📰 must reads

Online fashion retailer Revolve has told regulators that the September cyberattack affected more than 1.5 million individuals.

The post Revolve Puts Data Breach Victim Count at 1.5 Million appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Threat actors are exploiting the four-flaw chain to hack the Plex Media Server application on QNAP NAS devices.

The post Plex2Shell Exploited Against QNAP NAS Users appeared first on SecurityWeek.

The New York attorney general (AG) has reached a settlement over a medical data breach that affected 13.3 million people after basic security failures.

Perry Johnson & Associates (PJ&A) and four related companies have agreed to pay $300,000 and implement extensive security reforms following a breach that exposed personal and medical information belonging to more than 13.3 million people. They face another $9.7 million in penalties if they fail to meet the settlement’s terms.

New York AG Letitia James announced the agreement on November 6, alongside the attorneys general of Connecticut, Michigan, and New Jersey. Approximately 4.2 million of the people affected were New York residents.

The investigation describes a series of failures: remote access without multifactor authentication, nearly identical passwords circulated by email, sensitive files without file-level encryption, and security software that detected malicious activity but did not alert security staff.

The result: the companies only discovered the attack when the attackers contacted them on May 2, 2023, and demanded payment.

How many people were affected?

The stolen database files contained records associated with more than 13.3 million people, including approximately 4.2 million New Yorkers.

Earlier reporting put the number of affected patients at approximately 8.95 million. The settlement documents now give the larger figure of more than 13.3 million. The total could be higher, since the AG found that attackers also accessed files in shared network storage containing personal and health information, but the companies did not review those files to identify additional affected people.

The information included:

• Names, dates of birth, and home addresses.
• Social Security numbers.
• Medical record and hospital account numbers.
• Insurance information.
• Admission diagnoses and dates of treatment.
• Clinical information from medical transcriptions, including test results, medications, treatment facilities, and healthcare providers.

See if your personal data has been exposed.

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Notifications were also slow. PJ&A began contacting clients about the stolen database files in July 2023, and its clients notified affected individuals between October 31, 2023, and February 8, 2024. The New York AG found that the companies violated state requirements to disclose a breach as quickly as possible and without unreasonable delay.

The settlement

Although the announcement describes a settlement worth up to $10 million, the companies must pay $300,000 in penalties to the states. The remaining $9.7 million is suspended and could become payable. New York will receive $100,000 from the initial payment. These are payments to the states, not an announced compensation payout to patients.

The exposed information could be valuable to criminals. Our research found stolen identity packages selling for as little as 95 cents apiece on the dark web.

The settlement also requires extensive security changes for the relevant active companies, including:

• MFA for individual user accounts, including administrator accounts, and remote network access.
• Stronger password management and access restricted to what employees need for their jobs.
• Encryption of personal and protected health information.
• Monitoring that automatically alerts security personnel to suspicious activity.
• Annual risk assessments and penetration testing.
• Network segmentation and measures to detect and prevent unauthorized data transfers.
• Written incident response procedures and clearer rules for retaining and securely disposing of sensitive information.

Given the carelessness, number of exposed records and people, do you think the companies got off cheap? Let us know in the comments.

How to stay safe

A breach does not automatically mean someone has misused your information, but you can take these precautions while you wait for more details:

• Verify unexpected messages independently. Don’t let a message about the breach rush you into clicking a link, sharing sensitive information, or making a payment. Go to your healthcare provider or insurer’s official website yourself or use contact details you already trust.
• Review medical bills and insurance statements. Look for appointments, tests, prescriptions, or services you did not receive. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) identifies unfamiliar medical bills and unexpected items on an Explanation of Benefits statement, which explains how your insurer processed a claim, as warning signs of medical identity theft. Report discrepancies to your healthcare provider and your insurer.
• Review your credit reports. Look for unfamiliar accounts or debts and dispute errors. Free reports are available through AnnualCreditReport.com.
• Act if you find signs of identity theft. Visit IdentityTheft.gov for a recovery plan. If someone has received care in your name, ask the providers involved for copies of your medical records and request corrections in writing.

Medical identity theft is not just a financial problem; it can also affect your care. Someone using your identity to obtain treatment or submit insurance claims could introduce incorrect information into your health records. Checking medical statements and reporting anything unfamiliar can help you catch that misuse.

Let’s face it, an incognito window can only do so much. 
 
Breaches, dark web trading, credit fraud. Malwarebytes Identity Theft Protection monitors for all of it, alerts you fast, and comes with identity theft insurance. 

Hackers compromised an external cloud service used by the shopping platform and may have stolen personal information from it.

The post Iris Plaza Breach May Have Exposed Data of 7.7 Million Customers appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said Saturday that his personal data had been disseminated on the dark web.

The post Italy’s Meloni Blames Pro-Russian Hackers for Leak of Foreign Minister’s Data on the Dark Web appeared first on SecurityWeek.

The initial exploitation attempts are attributed to botnets and crypto miners, but other threat actors are expected to follow suit.

The post Hackers Exploiting ‘SSHole’ Authentication Bypass in OpenSSH appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Hackers stole personal, health, and insurance information, including Social Security numbers, from the company’s internal systems.

The post Amplifon Americas Data Breach Impacts 1.3 Million appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Frontline Education told Indiana regulators that its August data breach affected over 3 million school district staff and students.

The post Over 3 Million People Hit by Frontline Education Data Breach appeared first on SecurityWeek.

In 1804, Napoleon gave France a code that much of the world still runs on. The Code civil replaced a tangle of local customs with a single written statute: orderly and knowable. In that tradition, the judge’s job, in Montesquieu’s phrase, is to be the mouth of the law, nothing more. Certainty was the point.

Certainty has a cost. A codified system is only as current as its code. When the world produces something the code did not anticipate — a new technology, a new fraud — there is no statute to apply, and everyone waits for someone to write one.

Your email security works exactly this way. That is the problem.

Security by statute

A signature is a statute. Someone observes an attack, writes a rule that describes it, and from that moment you are protected against that attack and its close relatives. It is fast, certain, and blind to anything the code has not been written to see.

Signatures alone were never enough, so the industry made the code bigger. Anomaly detection and behavioral models are a thicker statute book, trained on what already happened and scoring how far a message deviates from it. More sophisticated than a signature, but not a different philosophy. A zero-day is a crime with no statute.

The strongest evidence against codified defense is not the attack that fails a check. It is the attack that passes every one. When a supplier’s mailbox is compromised, the message arrives from a real domain, with valid credentials and earned reputation. Every check comes back clean because the infrastructure is genuine. Verizon’s 2026 Data Breach Investigations Report found that breaches involving a third party now account for 48% of the total, up 60% in a single year. Authentication did exactly what it measures: it confirmed the letter came from who it said, and had no rule for whether it should be believed. The code was consulted. The code said valid. The message was a theft in progress.

Attackers understand this. A codified defense is cheap to walk around. You do not break the code; you do something it was never written to cover. The FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report put business email compromise losses above $3 billion in a single year, much of it carried by messages that broke no rule because no rule described them.

The other tradition

The English-speaking world chose a different system. Common law does not always wait for the legislature. A judge facing a situation no statute anticipated can reason from principle and precedent to a verdict. It adapts case by case. It is not simply a code that has to be rewritten. It is a court that knows how to weigh a new set of facts.

That is the difference between detecting and reasoning. The fair objection is that a reasoning system also learns from the past. True. But there is a difference between matching a case to a stored pattern and applying a principle to a case you have never seen. A judge who has never encountered your particular dispute still knows how to weigh evidence.

None of this means throwing out the code. Most mail is open and shut and should be settled that way in milliseconds. You keep the fast rule for the easy calls and save a full hearing for the contested ones.

A court can also answer a question a code struggles with: why. A codified system can say “this matched” or “this deviated.” A verdict can cite its evidence: what the sender actually is, whether the relationship supports the request, what the message is asking for. You do not have to trust the reasoning. You check the evidence, because a ruling stands or falls on whether its facts hold up, not on the private thoughts of the judge. It is the opposite of a black box: a decision you can read, challenge, and overturn.

None of this retreats from zero trust. Zero trust governs access, who gets in and what they can touch, and assumes nothing. This is about the verdict, whether a message is what it claims to be, and there the posture is not to presume guilt or innocence but to let the evidence decide.

The court of last resort

For the highest stakes matters, a mature legal system does not let the machinery decide alone. In security, some decisions belong with the person whose money is about to move.

When a message asks for a wire, a change to vendor banking details or a payroll redirect, the right design does not render a silent verdict and hope. It escalates and asks the owner to approve the action itself. Reasoning handles the general docket. The human is the court of last resort, reserved for the decisions that deserve one. Match the process to the stakes.

No analogy is perfect. Real judges in both traditions do more than this, and civil-law systems evolve through their own doctrine.

The question worth ending on

For most of this industry’s history, there was no choice, because machines could apply a code but could not weigh evidence and reason for a judgment. That is no longer true.

There is a simple way to find out which system you are running. Ask your team how many attacks that reached a user came from infrastructure you already trust: a compromised vendor, a real account, a genuine DocuSign or Microsoft notification bent to a purpose it was never meant for. If that number is high, your defenses are not failing to enforce the code. They are enforcing it perfectly; against threats the code was never written to describe.

So, the question is not whether your defenses are up to date. A code is always, by definition, up to date with yesterday. The question is whether your security is a code or a court, and whether it can rule on the case it has never seen, because that is the only case that was ever going to hurt you.

Working with cryptographers, DeepMind’s AI agents cut the cost of forging RSA-1024 signatures and found a cheaper way to factor keys.

The post Google DeepMind’s AI Agents Make 1024-Bit RSA Keys Cheaper to Attack appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Defensive security agility reflects an organization’s potential to rapidly detect, adapt, and respond to evolving cyber threats and vulnerabilities without disrupting core operations. By abandoning static, rigid defense architectures, an agile defense plan emphasizes continuous iteration, automation, and cross-functional flexibility.

Defensive agility allows cybersecurity teams to rapidly adapt and respond to evolving threats while minimizing business disruption, says Anant Adya, an executive vice president at business and technology consulting firm Infosys. “As attack surfaces expand, organizations must prioritize risk quantification and identify vulnerabilities to strengthen their security posture and improve their ability to recover from attacks that are inevitable.”

Is your organization taking the steps needed to achieve a high degree of defensive agility? Read on to find out.

1. Establish a zero-trust baseline

Achieving defensive agility should begin with a zero-trust approach that continuously verifies access across users, devices, and applications, Adya advises. “An effective zero-trust strategy must be embedded into an organization’s technology framework and business lifecycle in order to build resilience and foster an organization-wide security mindset.”

As enterprises adopt AI, modernize applications, and operate across highly distributed environments, security must evolve from a protective afterthought into a business accelerant, Adya says. “By integrating zero trust into day-to-day operations and AI workflows, organizations can strengthen their ability to adapt to evolving threats while innovating faster, integrating acquisitions more securely, and scaling globally without accumulating architectural or operational debt.”

2. Modernize (and rationalize) your existing security infrastructure

Many large organizations are struggling to keep pace with emerging challenges because their systems are incredibly complex or filled with old software, custom code, and a mixture of disconnected security tools that can hinder containment speed, says Sharon Chand, cyber defense and resilience leader at Deloitte.

Chand advises CISOs to evaluate their existing infrastructure and technologies to consider how they’re currently responding to threats. Meanwhile, it’s important to streamline operations into a more integrated system. “Security organizations must also have access to AI-driven systems to detect and automate response to machine-speed attacks at the pace of adversaries,” she states.

3. Enlist AI where confidence is high and actions are reversible

Randy Gross, CISO at training and certification organization CompTIA, recommends deciding in advance which defensive actions are safe enough to happen without placing a human in the middle. “Locking an account, killing a session, or isolating a device should already be automated when confidence is high and the action is easy to reverse,” he says.

Review your strategy at least quarterly, but never equate a strategy review with operational governance, Gross warns. “In a medium-to-large enterprise, agents’ permissions and integrations may change frequently, so the guardrails around them must be continuous and automated,” he advises. “The CISO and team should also revisit their strategy when enough changes have been made to the point where risk has changed materially.”

Gross adds: “The strategy shouldn’t be just to put more AI in the SOC; it should be to reduce the latency between finding a threat and doing something useful about it.”

4. Forego higher walls in favor of dynamic, structural resilience

Defensive agility requires an enterprise system with the architectural capacity to absorb, isolate, and adapt to anomalous behavior without relying on human intervention, says Jatin Chopra, a senior software engineer at Microsoft. “It marks the transition from static perimeter defense — where you build higher walls — to dynamic, structural resilience where the environment itself constantly shifts to restrict threat propagation.”

Using an approach with sufficient capacity also detaches security from manual bottlenecking, Chopra says. “When defensive protocols are codified into the architecture rather than enforced by a review board, engineering teams can maintain high developer velocity while inherently restricting the attack surface.” It transforms security from a workflow tax into an automated platform capability, he states.

5. Beware bureaucracy that does not lead to decisive action

Stop treating your security strategy as an annual document process and begin viewing it as a loop that runs continuously utilizing data you trust, says Bob Maley, CISO at security-as-a-service provider Black Kite. Feed decisions to someone who actually has the authority to make rapid critical choices, he recommends.

Attackers are already highly vigilant, Maley warns. “When a new vulnerability opportunity lands on a Friday afternoon, nobody on a ransomware crew is waiting for a quarterly review to approve going after it,” he explains. “If your defense team needs a steering committee before it can react, the gap between their tempo and yours is where the breach lives.”

6. Embrace automation to free up human judgment

Most security teams I’ve worked with build static defenses, observes Timur Rakhmatullin, senior software engineer at Softline Solutions, a consulting and social media marketing services provider. “They set up rules, configure alerts, and write runbooks, but then something happens that doesn’t match the runbook and everyone freezes.”

Rakhmatullin believes that automation is essential. He runs automated security scans across 30-plus repositories using in-house tools. “The scans catch vulnerabilities, license issues, and other gaps,” Rakhmatullin explains. “But the key part is that any engineer can override a scan result, escalate it, or reclassify a finding in minutes.”

Still, automation does all the heavy lifting, Rakhmatullin says. “Humans make the judgment calls.”

7. Conduct regular ‘fire drills’

Rehearse ugly scenarios before they happen, suggests Chris McGlasson, founder of ClearStack Advisory, a fractional executive technology and AI strategy firm.

Know who patches, who tests, who talks to the business, and who has the authority to take something offline at 2 a.m., McGlasson says. “Write it down and run it twice a year,” he recommends. “The teams that do so treat incident response like a fire drill.” McGlasson adds that many CISOs risk disaster because they treat security like a research project instead of a fundamental initiative.

McGlasson points to the recent “Citrix meltdown,” a severe, ongoing security crisis affecting Citrix NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway appliances, creating a mass wave of critical zero-day exploits. Citrix immediately warned IT administrators to patch their systems at once to address the issue.

As a result, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, gave federal agencies a three-day patch window, while other organizations were left to create their own timeline, McGlasson says. He notes that the shops that handled this challenging event well weren’t always the ones with the best tools. “They were the ones that already knew who patches, who tests, and who calls the shots before the advisory ever dropped.”

Agility is a muscle, McGlasson observes. “You build it through repetition.”

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs:

• Big Tech sues over California plan to limit kids’ scrolling
• Attacks on supermarket and blood storage systems prompt US warning
• Phone return scams: where a real delivery and a fake return end up in a bill for you
• NIKKE PC launcher compromise put players’ passwords and personal files at risk
• Scammers use AI-generated images of missing pets to extort owners
• Vizio, Samsung smart TVs seem to ignore tracking opt outs
• The fake $750 Apple Cash reward that pays out nothing
• mSecure tells users to change passwords but won’t say why [updated]
• Chrome 157 fixes 213 security issues, including 7 critical flaws
• A hidden backdoor put 1.3 million TV boxes to work for criminals
• Hackers put porn on public billboards and claim it was “far too easy”
• Revolve card breach: 1.5 million people may be affected
• 5 stars for sale: Inside the underground fake review trade
• Applebee’s customer data exposed by password left in app

Stay safe!

Let’s face it, an incognito window can only do so much. 
 
Breaches, dark web trading, credit fraud. Malwarebytes Identity Theft Protection monitors for all of it, alerts you fast, and comes with identity theft insurance. 

Its multi-agent AI platform generates the telemetry an attack would produce to fix gaps in enterprise defenses.

The post Brava Security Emerges From Stealth With $15 Million in Funding appeared first on SecurityWeek.

CVE-2026-19868 can let attackers holding credentials for a different login method get past SAML checks, including SAML-enforced MFA.

The post SonicWall Patches Exploited SonicOS Vulnerability That Weakens VPN Logins appeared first on SecurityWeek.

In this article

• California wants to switch off autoplay and personalized feeds for under-16s.
• Google, Meta, and TikTok are suing to stop the restrictions.
• Age checks could raise privacy concerns for adults, too.

Google, Meta, and TikTok filed separate federal lawsuits on November 4, challenging Assembly Bill 1709, which Governor Gavin Newsom signed in September.

The companies argue that the law, due to take effect in 2027, interferes with free speech, overrides parents’ decisions, and conflicts with federal protections for online platforms.

