The FBI has dismantled a major North Korean laptop farm operation in the U.S. with the help of CrowdStrike, which assisted in the identification and disruption of these networks. According to The New York Times, the agency shut down over 40 laptop farms in Texas, resulting in the seizure of over 200 devices. No arrests have been made so far, as the authorities wanted to take down the operations as soon as possible and did not wait for prosecutors to file charges against those involved, although they also warned that they could face criminal penalties if they continue to be involved with remote fraud.

North Korea has been using fake remote workers to earn income despite the economic sanctions placed against the hermit kingdom. It has been reported that it earns around $500 million a year under this scheme, which affects both startups and Fortune 500 companies. Amazon’s IT department actually caught one North Korean infiltrator after it noticed a 110ms keyboard input lag, betraying their distant location.

The U.S. has been clamping down on this scheme since last year, after it shut down 29 North Korean laptop farms across 16 states that were facilitating the employment of North Korean IT workers across over a hundred U.S. companies. Four U.S. citizens and a Ukrainian national were convicted over scams like this in November 2025, with the Justice Department unsealing indictments against two U.S. citizens and 10 China-based North Koreans recently. Prosecutors said that the last group defrauded more than $3 million from 70 companies over a span of six years from 2019, and that the identities of two more individuals involved in the case remain under seal.

Despite the number of networks that U.S. authorities have been able to shut down since last year, CrowdStrike’s Adam Meyers, who’s in charge of the company’s counter adversary operations, says that this scheme is “increasing both in prevalence and complexity.” He noted that it’s difficult to know how truly widespread the problem is and that even though CrowdStrike has identified an average of two new cases daily last month, it was most probably just the tip of the iceberg.

Facilitators are the one crucial aspect that North Korea’s operations rely on. These are people based in the United States who help bypass security measures by hosting the work laptops that companies send to the fraudulent North Korean IT workers to make it appear as if they’re based in the country. While the job looks like easy money from that start, it would eventually become more complicated as the operation progresses. “They get kind of hooked on it initially, and then more gets asked of them, and they’re kind of in too deep at that point,” Meyers told the publication.

A person claiming to be responsible for the recent hack of Denmark’s national registry claimed that they were able to gain access because of an IT company’s weak password. According to The Register, Pays ApS, an IT and data services company that lets customers reference the Danish Central Register of Persons (CPR) was the source of the hack, with the hacker saying that one of the accounts they breached was only protected by a ‘123456’ password.

Copenhagen has confirmed the hack, with a government official saying that the breach was discovered 12 days after it happened when an invoice revealed an unusual amount of activity from the company. The Danish government said that 8.8 million records have been illicitly retrieved, although the hacker claimed that they do not intend to sell or leak the information. While the government did not mention which company the hacker exploited, Pays ApS managing director Sophie Laursen confirmed that the hacker used the company’s access to the database to exfiltrate the data.

This incident shows that a system’s security is only as strong as the weakest link, with the Danish database getting compromised through a third-party user’s poorly chosen password. Given that CPR essentially contains information on virtually every Danish citizen, one would expect that it would require users to at least have a more complicated password, if not two-factor authentication. This isn’t the first time that an incident reveals shortcomings in government database protection, though — Indonesia realized that it had no backups when a ransomware attack in 2024 affected over 230 public agencies, while South Korea lost 858 terabytes of data after a catastrophic fire at a government data center last year.

We expect the Danish government to overhaul its password policies in the near future, especially now that AI is making it easier and more efficient for hackers to hit their targets. Recent incidents like the attacks on South Korean banks and against the Taiwanese government were reportedly conducted with the help of AI agents. Hackers also breached OpenAI using Claude tools, showing just how potent AI has become as a hacking tool in the wrong hands. But with a password like “123456,” potential hackers wouldn’t need to use any AI tools to break into weakly protected systems.

An ongoing cyberattack has reportedly struck major supermarket chains across Europe, disrupting refrigeration control systems. The attack — which has reportedly seen units set to continuously defrost at 50 degrees Celsius — is also apparently affecting deliveries and in-store pricing powered by electronic shelf labels, La Dépêche reports.

According to the report, "several" major retailers have been targeted by a cyberattack, which has hit Danfoss-made refrigeration controls used by French supermarkets Intermarché, Leclerc, and Coopérative U. Indeed, the latter's president, Dominique Schelcher, has confirmed as of Monday morning that "A cyberattack has been affecting the refrigeration production facilities of several stores in our network since last night." Schelcher said teams had been mobilized to fix the issue and promised an investigation into the incident, which he described as "extremely serious."

The report states the units have had their automatic defrosting systems activate, but that hackers have also configured the function — which normally runs for just two hours a day — into a continuous, forced defrosting cycle with the temperature set to a toasty 50 degrees Celsius. Sources reportedly described "a wave of heat" escaping from fridges and freezers

Early reports indicate losses are already approaching 300,000 euros, but could run into several million euros nationwide. Separately, NOS in the Netherlands reports that several supermarket chains have been hit with a malfunction due to a cybersecurity incident on Sunday afternoon. Albert Heijn, Etos, and Gall & Gall have had their websites taken down, impacting deliveries. Electronic shelf labels have also been compromised, disrupting in-store pricing. "We have immediately taken measures to protect our IT environment. Part of this involves the preventive temporary shutdown of a number of systems," Albert Heijn said in a statement.

It is unclear at this stage whether the two attacks are related or how widespread either of them is. Belgium's Delhaize chain, which belongs to Albert Heijn, has also reported disruption. Images online show stores in Amsterdam warning customers about price problems, and the suspension of loyalty programs that have also been impacted by the incident.

A YouTuber has received an unexpected visit from the police over an automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) camera he built to specifically track police cars, using the same technology law enforcement has infamously used to track ordinary citizens. In a video posted to his channel on October 7, Anthony Sistilli says two police officers showed up at his doorstep on September 20th to ask questions about the device, asking what his intentions were with the project.

Sistilli, a Canadian software engineer and YouTuber, pointed out the irony of the officers' concerns, explaining that they mirror the privacy concerns of ordinary citizens who are growing increasingly weary of the recent spike in blanket surveillance brought about by a mass installation of ALPR cameras. Flock Safety, a U.S. public safety technology company, recently scaled its centralized national surveillance network to over 120,000 cameras operating across 49 states, according to the company, capturing billions of vehicle scans every month.

The development sparked widespread public backlash, with critics arguing that Flock has quietly built a massive government surveillance dragnet without a public vote or federal oversight, since any police department on the network can search across state lines. Security researchers later discovered the network included 335,701 Flock cameras and created a “Flock Surveillance Map,” exposing their locations.

Similar ALPR camera surveillance networks exist in Canada, where Sistilli resides, prompting him to build his own device, but this time, encoded to exclusively track police cars. He detailed the build in several TikTok videos, describing it as “a personal Flock surveillance camera to Flock the Flockers.” He then posted a video of himself using the device in real life. The video brought Peel Regional Police, the local law enforcement serving Sistilli’s city, Brampton, Ontario, to his doorstep two weeks later.

“One of them [the officers] took the time to specifically mention how scary it would be for them, because people would be able to find out where they lived, when they got on their shift and what they were doing throughout the day, and that that type of powerful information could put them personally at risk for any bad apples that might want to track them down,” Sistilli narrated. He went on to point out that these were the exact concerns ordinary citizens had about constant surveillance, suggesting there should be more policies and systems around such networks. The officers reportedly responded that there was probably no effective way to implement this without giving away details of active investigations to criminals.

After several investigative reports exposed incidents where officers misused Flock’s database, with instances of stalking of exes and their acquaintances, public backlash snowballed into physical resistance that has seen residents covering or destroying the cameras. Several municipalities, including major hubs like Los Angeles and Fullerton, have now suspended or outright canceled their Flock contracts due to constituent privacy concerns.

Flock and its proponents insist the network has helped lower crime, a claim critics say misreads the data. Sistilli’s video also details aggressive, arguably deceptive marketing tactics Flock uses to convince municipalities to accept cameras. Another issue is centered around the collection and handling of the data. The company says its cameras are protected by on-device encryption and only briefly store images before they are forwarded to its servers. However, hackers reportedly extracted over 27,000 clips and 1.6 million images, captured in a span of 21 days, from a stolen Flock camera.

Over 3,400 “victim servers” were hit by cryptomining malware PoeLLM during a campaign named Canto Incognito, tracked since April 2026, Lumen’s cybersecurity research team Black Lotus Labs reports. The malware’s “command-and-control (C2) mechanism” used address encoding through four words in a two-stanza poem on GitHub, altered 11 times so far, to direct affected hosts to new C2 servers. Most of those hit look to be running “vulnerable versions of open-source AI/LLM services, such as LiteLLM and Ollama,” despite an April LiteLLM fix that probably patched the exploitation path.

The malware’s payload consists of XMRig and Iron miners, connected to Kryptex mining infrastructure, with infected servers becoming scanners and exploit servers. The “primary commonality amongst the first 900 victims” was contact with “an endpoint for the Russian crypto mining service,” Lumen says. This indicates that it may be financially motivated. “AI infrastructure is becoming an attractive target” because exposed AI services may contain valuable data and hardware access, especially GPUs. In the meantime, it has “blocked all traffic to and from the PoeLLM C2 servers.”

The primary targets are LiteLLM, a proxy server (AI Gateway) to call LLM APIs, a way companies can route their apps to many models through one endpoint, and Gotenberg, a Docker-based API for PDF conversion, which has a guide warning not to expose it to the internet. Also hit are Ollama, which allows you to run open-weight models on your own hardware, although it is not internet-exposed by default, and Gitea, a self-hosted Git platform. Ivanti Sentry, an enterprise gateway appliance, “may also have been targeted,” and one instance was how Lumen discovered the campaign.

Although the malware’s methodology involves leveraging poetry, this is only for pointing the infected servers to the C2 server. It is not a form of an AI jailbreak through harmful requests or prompt injection, or what is known as “adversarial poetry,” described in a paper last year.

The poem, “On the Nature of Connection,” was first committed in April, with each new version pointing to a new C2 server. The malware is able to decode the new address by pulling specific words and converting them into an IPv4 address. Lumen says that “the malware creator has not changed the pattern used in deciphering the poem” at the time of reporting. Using a poem likely aided in obfuscation as it is “a perfect vehicle for hiding an important message,” the researchers told The Register.

The malware is “deployed through vulnerability exploitation of publicly exposed services,” with broad scanning beginning in May. For LiteLLM, a crafted POST to the connection endpoint “was likely the exploitation path,” based on a flaw where two endpoints would run a supplied command on the host with no role check (CVE-2026-42271), which CISA added to its list of exploited vulnerabilities in June. Lumen didn’t detail the methods for Ollama, Gotenberg, and Gitea.

If you want to check your own systems, look at connection logs for the indicators of compromise listed on Lumen’s GitHub page. Be sure to audit external exposure when installing any open-source tool and close unnecessary ports. Patch any and all network devices. Follow the individual advisories for the vulnerable products — LiteLLM 1.83.7 or later and Ivanti Sentry R10.5.2, R10.6.2, or R10.7.1.

When Lumen published its report, three of the 12 C2 servers were still active and the campaign “continues to infect new victims.” The firm “will continue to monitor for new traffic.” More attacks like this seem likely: Lumen says enterprise attack surfaces are “expanding rapidly as AI infrastructure grows.”

Cyberattacks using AI agents against several of the largest South Korean banks, including Hana Bank, KB Kookmin Bank, and Shinhan Bank, are currently being investigated by South Korean authorities. According to The New York Times, at least 25,000 Shinhan Bank customers had their personal credit information leaked last week, while 99 customers and 20 current or former employees of Kookmin Bank have been affected. 89 Hana Bank customers were also affected by the hacks, which led to their information being stolen.

South Korea’s National Office of Investigation is looking at all three cases, which has also caught the attention of President Lee Jae Myung. The South Korean president said that there were signs that the hackers behind these incidents used AI models, “causing considerable public concern and anxiety,” and that he has instructed his cabinet to confirm the situation and to ensure that the damage from these incidents is minimized. “It’s now become possible to use AI to hack with ease even without specialized skills,” Lee said during the livestreamed cabinet meeting.

AI models are becoming more powerful with every release, and bad actors are taking advantage of them to find weaknesses in secure systems and exploit them. Anthropic reported the first instance of an AI-orchestrated cyberattack in November 2025, which was allegedly orchestrated by a Chinese state-sponsored group. A few months after that, a cybersecurity firm said that Taiwan was targeted by the first-ever end-to-end autonomous cyberattacks by China-linked hackers. Even AI labs that built these AI models aren’t immune from the AI-powered hacks, as security researchers breached OpenAI using Claude and gained access to its internal codebase.

There has been no indication yet of who’s behind the attacks on South Korea’s banking industry — speculation may focus on Seoul’s regional adversaries, but it can be difficult to trace and attribute hacks, especially if the actors know how to cover their tracks. Aside from that, AI agents are known to conduct unintentional cyberattacks on their own, with the Australian government complaining that it took OpenAI 84 days to inform it of a hacking incident involving Australia’s national health portal.

While the leading AI labs are believed to be putting safeguards in place to help prevent their models from being used in illegal and unethical ways, some hackers exploit hallucinations and trick AI agents into running malware. Aside from that, many open-weight and open-source models lack similar guardrails, making it easier for hackers to use them in their activities. While AI models haven’t replaced skilled attackers yet, they have made planning, reconnaissance, and attack execution so much easier and could serve as a force multiplier, allowing hackers to act more quickly and efficiently.

An Iranian-Turkish Man has been extradited to the U.S. from Montenegro over his alleged involvement in a $3.4 billion hacking scheme that affected numerous universities and companies across the country. The extradition, a rare move involving an individual accused of state-sponsored attacks, took place on October 1. According to a CNN report, Montenegrin police arrested the suspect, Amir Barati, in June at the FBI’s request.

The suspect and 16 other Iranians were indicted on wire and computer fraud charges in August, and are expected to face the charges in the U.S. Southern District of New York. According to the indictment, the 17 defendants are members of Mabna Institute — an Iran-based company known for state-backed global hacking activities.

In a campaign that began in 2013 and lasted several years, the defendants allegedly stole over 31 terabytes of academic data and intellectual property and breached 8,000 email accounts belonging to professors in the U.S. and worldwide. The attack affected 144 universities, 42 private companies, and five government agencies, including the Department of Labor and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. It also affected 178 universities and 11 companies abroad, as well as at least two NGOs, causing over $3.4 billion in losses and damages.

The attackers reportedly handed over the stolen data and illicit access to the Iranian government, after which it was used to benefit Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and other Iranian organizations and universities. Barati specifically allegedly “helped track the progress of the hacks of universities and helped create ‘targeting lists' for the private sector,” according to U.S. court documents.

The suspect’s extradition is a rare case, as accused Iranian hackers rarely ever face U.S. courts, and is widely seen as a win for law enforcement. Iran’s sizable hacking capabilities have caused considerable damage globally. In August, the country was suspected of conducting cyberattacks on U.S. water suppliers in 45 municipalities. Similarly, an Iranian-linked hacking group claimed an attack in March that wiped over 200,000 devices clean and extracted over 50 TB of data.

A “crafted VPN client configuration file” uploaded by the user or a logged-in attacker via an Asus router’s web management interface can allow an adversary to “execute arbitrary commands,” a critical security risk the company has acted to patch. A second, separate bug, which uses debug code left active, allows the attacker to bypass security checks in order to enable Telnet and may allow commands to be run “with root privileges,” potentially affecting devices connected to the router.

Asus recommends that users “only import VPN client configuration files from trusted sources.” The two CVEs, CVE-2026-14157 and CVE-2026-13313, score 9.4 and 8.9 out of 10 on the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) 4.0 scale, which measures vulnerability severity. Asus names firmware series rather than models: 3.0.0.6_102 for both bugs, with the 3.0.0.4_386 and 3.0.0.4_388 series also affected by the Telnet one.

The routers can act as a VPN client when set up with a configuration file from a VPN provider. Things go wrong when crafted text inside the uploaded files is read as formatting instructions rather than plain data. VPNs are commonly used to bypass filters and access otherwise unreachable content, but the risk here applies to owners who import VPN configuration files into the router itself, not to VPN apps on a laptop or phone.

The separate Telnet flaw relies on enabling the service first before running commands that could impact the network. Besides the firmware update, Asus recommends a strong, unique admin password with “at least 10 characters, with a mix of uppercase letters, numbers, and symbols.” To reduce risk in the meantime, Asus also advises against running “scripts, tools, or commands from untrusted sources on any device within your local network.” One risk is that “attackers may use social engineering to trick administrators,” the company says.

