Crims found the soft spot in the company's security. MyPillow, the US-based bedding brand founded by election conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell, has been listed by Play ransomware extortionists as an alleged victim. The pillow shop first appeared on Play’s name-and-shame data leak site on Monday, with the gang threatening to leak stolen data by Friday if MyPillow execs don’t pay the ransom demand. While the extortionists didn’t specify how many gigabytes of data they allegedly stole from MyPillow, they claim it includes “private and personal confidential data, client documents, budget, payroll, IDs, taxes, finance information” and more, according to the dark-web post seen by The Register and shared on social media by threat-intel firm FalconFeeds. MyPillow did not immediately respond to The Register’s inquiries. We will update this story if we receive any response. As of May 2025, the FBI said Play ransomware operators had allegedly exploited about 900 organizations, and the crew’s ransomware variant consistently ranks among the top five targeting critical infrastructure. Play previously stole around 65,000 Swiss government files after breaching its IT supplier Xplain in 2023. A year later, the group hacked Microchip Technology. The American semiconductor manufacturer told regulators that the ransomware attack disrupted some of its business operations and cost it $21.4 million in expenses related to the security incident. North Korean government goons have also used Play ransomware in their intrusions. Cisco Talos' incident responders previously told The Register that Play was one of the crews that used so-called "EDR killers" to disable endpoint security products in their ransomware infections. MyPillow is probably best known for its founder and CEO's politics. Lindell is a major proponent of President Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, and is now running for Minnesota governor. ®

Some internet connectivity is returning in Iran after nearly 90 days offline, web monitoring groups say. But it isn’t clear if the reconnection is permanent.

National security and digital forensics experts have called foul on Nigel Farage's "disturbing" and unsubstantiated claim that Russia was behind the leak of a story about the UK politician receiving a £5 million gift from a crypto billionaire. Sources inside Farage's right-wing Reform UK told the Mail on Sunday that the party leader believes Russian spies hacked his phone and relayed details about Christopher Harborne's gift, a matter of which only four people were aware. Farage was said to have engaged outside "counter-espionage experts" to perform a technical analysis of his device – analysis that was said to point to Russia. According to Peter Sommer, professor of digital forensics at Birmingham City University, whichever outfit was entrusted to carry out this work would have been looking for two different types of markers to prove Russia was involved. These would be either the phishing message Farage clicked on that allowed Russia to access his private communications or the malware code an attacker used to exfiltrate them. "It's obviously trivial to disguise the source of an email, so that doesn't help," Sommer told The Register. "And the second thing is if you're talking about looking for hacking codes, hackers, whether they are juveniles or people in major SIGINT systems, are likely to be stealing from each other, so there's nothing unique about a code that would say where it comes from." Sommer also highlighted that advanced intelligence powers have tools at their disposal to obfuscate the source of malicious code. The CIA's leaked Marble Framework supposedly had the ability to translate malicious code into any language, including those used by its chief adversaries. "Now, absent from that, how on Earth do you determine that this is a Russian hack?" Sommer asked. Neither Farage nor Reform UK has spoken officially on the alleged Russian phone hack. They have not specified which experts on whose conclusions they used to make the claims, they have not stated what evidence pointed to Russia's involvement, and they have not committed to making this forensic assessment available for public scrutiny. Opening up the data for verification was one of the core issues raised by Ciaran Martin, founding chief executive of the UK's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), who labeled Farage's claims "disturbing" and "without any merit." Speaking to The Guardian, Martin said that not only is the lack of clear evidence concerning, but also if Russia was behind the hack-and-leak operation, a deliberate attempt at destabilizing a foreign democracy, then it would have significant consequences for the UK's Russia policy. "An aspiring prime minister has essentially claimed that Russia has launched an unprecedentedly aggressive intervention – a malicious intervention – in British politics, and he's not produced a shred of evidence to support that claim," Martin said. "It is a very, very serious thing to allege. It would be a national security issue," he added. "If it is true, the government should be in emergency session in COBR right now, considering their response to the most serious Russian intervention in internal British affairs for years." He said the claims published by the Mail on Sunday, at present, are unsubstantiated, and if true, in normal circumstances, this would prompt a formal government response. The Reg understands that the NCSC has not been engaged by Farage or Reform UK over the matter. The National Crime Agency did not respond to questions regarding its involvement and the Metropolitan Police Service declined to comment. Reform UK did not respond to our requests for more information, nor did Nigel Farage's office. What exactly did Reform UK claim? According to sources who spoke to the Mail on Sunday, Russian spies hacked Farage's phone, ascertained details about Harborne's £5 million donation to the party leader, and leaked it to The Guardian, which first reported the story. The Guardian said at the weekend that Farage is now under "mounting pressure" to prove his claim about the Russian phone hack. There is no indication the Graun 's reporting was connected to any illegal activity or Russian spies, but Farage is implying so, telling the Mail on Sunday: "This shocking revelation brings into question The Guardian’s judgment and whether Reform can cooperate with them in future." According to the analysis of Farage's phone, carried out by the unidentified counter-espionage experts, the findings were "almost certainly linked to Moscow," the Reform UK source said. They also claimed that spear-phishing tactics were used to compromise his phone, email, and bank accounts. "It bore all the sophisticated hallmarks of a nation-state actor using destabilization techniques in the run-up to this month's local elections," the source added. Farage said: "These actions by Russia are deeply concerning and highlight the threat they pose to British security." Regarding the motive for such an attack, Reform UK believes its leader angered Russian president Vladimir Putin by previously expressing support for NATO. He has said in the past that UK forces should shoot down Russian aircraft if they enter NATO airspace, and joined controversial calls for Ukraine to be admitted to the military alliance. The party also said that Harborne may be a target for the Russian regime because he joined former prime minister Boris Johnson on a trip to Ukraine in 2022, designed to showcase the impact of Russia's invasion earlier that year. ®

Cisco's 2026 Segmentation Report analyzes 400 failed segmentation projects and identifies four distinct patterns of failure — and what teams can do about them

As Americans stew over the looming risk of job-stealing AI and data centers in their back yards, the feds are raising the alarm about a new category of threat, documents obtained by WIRED show.

