The UK's criminal records office, ACRO, has escaped a fine and received a regulatory reprimand after security failings potentially exposed highly sensitive data belonging to nearly 11,000 people. ACRO disclosed the "cybersecurity incident" in April 2023, and said at the time that it had no evidence to suggest that any data was compromised. However, it has now emerged that attackers maintained persistent access to ACRO's website and content management system for more than seven months, and staged sensitive data for possible exfiltration. According to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), which reprimanded ACRO rather than imposing a financial penalty, the breach was uncovered in March 2023 only because ACRO was investigating a separate intrusion. The watchdog said that while investigating an SQL injection attack that compromised 15 sets of credentials, most belonging to ACRO staff, investigators found evidence of separate intrusions dating back to July 8, 2021. The incidents fell into three categories, the ICO said. Some did not affect personal data, while others exposed only a small number of account credentials. The most serious involved ACRO's website and its Kentico content management system. The intrusion began on August 5, 2022, and the attackers maintained persistent access, without being detected, until March 14, 2023. The ICO found that ACRO ran version 12.0.0 of Kentico CMS from September 2019 until March 2023 without applying the patches and hotfixes released during that period, leaving known vulnerabilities unresolved. The ICO blamed poor communication between ACRO and its managed service provider. The supplier did not learn that patching was its responsibility until February 2020 and continued to assume that it was not required to monitor actively for security updates. "The ambiguity around who was accountable for identifying necessary Kentico CMS patches created a gap where patches and hotfixes were missed, which ultimately left ACRO's website vulnerable," the ICO said. Further, ACRO did not have a documented policy that covered patching Kentico CMS, nor could it demonstrate how vulnerabilities were identified or prioritized. ACRO's Trend Micro antivirus generated alerts, but nobody appears to have been minding them. The records office told the ICO that, for reasons redacted from the postmortem, it was "unable to establish what business processes existed for the assessment or handling of security alerts at the relevant time." It also could not identify which roles were responsible for reviewing these alerts at the time, ultimately resulting in them going unread. ACRO's poor logging means that, despite an extensive investigation by a third-party cybersecurity outfit, it remains impossible to determine whether the affected data was exfiltrated. Investigators did establish that the attackers staged the data for possible exfiltration between February 15 and 16, 2023. The potentially exposed material included: Police Certificate Applications Subject Access Request (SAR) forms and International Child Protection Certificate forms Names Dates of birth Addresses National Insurance numbers Passport and driving licence details Bank account information Biometric data Highly sensitive criminal offence and special category information ACRO notified 84,048 people of the breach, although investigators later determined that data relating to no more than 10,920 individuals had potentially been staged for exfiltration. Of these, ACRO received 35 formal complaints citing personal distress and concern about the risk of identity theft and financial loss, according to the ICO's reprimand document [PDF]. "Complainants included those connected to Police Certificates, International Child Protection Certificates, and victims of domestic violence." The ICO also received six complaints citing similar concerns. ACRO's saving grace was its network segmentation, which prevented the attackers from straying beyond the CMS into other systems, the ICO noted. Since the attack was discovered, ACRO has made a number of improvements to its security, including decommissioning the compromised infrastructure (although not until June 2023), implementing a SIEM, improving visibility, monitoring, and network segmentation, hardening systems, and migrating to Salesforce Experience Cloud. Jonathan Balmforth, group manager of civil and cyber investigations at the ICO, said: "This case highlights how basic cyber security failings can create significant risks for thousands of people, particularly where organizations process large volumes of highly sensitive personal information. "Organizations must ensure there is clear accountability for identifying, assessing and applying security updates. They must also have effective monitoring in place so that warning signs of cyberattacks are identified, investigated and acted upon promptly. "The lessons from this incident are clear. Having the right policies, responsibilities and oversight arrangements in place is just as important as having the right technology. "We welcome the improvements ACRO has made since these incidents. We hope other organizations will use this case as an opportunity to review their own processes and responses to ensure personal information remains properly protected." ACRO welcomed the reprimand from the ICO and highlighted the steps it has taken since to bolster its security. A spokesperson told The Register: "Since the cybersecurity incident was identified in March 2023, we have worked hard to strengthen our systems and safeguards. "In particular, we immediately took the previous website offline and subsequently decommissioned it. We also took steps to protect customers, including making sure anyone potentially affected was informed at the earliest possible stage." They went on to say: "We accept the ICO's findings of the infringements. We are grateful for the recognition from the Information Commissioner of the multiple remedial steps ACRO has taken in light of this incident and are committed to maintaining high standards of data protection and information security in future." ®

Millions of gamers are counting down the days until this fall’s biggest releases. 

After more than a decade of anticipation, Grand Theft Auto VI is finally set to launch this November. Surprise indie hit Meccha Chameleon has exploded across Twitch and YouTube after selling millions of copies within days. And highly anticipated titles like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, Minecraft Dungeons 2, Phantom Blade Zero, Marvel’s Wolverine, and dozens of others are keeping players glued to trailers, wishlists, Discord servers, and preorder pages. 

Scammers are watching those trends. 

Whenever millions of people rush to search for the same game, criminals quickly create fake downloads, unofficial mobile apps and servers, counterfeit storefronts, phishing pages, and cheat tools designed to steal money, credentials, or personal information. 

This year is no exception. 

Here’s how scammers are taking advantage of 2026’s biggest gaming moments, and how you can avoid becoming their next target, according to McAfee’s experts: 

The Most Common Gaming Scams and How to Avoid Them, According to McAfee 

Most gaming scams fall into a handful of predictable categories. Once you know what to look for, they’re much easier to spot. 

