap users use, with other runs covering parks, museums, and hospitals and, on September 30, a British Columbia cancer statistics dashboard.

The problem was getting the answer. Amap's anti-bot system expects browser cookies, JavaScript-generated tokens, and sometimes a CAPTCHA, while the fleet's harness sent plain Python and curl requests. One agent told the researchers that Amap had blocked its Tencent sandbox, so it could not fetch the data itself.

The agents improvised instead; according to the Swarmchasers report, they packed their own HTML and JavaScript into URLs and fed them to urlquery.net, a public security scanning service, borrowing its browser to run their code.

When Amap kept blocking them, the programs tried to intercept or forge tokens from Alibaba's own anti-bot libraries, sent 57 requests to four pre-production hosts, routed traffic through Baidu Translate and remote browsers, and, in seven reports, used Amap API keys found on the open web.

Most of it did not work as intended: in a snapshot of 2,372 reports up to October 4, nearly half ended on an empty Amap page or login prompt and almost a quarter on a blank tab. None of the token tricks appear to have succeeded, and there is no evidence that any pre-production server answered. The entrance figures that did come back arrived mostly through Jina's page reader, which can serve cached copies up to 30 days old.

The exception should worry businesses more than Alibaba. A key and security code exposed in another company's public source code did return real place data, and the researchers say they cannot tell whose account was billed for those requests.

Tencent's framing of the activity as "unintended" is accurate as far as it goes, but it sidesteps an awkward point. If an evaluation asks agents for data that only Amap displays, behind defenses a sandboxed agent without a browser cannot legitimately clear, then crossing that line is close to the only route to a correct answer.

US incidents involved something similar: OpenAI's agents breached Hugging Face while hunting for answers to an ExploitGym benchmark, with later disclosures showing they organized through a makeshift message board, and roughly 700 of them took part in an attack Hugging Face eventually contained using Zhipu's open GLM 5.2 model. Anthropic found three Claude models had compromised real organizations after a misconfigured evaluation left internet access open, and this month disclosed that Claude Haiku 4.5 filed a false homicide tip with Philadelphia police while exploring random websites.

Reuters judges Tencent's case less egregious than those, and the Swarmchasers found no sign the agents coordinated, which is why they call it a fleet rather than a swarm. Still, as recent analysis argued, sandbox escapes often come down to an agent routing around a proxy, and borrowing a stranger's browser is exactly that.

Tencent's admission lands in the same week ByteDance's Seed unit created a dedicated Alignment & Preparedness team and began recruiting 10 researchers worldwide, a rare public commitment to frontier safety work by a major Chinese developer. The internal email announcing it went out a day before the Swarmchasers' full report and, in 36Kr's translation, points to a broader run of agent escapes rather than this one case, so the two are not cause and effect even if they do point the same way.

The argument is that alignment remains unsolved regardless of whose flag flies over the data center, and they want every lab running internet-connected agents to audit what its sandboxes can reach, a seemingly modest ask.

This fleet, however, ran for nearly a week before outside researchers stumbled on it at a hackathon, then carried on for four more days after their preliminary findings went public, and Tencent has yet to explain why.

• US civilian agencies have been ordered to stop using DeepSeek and remove it from government systems
• DHS cited data security, user tracking, and potential national security risks tied to the AI model
• The move expands broader US restrictions on Chinese technology across government infrastructure

The Donald Trump administration has banned Chinese Artificial Intelligence model DeepSeek from all civilian government agencies and ordered them to stop using it and remove it from its tech stack immediately.

Earlier this week, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a new notice, notifying government agencies of the change:

“The Department of Homeland Security is publishing notice of the Secretary of Homeland Security’s issuance of an order (1) excluding information technology products and services developed by Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Co., Ltd (DeepSeek), to include affiliated entities as defined in applicable regulations, from federal civilian agency procurements; and, (2) removing all DeepSeek and DeepSeek-affiliate products, and third-party products and services developed using DeepSeek implementations, from civilian agency information technology.”

Multiple threat vectors

Apparently, this is not the first time the Trump administration made moves against Chinese AI tech. According to CNBC, the order was originally issued in late July this year, and applies to federal civilian agencies including the Treasury, State and Justice departments, but excluding the Department of Defense. The publication also said the US Congress restricted the use of DeepSeek in intelligence community systems late last year, and even earlier - in March - the US Commerce Department told its staff not to use DeepSeek. The Defense Information Systems Agency banned it in January 2025.

In the latest DHS order, it was said that DeepSeek’s models “present multiple threat vectors”. To use the tool, users need to provide all sorts of data - from personally identifiable information (PII) to other business or proprietary information, which the company can use to “track and digitally fingerprint users”. Furthermore, China’s laws allow the government to easily access and collect the data created and stored by private companies, meaning information on US citizens can easily fall into the government’s hands. That, in turn, “could produce actionable intelligence on US persons and/or government programs,” the DHS explains.

“The models themselves may contain malware or other security vulnerabilities,” it stressed. “Indeed, open-source security research has found that the DeepSeek iOS mobile application contains multiple critical vulnerabilities.”

When asked for a comment, China’s foreign ministry told the Reuters news agency it would safeguard the rights of its companies: “China consistently opposes the over-generalization of national security as well as the politicization of science, technology and trade issues,” Mao Ning, a ministry spokesperson, told the agency.

China trade war

US President Donald Trump has openly talked against using Chinese technology and has banned multiple companies and solutions already. In his first term, he blacklisted hundreds of Chinese companies and affiliates, including telecommunications giants Huawei and ZTE, semiconductor manufacturer SMIC, drone maker DJI, and surveillance technology firms Hikvision and Dahua Technology. ZTE almost went bankrupt over it, and Huawei ended up building its own mobile phone operating system, Harmony OS, after losing access to Google and Android. At the time, the US was upgrading its mobile network to 5G, something Chinese companies were interested in working on. However, Trump argued that the Chinese government could force these companies into installing backdoors, which could allow China to eavesdrop on US communications.

In August 2026, during his second term, Trump signed an executive order declaring a national emergency and banned all foreign bulk-power systems from being imported, installed, or used in the country. He also said the government would analyze existing systems to isolate and remove any foreign-built hardware or software. The same ban was issued during his first term but was revoked by the Biden administration.

Later this month, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will vote to prevent all Chinese labs from testing hardware used in the US, Reuters reported. Last year, four in five (82%) of all US electronics were tested in China.

Via CNBC

• California Department of Education third-party partner falls victim to a data breach attack
• An estimated three years' worth of students (5.7 million per year) likely affected
• It seems access was obtained by a simple password theft

Malwarebytes has reported that millions of current and former California public school students have had their sensitive personal information stole following a massive data breach.

The breach occurred in a Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) system used by Educational Testing Service (ETS) – a third party used by the California Department of Education for managing student information.

According to the report, the attackers were able to regain entry repeatedly over the course of four months, accessing student files filled with names, addresses, dates of birth and more.

California student system breach likely impacting millions

Though ETS hasn't officially disclosed how many students have been impacted, Malwarebytes notes that the state's public schools counted more than 5.7 million students in the 2025-2026 year alone. The state's Department of Education believes students who enrolled in the previous three years could be impacted – or around 17 million students if all three years were equal.

The sensitive files were accessed and copied multiple times between May 22 and September 18, with the activity finally being discovered on September 25, and it all comes down to human vulnerability.

Rather than a software vulnerability, the attackers are believed to have gained access via compromised credentials, though the intricacies around the specific attack vector haven't been shared yet.

ETS and the California Department of Education are both working to notify impacted individuals, who are being given 24 months of identity protection software for free. No evidence seems to have been found to prove that the stolen information has been publicly released, and it doesn't seem that a ransom threat has been made.

"We have implemented additional safeguards, including enhanced monitoring, strengthened access controls, and further third-party review of our security practices," ETS added in a statement (via Reuters).

• Social platforms have incurred over $26 billion in privacy fines and settlements globally since 2020.
• Meta platforms (Facebook and Instagram) accounted for $23.7 billion (91%) of all penalties.
• The US led enforcement with $20.9 billion in fines, followed by European regulators at $5.16 billion.

Social media platforms thrive on personal data, but failing to protect it is proving exceptionally costly. Since 2020, the world’s top 10 social networks have accumulated more than $26 billion in privacy-related fines and regulatory settlements worldwide.

According to a study published by cybersecurity firm Surfshark, the lion's share of this astronomical financial penalty belongs to one parent company: Meta.

Between Facebook and Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg’s tech empire is responsible for an overwhelming 91% of the worldwide total, racking up $23.7 billion in penalties.

Meta dominates the penalty board

Facebook alone accumulated $14.3 billion in penalties, while Instagram accounted for $9.4 billion. TikTok placed a distant third, tallying $1.6 billion in fines across global jurisdictions.

Other familiar platforms also faced notable regulatory actions. LinkedIn accrued $360 million, YouTube followed with $222 million, and X (formerly Twitter) totaled $151 million. Further down the list, Snapchat recorded $35 million in fines, Reddit registered $19 million, and Discord logged $928,000. Pinterest stood out as the sole platform in the study with zero qualifying privacy penalties.

The United States spearheaded the financial enforcement, imposing $20.9 billion, roughly 80% of all global fines examined. The single largest penalty came from a massive $17.1 billion US settlement involving Facebook and Instagram over allegations that inadequate safeguards exposed minors to deliberately addictive product features.

American authorities also levied $3.69 billion strictly for data-processing offenses, led by Facebook ($2.9 billion), TikTok ($593 million), and X ($150 million). TikTok additionally received an independent $100 million penalty in 2026 over inadequate security safeguards.

European regulators target cross-border transfers and GDPR

Across the Atlantic, European authorities have imposed $5.16 billion in fines under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and national frameworks.

Ireland served as the focal point of enforcement, issuing $4.87 billion, or 94% of Europe’s total, largely because many tech giants maintain their regional headquarters in Dublin. France trailed at $245 million, followed by the UK at $36 million.

Europe’s two heaviest individual fines stemmed from unauthorized international data transfers:

Facebook received a $1.39 billion fine for transferring EU user data to US servers.

TikTok was hit with a $615 million fine for transferring European user data to China, echoing wider scrutiny surrounding apps with ties to foreign jurisdictions.

European regulators also penalized platforms $1.22 billion for unlawful data processing, $1.09 billion for data breach incidents, and $594 million for insufficient technical security safeguards. Regulatory bodies in South Korea and Australia added further pressure, issuing $62.4 million and roughly $50.5 million in fines, respectively.

As lawmakers worldwide tighten regulations, whether battling data misuse or debating proposals that weaken encryption, these multi-billion-dollar sums send an unmistakable message: user privacy can no longer be treated as an afterthought.

• A hacker used AI agents to target more than 1,200 websites, compromising over 100 in under a month
• Autonomous agents tested vulnerabilities, adapted tactics, and established access with minimal human input
• Researchers warn AI-powered attacks are making large-scale website compromise faster and cheaper

In less than a month, a single Chinese hacker managed to break into more than 100 company websites, while doing almost none of the work himself. Instead, he tasked AI agents to do it for him and paid them around $5,000 in tokens for the job.

The campaign was spotted by cybersecurity researcher Snorre Fagerland from NorForge, who was looking for exposed Cairn installations when he found approximately two dozen being used for malicious purposes. These gave him first-hand insight into an active cybercriminal operation.

Cairn is described as an open source, general-purpose AI problem-solving engine, designed to help autonomous agents find solutions to complex tasks. Instead of focusing on a single application, Cairn provides a framework that defines goals, explores different approaches, and then executes actions to try and solve the problem. According to numerous media outlets, Cairn is quite popular in the cybercriminal community (although it’s not malicious by design).

When security becomes a problem needing solving

In this case, the “problem” Cairn was trying to solve for the attacker was how to run code on a website without signing in. They were trying out SQL injection, file uploads, as well as unsafe handling of stored objects. The goal, according to the researcher, was to establish persistent access to shopping and payment systems which could later be used to steal money.

Fagerland said the attacker used a combination of models, likely Claude Code with a DeepSeek model, although it is very difficult to determine. The instructions themselves were very brief, generally fewer than 100 Chinese characters, and in less than a month, the agents tried to break into more than 1,200 sites.

On average, the agents poke around a website for a day (23 hours), before either breaking in or moving on. With some 100 successful break-ins, Fagerland says the hacker paid $50 for tokens on average, per breach. This, however, is an estimate and not a confirmed billing.

The analyst did not name the victims. In its report, Cybersecurity News said the victims were mainly online stores in the United States, Canada, Australia and Japan, and Reuters managed to confirm some targets by “independently reviewing the hacker's Cairn activity”: including Deere (farm equipment maker), SharkNinja (home appliance ​company), and Cummins (engine manufacturer). It added that two “smaller businesses” also acknowledged being compromised but did not reply to the agency’s inquiries.