Today, we welcome the 45th government onboarded to Have I Been Pwned’s free gov service: Bhutan. The Bhutan Computer Incident Response Team, BtCIRT, now has access to monitor Bhutanese government domains against the data in HIBP. As Bhutan’s national CIRT, BtCIRT is responsible for consuming threat intelligence and sharing relevant insights with its constituents, helping identify and respond to cyber risks affecting government services and the people who depend on them.

This is exactly the sort of organisation the HIBP government service was built to support: national cybersecurity teams using breach data to identify leaked credentials and compromised databases associated with their government domains.

BtCIRT now joins the growing list of national CIRTs and government cybersecurity teams using HIBP to better understand their exposure, respond quickly when new breaches appear, and reduce the risk posed by compromised credentials before attackers can take advantage.

Authorities in the Netherlands have arrested the co-owners of two related Internet hosting companies for operating IT infrastructure used by Russia to carry out cyberattacks, influence operations and disinformation campaigns inside the European Union. The two men were the focus of a 2025 KrebsOnSecurity story about how their hosting companies had assumed control over the technical infrastructure of Stark Industries Solutions, an Internet service provider sanctioned last year by the EU as a frequent staging ground for cyber mischief from Russia’s intelligence agencies.

The Dutch daily news outlet de Volkskrant reports that the Dutch financial crime agency FIOD on May 18 arrested a 57-year-old from Amsterdam and a 39-year-old from The Hague, charging them with violating sanctions law by directly or indirectly making economic resources available to EU-sanctioned entities.

The Dutch investigation focuses on Stark Industries, a sprawling hosting provider that materialized just two weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine. As detailed in this May 2024 deep-dive, Stark quickly became the source of massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against European targets, and emerged as a top supplier of proxy and anonymity services that showed up time and again in cyberattacks linked to Russia-backed hacking groups.

That report identified two Moldovan brothers — Ivan and Yuri Neculiti and their company PQHosting — who were providing one of Stark’s two main conduits to the larger Internet. In May 2025, the EU sanctioned PQHosting and the Neculiti brothers for aiding Russia’s hybrid warfare efforts. But as KrebsOnSecurity observed in September 2025, those sanctions failed to target Stark’s remaining connection to the Internet — an Internet service provider based in the Netherlands called MIRhosting.

MIRhosting is operated by Andrey Nesterenko, a 39-year-old Russian native who runs the business out of the Netherlands.  News that PQHosting and the Neculiti brothers were about to be sanctioned by the EU leaked in the media nearly two weeks before the sanctions were announced last year. During that time, the Stark network assets were transferred from PQHosting to a new entity called the[.]hosting, under the control of the Dutch entity WorkTitans BV.

And as our September 2025 report showed, WorkTitans was controlled by Nesterenko and a 57-year-old from Amsterdam named Youssef Zinad. On top of that, WorkTitans was getting connectivity to the larger Internet solely through MIRhosting, where Zinad had worked previously.

On May 18, Dutch financial crime investigators arrested Nesterenko and Zinad, and searched three businesses in Enschede and Almere and two data centers in Dronten and Schiphol-Rijk. A statement from the Dutch authorities said they also seized laptops, telephones and more than 800 servers.

De Volkskrant said it reviewed data showing WorkTitans and MIRhosting were the most-used networks in pro-Russian attacks on Danish government bodies between November 13 and 19, 2025, the week of Denmark’s municipal elections.

The publication wrote that prior to Nesterenko’s arrest, the MIRhosting founder denied that he knew his servers had been misused by pro-Russian cybercriminals. “He said he had ended all services with the Neculiti brothers when the EU sanctions came into force in May 2025,” and the he “reserved all rights to take action against ‘harmful and incorrect publications,” de Volkskrant wrote.

MIRhosting released a statement saying it has initiated an internal investigation into the alleged facts concerning the elections in Denmark, and that it has temporarily paused services to WorkTitans as a precautionary measure while the matter is being reviewed further.

“Based on our preliminary findings, there are no indications that the services over which we exercise control were actually used to influence the Danish elections,” the statement reads. “No anomalies or spikes were observed in our network traffic during the period mentioned in the publication; had large-scale DDoS attacks occurred, such activity would have been evident. Furthermore, prior to the media publication, we had not received any complaints, abuse reports, or official requests regarding suspicious activities or misuse of our network. Meanwhile, our regular operational activities continue, and our service to our other clients remains fully intact.”

Born in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia, Mr. Nesterenko grew up as a piano prodigy who performed publicly at a young age. In 2004, Nesterenko founded MIRhosting’s parent Innovation IT Solutions Corp., which has the notable distinction of being the company responsible for hosting stopgeorgia[.]ru, a hacktivist website for organizing cyberattacks against Georgia that appeared at the same time Russian forces invaded the former Soviet nation in 2008. That conflict was thought to be the first war ever fought in which a notable cyberattack and an actual military engagement happened simultaneously.

Responding to questions shared via email, Nesterenko said MIRhosting does not support cybercrime, sanctions evasion, or illegal activity, and that the allegations and arrest by Dutch authorities have been extremely harmful to him and his company.

“The transition to the.hosting was not intended to evade sanctions,” Nesterenko wrote. “The hardware and customer portfolio had already been transferred to WorkTitans before the sanctions appeared. Closing or damaging a legitimate Dutch infrastructure company will not stop cybercrime, but it will harm many people who have done nothing wrong.”

Far less is public about the 57-year-old Zinad, who reportedly has been keeping a low profile since our story last year. De Volkskrant reported that Zinad blocked access to his LinkedIn account, had gone months without responding to emails, WhatsApp messages and phone calls, and told a colleague that illness was forcing him to lead a somewhat more reclusive life.

Mr. Nesterenko claims Zinad was never an employee of MIRhosting.

“He helped me and MIRhosting with certain business tasks under a normal business-to-business arrangement between companies,” Nesterenko explained.

However, in previous emails to KrebsOnSecurity, Nesterenko carbon copied Mr. Zinad (who had a @mirhosting.com email), explaining that he was part of the company’s legal team. Also, the Dutch website stagemarkt[.]nl lists Youssef Zinad as an official contact for MIRhosting’s offices in Almere.

Mr. Zinad has never responded to requests for comment. Nor did de Volkskrant have any luck tracking him down. The publication said it repeatedly asked Mr. Zinad (referred to here as simply “Z”), but he reportedly avoided every form of contact.