Here are some of the most common scams McAfee protection prevents 

Scam	What it looks like	Red flags	How to protect yourself
Fake game downloads	“Free” copies, cracked launchers, unofficial installers	Unknown websites, requests to disable antivirus, ZIP files instead of official installers	Download games only from official publishers or trusted storefronts
Fake early access	Too-good-to-be-true VIP access, beta invites, playable versions before launch that don’t exist	Cryptocurrency payments, countdown timers, “exclusive” offers, unofficial websites	Verify release dates , including early access dates, and preorder information directly with the publisher
Cheats, mods, and trainers	Unlimited money, aimbots, unlock tools, auto-play software	Downloads shared through Discord, YouTube descriptions, file-sharing sites	Only use trusted community repositories and avoid executable files from unknown sources
Fake mobile versions	Mobile apps for games that don’t officially exist on Android or iPhone	Different developer names, excessive ads, cloned screenshots	Confirm that the developer has actually released a mobile version before downloading
YouTube and Discord scams	Videos claiming to have mods or secret builds	Shortened links, pinned download comments, Discord invite links	Visit the developer’s official website instead of getting mods or clicking links from comments or descriptions
Fake giveaways and free skins	Free cosmetics, DLC, battle passes, or gift cards	Requests to sign in through third-party sites or enter account credentials	Only redeem offers through official game platforms

 These tactics aren’t theoretical. They’re happening right now. 

Detected by McAfee Labs: Malware Campaigns, Malicious Downloads, and Suspicious Apps 

Earlier this year, McAfee Labs uncovered WeedHack, a malware campaign disguised as free Minecraft mods and game clients.  

Since January 2026, the campaign has infected more than 116,000 devices, averaging roughly 2,000 to 3,000 new infections every day. Attackers lured players through fake mod websites and convincing YouTube videos before installing malware capable of stealing passwords, cryptocurrency wallets, Discord credentials, Minecraft accounts, and more.  

Ultimately these gaming attacks can expose players to: 

• Malware infections  
• Account theft  
• Password theft  
• Data breaches  
• Spyware monitoring cameras and microphones 
• Spyware monitoring keyboard and mouse inputs 
• Permanent game bans  

One of the campaign’s most concerning findings wasn’t just the malware itself, it was how inexpensive and accessible the tools had become. The malware was marketed almost like legitimate software, lowering the barrier for inexperienced attackers and helping spread scams throughout gaming communities. 

The lesson isn’t to avoid every cheat, unlock, or community-created project. It’s to be skeptical whenever someone promises something that seems too good to be true. 

Meccha Chameleon Shows How Quickly Scammers Embrace Viral Games 

Few people predicted Meccha Chameleon would become one of the biggest surprise gaming success stories of the year. 

The inexpensive indie title reportedly sold more than two million copies within days, fueled largely by livestreams, social media clips, and word of mouth. Unfortunately, that kind of overnight success doesn’t just attract new players. 

According to PC Gamer, players have already begun using automated “auto-paint” cheats that scan the environment and instantly camouflage characters, removing much of the creativity and skill the game was designed around. 

The game’s popularity has also created confusion about where players can safely download it. 

McAfee researchers recently identified multiple Android apps and an unofficial piracy site using the Meccha Chameleon name, despite the game’s independent developer not announcing an official Android release.  

Here’s how we saw it play out 

First a gamer might navigate to this piracy site to download a free game. The game may not come with malware, but malware is still distributed during the process. 

 

The post GTA 6 Is Coming. So Are the Scams. Here’s What McAfee Experts Found appeared first on McAfee Blog.

Security researchers found that in less than 60 seconds, they could open a hatch on a plane’s exterior, plug in a tiny device, and redirect the aircraft’s autopilot or sabotage its flight plan.

British Transport Police is expanding its trial of live facial recognition (LFR) to the London Underground, despite concerns about privacy and mistaken identification. The force, which polices railways across England, Scotland, and Wales, will begin its Tube deployments at Victoria Underground station. The cameras will then rotate between Underground and Network Rail stations until the trial ends in November. The trial began at London Bridge railway station in February and is intended to assess how the technology performs in a railway setting. It follows deployments by the Metropolitan Police, which says it will start using face-scanning cameras in London's West End and Soho by the end of this year after a six-month pilot in the south London borough of Croydon. Live facial recognition scans faces within a camera's field of view and compares them with a police watchlist. A possible match generates an alert that an officer must review before deciding whether further action is warranted. According to the railway bobbies, the technology deployed relies on the NEC NeoFace M40 algorithm, which appears to be the same across several forces. "Expanding deployments into London Underground stations will help us assess the technology in a different transport environment while continuing to refine how it is used across the railway network," said the officer responsible for the project, chief superintendent Chris Casey. Critics describe the technology as dystopian and intrusive, and errors have already resulted in innocent people being mistaken for criminals and detained. Members of ethnic minorities appear to be more at risk of being mistaken for someone else by facial algorithms. "This is a disturbing and dystopian expansion of live facial recognition that will capture millions of innocent people's faces. Far from reserving this for exceptional cases, British police are now using live facial recognition routinely in the sort of pervasive way you might expect in China, but not in a democracy," says Silkie Carlo, director of civil liberties group Big Brother Watch. The London Underground network is estimated to handle more than 3.7 million passenger journeys a day on weekdays. A recent Opinium survey of 2,000 UK adults, commissioned by facial recognition biz Face Int, found that 69 percent believed the public should have a say in how the technology is used. It also found that 61 percent worried errors could get people into trouble for things they had not done, while 57 percent were concerned about how facial images were stored. Britain's railway fuzz says images of anyone who does not match the authorized watchlist are deleted immediately and permanently. Whether that remains the policy in future is another matter, of course. We asked the British Transport Police to comment regarding public concerns about the use of facial recognition technology. A spokesperson for the force referred to us to the comments made in the announcement by chief superintendent Casey, who said: "Our focus remains on protecting the public, preventing crime and bringing offenders to justice, while ensuring the technology is used lawfully, proportionately and transparently." ®

Experts allege that two recent incidents in California show the extreme lengths that criminal organizations are willing to go to to steal servers and other gear meant for data centers.