The VPN bug uses the same entry point as one disclosed by VulnCheck in 2024, CVE-2024-0401, which used a crafted OVPN profile. That makes Asus’s config file import, specifically through the web admin page, a recurring weak point. As a popular brand, Asus is also a likely target. The AyySSHush campaign utilized authentication bypasses, brute-force logins, and a command-injection flaw (CVE-2023-39780) to backdoor over 9,000 routers, as we reported at the time. The backdoor was even able to survive firmware updates.

With the two router fixes came one for 13 motherboards, where a “physically proximate attacker” could “read or write arbitrary system memory by inserting a specially crafted device.” This flaw impacts many of Asus’s Z390 and C246 motherboards and is rated high severity at 7.0 out of 10, lower than the router flaws. It also requires physical access.

If you are at risk or potentially at risk, find the firmware update on Asus’s support page or your product’s page. For the affected motherboards, the fix is BIOS version 1502 for the WS Z390 Pro and 2203 for the other 12 boards. Routers that have reached end of life will not receive new firmware. For those, Asus advises the user to use strong, unique login and Wi-Fi passwords.

There's a private information leak most days, usually by way of misconfigured services or nasty security bugs. Sometimes, though, users will readily hand over private information without being aware of it. That's the case for over 300 organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies and a frontier AI lab, who collectively had 13,000+ private screenshots exposed — all thanks to their development AI agents being arguably too good at their jobs and performing them with little human oversight.

Besides showing pictures of internal and pre-release software, the leaked screenshots reportedly include corporate and client information, financial data, and even screen recordings for a money-movement interface. The report, called PixelLeak, comes from endpoint security firm Glow, and it details how the leaks happened. The root cause is surprisingly simple and likely to induce a forehead slap.

It's become customary in development work related to UI and UX (and other categories) to include screenshots showing previews or before/after comparisons of tweaked features, for review purposes. Said images travel as attachments to the respective code changes, also known as "pull requests" (PRs) in dev parlance.

When using GitHub (and potentially other code repository services), humans see a graphical interface for easily attaching an image to a PR. Meanwhile, bots are limited to using the command-line interface, which currently does not have that feature available for private repositories.

As the efficient and smart agents they are, the clankers came up with a simple solution: publish the PR as usual to the private repository, and include an image placeholder linking to a file that's hosted in a public repository instead. There, problem fixed! The user is happy and likely has no idea what happened unless they notice the problem somehow and start asking the bot some hard questions.

Glow says that in about a third of the affected companies, developers were using gitshot, a command-line tool for attaching screenshots, used in this instance to overcome the aforementioned limitation. Searching for images attached by the tool is quite easy, as one needs but look for the "_gitshot" tag. The report also indicates that in 93% of cases, images were found in repositories under direct control of the developer's username, rather than being tied to the company's GitHub account.

In one particular case, an agent skill (essentially long-winded prompts instructing a bot how to do something) was also an indirect source of leaked information. The agents started incorporating the image hosting workaround as a skill, and after a while, many of them were using it for every development ticket, leading to leaks of information about features months away from public release.

Glow provided sample reasoning output from an agent, explaining precisely why it uploaded the screenshots publicly:

"internal_sweeper is private, and GitHub cannot render images from a private repo in a PR description — its image proxy fetches anonymously, so anything committed here (branch, release asset, whatever) shows up broken for reviewers. The only way to satisfy both "reviewers see the images" and "nothing but index.html in the repo" was to host the PNGs elsewhere, so I created a new public repo, sweeper-demo/pr-assets, holding the two screenshots pinned to a commit SHA."

As mitigation measures, Glow first recommends checking that employees don't use repositories under their own accounts, auditing the accounts and code managed by employees no longer associated with the company, and curtailing the use of "shadow AI" — when employees unadvisedly sign up for their own AI tools without talking to IT first and neatly punch planet-sized holes in the firm's security and data privacy.

Additionally, Glow advises strong vetting of software and code libraries used for development, as well as careful reading of the instructions and rules of any agentic skills.

The U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC) experienced a data breach between October 2025 and July 2026, allowing unauthorized users to access and potentially exfiltrate data on 2.76 million records relating to living personnel, and an additional 294,000 records relating to deceased individuals. According to ABC News, some of the exposed information included Social Security numbers and the job details of both military and civilian personnel.

“A Defense Manpower Data Center information system experienced unauthorized access of personally identifiable information by a small number of unauthorized users between October 2025 and July 2026. Upon discovery, DMDC immediately remediated the vulnerability,” a U.S. defense official said in a statement. However, they also added that there hasn’t been any evidence of misuse of the compromised data at this time.

DMDC serves as the Pentagon’s central personnel database, storing information on active-duty and reserve members of the military, as well as civilian employees, contractors, retirees, veterans, and even military family members, and holds over 60 million records in its care. This makes any breach of its system potentially significant, putting the privacy and personal security of those affected at risk. But because the repository also lists the roles and job details of the affected personnel, it could also reveal the identities of people assigned to sensitive positions related to national security.

While it might be good news that there haven’t been any signs that the exposed information has been exploited, it could also mean that whoever was behind the breach is just sitting on the data for later use. The Pentagon also did not mention who was behind the hack, nor did it mention how it discovered the vulnerability.

Given that most governments rely on digital infrastructure for their day-to-day operations, one can expect that their adversaries, and sometimes even their allies, are always probing and looking for vulnerabilities in their systems. Chinese hackers reportedly breached the U.S. Treasury Department in early 2025, even going as far as hacking the Treasury Secretary’s PC. More recently, the CanisterWorm malware has spread and wiped Iranian machines for no reason, while the Middle Eastern country also claimed that Western-made routers from Cisco and others failed just as the U.S. and Israel began their bombing campaign against it during the first quarter of this year. At the same time, U.S. authorities released a warning that Iranian hackers are targeting Siemens controllers in a bid to sabotage critical infrastructure.

Even though the Pentagon claims it has already fixed the issue and stopped further information from leaking through this vulnerability, it cannot change exposed information like Social Security numbers and employment histories. This means that the affected people would need to remain more vigilant against criminals, intelligence services, and other threat actors long after this incident fades from the news cycle. And if an affected individual is in a sensitive position relating to national security, it's going to take more than a year of free credit monitoring to keep them safe.

Blockchain-assisted cyberattacks have risen more than fivefold since last year, driven largely by North Korean and Iranian nation-state actors and Russian-speaking criminal groups, according to a report by blockchain data and intelligence platform Chainalysis. Rather than storing malicious payloads on servers that are susceptible to disruption, the attackers store them on public, censorship-immune blockchains. The technique, named Blockchain Dead Drops (BDD), stores payloads in on-chain transactions and smart contracts where infected devices can retrieve them on demand.

What makes BDD particularly dangerous is that it gives cyberattack campaigns unprecedented durability. Because blockchain data is public, immutable, and replicated worldwide, takedowns become immensely difficult. Threat actors can use this resilient infrastructure for command and control without worrying about losing the layer to domain seizures, repository removals, hosting takedowns, and additional disruptions.

The report notes that the widespread availability of Chinese open-source AI tools has significantly lowered the technical barrier to entry for cybercrime. Meaning that less-experienced attackers can now launch complex cyberattacks, which is linked to a reported 440% rise in BDD attacks.

Understanding the Blockchain Dead Drops technique

While blockchain dead drops vary across cyberattack campaigns, attackers typically store either malware payloads or dynamic command-and-control (C2) configuration pointers on the blockchain itself. In C2 setups, the on-chain data does not carry out the attack. Instead, it holds configuration information, such as domains, IP addresses, or other pointers, that direct compromised devices to the attacker’s current infrastructure. Malware on the victim's machine retrieves and decodes this data, which then connects to the real C2 server off-chain, where subsequent commands and malicious activity take place.

In payload-delivery setups, attackers store malicious code or encrypted payload components on-chain for victim machines to retrieve and execute locally. In both cases, once the malware has what it needs, the operation moves off-chain, where the attacker executes the actual compromise, which, depending on the campaign, can mean infostealers targeting crypto wallets and credentials, or remote access trojans that give attackers persistent control over systems.

Chainalysis identified several techniques threat actors use to hide malware on-chain, primarily using transaction-based storage and contract-based storage. In transaction-based storage, attackers publish C2 configurations, payload references, or infrastructure pointers inside blockchain transactions for malware to retrieve later, embedding the data in fields such as memos or calldata. This can occur on a single chain or spread across several blockchains.

On the other hand, contract-based storage uses smart contracts as resilient storage for the same kinds of data, with the contract's state holding the current C2 pointer. This is the model behind EtherHiding, where malware queries the contract for up-to-date information, while the attackers' visible on-chain activity is typically limited to deploying and periodically updating the contract.

Beyond these two approaches, threat actors continue to develop new, less detectable ways to hide malicious data on-chain. One such technique involves “phantom wallets”, blockchain addresses that have no corresponding private key. Instead of placing their C2 server's IP address in a transaction or smart contract, attackers encode it directly into the bytes of the wallet address itself, then send zero-value transactions to that address. Malware on the victim's machine is programmed to decode the IP address from the phantom wallet and connect to the attacker's C2 server.

Nation-state actors are driving a surge in attacks

The BDD technique has been around for over a decade. One of the earliest instances was in 2013, when a Necurs botnet variant stored its C2 domain info on Namecoin, a Bitcoin fork. Then, in 2019, attackers encoded C2 IP addresses for banking malware into Bitcoin transactions. That same year, Glupteba crypto-mining botnet stored malicious info in Bitcoin’s OP_RETURN field.

EtherHiding, the implementation of BDD on EVM chains, began in Mid-2023, following Cloudflare crackdowns that blocked their infostealer malware distribution servers. The ClearFake malware crew moved malicious code into smart contracts on the BNB Smart Chain. This allowed the campaign to keep going, as the chain couldn't be taken offline. Within days, other groups began testing ways to replicate the move, and by late December 2023, the Smargaft DDoS botnet was also using smart contract-based C2 on BSC.

State-level actors entered the scene in 2024, when Iranian actors linked to the country's Ministry of Intelligence first embedded C2 data in Bitcoin transactions. By 2025, North Korean actors began using EtherHiding in fake job interview campaigns. Since then, daily malicious blockchain writes have increased from 2.06 to 11.1, a 440% increase that Chainalysis attributes to AI. Before the launch of powerful open-weight Chinese LLMs — which can be uncensored through a process known as abliteration — building effective BDDs required substantial cybersecurity and crypto experience. Now, far less experienced threat actors can deploy BDDs easily.

Tracking BDD activity across five major blockchains and over a dozen named malware strains, Chainalysis reports that by Q2 2026, “state-actor-linked groups were responsible for roughly two-thirds of new BDD activity each quarter, and half of total BDD activity,” despite only just entering the scene in mid-2024. The campaigns are being perpetrated by Iranian, North Korean, and Russian-speaking operators.

Circumventing blockchain dead drops

A seemingly obvious fix, blocking blockchain traffic, is out of the question. For example, cutting off Ethereum access would mean blocking every public RPC endpoint that providers such as Cloudflare and Alchemy run. This would also impact legitimate wallets and DeFi services. Even then, the attackers could just go back to running their own nodes off-chain. Similarly, restricting what can be written to a public blockchain at the protocol level is impractical, as the fundamental changes this would require would likely cause more harm than the malware.

This leaves detection, identifying the attackers, and disrupting the off-chain parts of the operation as the only viable options. In this case, the same blockchain properties that make BDD attractive to attackers work against them. Every time an operator rotates infrastructure by publishing a new transaction or updating a contract, the change is permanently recorded and timestamped on a public ledger. By tracing operator wallets, resolver contracts, funding sources, and update histories, investigators can link seemingly unrelated campaigns back to the same actors.

For organizations, one practical early-warning signal is outbound JSON-RPC traffic to public blockchain endpoints, particularly from machines with no legitimate reason to query a blockchain. A workstation or build server reading data from a smart contract should probably sound some warning bells. The technique also maps to an existing MITRE ATT&CK entry, T1102.001 (Web Service: Dead Drop Resolver), giving security teams an established framework for building detections.

In the case of individuals, it's important to note that BDD comes into play only after something malicious is already running on a device. The blockchain tells the malware where to go next, but it doesn't get the malware onto the machine in the first place. North Korea's fake job interview campaigns, for example, still require developers to first download and run malicious code. Therefore, being wary of unsolicited outreach — especially when it involves coding tests that require running unfamiliar repositories — remains the first and most effective line of defense.

What do you get when you cross a bored teenager with free time and excellent computer skills? A hack of a Microsoft database with trillions of records on hand and 25,000 records of employee data, of course. Future legend hacker Faav poked around Microsoft's supposedly internal Titan analytics platform, eventually finding that its user validation was... sub-optimal.

According to Faav, he's "spent the year hacking Microsoft off and on around school," digging up bugs on the Redmond firm's wares as well as Amazon, Google, Adobe, and others. Much like other hackers, he has his own set of tools, and predictably in this day and age, his sonic screwdriver is Antares, an AI orchestrator bot he concocted for the purpose of scanning and automating boring security legwork.

Antares found an endpoint URL in Titan that brought up an error message saying that a VPN was required. Just like a virtual pspspsps, this was enough to get Faav's attention. He got Antares to look for subdomains around this endpoint, coming up with one belonging to an Azure Cloud host, along with a corresponding Swagger/OpenAPI file listing four routes (Swagger is an industry-standard machine-readable instruction on how an API works, for easier third-party integration).

While three of those routes needed Azure Active Directory authentication, one did not, and its name was inspiring: /v2/Query. It also accepted raw SQL queries, prompting a collective facepalm from the audience. Faav still needed to know what to query for, and after clever usage of the Wayback Machine, he found a 2023 version of this login page, complete with a helpful Apache Superset configuration file describing the database schema, showing 56 table definitions.

He also found that this endpoint refused his queries due to the lack of a JWT (JSON Web Token) authentication, so he sicced Antares on it again for 10 days, with no success. Eventually, Faav had a flash of inspiration and realized that the way the server was responding implied that the token's digital signature wasn't being checked. So he just pretended his access token was for an administrator and was promptly let in. One handy "SHOW DATABASES" later, he was staring at 25,000 records of employee data, along with organization records, dashboards, and charts.

After exploring the database a little more, he found a particular data source for Bing analytics. Digging there and tallying up rows across tables, Faav saw he had access to a total of 17 trillion records total, and had to double-check this number and stop himself from yelling out and waking his parents at 2 am.

After reporting the problem to Microsoft's bug bounty program, he was awarded with $5,000 for his findings. In his blog post, he also points out that "AI and human intuition compounded here. Antares did ten days of work I didn’t have to [...] Its persistence, plus one human hunch, is what made this find possible."

A security researcher discovered a vulnerability in Flock’s website that gave him an access token without needing login credentials. The researcher used the information gleaned to build a map of Flock cameras and share it on a website he named the Flock Surveillance Map, which now lists the location of 335,701 cameras. Flock has now issued a trademark infringement complaint with the goal of having the researcher close the website.

According to The Intercept, Joshua Michael used this to query ArcGIS, a third-party mapping and geospatial layer that Flock uses, to retrieve a database of Flock devices in November 2025.

Michael said that he immediately informed the company about the security flaw. He said in his email, dated Nov. 13, 2025, that “all testing was strictly non-intrusive, limited to open unauthenticated endpoints, and did not involve bypassing authentication, modifying data, or invoking any billable ArcGIS or Google operations.” However, the company did not reply to his message, and it took him two more attempts before a representative responded. Flock said in its response, “Thank you for the findings. We are internally triaging them and will reach back out with next steps soon,” but the researcher said that the company still hasn’t replied to this day.

Flock apparently fixed the vulnerability in January of this year after Michael published his findings, but the researcher was able to exfiltrate a Flock device location database before that. This information has allowed him to build the Flock Surveillance Map website, which lists 335,701 cameras, presumably updated in December 2025.

The surveillance company said that it has never been hacked, that Flock information has never been leaked, and that the Flock Safety cloud platform “has never experienced a data breach,” but Michael says that this does not reflect reality. He told The Intercept that it made this announcement “after I pulled their database of devices.” “That leaves two possibilities,” said the researcher. “Either they knew and chose not to disclose it for fear of bad press, or they didn’t know I exfiltrated the data at all. The first is a transparency failure. The second is a detection failure with national security implications.”

This issue once again raises questions about the company’s cybersecurity and privacy measures. Hackers have recently discovered that the Flock cameras stored encryption keys directly on the device, which allowed them to extract more than 27,000 clips stored and find that it has taken more than 1.6 million images in a span of 21 days. There were also multiple instances of misuse, in which police officers used the system to stalk romantic partners, while a car reviewer was “ambushed” in a store parking lot and detained for an hour for a mistyped police report.