“‘I am unavailable but will respond to your message as soon as possible,’ reads an automated reply on WhatsApp on 2 October 2025,” de Volkskrant reported. “It is the only response de Volkskrant would receive in months. He did not pick up his phone and did not call back. When an acquaintance asked him via LinkedIn to contact the reporter, he blocked access to his LinkedIn page. At an address in Almere where Z.’s personal limited company is registered, no one was present in April. The corner house’s blinds were drawn, and a pile of rubbish bags lay outside next to a container, as if someone had recently left. A neighbour said he knew the man but did not know where he was staying. Z. was later arrested at a residence in Amsterdam.”

As attackers ramp up their AI exploit development, the search for software vulnerabilities is changing rapidly.

Anthropic has revealed its intention to one day release models that match the performance of its Mythos bug-finding AI to the public, once it can make them safe. In case you came in late, in early April Anthropic announced it had developed a model called Mythos that is so good at finding security vulnerabilities in programming code that the company decided to offer it only to select entities because allowing unfettered access would mean cybercriminals could quickly discover and exploit software flaws. That access program is called “Project Glasswing” and participants report it quickly finds many bugs but few that humans couldn’t find given enough time and resources. Those with access to Mythos have also sometimes said the quantity of bugs it finds somewhat overwhelms their ability to patch them all. The mere existence of Mythos has sparked a little panic – Japan’s government ordered a sweeping security review and Indian authorities demanded a patching spree at financial institutions – plus a general realization that even lesser AI models are also decent bug-finders, meaning cyber-defenders must now expect attackers will weaponize more flaws, more often. No company—including Anthropic—has developed safeguards strong enough to prevent such models from being misused Anthropic last week published an “initial update” on Project Glasswing that in its second-to-last paragraph reveals the company’s next step will see it “… work with critical partners – including US and allied governments – to expand Project Glasswing to additional partners. And in the near future, once we’ve developed the far stronger safeguards we need, we look forward to making Mythos-class models available through a general release.” The company didn’t explain what it means by “near future” and admits that “At present, no company—including Anthropic—has developed safeguards strong enough to prevent such models from being misused and potentially causing severe harm.” Further illustration of that assertion can be found earlier in the company’s post, which reveals that Anthropic has used Mythos to scan more than 1,000 open-source projects that it says “collectively underpin much of the internet – and much of our own infrastructure.” To date, Mythos has found an estimated 6,202 high-or-critical-severity vulnerabilities in these projects – and 23,019 flaws in all. The post reveals that when Mythos finds a flaw, Anthropic and its pals in the security community reproduce the issue that Mythos has found and “re-assess its severity.” “Once we’ve confirmed that a vulnerability is real, we check for whether there are already fixes in place, and write a detailed report to the software’s maintainers,” Anthropic explains. “We take considerable care here: on top of the regular challenges of maintaining open-source software, maintainers have been facing a deluge of low-quality, AI-generated bug reports. Indeed, several maintainers have told us they’re currently severely capacity constrained, and some have even asked us to slow down our rate of disclosures because they need more time to design patches.” 1,752 of the high-or-critical-rated vulnerabilities Mythos found in FOSS have gone through that process and 90.6 percent (1,587) proved to be valid flaws. Of those, 62.4 percent (1,094) “were confirmed as either high-or-critical-severity,” the post states. One of the critical flaws impacted the wolfSSL cryptography library used by billions of devices worldwide. “Mythos Preview constructed an exploit that would let an attacker forge certificates that would (for instance) allow them to host a fake website for a bank or email provider,” Anthropic wrote. “The website would look perfectly legitimate to an end user, despite being controlled by the attacker.” Thankfully, developers have already patched wolfSSL, and Anthropic said it will deliver a full technical analysis “in the coming weeks.” Keep an eye out for CVE-2026-5194 to learn more about this one. Mythos is adding to an already overloaded security ecosystem “75 of the 530 high-or-critical-severity bugs we’ve reported have now been patched, and 65 of those have been given public advisories,” the post states, then explains that low fix rate by revealing Anthropic is “still early in the 90-day window that’s set out in our Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure policy: we expect many more patches to land soon.” The company thinks it is also “likely to be undercounting patches because some vulnerabilities are patched without a public advisory.” Lastly, the flood of bugs Mythos found “is adding to an already overloaded security ecosystem.” Anthropic’s suggestion for security teams struggling to develop fixes for bugs AI discovered is, unsurprisingly, more AI such as skills that improve its Claude model’s ability to help developers. ®

Well, that didn't last long! Recording this on Saturday morning my time, I observed ShinyHunters having gone quiet since the massive haul that would have been the Instructure ransom. It was two weeks almost to the hour since I'd first heard rumour of payment being made, and I posited that groups like this often go quiet after they feel the heat, only to emerge shortly after, the drug that is hacking being too strong to ignore. Anyway, here we now are:

🚨🇺🇸 ShinyHunters Claims 3 New Victims

🇺🇸 https://t.co/v8Wf457Gbp: U.S.-based dental benefits administrator and oral health company.

🇺🇸 Charter Communications, Inc.: U.S. telecommunications and cable company best known for Spectrum internet, TV, mobile, and phone services.

🇺🇸… pic.twitter.com/epWcVVGRHa

— Dark Web Informer (@DarkWebInformer) May 22, 2026

DentaQuest has since been removed, but their website is currently returning "Access Denied", which isn't a great look. Obviously, the broken website doesn't look great, but neither do the optics of potentially having paid a ransom. But that does seem to be the way that many of these incidents are going now 🤷‍♂️