Signal has introduced a new layer of security to help make sure no one has secretly interfered with your encrypted chats. The chat app is favored by diplomats, activists, and journalists for its security. It uses end-to-end message encryption and “safety numbers” – cryptographic fingerprints associated with the keys securing a conversation – which users can compare to verify they have the expected encrypted connection with a contact. But in theory, someone could still intercept messages by corrupting the centralized directory of accounts and posing as somebody else – a classic "man in the middle" attack. Everything would still be encrypted, just going to the wrong place. To fight this possibility, Signal announced a new feature called Automatic Key Verification (AKV) on Tuesday. From a user perspective, AKV is easy: Tap on a Signal contact’s profile, navigate to the “View Safety Number” screen, and tap on the “Verify automatically” button. It will then show a green checkmark to verify that the contact’s public encryption key matches what Signal’s key transparency system expects. Behind the scenes, however, Signal has developed a new architecture for detecting whether someone has tampered with the public keys associated with an account to intercept messages, as that would require a change to the public encryption key and, in turn, the safety number that a user might not recognize. Ledgers and trees and third parties, oh my! Signal described the new system as serving as a ledger of public keys in which every change a user makes to their information (e.g., linked phone number) leads to a new iteration of the ledger. Accompanying that ledger is an index, allowing Signal users to verify the information in the ledger about themselves or their contacts to make sure it hasn’t been altered by a malicious third party seeking to intercept messages. This ledger lives on an “open-source key transparency server” Signal created for the AKV process, the company said. “When Signal users register, change their phone number or username, or re-create their account, Signal records the changes in a log tree ('the ledger') and facilitates searching through the log tree with prefix trees ('the index books'),” Signal said in the announcement. Digging through an index is hardly automatic, however, so Signal combs the index on the user's behalf to verify the information they’re retrieving about a contact is the most up-to-date. Up-to-date doesn’t mean it’s accurate, however, which is where third-party auditors come in. Cloudflare and security firm Trail of Bits serve as Signal’s AKV third-party auditors, according to the announcement. Their role in the whole thing is to verify that Signal’s own key transparency server isn’t compromised. Per the announcement, third-party auditors check the index to ensure entries don’t appear to have been altered. If those checks come out clear, the auditor signs the response to indicate that the keys being provided are the same for both users, thus eliminating the possibility of a man-in-the-middle attack. Yet again we have a security shortcoming, as auditors can guarantee the index and key transparency server hasn’t been tampered with, but can’t verify the accuracy of the data they contain, which is where the final part of the puzzle comes in: Monitoring. “There are two ways for customers to interact with the ledger: looking up someone else’s address, and looking up their own,” Signal explained. “Monitoring requires Alice and Bob [your usual cryptographic placeholders] to do both of these things on a regular basis, each detecting a different kind of tampering.” Alice and Bob are each able to monitor their own ledger entries via the Signal app, which periodically checks it automatically, and they can verify their connection’s data is correct through the View Safety Number “Verify Automatically” button we mentioned earlier. “These two kinds of monitoring, combined with third-party auditing, form a complete detection system: auditing guarantees that Alice and Bob are looking at the same data, and monitoring guarantees that both of them are regularly checking that data for accuracy,” Signal explained. Security is never simple AKV still ultimately leaves Signal users on the hook for their security: If you want to be truly sure your contact is who they say they are, you’ll need to hit that verify button every time you want to chat. It’s also worth pointing out that this won’t always work for all Signal users. “Your Signal app automatically verifies your own phone number and username data in the log,” the announcement said. “But to verify this for someone else, you need to have their phone number.” In other words, if you don’t have your contact’s phone number through Signal or a matching entry in your phone’s address book, you can’t use AKV to verify the encryption key associated with that contact. AKV can also be disabled for users who don’t want a third party involved in verifying their identity, in which case Signal recommends relying on good old fashioned safety number or QR code verification. Nothing in the cryptographic verification space is ever easy, is it?®

