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Some 1.6 million unique email addresses tied to RingCentral have been leaked online, alongside names, physical addresses, and phone numbers, according to Have I Been Pwned. RingCentral disclosed the breach July 28 and said “it was the target of a sophisticated social engineering campaign” affecting a “limited portion of RingCentral customers.” The comms platform said that it promptly responded to the intrusion upon detecting it, “took steps to stop the unauthorized activity,” and immediately launched an investigation into the security incident with help from a “leading third-party forensic firm.” “We have not seen any new unauthorized activity since taking these remediation efforts,” the company added. RingCentral did not immediately respond to The Register’s request for comment on this story. We will update it as needed. While the company hasn’t named its attacker, notorious data theft and extortion gang ShinyHunters previously claimed it compromised the collaboration platform, according to a post on its data leak site, viewed by The Register. Screenshots of the post also circulated on social media. The crooks claimed they stole more than 623 GB of data, and set a July 30 deadline for RingCentral to pay up - or else the crew would dump the stolen information online. RingCentral apparently didn’t pay the extortion demand, and ShinyHunters followed through on its threat, posting customers’ details on the internet. “The company failed to reach an agreement with us despite our incredible patience, all the chances and offers we made. They don’t care,” the crims wrote on August 3. ShinyHunters hasn’t said how it gained access to RingCentral. This same group, which security sleuth Dominic Alvieri says is his “top threat group and probably is for most analysts,” has hacked hundreds of organizations since the start of the year, including education tech firms that provide services for schools and universities along with healthcare-sector organizations. Recently, ShinyHunters dumped data stolen from Abbott’s cancer diagnostics business with the leak containing 10.9 million unique email addresses alongside personal and health information. The crooks claim that they made off with more than 30 million rows of customer information, including more than one million Social Security numbers and 7.5 million dates of birth. More concerning, however, they said the haul includes 22 million-plus rows of client notes containing confidential doctor-patient conversations and health information, and more than 20 million medical-order records containing patient IDs, prescription types, order dates, and refill information.®

France's tax authority has confirmed that an intruder accessed its systems and extracted data in June after an alleged cybercriminal advertised a purported database of 2 million taxpayers. Using the alias "ZeroBytes," the alleged crook behind the attack on the General Directorate of Public Finances (DGFiP) advertised the stolen database on a cybercrime forum on Wednesday. They claimed the database contained details of more than 2 million French taxpayers and that they gained access using stolen credentials and an MFA bypass technique. ZeroBytes also claimed to retain access to DGFiP's systems and offered to sell it alongside the database. DGFiP did not immediately answer our questions about the attacker's claims. However, in a statement released Thursday, it disputed the claim that ZeroBytes retained access. "On Wednesday, August 12, 2026, a malicious actor claimed unauthorized access to the information system of the French Public Finances Directorate, which occurred at the end of June 2026 following identity theft," it said. "Initial investigations confirm that this access, which had been severed at the end of June as part of an audit, nevertheless allowed the consultation and extraction of data concerning individuals and professionals. "Following this complaint, the French Public Finances Directorate immediately implemented new restrictions to stop the unauthorized access and prevent further unauthorized use. In-depth investigations are ongoing to determine precisely which data and number of users were affected." DGFiP said it would report the attack to French data protection watchdog CNIL and notify affected users once it had determined who they were. The intrusion is the latest in a string of security breaches affecting France's public sector this year. France's Ministry of Finance, which oversees DGFiP, admitted in February that miscreants had accessed a database containing French citizens' bank details. The attackers used stolen credentials and made off with 1.2 million records, despite the ministry saying it quickly revoked their access. A few weeks later, France's Health Ministry confirmed