OPINION Dirty Frag, Copy Fail, and Fragnesia are less a random cluster of Linux bugs and more the public unveiling of how AI tools can pry open security holes with just a prompt or two. What they also have in common is their shared abuse of a core kernel abstraction: The page cache. What does this mean for you and me? Is this the rainstorm before a downpour of killer Linux security problems, or is this just a shower? It depends on who you ask. Whatever else may be true, these problems must be addressed. As Igor Seletskiy, CEO of CloudLinux, said: "The real story here is that we typically see one or two kernel-level LPE (Linux privilege escalations) vulnerabilities that affect multiple distros/versions per year. And now we see two such vulnerabilities one week apart. We should expect this trend to continue for quite a few months, meaning companies might have to reboot servers weekly." Ouch! But is this the start of a trend? Linus Torvalds, who knows a thing or two about Linux, said at Open Source Summit North America in Minneapolis that until recently, the kernel community would quietly notify distributions about a bug and ask them to upgrade without detailing the vulnerability, and "most of the time, nobody would figure out what happened." That was then. This is now. With AI‑accelerated analysis, he recalled that "last week, we fixed the bug; within three hours, there was a blog post about the implications of that bug fix, because security people love getting attention." As a result of this kind of thing, Torvalds has changed how the Linux security community will deal with AI-discovered security holes. "AI-detected bugs are pretty much by definition not secret, and treating them on some private list is a waste of time for everybody involved – and only makes that duplication worse because the reporters can't even see each other's reports." In addition, Torvalds added, in the case of AI-discovered bugs, you need to keep in mind that just "because you found it with AI, 100 other people also found it with AI." That means we're going to hear a lot more about Linux security problems. But are they getting worse? I asked Greg Kroah-Hartman, the Linux stable kernel maintainer, and he told me: "Maybe? It's hard to tell; the 'recent' ones really are very minor, as the number of systems that have 'untrusted users' is not common anymore. I don't see any real uptick in our actual bug fixes that I can tell." He continued: "We fix bugs like that on a daily basis, it's just the rise of people wanting to 'name a bug' and release a public exploit seems to be all the rage at the moment." An important point that Chris Wright, Red Hat's CTO, made at Red Hat Summit, the week before, is that in "security, all things aren't created equal. There will always be a spectrum of vulnerabilities that will surface. Some of those will be really critical and we will need to respond very quickly, so that becomes a clear priority. Others will have a longer tail of lower severity." Torvalds also added at Open Source Summit that just because you read stories about Linux and AI-discovered bugs, you shouldn't think the same thing isn't happening to proprietary software, such as Windows. "If you think that AI can't reverse engineer closed source, you're in for a surprise." In fact, he warned, "closed source is even worse in this respect, because the AI can't help you fix those problems, but the AI sure can help find those problems in the first place." He also discouraged security researchers from publishing working exploits: "When it comes to things that really are security issues, you may not want to make the exploit public… Don't be that guy who then crows about it publicly and says, 'Look, I could bring down this big company.'" Following on this theme, Christopher "CRob" Robinson, chief security architect for the Open Source Software Foundation (OpenSSF), told The Register that thanks to AI, "roughly 30 percent of reported Linux security bugs were duplicates. That's going to be another problem in this AI age, where everybody's a researcher, right, with a $20 cloud code account." That, in turn, will burden already overworked maintainers with yet more patches to deal with. Linux, Torvalds added, is something that its maintainers can handle. Smaller open source projects, however, are all too likely to be overwhelmed. The real problem, according to what the Google Threat Intelligence Group has discovered, is that the mean time to exploit (TTE) for vulnerabilities has continually decreased "from 63 days in 2018 to -1 day in 2024 and further downward to an estimated -7 days in 2025. A negative number indicates that exploitation of a vulnerability, on average, occurred before a patch was released." So what does this mean? Yes, we're going to see a lot more security vulnerabilities showing up in Linux and other open source projects. Yes, some of them will be serious, and all too many will have exploits out before the patches arrive. It's not, however, that Linux has suddenly become less secure. It's that AI eyes are much better at detecting bugs than human eyes have ever been. We will catch up, and AI can help with that, too. In the meantime, system administrators and developers will have to be more security-conscious than ever before. As Wright told The Reg, it's high time we switched from using SELinux in permissive to restrictive mode. Enforcing strict security is a pain, but what's even more of a pain is having to rebuild your containers and servers after a serious attack gets through. ®

Plus: Google publishes a live exploit for an unpatched flaw, the feds arrest two men accused of creating thousands of nonconsensual deepfake nudes, and more.