AB 1709 prohibits covered platforms from providing California users under 16 certain

“psychologically exploitative features intended to maximize engagement that foreseeably lead to compulsive use.”

The law specifically includes personalized “addictive feeds” and autoplay. It also allows the attorney general to define additional features through regulations.

It would not ban children from using the platforms. They can keep their accounts if the platform removes the restricted features. Otherwise, the platform must delete the account and associated personal information.

The law also requires age verification before providing the restricted features. The law doesn’t stop children from searching for videos, following creators, or communicating privately. It makes exceptions for certain search-based results, content that a user explicitly requests, and direct private messages, subject to conditions.

California’s argument is that harm is not limited to what children see. It can also arise from how a service encourages them to keep using it, through personalized recommendations and features such as autoplay.

The idea behind the law is straightforward: Instead of relying entirely on teenagers to recognize when to stop, require platforms to remove some of the mechanisms designed to keep them engaged.

The companies’ objections

The companies’ objections fall into several related categories.

Meta argues that deciding which posts to show, and how to arrange them, is protected editorial judgment under the First Amendment. Its complaint accuses California of attempting to appoint itself the

“editor, curator, and controller of online speech.”

TikTok makes a similar argument about its For You feed. It says selecting and arranging videos creates a curated product protected by free-speech rights, not merely a mechanism that the state can redesign at will.

Google likewise argues that YouTube’s recommendations help users find relevant, appropriate material among its vast collection of videos. It also defends autoplay as useful for watching content intended to be viewed in sequence.

The central disagreement is whether these are harmful product features that California can regulate, or editorial decisions protected by free-speech rights. California describes them as potentially harmful product design; the companies describe them as protected decisions about publishing speech.

The companies also raise parental control. Google says parents are best placed to decide what is appropriate for their families. TikTok points to its existing teen-account safeguards and Family Pairing controls, arguing that the law restricts free expression while taking decisions away from parents. Meta adds that personalized features can help deliver age-appropriate experiences.

The business model

There is also a commercial interest at stake: engagement. How often people return, how long they stay, and how much they interact all matter to the platforms’ businesses.

Meta’s annual report says it generates substantially all its revenue from advertising. It also says that changes to its content displays and product features can affect time spent, user engagement, and financial results. That doesn’t establish why the companies sued, but it helps explain why restrictions on recommendations and autoplay could have financial consequences.

If removing these features leads people to spend less time on a service, it could mean fewer opportunities to show ads. Compliance would also require product and operational changes, such as checking users’ ages and providing a different experience to those under 16.

Youth is the future. Big Tech is very much aware of this. Meta’s annual report identifies youth as an investment priority and describes attracting and retaining users as a competitive objective. Restrictions affecting how young people join and use a platform could affect its longer-term audience strategy, too.

What the future will bring

California is challenging an important part of the attention-based business model. Meta’s annual report warns investors that regulation affecting how it displays content or serves younger users could affect user growth, engagement, and financial results.

And then there’s the matter of age verification. The required age checks could affect adults as well as children: a service must verify users’ ages before providing the restricted features. Depending on how the checks work, this could involve sharing age-related information, raising privacy concerns and creating another opportunity for sensitive data to be exposed in a breach.

If it were up to me, platforms would stop designing for compulsive use, whatever the user’s age. Adults deserve a healthier online experience too. Applying those protections to everyone would also remove the need to check someone’s age before deciding whether they can use these features. Platforms might lose some advertising opportunities, but time spent online should not be the only measure of a successful service.

Scammers don’t need to hack you. They just need you to click once. 

Malwarebytes Identity Theft Protection catches suspicious activity before it becomes a problem.

Residential proxies are often used by bad actors to hide the true source of internet traffic — and now one of them appears to have taken up residence in the White House.

The Residential Proxy Observatory, set up by Layer3 Intel to monitor the threat of anonymized network activity, has identified proxy exit activity on one particular network, AS2650, which is registered to the executive office of the US President and operated out of the White House.

Residential proxies — so-called because they typically run on home or personal devices — mask the true source of internet traffic by rerouting it to appear to come from a different IP address. While it may be concerning that this is activity to be found in one of the protected workspaces in the US, this is in line with recent research from Infoblox, which found that residential proxies were widespread throughout enterprises.

While not illegal per se, residential proxies can be used by bad actors for activities that most definitely are illicit, for example, denial-of-service operations or distribution of malware.

The Residential Proxy Observatory has also found evidence of their activity on the island of St Helena, one of the most remote locations on the planet, so there really is no place on earth to hide from internet interference.

Attackers don’t have to steal information to cause serious harm. Sometimes, changing a temperature setting is enough.

On November 5, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and three other federal agencies issued a warning urging operators to secure industrial refrigeration and cold-chain monitoring systems.

The warning follows cyberattacks on supermarket refrigeration systems across Europe. Separately, France’s national blood service confirmed that the monitoring and control systems at three of its cold-storage sites had been affected. Staff intervened before any blood products or samples were compromised. The incident showed how a connected cooling system can put essential supplies at risk.

On October 13, after the first attacks in France, refrigeration supplier Danfoss advised its Dutch customers to disconnect their systems from the public internet and reconnect only through a secure network.

A Danfoss spokesperson told NOS that most stores followed the advice. When similar attacks reached the Netherlands on November 2, major supermarket chains were reportedly unaffected. At least 17 businesses, mainly butcher shops and small neighborhood stores, had their refrigeration systems compromised.

Danfoss said that the affected systems were still accessible through unsecured connections and used default passwords. The spokesperson said the attacks could have been prevented if the recommended precautions had been taken.

CISA and its partners warned that attackers may exploit authentication bypass flaws, code-injection vulnerabilities, or weak configurations in refrigeration controllers. Successful attacks could let them change temperatures or force equipment into continuous heating or defrost cycles.

The agencies recommend reducing that risk by keeping control panels off the public internet, isolating operational equipment from business networks, changing default passwords, using strong authentication, patching firmware, and replacing unsupported devices. They also recommend setting safe operating limits and alerts for temperature changes outside those limits.

What about home appliances?

You don’t need an industrial refrigeration unit to adopt some of these precautions.

• Check whether you need remote access. If you never use a device while away from home, disable that feature. Check the manufacturer’s instructions first; disabling remote access may also affect alerts or smart-home integrations.
• Check who can access the appliance, including suppliers, and how that access is protected.
• Change default passwords and secure the associated account. Use a strong password and enable two-step verification wherever the appliance or app supports it. Protecting the app account matters as well as protecting the appliance itself.
• Keep firmware and apps updated. Turn on automatic updates where available, and don’t ignore manual update prompts.

“One of the best cybersecurity suites on the planet.” 

According to CNET. Read their review →

AI agents operated by cloud infrastructure and application hosting platform, Railway, have attempted to access a rival platform’s infrastructure, prompting the cloud provider’s leadership to acknowledge the incident on social media.

Railway senior product engineer Jake Runzer acknowledged running agents to perform signups and agentic testing on similar platforms after Primcloud founder Josh Manders publicly questioned why Railway employees were attempting to breach his infrastructure.

Runzer said he had halted the testing harness after it began reaching too far. Railway co-founder and CEO Jake Cooper apologized, saying the models were “getting a bit too good at this point,” and pledged to prohibit non-manual external testing.

According to Manders, the agents attempted to receive credentials from an application container, request platform secrets, access cloud-provider metadata, discover internal databases and caches, and scan all 65,536 addresses on Primcloud’s internal network twice.

The activity reportedly involved 24 scripted commands over 15 minutes.

“An agent can act without a person directing every step,” said Diana Kelley, chief information security officer at Noma Security. “It doesn’t remove the responsibility of the people and organizations that deploy it.”

Primcloud said its defenses blocked every attempt and that “nothing” was accessed. The incident follows Railway’s own security disclosure involving encrypted customer environment variables.

The engineer was acting on his own

Cooper said the employee had developed the testing tool independently, using personal accounts, a personal credit card, and his own time. He added that Runzer ran it against a single external provider and halted it proactively within 15 minutes, adding that Railway had addressed the incident internally.

“I can confirm they ran this tool once and only once,” Cooper said in an X post. “Railway does not condone these actions. We expect all our employees to uphold our standards of conduct, whether acting on behalf of Railway or in a personal capacity.”

Although that timeline checks out with Manders’ own account, some details remain murky. After publicly calling out Runzer on X, Manders posted a follow-up, saying he had observed another attempt to access the account after his initial warning.

“I see you tried to access the account after this tweet too, Jake,” he had written more than 30 minutes after his first post.

Primcloud does not have a bug bounty program, according to its Acceptable Use Policy (AUP). It forbids unauthorized probing, scanning, or vulnerability testing without prior written consent.

‘The AI did it’ is not an accountability strategy

Experts condemn Railway’s “rogue AI” explanation for the incident.

Amir Boldo, co-founder and chief product and technology officer of Above Security, cautioned against describing agents as attackers, as they can execute attacker-like sequences without any malicious intent.

Execution traces can establish what an agent did, but they cannot independently prove intent, he said, adding that investigators need evidence spanning instructions, identities, permissions, inputs and tool calls.  “You can’t put an agent on trial. You can hold each party accountable for its part,” Boldo said.

Ronald Lewis, head of cybersecurity governance at Black Duck, argued that users may not fully appreciate that delegating work to an agent also delegates the authority associated with their identity.

“We now have to ask what happens when trusted identity is delegated to a non-deterministic system capable of independently deciding how to use it,” Lewis said. Cooper confirmed in his X post that Railway had addressed the incident internally and was reinforcing its expectations for employee conduct, including when employees act in a personal capacity.

A memory-safety flaw in CPython can allow malicious AI model templates to escape code sandboxes and execute arbitrary code inside inference servers, according to security researchers at RunSybil.

“By exploiting this vulnerability, attackers could gain a foothold inside servers responsible for processing millions of user requests,” Darius Houle, a security researcher at RunSybil, wrote in a blog post. “They also could strike directly at the underlying cloud infrastructure hosting those workloads.”

The researchers demonstrated how a specially crafted model could exploit the flaw to bypass Jinja, a Python-based templating engine used to structure interactions between users and LLMs, sandbox protections, and execute code in the process of serving the model. The attack could expose AI hosting providers that allow customers to upload and run their own models, potentially giving attackers a foothold inside infrastructure processing requests for multiple customers, the post added.

However, the Python Security Response Team (PSRT), which handles security reports involving CPython, disputed the security implications of the demonstration in a response to CSO. “We acknowledge the underlying CPython bug reported by RunSybil and appreciate their contribution to fixing it. However, we do not consider the demonstrated sandbox escape to be a CPython security vulnerability,” the team said.

The disagreement centres on whether the interpreter should be responsible for preventing sandbox escapes. While RunSybil argues that the flaw creates risks for AI inference infrastructure, PSRT says executing untrusted Python code within a sandbox is outside CPython’s security threat model.

Exploiting Python’s type-handling mechanism

“The bug we discovered abuses CPython’s handling of generic types to accomplish a breakout,” Houle wrote. “We exploited it using objects that sandboxes make available in every template, even in empty sandbox contexts.”

The researchers found that CPython can use a cached list of parameters even after an object has been modified through a callback. When the interpreter subsequently looks for a newly introduced parameter in the original list, it can receive an invalid index. An assertion designed to catch the condition is disabled in normal release builds, allowing the interpreter to access memory outside the expected bounds.

RunSybil used this behavior to retrieve references to Python objects that the sandbox was supposed to keep inaccessible.

“While an invalid address will generally crash the interpreter, an address pointing to a useful live Python object gives our callback a reference to that object (even when the sandbox never intends to expose it),” Houle wrote.

The researchers then used the recovered object references to access Python classes and functions needed to construct executable code.

Malicious model templates enable code execution

To demonstrate the attack, RunSybil modified the Qwen2.5-0.5B-Instruct model by inserting a backdoored chat_template.jinja file. When the model was loaded and used through an inference-serving engine such as vLLM, the template enabled arbitrary code execution in the serving process.

“Breaking out of the chat template sandbox and executing code represents a supply chain risk that endangers inference providers, library developers, and model users,” Houle wrote.

The researchers said they shared proof-of-concept exploits with multiple inference providers supporting bring-your-own-model (BYOM) features, which allow customers to upload models from external sources.

Python disputes vulnerability classification

RunSybil disclosed the issue to CPython, the Pallets Project, which maintains Jinja, and Hugging Face. The researchers said they encountered conflicting views about which project should address the underlying problem.

CPython maintains that the interpreter does not support sandboxing untrusted Python code as a security boundary. In its response to CSO, the PSRT referred to the project’s security policy, which states that sandbox escapes should be addressed by the maintainers of the affected sandboxing software.

“Escapes from such sandboxes are therefore outside our security threat model and should be addressed by the maintainers of the affected sandboxing software,” the team said.

The team also disputed RunSybil’s suggestion that there was no coordinated remediation process. It said the researchers had submitted the report by email rather than through CPython’s designated private GitHub vulnerability reporting channel.

Fix backported to three Python branches

RunSybil submitted a patch to CPython, which was merged into the main development branch on Aug. 14. According to the PSRT, the fix was also backported to the 3.13, 3.14, and 3.15 branches as a regular bug fix rather than a security fix.

The distinction matters because RunSybil had raised concerns that the fix would not reach all supported Python versions.

The researchers said the absence of a backport to Python 3.12 could delay adoption of the fix across AI infrastructure deployments.

“With major portions of the AI ecosystem still solidly aligned on Python 3.12, we might not see organic adoption of our memory-safety fixes until late 2028, when it reaches its end-of-life date,” Houle wrote. The researchers recommend that AI hosting providers treat sandboxed code, template engines and expression evaluators as best-effort security controls rather than relying on them as standalone security boundaries.

A critical vulnerability that affects OpenSSH servers on Linux systems built with the musl C library instead of glibc allows remote attackers to easily bypass authentication and log into accounts that should have password authentication disabled. The flaw impacts the lightweight Alpine Linux, which is widely used for cloud Docker container images, as well as Linux distributions for embedded systems.

The security bug, dubbed *SSHole and tracked as CVE-2026-123158, was discovered by Ozgun Kultekin, a researcher with security testing firm Wakefield, and has existed for the past 10 years. The OpenSSH maintainers moved quickly to add mitigation for the flaw in the OpenSSH 10.6p2 emergency update released Thursday, even though they claim the bug is not actually in their code.

“It’s not every day that the ‘exploit’ for a vulnerability in a technology as prevalent as OpenSSH is just ‘send a long password’ or ‘send a lot of A characters,’ but here we are,” said Jake Knott, head of threat intelligence at preemptive exposure management firm watchTowr. “On affected systems, the exploit is strikingly simple: send a password between 257 and 1,024 characters long.”

Luckily, there are some prerequisites for this exploit to work:

• The Linux distribution needs to use musl, which means that many popular server distros such as Debian, Ubuntu, and Fedora are not impacted
• The system needs to use OpenSSH and not alternative SSH server implementations such as Dropbear, which many embedded distros use
• OpenSSH needs to be configured without support for Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM), the most common Linux login framework
• OpenSSH needs to allow password-based authentication
• The attacker needs to know the name of an account for which password login has been disabled at the system level

Those conditions are met in default configuration for Alpine Linux and its built-in “alpine” username, which allows executing commands as root. The Alpine project released emergency updates for the openssh package and advises users who can’t update to disable password-based authentication in the OpenSSH configuration and set up key-based authentication.

Why the trivial attack works

The flaw is the product of three changes made years apart, each solving a different problem. In 2012, musl’s developers capped password length at 256 bytes to stop attackers from tying up server resources by sending long passwords that need to be hashed as part of the login verification process.

At the same time they also made the library’s password hashing function return an asterisk (*) whenever it fails. The asterisk is the same character Unix has used since the 1980s to mark accounts for which no password should ever match — accounts with password disabled at the system level.

In 2016, OpenSSH changed how it checks passwords for accounts whose own password field offers no salt to hash against, borrowing another account’s salt so that attackers could not guess existing usernames with brute-force login retries and timing the server’s responses. Then in 2022, Alpine switched root’s password field to an asterisk so that SSH key logins would keep working for it.

When an attacker sends an over-long password for a password-disabled account on such a system, the hash attempt fails and returns an asterisk, which sshd compares with the asterisk stored in the account’s password field. The two match, and the login succeeds.

Alpine Linux cloud images will be the main target

Alpine’s standard OpenSSH package is built without PAM, and password logins are enabled by default, so Alpine servers meet the conditions out of the box. On the official cloud images published between versions 3.18.11 and 3.24.3, the default user account, named alpine, is one of the password-disabled accounts, and the images grant it passwordless “doas” privileges.

As a result, an attacker who logs in as that user can then switch to root, so the images are exposed as soon as an administrator sets a password for any other account on the system, because a legitimate account with a real password needs to exist for this attack to work.

Unlike the critical regreSSHion flaw from 2024, this one is confined to the musl world, but it requires no exploit engineering of any kind.

“Internet-exposed SSH servers are already being hammered by password guesses and brute-force attempts around the clock,” Knott said. “Exploiting this vulnerability simply means those same attackers add a very long password attempt to that brute-force list. We’d be extremely surprised if we didn’t see SSH brute-forcers attempting this by the weekend.”