What’s more alarming was that Michael pointed out that the ubiquity of the system and the vulnerabilities he uncovered so far show that it could be used to track personnel. Soldiers and civilians working in the defense industry could potentially be observed going to and from 22 sensitive sites, including Eglin AFB, CIA Headquarters, FBI Headquarters, Joint Base Andrews, and even the Pentagon, with people living within a 20-mile radius of these sites having a 57.22% to 93.94% chance of passing a Flock camera and getting recorded in the system.

While Flock did not comment on The Intercept’s reporting before publication, Michael noted that he received a trademark infringement complaint on his site. Doppel, a cybersecurity company focusing on social engineering defense, reached out on behalf of the surveillance company and said that he’s using the trademark “FLOCK SAFETY” without authorization and that it may confuse its customers. Because of this, the firm requested that the Flock Surveillance Map website be taken down, despite a pop-up that appears on the website when accessed for the first time saying otherwise.

Factoring attacks against the RSA algorithm were generally considered infeasible, but that may change dramatically if the findings in a paper from UC San Diego (California) and Inria Nancy (France) prove correct after peer review. The paper outlines a new attack that breaks RSA in record time. That's concerning because RSA-based encryption was in use for quite some time, and although it's been generally deprecated in favor of ECC and post-quantum algorithms, it's still employed today in a substantial portion of services.

Assuming the research holds up and the attack conditions are met, the number of necessary operations for cracking an RSA-encrypted key (and thus, inspecting network traffic encrypted with it) drops dramatically. (From 2⁸⁰, 2¹¹², 2¹²⁸, and 2¹⁴⁴ down to 2⁶⁵, 2⁹⁰, 2¹⁰⁵, and 2¹¹⁹ — for 1024, 2048, 3072-, and 4096-bit key lengths, respectively.)

Even for the 1024-bit keys, performing 2⁶⁵ calculations is still a lot, but it starts getting into the range where it's feasible for an entity with large resources at their disposal, like a number of state actors. Crucially, the paper indicates that the algorithms the team used are far from optimized and could hypothetically be significantly sped up after optimization passes, potentially with the help of AI tools and by leveraging GPUs for the task.

The attack only works against the textbook (or "raw") variant of RSA, which isn't widely used for commonplace computing like website certificates and remote access, but is nevertheless present in services like Cloudflare Privacy Pass, iCloud Private Relay, and Private Cloud Compute. Equipment and services using PKCS #11, like many smart cards, USB security tokens, code-signing pipelines, hardware security (HSM) and trusted platform (TPM) modules also use this variation. But fulfilling the attack conditions is much easier said than done.

In order to reach a point where an attacker can decipher data, they first must perform an exceedingly high number of queries against the key they're attacking, collecting enough data points from the key's oracle. In practical terms, this often means repeatedly poking a live server that's using that key to encrypt traffic, billions of times over, though it can also be done against a standalone hardware device.

In the practical context of an encryption algorithm, an oracle takes a number in, runs it through a computation involving a private key, and spits it back out, without revealing its key. The textbook variant of RSA under attack here lets the oracle be queried with any number, thus allowing the attacker to collect enough data points to perform the mathematical wizardry described in the paper. They can then proceed to throw a lot of computing power to ultimately inspect whichever traffic they captured that was using that same encryption key.

As network administrators have certainly figured out by now, running billions of queries against a live service is almost guaranteed to earn them an IP ban, among other measures. It's a reasonable assumption that entities like Cloudflare and Apple have those kinds of controls in place. Still, not everyone does, especially in the case of key management services that aren't closely monitored, including hardware-based ones. The scientists worked their magic on Thales Luna HSMs, in both hardware and online service form.

Although the bar for a practical application of this attack remains quite high, the key finding is that it may be significantly lowered. This opens the possibility that oracle data collected today may be used to decrypt saved traffic in a matter of weeks or months, especially in the near future as hardware advances. It's also possible that other scientists can take this idea and expand on it, finding additional flaws.

If you bought anything on Asus' web store, you should check your inbox. The company has reported that its online shop suffered a data breach, and that contact details and order records "may have been accessed."

Asus says that no payment or financial information was revealed. However, Asus is not saying how large the breach was, or which regions had records leaked. The firm only indicates "part of the Asus eShop environment," a statement that is quite vague. Since the eShop is segregated by region and country, there's also no word on which locations were affected.

No information was offered on the duration of the breach or who may be behind the attack. There is no publicly posted statement, except for what people who have received the email have shown.

Asus says it "promptly took steps" to contain the breach, and that it has not identified any ongoing access. The firm also states that an investigation is in progress, and is advising customers to be extra careful, as the leaked information could be used to convincingly impersonate Asus and used for phishing attacks. For example, someone claiming to be from Asus may reach out about a recent order and offer your name, address, and order information as proof they're legitimate.

Anyone with compromised credentials should keep an eye out for unexpected emails, phone calls, SMS, or online messages claiming to be from Asus. Don't click any links or scan any QR codes contained in those messages — be sure to manually visit the websites in question in your browser.

Likewise, don't hand out any personal info or passwords during any phone calls, much less accept any requests for remote access software unless you are fully aware you're speaking to actual support. As always, be sure to enable two-factor authentication (aka 2FA or MFA) so that thieves can't access your accounts even if they hold your password.

Security agencies in Japan, the U.S., Australia, and Germany warned that the North Korean “WaterPlum” cyber actor group has been installing malware on applicants to fake job postings and stealing their credentials and cryptocurrency holdings. The advisory [PDF] says more than 30,000 devices across 100 countries have already been infected and more than 7,000 cryptocurrency wallets have been compromised, leading to losses of $10.71 million.

It’s believed the stolen cryptocurrency was funneled to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) government, which also uses fake IT personnel working at legitimate companies to net $500 million annually. The operation also steals credentials and personal data, which it later uses to apply for openings at Western companies. Amazon has seen an example of this in late 2025, with over 1,800 suspected North Korean applications blocked by the company since April 2024.

The attacks occur when fake recruiters ask legitimate applicants to complete coding assignments and other tests to evaluate their skills. However, these often have hidden malware that gives the attackers access to the victim’s computer. These persistent remote access trojans (RATs) allow the WaterPlum group to access an infected system even months after the interview. Since the compromised computer is likely the same device that the targeted applicant will use once they get a legitimate job at another company, it could also be used by the North Koreans as a springboard to attack the systems of and steal credentials from their future clients.

International agencies say these fake recruiters often target software developers and IT professionals with attractive openings, using the names of legitimate AI, cryptocurrency, and NFT companies and posting openings on online job platforms, social media, gig work platforms, and freelance marketplaces. These fake IT workers and similar schemes are used by the hermit kingdom to generate revenue, especially since it has been largely excluded from the wider international economy due to sanctions.

Many companies are aware of this and are taking steps to protect themselves against similar tactics, but it’s probably harder for individual users who are simply looking for opportunities online to do so. Potential applicants can protect themselves by applying only directly with the company and on legitimate platforms, and if they’re unsure about an opening, they should contact the company directly to confirm its legitimacy. If they decide to go to an interview, it would also be wise to set up an isolated virtual machine just for that purpose, giving them an additional layer of protection against potential attacks.

Phoronix reported that Intel appears to have suspended its bounty program that once paid up to $100,000 per bug. Intel’s replacement for the Intigriti program offers no rewards, and no reason was given for the change. The Intigriti site states that it “is a responsible disclosure program without bounties,” confirming the report. A check of the site shows that the bounty board is still up but lists the program as suspended.

Intel’s site still lists details on the bug bounty program with awards that range “from $500 up to $100,000, based on quality of the report” and other factors. This program launched, invite-only, in 2017, and became open to all researchers in 2018, covering software, hardware, firmware, and open-source projects. Almost half of the CVEs Intel addressed in 2020, 105 out of 231, arrived through the bounty program, Intel said.

The old bounty board split vulnerabilities into four tiers, which were priced accordingly: Tier 1 from $2,000 to $100,000, Tier 2 $1,000 to $30,000, Tier 3 $500 to $10,000, and Tier 4 $250 to $5,000. Intel expanded the program’s scope to include web services between mid-2025 and October 2025, but it said in a January 6 update on Intigriti that it was evaluating “enhanced bounty and bonus criteria.” In about eight months, the bounties went from evaluation to suspension.

The outlet speculated that with the Linux kernel and other open-source projects being “bombarded” with security reports, it would not be surprising if AI bug-seeking played a role. Linux kernel CVEs have approached 2,000 per release, a fourfold increase from about 500, with maintainers “completely overwhelmed.” Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel, has said that duplicate AI reports on the kernel security list are “almost entirely unmanageable.” Curl, for one, closed its bounty program due to AI slop floods.

As a point of reference, HackerOne’s Internet Bug Bounty (IBB) program paused submissions effective March 27. “AI-assisted research is expanding vulnerability discovery across the ecosystem, increasing both coverage and speed,” HackerOne said on the program’s page. HackerOne is still paying queued submissions, with rewards from $68 to $2,257 based on severity. This supports the idea that AI has affected software programs, but it may not be as significant for hardware and firmware.

Intel’s next steps are worth watching to see if this suspension ends up permanent in a fast-changing landscape. Researchers are still able to submit vulnerabilities through the new program; it just offers no bounties for them. Checking AMD’s Intigriti page today shows that the program there is also suspended, although Intigriti does have an auto-suspend mechanism. This follows an earlier payment dispute over scope with a bounty hunter in June.

Even if AI tools carry a stigma and may be a factor in these recent events, they have proven handy. AI company OpenAI paid Hacktron researchers a $6,500 bounty for a discovered exploit chain using rival Anthropic’s model. Torvalds, who previously dismissed AI as mostly marketing, has also called AI “clearly a useful” tool, and acceptance in the field may grow.

A team of white-hat hackers from cybersecurity startup Hackron AI has successfully hacked OpenAI using Claude tools. In an X post on September 18, the team claimed they breached OpenAI's internal codebase on July 25 and gained access to the ChatGPT and Codex accounts of some OpenAI employees. They established proof of the hack via a pull request to OpenAI's private repository before reporting the vulnerabilities to OpenAI. The company reportedly fixed the issue within 14 hours of the report and paid the researchers a $6,500 bounty.

Operating as hackers under OpenAI’s bug bounty program, Hacktron researchers uncovered critical vulnerabilities that granted them access to internal employee tools and the ability to compromise private software repositories. The researchers exploited a single sign-on (SSO) misconfiguration and a Remote Code Execution (RCE) flaw in Discourse, a third-party platform that powers OpenAI’s community discussion forum. The chain of attack was as follows: HEIF upload → libheif heap overflow → RCE → OpenAI SSO flaw → ChatGPT/Codex takeover → connected GitHub → internal PR.

First, the researchers uploaded a malicious HEIF (High Efficiency Image File) image to the forum as a profile picture. When Discourse’s server-side software tried to process the image using an outdated libheif package, it triggered a heap overflow memory vulnerability, causing the library to crash and mismanage internal system memory. The researchers carefully orchestrated the memory crash to achieve remote code execution. After gaining access to the forum's local server environment, the researchers intercepted the server’s environmental configurations and session handling, discovering an SSO flaw in which the forum's authentication system did not adequately validate or isolate user sessions from other OpenAI services.

Armed with session tokens hijacked from the local forum server database, the hackers exploited the SSO flaw to impersonate a real OpenAI employee, allowing them to bypass traditional login screens and infiltrate a highly privileged internal account linked to OpenAI's development teams. As many tech companies unify authentication across corporate apps, the hijacked employee account was directly linked to OpenAI’s corporate enterprise systems, including GitHub, Slack, and email accounts. The researchers were able to access OpenAI’s massive private codebase, where they initiated an internal Pull Request as definitive proof of the exploit.

Similar to an incident last month in which China-linked hackers used AI to carry out the first-ever end-to-end autonomous cyberattack on Taiwan's government, the Hacktron hack also used artificial intelligence. The researchers constructed the exploit pipeline using Anthropic's Claude Opus 5 model, after attempts with Opus 4.8 failed. After they found the unpatched libheif library on OpenAI's forum, they fed the raw server data into the model, asking it to write an exploit for the bug.

The model analyzed the memory structure and successfully calculated how to trigger the heap buffer overflow. It generated the precise, weaponized code required to create the malicious HEIF image. The human hackers uploaded it to the forum — triggering the Remote Code Execution — then manually executed the rest of the “attack.” An important clarification is that they used an authorized, cybersecurity-configured version of Claude, which relaxes certain cyber restrictions for authorized researchers.

After gaining access, the researchers say they immediately halted testing and reported the vulnerabilities to OpenAI and Discourse — both of which have fixed their sides of the issue — without studying or downloading OpenAI's source code. From the initial finding to full resolution took 72 hours, after which OpenAI rewarded the researchers with a $6,500 bounty. The incident further highlights ongoing concerns over the risk of AI-powered cyberattacks. Recently, rogue OpenAI agents autonomously breached HuggingFace. US frontier AI companies are now warning against sophisticated distillation attacks.

Flock says that its cameras are protected by on-device encryption, and even though a security researcher noted some flaws in its system, the company said that physical access is still required to exploit them and that the images are only briefly retained on the device before they’re forwarded to the cloud. However, 404 Media says that a hacking group called stegan0gram found out that this wasn’t the case after they took down a Flock camera positioned over a roadway and analyzed the data stored inside it.

While the hacking group failed to access the most sensitive data stored on the Flock camera, they were still able to access its Android operating system and found two storage partitions, labeled “vendor” and “media.” The latter was found to contain an encryption key that unlocked another partition containing all the media files from the camera. 404 Media said that that particular Flock camera captured about 1.6 million images across 21 days, detecting around 50,200 vehicles and, more concerningly, 11 people. There were also 27,321 video clips saved on the device — MP4 files with a 1024 x 768 resolution that lasted about a second or two.

Abilities like reading license plates and describing vehicle characteristics like color, make, and model are done on Flock’s servers, but these cameras still retain some edge AI capabilities. This includes detecting people, vehicles, bicycles, and plate-like shapes, which it then crops and sends to the company servers, alongside the original images. Although the software was found to have some facial detection capabilities, the publication said that this was the stock capabilities included in the operating system and wasn’t used by the camera.

This discovery by the hacking group raises another issue with Flock’s system, which is facing a lot of controversies when it comes to privacy and misuse. For example, several police officers have been arrested for using it to stalk romantic partners, while another incident over a mistyped license plate resulted in the unnecessary “ambush” of a car reviewer. Because of this, some towns and cities have ended their contracts with the company, while other people are taking things into their own hands to blind the controversial cameras.

Nevertheless, some critics say that those who are against the deployment of these systems should refrain from damaging or sabotaging these devices, as doing so will only make the authorities feel that these systems are needed. “I think that type of vigilantism will only crystallize the police and the state at large in their belief that this tool is necessary,” former Pawtucket, Rhode Island, police officer Noel Pichardo told the news website. “The longer the state continues to ignore the groanings of their constituents who are against this type of surveillance, the more this will happen.”

Anyone keeping track of world news in the early 2010s, and reports on tech in particular, has probably heard about Stuxnet. That malware spawned a large number of conspiracy theories — with the kicker that some of them were actually true. The malware targeted Iranian nuclear facilities and is believed to be the first digital worm to cause direct physical damage in meatspace. An unknown security researcher has now published a source code reverse-engineering of Stuxnet in all its glory.

The worm's ultimate target, allegedly a successful one, were industrial controllers from Siemens that were reportedly used in Iranian's Natanz nuclear enrichment plant. Once it reached the target, Stuxnet's payload manipulated the frequency converters in industrial centrifuges, in a bid to subtly damage the rotors — all while keeping the plant staff in the dark by reporting normal operation.

The repository contains build instructions so interested techies can try it out for themselves and learn all about its inner workings. You'll need a Windows XP or Windows 7 virtual machine, and for obvious reasons, you shouldn't configure any network connectivity for it. To witness the full effects of the payload rather than just the spreading mechanisms, you'll need the appropriate Siemens software, and ideally hardware — though we figure that industrial-scale centrifuges aren't exactly common in techies' cable drawers.

In its heyday, Stuxnet spread via three mechanisms. The primary infection vector was USB sticks with Windows shortcuts and autorun.inf files. Upon plugging one of those sticks in, just viewing the drive's contents would immediately trigger infection thanks to a zero-day vulnerability.

Infected systems then autonomously tried to spread the worm further via the network using a zero-day Windows Print Spooler vulnerability that would let an attacker write system files into any machine sharing a printer. It would also copy itself into accessible network shares. To evade Windows driver signature checks, Stuxnet used two digital certificates stolen from Realtek and JMicron.