A solo Russian-speaking threat actor used a jailbroken Google Gemini in a fraud and credential-theft campaign targeting hardcore Trump supporters and conspiracy theorists. Between September 2025 and May 2026, the “low-skilled” scumbag using the handle bandcampro partnered with the LLM to impersonate an American veteran, run a Telegram channel (@americanpatriotus), hack admin credentials, and steal cryptocurrency, according to a threat report from TrendAI. His only "real cost" in the operation was stolen API keys. Bandcampro ultimately reached about 17,000 subscribers, used 73 likely-stolen Gemini API keys, hacked 29 WordPress admin credentials, infiltrated at least one company, and emptied at least one victim’s cryptocurrency wallets, according to TrendAI researchers Philippe Lin, Joseph C Chen, Fyodor Yarochkin, and Vladimir Kropotov. The threat-hunters detailed the campaign in a Thursday report, and said while the Telegram channel dates back five years, bandcampro’s success skyrocketed once he started using AI-generated content last fall. "We have reached an inflection point for cybercrime conspiracies,” Tom Kellermann, TrendAI’s VP of AI security and threat research, told The Register, adding that “bandcampro's conspiracy underscores the sophistication of the Russian cybercriminal community and how weaponized jailbroken LLMs are manipulated to orchestrate a systemic cybercrime campaign.” Kellermann said the attack “highlights LLMs' Achilles heel, which is the tremendous exposure to API attacks." TrendAI researchers discovered the scammer’s infrastructure in May, which exposed the full contents of the individual’s operational environment. He used Google Gemini to generate the Telegram channel text and Venice.ai to power an interactive chatbot designed to simulate a Quantum Financial System (QFS) terminal. Neither Google nor Venice responded to The Register’s requests for comment. The campaign targeted the QAnon and MAGA communities, mimicking the cryptic, anonymous “Q drop” messages at the heart of the QAnon conspiracy, but the researchers say his “use of information operation techniques was more likely for cryptocurrency fraud instead of political motives,” based on the content posted, and the stock remote access trojan (RAT) used alongside other commercial malware. On September 9, 2025, the actor posted a fake "freedom-first, self-custody wallet" called StellarMonster, with a welcome bonus of up to 1,000 XLM (about $380) on the Telegram channel. It was an executable named StellarMonSetup.exe. Malware analysis determined that in reality, StellarMonSetup.exe is a legitimate remote access tool called GoToResolve, which gives the operator a persistent remote desktop session with file access, command execution, and clipboard capture. Plus, any subscribers who used the "import your wallet" function and typed their seed phrase into the fake import screen gave the attacker their wallet keys. “At least one victim's crypto-wallet was fully compromised: password cracked, 12-word mnemonic stolen, and the owner's 40+ wallet addresses harvested across all major chains,” the researchers noted. The attacker also used an AI-powered brute-forcing tool to hack WordPress accounts, we’re told. “The script is built on the premise that people mutate familiar base passwords in predictable ways, and Gemini 2.5 Flash can model the mutations when supplied with static wordlists,” Trend wrote. In total, the AI-assisted WordPress hacking operation cracked 29 WordPress administrator accounts, including those belonging to weapons retailers, legal offices, medical practices, and small commercial sites. During his conversations with Gemini, bandcampro asked questions like: “When the bot accumulates 5,000 active users, how much can we earn from one pump-and-dump cycle?” The criminal also asked how professional crypto call centers scam North American victims and Gemini suggested Medicare and/or Health Canada fraud targeting the elderly. The Russian speaker also automated his content campaign through a pipeline he named "Quantum Patriot," a set of Python scripts that called Gemini to role-play as an American veteran patriot. The pipeline fed a preset list of newsfeeds into the LLM and Gemini rewrote them, prompted to act as an admin of an “American Patriot” channel looking for “hidden angles.” The crypto- and credential-thief also used Gemini to help him hack, set up a command-and-control framework - including a mail-testing tool, a Gmail aggregator, and an anonymous proxy on a VM in the Netherlands - steal and validate credentials, and run the chatbot. “In the anatomy of one busy working day, Gemini deployed servers, helped debug code, automated workflows, wrote a script to rotate API keys, and managed the actor’s Cloudflare tunnels,” the TrendAI researchers wrote. “The actor prompted in Russian, while the LLM reasoned and replied in English. Over one 16-hour session, the actor co-worked with Gemini end-to-end." At one point, after a nine-hour pause from the human partner, which the authors say “was likely a 9-hour sleep,” bandcampro found the bot posting every 20 minutes without a break - but with Russian slang appearing in the English posts. So he opened another session to fix it. “What previously required a team of writers, social media managers, IT workers, and malware programmers can now be automated by a single actor using a VPS, a Telegram bot, and API access to frontier models,” Trend’s team warned. ®

A malware-spreading scumbag swimming through GitHub pushed malicious commits to more than 5,500 repositories on Monday as part of an automated campaign called Megalodon. Similar to the earlier TeamPCP attacks that poisoned about 3,800 GitHub repositories, this new campaign has so far infected 5,561 repos with CI/CD credential-stealing malware, according to SafeDep researchers, who uncovered the predatory commits and published a full list of the compromised repositories. If a repository owner merges the commit, the malware executes inside their CI/CD pipeline and propagates further, Ox Security lead researcher Moshe Siman Tov Bustan said in a Thursday blog post. Megalodon steals AWS secret keys and Google Cloud access tokens. It also queries AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Azure metadata for instance role credentials, reads SSH private keys, Docker and Kubernetes configurations, Vault tokens, Terraform credentials, and scans source code for more than 30 secret regex patterns. Then it exfiltrates GitHub tokens, including secrets used to authenticate with cloud providers, thus allowing attackers to impersonate developers’ cloud identities, along with Bitbucket tokens. In other words: consider ALL of your CI/CD variables pwned. "We’ve entered a new supply chain attack era, and TeamPCP compromising GitHub was only the beginning,” Bustan told The Register. “What’s coming next is an endless wave, a tsunami of cyber attacks on developers worldwide.” Plus, he added, hacking GitHub “compromises the security of every company with a private repository hosted on the platform.” This new wave of supply chain attacks hitting developers’ environments won’t stop until “companies like npm and GitHub take serious action against the spread of malicious code on their servers,” Bustan said. He noted npm’s statement on X saying it “invalidated npm granular access tokens with write access that bypass 2FA” to prevent additional supply-chain attacks like Mini Shai Hulud. “That could help a little with account hijacking, but it doesn’t solve the actual problem,” Bustan said. “Malicious code is still reaching their servers, and nothing is stopping it before it does.” npm … but not TeamPCP SafeDep spotted Megalodon hidden inside a legitimate package: Tiledesk, an open source live chat and chatbot platform. The attacker backdoored versions 2.18.6 (May 19) through 2.18.12 (May 21), and the same npm maintainer published the last clean version, 2.18.5, before unknowingly publishing these newer compromised versions. “The attacker never touched the npm account,” the open source supply-chain security startup researchers said. “They compromised the GitHub repository, and the maintainer published from the poisoned source without realizing it.” While publishing malicious packages on npm is a TeamPCP signature move, Bustan said there’s no threat-intel or code-analysis evidence that connects Megalodon to the crew behind the Trivy, Checkmarx, and other recent supply-chain attacks. “Our best guess now is that it's a different threat actor copying their behavior and style, but not much of the code itself,” he told us. And despite TeamPCP open sourcing its Shai-Hulud worm and announcing a supply-chain attack competition on BreachForums, Ox doesn’t believe Megalodon is a contest entry. “We have indications that they are not participating in the TeamPCP contest due to the contest having a specific rule to add a public encryption key that the actor behind the malware could match with his private key to prove his involvement,” Bustan said. Who is built-bot? SafeDep’s threat hunters traced the malicious commit (acac5a9) to an author “build-bot,” connected to the email address build-system[@]noreply.dev with the message “ci: add build optimization step.” The author name and noreply email mimic automated CI commits, and there’s no GitHub account linked to the author and committer user fields. “Someone pushed the commit to master with no PR and no merge commit, using a compromised PAT or deploy key,” according to the researchers. They searched GitHub for other commits authored by the same email address and found 2,878 results, plus a second email, ci-bot@automated.dev, with an additional 2,841 commits. All landed May 18 during a six-hour window (11:36 to 17:48 UTC) and targeted 5,561 repositories. This includes nine compromised Tiledesk repositories: tiledesk-server, tiledesk-dashboard, tiledesk-telegram-connector, tiledesk-llm, tiledesk-docker-proxy, tiledesk-community-app, tiledesk-campaign-dashboard, tiledesk-helpcenter-template, and tiledesk-ai. Others include Black-Iron-Project with eight compromised repos, WISE-Community, and hundreds of smaller repositories. ®

Lawmakers in both houses of Congress are demanding answers from the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) after KrebsOnSecurity reported this week that a CISA contractor intentionally published AWS GovCloud keys and a vast trove of other agency secrets on a public GitHub account. The inquiry comes as CISA is still struggling to contain the breach and invalidate the leaked credentials.