a cyberattack on healthtech supplier Cegedim Santé in which around 15.8 million administrative files were stolen. Around 165,000 of these contained doctors' notes, which in "very limited cases" revealed medical histories. In April, the Interior Ministry confirmed reports of an attack on France Titres, the government agency responsible for identity documents including passports and driver's licenses. The alleged culprit, reportedly a 15-year-old, advertised the stolen data online and claimed the breach affected between 18 million and 19 million people – more than a quarter of metropolitan France's population. In June, the department responsible for Tchap, France's encrypted government messaging platform, investigated a suspected breach. The alleged attackers claimed to have accessed more than 73,000 user accounts, 643,000 messages, nearly 60,000 media files, and hundreds of chat rooms. ®

In early July, attackers used open source AI agents to autonomously hack government systems and energy companies, signaling to defenders that AI-powered attacks against critical infrastructure are no longer theoretical. "There is a clear and present danger," Tom Kellermann, TrendAI VP of AI security and threat research, told The Register. "As the geopolitical tension boils, systemic destructive cyberattacks launched by autonomous AI will occur," he said. "Weaponized AI will disable the safety systems of critical infrastructure, thus leading to kinetic disasters. Just like we see autonomous strike vehicles operating on the battlefield in Ukraine, we should expect autonomous weaponized AI." In fact, the prospect of attackers using AI against critical infrastructure was the top concern of every national security adviser, law enforcement official, and private-sector threat analyst The Reg spoke with at last week's Hacker Summer Camp conferences. "It's the targeting of critical infrastructure for us," Brett Leatherman, assistant director of the FBI's Cyber Division, told us during an interview at Black Hat. "We're very focused on the downstream impact targeting of critical infrastructure," Leatherman said. "That is where cyber becomes kinetic, and whether it is our water and wastewater treatment plants, whether it's the electric grid, whether it's the high-frequency trading networks and the financial networks, all of those, if the integrity of those are compromised, will have significant impact to communities and national security. So that's what keeps our teams up at night. How are we moving to secure critical infrastructure?" Where cyber becomes kinetic During the first four days of July, suspected Chinese operators aimed an attack framework built on Hermes and OpenClaw AI agents at targets in Taiwan. Across 12 "attack waves," the "near-autonomous" system deployed up to eight sub-agents, each assigned its own targets and techniques, and broke into a Taiwanese government website. Ultimately, they compromised a government email system, the country's nuclear safety agency, IT supply chain vendors, and at least seven energy sector companies, finding and exploiting misconfigurations and vulnerabilities while stealing sensitive data, credentials, and other secrets as they moved across the network. The Taiwanese government intrusion also followed a series of cyberattacks against water and wastewater utilities in the United States. While the Trump administration hasn't attributed these to a particular government or group, private sector threat hunters – including Halcyon Ransomware Research Center SVP Cynthia Kaiser, a former FBI cyber division deputy assistant director – blame Iran for these intrusions. Military conflicts spilling into cyberspace are nothing new, but these cyberattacks in America brought the war with Iran to more than 30 small-town water systems in Minnesota and targets across nearly a dozen other states. To be clear, there's no evidence that attackers used AI to hack these water utilities. Most were small, community systems that left programmable logic controllers (PLCs) directly exposed to the internet using default or weak passwords. Still, these breaches expose "40, 50 years of tech debt," former US National Cyber Director Chris Inglis told The Reg during an interview at Black Hat. This technical debt – deferred maintenance, unpatched or end-of-life systems, and delayed security updates – expands the attack surface and gives intruders more ways into critical systems, threatening operations and potentially disrupting services people rely on every day. "The water sector attacks – regardless of who is doing them – is taking advantage of unpatched vulnerabilities in the PLCs," Inglis said. "We've known about these particular vulnerabilities for years now, and yet we've not done anything about them because they're low-level, not easily accessible." Inglis added that there's no indication the digital intruders used AI to exploit these PLCs. 