The worm also had code to inject itself into Siemens software, by way of the WinCC SQL Server database, and embedding its code in Step 7 project files that automatically ran when engineers opened them. Since those files were almost guaranteed to be shared among more than one engineer, it made for an excellent internal infection vector that didn't depend on having network share control.

The final step was taking charge of the DLL that communicated with the actual centrifuges and injecting malicious code into the PLCs (Programmable Logic Controllers) of those machines to stealthily mess with the rotors.

Stuxnet was part of Operation Olympic Games, an alleged coordinated effort between the U.S. and Israel to try and curb Iran's purported progress in creating nuclear weapons at its Natanz facility. The initiative seemingly ran under both the Bush and Obama administrations, and was supposedly a way to dissuade Israel from launching its own preemptive strike against Iran. The software was allegedly developed by both the Pentagon and Israel's Unit 8200, and was reportedly successful in bringing down about 10% of Natanz' centrifuges by ultimately seriously damaging their rotors.

However, the worm had a nasty bug: it didn't have sufficient checks about which environment it was in, and failed to notice it was no longer in a local network environment. When engineers took their laptops home, it escaped out to the internet at large, at which point security researchers worldwide let out a collective "huh, that's odd" and proceeded to investigate. Mercifully, the worm contained a hard-coded self-destruct date set for June 24, 2012.

A federal grand jury in California has indicted Russian citizen Searzhudin Tamirlanovich Aktulaev for allegedly conducting phishing attacks that stole data from over 80,000 computers between June 2016 and November 2017, using TVRAT and DarkVNC remote-control malware. Detailed in a Department of Justice press release on September 1st, the indictment — filed in June 2021 and released September 2026 — lists charges of “Conspiracy, Transmission of a Program, Information, Code, and Command to Cause Damage to a Protected Computer, and Aggravated Identity Theft, among other offenses.”

Aktulaev was extradited to the U.S. in August 2026, five years after his arrest in Cyprus in May 2021. He made his first appearance in federal court in San Francisco — after which he was remanded to federal custody — and is scheduled to appear in district court on October 5, 2026. The arrest was made after an FBI investigation, and the case is being prosecuted by the National Security, Cyber, and Special Prosecutions Section.

According to the indictment, Aktulaev “conspired to exploit the online message platform of a well-known freelance employment technology company, located in the Northern District of California, to spread malware to approximately 80,000 freelancers”. He sent messages containing malicious Microsoft Excel attachments, using approximately 255 fake user accounts. Once opened, the attachments prompted users to run a macro that then downloaded malware from the Internet, mirroring a hack earlier this year in which an unofficial 7-zip.com website served malware-laden downloads for over a week.

The attack used TVRAT (TeamViewer Remote Access Trojan) and DarkVNC malware, both of which grant the attacker remote control of the infected system. TVRAT exploits TeamViewer, while DarkVNC exploits VNC Viewer, popular remote administration tools. The malware stole and uploaded data from the victims' computers to a command-and-control server, from which Aktulaev and his co-conspirators extracted the stolen data to “commit fraud and other criminal activities”.

The indictment says thousands of computers infected by the TVRAT malware were “calling back” to a command-and-control domain hosted in the United States, which was paid for using virtual currency. Roughly half of the victims were in the United States, many of whom were Northern District of California residents, according to the indictment.

“A database found on the command-and-control domain revealed thousands of victims. Additionally, a shared document on the email account used in the criminal activities contained information to include e-commerce login credentials, as well as personally identifiable information (“PII”) for hundreds of victims,” the press release said.

If convicted, Aktulaev could spend up to 20 years behind bars and pay a $250,000 fine or twice the total illicit gains for the conspiracy to commit wire fraud charge alone. The other charges carry terms ranging from two to twenty years in prison, in addition to fines. Meanwhile, the FBI is currently investigating another hack in which 153 million US and Canadian drivers’ licenses were leaked on a Russian cybercrime forum.

More than 153 million US and Canadian driver’s licenses, as well as other identity documents, have reportedly become available for purchase on the dark web for a limited time. According to cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs, the service was called Nexus, and although it’s no longer available at the time of writing, it claimed to have possessed 153 million driver’s licenses, 10 million ID cards, 1.9 million travel documents, 1.3 million international driver’s licenses, 579k medical cards, 429k common access cards, 91k residence cards, 77k employment authorization records, and 5 million other documents, allegedly sourced from an ID-authentication service based in Louisiana.

The service was advertised on the Russian cybercrime forum Exploit, where whoever was promoting it posted the driver’s license of Krebs as a free sample, which caught the journalist’s attention. He was also able to see a preview of U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s information on the database — a concerning breach of security for someone with such a sensitive position in the government. After further investigation, they concluded that the service seemed to have possessed legitimate data, especially after searching for the data of several of his friends and family members with their consent. One thing that all the people he found in the database had in common was that they all used Hertz to rent a vehicle.

Krebs also talked with security and privacy researcher Zach Edwards, who said that their information was also found on Nexus. Edwards said that they did not rent a car recently but used their ID at a Planet13 marijuana dispensary. The time stamps found on the scanned images of the driver’s licenses and other identity documents coincide with the time that the victims used their IDs at the said companies, confirming that they were the sources of the leaks. However, Planet13 and Hertz do not do their own authentication; instead, they contract a service provider for the service. Now, it turns out that both Planet13 and Hertz used the company for identity verification and ID-authentication — IDScan.

Based on the evidence gathered by Krebs, it seems that the leak is centered around the company. He has already contacted the company about the issue, and they said they were investigating the matter. “At this point I’m not able to share any additional information, but the updates you have provided have been welcome, and helpful to our team’s investigation,” Jillian Kossman, a marketing and operations leader at idscan.net, told the journalist. The FBI has also started looking into the leak, with its New Orleans field office opening an official investigation into the breach.

The massive amount of data that was briefly available on the dark web is certainly concerning. A similar data breach hit Discord after its third-party service provider was hit and resulted in the exposure of 70,000 government IDs. Incidents like these have got privacy experts concerned with the push for online age verification requirements, which is why the EFF is asking the California governor to veto the law requiring this.

Aside from privacy-invasive checks and stepping on First Amendment rights, the leakage of sensitive data like this could increase incidents of stolen identity and more. Driver’s licenses are often widely accepted for opening credit lines and bank accounts, with both photographic, UV, and IR scans available on many of the leaked licenses. Aside from that, it could also potentially compromise the privacy and security of vulnerable people, like those fleeing domestic violence and those who are under the witness protection program.

A new local‑only password manager, notes app, and secure vault that hides your secrets in an ordinary-looking .PNG image file is now available. BlindLock does all this and more with an option to bind to your hardware using TPM2.0, Secure Enclave, or StrongBox. No cloud storage or central vault account is required, and the dev is selling lifetime licenses at $49 (for now). There is an interactive online demo, with nothing uploaded or downloaded, as well as a downloadable full 7-day demo available.

BlindLock’s solo developer David Domingo indicates that one of the main drivers behind his efforts to create this application was the theft of customer vault backups from LastPass in late 2022. What happened to LastPass could have also happened to 1Password, Dashlane, even Proton Pass, reckons Domingo. “When your vault sits on someone else's server, you inherit every risk that server carries: employee access, infrastructure vulnerabilities, government subpoenas, supply chain attacks, and the simple mathematical reality that a server holding tens of millions of vaults is a far more attractive target than your laptop,” says the BlindLock dev on his blog.

So, three independent layers of security apply to your BlindLock vault. It is invisible in its ordinary-looking PNG carrier, not just encrypted. BlindLock doesn’t run a central vault database, so there is nothing for attackers to steal from BlindLock servers and crack later. Your resting vault file uses 256-bit authenticated encryption and already includes NIST post-quantum components. It is also bound to your device. “The vault opens only when three things match: the carrier file, your master password and your authorized device,” asserts the BlindLock app page. “A copied file alone is not enough to gain access.”

BlindLock’s feature set is pretty broad for a new offering. Fully encrypted inside your chosen .PNG holiday snap or cat photo is a password manager, Markdown-supporting secure notes, a built-in 2FA authenticator, and an encrypted file vault (for any type of file), and there is support for an optional fourth-factor security key like a YubiKey or Google Titan, etc.

Accessing your BlindLock data requires three things at once: the carrier file, your master password, and the authorized device - the vault key is sealed to that device's security chip, which is TPM 2.0, Secure Enclave, or StrongBox depending on the platform. You can avoid overly bloating your central .PNG file by squirreling larger files separately in their own encrypted containers. BlindLock employs a hidden volumes system not unlike VeraCrypt for these containers. Domingo admits these are “not magically unfindable,” but are Argon2id-hardened, 256-bit authentication-encrypted and stored inconspicuously. For device loss or migration, users must create an encrypted BlindLock backup and keep its recovery phrase separately.

As per the intro, BlindLock is being introduced as a one-time $49 purchase. This perpetual pricing plan only applies to the first 1,000 licenses. There will be three waves: “the first 100 at $49, the next 350 at $89, and the final 550 at $109. After that, BlindLock is subscription-only,” says Domingo. The independent dev wants to lay a solid financial foundation, so development of BlindLock can continue.

This article is merely sharing the news about BlindLock and shouldn't be taken as a recommendation. Please check out the online and downloadable demos and judge whether it works for you and offers the features you want for the price.

Security researchers have found three different backdoor-like implants hidden in firmware for routers manufactured by Shenzhen Zhibotong Electronics, better known as ZBT. The hardware is sold around the world under a bewildering array of brands, meaning you may not even realize you're using a ZBT router. The research, published by security firm VulnCheck, began with a Zbtlink AX3000 router. Researchers found that its firmware contained an implant that they dubbed ENDLESSDOORS, as it automatically phones home to a command-and-control server and can execute arbitrary commands as root.

ENDLESSDOORS is essentially a remote-control system embedded directly into the router's firmware. It starts automatically at boot and disguises itself as a normal Linux kernel process called kworker. The router periodically connects to a hard-coded server and announces itself. There's no meaningful authentication or encryption involved. Commands received from the server are passed directly to a shell running as root, and the implant can also establish an interactive root shell.

VulnCheck demonstrated the problem by impersonating the command server and taking control of its own test router. In other words, this isn't merely a theoretical vulnerability; if an attacker can hijack the connection to the implant's command server, they can obtain complete control of the router. The researchers found ENDLESSDOORS embedded in firmware for 20 ZBT models, including the Z8102AX, WG3526, WE826-T3-DSIM, and several other cellular routers. The same hardware is also sold under other names because ZBT manufactures routers for OEM and ODM customers. VulnCheck assigned the issue CVE-2026-66747, with a CVSS score of 9.3, but that wasn't the end of the investigation.

VulnCheck subsequently bought an $88 Deep Orange cellular router from a US seller on Amazon and discovered that it was actually a white-labeled ZBT-WE826-T2. Its 2019 firmware was too old to contain ENDLESSDOORS, but instead, it contained two other implants that the firm designated DARKLANTERN and SPEAKINGSTONE.

DARKLANTERN is the particularly straightforward one. Operating as the infosrvd service, it opens a listener on the WAN via UDP port 9992 and accepts commands directly from the Internet without authentication. An attacker only needs to send a fixed 19-byte info probe to force the router to reveal identifying information like its model, firmware version, MAC address, and uptime.

Researchers found that the backdoor's meager security mechanisms could be trivially bypassed: its command payload checksum relies on a static, hardcoded salt ("mqonu.com"), and its internal MAC address filter can be entirely circumvented simply by submitting a MAC field of all zeroes. This allows any remote attacker to easily forge a packet and execute arbitrary commands as root. VulnCheck scanned the Internet and found 203 exposed DARKLANTERN instances in 22 countries, spread across 16 router models.

Meanwhile, SPEAKINGSTONE works differently and is even more concerning. Rather than waiting for an attacker to connect to a listening port, it runs as the yunmgrd service and periodically beacons outbound to ZBT's command-and-control infrastructure over UDP port 10000. That makes it useful even when the router sits securely behind NAT or a firewall, as it relies on a custom format dubbed "zbtProtocol" to push full device fingerprints directly to the remote server. SPEAKINGSTONE is also considerably more capable than simply providing a remote shell. According to VulnCheck, its command protocol allows remote operators to execute arbitrary commands, steal WAN PPPoE credentials, rewrite a DNS hijack list, and establish a reverse SSH tunnel.

The researchers also discovered a backup command server domain embedded in the malware that nobody had registered, so naturally, they registered it themselves. VulnCheck set up a server capable of speaking SPEAKINGSTONE's protocol at the newly registered "www.findmyipaddr.com" and watched the infected routers start calling home.

By August 21st, 392 unique devices had connected to the sinkhole. Fully 390 of those 392 were located in China, with the vast majority using China Mobile's network. Most of those devices were the same router model running the same firmware, suggesting a large-scale carrier deployment rather than random consumer infections. VulnCheck describes this particular deployment as "domestic Chinese surveillance technology."

Now, that doesn't mean every ZBT router is a Chinese surveillance device. VulnCheck found ZBT hardware being sold under numerous independent brands worldwide, including Lippert Components, Wave WiFi, OneX in Australia, MoFI Network in Canada, Digineo in Germany, and more. Vulncheck explicitly notes that some of the firmware they examined did not contain the implants, calling out MOFI Network in particular for creating its own firmware which, when examined, "didn't contain any implants."

The problem is that ZBT's OEM business makes the hardware's origin surprisingly difficult to identify. The same underlying platforms have appeared under brands including WiFlyer, Deep Orange, Cioswi, CroSkylink and KuWFi, among others.

So the really unsettling part isn't that VulnCheck found three vulnerabilities in an obscure router. It's that these aren't conventional vulnerabilities where someone accidentally forgot to bounds-check a buffer. These are pieces of software deliberately included in the router firmware that provide remote access to the device. We would normally call this malware, but ZBT has described ENDLESSDOORS as an after-sales technical-support mechanism.

VulnCheck's counterargument is pretty compelling; the firm says that whatever its intended purpose, the mechanisms don't securely authenticate the party controlling them. An attacker who can hijack the communications can potentially exercise the same privileges, and because ZBT hardware is frequently sold under other brands, simply not buying something with “ZBT” printed on the box isn't necessarily enough.

If you own one of the affected devices, of which you can find a list at VulnCheck's blog entries for the vulnerabilities (ENDLESSDOORS and the other two), the only real solution is to simply replace it, because the security holes were installed at the factory; it's not as if installing a different firmware version is going to restore trust. Even if your device isn't listed, for anyone running a cheap cellular router, travel router, RV router, or other piece of networking hardware from an obscure OEM, you need to keep in mind that the brand on the plastic probably isn't the company that wrote the firmware, and the fellow who wrote the firmware may not share your values with regard to freedom or privacy.

The U.S. Department of Justice and FBI revealed in a statement Wednesday that it had seized domains related to platforms that it claims were operated by China state-sponsored hackers. The press release says the Federal Reserve, Department of Energy, Department of Justice, Department of Health and Human Services, NIH, NASA, and U.S. Senate all experienced "computer intrusion activity."

The Justice Department says a state-sponsored group known as QTFY is responsible for the intrusion, which the U.S. government claims came to be through two pieces of malware: QTRouter and QScan. The release says the People's Republic of China (PRC) Ministry of State Security was among QTFY's paying customers.

According to the U.S. government, QScan "scans and automatically infects thousands of [IoT] devices worldwide." Those devices are then added to the QTRouter network. It's a botnet, but the Justice Department also calls it an "obfuscation layer" to mask the origin of malicious traffic. QTFY's system has been used to compromise U.S. critical infrastructure since 2018, according to the affidavit.

The group is said to be employed by the Nanjing Xinjiuwei Network Technology Company, which we were unable to find any information on.

As part of the action, the Justice Department seized three domains: qtproxy.xyz, qt-proxy.org, and qt-team.com. Those domains now show the seizure notice you can see below.

The investigation into the group began as early as 2019, when the FBI looked into a system intrusion at NASA related to the CVE-2019-11510, which was subsequently patched. The FBI traced the activity back to two Gmail accounts and a phone number with a +86 country code (the code for the PRC).

The group allegedly rented infrastructure from commercial platforms, leading to a series of abuse complaints to the emails by hosting provider Hostwinds. The FBI says the group obtained the three domains it seized between 2022 and 2024, registering them with domain registrar Namecheap and paying through PayPal.

Although the PRC routinely denies hacking activities in the U.S., Chinese officials reportedly acknowledged that the government was behind a series of attacks on U.S. infrastructure late last year. In 2024, 30-year-old wiretap systems deployed by the U.S. government in telecom and internet providers were reportedly compromised by Chinese attackers.