On May 18, KrebsOnSecurity reported that a CISA contractor with administrative access to the agency’s code development platform had created a public GitHub profile called “Private-CISA” that included plaintext credentials to dozens of internal CISA systems. Experts who reviewed the exposed secrets said the commit logs for the code repository showed the CISA contractor disabled GitHub’s built-in protection against publishing sensitive credentials in public repos.

CISA acknowledged the leak but has not responded to questions about the duration of the data exposure. However, experts who reviewed the now-defunct Private-CISA archive said it was originally created in November 2025, and that it exhibits a pattern consistent with an individual operator using the repository as a working scratchpad or synchronization mechanism rather than a curated project repository.

In a written statement, CISA said “there is no indication that any sensitive data was compromised as a result of the incident.” But in a May 19 a letter (PDF) to CISA’s Acting Director Nick Andersen, Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH) said the credential leak raises serious questions about how such a security lapse could occur at the very agency charged with helping to prevent cyber breaches.

“This reporting raises serious concerns regarding CISA’s internal policies and procedures at a time of significant cybersecurity threats against U.S. critical infrastructure,” Sen. Hassan wrote.

Sen. Hassan noted that the incident occurred against the backdrop of major disruptions internally at CISA, which lost more than a third of it workforce and almost all of its senior leaders after the Trump administration forced a series of early retirements, buyouts, and resignations across the agency’s various divisions.

Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS), the ranking member on the House Homeland Security Committee, echoed the senator’s concerns.

“We are concerned that this incident reflects a diminished security culture and/or an inability for CISA to adequately manage its contract support,” Thompson wrote in a May 19 letter to the acting CISA chief that was co-signed by Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-Ill), the ranking member of the panel’s Subcommittee on Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection. “It’s no secret that our adversaries — like China, Russia, and Iran — seek to gain access to and persistence on federal networks. The files contained in the ‘Private-CISA’ repository provided the information, access, and roadmap to do just that.”

KrebsOnSecurity has learned that more a week after CISA was first notified of the data leak by the security firm GitGuardian, the agency is still working to invalidate and replace many of the exposed keys and secrets.

On May 20, KrebsOnSecurity heard from Dylan Ayrey, the creator of TruffleHog, an open-source tool for discovering private keys and other secrets buried in code hosted at GitHub and other public platforms. Ayrey said CISA still hadn’t invalidated an RSA private key exposed in the Private-CISA repo that granted access to a GitHub app which is owned by the CISA enterprise account and installed on the CISA-IT GitHub organization with full access to all code repositories.

“An attacker with this key can read source code from every repository in the CISA-IT organization, including private repos, register rogue self-hosted runners to hijack CI/CD pipelines and access repository secrets, and modify repository admin settings including branch protection rules, webhooks, and deploy keys,” Ayrey told KrebsOnSecurity. CI/CD stands for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery, and it refers to a set of practices used to automate the building, testing and deployment of software.

KrebsOnSecurity notified CISA about Ayrey’s findings on May 20. Ayrey said CISA appears to have invalidated the exposed RSA private key sometime after that notification. But he noted that CISA still hasn’t rotated leaked credentials tied to other critical security technologies that are deployed across the agency’s technology portfolio (KrebsOnSecurity is not naming those technologies publicly for the time being).

CISA responded with a brief written statement in response to questions about Ayrey’s findings, saying “CISA is actively responding and coordinating with the appropriate parties and vendors to ensure any identified leaked credentials are rotated and rendered invalid and will continue to take appropriate steps to protect the security of our systems.”

Ayrey said his company Truffle Security monitors GitHub and a number of other code platforms for exposed keys, and attempts to alert affected accounts to the sensitive data exposure(s). They can do this easily on GitHub because the platform publishes a live feed which includes a record of all commits and changes to public code repositories. But he said cybercriminal actors also monitor these public feeds, and are often quick to pounce on API or SSH keys that get inadvertently published in code commits.

In practical terms, it is likely that cybercrime groups or foreign adversaries also noticed the publication of these CISA secrets, the most egregious of which appears to have happened in late April 2026, Ayrey said.

“We monitor that firehose of data for keys, and we have tools to try to figure out whose they are,” he said. “We have evidence attackers monitor that firehose as well. Anyone monitoring GitHub events could be sitting on this information.”

James Wilson, the enterprise technology editor for the Risky Business security podcast, said organizations using GitHub to manage code projects can set top-down policies that prevent employees from disabling GitHub’s protections against publishing secret keys and credentials. But Wilson’s co-host Adam Boileau said it’s not clear that any technology could stop employees from opening their own personal GitHub account and using it to store sensitive and proprietary information.

“Ultimately, this is a thing you can’t solve with a technical control,” Boileau said on this week’s podcast. “This is a human problem where you’ve hired a contractor to do this work and they have decided of their own volition to use GitHub to synchronize content from a work machine to a home machine. I don’t know what technical controls you could put in place given that this is being done presumably outside of anything CISA managed or even had visibility on.”

Update, 3:05 p.m. ET: Added statement from CISA. Corrected a date in the story (Truffle Security said it found the repo gained some of its most sensitive secrets in late April 2026, not 2025).

Discover how Cisco is evolving its vulnerability disclosure practices. We are leveraging AI to prioritize high-risk security issues, helping customers focus on critical patching and remediation efforts.

Memorial Day weekend officially kicks off summer, and for millions of Americans, that means road trips, flights, cookouts, and a little online shopping for the deals. 

Unfortunately, scammers know this. They count on the fact that you’re distracted, you’re moving fast, and you’re probably connected to a network you don’t own. 

Here are five scams surging this holiday weekend, what they look like, and how to stay ahead of them.