Impressive technique

Deere told Reuters it took “necessary remediation actions” and added that there was “no indication that sensitive information was accessed.” SharkNinja said the breach hit a standalone site carrying product support information only, and that the threat had been remediated. Cummins just said it was looking into reports.

So far, no one knows if the attacker managed to steal any sensitive data from his victims, and if so - how many. The researcher apparently found “hundreds” of exposed secrets in the open panels and was working with Reuters to let the victims know.

Fageraland told Reuters he was “impressed” by some of the techniques the agents used while compromising their victims. Apparently, after hitting a dead end against one of the targets, the AI agents scanned digital records in search of associated infrastructure. When they found a public-facing control panel, they discovered a “subtle weakness” in how it processed data. It took “hours of trial and error” before finally being able to execute a malicious command on the website’s server.

"It's ⁠not straightforward to come up with solutions like that," Fagerland said. "It's not script kiddie stuff."

AI attackers are the new normal, it seems. Business owners are advised to patch public-facing applications, restrict access to admin panels, and keep an eye on unexpected files in web directories.

Via Tom's Hardware

• Microsoft unveils Guardian Agents to monitor, constrain, and manage risks posed by autonomous AI agents
• New controls dynamically adjust agent permissions, behavior, and access based on changing risk levels
• Company warns “agentic insiders” require continuous AI-driven oversight beyond traditional security controls

AI fans, your vocabulary is about to become two phrases richer: Agentic Insider, and Guardian Agent. These are the two phrases Microsoft used while announcing a swathe of new tools and features to help businesses secure their operations running AI agents.

A new Microsoft blog, published by Microsoft's Corporate VP for Identity and Network Access, Nadim Abdo, argues that agents, while not inherently malicious, can make mistakes or be manipulated and compromised.

Since they need to be granted relatively extensive permissions in order to be able to work properly, it creates the sort of risk that can prove disastrous if not properly handled.

Agentic Overwatch

Abdo also added that AI agents doing their master's bidding cannot be trusted with their own security.

"Satya Nadella, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Microsoft, recently described the trust architecture this new era requires: we must separate the supply of intelligence from the authority over it," Abdo writes.

"We should not ask a model to be its own security authority. The controls that determine what it can access, what actions it can take, and whether it should continue operating must sit outside the model, where the model cannot bypass or tamper with them."

So, oversight is the keyword here. But AI agents move at machine speed, something no human can match, and therefore humans are not properly equipped for the job. Instead, separate AI agents need to be introduced to keep their juniors in check. Earlier, Microsoft introduced Project Perception and the Microsoft cyber stack, to help organizations defend with agents.

Project Perception is an AI-powered cybersecurity system designed to coordinate specialized AI agents that analyze security data, identify vulnerabilities, and investigate different threats. The system uses three types of agents: red agents that probe for weaknesses, blue agents that investigate potential threats, and green agents that implement corrections and fixes.

Now, Microsoft says it is extending the project to secure “the agentic insider”. They’re calling it - Guardian Agent.

“Guardian Agents help security teams operate continuously, at machine speed and scale, while sensors, context, and actuators across the cyber stack help understand changing agent risk and continuously adapt protection in response,” Abdo explained. “Project Perception and Microsoft Agent 365 share signals, context, and a unified registry giving IT and security teams a consistent view of agents and risk, with the controls each needs.”

Drill sergeant

Abdo says Guardian Agents build on a security principle where non-deterministic intelligence needs to be surrounded with deterministic controls, independent evidence, and containment boundaries.

These controls are divided into seven aspects - identity, permissions, data, endpoints, network, cloud, and runtime - and these have four responsibilities: to know which agent exists, who owns them and why, and what they’re doing; to contain what each agents can access and do before it acts; to protect the data, tools, runtime, resources, and systems the agent uses; and to adapt protection continuously as behavior, context, and risk change.

In other words, the AI needs to be the drill sergeant for the drones, adapting to changes in real-time to make sure they’re doing good work and not going rogue.

Microsoft also said it is expanding discovery to 35 additional types of local agents, including Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, and GitHub Copilot. It also announced extending Microsoft Entra Agent ID with identity types for additional agent patterns, including both local and previously unknown agents discovered through security sensors.

With “Dynamic Permissions” and “Dynamic Agent Risk”, Microsoft wants to give businesses tighter control over what AI agents can access and do, while keeping tabs on their behavior and risk levels. Dynamic Permissions limit agents to the access they need for a specific task, while Dynamic Agent Risk checks for potential threats.

Dynamic Conditional Access can then respond to rising risks by restricting permissions, blocking certain operations, or asking for human approval. In more extreme scenarios, an agent can be stopped and isolated.

• Kaspersky's VPN, Password Manager, Safe Kids, and My Kaspersky portal failed worldwide from October 11 to roughly October 14
• The outage began hours after Ukrainian drones shut down Yandex's Vladimir data center, but no technical link has been shown between the two
• A viral post calling Kaspersky "practically dead" was wrong on database updates, lost passwords, and its Europe-only framing - the effect was global and temporary

Kaspersky customers worldwide recently spent several days unable to use the company's VPN, Password Manager, Safe Kids parental controls, or My Kaspersky account portal, after an outage began within hours of Ukrainian drones forcing a third Yandex data center offline.

The company has blamed technical issues and has not named an underlying cause - but the overlap with the strikes on Russia's biggest tech firm has been hard for users to ignore.

On October 15 2026, Riga-based commentator Professor Talk (@SergejTalk) told his followers that European users were finding Kaspersky's antivirus "practically dead," with database updates failing, the password manager gone along with its contents, and the VPN wiped out.

Many of those claims don't hold up to the record; the outage itself, however, was real, global, and lasted the better part of four days, but it did point to a potential connection to Russian hosting for many of Kaspersky's key services.

Locked out on four continents: Bad timing or something more?

The first complaints landed on Kaspersky's support forum early on Sunday, October 11, when a user reported the VPN refusing to connect on both PC and phone. Within a day, the thread had drawn reports from Malaysia, Brazil, Italy, Vietnam, Spain, Germany, Iraq, the UK, and Australia, while users in Japan described failed activations and an unreachable VPN on X.

As a result, on October 12, Kaspersky employee and forum moderator Danila T. confirmed that some features in Kaspersky products and on My Kaspersky were temporarily unavailable, naming VPN, Safe Kids, and Password Manager, and said protection and user data were unaffected.

A later notice, relayed in French by moderator Berny, said the VPN problems hit the app on every supported operating system, and that licenses bought from October 10 onward could face activation delays. Kaspersky said it would extend affected subscriptions automatically to cover the lost time.

The staff, while in damage-control mode, also told users not to uninstall or reinstall applications, noting that the activation service issues would essentially lock them out of the applications altogether.

Service came back in stages. Berny reported My Kaspersky was reachable again on the evening of October 13; users said the VPN was connecting by the morning of October 14, and Danila T. posted that day that "the VPN issue should now be resolved."

The timing is what has people talking. Drones struck Yandex's Sasovo data center in the Ryazan region overnight on October 7 to 8, partially disabled its Kaluga site on October 9, and forced the complete shutdown of its Vladimir facility overnight into October 11.

Yandex Cloud was placed into emergency mode, and customers were advised to activate their own disaster recovery plans. We reported Yandex search traffic collapsing as the company's central Russian cloud zones went dark.

Correlation, not proven causation

A detailed incident timeline published on Habr puts the Vladimir power failure between 04:00 and 06:08 Moscow time on October 11, close to when Kaspersky VPN users began reporting problems. Kaspersky's own notice flagging licenses bought on October 10 also falls within a window when two Yandex sites were already damaged.

This is correlation, not causation, and Kaspersky has not said any consumer service runs on Yandex Cloud; none of the reporting to date, including Günter Born's blog and WinFuture, has produced technical evidence that one does.

WinFuture has noted that it remains unclear whether Kaspersky still depends on Russian data centers. Yandex's collapse also knocked over more than a dozen unrelated third-party services, according to The Record, from retailers to the Russian arm of TikTok, so a coincidental fault elsewhere would struggle to stand out.

The same week also reminded everyone how quickly such links harden online often without actual grounding in facts. Viral claims that the strikes had silenced Russian troll farms drew a rebuttal from OCCRP senior editor Ilya Lozovsky, who said they have "no basis in fact", noting the Cloudflare data in question measured automated crawlers rather than social media bots.

Irrespective of what is true here, the timing of Kaspersky's services going offline coinciding with Russian data centers going offline is a worrying one for an EU that is already looking to develop its own data security infrastructure and is trying to wean its users off 3rd-party services of what could in the future be an adversary.

The wider data center war shows no sign of easing. Russian strikes damaged at least six Ukrainian data centers in late September, and Ukraine's current strikes are seen as a tit-for-tat measure rather than an escalation.

For retail customers of Kaspersky's services inside or outside the EU, the practical lesson is narrower: Local protection kept working, which matters most for antivirus software.

But anyone leaning on the company's VPN or cloud-synced password manager has just seen how a disruption far from their own machine can take those tools away for days. Those who want a reliable plan B can find alternatives in our guide to the best antivirus software or the best VPN solutions for their specific use cases.

• Ukraine's CCD says suspected Russian bot posts in its sample fell 83.6% on October 8 after a strike shut Yandex's Sasovo data center
• The same data shows volume back above pre-strike levels by October 10, with a smaller 42.6% dip after the Vladimir shutdown
• Cloudflare and Graphika found no comparable drop in Western political communities, though Russian-language Telegram output fell 5% to 15%

Ukraine's Center for Countering Disinformation (CCD) says suspected Russian bot accounts went almost silent after drones knocked out Yandex data centers earlier this month, with message volume across a monitored network falling 83.6% in a single day.

The findings come from an analytical report the CCD dated October 15 2026. Using Osavul monitoring software, analysts tracked 22,664 messages from 5,201 accounts showing signs of inauthentic behavior across 26 topics in Ukraine's Facebook and Telegram space between October 6 and 12.

The 83.6% figure is real, but the same report shows those accounts posting more than before within 48 hours, and independent data from Cloudflare shows that at least some of the malicious automation running on Yandex's cloud did not die so much as move house.

A collapse in automated traffic after the Yandex Cloud took a beating

The first collapse came on October 8, hours after a drone strike and fire shut down Yandex's Sasovo data center in Ryazan region, home to two of the company's three supercomputers.

Daily messages fell from 4,032 to 660, and active accounts dropped from 1,526 to 258. Telegram took the harder hit, down 90%, while Facebook fell 79.5%. A second, shallower dip followed the October 11 strike that Yandex said had completely halted its Vladimir site, with messages falling 42.6% on October 12, from 4,711 to 2,704. A subgroup of 98 accounts the CCD flagged for justifying the invasion or inciting hatred followed the same curve, down 77.8% on October 8 and 49.2% on October 12.

The most telling detail sits in the middle. The October 9 strike at Yandex's Kaluga campus, which the company describes as its largest, only partially took the site offline, and the CCD recorded no fall in activity that day. The two dips line up with the two complete shutdowns, as one would expect if these accounts depended on that infrastructure, though that's not proof on its own.

A surprisingly fast turnaround time?

What the 84% figure that the CCD touts leaves out is how briefly the silence held. Message volume recovered to 2,231 on October 9, then reached 4,585 on October 10 and 4,711 on October 11, both above the pre-strike level. The monitoring window in the report closes on October 12, so it cannot show whether the second dip recovered the same way.

The agency has also been downplaying the event on other forums; two days before the report, the CCD said posting in some clusters of the Pravda, InfoDefense and Nod of Time networks roughly halved for about 12 hours, and stressed that it had not recorded a significant overall decline across Russian bot farms.

On October 16, the CCD's summary of remarks by media literacy head Ivan Slychko described the effect as "a disruption of automation, not the complete disappearance of bots."

It also makes no mention of a similar comparison for ordinary accounts. On the afternoon of October 8, banks, retailers, mobile operators and news sites across Russia suffered outages. Without said information, it is hard to separate bot farms losing their servers from operators inside Russia simply losing connectivity.

The CCD is hardly an impartial player here; it is a body attached to Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council, and it has an incentive to exaggerate victories even when the data doesn't always support them.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had already jumped the gun, telling the Warsaw Security Forum that after the strikes "it suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms" and that might have been a deciding factor for how the CCD built its narrative.

Beyond Ukraine, the "bots went silent" story mostly rested on a Cloudflare Radar chart showing automated traffic from Yandex's AS13238 network falling to well under 1% of its recent peak on October 11. As we noted at the time, that traffic was far more likely to be crawlers than fake social media accounts, and "bot" is a loose word when automated requests make up around half of all web traffic.

Cloudflare's own post-mortem confirms it. Marina Elmore and Lai Yi Ohlsen found 99.5% of requests from AS13238 were automated, mostly verified Yandex search crawlers, and that the network supplied only about 7% of Russia-origin bot requests. Bot traffic from Russian IP addresses hitting the post, reply, and like endpoints of one social platform dipped just 5.7% across the event period.