This is an epic month for Microsoft patches, though not a record-setting one. Redmond addressed 421 bugs in its own products this month - about 200 fewer CVEs than last month, but likely the new norm with AI-assisted vulnerability disclosures and fixes. The big news is that North Korea’s Lazarus Group (and possibly other miscreants) found and attacked one of these flaws as a zero-day in early June. The bug, tracked as CVE-2026-68820, is a use-after-free in the Windows Ancillary Function Driver for WinSock. “A locally authenticated attacker could run a specially crafted application on an affected system to trigger a race condition,” Redmond warned, adding that successful exploitation could allow an attacker to execute code with SYSTEM-level privileges, and with no user interaction required. Microsoft credited Check Point researchers Moshe Marelus and David Driker with finding and reporting CVE-2026-68820, and the security shop’s threat intel lead told us that his analysts first observed attackers - namely North Korea’s Lazarus Group - battering this CVE at the beginning of June. “We are familiar with one successful implementation of the CVE - but we assume it was used widely in the campaign,” Sergey Shykevich, director of threat intelligence at Check Point, told The Register. He’s talking about Operation Dream Job, a long-running campaign targeting organizations worldwide, especially those in the defense sector, and attributed to Lazarus, an umbrella term for Pyongyang's government-sponsored goons who specialize in cryptocurrency theft, extortion attacks, and IT worker scams. It’s probably best known for the Sony Pictures Entertainment hack in late 2014 and the WannaCry ransomware outbreak in 2017, although the group has been active since at least 2009. Lazarus’ DreamJob campaigns have been around since 2020, and they use social engineering to lure job seekers with fake offers for high-profile positions, then trick the victims into clicking on malicious links or opening malware-laced documents. The goal in these attacks involves stealing IP and other sensitive data, conducting cyber spying missions, and collecting financial information. When Dream Job and Patch Tuesday collide This new wave of attacks focuses on the defense sector in Europe and India with dream jobs impersonating Lockheed Martin and privacy-tech firm Enveil. Attackers created at least three fake Enveil sites, and some even ranked as the top search result, making them even more believable to job seekers - and harder to spot a phish. “In this campaign, the threat actor expanded its delivery method by leveraging impersonation websites and search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to distribute the trojanized applications, increasing its credibility and helping it evade some phishing-based detections,” Check Point researchers said in a Tuesday blog. These attacks involve Lazarus distributing a modified PDF viewer called SecurityPDF designed to execute malicious payloads embedded within attacker-crafted PDF files when the user opens them. The PDFs, when opened, execute a never-before-seen backdoor that Check Point named Troy. And during the intrusions, the Norks exploited CVE-2026-68820 as a zero-day to deploy a new version of FudModule, Lazarus’ kernel-mode rootkit. “We will not be disclosing full technical details of the vulnerability in this article, as it was patched on the August 11 Patch Tuesday fix,” the researchers wrote. “At a high level, the exploit takes advantage of how afd.sys handles a socket is created when it is accessed concurrently by several threads at once.” Shykevich told us that “this campaign shows that this actor continues to develop new tools (like Troy), and finding and implementing new vulnerabilities in Windows to evade detection.” Best of the rest Redmond lists one of the other 421 Microsoft CVEs as publicly known. It’s CVE-2026-62832, an elevation-of-privilege flaw, and the Windows giant says exploitation is “more likely,” so patch this one sooner. “An authenticated attacker who has credentials for another local account could run a specially crafted application to load another user's registry hive,” according to the security advisory. “Successful exploitation could allow the attacker to access or modify another user's data and gain administrator privileges. User interaction is not required.” While CVE-2026-68820 and CVE-2026-62832 are the only vulnerabilities that Microsoft considers “notable” in its August patch cycle, Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative highlights five others, including one that came through ZDI’s bug reporting program and another that was successfully exploited at ZDI’s Pwn2Own contest in Berlin. All five of these should be considered notable and exploitable, so give those a read, too. CVE-2026-62893, a critical flaw in Windows Deployment Services TFTP Server that leads to remote code execution without user authentication or user interaction, is the one disclosed through ZDI. “TFTP has no auth mechanism and is available remotely vid UDP port 69,” ZDI bug boss Dustin Childs wrote. “UDP port 69 should be blocked at your perimeter, but this could easily be used by attackers for lateral movement within an enterprise. Again, test and deploy this one quickly if you’re using WDS for deployments in your enterprise.” Meanwhile, CVE-2026-62911, one of the many Exchange bugs in this month’s release, was demonstrated at ZDI’s Pwn2Own in Berlin. It allows a privilege escalation via an authentication bypass, and exploitation would allow an attacker to “take over the mailboxes of all Exchange users, attackers can send emails, read emails, download attachments,” according to Microsoft, which oddly deemed “exploitation less likely.” Childs calls BS on this. “Ignore Microsoft’s exploitability and Exploit Code Maturity ratings,” he wrote. “We handed them working exploits, so this is a real threat.” ®

A passenger on a Delta Air Lines flight from Las Vegas to Atlanta after DEF CON is suspected of jamming the in-flight Wi-Fi and broadcasting an unauthorized network in what could amount to a federal offense. It seems like someone forgot the old truism "what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas." News of the incident began circulating late Monday when flight watchers spotted Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS) messages from the crew of Delta Flight 591 indicating that something was up with the Wi-Fi and that they suspected a passenger was to blame. “HEY ALERT CORP SECURITY WE HAVE A PAX [passenger] ON THAT HAS CREATED A SCAM WIFI CALLED DELTA WIFI FAST WE BELIEVE THEY ARE TRYING TO SCAM THE OTH PAX,” the first notice read. Several minutes later, the flight crew followed up with a second message stating they had little additional info at the time, but pointing the blame at “A BUNCH OF PAX THAT WERE AT A CYBER CONFERENCE IN LAS” who “WERE ABLE TO JAM OUR WIFI” and broadcast their own signal. From there, the timeline and truth of the situation get a bit fuzzy, with accounts on social media differing as to what happened next. A poster on X speculated that the culprit was trying to phish for passenger credentials by setting up the fake Wi-Fi network, while a Facebook post shared to Reddit claimed that the incident involved a deauthentication attack that kicked users off the legitimate network before bringing up their own, which included a fake landing page, possibly using a device like a Wi-Fi Pineapple, which can broadcast fake networks, perform deauth attacks, and the like. A commenter in a thread on the Hacking subreddit (linked above) claimed to have been at the terminal in Las Vegas and said the individual was doing the same thing to airport Wi-Fi. The Facebook and X posts both claimed that law enforcement was waiting at the gate, though a post in the Delta subreddit included a comment from someone claiming to have been on the flight who didn’t see any police waiting at the gate. Regardless of what actually transpired once the plane landed, Delta Air Lines confirmed the incident to The Register. “We are fully investigating to gather a complete set of facts, which will take time,” a Delta spokesperson told us in an email. “We will partner with federal law enforcement and aviation regulators to ensure the incident is thoroughly investigated.” Delta further noted that the safety of the plane, crew, and passengers was never in question, and no aircraft systems were affected. The airline also told us that there was no hack of any Delta system, including the in-flight Wi-Fi, though it did confirm that an unauthorized Wi-Fi network was broadcast onboard the aircraft for a short period of time. Some of the confusion over the possible deauthentication attack may have come from the cabin crew deactivating the in-flight Wi-Fi for around 30 minutes due to the incident, Delta explained. The airline reiterated that the flight was leaving following the wrap-up of Black Hat and DEF CON, suggesting it suspected an attendee was behind the bad decision. We asked the Atlanta Police’s airport division if it was involved at all, and a representative told us they were unaware of the incident. Atlanta’s Department of Aviation declined to provide any comment on the matter. Based on Delta’s comment, it’s not clear whether the incident involved deliberate interference with authorized Wi-Fi communications, but if investigators determine that it did, the penalties could be severe. According [PDF] to the Federal Communications Commission, intentional Wi-Fi blocking can violate the Communications Act’s section 333. A willful and knowing violation punishable under the Act’s general criminal provision could carry a penalty of up to one year in prison and/or a fine of up to $10,000 upon conviction. If this wannabe hacker with a penchant for choosing the worst possible target in the world is stupid enough to have been caught doing this before (and let’s be frank - if you’re going to try jamming the Wi-Fi on a commercial airplane, you’re not that bright), that prison term could extend to up to two years. ®