Chinese multinational tech giant Alibaba has been accused of tracking web users after a developer discovered its global online marketplace running hidden audio processes that could be used for sophisticated audio fingerprinting. While investigating an issue with his wireless headphones, Matt Callaghan found that opening an AliExpress webpage in Firefox or Chrome interfered with the multipoint Bluetooth audio feature.

As Callaghan explains in his blog post, “Normally the PC takes priority playing audio, with my phone being able to play audio when nothing is playing on the PC. Usually I listen to music on my phone but with notifications or YouTube playing through the PC.” However, shortly after loading the AliExpress homepage, audio from his phone would stop playing, despite no media playing on his PC. Closing the AliExpress tab immediately fixed the issue, while muting the tab, browser, or Windows did not seem to resolve it.

Their investigation began by inspecting various conventional media elements; however, he did not find any unusual activity. He also zeroed in on the fact that the problem would not begin immediately, but rather after the webpage had been sitting idle for a few seconds. He then moved on to inspect the Web Audio API to wrap the AudioContext constructor so that it would record whenever a page created an audio-processing context. They additionally wrapped AudioNode.prototype.connect() to see whether anything was connected to the context's audio destination.

Eventually, Callaghan found that the page was loading two suspicious scripts named collina.js and fireyejs.js, which appeared to be part of Alibaba's browser security and anti-abuse tooling. With some help from AI during his research, he found that the scripts built a Web Audio graph using a sawtooth oscillator to generate a waveform. An analyzer then measured the results after they passed through the browser's audio implementation, while another script read the resulting frequency data. The scripts also set the volume gain to zero, meaning there was no audible sound or noise, even though the browser continued actively processing the Web Audio graph.

Unlike autoplaying videos, there is no media element playing, which is why the browser's tab mute control does not help. However, the webpage continues performing live audio processing, keeping the Bluetooth audio path active and preventing multipoint Bluetooth headphones from switching between devices. Further investigation also uncovered code collecting information related to screen dimensions, device memory, browser plugins, WebGL rendering, supported audio and video formats, browser performance, mouse events, and more. The scripts also appear to serialize and encrypt the collected data before sending it to Alibaba's telemetry services using fetch() or sendBeacon() functions.

Following the discovery, Firefox said on X that its browser includes built-in protections against fingerprinting. The company pointed to a blog post explaining that Firefox 118, released in September 2023, introduced additional protections against Web Audio-based fingerprinting. Brave also claims to block audio fingerprinting by default. According to the browser maker, it does this by injecting randomized data into the browser's audio output, making the fingerprint appear different to websites and resetting the data between sessions.

Various U.S. agencies just released a warning claiming that Iranian hackers are targeting Siemens S7-series programmable logic controllers (PLCs). According to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) advisory, hackers are using publicly available information on these widely used devices to develop exploits that would enable remote access and control. They’re also using AI tools, allowing them to identify additional attack vectors and possibly adapt to any defensive measures operators may have taken to protect their systems.

“The actors leverage Internet scanning services to find Internet-exposed PLCs running outdated software or that are otherwise poorly protected,” the agency said in its warning. “The U.S. critical infrastructure sectors most targeted by this threat activity include Critical Manufacturing, Energy, Water and Wastewater, Chemical, Food and Agriculture, and Commercial Facilities. This is not a theoretical risk — it is an active threat. Depending on the specific circumstances, exploitation of poorly protected PLCs could lead to disruption of critical industrial processes, safety incidents, downtime or equipment damage, compromise of sensitive data, compliance violations, and cascading impacts across interconnected systems.”

The warning comes from multiple government agencies, not just CISA. The advisory was also co-authored by the National Security Agency (NSA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Department of Energy (DOE), and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), underscoring how serious this issue could become. Because of this, operators using Siemens S7 PLCs (and other PLCs operating critical infrastructure) are advised to keep their equipment updated with the latest applicable security patches, isolate it from the internet as much as possible, protect it with strong access controls, and deploy cybersecurity measures to monitor industrial control systems (ICS) for any anomalies and possible malicious activity.

What makes the threat especially dangerous is that the use of AI tools could enable potential attackers to make malicious files look and behave like legitimate monitoring tools. They achieve this by using open-source industrial automation libraries, making it easier for unsuspecting users to fall victim to their attacks. Although the agencies did not specify where these attacks could originate, they came less than a month after the water infrastructure of several states was hit by cyberattacks thought to have originated from Iran.

The proliferation of internet-connected devices in critical infrastructure has made them prime targets for both hackers seeking to make big money and nation-states seeking to gain an advantage over their opponents. This was made apparent in recent years when key government websites and online services in Ukraine went down just as the Russian military started pouring across its borders back in 2022. More recently, a worm from an unknown source wiped Iranian machines during the first quarter of 2026, which happened around the same time as the United States’ bombing campaign against the country.

There were even claims from Iran that networking devices from American and European companies failed during an attack even though they were disconnected from the rest of the world. Aside from these scenarios in active warfare, cyberattacks could also be used in gray warfare, where opponents can inflict maximum damage while retaining plausible deniability, reducing the chances of retaliation.

Slovakia sought to modernize its traffic control systems with the acquisition of a batch of 279 new NERO R-ONE speed cameras, reports the Risky Bulletin Newsletter. Unfortunately, the country’s national security service, the NBU, has discovered that the cameras have multiple security issues. Firstly, they have SMS-activated Russian backdoors. Secondly, live camera feeds can be accessed by anyone with the device IP, no password necessary. Slovakia splurged a chunk of its €30 million EU-fund modernization budget on this now deactivated system.

The nearly 300 freshly installed NERO R-ONE cameras are thought to be rebranded Russian CORDON PRO.M traffic cameras, produced by a St. Petersburg-based firm called Semicon. Their path to acquisition sounds rather serpentine, with the big batch reportedly bought via a Cyprus-based shell company with fake certifications. Reports also suggest that pressure from the opposition political party in Slovakia led to the NBU investigations. The current government of the country, led by populist Robert Fico, initially denied reports that the cameras were of Russian origin and rebuffed any security concerns. Fico has what some would describe as a pro-Russia tilt, but you can read more about that elsewhere, if you are interested.

Camera flaws and vulnerabilities

As we mentioned in the intro, the hundreds of cameras Slovakia recently acquired and deployed have multiple issues which seem serious. Probably most seriously, in terms of national security, these cameras contain a hardcoded list of Russian phone numbers, which can be used to open a backdoor. An SMS from one of these numbers can open shell and network access.

Another problem with the cameras concerns broader security flaws. For example the SecureBoot feature is ineffective, and the web management portal can be accessed, exposing live streams, by anyone with the camera IP.

Cameras that have been installed and set up have since been deactivated by the Slovak Ministry of the Interior. Meanwhile, for due diligence, an independent auditor will be called in to confirm the NBU’s findings. It is thought that Croatia, and some other countries in Eastern Europe, may have undiscovered issues with traffic control cameras of similar origin.

For the most part, you can rest assured that your device will remain uncompromised by malware if you keep to verified, trusted sources for downloading software. And yet, software booby traps sometimes find their way onto legitimate wares, as was the case of Geekom's network drivers for its range of A7, A8, AE7, AE8, AX7 Pro and AX8 Pro mini-PCs, as discovered by Videocardz.

If you have a Geekom mini-PC from those lines and have installed the LAN driver from the firm's website in the past, we'd advise a full system wipe if possible, or at the very least a Windows Defender offline scan. But in the words of Lt. Ellen Ripley, "nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."

As it's part of a driver installer, this malicious software would get administrator-level permissions on your machine, being granted permission to steal all your data, intercept your keystrokes, or retrieve passwords. It connects to command-and-control centers so that the malfeasants can remotely access your PC at any time.

The basic story is fairly simple and sad as these things go: a support page for those series of machines contained a LAN driver whose installer was laced with the Asruex backdoor malware. As expected, Geekom has removed the software package in question and offered an apology, stating the driver was on a "legacy page [that] had already been replaced and was no longer accessible through the normal Support navigation, although it remained indexed by search engines."

The latter bit is precisely the problem, as it's a reasonable bet that many users (like yours truly) will first use Google or AI search to find the driver, and wouldn't go through Geekom's support menus. Furthermore, Geekom requested that Videocardz retract its original reporting of the problem, an arguably questionable move, and an ask that Videocardz denied.

For its part, Videocardz checked that the Asruex malware was indeed present with four separate detection engines: VirusTotal, FileScan.IO, MetaDefender, and Yarafy. It's worth nothing that nothing suggests that these families of mini-PCs are vulnerable out-of-the-box, too. That was unfortunately the case with some AceMagic machines a couple years ago that shipped with Bladabindi and Redline malware from the factory, as was Asus' incident with poisoned software updates in 2019.

The common knowledge for a new install is to get driver packages from Windows Update and only go to the manufacturers' website if something is amiss. However, many users might go to Geekom's site to ensure that they have the latest versions of their drivers, or perhaps they downloaded the LAN driver when trying to diagnose network issues of some sort.

As for a baseline cause, in our view this is clearly a case of Hanlon's Razor, as relatively small OEMs would have next to nothing to gain and everything to lose by intentionally shipping malware packages with their machines. As can be attested by most anyone who's installed Windows motherboard software of variable quality, Taiwan has historically been regarded as considering software a secondary concern when developing technology products, in part thanks to its unique geopolitical situation and the fact that its government only splits 30% of its IT budget to software.

The Dutch National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC-NL) reported on August 12 that attackers are actively exploiting CVE-2026-65400, an authentication bypass in macOS Screen Sharing, to compromise Macs with port 5900 exposed to the Internet. In every case reported to the agency, attackers obtained root access and installed a Monero cryptocurrency miner. Apple patched the flaw on August 6 in an out-of-band update covering macOS Tahoe 26.6.1, Sequoia 15.7.9, and Sonoma 14.8.9, but the bug's official severity has since been rewritten, with CISA raising its CVSS score from 7.1 to 9.8 critical on August 14, now assessing the attack as automatable.

NCSC-NL first flagged the vulnerability in an advisory on August 7, a day after Apple's patch, urging organizations to update immediately. The August 12 revision added that public proof-of-concept code is now available and that active abuse had been observed on multiple internet-exposed systems.

Technical details of the bug were presented at last week's Black Hat conference, according to Ars Technica, alongside a video of the exploit in action. The root-level access attackers gained in the reported incidents matches the level of control researchers demonstrated in May, when they bypassed Memory Integrity Enforcement on Apple's M5 silicon with AI assistance.

NVD's change log for CVE-2026-65400 shows CISA initially scored the bug at 7.1 on August 6, using a vector that assumed an attacker needed low-level privileges and could achieve only partial impact. On August 14, the agency replaced that vector with one requiring no privileges and granting full compromise of confidentiality, integrity, and availability, raising the score to 9.8. A day later, CISA's decision record for the flaw flipped from "not automatable" to automatable, an assessment consistent with unattended Macs being rooted at scale for coin mining.

The flaw still isn't in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog as of this writing. The same decision record also still lists exploitation as "none," despite the NCSC-NL report. Users who can't update immediately can turn Screen Sharing off under System Settings > General > Sharing.

Apple's advisory says an attacker on the network may be able to "authenticate to Screen Sharing without valid credentials," and describes the fix as improved state management during authentication. Screen Sharing is the VNC-based remote desktop service built into macOS, listening on TCP port 5900, which is disabled by default. The August 6 update comes just 10 days after Apple’s July 27 security round and fixes only this single CVE, representing the second Screen Sharing patch in a month. CVE-2026-43760, which required valid credentials to exploit, was fixed in the late-July releases.

President Donald Trump signed a presidential memorandum on August 12 establishing the first U.S. program that lets vetted private companies conduct offensive cyber operations, including attacks that destroy data and systems, against foreign cybercrime organizations. Participating firms must post at least $1 million in escrow, forfeited if they break the program's rules, and every operation requires written approval from officials of the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security. Just a few months ago, the administration publicly ruled out this very policy.

In March, Thomas Lind, then a senior adviser at the Office of the National Cyber Director, told a conference the administration had no plans to authorize private offensive operations. "We're not interested in fighting pirates with pirates," Lind said. National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross said the same week that companies running offensive campaigns weren't what the administration meant when it asked industry for more help.

The memorandum authorizes two categories of activity: "Cyber Surveillance Operations," meaning unauthorized access to foreign systems to collect intelligence while staying undetected, and "Cyber Effects Operations," meaning the disruption or destruction of systems and the data on them. A National Coordination Center manages the program, implementation guidance is due within 60 days, and eligibility rules will admit both large firms and smaller companies suited to specialized tasks. Any company that unintentionally hits a U.S. person or a system on U.S. soil must halt operations and notify the government immediately.

A foreign group qualifies as a target under the memo unless "clear intelligence exists" establishing it's institutionally part of a foreign government or wholly operated under one's direction. Ransomware crews that operate with state tolerance but not formal state control, a description that fits much of the Russia-based ransomware ecosystem, stay well within the target scope. The DOJ and DHS directors can't approve operations likely to cause loss of life or rise to an armed attack under international law.

The memo stops short of prohibiting such operations, with approval authority for them sitting in a classified annex. Participating companies can also sign commercial deals with other private firms, and with state and local agencies, to receive threat data and propose operations based on it.

Jake Williams, vice president of research and development at cybersecurity firm Hunter Strategy, told TechCrunch that Americans involved in the operations "could easily be classified as non-uniformed combatants while traveling overseas." The memo follows suspected Iranian cyberattacks on water suppliers in 45 U.S. municipalities and a CISA alert on Iranian hackers targeting programmable logic controllers at water and energy companies, though state-directed hackers fall outside the program's own definition of a valid target.

Congress earmarked $1 billion for offensive cyber operations in last year's spending bill, and Google said in August last year it was preparing to take part in disruptive actions against cybercriminals.

Many cybersecurity exploits have been deemed The One Ring To Rule Them All, but that moniker is rarely as true as a literal bit that disables the memory mapping on some AMD CPUs, granting access to normally inaccessible areas. With just one instruction, you can access off-limits software like Platform Security Processor (PSP) where the TPM runs, the System Management Mode (SMM), microcode patch RAM, and other various sundries — in other words, full hardware-level control.

The exploit is called Skitter Creek Bath Salts (Skitter), and was developed by prolific hacker Christopher Domas, famous for finding CPU flaws like Sandsifter and God Mode Unlocked. Only AMD chips from the 15h and 16h families are affected, roughly 2011 to 2015 vintages. Family 15 is FX-series desktop chips and some Opterons, while 16h includes low-power Jaguar- and Puma-based SoCs like those in the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, plus a handful of Athlon, Sempron, and Opteron-X chips, among others.

To pull off this exploit, you'll need kernel-level access, meaning the ability to run your own drivers. But once you do, the entirety of DRAM is your oyster. AMD published a security bulletin on the matter, saying these chips are out of security support, plus, as mentioned, the necessary access level means an attacker already controls the machine anyway.

If you're confused as to how one instruction opens up a system, here's our attempt at a simplification. Say you have 16 GB of RAM. You'd think that Windows gets all 16 GB to play with, from address 0 to the end of memory — but as you may have noticed before, it's actually a bit less than that. The rest is reserved for system-level data.

Some parts are visible to the OS so it can interact with devices, but others include Very Important Things like PSP, SMM, microcode patches, all in sections supposed to be completely untouchable. If they were accessible, the system as a whole wasn't secure by definition anymore — just think of a malicious driver being able to freely mess with how your processor handles data.

For performance reasons, modern processors' RAM controllers don't use memory in a straight line, so to speak — they use bank interleaving, meaning that the actual bytes in the DRAM are jumbled, all while the OS sees a nice, tidy, flat surface. As it turns out, the CPU setting that controls this feature is accessible to the OS in the aforementioned chip families, and it's called BankSwizzleMode (Swizzle). It can be toggled on or off with the instruction "xor dword [0xf80c2094], 0x00400000", a simple bit twiddle. And as it turns out, this can be exploited.

First, you run a loop to figure out how the mapping normally functions. You place a canary value in memory (say, 0xDEADBEEF, according to tradition), disable Swizzle, run through memory to see where it landed, and reenable Swizzle again. Do this enough times, and you know exactly how visible memory is mapped into physical DRAM, and vice versa.

With the map now in your possession, you can now disable Swizzle and force a read or write to normally inaccessible areas of the DRAM, since you now know where it will land. With this, you can access all the previously hidden code and data, netting you hardware-level access to do anything you want, including reading fTPM signing code and any other low-level shenanigans you can think of.

Attentive readers might be wondering why the system doesn't crash during this process since you're effectively temporarily turning the RAM into a spaghetti mess. The answer is that every time you enable and disable Swizzle, you prepare the CPU by disabling interrupts, along with a number of other measures. Even still, the machine can crash during the map-collection step, but that only needs to be done once. After you have the map, the likelihood of a crash is fairly low since you'll be targeting specific locations.