'There's an alligator in the boat' However, AI systems allow attackers to cash in on tech debt, and they don't need access to frontier models to do it. Free, open-weight models also excel at finding bugs in software and configurations, chaining these together, and abusing them to break software and systems. Earlier this summer, University of Toronto researchers used an unnamed publicly available open-weight model, released in 2025, to develop a computer worm that they claim spread through an enterprise test network. The self-propagating code adapted on the fly to identify known vulnerabilities and misconfigurations on target systems, then generated and executed attacks to move laterally through the network and compromise additional machines. "Commodity models can do that, and many of the vulnerabilities they find do not require access to the source code – it's in the configurations, and configurations change over time," Inglis said. When it comes to attackers abusing AI systems, "I wouldn't be worried about the frontier models," Inglis said. "Worry about the models that are already on the street. Turns out there's an alligator in the boat, and it's the commodity models." Plus, as we've seen in previous breaches, both government-backed goons and criminal groups increasingly use AI to automate reconnaissance. Security analysts worry that the technology could also help attackers acquire expertise in industrial control systems (ICS). When OT knowledge becomes a commodity "What protects ICS? More than anything, it's obscurity," said John Hultquist, chief analyst at Google Threat Intelligence Group, during a press briefing at Black Hat. "It is an obscure, esoteric, knowledge set that a handful of people – I call them uber nerds – have, and that attackers rarely have the necessary knowledge to carry out. That's no longer the case. That knowledge is simply on tap." AI tools mean miscreants don't need to be ICS or operational technology experts to carry out destructive cyberattacks on critical networks and facilities. They just have to ask an agent to learn everything about these systems and do the dirty work for them. "There have been threat actors who are capable of this at the top level, like China and Russia," Hultquist said. "But now I'm afraid the actors who are just a couple steps down – North Korea, Iran – who don't have the same focus on that technology are going to have far greater success. They're going to have the tools necessary to be as aggressive as they want to." During what was probably the most talked about Black Hat briefing of the week, OpenAI employees provided more details about how their models escaped their training pens, went rogue, and hacked Hugging Face to complete a security evaluation. We learned the AI agents spent months asking other agents for help, building message boards, developing their own communication protocols – essentially creating a hive mind to carry out the attack. "In the near future, we should expect that threat actors will intentionally deploy, optimize, weaponize, and use offensive agent collectives in the manner that we have just described here," OpenAI technical staffer Michael Dalton said. Retired general and former NSA chief Paul Nakasone, speaking to reporters at DEF CON, called the Hugging Face attack "an inflection point in terms of AI-generated, autonomous cyberattacks." "This is the challenge: that we have to, over the next several months, get the defensive side much quicker and much better than they are today," he added. Therein lies the challenge: offensive uses of AI appear to be advancing faster than autonomous defenses, and attackers don't face the legal and ethical constraints imposed on defenders. "I think we're still a ways out from having swarms of autonomous, defensive agents fighting attacks," Ryan Whelan, global head of Accenture Cyber Intelligence, told The Reg at Black Hat. "That's probably over a year out over the horizon. But I do think we're going to see it first on the adversary side, because they don't care if they break things." Kellermann quoted Victor Hugo: "Not all the armies of the history of the world can stop an idea whose time has come." "That idea," he said, "is weaponized AI. Shields up." ®