Graphika reached a similar verdict from the other direction. Founder John Kelly's analysis of the AfD, MAGA and Reform UK communities that viral posts claimed had gone quiet found none lost their active accounts or heaviest posters.

AfD-linked accounts posted 40,365 times on October 11, 4% below the week before and well within normal swings, while MAGA mentions on X rose 25% in the eight hours after the Vladimir strike. Georgetown's Renée DiResta, writing in Lawfare, was blunt about the viral version: "It's a great story. But it looks like fiction rather than fact."

For now, the most defensible reading of the CCD's numbers is narrower than its headline. Knocking out the right data center can briefly cut the output of Russia-based accounts aimed at Ukraine. Keeping them quiet would mean hitting the servers they move to next, and on the evidence so far, that move takes a day or two.

As one analysis of battlefield computing puts it particularly well, resilience comes from designing for disconnection, and the bot operators appear to have learned that lesson faster than Yandex did.

Via UNITED24 Media

• Kaspersky finds AI and technology-themed phishing lures achieved the highest click rates, reaching 45% in testing
• Healthcare, compliance, promotions, and HR messages also proved highly effective at deceiving employees
• Researchers found regular awareness training can dramatically reduce phishing susceptibility across organizations

Phishing emails are notorious for often working exceptionally well, but which ones are the most effective? We all know that these lures need two things: A) to carry a sense of urgency; and B) the idea that the victim will either miss out on something or suffer material troubles.

But no two emails are alike, and some campaigns prove to be more successful than others.

Security researchers Kaspersky set out to learn which themes work best, and which fail, to give businesses better insight into the biggest risks lurking in the depths of their employees’ inboxes. To do that, they analyzed anonymized voluntary provided data from their Phishing Simulator. “A high click rate among users clearly highlights what specific cybersecurity training is required,” they said.

Responding to sensitive emails

The data showed five topics that yield the best results for the attackers: AI & Tech, Healthcare & Insurance, IT Policies & Compliance, Gifts & Promotions, and HR & Corporate Communications.

AI & Tech was the best-performing topic overall, with themes such as “introducing next-gen artificial intelligence” having a 45% click-through rate. In other words, almost every other recipient would click on a malicious link and potentially get served malware or share login credentials with threat actors.

Healthcare & Insurance lures tricked an average of 28% of the audience, but among the different emails, one stood out. Emails regarding a sanitary inspection report reached a 92% click-through rate. IT & Policies were third with a 26% click-through rate, followed by Gifts & Promotions (24%).

Two-thirds (66%) of recipients clicked an email inviting them to wear their’ national team’s football jersey and win a prize. HR & Corporate comms yielded a 22% click-through rate, with emails raising sensitive and high-interest internal topics being “especially dangerous”, Kaspersky said.

“People naturally respond to sensitive and highly contextual emails, especially when phishing mimics their exact workflow or local specifics. Knowing this, cybercriminals make their traps more personalized and this trend is set to accelerate with the rise of generative AI,” said Svetlana Kalashnikova, Security Awareness expert at Kaspersky.

“Fortunately, proper cultivation of cyber vigilance demonstrates measurable risk reduction: regular training and attack simulations drastically reduce phishing susceptibility rates from 60% to a mere 5–7%, according to KASAP effectiveness analytics. To protect people and businesses from human-targeting threats, we strongly recommend that organizations implement ongoing cybersecurity awareness program for all employees.”

According to Kaspersky, phishing remains the most prevalent cyber-incident for businesses at any stage of growth and ranks top among incidents leading to damaging business consequences. At the same time, attacks on humans grow more sophisticated, faster, and broader in scope and are, thanks to Artificial Intelligence (AI) now becoming a multi-stage effort.

Spotting a phishing email

Before Artificial Intelligence (AI), phishing emails were relatively easy to spot. Since they were mostly written by threat actors who aren’t native English speakers, their language was rather clunky and could not properly convey the style or the tone set up by the legitimate company’s communications team.

AI has now made malicious emails almost indistinguishable from legitimate communications, pushing identification further down the infection chain: towards links and attachments, as well as the overall sentiment.

A few things remain the same for all weaponized emails: the sense of urgency. Most legitimate organizations would not threaten their customers with account suspensions within 24 hours. They would also not host their documents on unrecognizable third-party services, and would not share attachments in executable formats.

Double-checking the domain from which the email is being sent is still a good way to spot an attack, too. Most phishing emails originate from a stolen email address, or one created on a public service. The UK postal service does not have a Proton email account.

Therefore, raising awareness, training, and doing simulations, remains the number one way to defend in 2026.

• Hackers and fraudsters are already gearing up to steal data and financial information in the run up to the US midterm elections
• AI generated imagery and deepfakes are part of highly convincing scams
• Phishing campaigns designed to prey on voter registration are also likely to pop up

As the US midterms rapidly approach, the FBI is once again warning Americans about the flood of election-related scam campaigns coming their way.

Thousands of websites have already been spotted getting ready to spool up for election season, with phishing sites, fake donation portals, and Doppelganger clones also emerging as November draws closer.

Finances and personal data are both at risk, the FBI has warned, with many campaigns leveraging new AI technologies to make scams even more convincing.

Scammers leveraging AI and deepfakes

One of the ways scammers are taking advantage of the elections is by launching campaign investment pool schemes. These campaigns ask victims to pay into a campaign pool that promises to pay more money than the victims invested if the candidate wins.

Similar scams have been spotted surrounding investment in stocks and cryptocurrencies, but campaign investments are a novel new approach.

Fake political action committee (PAC) scams have also been popping up, requesting donations to help fund campaigns, but rather than any of the money going towards furthering the candidate’s political aims, the money is instead kept by the scammers.

Political merchandise is also being abused by scammers. Fake websites advertise clothing and trinkets bearing political logos and candidate’s names, but never arrive once they are purchased.

Election phishing on the rise

Outside of what the FBI has warned against in its advisory, there are a number of other common scams that are targeting Americans looking to exercise their right to vote.

Scammers are sending out text messages en masse stating that the recipient has not yet registered to vote and that the deadline is closing soon.

This sense of urgency can easily push past the better judgement of those looking to participate in the midterm elections, and upon visiting a fake voter registration website the victims hand over their sensitive information.

Subsequent phishing, scams, and even identity theft can follow.

Iran, Russia, and China are also launching disinformation and misinformation campaigns aimed at polarizing voters across the political spectrum. Similar campaigns were spotted for the 2024 Presidential election surrounding everything from US support for Ukraine, to election interference claims.

Via The Register

• Cyberattack on BAE Systems disrupted the US Bankruptcy Noticing Center and halted bankruptcy notice distribution
• Multiple judiciary-related services and websites were temporarily taken offline during the incident
• Authorities and BAE are investigating the attack, with no details yet on data exposure or attribution

BAE Systems recently suffered a cyberattack which disrupted the US Bankruptcy Noticing Center (BNC), a service that sends official notes and orders from US federal bankruptcy courts.

The incident meant that the production and distribution of bankruptcy notices was temporarily paused until the issue was resolved.

“BAE Systems IT and websites that support the operations of the Bankruptcy Noticing Center (BNC) have been impacted by a cybersecurity incident,” a notice on the US Federal Courts website reads. “The BNC produces and transmits bankruptcy notices for all federal bankruptcy courts around the country, and BAE Systems operates BNC systems and websites on behalf of the Federal Judiciary.”

Looking into the matter

The Administrative Office of the US Courts (AOUSC) is coordinating with impacting courts, it was said, as well as with BAE Systems which is now “actively investigating” the incident and working to restore operations.

“As a result of the incident, all access to the BNC systems and websites that BAE operates on behalf of the judiciary and the related bankruptcy noticing process are unavailable at this time, including bnc.uscourts.gov, bankruptcynotices.uscourts.gov, notices.uscourts.gov, and the National Creditor Registration Service,” the notice reads. “The incident has also halted the BNC’s production and distribution of bankruptcy notices for bankruptcy courts.”

There is no official confirmation, or clarification, on the company’s website for now, but in a statement given to BleepingComputer, BAE Systems said it was investigating the matter.

"We are aware of a security incident that is isolated to the BNC system and have taken immediate steps to address it. We are coordinating closely with AOUSC on the response," the statement reads.

BAE Systems is one of the largest defense, aerospace, and security companies in the world. It is headquartered in London, UK, and works on military equipment, weapons, advanced electronics, and cybersecurity systems for governments and the military.

Among other things, BAE Systems works on the Eurofighter Typhoon aircraft, different armored combat vehicles, naval ships, radars and sensors, and different intelligence analysis and digital security services. The company reported approximately $40.91 billion in sales for 2025 and employs more than 111,000 people worldwide.

Woes of US courts

It seems that every few months, news emerges of a new breach or cyberattack at one of the US court systems.

Most recently, it was reported that the Arizona Supreme Court suffered a cyberattack in which it lost sensitive data on more than a million people. In this incident, an employee allegedly clicked a malicious link in an email, which led to the compromise of information on 1.3 million people with unpaid court fees, fines and restitution payments for traffic and criminal violations dating back 30 years.

The threat actors also stole almost 30,000 active and inactive orders of protection, as well as 150,000 reports dating back to 2010 from a foster care board making recommendations in cases where parents were allegedly unable or unfit to care for a child.

In September 2026, Thomson Reuters, the IT company behind the Reuters news agency, reported suffering a breach a few months prior, and exposing certain court documents to the attackers. The company operates a court case-management system called C-Track which was broken into in March 2026.

Earlier still, in August 2026, the US Judiciary system confirmed experiencing an “escalated cyberattacks of a sophisticated and persistent nature.” in which the threat actors targeted the case management system.

“The vast majority of documents filed with the Judiciary’s electronic case management system are not confidential and indeed are readily available to the public, which is fundamental to an open and transparent judicial system. However, some filings contain confidential or proprietary information that are sealed from public view,” the announcement said.

• World ID for Zoom will put a Human Badge on your video feed to prove you're... human
• Setting this up requires a physical iris scan and a verification selfie
• Verifying human authenticity is easier than identifying deepfakes

Sam Altman's biometric identity verification company, World, has launched a series of tools designed to help businesses distinguish real people from AI deepfakes as one of his other companies – OpenAI – becomes increasingly capable of mimicking humans.

One of the main announcements was the general availability of World ID for Zoom, which gives enterprise customers access to a verification process that can distinguish genuine video from AI content.

Under the newly-launched system, verified participants will receive a "Human Badge" displayed alongside their video feed so that other participants can be more confident that they're speaking with a human.

World ID for Zoom

While the problem World is aiming to solve seems rather dystopian and unlikely, recent Gartner research actually revealed that 36% of senior cybersecurity leaders reported at least one incident involving a deepfake during an video call over the past 12 months.

We also know that Microsoft has been launching numerous updates to address similar concerns in Teams, opening up its platform to enable third-party deepfake detection in the hope of stamping out AI-generated video and audio.

However, proving human authenticity isn't as simple as ticking a few boxes or scanning a passport. Workers will have to visit one of World's physical Orb devices, which scans their iris to create a cryptographically secure biometric reference.

To streamline the process, enterprises can choose to have an Orb installed onsite, though this could likely be a costly option.

A selfie through the mobile app then verifies the human participant against that biometric reference image during Zoom calls.

World says that detecting deepfakes can be especially challenging, "lead[ing] to an arms race between deepfake detection and creation," hence the decision to verify human authenticity instead.

• Burger King Japan discloses breach affecting 11.18 million customer records from its mobile app platform
• Exposed data included personal details and order histories, though payment information was not compromised
• Company reported no confirmed misuse and notified regulators while investigating the intrusion

The Japanese subsidiary of Burger King has confirmed suffering a data breach and apologized for losing sensitive data on millions of customers.

In a breach notification letter, Burger King Japan confirmed the exact date of the breach, as well as the nature of the data that was stolen.

"We identified a potential unauthorized third-party access to the system that manages member information for our official app and conducted an investigation," the company said in the letter. "As a result, it was determined on Tuesday, October 13, 2026, that unauthorized access occurred between Friday, October 2, 2026, and Wednesday, October 7, 2026, resulting in a leak of member information. Upon becoming aware of the unauthorized access, we immediately blocked access from the source in question."

Echoes of Russia

The investigation determined that 11.18 million customer records were nabbed, which was mostly data on people using the company’s official smartphone app.

It includes people’s names, dates of birth, genders, email addresses, phone numbers, and order histories. While credit card and other payment data was not exposed, personally identifiable information (PII) is still more than enough to launch convincing phishing emails and escalate to business email compromise (BEC), malware, or even ransomware attacks.

Burger King Japan stressed that there is no evidence of data misuse yet and added that the breach was reported to the country’s Personal Information Protection Commission (PPC).

"We sincerely apologize for the great inconvenience and concern this situation has caused to our customers and all others involved," it added. "At this time, no secondary damage, such as fraudulent use, resulting from this incident has been confirmed."