Another question might be why sending a bit to a memory location somehow messes with the CPU, and the answer is that part of OS-accessible memory is actually mapped to hardware according to the Memory-Mapped Configuration Space standard (MMCONFIG) — meaning that reads or writes to that space are directed to hardware configuration settings, not actual RAM.

Edit 8/14/2026: Clarified TPM.

Prolific hacker and Microsoft nemesis 'Nightmare Eclipse' has just published ShieldBreak, yet another Windows zero-day vulnerability that ought to get you SYSTEM-level privileges just by running some code as a regular user. Although Eclipse has generally kept ahead of Microsoft, it seems the company may be catching up, as our own quick testing found this exploit is already detected by Defender and might even be patched as of last Tuesday.

As described by the author, ShieldBreak is essentially a continuation of the previously reported RoguePlanet vulnerability in Windows Defender's subsystems. Eclipse claims that Microsoft failed to properly patch RoguePlanet, and that ShieldBreak in theory bypasses the recently added protection.

The proof-of-concept code for the new exploit is supposed to bring up a super-elevated command prompt with SYSTEM privileges (higher than Administrator). The author claims the vulnerability is present in the "latest" versions of Windows 11, Windows Server 2025, and Windows 10, though the proof-of-concept is limited to the former two operating systems.

Although researchers like Kevin Beaumont and Will Dormann say they've successfully reproduced the exploit, our informal testing in a Windows 11 virtual machine didn't yield any results. Said VM was just updated yesterday with the latest Windows 11 patches and currently sits at version 10.0.26200.9168. Given that Microsoft just published a giga-patch last Tuesday, there's a solid chance it plugged whichever hole ShieldBreak was getting through.

The sample screenshot in the ShieldBreak repository shows the exploit working under version 10.0.26100.33296, lending some credence to this theory. A sample size of one does not research make, so we advise caution and remind everyone to run their own testing before assuming the bug has truly been fixed.

Microsoft appears to have already published a Defender detection for it. We found it when double-checking our results, with just a 20-minute window between both tests, as shown in the screenshot below.

Even if the issue is fixed, not every user updates their machines as soon as patches are available, and perhaps more importantly, corporations tend to hold back on patches until they know they don't bring in any new issues. That means that a good portion of the world's machines may still be vulnerable to ShieldBreak.

Little is known about Nightmare Eclipse, other than that they really don't like Microsoft and claim the company has ruined their lives. Some cybersecurity experts like Brian Krebs and Kevin Beaumont have offered up the theory that Eclipse is a disgruntled Microsoft ex-employee.

A group of researchers from the University of California San Diego (UCSD) and Oberlin College have developed a tiny device about the size of a coin that directly attaches to an external port on a Boeing 737 that connects to its Flight Management Computer (FMC) and Multipurpose Control Display Unit (MCDU). According to Wired, this gadget, which goes into one of the ports that aircraft mechanics use to test and diagnose avionics, is small enough to fit under its dust cap and go unnoticed during routine inspections. It then overrides the signals between the MCDU — the terminal in the cockpit that allows pilots to see and input data — and the FMC, the actual computer that controls the plane’s navigation, autopilot, performance calculations, and more.

The idea began when researchers were experimenting with hacking cars remotely in the mid-to-late 2010s, when they wondered if aircraft could be vulnerable to these types of attacks as well. Since an entire commercial aircraft is quite expensive, the group settled on looking for bargain-bin used aircraft parts until they were finally able to build a complete avionics stack to do their experiments on. Another UCSD professor, Aaron Schulman, was working on a different research project about credit card skimmers when the group realized that the communication bus that some skimmers were tapping into to steal payment information could potentially work similarly on a jet. “We realized that it's a reasonable threat for someone to plug a device into a bus and read stuff off of it and potentially even gain control of it,” Schulman told Wired. “We were like, ‘Wait a minute, we’ve got to rethink everything.’”

This was where the researchers discovered that a port in one of the Boeing 737’s two Electronics and Equipment (E&E) bays, located either in front of or behind the nose wheel well, connected to a bus that carried the data between the FMC and MCDU. This port, typically used for testing and diagnostics, isn’t protected by anything except for a dust cap and could easily be accessible by anyone authorized to work on or be around the aircraft. What’s more concerning is that the device can connect to the internet via in-flight Wi-Fi, allowing the researchers to tap into the plane’s avionics remotely.

Some of the changes they were able to make included intercepting, altering, and spoofing data and commands that go between the FMC and MCDU. This includes changing the outside air temperature readings and the aircraft weight inputted into the system, which could mess with the aircraft’s takeoff performance. If the temperature that the FMC has is higher than what the MCDU shows, or if the weight is lighter than what is actually measured, then the engine power set that the FMC will set for the takeoff might not be enough to get it off the ground.

This is actually the biggest threat to aircraft, as incidents of mistyped takeoff weight (by 100 tons) have resulted in tail strikes for LATAM 8073 in 2024 and Emirates 407 in 2009. A more egregious accident happened in 2004, when the crew of MK Airlines 1602 typed the empty weight of their Boeing 747 instead of its actual weight, resulting in the plane striking an earthen berm and causing it to disintegrate and crash into the ground. However, these events have caused the industry to implement stricter measures to prevent these crashes from happening again, including independent computations on their electronic flight bags (EFBs) and warning messages on the Electronic Flight Display (EFD), which is independent of the MCDU.

Another thing that a potential attacker can do is to silently change the plane’s flight plan, causing it to divert from its intended routing. They can do this by making minor changes that might be imperceptible to the pilots, causing the flight to go astray over time. Despite these threats, pilots are trained to deal with conflicting data from the MCDU and override the FMC as necessary. Incidents in the past, like the disappearance of MH370, have ensured that multiple systems exist so that a malfunctioning or compromised FMC will not lead to disaster. For example, an aircraft deviating from its assigned route and altitude will be contacted by ATC, as we have seen in this small aircraft crash that began when the pilots were confused by GPS jamming.

Because of these safety layers, Boeing told Wired, “Our technical experts are confident that the layers of protection in place on the airplane, including within the system design and the operating environment, provide sufficient mitigation to significantly limit the feasibility and risk of real-world attacks.” Still, it doesn’t mean that aircraft manufacturers should just ignore this threat. The researchers initially suggested permanently blocking the service port, followed by better isolation of electrical systems, or the addition of cryptography to prevent a device such as this from spoofing the plane’s systems. However, they also feared that Boeing would not do anything, as major changes like this are expensive and could take years to implement. We see this in some aircraft that still carry passengers or freight to this day but are kept updated through 3.5-inch floppy disks.

We've typed many words about how the industry-standard 90-day security bug disclosure window is effectively dead and gone with the advent of AI-assisted exploiting. Illustrating that point rather poignantly, researchers at A.Security easily came up with Zoomsday. This exploit let any participant in a Zoom meeting gain control over the device of anyone else, all without them being any wiser.

The team claims it cooked the exploit with merely 20 prompts to an AI agent. The exploitable area is substantial, as recent estimates pin Zoom's monthly active users at around 220 million and an estimated 56% of the global conferencing market share.

There were two remote code execution (RCE) vulnerabilities present in Zoom Workplace before 7.0.6 and, for users on the "fast track" branch, before version 7.1.5. The bugs were in a library used by Zoom's annotation functionality, though no participants need to actually use the whiteboard for the exploit to work — the code is always on, so all an attacker needed to do was join the meeting. Zoom quickly fixed the bugs after the initial reports, so everyone who has updated Zoom Workplace to the current version should be safe.

With the exploit, the attacker was able to get full remote code execution, meaning they could effectively control the user's computer and their data — invisibly, to boot. Zoom isn't an application that runs with administrator privileges, so kernel-level rootkits are off the menu, but once you have the user's data, it's not like you need much else. Plus, it's easy to gain exploit persistence any number of other ways.

A.Security says a small team developed this exploit with a mere 20 prompts to an AI agent — pointing out how easy it was to come up with a nation-state-class vulnerability with meager resources. While the majority of AI-assisted vulnerability research focuses on open-source software or applications with published communications protocols or file formats, Zoom is fully proprietary, and it was still easily cracked open.

The firm further noted that "the model requiring elite teams, months of effort, and weapons-grade budgets has collapsed," and that "the barrier that kept these weapons scarce has collapsed, and it will not come back" — basically repeating what every security researcher has been yelling from the top of their lungs for the past year or so.

The vulnerability itself is, rather unsurprisingly, a buffer overrun: the program fails to check that an input is the right size, so you can push more data than it expects and overwrite part of the following memory with code that will be executed.

First, the scientists decompiled the Android package and asked an AI agent to rank the potential attack surfaces to relatively little success. They then turned their attention to the communications protocol. They found that the code library handling annotations received each object (rectangles, text, etc.) in serialized form, with count fields telling the recipient how much data to read next.

Crucially, they found that the code handling these reads didn't have a boundary check for maximum size, meaning one could simply lie about it and send a chunk of data that's too large and padded with exploit code at the end, as Norman Stansfield would say, bin-go!

Hackers with suspected links to China used publicly available AI tools to carry out what researchers describe as the first observed end-to-end autonomous cyberattack against a government target, compromising at least 85 user accounts and stealing more than 2,500 personnel records from Taiwanese government systems, according to an August 12 Financial Times report, citing researchers at Israeli cybersecurity company Dream. The researchers say the attackers assembled an autonomous hacking platform using open-source AI-agent frameworks, enabling multiple agents to simultaneously map networks, research vulnerabilities, attempt intrusions, and adapt tactics when an attack path failed.

The campaign reportedly ran for four days at the beginning of July and at times deployed as many as eight autonomous agents in parallel. Dream said the system mapped 21 government systems before compromising user accounts and extracting personnel information. The attackers subsequently expanded their activity to Taiwan's nuclear safety agency, at least seven energy companies, government suppliers, and other government systems.

Dream says it found the evidence inside a 160-megabyte (160MB) online archive that surfaced during its broader tracking of cyberthreat actors. The archive reportedly held 1,395 files showing that the tool was built on two open-source AI agent systems — Hermes and OpenClaw — both of which can be downloaded freely and are designed to let large language models carry out multi-step tasks on their own.

Researchers could not determine which underlying model powered the agents, but the data reportedly showed the model's safeguards had been sidestepped by presenting the intrusion as an authorized penetration test rather than a real attack. Of particular concern is that the toolkit for the hack comprised such easily available systems, neither of which was purpose-built for offense. The operators appear to have assembled a capable autonomous tool out of components any developer can pull down and run.

What the researchers describe as the tool’s most striking feature was its ability to continuously devise attacks on its own, rather than follow a preprogrammed route. The platform continuously assessed available evidence, ranked possible attack paths, and reprioritized them as circumstances changed. When one technique failed, the tool tasked another agent with searching the internet for information and developing an alternative approach.

Dream stopped short of attributing the campaign to a specific hacking group or country. However, the researchers said the operators’ internal communications were written in Simplified Chinese, suggesting what they called a high probability that the operator was connected to China. The company also declined to name the victim, citing policy, but confirmed that it had notified a country in the "Asia-Pacific" region. Also, the data pulled from the target was in Traditional Chinese — a script used on government sites in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau. Financial Times said a person with knowledge of the incident identified the target as Taiwan.

The incident highlights a growing concern within both the cybersecurity and AI industries over what the latest AI models can do autonomously. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta have reported instances of new AI models launching unexpected cyberattacks during internal testing, an infamous example being the recent OpenAI agent’s attack on Hugging Face. In another instance, OpenClaw wiped the inbox of Meta's AI Alignment director despite repeated commands to stop

Researchers have warned that AI agents are making it increasingly easy to automate portions of cyberattacks that previously required skilled human operators, another deadly feature in the era of AI hacking. Dream's chief strategy officer, Amir Becker, warned that the arrival of such tooling used in the Taiwan attack means every government should now assume it is under permanent automated assault.

The risk is stark for Taiwan, which was already facing a staggering volume of cyberattacks before agents entered the picture. The island's National Security Bureau reported in January that it faced an average of 2.6 million Chinese cyberattacks per day in 2025, up 6 percent from the previous year. Beijing claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has threatened to use force if necessary to bring the island under its control. According to the Financial Times, Taiwan's Ministry of Digital Affairs declined to comment on the specific incident, citing confidentiality. However, a ministry spokesperson acknowledged that the integration of AI has transformed the nature of security incidents.

Delta Flight 591 between Las Vegas, Nevada, and Atlanta, Georgia was carrying some passengers from the recently concluded DEF CON 34 hacking conference yesterday, and an attendee apparently didn't want to let the fun stay in Vegas. A passenger reportedly “jammed” the plane’s Wi-Fi signal. According to View From the Wing, that hacker then created their own Wi-Fi hotspot called “Delta WiFi Fast” that routed to a phishing website that harvested the Google credentials of any passenger who attempted to log in.

The pilots on the flight told the ground crew to alert corporate security as someone was tampering with in-flight Wi-Fi through ACARS, the digital communications systems airliners use for air-to-ground text communications. “Hey, alert corporate security. We have a passenger onboard that has created a scam Wi-Fi called ‘Delta WiFi Fast.’ We believe they are trying to scam the other passengers,” the pilots said in their first message. They followed this up 17 minutes later with, “No information as of now. We have a bunch of passengers that were at a cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas. They were able to jam our Wi-Fi and broadcast their signal.”

While the exact details are unclear as the incident is still under investigation, the attacker (or prankster) apparently used a Wi-Fi Pineapple penetration testing device to launch Wi-Fi deauthentication attacks and then created an evil twin that other passengers could log into instead. This fake log-in page could have been used to harvest usernames, passwords, and other credentials. The plane was reportedly met at the gate by the authorities, although it’s unclear if any arrests were made.

Most in-flight Wi-Fi networks are unsecured, so a determined hacker could potentially use it for cyberattacks on their fellow passengers. Creating an “evil twin” network does not carry the same alarm, scandal, and potential lawsuit that a public network or device named “bomb” would on a flight, but it could still land you in hot water.

“Jamming” or interfering with in-flight Wi-Fi (or any Wi-Fi network, for that matter) is prohibited by the FCC [PDF], while the phishing log-in page could constitute wire fraud or identity theft. The passenger who created the fake in-flight Wi-Fi is also using social engineering, especially as more airlines adopt in-flight Wi-Fi and more passengers expect it, especially as they start switching to Starlink to provide reliable and fast internet.

Despite the potential threat to passengers’ cybersecurity, Delta reassured flyers that the safety of the flight was never threatened in any way. “Safety of flight was never in question, and no aircraft operating systems were affected. We are fully investigating to gather a complete set of facts, which will take time,” a Delta spokesperson told View From the Wing. “We will partner with federal law enforcement and aviation regulators to ensure the incident is thoroughly investigated. We thank our crew for their professionalism and our customers for their understanding.”

Recently, the Kyoto Prefectural Police caught one of the initial-seeders of the well-known Japanese torrent website Nyaa. Masakazu Ono, 56, from Sagamihara in the Kamigawa Prefecture, was arrested after a multi-year investigation. While this news is straightforward by itself, the interesting bit is that CODA, the Japanese anti-piracy entity that performed the initial cyber-investigation, identified Ono allegedly without joining or monitoring BitTorrent swarm traffic, with the help of the Japan Hacker Association (JHA).

CODA's description of only having "[analyzed] how data moves through torrent sites, such as index sites and tracker sites" is vague and can be parsed in a number of ways. The distinction between indexer and tracker is relevant: while an indexer is a user-visible list of torrents (usually a website), the tracker is the background service that software like qBittorrent actually connects to, and it lists everyone who's currently active in that torrent, whether sharing, downloading, or both.

Our hypothesis is that CODA kept close tabs on the Nyaa trackers to see which IP address (in this case, Ono's) consistently appeared as the first person to offer up a 100% complete set of data for a show, a theory that would fit with how long the operation took. JHA's founder, Takayuki Sugiura, was the first to decrypt the Winny P2P protocol in 2004 to find original uploader sources, and the methods used weren't too different from the aforementioned theory. It's also possible that Ono wasn't using a VPN but was logged into Nyaa, or activity at another website's cookies or CDN logs was used to establish a link to his activity at Nyaa, and from thereon, to the tracker.

An initial-seeder is someone who is the first to offer up data for others to download — in this case, shows and movies. The show that reportedly got Ono nailed was Midnight Taxi, a 2026 Japanese drama produced by NHK and WOWOW. However, the police apparently had been tracking him for quite a while and claimed that he had uploaded close to a thousand NHK recordings over the investigation's span.