Ongoing wars in Ukraine and Iran and the FIFA World Cup all contributed to a DDoS walloping of media organizations throughout 2026 so far, according to Cloudflare’s latest data, which identified the sector as the most targeted this year. Attacks on media, production, and publishing accounted for 14.2 percent of all DDoS attacks launched since January 1. Over the first six months of the year, the sector saw nearly four times the number of attacks leveled at the second most-targeted sector, gambling and casinos, and six times more in Q2 alone. “DDoS attacks on media organisations can be highly effective at achieving their core goals, which differ fundamentally from attacks on other sectors," Blake Darché, Head of Cloudforce One and Threat Intelligence at Cloudflare, told The Register. "For publishers, availability is the deliverable. While a DDoS attack on an e-commerce site could aim to steal transaction revenue, an attack on a publisher is typically aimed at censorship, information suppression or timing disruption. “DDoS attacks are uniquely effective against publishers because news expires quickly - taking an outlet offline for just two hours during an election night, a military conflict, or a breaking news story successfully silences it at peak readership. The attack succeeds even if systems recover shortly after.” Cloudflare's data aligns with third-party reporting shortly after the US started a war with Iran in February. Akamai reported a 245 percent uplift in cybercrime in the immediate weeks following the war breaking out, with DDoS attacks up 38 percent. Similarly, Justin Moore, senior manager at Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42, previously told The Register that by the start of March, the company’s telemetry showed a clear increase in pro-Russia hacktivism too. Hacktivists rely heavily on DDoS attacks to carry out their objectives. Often assembled on social media platforms, hacktivist groups decide on which organizations they will attempt to down and launch coordinated attacks against them. Signals intelligence agencies say these efforts are almost always low-level and low-impact, but equally advise that businesses should not underestimate these groups. The advice applies largely to operators of critical infrastructure, which if attacked successfully and for a sustained period, could lead to vital service disruption. The US’ war in Iran also led to a major uptick in attacks targeting government entities. From the 29th most-targeted sector in Q1, it jumped to number nine in Q2. The US and China comprised the two most-targeted regions, although Turkey shot up to third after it hosted the Ankara NATO summit in July. 1 Tbps network-layer attacks explode Cloudflare said it mitigated 805 network-layer attacks exceeding 1 Tbps in Q2 alone, representing a 519 percent increase compared to Q1. To quickly debunk some jargon for the uninitiated, network-layer attacks are confined to layer 3 of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model, meaning that they target core routing, transport, and infrastructure protocols to overwhelm networking equipment. Not all 1 Tbps+ attacks target the network layer. These high-packet onslaughts are referred to as hyper-volumetric DDoS attacks and involve transmitting a huge amount of data to a network – enough to take down even the most robust internet infrastructure. Despite the growth in these hyper-volumetric attacks, these comprise only the smallest fraction of DDoS attacks overall (0.004 percent). The vast majority – 96.62 percent – transmit less than 500 Mbps and 90.6 percent end in under ten minutes. That isn’t to say that these attacks are inconsequential, either. Cloudflare said that even attacks of this size would be enough to knock most networks offline. Putting it into perspective, the company said a 100 Mbps attack would be sufficient to knock a website or server offline, while a 1 Gbps attack could disrupt an entire datacenter if it wasn’t protected from DDoS attacks. 1 Tbps hyper-volumetric attacks are among the fastest ever observed. The first of this kind on record targeted Dyn DNS in 2016, in turn downing major websites such as Twitter, Netflix, Reddit, Spotify, and GitHub, and they have become increasingly common since then, despite their markedly low proportion compared to other DDoS attacks. A law enforcement operation in March disrupted the infrastructure relied upon by four of the most significant botnets operating at the time, including Aisuru, which by the end of 2025 had recruited up to 4 million devices and was rattling out multiple 1 Tbps attacks daily. Hyper-volumetric attacks are often short-lived, measured in seconds rather than greater units, although Cloudflare said even this is enough to cause significant damage. “Whether an attack lasts half a minute or ten minutes, there is no practical window for human intervention: By the time an alert reaches a security analyst, the attack has already completed,” said Cloudflare in its report. “Manual mitigation and on-demand solutions are simply too slow for this reality. Yet while the attack itself may be brief, its aftershocks are not. The cascading effects of even a short burst can trigger routing instability, TCP retransmissions, application timeouts, and downstream service degradation that takes hours or days to fully resolve – all while services remain down or impaired.” ®

Researchers say it took fewer than 20 prompts for a public AI tool to find a flaw (now fixed) allowing anyone on a Zoom call to hijack another participants’ device.