Burger King’s food isn’t the only tasty thing about the company, it seems. Cybercriminals also love breaking in and stealing data. Back in 2024, for example, the Russian arm of Burger King suffered a data breach at the hands of unknown threat actors and in late September this year, that data leaked online.

In October 2024, Burger King told local media about an attack on Mindbox, a domestic marketing automation platform the company had been using. Through Mindbox, the threat actors managed to obtain sensitive company data, including information belonging to the customers.

"Among the victims of the attack may also be the data of customers of the Burger King restaurant chain," the company said at the time. “Burger King confirms that among the personal data, the accuracy of which is being clarified, there is no information about payment details: open information about transactions is not transmitted or stored by third parties.”

Just like in the Japan incident, the Russia one did not discuss the details of the attack, or how it was pulled off. Third-party supply chain attacks are common and often rather disruptive, affecting numerous companies using the same tools. For Mindbox, however, there have been no reports of additional victims.

Supply chain attacks

In its 2024 results announcement, Mindbox said the attack was its “first serious information security incident”, which was quickly detected and contained “thanks to threat detection tools.”

In the aftermath of the breach, Mindbox said it “found and eliminated points where employees without access rights to sensitive data could indirectly obtain them,” hinting that the attack was, in fact, an identity-based attack rather than a zero-day exploit.

The company also “changed development processes to find such points before they get into the product,” and reformed Mindbox's internal role system to make permissions stricter and more granular. It also limited project access scenarios, introduced a mechanism for confirming access by another employee, and introduced mandatory two-factor authentication, among other things.

Have I Been Pwned?, a website that aggregates information stolen in various hacks and helps people learn if their email addresses and other information had been compromised in the past, has Burger King Russia on its list, but not Burger King Japan.

Via BleepingComputer

• Fake WatchGuard VPN website steals administrator credentials while delivering legitimate software
• Attackers collected VPN server addresses, usernames, and passwords
• The fraudulent website rejected initial submissions to collect credentials a second time

A fraudulent WatchGuard download website stole VPN login details while supplying the authentic installation package, experts have claimed.

Security investigators at Huntress traced the activity to a lookalike domain that collected connection details before downloading the legitimate client.

The investigation began after suspicious activity involving an administrator working for a managed service provider was detected.

Fake download pages harvest user credentials

Investigators found that the user had searched Bing for a WatchGuard VPN download before visiting a deceptive website designed to resemble the vendor's official download pages.

The website, watchguard-vpn[.]net, offered a purported mobile VPN with SSL download and displayed a form requesting the server address, username, and password.

Those details matched information required by the genuine VPN client, making the request appear consistent with an ordinary installation process.

Submitting the form transmitted the information to a separate domain, watchguard-ssl[.]online, where attackers collected the credentials for potential use against the organization's network.

The malicious script rejected the first submission and cleared the fields, prompting the victim to enter the information again and potentially supplying attackers with multiple password attempts.

Huntress revealed that the operators registered the download domain on August 22, 2026, while the credential collection domain appeared on September 14.

WatchGuard had previously reported the lookalike address in January, although researchers then found no functioning mechanism directing visitors through the fraudulent download process.

Genuine software helps conceal the credential theft

After collecting the second submission, the website initiated a download from WatchGuard's official content delivery network rather than providing a counterfeit installation package.

The file was Mobile VPN with SSL client version 12.11.5, carrying a valid digital signature from WatchGuard Technologies and a timestamp dated November 4, 2025.

Huntress verified that the installer remained unchanged after signing, meaning investigators found no evidence that attackers had modified the legitimate executable.

This approach differs from campaigns that distribute tampered installers or malicious libraries, which endpoint protection products may identify through file inspection.

The authentic download also gives victims little reason to suspect their credentials have already been compromised, since installation can proceed normally afterward.

Huntress found no recorded download from the official server during the investigated incident, suggesting the user might not have completed both credential submissions.

The detection arrived 21 seconds after the malicious website loaded, allowing the security operations team to provide remediation guidance before investigators observed further escalation.

Huntress reported that the main deceptive domain was offline by October 13, although that status does not establish whether associated infrastructure remains active elsewhere.

The attack avoids many malware checks because the fake website steals VPN credentials through the browser before downloading the genuine software.

Organizations should reset compromised passwords, enable multifactor authentication, check for suspicious VPN logins, and direct employees to official software download pages.

• Dashcams captured soldiers entering vehicles, moving around, and typing security codes
• Military personnel deleted recordings after discovering them inside the rented cars
• A shortage of alternative vehicles kept the cars in military use

Rental cars used by the Norwegian army during an exercise in Oslo filmed soldiers and stored the recordings inside the vehicles without anyone noticing, reportts have claimed.

The clips showed troops getting into and out of the cars, their movements and locations, and gate codes they typed while facing the camera.

Despite finding the footage, the military kept using the vehicles for the rest of the exercise because it had very few alternative cars available.

Why the recordings alarm people

Public sensitivity about personal data is already high, so any device that silently stores images of people attracts immediate scrutiny.

Soldiers typing access codes within view of a recording lens is a serious breach of routine security, whatever the nationality of the car's owner.

Gate codes protect restricted areas, so anyone who accessed the clips could have learned how to enter them without authorization.

The cameras were standard dash cams that soldiers had mistakenly left switched on, so recordings accumulated in the cars with nobody reviewing them.

Soldiers found the clips by chance while browsing the vehicle menus because they were bored, and they erased the recordings afterward.

What the evidence shows about China's role

The entire situation became a more sensitive topic after learning that the rental operator is part of a corporate chain that ends with a company based in China.

The armed forces rent from First Rent A Car Norway AS, a Hertz-branded operator that supplies vehicles for daily errands, exercises and operational missions.

Volvo Cars gained complete control of First Rent A Car Norway AS, but about 79% of Volvo Cars is controlled by Geely's Swedish holding arm.

Interestingly, that arm of Geely is entirely controlled by China-based Zhejiang Geely Holding Group.

Although the rental firm belongs to Volvo, only two vehicles are confirmed as Chinese-made Deepals, and the brands of the rest are unnamed.

Ownership alone proves nothing about intent, so the question becomes whether Chinese services have the capacity and record to exploit such access in Norway.

Norway’s Police Security Service, the counterintelligence body, says Chinese intelligence and security agencies now possess greater capacity to run operations inside the country.

That concern has a recent case behind it, as police detained a Chinese citizen suspected of aiding espionage, possibly aimed at the Andøya spaceport.

Other governments have acted on similar risks, as Israel’s military barred Chinese-made vehicles from its bases and later withdrew official ones from officers.

Germany’s military took a similar step, restricting phones, tablets and smartwatches for staff handling classified material because of espionage threats from Russia and China.

Yet all these cases involve other incidents and policies, and none connects Geely or the rental firm to the dash cams that recorded the soldiers.

No evidence has emerged that any recording left the cars, which makes a settings lapse by soldiers the more defensible explanation than deliberate spying.

Via Militaryni

• Researchers uncovered a zero-click spyware campaign delivered through online advertisements, requiring no user interaction
• Journalists’ devices were infected with surveillance malware capable of stealing data, messages, audio, and video
• Investigation linked the operation to Israeli firms tied to ad-tech infrastructure and commercial spyware

Imagine this: You’re a journalist. You get to work, log into your computer, and go about your daily activities. While browsing the internet, you see an ad for earbuds. You don’t click the ad, you don’t even view it with interest. You just get it served, much like any other ad on the internet, and scroll away to continue with your day.

But the moment the ad was served, through it your computer was infected with a powerful infostealer. The malware harvested all sorts of sensitive data, including files, documents, cookies, bookmarks, even saved credentials. It captured your keystrokes, took screenshots while you were working, and was even able to use your microphone and camera to record you while you were working.

Email messages, as well as instant messages shared through a wide range of platforms, were picked up and exfiltrated, as well.

Mission impossible

While this might sound like a scene from a Mission Impossible movie, unfortunately it’s completely real. The victims in this story are Al Jazeera journalists (among others). In 2024, some of the journalists noticed their devices acting strange, so they reached out to Canadian cybersecurity firm Citizen Lab, who confirmed the first-ever case of zero-click mercenary spyware attack that was delivered through online ads. They’re calling it “AdFection”.

Both Al Jazeera and Citizen Lab have released their findings, and while the question of who might be attacking journalists remains unanswered, the researchers know who facilitated it - two Israeli companies, one of which has been on the US blacklist for half a decade now.

The two companies are called Candiru and Discover-Tech. The former is a mercenary spyware company that sells sophisticated surveillance tools to government customers. They were the ones who built the infostealer and the delivery mechanism. The researchers did not say who bought the tool and who was spying on the journalists, but they did say that the infostealer cost “several million dollars”.

Candiru is now known as Integrity Labs, following a rebranding and reported acquisition. The US Department of Commerce blacklisted it in early November 2021, citing evidence that it supplied spyware to foreign governments that used it to target government officials, journalists, activists, and others. However, it seems Candiru was delisted in late July, 2026.

The second company in the infection chain is Discover-Tech. It is an Israeli ad-tech company operating MyDSP, a demand-side platform that purchases digital advertising inventory through automated ad exchanges. So allegedly, the ads carrying Candiru’s malware were served through Discover-Tech’s infrastructure.

The discovery raised questions if Discover-Tech was ever a legitimate business, or just a cover for a highly sophisticated cyber-espionage campaign.

Who are the targets?

“We present technical evidence that the Israel-based company Discover-Tech, while purporting to be a legitimate advertising company, appears to be a front for large-scale ad espionage abuse," Citizen Lab’s researchers wrote. “In fact, it appears that serving as this bridge is Discover-Tech’s primary purpose.”

The company was listed with both Google and IAB Europe as an approved vendor from 2020, The Register reported. Citizen Lab analyzed roughly four billion ad-bidding records and found Discover-Tech ads on more than 70,000 mobile apps and 120,000 websites in Q2 2026, alone.

So the question now is - how many people are affected, and where do they work?

Citizen Lab says that at least 45 devices belonging to Al Jazeera were compromised this way in 2024 and 2025. Citing data from New York-based advertising security firm Confiant, The Register reported that some of Discover-Tech’s ads also appeared in critical networks used by the Pentagon, the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency, and the International Criminal Court - the same court that in 2024 issued an arrest warrant against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, alleging responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Via The Register

• Attackers exploited vulnerable devices to install legitimate bandwidth-sharing software and hijack internet connections
• Compromised systems were covertly added to proxy networks, enabling anonymous criminal activity
• Campaign affected at least 143 devices across 34 countries, highlighting patching and access-control failures

When threat actors break into a system, they don’t need to install malware to make use of the compromised endpoint - they can install perfectly legal, normal software, and still walk away with a paycheck they didn’t earn.

A recent proxyjacking campaign spotted by security researchers GreyNoise impacted hundreds of devices in dozens of countries.

Proxyjacking

Proxyjacking is a type of attack in which a device is hijacked and assimilated into a proxy network. Usually, cybercriminals would break into a computer, install malware and create a proxy network of their own, which they can later rent or use themselves. Threat actors are always in need of “clean” and unflagged devices and IP addresses behind which they can hide, making residential proxies - both malicious and legal - highly wanted services.

Some of the biggest malicious residential proxies out there include IPIDEA, NetNut, and Cloudrouter. All of them are now either entirely dismantled, or severely disrupted, but while they were operational, they offered hundreds of thousands (sometimes millions) of IP addresses associated with an internet connection used in a household (hence the name “residential IP address”).

But malicious proxies are difficult to pull off. To assimilate a device into the network, the threat actor needs to deploy malware which, as soon as it’s spotted, will be flagged by antivirus products and quarantined. In the newest attacks, spotted by GreyNoise, someone went for a legitimate app with similar functionality, instead.

The researchers found someone installing Pawns.app, primarily a rewards platform that lets users earn money by completing online surveys and playing games. However, it used to offer a bandwidth-sharing feature that let users earn money by allowing business clients to route their internet traffic through the user’s residential IP address. At the start of the year, the app discontinued the feature, but it seems it still works for older versions.

“As of 2026, Pawns.app does not offer internet bandwidth sharing,” a notification on the app’s website reads. “This feature was discontinued and is not associated with Pawns.app anymore.” But the app’s Terms of use still describe traffic sharing as available in some versions of the application, and its business website still promotes an SDK for bandwidth monetization.

Targeting D-Link

Apparently, someone picked up on this and went to work. According to GreyNoise, they targeted D-Link ShareCenter NAS devices, Ubiquiti UniFi Video NVRs, as well as SAP NetWeaver Visual Composers. These contained different vulnerabilities: CVE-2024-3272 and CVE-2024-3273 for D-Link, CVE-2021-44228 for Ubiquiti, and

CVE-2025-31324 for SAP, which the threat actor leveraged to deploy Pawns.app. GreyNoise also said that the attackers targeted Hikvision and Dahua DVR/NVR devices, but did not say which vulnerabilities they leveraged against these devices.