The process started in 2021 when CODA first launched its Cross-Border Enforcement Project, aiming to identify Nyaa's uploaders. During three years, with the help of JHA, CODA seemingly collected enough information to get the Kyoto police involved in 2024. Three "secondary uploaders" from "reach sites" were charged in 2025, likely meaning regular users participating in the torrents, who got there through link aggregator sites. Fast-forward to a couple of weeks ago, and Masakazu Ono was formally arrested with specific charges.

The most common techniques used by law enforcement agencies are creating a tracker honeypot or participating in the torrent swarm themselves in a bid to identify who's sharing files. However, Nyaa's list of trackers is small and comprises well-known, trusted servers, so together with CODA's wording, it's unlikely this was the method used. Furthermore, Japanese law generally frowns on non-targeted data monitoring, meaning that techniques like Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) and traffic volume monitoring likely weren't used, at least until such time as Ono was identified.

Steam hardware customers in Europe should “expect fake messages - email, SMS or phone,” says Valve in an email bulletin circulating today. The problem is that its European hardware distributor, CEVA Logistics, has fallen prey to a cyberattack where personal information and hardware purchase details were compromised. The most sensitive data, such as payment information, passwords, and/or Steam Guard codes, was not pilfered during the attack.

Valve EU shipping partner hit by cyberattack.

— @joel.zone (@joel.zone.bsky.social) 2026-08-10T11:42:07.084Z

According to the official communication from Valve, CEVA was hit by a cyberattack between July 29 and August 1, 2026. The PC gaming company says that it learned that hackers had successfully swiped a range of information about Steam hardware customers on August 7.

As this data was in the hands of CEVA, it was strictly limited to delivery-related information. That means the cyberattackers now likely have a database of hardware customer information that will include fields like names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and the type and price of the product(s) ordered. CEVA holds this type of information for 90 days to cover fulfillment of the hardware order. It is worth repeating that the attacked distributor won’t have spilled data such as payment information, passwords, and/or Steam Guard codes.

The likely fallout customers should be wary of

Valve candidly warns those who have purchased Steam hardware like a Steam Deck or Steam Machine in Europe over recent months to “expect fake messages - email, SMS or phone - that mention your hardware order and appear to come from Steam, Valve or a delivery company.” Likely angles used by swindlers will be to ask for extra customs or delivery fees. They may also ask you to sign into some fake web portal or other. However, you should ignore such requests, of course, and changing your Steam password or anything to do with your account settings is not necessary, insists Valve.

If you are in any doubt about a communication that comes from Steam / Valve or a distributor, please check the URLs carefully. For example, Steam Support only handles account issues at help.steampowered.com, and only store.steampowered.com, www.steampowered.com, steamcommunity.com, or help.steampowered.com are ever used for Steam account logins. You are advised to type these into a browser yourself and not click any email-embedded links. We assume poking around the official Steam App on your PC will also be fine, and many of you will have that auto-running when your PC starts up. Lastly, you are reminded that “Steam Support will never ask you for your password or a Steam Guard code. Neither will a courier.”

CEVA isolated the affected systems and notified data protection authorities after discovering the hack. It has brought in outside investigators.

Seven states have reported cyberattacks on their water supply control systems, with some officials suspecting that Iran is behind these actions. According to the New York Times, there isn’t any definitive proof yet that Iran orchestrated these attacks but it said that moves like this have been escalating since the U.S. began its bombing campaign of the country. It was also noted that the attackers made zero financial demands, making it more likely to have been conducted by state actors that aren’t just motivated by money.

Minnesota was the first to report this kind of attack, with Michigan soon saying that it was targeted, too. While there have been no major disruptions that have made tap water unsafe to drink, the authorities across local and state governments are still on the lookout for potential problems. They’re particularly concerned about older computer systems that monitor water quality, adjust chemical treatments, and control water pressure, especially those that are connected to the internet.

Braham, Minnesota, is one of the areas affected by the cyberattacks. The mayor of the small city, which has a population of less than 2,000 people and is located about 50 miles north of Minneapolis, said it has already received guidance on how to resolve the issue and strengthen its defenses against future attacks. It’s currently using manual control to keep the water service on, but its mayor, Nate George, told the publication, “I think the troubling thing on the horizon is how do we move forward to a more secure system. IT infrastructure upgrades are very costly, and we are a very small municipality.”

He also repeated the suspicions that some federal officials had but declined to confirm. “We’re getting bits and pieces of information from the state of Minnesota and the F.B.I. They are pretty sure it’s Iranian actors.”

While states scramble to protect their utilities and other critical infrastructure, the White House has downplayed the suspected state-sponsored cyberattacks. President Donald Trump told a reporter, “I think Minnesota is behind it. I don’t think there was an Iranian cyberattack.”

This isn’t the first time that Iranian hackers have hit a U.S. institution during the 2026 war, but it’s the first time that essential services and infrastructure within the mainland have been affected. The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has previously warned about potential Iranian cyberattacks, but smaller municipalities remain vulnerable.

Iran was also once on the receiving end of a cyberattack that many experts link to the U.S. The most famous of these was Stuxnet, which was supposedly used in 2009 to significantly damage and destroy critical tools used by the Iranian nuclear program. More recently, the CanisterWorm malware attacked Iranian machines and wiped them clean for no apparent reason. Again, no one has claimed responsibility for this attack.

Wars have always been fought on land and on sea, and more recently, in the air and in space. But as the internet has become indispensable for society, cyberspace has quickly become a fifth domain that states must protect and dominate. “This is what modern warfare looks like,” Gov. Tim Walz said on X.

Click To Pray, the official prayer app of the Pope’s Worldwide Prayer Network, was found to have zero security by a security researcher. According to BobDaHacker, they discovered in January 2026 that the Vatican-linked app had zero security, allowing anyone to access user data through the API endpoint by simply typing in user IDs. They emailed nine individuals about the vulnerabilities as soon as they discovered them but received no responses and saw no changes for six months.

The information that anyone could get from the Click To Pray app’s database included first and last names, email addresses, and birthdates, among other information. You may not think this is much, but getting names and email addresses is more than enough for bad actors to start sending phishing emails to vulnerable users. BobDaHacker also pointed out that most of the app's users are likely older people who aren’t tech-savvy, so any enterprising scammer could tap into the app for a literal treasure trove of email addresses.

It was also easy to get the complete list automatically. The user ID assigned to new accounts is sequential, and since there’s no rate limiting for the API, all it takes is one GET request per user to capture all that information. Aside from this, the validation_hash used to verify the validity of an account signup is also stored in the clear, meaning anyone with access to the API can verify an account by opening their inbox. The email also had security issues that make it look like a phishing email, even if it’s legitimate.

You may think that a prayer app shouldn’t be much of a target for cybercriminals, especially as this has a small install base compared to the 16 billion accounts exposed in one of the largest data breaches in history. But the fact that it had almost 720,000 accounts as of July 2026 meant that there’s a lot of possible targets within that database. Even if just 1% of these users respond to an enterprising cybercriminal who harvested their email addresses from the app, that’s more than 7,000 different individuals who could lose money because of this leak.

BobDaHacker waited for six months for a response, but, unfortunately, no one related to the app responded to their concerns. Because of this, they contacted Nate Neslon, a security journalist for Dark Reading (who similarly received crickets after contacting them), who published a story about it. It was only after the news went live that the app’s security lapses were fixed, even if BobDaHacker wasn’t, at the very least, acknowledged by the makers of the app. Hopefully, no other hackers were aware of the weaknesses of the Click To Pray app.

Federal agents arrested 21-year-old Zyaire Dontaevious Zamarion Wilkins of North Lauderdale, Florida, on Tuesday and charged him with conspiracy to obtain information by computer for private financial gain, according to a 15-page criminal complaint first reported by WPLG Local 10. The FBI alleges Wilkins helped run an operation that embedded malware in eight video games, infected around 8,000 devices, and stole at least $220,000 from roughly 80 cryptocurrency wallets between May 2024 and February 2026. Investigators put a name to the scheme by following stolen Bitcoin to more than 150 gift cards, most of them spent on Uber Eats.

The complaint identifies the distribution channel only as a "popular digital distribution software company," but the games it lists, including BlockBlasters, Dashverse, Lunara, and PirateFi, match the titles named when the FBI began seeking victims of infected Steam games in March. The case is being prosecuted in Seattle federal court, near Valve's headquarters in Bellevue, Washington, and Wilkins' arrest is the first publicly reported in the investigation.

Wilkins allegedly financed and marketed the malware rather than writing it, with Local 10 reporting that agents had already searched the home of the unidentified developer who built the programs, and that Signal chats seized there tied Wilkins, operating under the handle Sibel.eth, to a $10,000 purchase of a remote access trojan and to discussions about tricking victims into approving transactions that emptied their wallets. That developer isn't named in the complaint and doesn't appear to have been charged.

The conspirators promoted the games on Discord, Telegram, X, and LinkedIn, and used bots to find users with large cryptocurrency holdings and message them directly, according to the complaint. Roughly 80 wallets were drained from 8,000 infections, a hit rate of about 1% consistent with that targeted approach. ZachXBT and vx-underground estimated BlockBlasters alone took more than $150,000 from between 261 and 478 victims, including $32,000 in donated cancer treatment funds taken from a Twitch streamer in September 2025.

Payments from the scheme's Bitcoin wallet went to Bitrefill, a gift card service, where the 150-plus cards were purchased, agents said. A subpoena to Uber matched the cards to an account with deliveries at Wilkins' family home and his addresses at the University of West Florida. When agents searched the North Lauderdale house a week before the arrest, they seized several devices and three cryptocurrency wallet seed phrases, one belonging to a Monero wallet. Wilkins' transaction history showed $382,000 in cryptocurrency sent or received, per the complaint.

Wilkins faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted and was scheduled to appear in Fort Lauderdale federal court on July 15. Valve, whose storefront has seen a steady run of malware incidents over the past two years, including the Chemia Early Access game that shipped with three malware strains, hadn't responded to Local 10's request for comment as of publication.

A security researcher has published a method for lifting the client certificate off a Shark robot vacuum and using it to run root commands on other Shark vacuums across the same Amazon Web Services region, exposing live camera feeds, stored home maps, and Wi-Fi credentials held in plaintext. The researcher, who publishes under the handle tokay0, published the technique on Monday and says he first reported it to SharkNinja on March 1. As of the time of writing, the flaw is still unpatched, requiring a fix that sits entirely on SharkNinja's side of the cloud rather than on the robot.

The problem is an over-permissive AWS IoT policy. The certificate that a Shark vacuum uses to authenticate to Amazon's cloud broker was never restricted to the device carrying it, so a certificate pulled from one unit can subscribe to fleet-wide traffic and publish commands addressed to any device the broker serves. Those commands travel in an ordinary field called Exec_Command inside the per-device state document AWS keeps in the cloud, and a management daemon on the vacuum passes anything under 1,000 bytes from it to a shell.

The researcher tested the technique only on units he bought himself, including a cross-model reverse shell on an AV1102ARUS Shark IQ Robot Vacuum XL, which he then used to pull a live feed off that robot's onboard camera. Watching a single AWS region for 24 hours, he counted 1,517,605 unique Shark serial numbers, of which 673,816, or 44%, replied to a command probe. Those are devices observed responding, not devices he tested or compromised. Certificates are pinned to their AWS region, so a key lifted in one region only reaches devices in that region.

tokay0 says SharkNinja acknowledged his report on March 12, told him on April 27 that it was under review, and on July 3 promised a completion date by July 10 that never arrived. He also says the company downplayed the severity and questioned whether a CVE was warranted, despite a published disclosure policy that commits SharkNinja to "provide regular updates until the reported vulnerability is resolved." The company had posted nothing on the flaw as of July 16.

Remediation in this scenario doesn’t require a firmware update. Per Amazon, a non-compliant IoT policy is fixed by pushing a scoped version inside the operator's own AWS account until SharkNinja rescopes the policy or reissues the certificates.

SharkNinja's timeline is pretty similar to a vulnerability we saw with DJI Romo vacuums back in February, whereby an authorization flaw exposed roughly 6,700 vacuums, handing out camera feeds, audio, and floor plans; DJI patched it within weeks, and the researcher who found it later collected a $30,000 bounty. Cloud-side failures, where a backend fails to scope device access, have driven a run of robot-vacuum breaches and fueled interest in fully offline designs that keep mapping and camera data off any vendor cloud.

Supply-chain security firm Socket has published research findings describing a Go module that posed as a DNS and subdomain scanner while acting as a first-stage Windows malware loader. The firm then traced it to a network of 222 GitHub repositories across 190 accounts. The module published its first version on January 24 this year and has since accumulated more than 1,200 versions, over 700 of them malicious. Socket tracks the campaign as “Operation Muck and Load” and reported the module to the Go security team, which blocked it from the Go module proxy.

Go derives a pseudo-version from the commit timestamp and hash for any commit that lacks a semantic version tag. Socket attributes the sprawl to the threat actor's own GitHub Actions workflow, saying its timed commits could each be resolved as a version, inflating a scanner utility's release history into the hundreds.

Across the confirmed repositories, Socket found the same workflow: it sets the Git email to ischhfd83@rambler.ru, sets the visible commit username to the current repository owner, and then force-pushes a rewritten log file every minute. That split generated owner-attributed activity across disposable accounts while leaving one reusable fingerprint. Socket counted a repository only when both the email and the workflow appeared together, resulting in 222 repositories as the confirmed minimum.

The module's main.go launches a hidden PowerShell command that downloads content from muckcoding.com, decodes it with certutil, and runs the result with execution-policy bypass. Socket describes the decoded script as a multi-layer loader using Base64 encoding and XOR decryption, with a Turkish-language comment in one layer that translates to "run directly, no other step is needed."

Rather than hardcoding a payload URL, the resolver retrieves text from public platforms, searches it for the marker string "LastW," then decrypts the trailing blob with a hardcoded key to recover the actual download location. Primary dead drops include Pastebin and a paste service called Rlim, with fallbacks across YouTube, Instagram, Telegram, Google Docs, and GitCode. If defenders remove one paste or block the final archive URL, the actor can update the resolver content without touching the first-stage loader.

The resolved URL points to a password-protected 7-Zip archive hosted as a GitHub release asset. The loader extracts it into a directory named to resemble a legitimate Microsoft Photos install and launches Microsoft.exe from that path with a hidden window. Decoded payload stages map to AsyncRAT, Quasar, and Remcos-style RAT detections alongside infostealer behavior.

Socket confirmed at least 14 unique malware files across the analyzed set, including Trojan loaders and downloaders, Vidar infostealer, dropper and spyware payloads, and XMRig-related Monero cryptominers. One Loader.exe appeared byte-identically across four separate repositories.

Lure themes span MetaMask and Trust Wallet integrations, seed-phrase utilities, Binance and PayPal automation, Telegram and Discord bots, and game cheats for PUBG, Valorant, and Escape from Tarkov. One PUBG repository, nrevv1lad/Pubg-DESYNC-Menu, presented itself as an external cheat with an installation guide while hosting a Vidar-linked Loader.exe in its source tree.

Socket assesses with high confidence that Operation Muck and Load belongs to the same cluster that Sophos documented in June last year. Sophos researchers Matt Wixey and Andrew O'Donnell traced 141 GitHub repositories, 133 of them backdoored, to the same ischhfd83@rambler.ru address. Sophos also identified "Muck" as one of the actor's aliases, a label now embedded in the muckcoding.com and muckdeveloper.com domains.

Neither GitHub nor the Go team has commented beyond the proxy block.

The Chat Control 1.0 law that enables warrantless mass scanning of digital communications has been voted against multiple times by the EU Parliament. And yet, just like a movie zombie, it keeps getting resurrected by various legal sleight-of-hand moves. Yesterday, one of those tricks worked, as Chat Control 1.0 passed (or rather, was not rejected) in a forced re-vote that required an absolute majority (50% + 1) for active refusal. This brings back the law until 2028, and sets a different stage for September's upcoming discussion on Chat Control 2.0.

After the impending publication in the EU Official Journal, online direct-communication platforms will be allowed to mass-scan their users' data without the need for a warrant, under the guise of looking for child sexual abuse material (CSAM).

The scanning is not mandatory, but big tech firms will have a legal mechanism to rifle through user data. EU firms have historically refrained from doing so, presenting privacy and data sovereignty as selling points, but the legal door is nevertheless now officially open.

The obvious platforms where monitoring can now take place will be e-mail and chat services. Immediate examples include Gmail, iCloud, Hotmail, Discord, Instagram, Slack, Teams, Snapchat, Xbox, and Google Chat.

Although the law's scope is for "interpersonal communications services," the legal mechanism might hypothetically extend to some gray areas like Google Drive, where sending someone a link to a cloud file could be within the scope of the law.