1. Fake Travel Alerts from “Your Bank” or Hotel

You’re packing your bag when a text arrives: “Unusual activity detected on your account. Verify now to avoid suspension.”  

It looks like it’s from your bank, or maybe your hotel loyalty program. There’s a link. There’s urgency. And that’s exactly the point. 

These are brand impersonation scams, and they’re a dominant tactic year-round, but they spike around travel holidays when people are actively monitoring reservations and accounts.  

According to McAfee research, trusted brands like banks, airlines, and hotels are among the most commonly impersonated, and email scams impersonating retail and financial brands have surged up to 85% as major holidays approach. 

The message will typically ask you to click a link and “confirm your details” to secure your account or honor a reservation. That link leads to a convincing-looking fake site designed to capture your login credentials, payment info, or both. 

How to Avoid Travel Alert Scams:  

• Don’t click links in unsolicited texts or emails.  
• Go directly to the company’s app or website by typing the URL yourself.  
• Remember: pressure is a tactic, not customer service.  

McAfee’s Scam Detector can flag suspicious messages before you interact with them, whether they come via text, email, or social media. 

2. Fake Memorial Day Weekend “Deals”

Memorial Day is one of the biggest shopping weekends of the year. Scammers treat it like an open invitation. 

Fraudulent retailers flood social feeds with too-good-to-be-true deals on everything from patio furniture to electronics, often impersonating legitimate brands with copycat websites and paid ads. 

According to McAfee’s holiday shopping research, 91% of shoppers see ads from unfamiliar retailers, 37% say they might buy from a brand they don’t recognize, and a full 40% of consumers have abandoned a purchase out of fear that the deal wasn’t real. 

The most impersonated brands in McAfee’s research span luxury labels (Coach, Dior, Gucci) to mainstream favorites (Apple, Samsung, Nintendo, Disney), exactly the kind of items that show up in “blowout sale” ads. Fake storefronts have grown significantly, with technology URL scams rising nearly 50%. 

Once shoppers enter their payment details on a fraudulent site, that information goes directly to criminals. The average scam loss during the holiday shopping period runs around $840 per victim. 

How to Avoid Shopping Scams:  

• Type retailer URLs directly into your browser instead of clicking through ads or social posts.  
• Look for HTTPS and double-check the domain carefully before entering any payment info.  
• If a deal looks unbelievably good, verify it on the retailer’s official app before buying.  

McAfee’s Web Protection blocks malicious and suspicious sites before they load, including fake checkout pages. 

3. QR Code Scams at Gas Stations and Travel Stops

If you’re road-tripping this weekend, you may scan a QR code somewhere. It could be at the gas pump, a rest stop, a parking meter, or a roadside attraction. Scammers know this too. 

Criminals increasingly place fake QR codes over legitimate ones on gas station pumps, parking kiosks, and public signs. When you scan, you’re redirected to a convincing-looking payment or login page that captures your financial information. This is known as “quishing” or phishing via QR code. 

McAfee research shows just how widespread this risk has become: 68% of people scanned a QR code in the past three months, and 18% ended up on a suspicious or unsafe page after scanning. Among those who did, more than half took a risky action like entering personal information, installing an app, or connecting a digital wallet. 

How to Avoid Sketchy QR Codes:   

• Before scanning any QR code in public, look closely at the sticker or sign.  

• If it looks like it’s been placed over something else, skip it.  

• If you do scan, check the URL before proceeding.  

McAfee’s Scam Detector now includes instant QR code safety checks that assess risk before you tap, so you’re not flying blind at the gas pump. 

4. Public Wi-Fi Traps at Airports, Hotels, and Coffee Shops

Whether you’re waiting at the airport or grabbing coffee before hitting the highway, free Wi-Fi can feel like a gift. But not every “free Wi-Fi” network is what it appears to be. 

Hackers set up what are called “evil twin” networks, hotspots with names designed to look exactly like the legitimate network at the airport, hotel, or café you’re in.  

The moment you connect, they can use tools called packet sniffers to capture the data you send and receive: passwords, banking credentials, credit card numbers, email logins.  

According to McAfee’s travel research, 63% of travelers connect to public Wi-Fi, and 49% use airport Wi-Fi, making these among the riskiest behaviors travelers engage in without realizing it. 

Some of these fake networks go further, presenting a phony login screen that captures your username and password for popular services like Google or Apple before you even realize you’ve been compromised. 

How to Avoid Malicious Wi-Fi : 

• Always confirm the exact Wi-Fi network name with staff before connecting.  
• Turn off auto-join for Wi-Fi on your devices.  
• And most importantly: use a VPN.  

A VPN creates an encrypted tunnel for your internet traffic, so even if a hacker intercepts it, they’ll only see scrambled data. McAfee’s VPN is included in McAfee+ plans and automatically connects when you join public Wi-Fi, exactly the protection you want when you’re traveling and connecting everywhere.

5. Toll Road and Parking Text Scams (Expect a Surge After the Weekend)

You may have seen these already: a text that says you owe an unpaid toll or parking fee, with a link to pay before penalties kick in. These scams have been circulating for a while, and there’s a good chance Memorial Day weekend is about to make them worse. 

Scammers track news cycles and know that millions of Americans will be driving this weekend, many of them through toll roads and unfamiliar areas.  

That means they can blast out fake “unpaid toll” texts after the holiday and a significant percentage of recipients will think: “Actually, I did drive somewhere new this weekend.” That uncertainty is exactly what they’re counting on. 

These texts typically impersonate EZPass, SunPass, or state transportation departments and create urgency around a small fee to avoid larger fines. The link leads to a fake payment page designed to steal your credit card details. 

How to Avoid Toll Scams:   

• Don’t click links in unsolicited toll or parking texts.  
• If you think the charge might be legitimate, go directly to your state’s official toll authority website and look up your account there.  
• Real toll agencies will not threaten immediate penalties over text with a payment link.  
• If you receive one of these texts after this weekend, treat it as suspicious by default. 

Have a Safe Memorial Day Weekend 

Scammers don’t take holidays. If anything, long weekends are peak season. The good news: a little awareness goes a long way. Slow down before you click, verify before you scan, and protect your connection before you log on. 

McAfee+ Advanced comes with layered protection across all the moments where scams are most likely to strike, from the gas station to the hotel lobby to your inbox.  