At the moment of publication, the researchers identified at least 143 compromised devices worldwide, located in 34 different countries. While they all had legitimate software installed, it was deployed without their knowledge or consent, making the entire ordeal illegal.

“While “earn on your internet” is voluntary, proxyjacking is a crime. Proxyjacking is when an MCA (malicious cyber actor) forces victim devices into proxy networks in order to monetize their bandwidth,” GreyNoise warned.

If you’re worried someone might have done something similar to a device under your control, GreyNoise created a free service that lets you check if your IP interacted with its Global Observation Grid. The researchers said it can serve as a potential indicator of proxyjacking.

Apart from scanning IP addresses, businesses should educate employees about the risks associated with installing free apps, as well as about the importance of keeping devices patched. They should also detect residential proxy IP addresses in authentication logs, as well as deviations in user authentication behavior and characteristics beyond geolocation, such as mismatches in device identifiers, or session identifiers.

Via BleepingComputer

• Phishing campaigns are abusing calendar invites and meeting requests to steal Microsoft 365 credentials
• Attackers hide malicious links in .ics files, fake meeting details, QR codes, and invite pages
• Researchers observed hundreds of thousands of phishing emails targeting over 40,000 organizations

If you get a calendar invite in your inbox be wary - it might be a carefully created phishing lure, designed to have you hand over Microsoft 365 or other login credentials.

Security firm Check Point Research (CPR) recently sounded the alarm for “several large-scale phishing campaigns,” abusing the fact that businesspeople routinely share calendar invites, and all designed to harvest their victim’s credentials.

Different approach, same result

CPR says it identified two separate approaches. In some cases, the threat actors would share calendar invites as .ics attachments. These pass email filters (since the file type itself is harmless) and land directly into people’s inboxes. In other cases, the invites would come as links (which end up redirecting the victim away from their calendar and right into a trap).

The former is arguably more dangerous: the attachment is disguised as a meeting request or a payment notification, and when the recipient opens or accepts the invitation, it ends up in their calendar. Sometimes, depending on each user’s settings, the calendar entry may be processed automatically, too. In both cases, the fraudulent content now looks like an ordinary work appointment or service notification.

So far, none of these things are malicious, or dangerous, on their own. There is no vulnerability exploited, or malware deployed, here. However, the event description, location field, or embedded QR code, may direct the victim to a fake Microsoft 365 sign-in page, or a fraudulent payment portal. The victim, not realizing the landing pages were spoofed, may end up sharing their login credentials or payment information with the attackers.

The latter approach is easier to set up, but arguably harder to pull off. A link placed directly in the email, even if it looks benign on the surface, might get flagged by email security services and filtered out into spam. If it passes, though, victims will have a rather difficult time spotting the ruse.

In one of the examples shared by CPR, a victim received a fake Microsoft Teams meeting invite, and simply hovering over the “join” link revealed its real destination - a credential-harvesting page at a third-party website.

Large campaigns

The campaigns are quite large, CPR stressed, and growing. Hundreds of thousands of these emails get sent every month, from countless compromised email addresses:

“Check Point Email researchers are tracking these campaigns and have seen a significant surge starting September 25, 2026,” the report reads.

“A new detection layer specifically designed to identify this type of attack has flagged more than 302,386 unique phishing emails among our customers’ emails, sent to more than 40,000 organizations.”

The campaigns average more than 8,300 emails per active day, CPR said, adding that the messages came from more than 33,890 different sender domains and more than 247,270 unique sender addresses.

“Activity is not fading, it is accelerating. Daily volume grew from a few thousand emails a month in April to more than 118,000 in September, and to more than 740,000 in just the first two weeks of October. The busiest single day so far was October 8, with almost 200,000 emails,” the researchers concluded.

Phishing is one of the oldest and most used attack vectors out there, and for good reason. Besides being omnipresent, it is the cheapest and most effective way to compromise a target network.

That being said, defending against it usually revolves around common sense. Employees should be made aware that unsolicited emails carry real risk of cyberattacks, and that any email or instant message asking the recipient to urgently download a file, or log into a service, is most likely an attempted attack.

• KGB RAT is a malware-as-a-service platform offering remote access, credential theft, and crypto hijacking features
• The malware includes unusual psychological tactics such as fake BSODs, jump scares, and screamer functions
• Researchers found multiple operators using the tool, which is marketed as legitimate software despite its criminal capabilities

Halloween is just around the corner, and cybercriminals are making use of it to give Windows users a good scare (and then some!) - ater all, few things strike fear into the hearts of Windows users quite like the infamous Blue Screen of Death (BSOD), and a newly analyzed malware strain is turning that nightmare - into a weapon.

Security researchers Group-IB have published an in-depth report on KBG RAT, a newly discovered Remote Access Trojan (RAT). The malware has been advertised for sale on underground forums since late 2025, although researchers found evidence of its infrastructure dating back to January 2022. It’s quite possible that it was used privately for a little while before its developers decided to share it with the community.

KGB RAT

KGB RAT is offered as Malware-as-a-Service (MaaS), Group-IB explained, saying subscriptions start at $150 per month and reach $800 annually. The $150 package provides one month of access, while the $800 one covers the entire year, working out to roughly $67 per month for the annual subscription.

According to Group-IB, even the cheapest package includes all of the biggest features - remote desktop access, file management, webcam and microphone access, keylogging, password recovery, endpoint persistence, and different anti-detection features.

KGB RAT can also hijack cryptocurrency transactions by monitoring the clipboard for copied wallet addresses and replacing them with the ones owned by the attackers during pasting.

The more expensive plans, on the other hand, include multi-client management, payload customization, additional evasion features, plugin support, and access to more extensive server infrastructure. The unnamed developers are also offering a separate $500 Network Spreading add-on, which apparently allows the malware to propagate automatically throughout compromised networks.

Boo!

What makes this RAT stand out, however, are not its hacking features, but rather - thriller ones. In the report, Group-IB describes them as “a set of psychological harassment features”, which include screamer functions, jump scares, and forced blue screens of death. “Psychological harassment” might be a bit too harsh of a classification for a jump-scare during Halloween, but we would argue that what Microsoft did with its OS after Windows 11 could fall under that category.

KGB RAT’s developers call these features “fun settings”, the researchers discovered, while Group-IB says they’re a signal that the threat actor is “comfortable weaponizing victim anxiety alongside data theft”. Cryptocurrency theft, data exfiltration, keylogging, and remote desktop access, somehow seem to go hand-in-hand with anxiety, we believe.

The malware is designed to evade detection, using obfuscation, a reportedly daily-updated crypter, sandbox detection, and mechanisms for disabling (or simply bypassing) security protections. It uses a Telegram bot to notify the attackers when a new device becomes infected, and ip-api.com to determine where the compromised endpoint is located. The researchers said they identified multiple operators using the same malware builder, including at least one focused on stealing cryptocurrency from their victims.

Another interesting aspect of KGB RAT is that it is being positioned as a legitimate tool. Its website comes with (fake) customer reviews, and claims of being used by more than 10,000 IT professionals. It comes with an education section and different how-to videos. Ironically enough, the site was returning a “502 Bad Gateway” error when we tried to open it. While it could mean it was shut down, it can also mean a temporary server failure, or hosting problems, and it could make a comeback in the future.

While it was online, though, it contained a legal section with disclaimers, warnings and notifications encouraging users to make a legit use of their software, Group-IB found. They also included educational videos of how to install, configure, and use the software.

• Bank of America hired 1,000 contractors and spent hundreds of millions fixing AI-discovered vulnerabilities
• Anthropic’s Mythos uncovered enough flaws to trigger large-scale remediation across major banks
• Financial institutions warn advanced AI security tools are exposing weaknesses faster than teams can patch them

Bank of America, one of the largest financial institutions in the United States, was forced to hire a thousand people on contractor roles, and spend north of a $100 million dollars to fix all of the bugs found by the famed Mythos, Anthropic’s generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) model.

When Anthropic first unveiled Mythos in April 2026, it described it as a tool with advanced cybersecurity capabilities that can autonomously discover and exploit previously unknown software vulnerabilities.

However, the tool was so capable (and dangerous) that Anthropic locked it down, giving access to a handful of vetted organizations: the US government, critical infrastructure organizations, banks, and some cybersecurity firms, to name a few.

Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase

Bank of America was apparently one of those companies, as speaking to CNBC, the bank’s CEO, Brian Moynihan, said that when Mythos started finding bugs in the system, the company saw it as “real risk”, and was forced to sit down and come up with a plan to address all of the vulnerabilities.

“We put on 1,000 contractors to help us do the patching work in the second quarter, and those people remain here today, helping us, on top of the 3,000 people we have in that area,” he told the publication. CNBC added that Moynihan told analysts earlier that day that the company spent “a couple hundred million plus” on fixing bugs and addressing regulatory issues.

Even for a bank of that scale, such hiring and spending sprees are uncommon, to put it mildly. That’s likely why Moynihan added that the spending increase was temporary and that, once the vulnerabilities are addressed, there won’t be as much work as there is now. “Once you patch, you don’t have to patch as much. … The pipeline moves through,” Moynihan said.

In its report, The Next Web put it in the context of staying compliant with state and federal regulations. “The compliance spending follows Treasury penalties of more than $1.21 billion announced on 13 October,” the publication wrote. “Federal regulators said the bank had failed to report suspicious transactions worth $5 billion and to finish steps ordered in 2024.”

Severe fallout

Bank of America is hardly the only bank rushing to fix what Mythos exposed. A few months ago, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, said the bank was working with peers and vendors to make sure its systems are prepared for what’s coming. “It’s serious work,” Dimon said in a Bloomberg TV interview. “We have, I think, hundreds of people doing it full time now.”

Goldman Sachs’ chief executive, David Solomon, said in mid-April he was “hyper-aware” of the capabilities of Mythos, and added the company was working “closely” with the tech firm. “Obviously the LLMs are making rapid progress and we’re hyper-aware of the enhanced capabilities of these new models with the help of the US government and the model publishers,” Solomon told analysts at the time.

When Anthropic first disclosed Mythos, it said the AI models reached a level of coding capability “where they can surpass all but the most skilled humans at finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities.”

“The fallout – for economies, public safety, and national security – could be severe.”

Many companies that tried it seem to agree. Mozilla, for example, called it “every bit as capable as the world’s best security researchers”, after finding 22 security-sensitive bugs in just one round of testing.

Palo Alto Networks, on the other hand, used Mythos to find more than two dozen critical vulnerabilities in about three weeks, but the tests also showed the companies needed significantly bigger AI security budgets.

• Microsoft helped dismantle a cybercrime marketplace that sold phishing tools, accounts, and scam infrastructure
• Platforms CoGUI and Iron Man enabled large-scale phishing campaigns targeting organizations worldwide
• The operation drove over a billion phishing messages before domains and thousands of accounts were seized

Late last year, Microsoft set out to investigate what seemed to be yet another phishing campaign.

However, what it uncovered under the surface was a lot bigger - it was a sprawling Chinese-language cybercrime marketplace where countless threat actors bought, traded, and sold digital accounts, web hosting services, as well as different tools needed to create spoofed websites and fake identities.

The company has now revealed how it led the move to dismantle the marketplace, together with private cybersecurity companies including Proofpoint, and law enforcement agencies from Japan.

YAM Store, CoGUI, and Iron Man

The investigation began after Japan’s National Police Agency (NPA) tipped Microsoft off about a wave of fraud and scam activity targeting both individuals and businesses in the country.

The researchers uncovered a major underground marketplace called YAM Store, where they saw fraudulent Microsoft and Google accounts being offered for sale, as well as different ready-made tools for carrying out scams, including credential theft.

In the store, two specific tools stood out: CoGUI, and Iron Man. The former seems to be a website building framework, while the latter - a template gallery.

“CoGUI supplied criminals with ready-made websites and messages impersonating companies, financial institutions, government agencies, and other trusted organizations,” Microsoft explained. “Instead of creating fraudulent websites themselves, criminals could quickly deploy pages designed to steal passwords, payment information, and other personal data.”

According to the researchers, CoGUI became one of the most widely used offerings in the ecosystem, primarily for targeting victims in Japan and the United States. However, by mid-2026 it was steadily being replaced by Iron Man:

“Iron Man expanded the model by giving criminals access to thousands of ready-made templates designed to impersonate trusted organizations,” the researchers said. “Criminals could then quickly deploy email, text and web content tailored to specific brands, industries and countries.”

Microsoft said the tool offered more than 2,300 templates of different banks, retailers, healthcare providers, police departments, and other organizations, found in more than 150 countries around the world.

The store, and its offerings, were very popular in the cybercriminal community. Just this year, they facilitated more than a billion phishing messages being aimed at 75,000 organizations around the world. Microsoft customers alone received more than 750 million of these messages since the start of the year.

These attacks translated to “tens of millions of dollars” in profit for the operators.