Organizations should also check whether the flaw was already used against their servers. An “Accepted password” entry in /var/log/messages for an account that has no password, such as root, a key-only user, or the default alpine user, is a strong sign of compromise.

Alpine recommends reviewing doas usage, recently created users and files on exposed machines, and its advisory says any server where a login cannot be ruled out should be treated as compromised. Kultekin also published a check script on GitHub that identifies exposed servers and lists the accounts at risk.

French regional banking group Crédit Mutuel Arkéa admitted Wednesday that attackers had accessed an internal account via an unnamed third-party service provider’s platform and transferred funds to other financial institutions. Those funds, it said, could have then been potentially converted to cryptocurrency by the thieves.

The day before, cryptocurrency news outlet CoinDesk reported that the attack had been detected on Monday by blockchain investigator ZachXBT, although at the time he did not identify the entity involved. On Wednesday, he identified the suspected victim as Crédit Mutuel Arkéa, which the banking group later confirmed. It did not, however, specify whether the stolen funds were originally in traditional currency or cryptocurrency.

This attack comes amidst worries by European regulators about cyber threats to financial institutions as they become more reliant on interconnected systems and external service providers.

The bank, which serves the West of France, temporarily suspended some transactions in the wake of the attack to prevent further fraudulent activity. It reported that, as of Wednesday morning, operations were returning to normal after the implementation of additional security controls. French law enforcement is investigating the breach.

In its initial announcement, the group reassured customers that their funds were safe. “This incident has no impact on [customer] assets, and has only resulted in a delayed execution of certain transfer operations. Their interests are fully protected, and safeguarding their assets is an absolute priority,” it said.

French regional newspaper Le Télégramme reported that the thieves had taken over €118 million (over $133 million); the bank would not confirm the amount but said that the order of magnitude was accurate.

The bank said it was still working to assess the precise financial consequences of this attack. “Some of the funds involved have been frozen, and other actions are underway to recover them. While it is therefore still too early to provide a final figure, we can already confirm that the amounts involved are in no way likely to jeopardize the financial health and stability of Crédit Mutuel Arkéa,” it said. The group has 5.8 million customers and manages more than €211 billion (about $237 billion) in assets.

A caller offers you a free phone upgrade or an exclusive deal from your mobile provider. A new phone arrives at your home. So far, everything seems to check out.

Then comes another call: There’s been a shipping mistake. You received the wrong phone, and the company needs you to send it back. You send it back, but the phone never reaches your provider, leaving you with a large charge or long-term contract to pay.

Now police are warning about this scheme after residents lost devices and were left facing the associated payments.

How phone return scams work

The scam usually starts with a call from a spoofed number. In the US we’re seeing several examples in anonymized Malwarebytes Scam Guard records of the impersonated company being Canadian mobile provider Rogers.

The Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre warns:

“After collecting personal information required for credit checks, they’ll order a new phone in your name.”

Next, a genuine device arrives through a legitimate delivery service. That delivery makes the next part of the story easier to believe.

The caller gets back in touch and claims something went wrong. Perhaps the company sent the wrong device, or an extra phone arrived by mistake. To put things right, you need to send it back using the label or shipping QR code they provide.

The shipping label is the real trick. Rather than directing the package to the provider’s returns facility, it sends the device to an address chosen by the criminals.

The result: You no longer have the phone, but your provider has not received it back. Victims can be left facing a contract, financing agreement, or monthly payments for the missing device.

How to stay safe

The most important protection against most types of scams is having someone you can trust and help you decide whether something is a scam. Malwarebytes Scam Guard can be that partner if you’re on your own.

You don’t need to decide on the spot about whether a caller sounds convincing. Break the conversation and verify the offer separately. Pause and check if you encounter any of the following:

• An unexpected call offering a free phone, loyalty reward, or unusually attractive upgrade.
• A caller asking for personal, financial, or account information to arrange the offer.
• A follow-up call claiming the wrong device was shipped or that another delivery mistake needs correcting.
• Instructions to use a return label or QR code supplied by that caller.
• A return destination that you have not confirmed directly with your provider.

If you’ve already sent a phone, contact your mobile provider immediately using verified contact details. Explain that you believe you were targeted by a phone return scam, identify the affected orders, and ask for a fraud investigation.

If you shared your account password or PIN, change it through the provider’s official channels. Rogers advises customers who disclosed their credentials to reset them and contact customer service to check for unauthorized transactions.

Keep the evidence: messages, emails, the shipping label, tracking details, order confirmations, bills, and a timeline of the calls. These records can help support a billing complaint and fraud report.

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Players of Goddess of Victory: NIKKE are being urged to check their PCs after attackers tampered with files used by the game’s Windows launcher. Opening the launcher could allow malicious software to run, potentially exposing much more than a player’s game account.

The incident occurred as part of a supply-chain attack, where services or software used by the company in question is compromised. In practice, this meant that instead of persuading players to download a fake game or install a suspicious add-on, the attackers compromised resources used by the legitimate launcher. Players could therefore encounter the threat simply by opening software they already trusted.

Game publisher Level Infinite has released fixes and added a malware-checking feature to the official PC client. However, fixing the delivery mechanism does not undo an infection, nor does it recover passwords and other information that may have been stolen.

Breaches happen every day. Don’t be the last to know.

SEE PLANS

Independent researcher MotherSphere identified malicious code in four JavaScript files hosted on Level Infinite’s official content delivery network (CDN).

Players should be aware of a discrepancy in the published timelines. Level Infinite says malicious-program distribution began on October 30, while MotherSphere reports evidence of the remote-control agent running as early as October 23.

According to the researcher’s analysis, the distributed remote-control agent supported commands to:

• Run programs and system commands.
• Browse folders and download files.
• Take screenshots.
• Retrieve saved NIKKE login credentials.
• Collect browser passwords and cookies.
• Search for developer credentials, API tokens, and other secrets.
• Collect cryptocurrency wallet-extension data.

The number of compromised PCs and the full extent of any data theft remain unclear.

How to stay safe

Mobile-only players are not affected, according to Level Infinite, so they do not need to take any additional security measures.

Level Infinite says it replaced three abnormal script files early on November 4, then refreshed the CDN’s cache for the remaining file later that day. MotherSphere subsequently reported that all four files were clean on the four CDN servers checked.

If you opened the Windows launcher during the period identified above, take the following steps.

• Close the launcher and check your PC. MotherSphere’s report includes user-reported Malwarebytes detections for traces associated with the attack.
• Follow the removal instructions published by NIKKE carefully.
• Secure your accounts from a clean device. Do not change passwords on a computer that may still be compromised.
• If a cryptocurrency wallet or its recovery phrase may have been exposed, use a clean device to move funds to a newly created wallet with a new recovery phrase.
• Level Infinite asks players who believe they were affected, including those experiencing problems with external accounts or financial losses, to contact its customer support team, so keep relevant records without handing over personal information.

Please note that the NIKKE wiki’s unofficial cleanup guidance recommends scanning with Malwarebytes. Although the guide describes this as a one-time free option, Malwarebytes Free lets you continue running manual scans and removing detected malware after the Premium trial ends. The trial provides additional features, including real-time protection, so decide what is best for you.

From reporting threats to removing them.

Cybersecurity risks should never spread beyond a headline. Keep threats off your devices by downloading Malwarebytes today.

A chain of avoidable technical and human security failures enabled the largest crypto heist on record, the theft of approximately $6.34 billion from Binance. The improper monitoring and access scoping of an internal AI tool played a major role in helping the hackers, and should serve as a warning for enterprise CISOs to take AI governance seriously.

Binance’s initial findings report, published Nov. 3, describes a months-long, multi-stage campaign against its wallet-infrastructure engineers that resulted in malware being installed on developer machines in two separate incidents, only one of which was detected. The attackers were then able to pivot through an internal AI tool to additional developer systems, obtain an access token, and deploy a container on Binance’s infrastructure before executing the rogue withdrawals.

While Binance describes this attack as highly sophisticated, there were multiple security failures involved that could have been avoided, from weak or absent access controls to overly broad privileges, poor credential hygiene, and employee security awareness lapses or policy violations.

“Developer workstations have quietly become some of the most privileged assets in the enterprise, carrying deployment tokens, signing access, and now AI tools that can act across internal systems on an employee’s behalf,” warns Joe Brinkley, director of offensive security research and community at security firm Cobalt. “Once an attacker controls that machine, an AI tool with broad internal reach becomes one more trusted path they can use.”

He adds: “Security teams should treat engineers with production or signing access as a high-value attack surface, test the path from workstation to production the way an adversary would, and scope AI tool permissions as tightly as any service account.”

Two compromises, months apart

The FBI has attributed the Binance breach to North Korea, identifying the hacking unit as TraderTraitor, which other researchers consider part of the broader Lazarus operation that has stolen billions of dollars from cryptocurrency platforms over the past decade. Binance’s own report relays the FBI’s conclusion and notes that throughout 2026, the company’s security team detected and prevented 57 suspected North Korea–linked cyber threat cases.

This suggests Binance has the Lazarus APT in its threat model, as it should, and is well aware of the group’s tools, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), which include software supply-chain compromises, the use of malware that masquerades as popular legitimate tools, tricking developers with fake job interviews, and long-horizon social engineering operations. Yet, two Binance engineers fell victim to exactly these tricks, raising questions about the company’s security awareness training as well as its technical controls.

In June, a wallet-infrastructure engineer searched the web for a popular AI coding tool and downloaded a tampered Homebrew installer rather than obtaining the software from a trusted source. Homebrew is a package manager and distribution channel for open-source applications on macOS. Binance’s security team detected the anomaly, replaced the device, and rotated all related credentials, but the attackers had already learned who the engineer was and who else worked on the wallet infrastructure team.

It’s good that Binance was able to quickly detect the breach, but the incident raises the question of why an engineer was installing software from a search result at all. Does Binance have a policy that employees install software only from approved sources, and is this enforced with technical controls such as application whitelisting?

Three months later, the attackers approached a second engineer through a job-hunting platform, posing as a project director recruiting for a company that did not exist. Two staged interviews followed: one with a purported HR representative who shared a social media account filled with personal photos and videos to build trust, and one with someone claiming to be the company’s CEO.

At the end of the second interview, the engineer was told to download a coding assignment onto their work computer from a repository. The assignment included malicious code, and this time Binance’s endpoint protection tools did not detect it. The company described this as zero-day malware, but if endpoint protection tools were only capable of detecting known malware, then the whole industry has a problem.

Either way, the developer’s actions raise a number of questions regarding security policies, procedures, and awareness at Binance, first among them: Why was the engineer doing job interviews and test assignments on their work computer? Why did they clone a repository directly on their system instead of using a virtual machine? If this is something they regularly do, then it points to lapses in security training or intentional policy violations. And companies cannot solely rely on employees always following policies. They need detection and enforcement mechanisms.

“The engineer did multiple things wrong,” says Tim Chase, AVP for cybersecurity at human-risk management company Fable Security. “A modern risk program should have ensured he understood the modern [attack] surface of social engineering that attackers are using today.”

Binance did not respond to CSO’s questions on whether it had policies in place that explicitly prohibited the developer’s actions on work computers and whether its employee training covered the fake recruitment social engineering tactic commonly used by North Korean hackers.

An overprivileged AI tool enables lateral movement

Once the attackers had malware running on the engineer’s computer, they were able to use an internal AI tool present on it to pivot to additional machines belonging to two other engineers from the wallet infrastructure team.

Binance did not clarify the purpose of this tool in its report or to CSO, but the fact that it could be used by one compromised user to access different computers suggests its privileges were too broad or that it lacked proper access controls. This is hinted at by the company in its list of remediation steps, which included: “Rebuilt the affected internal AI tool and access controls.”

On one of the additional engineering computers, the attackers found a token with permissions to deploy new containers on the company’s infrastructure. Nine days later they used this token on a different compromised engineering computer to deploy a container with a malicious script that interacted with the wallet signing service and initiated withdrawals.

This series of events raises additional questions about credential hygiene and access controls because Binance’s report doesn’t describe any additional checks. Why was the token long-lived and not ephemeral for a single operation? Did deployment of containers to production involve additional validation or approval steps? Is there any authentication between the deployed container and the signing service, or was being on the same trusted network enough? Binance did not respond to CSO’s questions about any of these points.

“An internal AI tool that can reach engineers’ systems holds the same kind of access as a privileged employee, and most organizations don’t govern it that way,” says Justin Beals, CEO of Strike Graph. “Expect more groups to copy this playbook against anyone holding signing keys, deployment tokens, or production access. Security leaders should treat engineers with production access, and the AI tools those engineers use, as privileged identities. That means restricting what gets installed on work machines, expiring deployment tokens quickly, and logging and reviewing what internal AI tools actually do.”

Shlomi Salem, co-founder of Neo, a startup focused on AI agent security, predicted the AI attack vector days before Binance released its findings. “I wouldn’t be surprised if investigators find a poisoned package, a misused agent, or both at the start of this chain,” he said on Oct. 30 after the breach was announced.

The takeaway for organizations is that internal AI tools are now part of the attack surface and need to be tested accordingly, Bri Frost, director of product management at Cloud Range, tells CSO.

“When an AI tool can reach other systems on an employee’s behalf, an attacker who controls that employee’s machine may inherit everything the tool can do,” she says. “That changes the question security teams need to answer. It’s not only whether the model gives good answers, but what it will do, and for whom, when a request comes from a compromised session.”

When your pet goes missing, it can be totally heartbreaking.

So hearing that they’ve been found is no doubt very welcome news. Even better to see a photo of them looking safe and well.

But while the photo may look exactly like your pet, that doesn’t mean the person who sent it has your pet or even ever saw it.

The BBC reports how criminals are sending owners AI-generated images of their missing pets, demanding money for their return, and sometimes threatening to harm the animals when owners refuse to pay.

The BBC interviewed two targets of this scam who were both contacted after posting a missing pet message on social media. The scammers sent them pictures of their beloved pets and demanded a ransom for their safe return.

Messages like these exploit two powerful emotions in quick succession: relief that a beloved pet has been found, followed by fear that something terrible will happen unless the owner acts immediately.

The scam typically follows this pattern:

• A scammer finds a missing pet appeal, which is typically posted to social media or local sites with an accompanying photo and contact details.
• The scammer contacts the owner and claims to have found the animal. An image fabricated with the help of AI makes the claim appear more convincing.
• They ask for money which may be described as a reward or as payment for emergency treatment.
• They add pressure. They might refuse to meet until payment arrives, or threaten to sell or harm the pet.

Our data backs this report up. Over the last month, people anonymously submitted three distinctive types of pet related scam attempts to Malwarebytes Scam Guard:

• “We found your missing cat” message, with photos: Someone claimed to have found a user’s missing cat and had images of it.
• Found pet callback lure: A voicemail claimed to have found a lost cat and supplied a callback number.
• Humane Society impersonation and payment demand: A caller claimed a missing cat needed emergency surgery, and demanded successive Zelle payments.

How to stay safe

Sadly, while it can be very useful to use social media to retrieve lost pets, it also attracts scammers and other abuse.

You don’t have to stop asking for help online, but you can put some safeguards between an unexpected message and any payment.

• Keep some identifying details private. Leave a distinctive feature out of the public description so you can ask a supposed finder about it later.
• Do not pay in advance to secure a reunion. Be particularly wary of someone who insists that you send money before they will let you see the animal. Arrange any legitimate handover in a safe, public location, and verify that it is your pet before paying a reward.
• Verify veterinary claims independently. If someone says your pet is at an animal hospital, find the hospital’s contact details yourself and call it directly. Do not rely on the number or payment link in the message.
• A second pair of eyes can help you assess a demand without the same emotional pressure. Malwarebytes Scam Guard can help you identify whether a message might be a scam and how to proceed.
• If someone is threatening your pet, remember that when they make threats to your pet, it is very likely they don’t have a clue where it is either, so don’t let them extort you.

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Try it free → 

OpenAI has developed an autonomous AI pipeline that can identify software vulnerabilities, develop working exploits to validate their impact and generate patches for human review. In an October experiment targeting the Linux kernel, the pipeline created exploits for 948 distinct local privilege-escalation (LPE) vulnerabilities at a total API cost of $1.2 million, the company said in a November 4 research report, “A thousand fewer paths to root.”

The system automates vulnerability discovery, dynamic validation, exploit development and patch generation. Human researchers still review the root-cause analysis, proof-of-concept exploits and proposed fixes before findings are reported to maintainers, OpenAI said.

The research builds on OpenAI’s Patch the Planet initiative. Announcing the project in June as part of its Daybreak cybersecurity effort, the company said GPT-5.5 Cyber had identified Linux kernel vulnerabilities and developed 24 LPE exploits. The latest experiment extends that work into a pipeline covering discovery, exploitation and patch generation, the report added.

AI changes the economics of vulnerability research

The October campaign cost $1,213,430 in API credits, averaging $1,279 per distinct LPE exploit created, OpenAI said.

OpenAI compared its research expenditure with historical Linux kernel vulnerability bounty rewards offered by the Pwn2Own and TyphoonPWN hacking competitions, which have paid $20,000 to $70,000 for LPE exploits. Based on those numbers, OpenAI estimated the value of the 948 exploits it created at between $18.9 million and $66.3 million, or 16 to 55 times the pipeline’s cost. The comparison does not represent actual bounty payouts or establish that every finding would qualify for those rewards.