Stay safe out there. 

The post 5 Scams to Watch for This Memorial Day Weekend appeared first on McAfee Blog.

The US President’s oft-maligned Trump Mobile venture may be facing another setback after a security buff claims he discovered a now-plugged website vulnerability that he says was leaking what could be tens of thousands of suckers' customers' details. The individual behind the discovery, who goes by "Louis," says he's a self-taught tech tinkerer and described himself as "just a nerd between jobs with too much time on my hands." He reckons the website’s data could be scooped up with a simple POST request. “It wasn't SQL. That wouldn't be as bad,” he told The Register. “It was a really simple HTTP request. POST, and then just asking for the info I wanted, basically.” More than 27,000 people who ordered from Trump Mobile, the President’s all-American smartphone and cell service brand, had their data flimsily secured online, Louis claimed. Louis, a long-serving IT professional who refuses to be called a security researcher, said the types of data he was able to gather included: first and last names, primary addresses, secondary addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, customer/account numbers, "enrollment ID" (pre-order number), and whether the order was placed by phone or online. “I discovered it first by looking into the site to see if I could find how many orders there actually were, and noticing some API endpoints,” he added. “I tried a couple of basic commands, and then it started showing whatever data I wanted. “It was as easy as going to the website and writing a very simple HTTP POST request into the console.” The website flaw only allowed him to return ten customer records at a time, he said, but these records all contained a customer number, which Louis used to loop through them all. In the space of an hour, the method allowed him to access the records of around 5,000 Trump Mobile customers, he claimed. After confirming the issue was valid and that all the data his script scooped up was deleted, Louis tried to disclose his findings to Trump Mobile, and anyone else who could take action, but received no response, although someone appears to have fixed the issue. The Register also tried contacting Trump Mobile but similarly received nothing in return. Out of options for disclosure, Louis decided to go public, informing two prominent YouTube creators and known orderers of the Trump T1 phone, Stephen “Coffeezilla” Findeisen and Charles “penguinz0” White Jr., whose respective videos covering his findings have jointly gathered millions of views. Trump T1 begins shipping Trump Mobile’s flagship device, the T1 Android smartphone with the gold-colored casing, began showing up at pre-order customers’ doors this week, after originally being slated for an August 2025 release. The brand’s entire schtick since first being announced in June 2025, around the time of a significant escalation in US-China trade war conflict, was that everything was going to be “Made in America.” Early renders of the proposed T1 showed what appeared to be an iPhone-like device – gold-colored, of course – but those who received their orders this week confirm it is just a reskinned HTC U-24 Pro, a mid-range Android from the Taiwanese tech biz which first hit the market in June 2024. The American flag embossed on the back of the device also only has 11 stripes instead of 13, although all the stars are present and accounted for, at least. When the President’s sons launched the Trump Mobile Brand last year, they promised the devices would be manufactured in America, although the company soon dropped this from its marketing. The T1 comes loaded with 512GB of storage, a 120Hz display, a Snapdragon 7 chip, and, of course, Truth Social pre-installed. Customers can order now to lock in what the company calls promotional pricing, picking up the T1 for $499. It is not clear what this may rise to in the future. You can pick up a standard HTC U-24 Pro 512GB model for roughly the same price, depending on the retailer. ®

Watch out for bogus World Cup websites that mimic official ticket and merchandise flows to steal money and personal data

Cisco tested AI’s ability to write an accurate report on a tabletop security incident response exercise, and found that while the tech can save time, many risks remain. The networking giant revealed its results in a Thursday blog post by Nate Pors, a senior incident commander in the Cisco Talos Incident Response team. Pors opened by observing that when to used generate long-form technical content, large language models can deliver “significant inaccuracies, unusual conclusions, and inconsistent writing styles.” LLMs make those mistakes because they’re essentially a fancy autocomplete system that makes educated guesses. Pors wrote that the nature of LLMs therefore sees them mess up in four ways: Using different data for each query, which means it’s “difficult to rely on an LLM for repeatable, standardized research outcomes.”Reaching different conclusions from the same data. “In a data breach scenario, a model might suggest a full organization-wide password reset in one instance and a targeted reset in another,” Pors wrote and AI then “often defaults to whichever recommendation it generates first” – and may therefore give bad advice.Because LLMs generate content token-by-token, they can create documents with different structure and formatting on each new run. “This unpredictability is problematic for professional environments where standardized layouts, such as consistent executive summaries or recommendation sections, are essential for quality control,” the Talos man observed.AI can discard data, so its output might ignore critical information.Talos developed several techniques to stop this sort of thing happening. One involves giving an LLM “granular, single-task instructions” that focus on “a specific, small portion of the report.” Doing so means “risk of hallucination or cross-contamination between sections is significantly reduced.” Telling an LLM which sources to use also helps. So does setting rules about the style and format of output. Using those techniques, Cisco says the time required to draft an incident report based on a tabletop exercise fell by 50 percent. "A blind test of the sample report in our quality assurance process showed no noticeable drop in overall writing quality," Pors wrote. "The peer reviewer, professional editor, and management reviewer all made complimentary comments about the report while unaware that it was AI-generated. The peer reviewer commented that the incidence of typos and grammatical errors was far lower than in the average report." But the Talos team also found “editing multiple sample reports within a single session resulted in cross-contamination of content from one report’s source material to another, even if the notes used to generate the first report were deleted from the project’s reference documents.” The researchers therefore recommend starting a new session, and re-entering prompts, for each new incident report. They also developed a spelling-and-grammar-checking prompt that “hallucinated numerous grammar issues … failed to identify actual issues,” had a success rate below 50 percent and “would behave inconsistently, sometimes catching issues and sometimes overlooking them. “It is currently unsuitable for production use,” Pors concluded. Pors said Cisco concluded that its approach “could be adapted to any cybersecurity reporting use case with standardized inputs and predictable outputs," but also warned authors must "take ownership of every word of the final report." "While testing, we found that the LLMs generated recommendations that were duplicative, irrelevant, or not actionable. If this were used in a production environment without manual checks, it could result in poor-quality recommendations in a final report." Those problems arose when considering a tabletop exercise, a far simpler affair than analysis of an incident that involves analyzing log files from multiple systems. ®