Dismantling the operation

The network is now being torn down, Microsoft said. After receiving the order from the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida, Microsoft and Health-ISAC (a global non-profit helping healthcare firms share cyber intelligence) seized and redirected the domains leading to YAM Store, CoGUI, and Iron Man. At the same time, Microsoft disabled more than 20,000 accounts connected to the store and “continues to dismantle the operation by removing infrastructure hosted on its services.”

So far, the action has blocked more than 100,000 domains used for both impersonation, and fraud.

“What began with scam activity targeting people and organizations in Japan led investigators to an underground service economy supplying criminals around the world,” the researchers concluded.

“YAM Store, CoGUI and Iron Man are only part of that larger criminal network, but disrupting them makes it harder for criminals to obtain the accounts, tools and infrastructure they rely on.”

While tearing down the infrastructure is commendable, without arrests chances are the marketplace will re-emerge sooner or later. For example, when law enforcement agencies took down two major platforms Cracked and Nulled early in 2025, they arrested two suspects, and seized 17 servers and more than 50 electronic devices.

Cracked and Nulled, forums that offered illegal goods and cybercrime-as-a-service, counted more than 10 million users in total, and investigators estimated the arrested suspects earned more than a million dollars in criminal profits.

• Two LiteLLM flaws let low-privileged users gain administrative control and execute malicious code
• Attackers could also steal AI provider API keys through a server-side request forgery bug
• Organizations should upgrade to LiteLLM 1.83.9+ and rotate potentially exposed credentials

Security researchers recently discovered two vulnerabilities in a popular AI gateway that allowed threat actors to take complete control of the system, steal sensitive files and AI provider API keys, and execute malicious code remotely.

The AI gateway in question is called LiteLLM. It is an open source solution allowing users to connect their applications to large language models (LLM) from different providers, including the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic.

The connection goes through a single interface, where users can route requests, manage API keys, control user access, and monitor things like usage and costs.

Right now, LiteLLM supports some 140 AI providers and has become quite popular - it has more than 90 million monthly downloads on GitHub, and more than 61,000 stars.

LiteLLM

However, security experts from Check Point Research (CPR) recently found two bugs in LiteLLM.

The first one is an access control bug in the way LiteLLM enforces permissions. It is tracked as CVE-2026-35029 and was given a severity score of 8.7/10 (high). According to CPR, the bug allows users with minimal privileges to reach admin functions controlling the gateway’s core configuration which, in turn, allows them to read files stored on the server, overwrite admin credentials, download and run malware, and more.

The second one is a server side request forgery bug, allowing gateway users to direct LiteLLM to send API requests to third-party servers. In theory, threat actors could send API requests to servers under their own control, and since these carry AI provider authentication keys, this would deliver the credentials directly to the attackers. In turn, they could use the credentials to use other organizations’ AI accounts and rake up their bills. The bug is tracked as CVE-2026-59823 and was given a severity score of 5.3/10 (medium).

“The credentials a gateway holds provide direct, billable access to AI providers with no further authentication required,” CPR explained. “Given LiteLLM’s scale of adoption, a flaw in this component has the potential to affect a very large number of AI deployments at once.”

Vulnerable versions and patches

CPR says that all organizations running LiteLLM versions earlier than 1.83.9 are exposed to both vulnerabilities. Security teams should also check for LiteLLM instances running indirectly, since the gateway is embedded in many platforms and internal tools used to build AI applications. As such, it could be present in environments where it was never deployed as a standalone solution.

LiteLLM has released a fix for both bugs included in version 1.83.9, and users are advised to install this one as soon as possible. Besides that, CPR advises users review who has access to the gateway, since any account could be used to exploit these flaws. AI provider API keys stored in LiteLLM should be rotated if there is any indication the gateway way accessed by unauthorized users, and permissions should be verified in practice.

“Confirm that users with limited roles are actually limited, because the gap between configured and enforced permissions is where flaws like CVE-2026-35029 cause the most damage,” CPR warns.

“Include LLM gateways in security assessments by extending penetration tests and vulnerability assessments to cover AI tooling alongside web applications and cloud infrastructure.”

According to the researchers, both bugs are a “well understood class” of errors, meaning AI infrastructure suffers from the same risks as enterprise software. That means organizations need to approach AI gateway security “with the same rigor they apply to any other business critical system.”

• Attackers reportedly accessed Denmark’s population registry through a third-party company using weak credentials
• Data on roughly 8.8 million individuals may have been exposed, including CPR identification numbers
• Breach highlights severe third-party security failures, with reports citing passwords like “123456”

Data held by the Danish national population registry was allegedly protected by a very strong, very difficult-to-crack password: 123456.

This claim was made by a person who allegedly broke into the registry in September 2026, accessing data on 8.8 million people.

Might as well been without a password

The Danish Central Register of Persons (CPR) is the country’s national population registry that maintains identifying information about people living in Denmark, including their names, addresses, birth dates, citizenship, and marital status.

Each individual is assigned a unique 10-digit CPR number which is widely used in healthcare, taxation, banking, and more.

In a press release, CPR disclosed that someone gained unauthorized access to its systems “by abusing a Danish company’s legal access to search for information in the CPR system.”

It explained that private companies with a legitimate interest can pull information from CPR about “a larger, limited group of persons whom the company has identified in advance individually.”

So, this was a supply chain attack, in which someone accessed names, addresses, CPR numbers, and other details, on roughly 8.8 million people, through a privately-owned third party. What’s also interesting is that the entire Danish population counts just over six million people, according to Worldometer - but CPR says it holds some 11 million records, including deceased individuals, as well as those living abroad.

The initial press release did not say who the attacker was, or which company was abused in the attack. It said the investigation was still ongoing and that CPR made moves to strengthen its security posture. However, Danish media uncovered that the attack happened through a Funen-based Pays ApS, a fact that was later confirmed by managing director Sophie Laursen.

Pays was authorized to access the CPR system, and the intrusion was spotted when, at the end of the month, a government employee saw an unusually high activity log from Pays for the previous month. Local TV station TV 2 said the attacker ran 14 million automated searches in ten days. In the meantime, Pays’ website was taken offline. At press time, it was operating normally, though.

"Really shocking"

The story gets better still. Local publication Politiken claims to have spoken to the attacker via an encrypted chat service. The threat actor, which wasn’t named, said they used login credentials of a former employee, whose password was “123456”. After logging in, they created two scripts to pull information out of CPR and into a third-party system.

Allegedly, three separate accounts were found all using the same simple password. The threat actor confirmed they have no intention of leaking, or selling the stolen data, and added they were “really shocked” by how poor the security posture was.

“Someone leaves a suitcase with 10 kilos of plutonium unattended at a train station. Then a homeless person steals it,” the hacker said. “Yes, of course you shouldn’t steal other people’s suitcases. But you also shouldn’t leave nuclear material at a train station.”

The threat actor gave the publication a file with CPR numbers, and the media confirmed its authenticity with the help of an independent cybersecurity researcher Emil Hørning. The researcher said the threat actor’s account “appeared credible” and that the methods he described were “plausible.”

While having no intention of selling or leaking the data is commendable, we can’t help but notice that the threat actor did not mention using the data. Names, addresses, birth dates, as well as CPR numbers used in healthcare, taxation, or banking - this is all very valuable information that can be put to use in highly tailored phishing attacks that can result in ransomware infections and wire fraud.

Via The Register

• Researchers found an exposed database containing 13.7 million records from past data breaches and leaks
• Archive included passwords, banking details, and data tied to major firms like AT&T and Amazon
• The database was secured after disclosure, highlighting ongoing risks from exposed breach repositories

Indian software development platform Vibetech seems to have been collecting data exposed in various leaks and cyberattacks and creating one big repository.

Besides the questionable legality of the whole ordeal, an equally important issue is that the archive was sitting on the open internet, available to anyone who knew where to look.

AT&T, PayPal, and more

The news comes from Jeremiah Fowler, a security researcher known for hunting down non-encrypted, non-password-protected databases across the web.

Fowler's research found one database containing 13.7 million records, including a “collection of highly sensitive data from previous breaches,” including names, people’s phone numbers, email addresses, passwords, bank account details, and more.

“In a limited sample, I saw accounts and credentials belonging to individuals from multiple countries," Fowler noted.

The archive was split by company names - the majority of the records (almost eight million) came from an AT&T data leak, but other notable mentions include Amazon (1.2 million), Walmart (420,000 records), BluBank Digital Bank (24,000 records), and PayPal (18,000 records). There were even (relatively small) leaks from the FBI Employee Directory (4,084 records), as well as Interpol (929 records).

This is, by no means, your average data breach archive, as it contained passwords and banking details, which makes it infinitely more potent, as threat actors can directly access people’s online accounts, escalate privileges to deploy ransomware, and possibly wire funds directly from people’s bank accounts.

Fowler later discovered that the IP address of the database was connected to a data intelligence platform operated or developed by Vibetech, which, Fowler speculates, was collecting datasets from previous breaches or leaks, and inadvertently made them publicly accessible without authentication.

The researcher notified both the company and the hosting provider, and the database was restricted and made no longer publicly accessible, soon after. Furthermore, a day later the IP address no longer hosted the plaintext credentials and instead displayed an Information Security Management System (ISMS) compliance platform dashboard.

Unprotected databases - the bane of internet privacy

According to Fowler’s report, there is a “growing number” of organizations that intentionally collect and sell breached credential datasets, apparently for research, monitoring, or threat intelligence purposes, but the question is how legal the activity actually is.

“Although these datasets can provide valuable insights into attack trends, credential reuse, and emerging threats, organizations that collect compromised personal information operate in a legally and ethically complex environment,” Fowler argues.

Unprotected databases are one of the leading causes of data leaks. In many instances, these are unintentional - businesses generating or harvesting data often misconfigure their buckets or are under the impression that securing the data is the cloud provider’s responsibility.

For example, in early 2024, Cybernews discovered an archive with personal information on approximately 223 million Brazilians. Brazil is a country of 214 million people, making some researchers speculate if the country’s entire population was exposed. The researchers said they discovered the database after running a query in Elasticsearch but couldn’t determine who the owners were.

Earlier still, in 2021, a B2B sales and marketing company leaked personally identifiable information (PII) of up to 126 million US citizens, when researchers discovered an unsecured database on Amazon’s cloud computing platform AWS. The archive, owned by a US-based marketing company OneMoreLead, included email addresses, home address, and phone numbers, and more could easily have been used to perpetrate identity theft, financial fraud, or be used to devise effective phishing campaigns.

Individuals who think their information may have been exposed in any of these breaches should change their passwords immediately and be careful with incoming email messages.

• AI Scout tracks which artificial intelligence services employees actually use at work
• Employees are increasingly turning to AI services outside approved channels
• NordLayer AI Scout can warn, redact, or block sensitive prompts before submission

Employees are increasingly using AI tools at work, including services their employers may not have approved or formally provided.

That creates uncertainty about which AI platforms workers access, what information they submit, and how those systems connect with business operations.

NordLayer says its new AI Scout tool will now help give organizations visibility into workplace AI activity and the security risks associated with it.

Seeing actual AI use inside companies

The standalone product monitors browser and desktop interactions while providing controls intended to limit exposure of confidential information across systems.

AI Scout can identify authorized and unauthorized AI services, allowing organizations to compare observed activity against software approved for workplace use.

Its reporting measures usage from real activity rather than purchased subscriptions, and it also estimates token consumption across deployed LLMs.

It also examines information employees send to AI systems, using controls designed to detect potentially sensitive material before certain prompts are submitted.

The company says these safeguards operate before submission, potentially preventing confidential material from reaching an external AI service.

NordLayer also says browser-based controls can intervene when employees enter information requiring additional scrutiny before transmission.

The monitoring extends beyond conventional chatbot use into AI agents and their technical relationships with connected services used at work.

Administrators can inspect MCP infrastructure linked to programming agents and review the capabilities available through those systems in practice.

“We built NordLayer AI Scout for how AI actually works — not just what it looks like from the outside, but for what’s happening at a technical level,” says Vakaris Noreika, VP of product research and development at NordLayer.

“Its AI DLP is designed to inspect prompts and control them pre-submission, to ensure that sensitive data is never inputted in the first place.

Why workplace AI needs closer oversight

The need for monitoring comes as business investment in artificial intelligence grows alongside employee use of unapproved services, a practice known as shadow AI.

Writer's 2026 enterprise survey found that 59% of companies spend more than $1 million annually on artificial intelligence technology.

A University of Melbourne report cited by NordLayer found that 42% of employees use approved AI systems, while 70% use free models at work.

IBM reports that breaches involving shadow AI add $400,000 to the global average breach cost of $4.99 million worldwide.

Those figures help explain why organizations may struggle to maintain visibility when employees use AI services beyond formally approved platforms.

“What companies are facing today is an AI zoo — dozens of unsanctioned LLMs in daily use across the workforce, each one widening the organization’s exposure to data leaks and security breaches,” says Andrius Buinovskis, VP of product strategy at NordLayer.