The latest campaign identified five times more unique LPE vulnerabilities than an earlier experiment using GPT-5.6 Sol, despite three months of additional hardening of the Linux kernel between the scans, OpenAI said. It also reported that its agents used at least 10 novel Linux exploitation techniques based on its analysis of a sample of 166 of the exploits.

The pipeline generated candidate patches for the validated vulnerabilities and used iterative testing and variant analysis to improve them, OpenAI said, adding that initial patches sometimes introduced unnecessary code changes or performance trade-offs, or failed to address related vulnerability variants.

Humans still needed in the loop

While the campaign was going on and before OpenAI could report its results to Linux kernel maintainers, 61 of the vulnerabilities it discovered had already been patched upstream, 43 had staging patches, and another 299 were being publicly discussed.

OpenAI said it had submitted hundreds of vulnerability reports and patches to maintainers. The report did not provide a complete remediation breakdown for all 948 findings.

The need to validate AI-generated exploits is another brake on reporting. During an early experiment, OpenAI found that 20 of 200 purportedly successful exploits had obtained root privileges by exploiting a different zero-day vulnerability than the one assigned for analysis. The company subsequently introduced additional checks to ensure its AI performed the assigned work.

Enterprises evaluating autonomous security tools should demand reproducible exploits, accurate root-cause identification and independent validation, said Yash Kadakia, founder and CTO at Security Brigade. “Achieving a result and correctly explaining how you achieved it are two different things,” he said.

Enterprise patching remains a challenge

While OpenAI focused on the number of exploits it had found, that’s not the biggest threat, said Sakshi Grover, research director at IDC. “The risk is less the 948 than the length of the window between discovery and fixes reaching production,” she said.

An upstream patch does not necessarily mean that the fix has reached the Linux distribution kernel running in an enterprise environment, Grover said. She recommended prioritizing multi-tenant hosts, CI/CD runners, shared bastions, container platforms and developer fleets, and seeking backport timelines from Linux distributors.

Thomas Di Giacomo, chief technology and product officer at SUSE, said the company is using similar AI tools to discover and remediate vulnerabilities while working with upstream communities on disclosure and patching.

“AI accelerating code analysis and bug hunting represents a fundamental shift in the threat landscape,” Di Giacomo said.

He said SUSE’s enterprise Linux security approach combines multiple layers of protection with hardened runtimes for customer applications to mitigate privilege-escalation and container-escape risks.

OpenAI added that it plans to extend the research to other critical software projects through Patch the Planet, working with maintainers and security partners on vulnerability discovery, validation and automated patching.

OpenAI is introducing GPT-6 Cyber, a restricted access model that the company calls its most capable and aligned cybersecurity model yet, “built to help security researchers identify and validate exploitable vulnerabilities, assess their impact, and harden potential patches before they’re released.”

OpenAI researchers said they used GPT-6 Cyber to find 81 previously unknown high-severity vulnerabilities in Firefox and develop working exploits for 948 Linux kernel vulnerabilities, including 588 previously unknown vulnerabilities. Mozilla has begun releasing fixes, and Linux findings are being reported with candidate patches for maintainer review.

In a sample of 166 exploits, OpenAI’s researchers identified 10 exploitation techniques that the company says appeared novel, meaning external kernel exploitation experts reportedly had not seen them before, and that could enable someone with local access to obtain root privileges.

Highlighting what it called stronger alignment and safeguards, OpenAI said that GPT-6 Cyber “was trained to stay within authorized scope, respect restrictions, and report results accurately.” In its ExploitGym Honeypot evaluation, the model went beyond the intended scope in only 0.07% of cases, compared with 5.51% for GPT-5.6 Cyber.

More bugs, new exploitation paths

Chris Hughes, VP of security strategy at Noma Security, believes the Firefox findings suggest a deeper reservoir of vulnerabilities in mature software than defenders may have anticipated.

“Mozilla says GPT-6 Cyber surfaced high-severity Firefox bugs after multiple generations of frontier models had already hardened that code,” Hughes told CSO. “If that holds up, the long tail of vulnerabilities in mature software is deeper than most of us assumed, which is the same ‘vulnpocalypse’ pressure many have been discussing this year.”

Beyond that, the 10 novel techniques might point to how AI models could not only unearth more vulnerabilities but also create new exploitation paths, according to Rob T. Lee, the new chief AI officer at industrial cybersecurity company Dragos, which recently partnered with OpenAI.

“That could mean a few things, but that’s interesting to me as it could reveal models can create new exploitation paths,” Lee told CSO. “Adding new TTPs and exploitation paths will make detection more complex.” (Rob T. Lee just joined Dragos, which is run by company founder and CEO Rob M. Lee.)

The promise of security at agent speed

During a press call to discuss GPT-6 Cyber, OpenAI’s representatives argued that models can help validate exploitability, investigate alternative attack paths, harden patches, and assist with patch deployment. They described the goal as security operating at “agent speed.”

OpenAI researcher Eric Wallace said the goal was to “validate the potential exploitability of vulnerabilities at scale” and prioritize the most consequential flaws. He also emphasized testing fixes against alternative routes of exploitation, noting that “one vulnerability might not be the only attack path.”

During the call, OpenAI cybersecurity research lead Clint Gibler touched on advance coordination the company engaged in regarding PHP vulnerabilities with researchers, maintainers, and security vendors. “We wanted to get ahead of that public patch and release, so that as many users and companies could be protected even before the patch was available,” he said. OpenAI worked with Cloudflare “to ensure that they could deploy WAF [web application firewall] rules, which would proactively protect as many websites as possible even before the bug was announced.”

Finding flaws is easier to measure than fixing them

OpenAI, however, provided no measurements showing how much its models accelerate enterprise patch deployment or reduce exposure.

Noma Security’s Hughes argued that defensive applications need more rigorous evaluation, telling CSO, “Detection engineering, incident response, hardening, and prioritization are harder to score because success depends on each organization’s environment, tooling, and risk tolerance.” He believes that sharing defender benchmarks would direct progress toward “the work that closes the remediation gap, not only toward finding more bugs.”

Hughes added: “The OpenAI Patch the Planet dashboard currently shows a less than 25% remediation rate thus far, and given the improved finding capability, this is likely to exacerbate that further, meaning more things found but unfixed and likely to be found by malicious actors with similar capabilities or effective harness engineering on sub-tier models. This highlights even further risk for organizations facing the rise of industrialized discovery via AI.”

Stronger safeguards, restricted access

OpenAI classifies GPT-6 Cyber as “Critical” in cybersecurity under its own Preparedness Framework.

“Going out of scope in 0.07% of cases versus 5.51% for the prior model is a real improvement,” Hughes noted. “At the scale these models operate, though, even a small fraction means actions against systems nobody authorized.”

OpenAI said that GPT-6 Cyber will initially be available through the API and Codex to a select group of approved Daybreak Red customers, the more permissive of two vetted access tiers in Daybreak, OpenAI’s trusted-access cyber program. (Daybreak Blue is the tier OpenAI recommends for most defenders.) OpenAI said it will progressively expand GPT-6 Cyber access to all Daybreak Red customers over the coming weeks, and is making GPT-5.6 Cyber available to that customer set as well.

OpenAI said in briefing materials prior to the press call, “We are working to responsibly expand access to frontier cyber capabilities to many more organizations and members of the security community. To start, we’re broadening access to an alpha of Daybreak Blue for Astra,” which is OpenAI’s GPT-6 general-purpose frontier model.

In this article

• Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) sends viewing data from your smart TV to third parties.
• Vizio and Samsung TVs both appeared to send this data even when researchers opted out of ACR.
• Only four out of eight smart TVs appeared to completely honor ACR opt-out.

If you thought that opting out of surveillance on your smart TV would give you your privacy back, think again.

A study by researchers at Northeastern University found that some smart TVs still seem to send information about what you’re watching to third parties, even after you pressed the opt-out button.

The study, ‘Watching the watchers‘, tested twelve smart TVs from ten manufacturers to find out how well they respected opt-outs from automatic content recognition (ACR). ACR is a TV feature that captures audio and/or video content from smart TVs and uploads it to a third party (typically the TV manufacturer).

The third party converts this content into digital fingerprints to understand what you’re watching, and can then use it to send targeted advertising or allow others to do the same. It’s on most if not all smart TVs, and 82% of US households had a smart TV as of last year.

The test took in the eight operating systems behind roughly 95% of US smart TVs, and ran ten viewing scenarios on each of them. These ranged from viewing antenna TV through to viewing via screen mirroring from another device. The researchers tested viewing the first-party streaming services provided free with the manufacturers’ operating systems, along with sessions using third-party streaming apps. And they tested sessions where the TV was connected to another device via its HDMI port.

The study ran all of its tests both with ACR left on, and with the opt-out setting selected. The whole test involved over 5,000 automated sessions.

Vizio continued to send 100% of what looked like traffic when viewing its first-party streaming services and antenna-based TV services, even after people had opted out, the study said. It also sent the same amount of traffic when idle. However it didn’t send any ACR traffic for third-party streaming data, according to the report.

Samsung did appear to leak some traffic from third-party streaming services after the researchers opted out of its ACR function. They tested 30 runs of Samsung’s built-in streaming service after opting out of ACR, and found that it still showed traffic “consistent with ACR”.

After opt-out, the Samsung TV’s Tizen OS seemed to send ACR-related traffic about Netflix in 7% of runs, YouTube in 10% of runs, and Tubi TV in 20%. It sent ACR 60% of the time from HDMI sessions. Like the Vizio TV, it also sent ACR traffic for all of its first-party streaming sessions.

Late last month, a researcher reverse-engineered a Samsung Smart TV and cast doubt on whether disabling ACR worked on the device.

There was good news, though. Four smart TV operating systems went completely silent after the researchers turned off ACR: LG’s WebOS, Sony’s Google TV OS, Amazon’s FireTV OS, and Supersonic’s VIDAA OS.

Encryption is a research challenge

Vizio agreed to pay $2.2 million in a 2017 FTC settlement over charges that it collected viewing histories on eleven million smart TVs without user consent. At the time, it agreed to allow people to opt out of ACR.

The Vizio TV that the researchers tested sent traffic to Kinesis, an Amazon-run data ingestion service that the manufacturer uses to analyze data from its smart TVs. The researchers noticed no dip in traffic to this domain when they opted out of ACR on a Vizio TV. They said:

“The opt-out setting has no observable effect on traffic sent to this endpoint. However, we cannot inspect the payload due to encryption so we cannot confirm whether this violates the FTC settlement.”

That’s a challenge to this research because most smart TVs encrypt their ACR traffic, including Samsung. So the researchers had to infer that this was ACR traffic based on signals such as where it was being sent, along with timing, volume, and protocol details.

One exception was Supersonic’s VIDAA OS, which sent ACR data to servers unencrypted. The servers responded unencrypted with a genre for what they recognized. Anyone watching the network could see it all, they warned. And because the servers didn’t require a login at the time of the test, over 57 million ACR detection results from other people’s TVs were accessible.

Vizio’s first-party streaming service WatchFree+ also dropped unencrypted titles of any show or channel being watched into online communications with the free TV service provider. There’s no way to turn that off, the researchers warned.

Walmart acquired Vizio for $2.3 billion in 2024, partly to help “advertisers to meaningfully connect with customers at scale and boost product discovery”.

The retailer also runs Walmart Connect, a retail media business that uses its customers’ data to help other businesses target them with ads.

Walmart was particularly interested in Vizio’s advertising business it, said at the time:

“Pairing it with Walmart Connect will be impactful and allow us to invest in our business even further on behalf of our customers.”

What smart TV owners can do

What can you do to protect yourself from a smart TV that might be sending your viewing data elsewhere? The researchers have some suggestions:

• WebOS (LG), Fire TV OS, Google TV on Sony, and VIDAA OS on Supersonic all appeared to honor ACR opt-out, so selecting it on these TVs should be safe.
• Disconnect the TV from the internet and use an external streaming device. That way the TV can’t send back data, even if it picks it up from the HDMI connection.
• Use a blocklist. This takes a little more technical knowledge. If you run an internet router that can accept blocklists, then you can add a list of known ACR endpoints that will stop your TV’s traffic reaching them. The researchers provide one here.

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Several staffers at the White House are using computers or mobile devices equipped with residential proxy services that render their internet address available for others to rent, security experts warned today. One of the proxy services is a Russian company whose founder’s web hosting business was ground zero for cyberattacks against election systems in Arizona and Illinois in 2016.

The security firm Layer3 Intel said it detected multiple residential proxy nodes beaconing out from the internet address network reserved for the Executive Office of the President (AS2650). Layer3 said the proxy activity was relatively persistent between October 5 to November 3, and that a review of the proxies available from AS2650 showed they exited from the White House network 236 times during that period.

The proxy tracking company Synthient said on Twitter/X that the activity it saw coming from AS2650 was related to multiple Windows 11 installations of a service called Infatica, a proxy program that is often integrated into “free” mobile and desktop applications. Infatica’s founder Vladimir Fomenko is a Russian man whose hosting firm King Servers was home to six of the eight internet addresses used by Russia’s state security services to compromise databases for election systems in Arizona and Illinois in 2016.

Synthient’s depiction of the outgoing proxy traffic from the dedicated White House network (AS2650). Click to enlarge.

There are dozens of residential proxy providers with varying degrees of legitimacy, many of them based in China or Russia. But at a minimum, they all make it simple for customers to rent someone else’s internet address as a way to anonymize their web traffic or spoof their true location. From a website’s perspective, the traffic from a proxy network user appears to originate from the rented IP address, not from the proxy service customer.

Layer3 Intel said the proxy exit nodes at the White House came from six internet addresses, on 26 of the 30 days, and that most of the activity happens in the evening, between 5 p.m. and midnight.

Incredibly, Infatica was not the only proxy service that reportedly has been reselling access to White House internet addresses: Layer3 Intel said it found 28 separate residential proxy services were able to exit through this network.

“This is public access,” the Layer3 Intel team wrote. “Anybody can obtain it by signing up to a public residential proxy service, paying a few dollars and sending requests through it. We did not selectively target this network or try to make our probes exit from it. We caught this by chance, simply by requesting global rotating access through these services.”

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

As detailed in several stories here over the past year, residential proxy services are a major source of unwanted and often malicious traffic, including account takeover and other cybercrime activity, advertising fraud, and mass content scraping for AI projects.

They can also introduce serious security risks. In late 2025, it was discovered that cybercriminals were mass exploiting a widespread vulnerability in these services that allowed them to probe each proxy endpoint’s local network for vulnerable systems to infect with malware. In January 2026, dozens of proxy services were forced to patch their networks after Synthient Founder Ben Brundage showed how cybercriminals were abusing a vulnerability in these residential proxy services to seize control over devices inside the local networks of unsuspecting users.

“Some of these resellers sell bandwidth for as low as 60 cents a Gigabyte, that means for less than a dollar you can gain access into some of the most confidential and trusted networks,” Brundage told KrebsOnSecurity. “The reseller ecosystem further enables this with any criminal able to buy access while skipping KYC [Know Your Customer] processes.”

All too often, these proxy services are beaconing out from employee devices brought into the workplace. App developers can embed software development kits (SDKs) provided by the residential proxy networks to monetize their software, allowing them to receive a small amount of money on each installation.

As risky as residential proxies can be for unsuspecting end users, they are all too commonly found on government and corporate networks. In a webinar in January 2026, the proxy tracking service Spur found residential proxies in nearly 300 government owned and operated networks, 318 utility companies, 166 healthcare companies or hospitals, and 141 companies in banking and finance. In a blog post earlier this year, the security firm Infoblox said it discovered that fully 65% of its customer base was querying one or more residential proxy related domains.

In this article

• A fake $750 Apple Cash offer funnels users toward app and game promotions
• Its device checks, countdown, and “spots left” claims aren’t real
• Users get no reward and may share information or spend money in games

A page we found promises a $750 Apple Cash reward if you complete a quick “device verification.” There is no reward, and the page does not verify your device. Instead, it sends you to app offers through affiliate tracking links.

The page is not affiliated with Apple. If you’ve landed on a page like this, close it.

Why Apple makes such good bait

Apple is one of the world’s most recognized brands, and scammers use that familiarity to make fake offers seem credible. Apple’s own scam guidance lists fake promotions offering free products and prizes among common tricks.

Current Apple news gives scammers useful cover. The new iPhone Duo is in the headlines, and we recently found a fake preorder page whose code tried to exploit older iPhones as soon as the page opened. With the iPhone Duo starting at $1,999, a promise of $750 in Apple money may catch people’s attention.

The word “verify” may also sound timely. Starting November 9, Green Dot Bank, which issues Apple Cash, will require some users to verify their identity before they can reload their balance. A fake page asking people to “verify your device” to get Apple Cash may seem more plausible in that context.

Apple Cash isn’t an Apple Gift Card

The page blurs two different things:

• Apple Cash is money you send, receive and spend through Apple Wallet.
• An Apple Gift Card adds money to your Apple Account balance for Apple purchases.