Spain's national police say they caught a cybercriminal after a momentary technical glitch exposed his face to a video identification platform. The unnamed man allegedly made 38 attempts to impersonate 30 people and obtain digital certificates in their names, succeeding on multiple occasions. A digital certificate uses public key infrastructure to bind a cryptographic key to a verified identity, allowing its holder to authenticate themselves and create legally recognized electronic signatures. In Spain and other EU countries, certificates can be used to sign contracts, authorize transactions and deal with public bodies online, avoiding some of the in-person appointments traditionally required for administrative procedures. A certificate issued in someone else's name would therefore give a scammer a powerful tool for impersonation. Police allege that the suspect planned to use the fraudulently obtained credentials in further cybercrimes. The alleged fraudster targeted a security company authorized to issue digital certificates and bypassed its identity checks using forged documents, altered photographs, deepfake tools, and a carefully arranged lighting rig. The verification process required a live video check comparing the applicant's face with the photograph on the identity document. He allegedly used deepfake technology to alter his face in real time so that he could bypass the visual identity checks, and used custom lighting to recreate the appearance of each document's holograms. "The alleged perpetrator used household spotlights with strategically placed colored bulbs to simulate the flashes and security features found on physical identity documents under real light," police said (machine translated). "He then balanced the counterfeit documents in front of the webcam, perfectly recreating the official holograms. He also used VPNs to anonymize his connections and employed manipulated documents with apparent security features." Police did not say how many of the 38 attempts succeeded, only that certificates were issued on "multiple" occasions. His luck allegedly ran out when the face-changing software suffered a momentary processing delay. The disguise dropped for "barely a second," exposing his real face to the verification camera, police said. Investigators eventually identified and located the suspect, who was arrested on suspicion of repeatedly forging official documents. A search of his home yielded a laptop protected by high-grade encryption, several mobile phones, storage devices, and documents, according to police. The investigation was complicated by the use of more than 320 phone lines across 24 devices. Most had allegedly been registered under stolen identities, with police tracing their sale to outlets in the Murcia region. ®

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Mozilla has revoked a cryptographic key used to sign Firefox and Thunderbird releases after discovering someone had accidentally committed an unencrypted copy of the private key to a GitHub repository. The browser maker disclosed the mishap on Monday, saying the GPG private subkey was checked into a private GitHub repository accessible only to a small number of Mozilla employees. All of them were already authorized to access the key through other means. Still, leaving an unencrypted private signing key sitting in source control isn't exactly ideal, so Mozilla revoked the exposed subkey and replaced it. The affected subkey was used to sign Linux tarballs, RPM packages, and checksum files for Firefox and Thunderbird releases. Signing keys allow users and package managers to verify that software really came from Mozilla and hasn't been tampered with along the way. Mozilla said its review of available audit records "found no evidence that the key was accessed by an unauthorized party while it was present in the repository." It has introduced additional safeguards to prevent a repeat, but did not explain how the unencrypted key ended up in GitHub or how long it remained there. For most Firefox and Thunderbird users, the key swap shouldn't require any action. Anyone manually verifying Mozilla's GPG signatures, however, will need to import the new signing key and the revocation for the old one. The change is a little more involved for users who installed Firefox through Mozilla's RPM repository. On Fedora 43 and later, DNF should download the updated key during the next Firefox update, although users will be asked to approve its import. Mozilla says users running Fedora 42 or earlier, RHEL, Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux, openSUSE, or SUSE will need to remove the old key and manually import its replacement. There's another wrinkle for anyone checking older releases: after importing the revocation, normal signature verification will reject releases signed with the revoked subkey. Thunderbird users don't have to worry about RPM-specific shenanigans, as Mozilla doesn't provide official RPM packages for the email client. The Register asked Mozilla how long the private key was sitting in GitHub, how it got there, and whether its audit logs cover the entire period it was exposed, but did not receive a response. ®

Researchers have found that a malicious SIM card can tell some phones and cellular-connected devices to leak data, drop to 2G, shut themselves down, or even execute code, all thanks to functionality that's supposed to be there. The research [PDF], presented at the USENIX WOOT conference in Baltimore this week, examines proactive SIM functionality, which allows a SIM to issue commands to the device hosting it. One of those is RUN AT, which allows the SIM to request the execution of AT commands, the instruction set that's been bossing modems around since the 1980s. Give that ability to a hostile SIM, and things get rather more interesting. Tomasz Piotr Lisowski and Marius Muench of the University of Birmingham, working with Fuzzware's Kristian Covic, built a toolkit called CATANA to see what a malicious SIM could get away with. They tested 26 devices – 18 smartphones and eight IoT modems – and found that nine exposed an AT command interface to the SIM. The IoT kit was particularly accommodating, with seven of the eight modems exposing it. The researchers uncovered four vulnerabilities and demonstrated attacks including code execution, arbitrary file reads, denial of service, and downgrading connections to 2G. "The fascinating part here is that the proactive capabilities of a SIM and the resulting attack surface is explicitly defined in the technical specifications for cellular communication," said Muench, making the attacks "specification-compliant." He added that hostile SIMs are still missing from many threat models despite previous research and leaked intelligence documents demonstrating the risks. The researchers put that access to work on an Autel EV charger fitted with a Quectel EC25-AFX cellular module. By sending commands from the SIM, they were able to exploit a command injection bug in the modem's Linux-based application processor and achieve code execution. On an Oppo Reno14 F 5G, meanwhile, they found 198 AT commands and variants available through the SIM interface. Among them were commands that could power down the handset, kill its modem, or shove it back onto 2G. The last trick was particularly stubborn: toggling airplane mode, disabling the SIM, and changing the phone's network settings all failed to reverse the downgrade. The team also demonstrated file theft against a Quectel EG25-G modem, combining a malicious symbolic link with SIM-originating commands to email a targeted file to an attacker-controlled server. Before you start eyeing your SIM tray suspiciously, there is a catch: the attacks require control of the SIM itself. That could come through compromised SIM software, physical tampering, abuse of remote administration by a malicious or breached operator, or supply chain shenanigans. The researchers also found that vulnerable versions of Android allowed a hostile SIM to invoke the standardized LAUNCH BROWSER command and open an attacker-controlled website without user interaction, even while the phone was locked. Google tracked the flaw as CVE-2025-48618 and patched Android 13 through 16 in December 2025. The researchers disclosed their findings to Google, Oppo, Quectel, Semtech, and Qualcomm in March, followed by the GSMA in May. Qualcomm has since produced a hardened configuration that disables the SIM AT interface by default, while the GSMA is tracking the wider issue as CVD-2026-0122. The researchers reckon the best long-term answer is to retire RUN AT and other risky proactive SIM functionality. Modern smartphones appear to have largely got the memo. The IoT world still has some hanging up to do. ®