“True AI governance requires extensive visibility. With new LLM solutions emerging at a rapid pace, reviewing every new AI tool manually simply doesn’t scale — organizations need telemetry that brings all AI use, sanctioned or not, into one platform.”

• Clicking 'Learn more' would skip Microsoft account demands when setting up Windows 11
• It now shows user data policies, so you'll have to sign in with your account (or create one)
• Having an account can make certain things easier, but it's one less choice for consumers

Microsoft has finally fixed one of the easiest ways for attackers to bypass its account requirements when installing Windows 11, but it's bad news for anybody who didn't want to sign in with – or create – a Microsoft account during setup.

Previously, users only had to click the 'Learn more' hyperlink on the sign-in screen to be taken to a local account creation screen.

Ultimately, it marks another step in the company's ongoing efforts to make Microsoft accounts mandatory during the initial setup of Windows 11 on consumer PCs.

Microsoft wants you to use an account to activate Windows 11

Before the fix, users could click the 'Learn more' link and be taken to a screen that allowed them to enter a local username, create a password, configure security questions and complete Windows 11 setup without ever entering their Microsoft username or password.

Instead, the link now opens a page that explains how the company managers user data.

The change "has been recently quietly patched server side," Bob Pony said in a Bluesky post after revealing that "a new method for skipping the mandatory Microsoft Account login in Windows 11 Home Edition has been discovered" just one month ago.

Local accounts remain supported to a certain degree, but creating them either requires technical knowledge to use a third-party tool or command-line methods, or enterprise versions of Windows rather than consumer-grade operating systems.

There are some benefits to signing in with a Microsoft account from the get-go, like speedier setup of system integrations with OneDrive, the Copilot app and other Microsoft products, however it eliminates user choice for those who prefer not to tie their PCs to their online account.

• Attackers exploited critical AhsayCBS backup software flaws to compromise organizations’ backup servers
• Intrusions deployed webshells and disguised XMRig cryptominers for persistence and stealth
• Researchers urge immediate patching, restricted access, and full system reimaging if compromised

In a particularly brazen hack, threat actors were seen targeting the servers that businesses use as backups in case of a cyberattack.

The vulnerabilities used in this attack have since been mitigated, but since the attack is currently ongoing, organizations using this particular backup method are urged to apply the fixes immediately and secure their premises.

AhsayCBS backup utility

At the core of this incident is a backup utility called Ahsay Cloud Backup Suite (or AhsayCBS), a server-based backup management platform developed by a company of the same name, based in Hong Kong.

Businesses, managed service providers (MSP), and IT admins use it to manage backups for their devices and clients across a range of virtual and physical servers, databases, and various software environments, with the tool widely used by IT service providers to manage their clients' data.

Security researchers Huntress noted that on October 4, 2026, two flaws in AhsayCBS were publicly disclosed: CVE-2026-105113, and CVE-2026-105134. The former is a medium-severity vulnerability affecting the checkSysPwd function, and can lead to improper authentication. The latter is a critical-severity flaw affecting the Replication Receiver component, which could lead to unauthenticated remote code execution as NT AUTHORITY/SYSTEM on the host.

“The API contains an authentication bypass that could allow for a random token to substitute valid credentials,” the researchers explained. “After exploitation, a threat actor configured a malicious receiver and dropped a Java Server Page (JSP) webshell into the application directory served by the CBS application.”

Just three days later, threat actors started exploiting these bugs - the first one to bypass authentication, and the second one to gain code execution and deploy webshells on exposed systems. The webshells served primarily as droppers, deploying a range of stage-two executables.

Mining crypto

Huntress also saw threat actors deploy a popular cryptominer called XMRig. This is a legitimate open-source miner that uses the computer’s hardware, electricity, and internet, to mine the Monero currency and deposit it to the attackers’ wallets.

Monero is the go-to currency for unsolicited crypto mining since it is designed as a privacy-first coin that is very difficult to trace across the blockchain.

The attackers went to lengths to hide XMRig on these backup servers. They disguised them as a Microsoft Edge process and installed them as fake Edge update services. They also made sure it hid when someone looked.

A script (apparently written by AI) shuts down the miner whenever Task Manager is opened. The same script would close Task Manager after an hour.

Backups are perceived as one of the strongest protections against ransomware attacks. Virtually all cybersecurity organizations and thought leaders are advising organizations deploy backups and frequently maintain and control them, to make sure they are not outdated or otherwise corrupted. The fact that they can be compromised with relative ease should be cause for alarm. Businesses who were struck could consider themselves lucky to have only gotten an XMRig infection and not a full-blown ransomware encryptor.

That being said, as of October 8, at least five organizations were already targeted, Huntress said. Therefore, it is essential all organizations using AhsayCBS apply the provided patch as soon as possible. All versions of the utility, through 10.3.4 are impacted, it was said.

Besides applying the fix, organizations should also restrict AhsayCBS management interface web access, since the exploit targets the external accessible web app service on the host. “Access should be limited to trusted IP addresses only or require VPN,” Huntress says. “If any of the IoCs listed in this blog have been uncovered, companies should carry out a full host re-image from a trusted backup; as attackers have been able to hide secondary backdoors for extended persistence.”

• Ahold Delhaize took systems offline after a cyberattack, though details remain limited
• Disruptions affected employee services and customer-facing websites across multiple retail brands
• Company is investigating the incident amid concerns of another major ransomware-related attack

Ahold Delhaize has suffered a cyberattack that forced it to pull parts of its IT network offline.

On October 12, 2026, the retail giant issued a brief statement, saying it is experiencing a “security issue” within its network. “Our teams are taking steps to assess and mitigate the issue,” it said. “This includes taking some systems offline to help protect them. At this time, our stores are open and serving customers.”

We don’t know which parts of the operation were affected, how the attack took place, and whether or not any sensitive company or customer data was exposed. We don’t know if customers were affected, how many, and to what extent.

Usually, when a company shuts down its network to contain an incident, it is due to a ransomware attack and its data exfiltration efforts. However, no threat actors have yet claimed responsibility for this attack, and no data has surfaced on the dark web, at press time.

“Protecting our infrastructure in the best interest of our customers, associates and partners is a top priority,” the company concluded. “We apologize for any inconvenience this issue may have caused customers and partners.”

Hackers get ahold of Delhaize

Ahold Delhaize is a wholesale company and a multinational retailer running more than 9,400 stores across the United States, Europe, and Indonesia.

It counts roughly 400,000 employees, which serve some 60 million customers weekly, both in stores, and online. Brands under its umbrella include Delhaize, Maxi, Mega Image, Albert, bol, Alfa Beta, Etos, Gall & Gall, and Profi in Europe, and Food Lion, Stop & Shop, Giant Food, and Hannaford in the American market, as per BleepingComputer.

Unfortunately, it has plenty of experience with cyberattacks. In mid-November 2024, an attack on the company resulted in grocery stores and pharmacies in the US being unable to service their customers properly. Even then, Ahold Delhaize shut down parts of its network to contain the attack and had trouble with disabled phone lines. It was later confirmed that it was a ransomware attack launched by the INC Ransom threat actor.

In the attack, the hackers stole sensitive data on more than 2.2 million people, the company later confirmed via a filing with the Maine Attorney General’s Office. It said the data may have included internal employment records for both current and former employees.

The combination of stolen data varied from person to person, but generally, it included full names, postal addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, government-issued ID numbers, bank account numbers, health information, and other employment-related information.

Trouble for the retailers

That attack, which apparently took more than a week to remedy, was disruptive enough to have employees voicing their annoyance on social media. At one point, the pharmacy at Stop & Shop could not refill prescriptions. The Food Lion, on the other hand, had to address missing and delayed deliveries. Instacart orders return dates were constantly being pushed back.

BleepingComputer noted employees at the Stop & Shop American regional supermarket chain are now having trouble accessing their schedules and pay stubs as a direct consequence of the latest attack. Customers have been unable to use websites, apps, and customer service platforms at Albert Heijn, Etos, and Gall & Gall stores in the Netherlands, and Delhaize in Belgium.

The publication also reported, citing an internal memo shared by Lion Food employees in the United States, that the company flagged the attack as an IT outage, and told staff their “store may be unable to shop, stage, or hand off orders.”

• Malware infection at a third-party contractor may have exposed data of 8.7 million customers and employees
• Exposed records included personal details, though no payment data or confirmed misuse was reported
• Incident highlights supply-chain risks, with Daiichi Kosho investigating and reviewing contractor security

Even the entertainment industry is not safe from data-stealing cybercriminals - Daiichi Kosho, one of the biggest entertainment system makers in Japan, has disclosed a malware infection in its supply chain that may have resulted in the compromise of 8.7 million of both customer and employee information.

“Daiichi Kosho has received a report from Nippon Columbia Group (NCG), to which the Company outsources the handling of personal information, that a device used by an NCG employee was infected with malware and that the company’s customer information may have been leaked,” a machine-translated data breach notification letter reads.

“At this time, we have not confirmed that personal information was actually leaked externally or that it was misused as a result of this incident. However, as we cannot rule out the possibility that personal information was leaked, we are providing the information currently available and the actions we will take, as follows. We have also confirmed that the company’s systems were not affected.”

Supply chain attack

The wording is intentionally ambiguous - as this is obviously a supply chain attack, since Daiichi Kosho was not directly compromised.

Instead, it was Nippon Columbia Group, a group formed in 2025 after a restructuring of Faith. Nippon’s roots date back to 1910, when its predecessor became Japan’s first record company. Today, Faith established Nippon Columbia Group as a new organization focused on AI-powered entertainment and content distribution.

Daiichi Kosho, on the other hand, is one of Japan’s leading karaoke and entertainment companies. It was founded in 1973 and is today best known for its DAM karaoke systems and Big Echo karaoke venues. In fact, the company today runs more than 400 karaoke venues across Japan, including more than 100 in Tokyo alone.

The company both sells and rents karaoke gear, runs establishments and restaurants, and produces music and videos. Daiichi Kosho is a substantial business, generating roughly ¥163 billion (around $1.06 billion) in annual revenue a year.

Malware infection

According to BleepingComputer, Daiichi Kosho outsources the handling of its customers’ personal information to NCG. On October 5 2026, that company notified Daiichi Kosho that it found a malware infection and isolated the affected systems the day after. We don’t know exactly how the company ended up infected, or what kind of infection it was. What we do know is that it suspects records on 93,000 employees and 8,631,000 customers may have been exposed.

These records contain people’s full names, genders, dates of birth, email addresses, and telephone numbers. Customers of BIG ECHO, MEGA BIG, Karaoke CLUB DAM, Banana Club, B-GARAGE, and DK Dining, are among those affected by the attack. Passwords, loyalty points, or payment data, were not disclosed, the notice reads. Furthermore, there is no evidence of the data being misused on the dark web.

However, Daiichi Kosho did warn employees and customers to be wary of incoming email messages, especially unsolicited ones claiming to come from the company itself.

Personally identifiable information holds value on the black market because threat actors can use it to launch personalized, highly tailored phishing attacks.

Through these attacks, they can steal login credentials for corporate environments, or deploy infostealers to grab the passwords. That allows them to pivot to corporate IT infrastructure, steal business secrets and other data, and establish persistence. Ultimately, all of this allows the attackers to threaten to release the files to competitors and the public and thus pressure the victims into paying a ransom.

Daiichi Kosho said it will “continue to monitor the situation and take the necessary measures if we detect any signs of unauthorized use.”

It also said that, out of an abundance of caution, it was now inspecting other systems and was examining how it manages its contractors to see if there is room for improvement.

“If further investigation reveals any new facts, we will promptly provide an update, including the customers affected and the measures to be taken,” the machine-translated notice reads.

• Mozilla wants security-conscious companies to use Firefox Enterprise
• "Choice is a lie," Mozilla CEO says, referring to browser engines
• Thunderbird Enterprise is also in the works

Mozilla has introduced Firefox Enterprise, a brand-new version of its browser designed specifically for organizations that need extra security, governance and compliance controls.

The company argues businesses have become increasingly dependent on a small number of tech companies, handing over certain levels of control to third parties, however it believes that tech consolidation comes with its own risks.

It also acknowledges that these deep dependencies have made it harder for companies to switch providers, and all of this has been factored into its Firefox Enterprise browser.

Firefox Enterprise

"We see [the browser] as a key, but under-governed, layer," Mozilla said in an announcement, slating other browsers' dependencies largely on Google (Chromium) and Apple (WebKit). For reference Firefox runs on Gecko, a free and open-source browser engine developed by Mozilla itself.

"If all your options are built with the same technology underneath, ‘choice’ is a lie," CEO Anthony Enzor-DeMeo explained.

Firefox Enterprise's biggest selling point is control – customers can choose where data is stored and how it's governed, and it's designed to work with existing systems.

"Keep your identity provider. Keep your SIEM. Keep your MDM. Just add a browser whose management infrastructure you operate," Mozilla said.