Cryptocurrency hardware wallet maker Trezor has confirmed that a breach at one of its shipping partners exposed the personal data of more than 13,000 customers. The company's initial findings suggested the breach was limited to orders placed in certain countries during the previous 90 days. New information indicates that earlier orders may also be affected. The breach exposed the names, email addresses, phone numbers, and shipping addresses of 11,742 customers in the US, UK, Sweden, Colombia, Brazil, Italy, and Portugal who ordered Trezor products between May 10 and August 8. An additional 1,947 customers had their names, home cities, and email addresses exposed. Some members of this group may have placed their orders before May 10. "We are verifying this information and the timeframe with ShipMonk," said Trezor. ShipMonk is Trezor's logistics partner. It stores and ships products on the company's behalf and collects the information needed to fulfill orders. ShipMonk is subject to Trezor's 90-day retention policy, which requires partners to delete or anonymize customer data within 90 days of collecting it for an order. ShipMonk did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Trezor markets itself as a purveyor of secure, offline, hardware-based cryptocurrency wallets. With its products, it aims to shield customers from cyberattacks and malicious apps. While it assured customers that its own systems and devices remain secure, Trezor warned that "affected customers could experience an increase in phishing attempts." The exposed details could help criminals craft convincing phishing attempts impersonating banks, crypto exchanges, or Trezor itself. The company said it contacted affected customers directly and advised them to check any communications against information published through its official channels. "Never enter your wallet backup on a website or share it with anyone," Trezor said in an apologetic advisory. "This is the first time since Trezor was founded in 2013 that we have experienced a breach that exposed customer phone numbers and shipping addresses. "We absolutely understand how serious this is and the potential risks it poses to our customers and are deeply sorry to those affected." Trezor said in a supplementary social media post, separate from the advisory, that its "top priority" project at the moment is to establish an "Anonymous Delivery" option for customers. The service will allow buyers to complete checkout without linking their home address or real-world identity to an order. Customers using Anonymous Delivery will go through a dedicated checkout, use a nickname or label ID in place of a real name, and have their product shipped to an automated delivery locker instead of their home. The delivery will also come in unbranded packaging with a generic sender label. The carrier will only use email or SMS to send a PIN for the locker. Trezor said the service is gearing up for a September launch in the EU and by the end of the year in the US. Alas, that didn't stop Cake Wallet, a rival crypto wallet, from poking fun at Trezor. "Another rough day for self custody," it Xeeted, before suggesting crypto holders instead use an old smartphone with Cake Wallet installed because "there is no order, no shipping address, or customer data tied to the purchase." ®

Scotland's public prosecution service has warned 300 staff that their personal information may have been caught up in a cyberattack on one of its suppliers. The Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS) disclosed the incident on Thursday, saying an unnamed third-party supplier detected suspicious activity on August 5 and subsequently launched an investigation. COPFS said its own systems were not compromised and that the incident involves information provided for an online data maturity assessment completed by the prosecution service last year. The Scottish government organized the assessment, which was managed by the affected supplier. COPFS said the potentially exposed information is limited to employment-related data submitted for the exercise, including staff names, roles, and work email addresses. In a statement to The Register, a COPFS spokesperson said: "COPFS is aware that a Scottish Government partner has been subject to a data security breach. We understand that this has affected around 300 COPFS colleagues who participated in a public sector data maturity survey. "This is unconnected to casework and did not involve sensitive or confidential case information. There is no impact on the work of the prosecution service. "Colleagues have been reminded of guidance on responding to any phishing or scam attempts which may arise from this third-party breach." According to COPFS, the supplier has taken steps to secure its systems and is still investigating how the intrusion happened and precisely what information may have been accessed. COPFS said it would provide further updates if "significant new information" emerges. It is unclear whether the incident is connected to the recent exploitation of a zero-day vulnerability in business intelligence platform Metabase. The Scottish government did not answer our question about whether the affected supplier used the software. Metabase disclosed this month that attackers had exploited a previously unknown vulnerability in its cloud service, potentially allowing them to gain administrator access and reach connected databases. As we reported earlier this week, modular laptop maker Framework was among those affected. For now, the supplier breach leaves plenty of questions and few answers about who got in or what they accessed. ®