Apple warns that its gift cards can only be used for Apple purchases, and that someone asking you to pay them with one is probably a scammer. But neither Apple Cash nor an Apple Gift Card comes from a website that “unlocks” it after you install an app.

The fake site leans hard on Apple’s name. It calls the app it promotes an “Official Apple Partner” that is “Verified by Apple Cash,” and its footer claims “Copyright © 2026 Apple Inc.” None of that is true.

A “verification” that verifies nothing

We looked at the code behind the page’s three steps: Eligibility Check, Verify Device and Claim Reward.

The eligibility check is a timer. The four items that tick green, including “Location: United States,” are just labels that light up on a schedule. The page never checks where you are or what device you use. Everyone passes in under four seconds.

The device verification is an app install. The page tell users to download an app called Reco Social, then tells them to create an account, and install and play a game. We found no evidence that Reco Social or its developer created or operated the fake reward page.

When you tap Download & Open App, the page opens a link in a new tab. Five seconds later, it starts showing “Verifying device…”. Nothing is being verified. The page has no way of knowing whether you installed anything, created an account or played a game.

The reward is the same link again. Ten minutes after you tap the button, the page moves on by itself and announces “Device Verified Successfully,” whether or not you installed anything. The Claim Your $750 button doesn’t add anything to your wallet. It opens the same link as the download button.

Fake urgency

The page is built to stop you from thinking too long:

• “Only 47 spots left today” always starts at 47. It drops by one every 30 seconds and stops at 3, so it never runs out.
• The “claimed $750” pop-ups are generated at random from a list of 15 first names and 15 US states, with a random “minutes ago.” Every visitor sees a new one every 8 to 15 seconds.
• The 10-minute “Session Expires” countdown doesn’t end anything when it hits zero.

Who gets paid?

The download button doesn’t go directly to the App Store. It first goes through a tracking link on taprkr[.]com. These links can be used in affiliate marketing to credit clicks and installs to whoever sent the traffic.

The link carries a label, “recosocial-cpr.” CPR can stand for “cost per registration,” a deal where a promoter earns money when someone signs up. That label alone doesn’t confirm how this offer pays.

The destination varied in our tests. The link led to an offer labeled “playful-rewards-revshare” on iPhone and an ad network on PC. A revshare (revenue share) deal usually pays the promoter a cut of what users later spend, such as on in-app purchases.

The tracking labels suggest that promoters may earn money from registrations or spending in promoted apps, but they don’t confirm how this offer pays. Users don’t receive the promised $750.

We have no evidence that Reco Social or any app at the end of these links is behind the fake Apple page. Deceptive affiliate promoters can send traffic to legitimate apps because they may earn money for installs or signups regardless of how users were persuaded.

The page also loads a TikTok tracking pixel, which advertisers use to measure campaigns. This could mean the operators are measuring traffic from TikTok, but it doesn’t show where the link was shared.

What’s the harm if it’s “just” an app install?

Compared to a page that steals passwords or card numbers, this one can look harmless. But you still pay a price:

• You give away personal data. Creating an account means handing over your email address, phone number or social login to a service you only signed up for because of a lie.
• You may be encouraged to spend. Many mobile games make their money from in-app purchases, and with a revenue-share deal, someone profits when you spend.
• You may be set up for the next scam. Fake reward offers often come in chains. The next one may ask for your Apple Account details, card number, or a “small processing fee.”
• You lose time chasing a reward that was never coming.

How to stay safe

Keep these points in mind if you come across an Apple Cash or other Apple-related offer online:

• Don’t expect an app install to pay you in Apple Cash. Be suspicious of any “Apple” offer that asks you to download a third-party app, create an account or play a game to receive Apple Cash or an Apple Gift Card.
• Verify Apple Cash only in Settings. The real identity check is in Settings > Wallet & Apple Pay > Apple Cash. Treat any website or message that asks you to “verify” Apple Cash somewhere else as suspicious.
• Be extra careful around launches and holidays. iPhone Duo deals, giveaways and preorder offers will keep circulating. Go to apple.com or the Apple Store app yourself instead of following links.
• Check the address bar. Apple’s website is apple.com. A page on a domain like applecashgiftcard[.]com is not Apple, however much it looks like it.
• Treat countdowns and “spots left” as red flags. Fake urgency is there to rush you past the moment you’d ask, “Why would anyone give me $750 for this?”
• Already installed an app from a page like this? You didn’t earn a reward, so you can delete the app. Delete any account you created through it, cancel any subscriptions in your App Store settings, and change that password on any other accounts where you reused it.
• Never pay with gift cards, and never pay to receive a prize. As the FTC puts it, “No real business or government agency will ever tell you to buy a gift card to pay them.” If a “reward” asks for a fee, your card details or gift card codes, it’s a scam.
• Report it. Apple asks people to forward suspicious Apple-themed messages to [email protected]. You can also report the ad or post to the platform where you saw it and, in the US, report fraud at ReportFraud.ftc.gov.

How Malwarebytes helps

Malwarebytes can help block known scam pages. Use Browser Guard with a supported browser, or Web Protection in Malwarebytes for iOS when browsing with Safari.

If you’re not sure whether a link, text or offer is real, you can ask Malwarebytes Scam Guard before you click.

“One of the best cybersecurity suites on the planet.” 

According to CNET. Read their review →

Password manager mSecure has warned current and former customers to protect the confidential information stored in its app after detecting “suspicious activity.”

But its advice about what users should do comes without an explanation of what happened or whose information might be at risk.

The warning leaves users to decide whether to replace credentials—and whether it’s safe to store replacements in mSecure.

While those are perfectly reasonable questions, mSecure’s warning does not answer them.

In an email published by The Hacker News and sent to customers on November 3, mSecure’s developer, mSeven Software, said:

“mSeven Software (‘mSeven’) recently learned of suspicious activity associated with the mSecure password management application. In response, mSeven quickly launched an investigation, took steps to mitigate the issue, and engaged external cybersecurity experts to assist.”

The notice recommends that customers “immediately take steps to protect all confidential information” stored in mSecure. Those steps:

“may include changing passwords, resetting or re-enrolling two-factor authentication methods, or removing existing passkeys.”

But the notice does not identify the suspicious activity, when it occurred, which systems were involved, or whether anyone accessed customers’ stored information. The Register, which also reviewed the email, noted that the company had not explained whether customers’ secrets were exposed.

How to be safe

Because the scope of the incident is unknown, we recommend prioritizing your most important accounts while mSeven investigates.

Changing your mSecure password alone may not be enough if someone has already accessed your account. mSecure’s documentation explicitly warns that someone may already have made a backup of its contents. That guidance does not establish what happened in this incident.

Users should not have to wait for a completed forensic investigation before receiving useful guidance. They need to know who should act, which credentials need attention, and whether the tool they would normally use to manage those changes remains safe to use.

Until mSeven provides those answers, our advice is to prioritize your most important accounts, replace the relevant credentials through official services, and avoid destructive account resets:

• Change passwords through each service’s official website or app, beginning with your primary email, financial accounts, work accounts, and accounts used to recover access to other services. Use a new, different, strong password for each.
• Review two-factor authentication stored in the vault. If that could be compromised by unauthorized access, consider re-enrolling that account’s authenticator through the service’s security settings.
• For passkeys stored in mSecure, use each website or app’s account-security settings to remove the old registration and create a replacement with a different provider as a precaution. But make sure another working sign-in method is available first.
• Think carefully about where replacement credentials go. The notice does not establish whether saving new credentials in mSecure is safe. For users rotating important accounts now, using a different password manager temporarily is a reasonable precaution.

We’ll keep you posted if we learn more about this incident, so stay tuned.

Update November 6, 2026

According to follow-up messages attributed to mSecure support and reproduced by multiple customers on the company’s forum, the incident affects only users who synchronized with mSecure Cloud. We have not located a directly published company statement confirming that scope.

Let’s face it, an incognito window can only do so much. 
 
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Google said today it worked with industry partners to dismantle a botnet made up of more than 1.3 million Android TV set-top boxes that ship with malicious software which secretly rents the user’s Internet connection out to strangers and conducts advertising fraud. Experts involved in the takedown say the action is likely to sever the botnet’s access to more than 10 million additional compromised systems, including other Internet of Things (IoT) products such as Android-based healthcare devices and karaoke machines.

A report from the Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) said Google has severed ties with Videostrong Technology Co., a TV box manufacturer in China that GTIG and other industry experts concluded was responsible for including malware that enrolled more than 1.3 million set-top boxes in a botnet dubbed “XCPE” (named after one of the malware’s core code components).

The global distribution of XCPE botnet infections. Image: Google Threat Intelligence Group.

The report said the XCPE botnet loaded the user’s device with software that makes their Internet address available for resale by multiple “residential proxy” services, which allow customers to rent Internet addresses as a way to anonymize their web traffic or spoof their true location. As detailed in several stories here over the past year, residential proxy services are a major source of unwanted and often malicious traffic, including account takeover activity, advertising fraud, and mass content scraping for AI projects.

“Videostrong monetized the backdoor by selling access to criminal affiliates and loading those affiliates’ malware modules onto infected devices,” the GTIG post reads, noting that Google took legal action to take down the domains and servers Videostrong used to control the botnet and install additional malware. “A device manufacturer intentionally infecting their users with malware is an unacceptable breach of trust, and represents a serious risk to those users. Without users’ knowledge or consent, infected devices were offered as a distribution mechanism for a wide array of criminal actors.”

The report notes that while TV boxes made up the the majority of the botnet, the same XCPE malware was found in other Android-based IoT products, including telehealth devices, karaoke machines, and even digital signage systems.

Google said it requires all Android device makers to pass compatibility and security tests to ensure their products don’t harm users, but that Videostrong nevertheless found a way to load their malicious software immediately after a user boots up one of these devices for the first time (Google says it has since addressed that weakness).

The GTIG report calls out a number of residential proxy providers whose software development kits were routinely downloaded by devices infected by the XCPE botnet. Those include AppSalt, also known as Honeygain, which was developed by the Vilnius, Lithuania-based Oxylabs. In October 2026, Oxylabs and Honeygain were reorganized as independent platforms under an umbrella entity called Source, which received $130 million in funding from private equity firm Warburg Pincus that reportedly valued the business at $3.6 billion.

Another provider linked to the botnet was NetNut, a once sprawling residential proxy company operated by the publicly-traded Israeli company Alarum Technologies. In July 2026, the FBI worked with industry partners to seize hundreds of domains associated with NetNut, saying the company was responsible for operating a separate botnet called Popa that enslaved TV boxes as residential proxies. Other proxy providers named in the GTIG report include EarnFM, Traffmonetizer, Jaguar, LINKFOG, BMW/IPWeb and GaGaNode.

Google’s announcement credits a number of industry partners, including Synthient, a startup that tracks proxy providers. In January 2026, Synthient published research into the rapid spread of the Kimwolf botnet, which at the time was hammering networks worldwide with record-smashing DDoS attacks. Synthient documented how Kimwolf infected millions of Android set-top boxes virtually overnight, using a widespread vulnerability in these residential proxy services to compromise other Android-based devices inside the local networks of unsuspecting TV box users.

Synthient’s research caused dozens of residential proxy providers to patch their networks, which helped to fragment the Kimwolf botnet into much smaller pieces that made its incessant and disruptive DDoS attacks far easier for network operators to manage. It also attracted the attention of the Motion Picture Association (MPA), a trade group representing the major Hollywood studios, which partnered with Synthient to purchase and tear apart a number of popular Android TV set-top boxes — including some that were being infected by Kimwolf and other IoT botnets.

In a report published today, Synthient examined a popular, pre-infected TV box sold under the brand MECOOL by a publicly traded company in China called Skyworth Technology, concluding that MECOOL also bundled the malware from Videostrong Technology Co. and likewise installed AppSalt/Honeygain and other proxy components.

The MECOOL storefront and marketing. Image: Synthient.com.

Synthient founder Ben Brundage told KrebsOnSecurity that Videostrong’s malware also distributed software for the proxy service Grass. In our November 2025 story, “Is Your Android TV Streaming Box Part of a Botnet?” we quoted a researcher from Censys who found the popular Superbox TV streaming device bundled Grass’s residential proxy software. We also quoted the Grass founder, who denied any affiliation with the TV box maker.

That November 2025 story noted that Superbox and similar Android TV set-top boxes gain new customers primarily by engaging influencers on Tiktok and other social networks who praise the product’s ability to offer hundreds of (pirated) pay TV streaming services for a one-time fee.

Likewise, Synthient’s report observes that the MECOOL set-top boxes exploded in popularity after the product was mentioned in 2023 by the Youtube channel Linus Tech Tips, which has an audience of nearly 17 million subscribers [Linus Tech Tips said in a statement shared with Synthient that it has since updated the video to explicitly frame the product as a scam and have removed all associated affiliate links].

The popular Youtube channel Linus Tech Tips discussing MECOOL TV streaming boxes.

The GTIG report estimates the XCPE botnet takedown should sever access to at least 10 million additional compromised devices, noting that the various proxy and ad fraud affiliates of Videostrong “each have diversified distribution channels for their modules beyond XCPE.”

Synthient’s Brundage echoed that conclusion, calling the 1.3 million number “highly conservative.”

“The scale of affected devices is likely way higher,” he said. “This is probably the largest operation against backdoored TV boxes that we’ve seen.”

Update, Nov. 5, 11:07 a.m. ET: In a statement shared post-publication, Oxylabs said that while its system is built so that a device can’t be used as a proxy exit node unless they receive a signal that it has consented, the developer faked these signals.

“We have been conducting regular audits of the applications provided by our partners,” the statement reads. “However, following this incident, we will improve the application and application’s build fingerprinting logic to better detect cases where the SDK is running on an unapproved build of an originally authorized application.”

The statement said Oxylabs has no record of any company called Videostrong Technology Co., but it did find between is suppliers the domain “com.abc[.]nexus,” mentioned in the GTIG report as an external malware loader.

“As soon as we saw that, we suspended the relationship and sent them a formal legal inquiry,” the statement reads. “This supplier accounts for less than 1% of our IP address pool. We had a signed contract with them, they assured our QA team that users had given consent, and we saw the consent flow ourselves.”

Further reading:
Plume Security Labs white paper on the XCPE botnet (PDF)
Black Lotus Labs writeup on LinkedIn
TrendAI’s analysis
Synthient’s list of affected devices, broken down by model number

Expect to see quite a few websites serving error pages today: Nearly 70 percent of websites need to update their core software to fix a pair of vulnerabilities that allow an attacker to seize full control over affected servers. Experts say there are working exploits for the flaws, and that these critical bugs are already being exploited in the wild.

Image: Shutterstock.com, Sashkin.

The flaws at issue are present in PHP, the programming language that powers sites running on a large number of web publishing systems, including Drupal, Magento, Joomla and WordPress. Earlier today, PHP released an emergency security update to fix two critical bugs that can allow an attacker to execute code of their choosing on a vulnerable server.

Reuters reports that government websites in Europe and elsewhere went offline today after the PHP vulnerabilities were disclosed. Cloudflare said it has already detected some exploitation of the flaw, and that at 3:02 am (UTC) it implemented web application firewall rules to protect websites from attack traffic seeking to exploit the bugs, which could cause a denial of service condition, remote code execution, and data exposure.

OpenAI, which was involved in the vulnerability research and outreach, said “given the severity of these flaws and PHP’s widespread use, we consider this one of the most impactful security issues in recent memory.”

Censys, a company that tracks the technology used by Internet hosts, said a recent scan identified approximately 2.58 million Internet facing hosts and 54.9 million web properties running PHP.

Security experts at Wiz said every PHP version released in the last decade is affected by at least one of these vulnerabilities [full disclosure: Wiz is an advertiser on this blog].

“These findings rank among the most severe vulnerabilities discovered in PHP, and arguably in software history,” reads a blog post published today by a team of researchers at Wiz, which was one of several organizations credited with discovering the vulnerabilities. “The underlying flaws had been present for decades, but demonstrating their exploitability required an exceptionally complex chain of steps, at the edge of what human researchers could practically achieve. Frontier AI models substantially reduced that barrier, turning a longstanding flaw into an exploit.”

The Wiz researchers say it is likely the PHP vulnerabilities will be mass-exploited to install web-based backdoors or “web shells,” which give attackers a web-based panel that allows them to remotely control infected sites. Wiz said that prior to the PHP bugs being publicly disclosed, the company worked with the PHP team, Calif and OpenAI to measure the size of the problem and coordinate patch verification and disclosure.

The PHP zero-day vulnerabilities are being tracked by their CVE numbers, CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, and they affect all web servers running PHP 5.4 or later. The bugs are fixed in PHP 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36, and 8.2.35.

According to Wiz, PHP is so deeply embedded in many web applications that we are likely to see organizations struggling to patch these vulnerabilities for some time to come, comparing this PHP vulnerability pair with the Log4Shell weakness that emerged in 2021 — a widespread, severe-as-it-gets security flaw in Log4j, a popular Java logging framework.

“A vulnerability in core PHP reaches far beyond a single application,” the Wiz researchers wrote. “PHP runs across clouds, hosting providers, content-delivery networks and millions of independently managed servers. Reducing exposure before the technical details became public required coordinated work across that entire ecosystem.”