Firefox claims to have 200 million monthly users, but per Statcounter data, it only accounts for 6% of desktop browsing sessions globally compared with 65% for Chrome.

France, Germany, Austria and Switzerland will be the first countries to get access to Firefox Enterprise, with other countries added later on. And as for emails, Thunderbird Enterprise "is also in development," so we can expect to hear more about that soon.

• Human error remains one of the biggest challenge to online security, according to industry leaders
• 68% of security professionals cite human error, compared with just 55% for email-based scams
• A worrying 80% of contributing factors in recent security incidents can be traced back to poor user practices or lack of training

New research into the challenges facing cybersecurity professionals has revealed the naked truth: that humans are considered the main challenge to security.

A new Kaseya survey of over 1,100 MSPs and IT professionals around the world uncovered a startling trend: that the risks posed by humans to their cybersecurity are considerable. Some 68% of respondents cited human error (including social engineering and distraction) as the most concerning attack vector over the next 12 months.

With the overwhelming majority of cybersecurity incidents attributable to human error, security suites and the teams that use them are increasingly focusing on ways to mitigate the challenges posed by people.

Human error

We know that humans need security as much as the data they’re working with. But the results of this survey illustrate a sad truth: that cybersecurity professionals are more concerned about user error and the vulnerabilities of “soft” targets than the threats from automated attacks against network hardware and servers.

Hackers know that humans make mistakes. Organizations need to be on the same page.

From the results of the report, we can see that after the prospect of risks caused by human error, social engineering, and distraction, 55% of those surveyed are concerned about attacks via email. Gullibility is also considered a risk (41%) as is a lack of cybersecurity training for users (40%).

Auditing isn’t always the answer, either. Of those surveyed, 65% said they would pass a compliance audit today, but 49% noted that incomplete documentation and procedures could create problems.

True cyber resilience

Worryingly, only 20% of IT departments have a budget that is growing in line with the risks they face, with 77% describing themselves as under-resourced.

“People aren’t perfect, and everyone knows it,” noted David Baggett, SVP and GM of Security Suite at Kaseya. “Yet much of cybersecurity still depends on people making the right decision every time.”

Unfortunately, it seems as though human error is here to stay. So what is the solution? Bagget says its about factoring in the poor practices and errors.

“The path to true cyber resilience isn’t about eliminating mistakes. It’s about building an organisation that can withstand them. Expect mistakes, account for constraints and engineer around them.”

As far as Kaseya is concerned, that means building security systems and practices that withstand those mistakes.

• Cybercrime group BYOD has published records on 3,615 Trump Mobile customers, including names, home addresses, phone numbers, and order details
• BYOD says it got in via malware on a Liberty Mobile employee's device, and that Trump Mobile told it there was "no team" to respond
• The published data appears to cover the wireless service rather than T1 phone orders, and includes abandoned sign-ups and the Trump Organization's own CIO

A newly formed cybercrime group calling itself BYOD says it has stolen and published personal data belonging to 3,615 Trump Mobile customers, the latest setback for the Trump-branded wireless venture and its gold-colored T1 smartphone.

Straight Arrow News first reported the leak after reviewing the dataset, which contains names, email addresses, phone numbers, home addresses, and order details, and contacting people listed in it.

Trump Mobile has not responded to Straight Arrow, and neither the Trump Organization nor Liberty Mobile, the Florida-based operator behind the service, answered questions from The Register.

A ransom note that skipped the ransom component

BYOD posted the data to its dark web leak site in late September 2026; a ransomware tracker cited by IBTimes UK dates the entry to September 29. The Register describes BYOD as a new ransomware-as-a-service operation, with Trump Mobile as only the third organization named on its site, though IBTimes UK notes that nothing published so far shows encrypted systems or a ransom demand.

The group's account of how it got in is consistent in outline, even if the details differ slightly: BYOD told International Cyber Digest it compromised a Liberty Mobile employee with an infostealer, while Cybernews and Android Authority describe a remote access trojan.

Regardless of how they got onto the device, BYOD's messaging indicates it pivoted from that foothold to exposed Trump Mobile subdomains, still has live access to a customer dashboard, and claims neither company used multi-factor authentication.

As proof, it sent Straight Arrow a dashboard screenshot showing one customer's personal details, but said access has not been independently confirmed yet. The more damning part of this is that Trump Mobile's answer to this has been "We have no team to handle this" and branding anyone who hacked it a terrorist, an exchange that BYOD alleges took place.

The data, however, has held up; Straight Arrow reached people who confirmed their details were accurate, Cybernews said its samples looked genuine and did not match earlier breaches, and PCMag reached three people in the file, one of whom was surprised to find an accurate record of canceling a 30-day unlimited plan.

BYOD may not even be the first to cash in: a separate group, EndZone, claimed on September 23 to have taken data on 4,000 Trump Mobile users, IBTimes UK reports, and security researcher Dominic Alvieri told The Register the EndZone dump "appears to be the same original breach." BYOD denies a formal tie, with a representative telling PCMag that one member "just knows a few people behind EndZone," according to IBTimes UK.

At launch in June 2025, Eric Trump promised that "Trump Mobile is going to revolutionize cell phones" - but what followed has been less revolutionary.

The "Made in America" promise disappeared from the website within two weeks. Shipping slipped from August 2025 to December, then March, then April, and in April the company rewrote its preorder terms to state that "a deposit is not a purchase." In January, lawmakers urged the FTC to examine the brand's marketing.

For consumers, there is a silver lining: No payment card data has been reported in the dump, so the immediate risk is phishing rather than direct fraud. This doesn't completely solve the problem, however: names, phone numbers, home addresses, and order histories are exactly what scammers need to pose convincingly as a carrier or a delivery service.

Anyone who signed up, or merely started signing up, with Trump Mobile should treat unexpected messages about orders, refunds, or account problems with suspicion at a time when Trump Mobile continues to drag its feet on the matter, much like its May breach, when the company said it was still deciding whether to notify people. This time is a little different, however: it has said nothing at all.

• Mozilla accused Microsoft of using Windows, Edge, Bing, and Copilot to steer users toward Edge
• Firefox maker claims stricter EU regulations force fairer browser choice than elsewhere
• Browser competition increasingly overlaps with the fight for AI distribution and user reach

Mozilla has accused Microsoft of abusing its dominant position wherever it can to push people towards Edge, and away from other browsers.

The company framed the story as if it wants “better for the people”, while Microsoft only does it when it’s forced to, but is that really the case?

In a newly released blog, Mozilla noted it has now been 100 days since it published Over The Edge 2.0, a report from “leading experts on deceptive design Dr. Harry Brignull and Cennydd Bowles on how Windows, Edge, Bing, and Copilot are designed to steer people away from the browser they choose.”

Better for the people

In the report, Mozilla said that in the European Economic Area (EEA), where the Digital Market Acts (DMA) is being enforced, Microsoft is forced to “play fair”.

Anywhere else around the world, including the US, UK, India, and other parts of the planet, it still uses its “shady tactics”. These include the Windows 10 message “You’re almost done setting up your PC” which allegedly uses “tricky wording” to pull people off the default they picked, Windows Search and Widgets opening links in Edge instead of the default browser, and Windows keeping Edge as the default for common browser file types like PDF and SVG, even after another browser were set up as the default.

Mozilla claims that even within the EU, Microsoft is doing all it can to steer people towards Edge. That includes pre-pinning the browser to the taskbar which, according to the company, “seems to directly violate the ‘principled approach to app pinning and app defaults’, Copilot opening web links in a side-panel instead of in the browser, and Windows Backup “silently” trying to set Edge as the default when it restores a PC and “fails to properly bring the user’s own browser along. “

“Most of the 2024 patterns are still there. The 2026 patterns are worse. Microsoft is using new surfaces like Copilot and the migration to Windows 11 to further undermine user choice,” Mozilla claims.

“We also shared the report with Microsoft and talked to them about the issues raised in the report. We knew that an immediate change was unlikely, but we hoped that, when faced with independent evidence of harmful design practices impacting Windows users, they would also want better for people,” Mozilla said.

“Instead, it became clear that Microsoft will respect user choice only when it is forced to. Microsoft’s standard for respecting people’s choices is legal compliance. Not what’s best for its users. Not its own published principles. Not what’s technically feasible. Not even what it already does for users in Europe.”

Plenty of other browsers agree with Mozilla, too. The Browser Choice Alliance, a coalition of web browsers established in 2024 and consisting of Chrome, Opera, Vivaldi, BrowserWorks, Midori, and Wavebox, issued a statement following Mozilla's report.

The coalition, which describes itself as "fighting for an internet browsing experience free of manipulation, deception and unnecessary complications" said:

“Mozilla’s research demonstrated that harmful patterns in the Microsoft ecosystem are designed to steer users toward Edge, yet Microsoft has refused to commit to respecting users’ browser choice. Today, we join Mozilla’s call for Microsoft to end its campaign to undermine fair competition and restrict web freedom for users across the globe.”

A story on AI

Mozilla said it shared the report with Microsoft but did not say if the company replied in any way. We’ve reached out to Microsoft with a request for comment and will update this article when we hear from them.

In the meantime, we believe it is also important to mention what Mozilla said in the blog’s introduction:

“As AI reshapes our online experiences, the stakes couldn’t be higher. Browsers are a key distribution layer for AI tools and services, while still determining many of the privacy and security functionality people rely on every day. Steering people toward one browser can therefore shape which AI services reach users and the protections that come with it.”

So the question becomes - is this really about wanting better for people, or wanting people to use one AI model instead of another AI model? If demanding equal browser opportunity is fair game, then demanding equal AI opportunity is also fair game, so why not just say so? Why hide behind alleged altruistic causes and principles?

In the blog, Mozilla says it has a “simple” ask - to expand the “fairer designs” currently being enforced in the EEA everywhere on the planet, and to “stop the remaining harmful design practices that persist in the EEA.”

The company concluded the blog by saying there will be no more mister Nice Guy. It says it “stepped up” public pressure on the company and has reached out to regulators and policy makers.

“We hope that regulators in the US, the UK, India, and Brazil are paying attention.”

• Budget Android phones shipped with firmware-level malware preinstalled before reaching customers
• Malware generated fraudulent ad revenue and turned infected devices into residential proxies
• Victims spanned 150 countries, with cleanup often requiring firmware-level remediation

Imagine buying a brand new, sealed Android phone, and later realizing it came with preinstalled malware rooted deeply into the firmware and thus almost impossible to remove - generating fraudulent ad clicks for a malicious third party, and even turning the phones into residential proxies to be used for whatever sinister purposes.

Security researchers Bitdefender found an unidentified threat actor managed to compromise the supply chain of multiple smartphone manufacturers and added malware on a firmware level before the devices were even shipped to stores.

A number of brands were mentioned, including Doogee S200 X, Doogee Fire 3 Max, and Cubot KINGKONG X - both Chinese smartphone manufacturers building budget, rugged Android phones.

The reports also mention ripoff devices impersonating Samsung and Apple products. In general, these are devices using MediaTek chipsets, which were infected in a way that allowed the attackers to tamper with applications, grant themselves higher privileges, and even do remote code execution (RCE) attacks without the victim’s knowledge.

Victims across the world

Unfortunately, these devices were shipped all over the world, and Bitdefender claims “thousands” of people were victims, scattered across some 150 countries around the world, with the highest concentration found in Mexico, France, Italy, United States, Germany, Brazil, and Spain.

The malware comes in different shapes and sizes. So far, Bitdefender uncovered 32 malicious apps, including those pretending to be weather apps, file managers app lockers, OCR tools, and audio editors. All of these do the same thing - create an invisible overlay over different apps and register an ad being viewed, despite the fact that the user never actually saw it.

That way, whoever installed the malware scams the ad network into thinking the ad was served to thousands of users which, in turn, generates profit. We don’t know exactly how many devices are compromised this way, or how much money the crooks stole this way.

"The system app itself doesn’t register the fraudulent impressions and clicks," Bitdefender said. "The revenue engine is driven by the dropped cover apps, including real-looking weather, app-lock, note, and OCR apps, which load genuine ads through a legitimate ad SDK. The goal is simple: to load an invisible window on top of apps that registers ads being shown."

Spilling into the Play Store

Bitdefender also said that one of the uncovered applications (the app locker one), contained a TCP proxy element that registered the compromised phones with a remote command server. After successful registration, the attackers were able to forward traffic through the phone, essentially creating a residential proxy service that criminals can use for different things, from launching DDoS attacks to participating in spam and wire fraud.

They also found more than a dozen applications on the Google Play Store with the same fraudulent advertising code, as well as the same communications infrastructure. These, however, required manual installation and required users to grant them the requested permissions, which might have raised flags with the users.

Removing the malware isn’t as easy as simply uninstalling the app. The researchers said that many of the devices require cleanup on the firmware level, or disabling the malicious component using Android Debug Bridge (ADB), which could be too technical for many victims.

The easier and more elegant solution is also a more expensive one - don’t buy devices from brands with a shady reputation.