DEF CON hackers expanded their efforts to provide free cyber-defenses to rural water systems in the US to include managed detection and response providers, digital twins, and AI agents. On Friday, at the annual hacker’s conference, DEF CON Franklin and the National Rural Water Association (NRWA) announced a new program called the Water Watch Center. It will initially fund five providers - Defendify, Legato Security, L1 Secure, Rapid7, and Sentinel Technologies - to help small water utilities serving fewer than 10,000 people detect and mitigate breaches. The security providers will exchange threat info and share that with the NRWA, which provides technical assistance and operational support to small water and wastewater utilities across all 50 states. “We've had our volunteer experts out for two years in these water utilities, in the trenches with these folks, and the thing that we've realized is that there's just not a scalable delivery mechanism for cyber for these utilities when there’s 150,000 of them, and 98 percent of them are small businesses,” Jake Braun told The Register during an interview at DEF CON. Braun co-founded the Franklin project at DEF CON in 2024, and 350 people signed up that year to donate their time and talent to securing water facilities. “We groped around in the dark for what to do, and eventually realized we already know how to do security for small businesses - it’s MSSPs,” Braun said. “So why don’t we just do that?” He described the new Water Watch Center as a pyramid, with the NRWA at the top, the managed detection and response providers’ sensors hunting for security vulnerabilities across the utilities’ networks, and then Franklin volunteers fixing issues or responding to instructions as needed. “We have five initial MSSPs, which will expand to 10 eventually, based on the 10 CISA regions,” Braun said. “And then below that, we have volunteers who can help, and connect water utilities to MSSPs, so we’re not just sending alerts. We can take the alerts that CISA and the ISAC put out, and deliver cybersecurity. That’s been the missing piece: there has been no delivery mechanism for cybersecurity that’s scalable nationally - that's what this is.” Suspected Iranian hackers have hit numerous water systems in recent weeks, and most were small, community systems that left programmable logic controllers directly exposed to the internet using default or weak passwords. There’s no indication that the attackers used AI to help plan or carry out these digital disruptions. However, as both cyber and national security experts told The Register during conversations on the sidelines of Black Hat and DEF CON, it’s only a matter of time until that happens. DEF CON Franklin has a plan for that scenario, too. The Water Watch Center also partnered with Vanderbilt University to apply research from the DARPA Cyber Agents for Security Testing and Learning Environment (CASTLE) program. This partnership will create digital twins for a few WWC water and wastewater system environments, and then researchers will deploy both red- and blue-team agents across these digital dupes. The red-team attack agents try to hack the water systems, testing the blue-team defenders’ automated detection and response capabilities, with the eventual goal of deploying AI-based defense to water and wastewater facilities across the US. “They let it fight each other a gazillion times, and then they figure out when does the blue team win, so we can train agents to then later drop into these 150,000 water utilities,” Braun said. “There's already a 500,000-person shortage of cyber professionals. The idea that we're magically going to find 150,000 new people is a fantasy. There is no other way to really be able to combat the AI attacks that are going to be coming at these things.” ®

North Korean government snoops are operating LLMs locally and collecting technology to weave AI into their attack operations, according to South Korean security firm Genians. The researchers said they observed Kimsuky setting up and operating local LLM environments using Ollama, GPT4All, and Msty, experimenting with other AI tools such as Cursor, and using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for local document searches. This prevents the data from getting sucked into the cloud where enemies might see it and try to stop it. Kimsuky, a cyber-espionage crew that operates under North Korea's Reconnaissance General Bureau, has for years used phishing and decoy documents in attacks targeting government agencies, think tanks, academia and security research organizations. Genians’ findings “provide concrete evidence that the Kimsuky-affiliated threat actor is moving beyond one-off experimentation with AI and is continuously preparing to integrate the technology into actual attack capabilities, including malware development, data analysis, and the advancement of attack techniques,” the researchers said in a Monday report. The North Korean group’s recent phishing emails use ZIP archives containing malicious LNK files - Kimsuky typically disguises these as materials related to international events, research reports, or meeting requests. When the recipient opens the archive and executes the LNK file contained within it, the shortcut runs an embedded PowerShell loader. In some cases, the goon squad used AI to create lures related to virtual assets and finance, we’re told. These decoy documents “use natural language, a highly polished structure, and formats similar to actual business materials to increase user trust and induce the execution of malicious files,” the security analysts noted. Additionally, the Pyongyang spies use various obfuscation techniques, including Base64 encoding, string splitting, and custom decoding routines, to hide the files’ malicious behavior. The PowerShell script collects a ton of system information, including operating system version and architecture, system configuration, PC type, operating system installation and boot history, and a list of running processes. The attackers use this information to assess the infected environment and support follow-on attacks. As with earlier Kimsuky campaigns, these intrusions use Git repositories for command-and-control (C2) infrastructure. “During the analysis, Genians Security Center identified multiple public GitHub repositories operated by the threat actor,” the researchers wrote. “One repository contained not only configuration files and PowerShell scripts, but also various payloads used in subsequent attacks.” Additionally, the months-long investigation uncovered the spies also using the Git-based C2 infrastructure for malware development and testing, stolen data management, and AI technology research. This included setting up multiple local LLM environments using Ollama, GPT4All, and Msty on infrastructure it controlled. “Because the local approach prevents conversation data from being transmitted to external AI services, it reduces the risk of external exposure, making it a particularly attractive option for a state-sponsored threat actor,” Genians said. The miscreants also collected a “large number” of libraries, such as LLaMaSharp and Microsoft.Extensions.AI, plus packages including OpenAI and Azure.AI.OpenAI, which call and integrate commercial AI services into their own custom applications. “The fact that development components spanning 'local AI execution → document retrieval (RAG) → automated agents → external AI integration' were collected together strongly suggests that they were not gathered out of simple curiosity, but for the direct development of an AI-based tool designed for a specific purpose,” according to the threat hunters. Genians uncovered logs containing speech-to-text tools, such as OpenAI’s Whisper speech recognition models, and evidence that the spies used Cursor AI to edit code and tested RAG for document-based question answering. Using RAG on stolen files can help attackers more quickly and automatically identify valuable information within large volumes of data. While the researchers noted that they did not identify any evidence that the Norks have begun training their own models - but rather remain focused on applying AI to malware development and attack operations - the findings make a strong case for defenders needing to shift away from content-based assessment to behavior-based detection. Assessing threats based on the quality of fake documents, such as unnatural translated language, poor formatting, and spelling errors, is no longer effective because AI is really good at producing convincing decoys. In addition to using indicators of compromise (IoC) to detect attackers in their environments, organizations should look for anomalous behaviors following LNK execution - such as PowerShell execution, persistence establishment, and external communications - to hunt for threats.®