The SANS Internet Storm Center is keeping an eye on major software platforms that are shipping updates to deal with these PHP flaws. For example, Ubuntu just released updated PHP packages. For a technical deep-dive on these vulnerabilities that tells the timeline of the discovery of these bugs in a comic book style, check out this post from Calif, another technology company credited with finding the PHP flaws.

A snapshot of php2shell.censys.com, the website Censys set up to track the PHP vulnerabilities.

This is a fast-moving story. Updates will be noted here with timestamps.

Update, 2:30 pm ET: Add figures from Censys and a link to Calif’s writeup.

U.S. federal investigators pursuing the ShinyHunters hacking group that recently stole highly sensitive data from the FBI have identified executives at two different ransomware negotiation firms who maintained unusually close relations with the extortion group, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. Sources close to the investigation say one of the executives in the United States even helped ShinyHunters operate a website that pressured victims into paying a ransom.

Hackers aligned with ShinyHunters have claimed credit for dozens of major data breaches since 2019, when the group was primarily operated by cybercriminals living in France. As those original members were arrested or jailed one by one, control over the ShinyHunters brand eventually passed to “Rey,” identified last year as a teenage hacker from Amman, Jordan. According to the FBI, ShinyHunters has extorted more than $70 million from victims so far this year.

In late September, ShinyHunters hacked the FBI recruitment website fbijobs.gov and taunted the agency by threatening to publish the stolen files, which reportedly included medical and psychological records, Social Security numbers and home addresses, and information about each employee’s unit and specialization.

The FBI jobs site hack has prompted the agency to move with uncommon speed to arrest, detain and question people who had any communications with Rey or other ShinyHunters suspects. Reuters reported on October 3 that Rey had been detained by Jordanian authorities and was cooperating with the FBI.

Rey was able to assume control over the hacking group because one of its alleged senior members had just been nabbed. On the evening of September 15, 2026, authorities in the Netherlands arrested convicted hacker and ShinyHunters suspect Pepijn van der Stap. Dutch police reportedly used flash-bang grenades in an effort to stun and apprehend Van der Stap as he was logged in to various online accounts.

According to a source close to the investigation, the authorities arrested Van der Stap while he was using his Signal instant messaging account, which allowed them to read recent communications with frequent contacts — including ransomware negotiators based in Canada and the United States.

Multiple sources with knowledge of the matter told KrebsOnSecurity that Van der Stap’s messages were the key to unraveling a murder-for-hire plot that emerged immediately following his arrest. The Dutch news outlet RTL reported last month the two murders were allegedly to be committed abroad, and that there are indications Van der Stap gave the order for the attacks (there is no indication those orders were ever carried out).

On October 9, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that the FBI arrested a 54-year-old Canadian cybersecurity executive named Edward Dubrovsky in connection with the ShinyHunters investigation. Dubrovsky, who recently published a book on handling cyber extortion that recommended always engaging with the hackers, was charged with threatening to disclose stolen or hacked data and interfering with interstate commerce through extortion, according to court records. Politico reports prosecutors have asked that Dubrovsky remain in custody pending trial, and that records related to his case remain under seal.

A source close to the investigation told KrebsOnSecurity that Van der Stap’s Signal messages showed he had frequent conversations with Mr. Dubrovsky and with at least one executive at a large U.S.-based consulting firm, and that these executives often knew the details about new ShinyHunters victims before the victims themselves had even learned of the breach.

That source shared another potentially explosive finding by federal investigators: the Dutch hacker’s chats showed Mr. Dubrovsky knew ShinyHunters had stolen highly sensitive data from FBI servers, and that he never informed the bureau of the data breach prior to ShinyHunters threatening on Twitter/X to publish the agency’s deeply personal personnel files.

SHINYWIRE

KrebsOnSecurity has learned from two sources close to the ShinyHunters probe that FBI investigators believe at least one executive at a U.S.-based consulting firm played an active role in operating the now-defunct ShinyHunters victim extortion website “shinywire[.]com.” KrebsOnSecurity is not naming the U.S. company or the suspected executive(s) for now because they have not yet been charged with a crime, but it is a prestigious firm with more than 1,000 associates.

A section of the homepage for the now-defunct Shinywire website.

The Shinywire website was active from approximately May 3, 2026 until October 16 and had entries for nearly 100 organizations hacked by ShinyHunters. Each entry urged victims to engage with the cybercrime group and discuss terms for payment. The pages also included samples of stolen files and promised those files would be published online if the victim ignored their demands.

The following screenshot shows a cached portion of the Shinywire extortion page for Intuitive Surgical, an American medical technology company that was breached in March 2026 after an employee fell for a targeted phishing email.

The Shinywire website, as indexed by urlscan.io. This listing is an extortion demand targeting Intuitive Surgical, an American medical technology company breached in March 2026 by a targeted phishing email attack that compromised an employee’s credentials.

Victim organizations that refused to engage or negotiate after seven days would find all of their stolen data published on the ShinyHunters victim shaming blog (a website that is only reachable via the anonymity network Tor).

In a story published October 15, The Globe and Mail wrote that a few months before Edward Dubrovsky was arrested by the FBI, the Canadian cybersecurity executive alleged in court documents he had become collateral damage in a campaign by a former business partner to “destroy” another industry executive.

The story noted that Dubrovsky filed the lawsuit in Ontario this year against Daniel Tobok, the former chief executive of Cypfer, a cybersecurity firm founded in Toronto with offices in the U.S., Britain, the Netherlands, the United Arab Emirates, and Mexico. The two first became business partners in 2017 and later developed Cypfer together, where Mr. Dubrovsky was a managing partner and chief operating officer. But by 2024, the two had a falling out, with Dubrovsky accusing Tobok of gradually excluding him from business matters and making “increasingly capricious business decisions.”

Mr. Tobok reportedly denied the allegations and filed a counterclaim, accusing Mr. Dubrovsky of accessing confidential information and unfairly competing with Cypfer through work at another firm called CyberSteward Inc. He also said Mr. Dubrovsky has misrepresented himself as a Cypfer founder, and is not a shareholder.

GHOSTBYTE

According to interviews with several former colleagues of Mr. Tobok, as far back as eight years ago he was known to ransomware purveyors by a particular nickname: Ghostbyte. In 2018, a Canadian company was hacked by Dharma, a prolific Russian-language ransomware affiliate program that first surfaced in 2016. The victim company told the Dharma ransomware representative they were leaning toward paying because some of the files were unrecoverable after being locked, but that they needed a better guarantee that Dharma would keep their word if paid.

A redacted copy of the Dharma rep’s reply is pictured below, and it shows the ransomware group urged the victim to contact a person at a Canadian IT firm that helps companies seeking such guarantees. The Dharma rep recommended the victim contact the email address [email protected].

“If you want guarantees, you can write to the IT company,” the Dharma reply advised. “Take the phone and negotiate with them. This IT company often solves such problems in Canada. You can contact them and sign a contract for services. You’ll still have to pay.”

An email reply from the Dharma ransomware group to a victim, recommending they contact an email address that is connected to Mr. Tobok.

It’s unclear if Mr. Tobok ever used that Ghostbyte address offered by the Dharma representative, and he has not responded to multiple requests for comment. However, the breach tracking service Constella Intelligence finds an email address Mr. Tobok has frequently used — [email protected] — is associated with two online accounts where the chosen username was “ghostbyte,” including a Snapchat account.

Incidentally, Constella also finds the Dharma rep’s email address [email protected] is associated with a cryptocurrency address that processed 38 transactions totaling 43 bitcoin, ~$3.5 million at today’s value (the most recent transaction for this wallet is dated February 2019).

In a statement shared on October 14, Cypfer said the company’s business does not include making or facilitating ransomware payments, and that Cypfer learned of Dubrovsky’s arrest when the news first broke in the media.

“We had no prior knowledge of Mr. Dubrovsky’s arrest,” a spokesperson told KrebsOnSecurity via email. “CYPFER has not received any outreach from law enforcement and, to our knowledge, is not the target of any law enforcement investigation.”

The statement said CyberSteward and Cypfer are separate companies with no officers, directors or employees in common, and that Cypfer was recently acquired by the Apros Group, a holding company led by Jason Hogg, a former FBI special agent and former CEO of Aon Cyber Solutions Group. In 2020, Aon aquired Cytelligence, a security consulting firm where Mr. Tobok was founder and CEO and Mr. Dubrovsky was a managing partner.

CONFLICTING INTERESTS

It is not illegal in the United States to pay hackers for an encryption key to unlock servers infected with ransomware, or in exchange for a promise to delete any stolen files and refrain from publishing them online. While victim organizations can land in legal hot water if they pay a ransom to a group that is sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department, ShinyHunters is not among the ransomware groups currently sanctioned by the United States or by any other government.

Experts say ransomware victims are typically directed by their insurance provider to work with a specific incident response firm. But not all cyber forensics and breach response companies will agree to facilitate payments to ransomware groups on behalf of their clients. As a result, once victim firms make a decision to pay, the firms that eschew rewarding extortionists are invariably replaced by companies that have no such qualms.

In December 2024, ShinyHunters began extorting the education technology company PowerSchool, stealing private information on 62 million students and 9.5 million teachers in the U.S. and Canada. PowerSchool reportedly paid a $2.85 million ransom demand, and a “frequently asked questions” statement (PDF) about the breach says PowerSchool was assisted in that effort by CyberSteward (ShinyHunters affiliate Matthew Lane, 20, of Sterling, Mass., was sentenced in November 2025 to four years in prison for his admitted role in the PowerSchool hack).

But that ransom payment did not stop future extortion attempts using the same stolen data. By May 2025, individual school districts were reportedly receiving separate ransom demands using samples of the same stolen files. While nobody has alleged ShinyHunters was behind the second wave of extortion against PowerSchool users, the incident drives home the reality that there is no technical way to verify the threat actors have deleted the stolen data as promised, or prevent others from abusing the same records.

A number of leading cyber incident response firms, including Coveware and Unit 221B, have consistently warned victims against paying ShinyHunters, noting that “destroyed” victim data is often kept, resold or used to extort the company’s clients directly later on.

The FBI echoed those sentiments in an alert on May 15, 2026 advising victims against paying the ShinyHunters group. Meanwhile, ShinyHunters members have been harassing and threatening employees at Coveware and Unit 221B for offering this advice.

The following screenshots show just how annoyed the ShinyHunters leaders were with Coveware’s relentless advice against paying the group. The first image is from a conversation on May 6, 2026 that took place between the group’s main account on Telegram and a co-conspirator. In that chat, snippets of which were shared with KrebsOnSecurity by a trusted source, ShinyHunters complained that Coveware was harming the group’s payment rates.

The operator of the ShinyHunters account on Telegram speaking privately with a co-conspirator and complaining that Coveware was harming their business.

“Go on my website, majority of those companies would’ve paid if it weren’t for Coveware giving them misinformation,” the ShinyHunters account wrote. “Someone (100% Coveware) is going out of their way to make sure i am not paid.”

In another conversation on April 11, 2026, the ShinyHunters Telegram account privately said they were trying to “eliminate the problem,” which they said was Coveware. Coveware declined to comment for this story.

“I’m sure the company will pay but in this specific case I am aware of Coveware and their involvement, and I’ve probably been not getting a lot of other negotiations mostly likely because Coveware keeps getting involved,” the ShinyHunters account bemoaned.

The operator of the ShinyHunters account on Telegram telling a co-conspirator they were “trying to eliminate the problem,” which they identified as Coveware advising victims not to pay the cybercrime group.

Mark Camillo is chief executive at CyberAcuView, an industry group founded in 2021 by a consortium of major cyber insurance carriers. Camillo said some firms charge a flat retainer fee, while those that specialize in helping companies negotiate a ransom payment tend to charge a percentage of the total ransom amount paid.

That latter dynamic, he said, is an inherent conflict of interest, as the negotiator has every incentive to make things more favorable to the attackers because they are financially incentivized to negotiate and pay out, and to not negotiate down on the price.

“It has come to the industry’s attention that many of the ransomware payers charge a percentage of the final payment which may or may not be disclosed,” Camillo said. “This makes no sense if they are also the negotiator. There needs to be more transparency in the process as no one in the ecosystem should be profiting purely on the size of the ransomware transaction or payment itself.”

Camillo said the firms doing this work would argue the fees are needed because there may be unexpectedly higher costs to secure larger quantities of cryptocurrency or more risk carrying the float, and because cryptocurrency exchanges may charge higher fees for high risk transactions.

“There definitely needs to be more visibility around the transaction and clarity on the increasing value of the crypto and the exchange’s percent in the transaction to get to the bottom of this and remove any misaligned incentives,” he said.

In recent months, the U.S. Department of Justice has prosecuted a number of ransomware negotiators alleged to have conspired with cybercriminals to defraud their clients. On October 7, the DOJ charged MonsterCloud CEO Zohar Pinhasi, 50, with wire fraud and conspiracy for allegedly charging customers to remediate ransomware attacks without paying the hackers. According to charging documents, Pinhasi secretly went behind his customers’ backs and paid hackers anyway, paying ransomware groups $8 million while charging customers $19 million.

In July, Angelo Martino, a 41-year-old ransomware negotiator from Land O’Lakes, Florida, was sentenced to 70 months in prison for conspiring with the Blackcat/ALPHV ransomware group to extort multiple victims. According to the DOJ, Martino was paid by BlackCat attackers to provide confidential information about the negotiating position and strategy of his employer’s clients and enable the ransomware actors to maximize the ransoms paid by the victims.

The United Kingdom has issued economic sanctions against Cryptomus, a chameleonic cryptocurrency platform that experts say serves as a major conduit for payments related to ransomware, narcotics, darknet markets, fraud and cybercrime services that are helping Russia circumvent existing financial restrictions.

Heleket’s support agent on Telegram claims, despite all evidence to the contrary, that it is not affiliated with Cryptomus. Image: Richard Sanders.

On October 8, the U.K. issued sanctions (PDF) against Cryptomus — previously known as Certa Payments and Xeltox Enterprises — for processing payments that benefit the Russian government and its financial institutions. The sanctions freeze any Cryptomus assets at U.K. banks, and bar British companies from offering it any business, virtual or otherwise. Also targeted in these sanctions were the virtual payment platforms VexPay, TokenSpot, and the Tsunami Payments service.

As explained in our December 2024 investigation, “How Cryptocurrency Turns to Cash in Russian Banks,” Cryptomus has been a key payment processor for dozens of Russian cryptocurrency exchanges and websites hawking cybercrime services. The company has changed its name several times since emerging in 2022, most recently to “Heleket” last year after Canada levied a record CAD $176 million fine against the platform for anti-money laundering violations.

The blockchain data-crunching firm Chainalysis said the U.K. sanctions target the broader infrastructure supporting Russia’s wartime economy.

“Cryptomus and Heleket have emerged as major payment hubs for illicit activity,” Chainalysis wrote in an October 8 blog post. “Together, these services received more illicit funds across tracked categories than the mixers in our dataset and the number of illicit counterparties surged to more than 900 in a single month in late 2025.”

The Cryptomus support bot on Telegram, responding on Oct. 8 to an inquiry by saying the platform was suddenly unable to process transactions.

In April 2026, the blockchain analysis firm TRM Labs found Cryptomus had processed more than $7 billion in transactions since its inception in 2022, including transactions associated with child sexual abuse material vendors, terrorist financing networks, and human trafficking operations.

TRM noted that Cryptomus’s transaction volume cratered after the platform instituted new “know your customer” or KYC rules, and that the cryptocurrency platform responded to the Canadian fines by launching Heleket as a parallel service that continued to offer no-KYC payment processing.

Richard Sanders is a blockchain analyst and investigator who spent months mapping out Cryptomus’s payment infrastructure and transacting with its customers. Sanders said the U.K. sanctions on Cryptomus are important because Canada’s fine against the platform was ultimately unenforceable and uncollectible.

“A fine doesn’t stop a cryptocurrency payment processor from processing payments,” Sanders wrote on LinkedIn. “Sanctions kill the operation. The distinction matters.”

As our 2024 investigation noted, Cryptomus shared a Vancouver address with dozens of other foreign currency dealers and money transfer businesses — none of which appeared to be physically located there. Following the CAD $176 million fine for alleged money laundering violations, Cryptomus appealed the penalty, launched Heleket as a parallel service, and kept on processing large volumes of sketchy transactions, Sanders said.

Sanders said the sanctions also are notable because they are the first known instance of a “Five Eyes” country (referring to the Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the U.K. and the U.S.) sanctioning a cryptocurrency operation incorporated in another Five Eyes jurisdiction.

Where do entities like Cryptomus and Heleket derive their authority to offer international financial services? The answer appears to involve fake financial institutions overseen by a phony regulatory body positioned in a country that is not widely recognized as a sovereign nation.

Our 2024 investigation found the sole shareholder of Cryptomus’s parent company Certa Payments was a 25-year-old Ukrainian woman who also headed several other firms, including the WS Management and Advisory Corporation, which bills itself as the regulatory body that exclusively oversees licenses for cryptocurrency, foreign exchange and online gaming businesses incorporated in the disputed region in northwest Africa known as the Western Sahara.