New Zealand’s Security Intelligence Service (NZSIS) has claimed Chinese companies are building space facilities in the nation to gather military intelligence. Director-general of security Andrew Hampton yesterday made that allegation in the SIS’s annual threat environment assessment. The document points out that New Zealand’s space sector is booming, because the nation’s location makes it “an ideal place to install Ground Based Space Infrastructure (GBSI) … to track satellites and space debris, as well as for collecting a range of other scientific data.” The NZSIS has also found that GBSI is “attractive for foreign states seeking to advance military capabilities and intelligence operations.” The report offers a case study of a China-based organization called “Purple Mountain Observatory” that has “close links” to Beijing and tried to install GBSI in New Zealand. “They worked with a local company that was likely unaware of the equipment’s capability to collect intelligence of military value and would have no idea who was receiving the data,” the report states, before noting that Chinese laws mean Purple Mountain could be compelled to provide information to China’s government. The intelligence agency believes Purple Mountain “would have … willingly passed on” data it collected. “NZSIS, working with other agencies was able to disrupt this activity, but it was not the first time this organisation has attempted to install its own GBSI in New Zealand and is unlikely to be the last.” The report rates China as the only country targeting New Zealand at scale, based on activity NZSIS has been able to observe. “We have observed increased targeting of professional networking sites and online job platforms for espionage purposes by China’s military intelligence services,” the assessment finds. "PRC (People’s Republic of China) intelligence officers, or their affiliates, use an aggressive strategy where they pose as consultants or employees of think tanks, or recruitment firms. They place online job advertisements looking for analysts in foreign policy, international relations, defence or security,” the document states. “Candidates are then vetted by PRC intelligence to determine what information they have had access to and whether they would divulge it. The job offers are lucrative, but the intelligence officers often encourage their candidates to keep their government jobs both to keep the information tap running and to open up opportunities to recruit their colleagues.” The report also observes that some recent cyber-attacks were probably the work of state-backed groups trying to destabilize New Zealand. “Looking for the sharpest needle in endless giant stacks of needles” The document also addresses domestic threats, especially violent extremism. “Part of our job is to work out whether someone’s vitriolic and violent online pronouncements have any link to New Zealand,” the report states. “This is a narrow focus but the pool of information and intelligence we are working with is vast.” “We used to describe our work as finding a needle in a haystack. However, the internet has changed. Large volumes of toxic content, widespread anonymity, and hidden locations mean our job is now like looking for the sharpest needle in endless giant stacks of needles.” “Extremist rhetoric, particularly online, has become more mainstream, a development which has made it even more challenging to differentiate between genuine support for violent extremism, hateful language designed to shock, or online content created simply to drive engagement or ‘likes’.” NZSIS also has to keep an eye on encrypted messaging services and even gaming platforms, to counter violent online communities. “Algorithms on various social media platforms can link non-violent content to progressively more extreme material,” the report states. “The gateway subject matter can quickly expose people to violent extremist content that can support radicalisation.” Kiwis aren’t just recipients of this vile material. “NZSIS has observed New Zealand violent extremists use encrypted messaging systems, social media and online gaming platforms to circulate violent material including weapon tutorials and objectionable content. Their presence on these platforms, many of which are mainstream, also helps them to find like-minded individuals or supporters.” ® Bootnote: Readers interested in New Zealand’s intelligence services might enjoy 2026 comedy series New Zealand Spy, a deadpan delight.