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Levi Strauss is investigating a data breach after attackers used social engineering to access three employees' work computers. In a regulatory filing, the jeans maker said the intruders accessed and exfiltrated what it described only as "certain corporate information." Levi's said it spotted the intrusion, kicked off its incident response procedures, brought in outside cybersecurity experts, and managed to cut off the unauthorized access. Its investigation remains ongoing. There is some good news for anyone worried that their trouser-buying habits might now be circulating on the dark web: Levi's said its preliminary investigation indicates that no consumer data was affected. The company also said the attack caused no disruption to its operations and, based on what it knows so far, isn't expected to have a material impact on its business. Affected parties and regulators will be notified where required. While Levi's isn't sharing much else about the incident, Reuters reports that the company was also among more than 200 targeted over the past five weeks by ransom-seeking hackers using decidedly old-school social engineering techniques. Google researchers have been tracking several crews involved in the wider campaign, which it believes may sit under an umbrella group dubbed UNC6671. The attackers have been phoning employees on their personal mobiles while posing as colleagues or IT support staff, then directing them to spoofed login pages designed to harvest credentials and multi-factor authentication codes. Their targets have included financial and legal firms handling the sort of information that can make for particularly effective extortion fodder, although Google says the attackers have previously gone after organizations across manufacturing, healthcare, insurance, technology, and hospitality too. There's no confirmation that UNC6671 was behind the successful Levi's intrusion, nor has the denim dealer said exactly what was stolen or whether anyone tried to extort it. For now, Levi's appears to have contained the breach before its attackers could get any deeper into its pockets. ®

Turns out the fastest way to get a company to consider paying a ransom isn't calling the CEO – it's targeting the 46-year-old IT manager. That's according to Zscaler, whose ThreatLabz researchers tracked 351 victims across 334 organizations caught up in a single ransomware campaign over the course of a month. The data suggests today's ransomware crews have become oddly specific about their preferred victim profile: nearly two-thirds of victims held manager-level titles or above, the average victim was a 46-year-old Gen Xer, and three-quarters worked in accounting and finance, sales, operations, HR, or marketing. Half worked in the industrial or IT sectors. Rather than blasting the same extortion email across an organization, attackers are doing their homework first. Zscaler says they combine information from compromised systems with publicly available data to map reporting lines and identify the employees most likely to influence a company's response. "The ransomware landscape has shifted from indiscriminate attacks to highly targeted extortion campaigns," the security outfit wrote. "Rather than targeting executives directly, attackers are increasingly focusing on managers and other key personnel with the authority or influence to accelerate payment decisions." That shift reflects what Zscaler calls "business privilege" rather than technical privilege. Security teams have traditionally focused on privileged users with administrator rights. Attackers, meanwhile, are after employees whose day jobs give them access to invoices, payment approvals, budgets, supplier contracts, customer accounts, HR records, or other sensitive business processes. "The value of a compromised managerial account lies in the breadth of business access associated with the position," the researchers wrote. "Managers may approve payments, oversee budgets and vendors, review contracts, access sensitive records, or coordinate work across business units." The Gen X skew is probably no coincidence either. Zscaler says many workers in their forties and fifties have reached established management positions, giving attackers access to valuable systems, sensitive information, and people with decision-making authority without needing to compromise the executive suite. It also found more than a dozen organizations said multiple employees were compromised during the campaign, suggesting attackers weren't content with a single foothold once inside a network. Instead, they appeared to work their way through different business functions to increase the chances of reaching valuable data and the people capable of influencing a ransom payment. The wider report points to a ransomware ecosystem that is becoming increasingly focused on extortion rather than encryption alone. Zscaler said ransomware attempts blocked across its cloud platform increased 146 percent over the past year, while public extortion cases rose 70 percent and the volume of data stolen from victims climbed 92 percent. By the time the ransom note lands, the crooks may already know who approves invoices, who signs contracts, who runs HR, and who reports to whom. The encryption is just the bit that victims notice. ®

Plus: A judge rules cell tower dumps unconstitutional, water utility hacks spread to a dozen states, a phishing email opens a missile-parts supplier’s inbox, and a ransomware boss gets 16 years.