That entity’s website — crasadr.com — says it assists applicants with bank setup and formation, online gaming licenses, and the creation and licensing of foreign exchange brokers. One of Certa Payments’ former sites — certa[.]website — also shared a server with 12 other domains, including rasd-state[.]ws, a website for the Central Reserve Authority of the Western Sahara.

The website crasadr dot com, the official website of the Central Reserve Authority of Western Sahara, which lists the entities awarded licenses for cryptocurrencies, gaming and foreign exchange services.

Microsoft today issued updates to fix more than 1,400 security vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and other software. Today’s epic patch batch dwarfs September’s record of nearly 1,000 fixes, which was already about ten times the normal monthly patch load from Redmond.

Just one of the weaknesses patched this week is considered a “zero day,” or already exploited in the wild. CVE-2026-96951 is a security feature bypass in the Windows Shell that affects Windows 10 and 11 systems, as well as some Server versions.

Windows 10 users might be wondering if they can still expect security updates after this month. Microsoft had been slated to stop shipping updates for Windows 10 systems in October 2025, but ended up adding another year of free updates after considerable pushback. A few months ago, Microsoft quietly extended that support for another year (until October 2027).

At least 78 of the flaws fixed this month are rated “critical,” meaning they could be exploited with little or no action by the user, and most of those critical bugs allow an attacker to execute code of their choice on the vulnerable system.

While Microsoft said there are no signs anyone is exploiting it yet, a security feature bypass in the .NET Framework (CVE-2026-108398) was publicly disclosed prior to today, potentially giving attackers advance time to work out how to exploit the bug.

Satnam Narang at Tenable said the number of flaws fixed this month far surpasses the previous record-setting year 2020, when Microsoft patched 1,261 CVEs.

“We’ve now crossed the 4,000 CVE mark with two months left to go,” he said.

Microsoft credits large language models for the high volume of bug discovery, and presumably AI gets credit for many of the patches used to fix these flaw. Meanwhile, security experts have been warning that these unusually large patch volleys from Microsoft are placing extra strain on corporate security teams, which often have to test individual updates before deploying them across a network to ensure the fixes don’t cause problems for other software.

Tyler Reguly, associate director of security research and development at Fortra, notes that just 26 Microsoft vulnerabilities appeared in the “Known Exploited Vulnerabilities” (KEV) catalog maintained by the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) so far this year, and security teams would do well to prioritize patching those 26 vulnerabilities first.

“Security leaders should focus on exploitable risk, and ask whether their teams have the clarity, capacity and support to act,” Reguly said.

Which vulnerabilities deserve the most scrutiny in your organization? The folks at Cisco Talos have a useful roundup of the more noteworthy flaws that Microsoft fixed today, and of course the SANS Internet Storm Center has a reliable roundup that indexes vulnerabilities by severity, CVE number and affected software.

Agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on Thursday arrested an executive at a Canadian cybersecurity firm in connection with an investigation into the ShinyHunters hacking group that recently relieved the FBI of sensitive data on thousands of agents, multiple sources tell KrebsOnSecurity.

The New York Times reported today that the FBI has arrested a Canadian man in Pennsylvania on suspicion of assisting ShinyHunters. The Times story did not identify the man, nor did a statement on Twitter/X about the arrest from FBI Director Kash Patel.

One source close to the investigation told KrebsOnSecurity the Canadian person arrested this week was visiting Pennsylvania for a cyber insurance conference, and that the suspect’s company specialized in handling ransomware negotiations with cybercrime groups. Another shared that control over the ShinyHunters investigation has been centralized at an FBI field office in Texas.

An online search reveals the Cyber Risk Summit was held at the Loews Philadelphia Hotel between Oct. 5 and Oct. 7. The conference had several sponsors, but according to the summit’s website its biggest sponsor was a Canadian security company called Cypfer.

According to LinkedIn, one of Cypfer’s “ex-founders” was Edward Dubrovsky, who is now associated with another Canadian security firm and sponsor called CyberSteward. In a post to LinkedIn approximately one month ago, Dubrovsky said he had plans to attend the Cyber Risk Summit with the rest of the CyberSteward team.

[Update: Oct. 10, 9:58 a.m. ET: A spokesperson for Cypfer said Dubrovsky was not a founder or co-founder as his LinkedIn profile claims, but instead served as a managing director before resigning in December 2025].

Edward Dubrovsky’s LinkedIn profile.

“Looking forward to continuing conversations around strategy & compliant driven coercive (ransomware, extortion) advisory, negotiations and settlement services that are global and truly agnostic,” Dubrovsky wrote.

Federal court records show that on October 8, an Edward Dobrovsky (note the slight misspelling of the last name) was arrested in Pennsylvania on cyber extortion and conspiracy charges. Several of those documents — including the core complaint — are now sealed. But a handful of them were indexed at Courtlistener.com, including a summary of the complaint, which charges the defendant with “conspiracy to threaten to impair the confidentiality of information with the intent to extort money,” and “interference with commerce by threats.”

Image: Courtlistener.com

The inmate locator at the U.S. Bureau of Prisons website reports that a 54-year-old Edward Dubrovsky is currently being held at a federal facility in Philadelphia. But the court records indexed by CourtListener include a notice filed on October 9 that moved the case to the Eastern District of Texas, which sources say is now the epicenter of the FBI’s ShinyHunters investigation. The FBI declined to comment for this story.

Dubrovsky’s LinkedIn profile states he is the author of Cyber Extortion Strategic Response, a 252-page book that promises to “take readers beyond the ransom note and into the decisions that determine how an organization responds, recovers, and protects what matters.”

Edward Dubrovsky’s book, which centers on the intricacies of ransomware negotiations.

“At the heart of the book is a critical distinction: communicating with a criminal is not the same as negotiating a payment, and negotiating is not a commitment to pay,” reads an excerpt from the book’s listing on Amazon. “Engagement can serve other objectives, including testing claims, gathering information, creating time, and preserving options while the organization evaluates its next move.”

Mr. Dubrovsky could not be immediately reached for comment. KrebsOnSecurity also sought comment from other executives at CyberSteward, and will update this post in the event they respond. The available court records in Dubrovsky’s case show that he does not currently have an attorney and has yet to be appointed a public defender by the courts.

ShinyHunters typically uses phishing and stolen credentials to siphon data from corporate accounts at software-as-a-service companies, and then threatens to publish the stolen data online unless a ransom demand is paid. According to the FBI, the group has extorted more than $70 million from victims so far this year.

Sources tell KrebsOnSecurity the FBI has been poring over devices that were seized last month when the Dutch police arrested the convicted cybercriminal Pepijn van der Stap in connection with the ShinyHunters investigation, and that charges against principals at other companies that specialize in ransomware negotiation may be forthcoming.

Immediately after Van der Stap’s arrest, another member of ShinyHunters named “Rey” assumed control over the group and began taunting the FBI over data the group stole from the agency’s online recruitment portal, which included each’s person’s unit and specialization, as well as medical and psychiatric records.

Last week, Reuters reported that Rey — identified as a teenager named Saif Al-din Khader — had been detained and was cooperating with FBI investigators. On October 7, we detailed how Rey was apprehended as the cybercrime group allegedly sought to extort a navigation and digital aviation unit that was divested by Boeing in late 2025.

This is likely to be a fast-moving story. Updates will be noted along with timestamps.

A teenager from Amman, Jordan suspected of leading the prolific data theft and extortion group ShinyHunters has been detained and is reportedly cooperating with the FBI to identify other members of the hacking gang. KrebsOnSecurity has learned that the suspect, who uses the hacker handle “Rey,” was detained as ShinyHunters was in the process of extorting a business unit recently divested by the global aerospace company Boeing, which manufactures the fleet of planes used by the employer of Rey’s father — Royal Jordanian Airlines.

The logo for Jeppesen ForeFlight, a business unit divested last year by the aerospace firm Boeing.

On October 3, Reuters cited three unnamed sources saying a suspected ShinyHunters member in Amman named Saif Al-din Khader was detained by Jordanian authorities and was cooperating with the FBI. KrebsOnSecurity identified Rey as Khader in a November 2025 profile, in which the young man admitted working with multiple ransomware groups.

Rey was featured again in a September 28 exclusive about the Dutch police arresting 24-year-old convicted cybercriminal Pepijn van der Stap on suspicion of aiding in data thefts and extortions by ShinyHunters. The story noted that immediately following the Dutchman’s arrest on the evening of September 15, Rey assumed control over the ShinyHunters brand and boasted publicly about stealing highly sensitive data from the FBI and extorting the ransomware group Cl0p.

Rey taunted both the FBI and Cl0p with memes posted to his longtime account on Twitter/X, while simultaneously including images of the avatar used by Van Der Stap’s former hacker alias “Umbreon” in an apparent attempt to frame the Dutchman for both hacks.

A taunting meme uploaded to Twitter/X by Rey on Sept. 22. A giant sized version of the Pokemon character Umbreon can be seen in the bottom left.

As noted in our September 28 report, ShinyHunters gained access to the FBI site and other victims by exploiting a vulnerability (CVE-2026-35273) in PeopleSoft, a software-as-a-service platform from the tech giant Oracle that is broadly used by companies to manage hiring and human resources, benefits and payroll. Oracle quickly issued a fix for CVE-2026-35273, which ShinyHunters first began exploiting as a zero-day in June, and at the time Mandiant released web application firewall rules intended for organizations that couldn’t apply the security update quickly enough.

ShinyHunters told BleepingComputer in June that the original goal behind exploiting the PeopleSoft vulnerability was to breach the FBI’s own PeopleSoft database, but the hackers said those attacks were unsuccessful for some reason. In recent weeks, however, ShinyHunters turned to a well-known URL-encoding trick to bypass Mandiant’s suggested web application firewall rules.

In a report released Sept. 25, security experts at Mandiant and the Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) confirmed that ShinyHunters had mass-exploited the PeopleSoft vulnerability to steal data from dozens of systems across a range of industries, including higher education, technology, healthcare, agriculture, transportation and government.

Reuters reported October 5 that the FBI has removed a contractor at Accenture over their failure to patch the FBI recruitment website hacked by ShinyHunters, which exposed sensitive data on more than 5,000 FBI personnel, including each’s person’s unit and specialization, as well as medical and psychiatric records.

‘REY’ MEANS KING, AS IN ROYAL

According to two sources familiar with the ShinyHunters investigation, a navigation and digital aviation unit recently divested by the global aerospace company Boeing was among the victims that ShinyHunters was in the process of extorting when Rey was apprehended by Jordanian authorities.

Those sources said the FBI’s investigation into ShinyHunters gained renewed urgency with the group’s attempted extortion of the former Boeing unit, which allegedly included the theft of sensitive information that sources said could pose operational safety and security risks.

In a brief statement shared with KrebsOnSecurity, Boeing acknowledged the extortion attempts by ShinyHunters, and said the incident concerned data stolen from Jeppesen ForeFlight, a subsidiary that Boeing sold in November 2025 to the private equity firm Thoma Bravo for $10.55 billion.

“We are aware of claims by a threat actor regarding data allegedly associated with Boeing and our former subsidiary Jeppesen ForeFlight,” a Boeing spokesperson shared. “We are actively reviewing the matter with the Jeppesen ForeFlight team.”

A spokesperson for Jeppesen ForeFlight shared a written statement in response to questions, saying the company has seen no impact on their end. “Based on our investigation to date into this claim and proactive security posture, there was no impact to our operations or products.”

Rey’s alleged involvement in attempting to extort the former Boeing unit is noteworthy because there is strong evidence that his father works for Royal Jordanian Airlines, which is mostly controlled by the Jordanian government and operates its long-haul fleet on passenger planes built by Boeing. Rey claimed on Telegram in early 2025 that his father was an airline pilot, although that could not be independently confirmed.

However, as noted in our November 2025 profile of Rey, his family’s shared computer was at one point compromised by password-stealing malware, and the data collected by that malware clearly shows Rey’s father used the same credentials to log in at multiple online portals for Royal Jordanian Airlines employees.

Royal Jordanian Airlines has not yet responded to a request for comment. In advance of our September 28 story, KrebsOnSecurity once again emailed Rey’s father to seek comment and update him on his son’s alleged activities. Neither of the Khaders have responded. But just hours after that request was sent, Rey began deleting his various social media accounts, including the Twitter/X account he previously used to taunt the FBI, Cl0p, and other ShinyHunters victims.

Rey may have nixed many of his social media profiles, but his cybersecurity blog on GitHub somehow escaped the purge, and it shows that Rey was fixated on the leaders of the Cl0p ransomware group. In March 2026, Rey’s blog featured a lengthy post that identified two Russian men as the core developers and hackers behind Cl0p.

Rey’s blog on GitHub. This post doxes two Russian men as the core operators behind Cl0p, one of the oldest and most established ransomware groups still in operation today.

MURDER FOR HIRE?

Meanwhile, news outlets in the Netherlands reported explosive new allegations leveled at Van der Stap, whose supposed personal transformation from convicted to reformed hacker has been widely covered in the tech news media. The Dutch daily RTL reported on Sept. 29 that investigators suspect Van der Stap tried to orchestrate at least two murders. According to RTL, the murders were allegedly to be committed abroad, and there are indications Van der Stap gave the order for these attacks.

Van der Stap was released from prison after serving the better part of a four year sentence for data theft and extortion activity that prosecutors said netted between €1.5 million and €2.7 million. In an interview with KrebsOnSecurity on September 9, Van der Stap described his new role as “offensive security lead” at the Dutch cybersecurity company Neo Security, saying the job involved probing client networks for security vulnerabilities.

Neo Security’s owner Benjamin Korper told Reuters he has hired an outside firm to investigate whether Van der Stap had hacked Neo Security or its customers, but that so far investigators have found no evidence he acted against his employer or clients. Korper said Dutch forensic investigators visited his office on September 15, the night Van der ⁠Stap was arrested in a dramatic police raid that reportedly involved flash bang grenades.

A screenshot of a Sept 16 story by the Dutch news outlet at5.nl, describing a police raid on Van Der Stap’s residence that reportedly used flash-bang grenades.

Prior to his first arrest in 2023, Van der Stap was working as a software engineer at the Amsterdam-based cybersecurity startup Hadrian, while volunteering at the Dutch Institute for Vulnerability Disclosure (DIVD) — even as he was hacking into and extorting a number of large organizations.

When asked in a recent interview why anyone should believe the word of a self-described “reformed” cybercriminal who had so casually deceived countless friends, co-workers and journalists for years, Van der Stap replied that his work spoke for itself and there was nothing he could say that would convince his worst critics.

“You can throw a bunch of nice words at someone, but you can’t convince them if they don’t want to be convinced,” Van der Stap told KrebsOnSecurity on Sept. 9. “I’m doing what I can to repay victims, and that’s all I can do. If someone doesn’t want to believe me, then that’s on them.”

FRANCHISING AND BURNING A BRAND

Cybercriminals aligned with ShinyHunters have been responsible for dozens of data breaches involving billions of stolen records, and breaches claimed by the group stretch back to at least 2019. But experts say the people recently operating behind the ShinyHunters name are not the same core members that populated the group in its early days, most of whom are French citizens who have been arrested (if not also imprisoned) on at least one prior occasion for alleged cybercrime activity.

More to the point, ShinyHunters has become something of a franchise. Think the Dread Pirate Roberts character in the 1980s cult movie classic “The Princess Bride,” only succession by death is replaced with succession by arrest, and there can be multiple simultaneous Dread Pirate Robertses. Sources close to the investigation say the FBI is focusing on a remaining handful of cybercriminal freelancers or affiliates who have been feeding the group stolen credentials to various software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms used by major companies in exchange for a cut of any data ransoms later paid by victims.

In the days after the news broke of Van der Stap’s arrest, a cybercrime-focused chat server on Telegram that was allegedly operated by Rey erupted with hot takes, with most participants heaping ridicule on the teenage hacker after he publicly backed down from threats against the FBI and Cl0p, and again when the ShinyHunters’s darknet website suddenly went offline. Several commentators accused Rey of resurrecting the ShinyHunters brand after its core members were rounded up in France, and making a mockery of the group’s name and reputation ever since.

“He bought the old forum PGP key and used it to make new Breachforum websites and Telegram channels larping as ShinyHunters to ransom companies and then sell the used data or resell his forum when he goes broke,” one member recounted.

A relatively new Telegram channel called “The Battle” has been doxing and needling Rey and other alleged ShinyHunters members for several weeks, and it has gained a considerable readership among the cybercrime communities operating on Telegram. One of the coordinators of that harassment campaign repeatedly portrayed Rey as clueless greenhorn who sought to ride the coattails of a cybercriminal brand that has long enjoyed a reputation for ruthlessly selling or publishing data stolen from victim companies who refuse to give in to extortion demands.

“Rey (Saif Al-Din Khader) made a serious mistake when he started pretending to be a member of ShinyHunters,” wrote the administrators of The Battle server on Telegram. “That group had already been dismantled, with many of its members either arrested or imprisoned, yet Rey still chose to use its name while carrying out his crimes. We’re aware of claims that [Rey] caused over $200 million in damages and helped around 5–6 friend groups in the community make money by using Shiny Hunters group aliases to negotiate deals for a 25–30% cut over the past few months.”

In an interview with The Register, ShinyHunters claimed they hacked the FBI to counter the agency’s narrative in a May 2026 alert that advised victims against paying a ransom to the group, which came off looking unprofessional and capricious in the FBI’s advisory.