It's worth noting that "direct communication" isn't restricted to one-to-one chats, as it includes group chats; just not public or undirected communications. Additionally, EU law enforcement is still beholden to the same warrant requirement as before — Chat Control 1.0 does not grant a blank pass to authorities to mass-scan user data, or request companies to do so without a targeted warrant.

Thanks to two amendments in yesterday's vote, end-to-end-encrypted (E2EE) communications means (ex: WhatsApp) stay exempt. That means that for now, Chat Control 1.0 isn't a commandment to break encryption, something that has been regularly suggested by lawmakers around the world.

It's as good a time as any to remind people that Instagram messages are no longer E2EE as of May, and that although WhatsApp's messages are encrypted, the service leaks out every single bit of metadata about them — sender, recipient, time, size, etc. As always, Signal is recommended as a privacy-focused communications app.

This latest development in the EU parliament is eliciting widespread public outcry due to the nature of the law itself, but also due to the manner in which it happened. Critics and opponents of the rule are suggesting this move is unprecedented.

Chat Control 1.0 has already been shot down repeatedly, most recently in March. However, European Parliament President Roberta Metsola forced a second reading of the law, and invoked Rule 163's "urgent procedure" mechanism. This had many effects, including bringing up a law that was voted against for discussion yet again; turning the decision into a denial vote (vote-to-deny, not vote-to-pass); exploiting the second-reading requirement that demands an absolute majority vote (50% + 1); and letting the President herself set the schedule. Metsola scheduled the second reading to the very last day before the European Parliament summer recess.

The result was that out of 720 representatives, only 607 actually cast a vote. Of those, 315 (over half) voted against Chat Control 1.0. That figure did not meet the supermajority threshold of 361, which was calculated against a full chamber.

Opponents to Chat Control have posted resources at the Fight Chat Control website, including a breakdown of member-state and individual representative voting positions and contact information.

Ever since the advent of agentic AI, security researchers have been yelling from the top of their lungs about how it's a bad idea to grant user-level permissions to an LLM — for all purposes, a program with non-deterministic outputs and inconsistent handling of inputs. A research paper on HalluSquatting from researchers at Tel Aviv University, Technion, and Intuit, shows how easily one can fool modern AI bots and harness them into a massive army of AI agents, with the research showing that agents can hallucinate potentially malicious code repositories up to 85% of the time.

The mechanism for HalluSquatting (aka "adversarial hallucination squatting") is surprisingly simple, and takes advantage of the fact that when met with unfamiliar terms, bots will not know they're incorrect and hallucinate a "correct" answer. Adding to that, the methods the bots use to come up with said answer are predictable, for example, owner/repository or toolname/toolname GitHub URLs. This is different than just standard typo-squatting, as it exploits the hallucination mechanism itself.

An attacker first identifies an application, code repository, programming library, or bot skill that's gained popularity only in recent months or years — let's say, a new GitHub repo with the URL OriginalOwner/WindowsTelemetryOff. As the bots' training data is not recent enough to contain information about it, GitHub URLs owner/repo combinations SuperHacker/WindowsTelemetryOff , and WindowsTelemetryOff/WindowsTelemetryOff look just as peachy. Likewise, WindowsTelemetryOf and WindowTelemetryOff (note the typos) will be valid candidates.

The attacker then creates a malicious repository using those generated names. When Claude or another code agent is asked to "run the windowstelemetryoff scripts" or a similar instruction, chances are they'll hallucinate the repo name (sometimes even having run a web search), run into the malicious version that looks like the original, and happily run whatever's in there.

From that point, all bets are off now that the attacker's code is running on the user's machine. The most obvious outcome could be creating a reverse shell (the user's machine opens a command line that's controlled remotely). Now having access to the user's account, the attacker can siphon off their data and passwords, install software, run crypto miners, or harness their AI agent for further malfeasance, all with the power of entire data centers at their disposal.

And here's the kicker: just the one HalluSquatted piece of software has the potential to bait and reel in tens of thousands of bots, if not more, in a proverbial blink of an eye. A crafty attacker would be kind enough to include all the original code in their poisoned version, adding yet another layer of unawareness to the mix.

The research team found that an LLM will hallucinate the location of a recent code repository up to 85% of the time, a figure that can reach 100% for trending agentic skills. Every single model is widely affected, up to and including Anthropic's mighty Claude Opus 4.5. At the application level, the figures are better, but still pretty bad.

The scientists are working on common LLM-backed programming applications, including Cursor, Windsurf, and OpenClaw, among others. In this scenario, the bots stand a better chance given they're working with more context information, but even still, the success rates for hacking ranged from 20%-35% for Cursor, Gemini CLI, and Copilot, and increased massively to close to 80-100% on OpenClaw and its variants. The exploit mechanism doesn't even need to be crafted specifically for any bot; the researchers' results show it's universal and transferable, too.

The mean hallucination rate for names of sample GitHub repositories published in 2025 is 92.4%, while predictably, bots get the URLs wrong 0.9% for those from 2019 or earlier, though that's arguably still a concerning figure. The most effective mitigation is adjusting workflow: instructing bots to always run web searches before installing software, and providing them with additional context. Unfortunately, that's not the default way most people appear to use them.

Cybersecurity professionals have long advocated for not blindly trusting a bot's actions and severely restricting the access level granted to AI agents. And yet it's not uncommon to see bots with wide-ranging permissions over users' machines, API keys, access keys, and service accounts, to name a few — all in a bid to make it "easier" for the bot to vibe-code their pointy-haired-boss' latest brilliant idea.

The CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC), a U.S. government-backed cybersecurity group at Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute, disclosed a firmware flaw on July 6 that can hand attackers full administrative control over several Tenda networking devices. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-11405, is an undocumented authentication backdoor in the affected models' firmware that bypasses the normal login process and grants access to the devices' web management interface without valid credentials. Compounding the risk, there is currently no security patch available, as Tenda — a Shenzhen-based budget networking brand with a large presence in India and other markets — is yet to respond despite CERT/CC reaching out on the issue.

CERT/CC lists five affected firmware versions spanning the FH1201, W15E, AC10, AC5, and AC6 router families. The advisory, which credits an anonymous researcher for the finding, does not describe this list as exhaustive. The list covers only the specific builds the researcher reported to CERT/CC, as there is no vendor-confirmed scope. According to the advisory, the flaw resides inside the routers' built-in web server, where an undocumented authentication routine allows administrative access without requiring the configured administrator credentials.

Like most consumer routers, Tenda devices provide a password-protected web management interface for configuring Wi-Fi settings, firewall rules, DNS servers, firmware updates, port forwarding, parental controls, and other core networking features. Because these interfaces control most aspects of a router's operation, they are typically protected by authentication mechanisms designed to prevent unauthorized users from making changes that could compromise an entire home or business network.

According to the advisory, the affected firmware initially performs authentication as expected, verifying the administrator password with a standard MD5-based check. However, when that verification fails, the login routine quietly follows a second, undocumented code path. Instead of immediately rejecting the login attempt, the firmware retrieves another password stored internally under the configuration key sys.rzadmin.password and compares it directly against the user-supplied password using the standard C library function strcmp().

If the supplied password matches this hidden value, the firmware immediately creates a valid administrator session with full privileges. Even more concerning, the associated username is never validated, meaning any username can be used as long as the hidden password is supplied. As a result, the mechanism effectively bypasses the router's configured administrator account altogether.

While CERT/CC did not disclose the hidden password itself, the existence of an undocumented secondary authentication path significantly weakens the security model of affected devices. Unlike conventional authentication vulnerabilities that stem from implementation errors, this is a separate login path rather than a flaw in the existing one, granting administrative access through credentials that are neither documented nor exposed through the router's management interface. Whether that path was placed there deliberately or left in as a forgotten development feature is unclear. CERT/CC draws no conclusion on intent, and Tenda's silence settles nothing.

Successful exploitation grants an attacker unrestricted control over the router's configuration. With administrator access, an attacker could modify network settings, change DNS servers to redirect internet traffic, disable security protections, replace administrator credentials, or enable additional remote access features. As routers serve as the gateway between local devices and the internet, compromising one can expose every connected system on the network to further attacks.

Pending official Tenda firmware updates, CERT/CC recommends disabling remote web management wherever possible to prevent attackers from reaching the administrative interface over the internet. The organization also advises limiting local network exposure, noting that while changing a router's default LAN IP address may reduce opportunistic discovery by automated scanning tools, it does not protect against determined attackers performing targeted network reconnaissance.

The disclosure echoes the concerns the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) cited when it added certain foreign-made networking products to its Covered List in March, preventing new models from receiving the authorization required for import and sale in the U.S. The FCC argued that compromised consumer routers can provide attackers with a foothold into home and small-business networks. An undocumented administrator backdoor in widely sold networking equipment — combined with the absence of a vendor patch or response — illustrates the type of supply-chain security risk regulators seek to address.

The Internet is buzzing over news that 19-year-old Estonian "hacker" Peter Stokes got nabbed by the authorities and extradited to the U.S. on digital crime charges, mostly thanks to Microsoft Windows' built-in telemetry. The FBI seemingly subpoenaed Microsoft, which coughed up telemetry logs that contained both Stokes' GDID (Global Device Identifier) and websites he visited using his main Windows machine.

The existence of GDID isn't new by itself, as Windows telemetry's data collection has been extensively analyzed and reported on. It's also been known, and publicly explained by Microsoft, that the extended telemetry modes (Full/Optional instead of Required/Basic) can upload lists of URLs analyzed by SmartScreen and Defender, together with the GDID. In fact, using the Edge browser in this setup can even send every visited URL. The court documents do not reveal which exact mechanism triggered the telemetry upload, though.

This data collection has long been the source of heated debate and general public disgust. Even though the data is genuinely useful and necessary for debugging (by Microsoft or systems administrators in enterprise environments), the fact that it comes enabled by default in Windows Home and Professional editions is questionable. The fact that those versions don't have a simple, user-facing "Off" switch to fully disable telemetry also adds insult to injury.

The Peter Stokes arrest appears to be the first public case where these Windows GDIDs were both used as a tracking identifier and contained telemetry data including some of the URLs the defendant visited. The case also prompted a renewed analysis of the GDID by a security researcher that you might want to look into. From what we can ascertain, it's likely Stokes had his Windows telemetry set to Optional/Full, as Required/Basic doesn't appear to transmit URLs by default.

Using the telemetry GDID, the FBI easily connected the dashing rogue to his ngrokaccount, because he used that tool in the same session in which he accessed his Facebook and Snapchat accounts. The agents also established a link between travel records, a New York IP address, and a rental at the Empire Hotel, likely facilitated by the photos Stokes posted of his hotel room. The criminal mastermind was equally sneaky (read: not) in his visit to Thailand.

As many hackers do, he enjoyed some time off playing an obscure game, in this case Ubisoft's Growtopia, shortly before accessing his Apple logins, as well as the aforementioned Facebook and Snapchat logins over the following weeks. Besides Microsoft, Google and Apple also collaborated on the hunting effort, with Google linking Stokes' phishing phone number to the same exact IP address and date where he created the ngrok account. Ever the stealthy craftsman, Stokes had created the ngrok account using the same GMail address connected to a second phone number where he made phishing calls from.

While it's easy and arguably quite necessary to hoist pitchforks at Microsoft for collecting detailed information about billions of computers by default, security professionals will be quick to remind users that Windows' telemetry is merely one of the many ways to track a user. Even if not by malice, a lot of software simply requires GDID-like identifiers for things like tracking usage, subscription and licensing limitations, activation requests, and hardware detection. And every company behind such software can be subpoenaed by authorities, as exemplified in Stokes' case by Microsoft, Google, Apple, ngrok, and others. Even privacy-oriented services like Proton are careful enough to describe what they can and cannot reveal to authorities under a court order.

If you're wondering the steps Stokes took to cover his tracks, though, you'd be looking at a small list. He did route his connections through a VPN hosted at servers from Tzulo along with the developer-oriented ngrok tunneling service and teleport.sh. Unfortunately, the modern digital world allows for many forms of identification, and hiding one's source IP address is merely one of them.

Using a VPN is recommended for digital anonymity, but it's merely the first of many necessary steps and can even backfire when not set up carefully. If misconfigured, a VPN may allow certain applications and operating system features to talk to the outside world using the original IP instead of the hidden one. Plus, the VPN will not stop the operating system or any application from sending out identifying information to begin with.

Perhaps more worryingly still, modern-day device and user fingerprinting is far more insidious and hard to counter. For example, plain web browsers are notorious leakers of personal information, as data-harvesting companies can weaponize features like TLS levels, HTML5 Canvas functionality, the fonts list, and even Widevine DRM in a combination that uniquely identifies a visitor. Stokes now has plenty of time to read up on the EFF's surveillance self-defense guides and get acquainted with the scripts at the Privacy Is Sexy website.

If you read or watch any privacy tutorial on the internet, one of the first tips will be to start using anonymized email addresses in some form — providing a fake email that redirects to your real one. Many email providers offer this functionality, and so does Apple's basic paid iCloud plan with the Hide My Email feature. But apparently Apple's implementation of the feature is trivial to crack — which means anyone can find your real email address with little effort, according to 404 Media.

The privacy vulnerability has been known to Apple for just over a year, and was first reported by Tyler Murphy, co-founder of data removal company EasyOptOuts. The folks at 404 Media claim they tested the vulnerability themselves and that, sure enough, it takes minimal effort to figure out the real address behind the fake alias — with a 100% success rate.

Apple doesn't seem to be bothered by the issue, given that Murphy revealed the problem in June 2025, and the company only executed a fix in March 2026. Post-fix, however, Murphy verified the issue remained (and apparently the last time he heard back from Apple back was in May, when the company said said it was still investigating). There are no further updates, it seems, and this is poor optics for a company that talks a big game about user data privacy.

Neither the researcher nor 404 media divulged the exact mechanism, despite the one-year timeframe being well past the common 90-day security vulnerability disclosure window. This is likely to avoid putting a lot of users at risk of exposure, considering that Apple has passed one billion paid subscribers. Even if only 1% of users use Hide My Email, that still accounts for 10 million people.

Given the lack of technical details, it's hard to pin down where the problem could lie. Accidental revelations of aliased emails have happened several times, by the hand of client software trying to be helpful and "fixing" the reply path, and by servers mismanaging email headers.

Perhaps adding insult to injury, Apple recently stated that it's going to move Hide My Email addresses to their own domain, "private.icloud.com", making it easy for websites to reject such addresses in a bid to always have users' real contact info. Murphy suggested that the company stop sales of the Hide My Email feature until the data leak matter is resolved, but, again, there's been no response.

Late spring and early summer in the cybersecurity world were marked by multiple Windows exploits, thanks to the efforts of the controversial hacker figure Nightmare Eclipse. One of the better-known exploits is BlueHammer, a race condition in Windows Defender that gets you a shell with access to the SYSTEM user with just a small script — in other words, the keys to the kingdom in exchange for a double-click. Microsoft released a patch on April 14, but as a clear illustration of the lack of cybersecurity awareness, CISA (the U.S. cyber-defense agency) yesterday marked BlueHammer as actively exploited in ransomware campaigns.

That marks about a month and a half since the patch, and it illustrates quite clearly that when it comes to computer security, the publication of a patch is almost always the easy part; getting that patch into every device that needs it is the real tricky bit. The patch is part of standard Windows updates, too, so there's really no technical reason for not installing it. Additionally, since BlueHammer gets the attackers a SYSTEM shell, the ransomware in question may encrypt parts of the OS or the boot process rather than "just" the data files, potentially making machines unusable on top.

While stating that "people don't patch their machines" is a broad statement that won't surprise anyone in the field, a recent report from security vendor Absolute claims the application of critical OS patches across Windows 11 and 10 lags 127 days (over 4 months) on average, and that figure basically doubled since last year. Even in enterprise settings, Absolute says the average time-to-patch is shockingly high at 76 days, or 2.5 months. While one vendor's claims aren't gospel, the figures aren't too hard to believe; plus, they're averages, meaning half the machines purportedly go unpatched for longer than those timeframes.

Depending on the source, estimates on the percentage of Windows 10 machines can vary between 15% (PassMark) and 26% (StatCounter). Calling it 20% for simplicity's sake, that's 1 out of 5 machines almost guaranteed to be unpatched. Techies like us know full well that Microsoft has extended security updates (ESU) for Windows 10 twice now, with the new real EOL now being October 14, 2027. The problem is, although enrolling a machine into ESU is trivial, the lack of public awareness essentially guarantees these machines will remain vulnerable until they're upgraded or replaced.

Meanwhile, Nightmare Eclipse says they're "done with taking a break", and that "July will be an incredibly interesting month because [they] will drop some really interesting and possibly insanely controversial findings."