A flash notice on ShinyHunters released by the FBI on May 15, 2026.

The public notice warned the group has been known to pursue a number of different victim harassment strategies, from sending threatening text messages and phone calls to victims and their family members to in some cases swatting victims. The FBI warned ShinyHunters members “may also falsely claim to have sensitive or compromising information, including embarrassing photographs or videos of victims, which frequently do not exist.”

The hackers told The Register their attack on the FBI “demonstrated our technical capabilities and directly refuted the misinformation disseminated by the FBI, journalists, and industry researchers.” At the same time, the group’s leaders seemed to acknowledge that the FBI’s warning materially harmed their prospects for convincing victims to pay, saying “this was fundamentally a public relations and marketing initiative for our business.”

Authorities in the Netherlands have arrested a 24-year-old convicted cybercriminal on suspicion of aiding in data thefts and extortions by the prolific hacker group ShinyHunters. In the days immediately following the suspect’s arrest, remaining ShinyHunters members dramatically escalated their attacks, stealing highly sensitive data from the FBI and extorting the Russian ransomware group Cl0p.

According to three sources familiar with the matter, the Dutch man arrested by authorities this month is Pepijn van der Stap, a convicted cybercriminal from Almere and Lelystad in the Netherlands. Van der Stap was previously convicted in 2023 in connection with a string of data thefts and extortions that prosecutors said earned between €1.5 million and €2.7 million.

At his trial in late 2023, van der Stap admitted that he lived a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde existence, secretly using the hacker handle “Umbreon” to extort victims and post their data on English language hacking communities like the now-defunct RaidForums and Breached. By day, however, van der Stap was working as a software engineer at the Amsterdam-based cybersecurity startup Hadrian, while volunteering at the Dutch Institute for Vulnerability Disclosure (DIVD), a nonprofit security research group.

Pepijn van der Stap’s alter ego “Umbreon” selling a database on RaidForums, offering information on 2.3 million people from The Netherlands in September 2021. This user’s avatar is a depiction of the Pokemon character Umbreon. Image: KELA.

Van der Stap confessed to his data theft and extortion activity, and was sentenced to four years in prison (one of which was suspended). During his trial, van der Stap opted to remain in custody for a time rather than at home, saying he could not find better treatment on the outside for his ongoing psychological issues, which he claimed included PTSD related to childhood trauma. He was released from prison in December 2025.

In an interview with KrebsOnSecurity on September 9, 2026, Van der Stap cast himself as a reformed hacker who was trying to turn his life around and make a positive contribution to society. Van der Stap is currently employed as offensive security lead at the Dutch company Neo Security, which did not respond to requests for comment.

Van der Stap said he was still dealing with civil lawsuits and restitution related to his previous cybercrime victims, and that he was trying his best to make amends. But not long after that interview, the Dutch hacker abruptly stopped replying to messages. Efforts by others close to him also repeatedly failed to elicit a response for the past two weeks.

The LinkedIn profile for Pepijn van der Stap.

According to two sources with knowledge of the matter, Van der Stap was arrested by Dutch authorities on or around September 16, and has been held in custody for questioning since. One source said a colleague of theirs personally witnessed Dutch authorities carting items out of Van der Stap’s residence.

Authorities in the Netherlands have been asking the public for help in identifying the voice in a recorded telephone call from February 2026 in which a native Dutch-speaking ShinyHunters member social engineered their way into Odido, the nation’s largest mobile telecommunications provider. In that intrusion, ShinyHunters tricked an Odido employee into logging in at a spoofed website, and then used that access to steal data on more than 6.2 million Dutch people.

Responding to Dutch news media, ShinyHunters confirmed that the suspect in the audio clip is indeed a member of the hacker collective.

“Our team member has our full support – emotionally, mentally, and financially,” the hackers said. “Everything has been arranged, including a criminal defense lawyer. We do not look down on our staff and members; we take excellent care of them,” reads a statement ShinyHunters shared with NL Times. It remains unclear if the Dutch police have matched the Odido caller to a confirmed real-life identity. The Dutch police unit handling the Odido incident did not respond to requests for comment.

The group also lashed out at the authorities in the Netherlands. “The Dutch police will need all the luck in the world – and everyone’s prayers – if they want to catch him before we carry out another large-scale data theft in the Netherlands,” the ShinyHunters statement said. “Frankly, the Dutch police are a big joke; they are incapable of doing anything. Incompetent. Irrelevant. Unimportant. Useless.”

FBI, CL0P HACKS

Just days after sources say Van der Stap was detained by Dutch authorities, ShinyHunters claimed credit for an unusually brazen breach at the FBI’s job application site apply.fbijobs.gov. According to reporting from 404 Media, the data stolen from the FBI site includes Social Security numbers and personal information on more than 5,000 officials.

404 Media and Reuters reported the FBI data included each person’s job title or team, such as special agent, threat intake examiner, major cybercrimes unit, and those investigating cyber threats from foreign state-backed actors. Reuters examined documents shared by ShinyHunters and found they included sensitive psychiatric and medical files of FBI staff. The FBI issued a brief statement confirming the hack.

ShinyHunters said it gained access to the FBI site and other victims by exploiting a recently patched vulnerability (CVE-2026-35273) in PeopleSoft, a software-as-a-service platform from the software giant Oracle that is broadly used by companies to manage hiring and human resources, benefits and payroll. Oracle quickly issued a fix for the Peoplesoft vulnerability that ShinyHunters reportedly began exploiting as a zero-day in June, and at the time Mandiant released web application firewall rules intended for organizations who couldn’t apply the security update quickly enough.

But on Friday, BleepingComputer reported that ShinyHunters used a URL-encoding trick to bypass Mandiant’s suggested web application firewall rules designed to mitigate the threat from the PeopleSoft flaw. In a report released Sept. 25, security experts at Mandiant and the Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) confirmed that ShinyHunters had mass-exploited the PeopleSoft vulnerability to steal data from dozens of systems across a range of industries, including higher education, technology, healthcare, agriculture, transportation and government.

Van der Stap’s former hacker alias Umbreon was hidden in plain sight throughout the imagery ShinyHunters used to spread news about the FBI hack: The defacement image that ShinyHunters left behind on the hacked FBI jobs site included an ASCII art design featuring the Pokemon character Umbreon. The message at the top read, “This site has been seized by ShinyHunters. rooting your systems since ’19 ;)” The image appears identical to a defacement message ShinyHunters used in their 2020 hack of the English-language cybercrime community Hackforums.

The defacement message left by ShinyHunters on the FBI jobs site included an ASCII art rendition of the Pokemon character Umbreon. Image: Bleeping Computer.

Multiple sources close to the ShinyHunters investigation said the group’s recent risky attacks against the FBI and one of Russia’s most venerated ransomware groups amounted to a major pivot away from the more measured tenor of the hacking gang’s operations. Those sources said the sudden shift came about after ShinyHunters was taken over by a teenage cybercriminal from Amman, Jordan who goes by the nickname Rey and operates as part of a cybercrime group called ScatteredLapsussHunters (SLSH), which experts say is an amalgamation of three hacking groups — Scattered Spider, LAPSUS$ and ShinyHunters.

Those sources said Rey had an ongoing beef with the Dutch hacker over control of the ShinyHunters brand and data, and that the inclusion of the oversized Umbreon Pokemon image in the FBI jobs site defacement was likely an attempt by Rey to pin the hack on the Dutchman.

Rey was first publicly identified by the cybersecurity firm KELA in March 2025. In advance of our November 2025 profile of Rey, KrebsOnSecurity messaged Rey’s father and asked for permission to interview his teenage son. Rey’s dad merely forwarded the message to his son, who admitted to participating in ransomware attacks and said he was trying to extricate himself from the SLSH hacker group.

BLAMING UMBREON

Immediately after news of the FBI jobs site hack was picked up in the media, Rey’s main account on Twitter/X (Ryan Moran/@rmoskovy) was taunting the Cl0p ransomware group and the FBI, crudely depicting them as the twin towers in New York being struck by planes labeled “cl0p drama” and “fbi breach claim.” In the foreground of the city is the giant Pokemon figure of Umbreon.

A taunting meme uploaded to Twitter/X by Rey’s now-defunct account on Sept. 22. A giant float-sized version of the Pokemon character Umbreon can be seen in the bottom left.

On Sept. 24, KrebsOnSecurity again contacted Rey’s dad, asking to interview him and his son for a story on Rey’s apparent ascendency as the head of ShinyHunters. Just hours after that request, Rey deleted his longtime Twitter/X account. Meanwhile, Rey’s dad, who works for the Royal Jordanian Airlines, has failed to respond to a half-dozen emailed requests for comment about his son’s alleged activities.

Where does the bad blood between SLSH and ShinyHunters come from? According to a story in Wired this month, ShinyHunters and SLSH members briefly partnered earlier this year to help better monetize important stolen credentials collected by TeamPCP, an upstart group that was having great success compromising global code supply chains with malicious software but hadn’t been able to profit much from their stolen data (two alleged leaders of TeamPCP were arrested last month in Australia, and in an interview the TeamPCP leader claimed they made just $20,000).

The Wired story noted how Mandiant had infiltrated TeamPCP and was secretly responsible for having the crime group’s stolen credentials burned so quickly: Mandiant was secretly feeding those credentials to the major cloud providers like Amazon and Microsoft, who quickly invalidated the stolen keys. Meanwhile, the formerly cooperating hacker groups began to blame one another for causing the credentials to become worthless.

Wired’s Andy Greenberg reported that a few weeks after partnering with TeamPCP, “ShinyHunters went rogue, carrying out its own extortions with TeamPCP’s credentials but without giving the supply-chain hackers their cut.”

Mandiant researcher Austin Larsen told KrebsOnSecurity earlier this month that ShinyHunters has been enjoying a successful extortion spree so far this year, and is on track to pull in nearly $100 million in extortion payments from cybercrime victims in 2026.

Van der Stap claims he was never motivated by money and that his earlier hacker activity was driven by a desire to have the world’s most complete collection of stolen databases. Speaking with reporters from Bloomberg in 2024, Van der Stap said that singular focus in turn fueled his desire to carry out cyberattacks.

“The hacking was very easy for me, and it wasn’t a compulsion,” he told Bloomberg. “My habit was collecting. Collecting data, organizing data, downloading data, creating folders.”

DIVD, the nonprofit security research group where Van der Stap previously served as a volunteer, disclosed on LinkedIn last week that the organization was dealing with an internal cybersecurity incident that appears to have involved the malicious use of artificial intelligence. DIVD has released few details about that incident, but a spokesperson for the nonprofit told KrebsOnSecurity it does not appear related to ShinyHunters, nor are there any signs the matter involves the work of a previous volunteer.

Update: 3:44 p.m. ET: Corrected Van der Stap’s age, which is 24 (not 23).

Update, 4:54 p.m. ET: The Dutch police have confirmed the arrest of a 24-year-old in connection with the ShinyHunters investigation. In a statement on Twitter/X, the Dutch police said the man will appear on Tuesday, September 29 before the chambers of the Rotterdam District Court, and that it will provide more information tomorrow.

Sept. 29, 9:42 a.m. ET: The Dutch news outlet RTL reports that investigators suspect Van der Stap tried to orchestrate at least two murders. RTL reported the two murders were allegedly to be committed abroad, and that there are indications the suspect gave the order for this.

The FBI released a short video message on the ShinyHunters investigation from Brett Leatherman, assistant director of the FBI’s cyber division, who thanked Dutch law enforcement partners for their assistance and urged remaining ShinyHunters members to turn themselves in.

“Arrests have a way of changing who is willing to talk, and seized infrastructure has a way of showing us who’s left,” Leatherman said. “The longer you stay in this, the more we learn about you. You know how to find us, and we know how to find you. I suggest you reach out to us while the choice is still yours.”

A U.S. Army soldier who pleaded guilty to hacking into multiple telecommunications companies and stealing mobile call and text metadata for more than 100 million AT&T customers in 2024 was sentenced to 70 months in federal prison today and ordered to pay nearly $300,000 in restitution to victims.

One of several selfies from the Facebook page of Cameron Wagenius.

Cameron John Wagenius, 22, was stationed at a U.S. Army base in South Korea when he adopted the cybercriminal persona “Kiberphant0m.” Working with three alleged co-conspirators, Kiberphant0m downloaded data from several large customers of the cloud data storage service Snowflake that had exposed credentials and did not enforce multi-factor authentication (Snowflake has since mandated MFA on all accounts).

In October 2024, Kiberphant0m bragged on the cybercrime forums that he’d stolen the call and text metadata (e.g. source and destination number, timestamp, duration, etc.) for tens of millions of AT&T customers. Kiberphant0m claimed to have hacked into more than dozen telecommunications companies worldwide, including Verizon’s Push-to-Talk business, and publicly extorted these companies in exchange for a promise not to publish the stolen data.

In late November 2025, KrebsOnSecurity warned that Kiberphant0m was likely a U.S. soldier stationed in South Korea. Less than a month later, Wagenius was arrested and charged in two separate federal indictments, and soon pleaded guilty to all counts in both cases.

At his sentencing hearing in Seattle today, Wagenius was sentenced to nearly six years in federal prison, and ordered to pay $294,978 in restitution.

Federal prosecutors said Wagenius was assisted in his efforts to extort victim companies by Kenneth Schuchman, a 28-year old man from Vancouver, Washington who has a lengthy cybercriminal history. In 2019, Schuchman pleaded guilty to operating the Satori botnet, a vast collection of hacked Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices that was used for large-scale distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.

Two other alleged co-conspirators of Wagenius are still facing charges in connection with the Snowflake data thefts; Conor Riley Moucka, a.k.a. “Judische,” of Kitchener, Ontario was arrested in 2024 and pleaded guilty in August 2026; and John Erin Binns, an American man currently living in Turkey who is also wanted for a 2021 data breach at T-Mobile that exposed the personal information of at least 76 million customers.

Kiberphant0m also admitted to re-extorting victims, and threatening to disclose national security secrets. Immediately following Moucka’s arrest — after AT&T had already paid the extortion group a $370,000 Bitcoin ransom — Kiberphant0m posted on hacker forums what he claimed were the AT&T call logs for then President-elect Donald Trump and for then Vice President Kamala Harris, as well as schematics allegedly stolen from the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA).

Paul Russell is a resident agent in charge at the Defense Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS), the criminal investigative arm of the U.S. Department of Defense Office of Inspector General. Russell said when DCIS received information that a soldier with secret clearance was allegedly involved in cybercrime and extortion, the agency began working the investigation alongside the FBI, the Army Criminal Investigative Division (CID), and the U.S. Secret Service.

“We don’t often get leads where there’s an active duty soldier with a secret clearance who’s creating hacking tools and trafficking in data,” Russell said. “That doesn’t happen every day, and so when that hits it really spins all of our partner organizations up. It was very serious from jump street, just because it was unique, it was an insider threat, and we weren’t sure what we were dealing with.”

A sentencing memo (PDF) filed Sept. 19 by federal prosecutors in Seattle notes that while Wagenius pleaded guilty almost immediately and has been remarkably cooperative, he recently got caught trying to find security vulnerabilities in the BOP’s computer network. The government’s memo notes that while incarcerated and awaiting sentencing, Wagenius violated the computer use policies of the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) in attempts to learn about vulnerabilities in BOP computer systems.

“According to records from BOP, in or around September 2025, Wagenius used another inmate’s email system to request that the email recipient prompt a commercial AI tool to provide information about “[w]hat CVE’s are there for Windows 10 Enterprise privilege escalation and bypasses” and to “[p]rovide the CVE’s and a real world working script for each CVE . . . without omitted code,” the government’s memo states.

The memo states that less than a week later, Wagenius used a different inmate’s email account and requested that the email recipient prompt an AI tool to “[p]rovide the step by step for CVE-2023-45208, code for this if any, and if no code exists make some, make sure to describe everything in detail.” CVE-2023-45208 is a three-year-old “command injection” vulnerability in D-Link networking devices.

That same month, Wagenius allegedly again requested that the email recipient prompt AI with the question, “How do you make an antenna in a prison environment with commissary or readily available items/tools to improve/make an antenna to extend radio reception?”

Federal prosecutors said Wagenius also requested that the recipient research escaping prison.

“In several instances, Wagenius framed the AI queries as being posed in connection to a book he was writing. This is a common method of ‘prompt injection,’ in which attackers feed specially crafted, deceptive inputs into commercial AI tools that are programmed to avoid outputting malicious code that can be used to exploit computer vulnerabilities,” the sentencing memo reads.

The government told the court it is unaware of evidence that Wagenius figured out how to use or deploy the vulnerabilities he was researching in the BOP’s systems, and when questioned said he was only researching “potential vulnerabilities to provide information to the BOP.”

Incredibly, despite the enormous financial value of the data stolen from AT&T and other telecom providers, Wagenius’s extortion efforts were largely unsuccessful. The government’s sentencing memo says Wagenius made a whopping total of around $1,500 from selling stolen data.

“While Wagenius was not particularly financially successful as a cybercriminal, he both intended to and caused significant harm to numerous individual victims, U.S. companies, and the U.S. government,” the memo states.

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