If you want to record whatever you do on a computer, send those records to OpenAI, use more ChatGPT tokens, and increase your vulnerability to prompt injection, then OpenAI has something for you. It's called Computer History, an opt-in way to record your computer interactions across apps and websites as memories organized on a timeline. Why would you want to do so? Maybe you found Chronicle, the predecessor of Computer History which compiled similar histories using screenshots, a bit too intrusive but don't mind Computer History's approach – recording input events and storing them unencrypted locally for 48 hours (or more), with a brief visit to OpenAI's servers. Maybe you're not bothered by the warning OpenAI includes in its documentation: "Computer History files can contain sensitive information. They are not encrypted by Computer History, and other programs running as your macOS user may be able to access them." Perhaps, having given OpenAI's Codex and GPT Work the run of your computer, you're already sold on the suggestion that storing your computer activity in memory files and arranging those interactions in a timeline will improve ChatGPT responses, surface opportunities for automation, and make it easier to resume prior work. Computer History is, to put it bluntly, a keylogging and event capture system. There was a time before eyeglass cameras, license plate readers, surveillance capitalism, and police drones when such snooping might have provoked an outcry from privacy advocates. But the tech industry has found it can outsource surveillance to its own customers and in so doing make the panopticon harder to protest once it becomes a personal choice. "Computer History creates an interaction-event stream from allowed apps and websites," OpenAI's documentation explains. "Events can include clicks, typing, keyboard shortcuts, app switches, and context that macOS exposes through its accessibility system. Computer History periodically turns these events into text summaries and local memory files." The AI biz makes a point of noting that Computer History does not capture screen images, microphone input, or system audio. Nor does it capture private-mode browsing. Off by default, Computer History is available for ChatGPT Pro, Business, and Enterprise users in the ChatGPT desktop app on macOS. Pro users can enable it individually; Business and Enterprise users need an admin to approve it. It's not available currently in the European Economic Area (EEA), Switzerland, or the United Kingdom or to those accessing ChatGPT via API key or Amazon Bedrock. There are circumstances in which OpenAI suggests Computer History users might want to suspend the service if they have some scruples about capturing user activity in apps and websites without permission. "Turn it off during communications with other people unless you have their prior express consent," the company advises, perhaps in acknowledgement of legal risk. "Consider pausing it or excluding apps that contain sensitive health, financial, or personal information." Computer History interaction events are supposed to be saved locally for up to 48 hours before being deleted by ChatGPT and Codex. Events, however, get sent to OpenAI servers to generate memories, and those may be stored locally for longer periods of time and may be used in future chats that get passed back to OpenAI. "OpenAI does not retain those event files after processing unless required by law and does not use them for training," the company says. While it has opposed demands for chat logs, it has nonetheless provided chat logs in response to legal process. Computer History adds cost because it uses tokens during the summarization of activities and the creation of memory data. It also expands the prompt injection attack surface. "Computer History increases the risk of prompt injection from content in apps and websites," the company says. "For example, if you visit a website containing malicious instructions, ChatGPT or Codex might follow those instructions." But at least you get a nice timeline of your recent activity. ®

Donald Trump is allowing government agencies to contract private cybersecurity companies to carry out operations against cyber-enabled transnational criminal organizations (CE-TCOs). The US President signed a memo on Wednesday confirming a strategy hinted at earlier this year, saying participating companies can support national operations against criminals, including cyber surveillance and technical disruptions of their networks. The latter, described as "Cyber Effects Operations," covers activities that cause "the manipulation, disruption, denial, degradation, or destruction of information systems, networks, physical or virtual infrastructure controlled by information systems, or information resident thereon." Although the memo establishes a distinction between cyber effects operations and cyber surveillance missions, it acknowledged that the latter will also inevitably involve some disruption or manipulation of systems in order to carry out the surveillance. Surveillance operations are designed for intel gathering, either to support further snooping or for later use in cyber effects operations, with the intent of remaining undetected. Trump described CE-TCOs as "any foreign group that conducts cyber-enabled crime against the United States Government, a United States person, or United States interests." Crucially, the definition excludes entities directly associated with, or operating wholly on behalf of, foreign governments. No stepping on TAO's toes, of course. Participating companies will undergo "rigorous vetting" and will be subject to "strict operational procedures," the memo adds. The operational procedures are to be drawn up within 60 days and codified by program executive directors working with the Homeland Security Council. Companies wishing to be called up for service will have to demonstrate that they have the technical capabilities to carry out the required operations, and be willing to prove this each year via annual evaluations. Program managers must ensure that the operational procedures open opportunities for highly resourced, large organizations, as well as "smaller, more agile companies" that may prove useful for "specialized or discrete tasks." The Justice Department will also play a role in authorizing operations, particularly those targeting US residents or raising domestic legal issues. Participating companies will also be prohibited from executing operations that could lead to "critical outcomes," which is shorthand for attacks that result in the loss of life or serious injury, or those that could be seen as an armed attack under international law. These companies will also be required to maintain a bond or escrow of at least $1 million, which shall be forfeited if they violate the terms of their contracts. Unleashing Trump's cyber army The White House published "President Trump's Cyber Strategy for America" document in March, which promised to "unleash the private sector by creating incentives to identify and disrupt adversary networks and scale our national capabilities." The document [PDF] also stated: "We will leverage the immense talents and ingenuity of our private sector research base. "We will establish a new level of relationship between the public and private sectors to defend America in peace and war." The announcement prompted legal eagles and think tanks to ponder the implications of such a move. Many wondered how the promise to mobilize the private sector would be put into practice. They did not then have the details contained in this week's memo, and some assumed participating companies would support operations against nation-states. This particular program, however, excludes entities acting directly on behalf of foreign governments. Writing for the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) and citing reporting available at the time, cyber and tech research fellow Gareth Mott said that the US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) might need to be amended before American companies could legally offer such services. Experts from law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom agreed, despite the US Cyber Strategy not mentioning any plans for legislative changes. They wrote: "Any attempt to more directly involve the private sector in offensive cyber actions will likely require further legal and regulatory changes before it can be meaningfully implemented. "Even if the administration were to issue new enforcement guidance redirecting prosecutions away from hack-back cases, the availability of civil penalties under the CFAA and its five-year statute of limitations would likely render such executive actions significantly less impactful. "Technology companies should consider closely monitoring developments to track how the administration plans to enact such incentives." However, Jenner & Block lawyers noted in an analysis published by Lawfare that a provision of the CFAA could limit participating companies' exposure. Title 18 of the US Code, § 1030(f), says the CFAA does not prohibit lawfully authorized investigative, protective, or intelligence activity by a US government agency or intelligence agency. Participating companies might therefore be protected when acting under government contracts and direction. However, no court has determined whether that exemption covers private companies carrying out such work. "No court has addressed whether this exception provides any protection for private-sector entities engaged to perform these activities on behalf of the US government and, if so, under what circumstances," the lawyers wrote. "At the very least, it is unlikely that a court would interpret this provision to extend to private companies engaged in independent offensive operations, without government direction or involvement." The last part is key: because the US government will draw up procedures and direct the companies' involvement, the work may fall within the CFAA exemption. Whichever way the US constructs its private sector play, it represents a significant shift in the country's cybersecurity policy, and perhaps that of other nations further down the line. As Mott points out, US allies will certainly be keeping tabs on the private sector program's success, and its take-up from the companies it looks to attract. ®

Confidence in an organization's cyber recovery capabilities deserves scrutiny. If a ransomware attack disables the SaaS data tenanted in the Microsoft cloud ecosystem, the data the business depends on as its lifeblood, the pace at which operations resume rests on assumptions that often prove wrong. Anyone whose answer is "It's all good. Microsoft has my back on this one with its comprehensive native retention and recovery capabilities" is due a reality check. With agile business tools like M365 and Entra ID and solid backend infrastructure in the form of Azure, Microsoft brings a lot to the SaaS party. Both IT departments and MSPs need to be aware, however, that Redmond operates on the same shared responsibility model as other major SaaS providers. In the event of a cyberattack, the recovery burden splits between what the cloud provider handles and what falls to the subscriber alone. MSPs face the additional pressure of meeting stringent SLAs, working with clients’ preferred providers or tooling, and managing their own staffing and profitability accordingly. Microsoft ensures that its services keep running in the aftermath of a strike but does not promise to restore data to a specific known good point before the disaster. That gap always sat with the customer, and planning for it before problems hit beats improvising while picking up the pieces. "There's a common misconception about what Microsoft is responsible for, as distinct from the service they're providing," explains Brent Torre, GM of cyber resilience . Microsoft's native tools, he points out, address problems like short-term accidental deletion and aspects of data governance. They are not a backup solution and will not protect against ransomware or recover data. "Microsoft is clear that whether it's a SaaS application like Microsoft 365, a platform application like SQL Server, or even VMs running in Azure, the customer is always responsible for the information that's in that service, as well as devices, accounts and identities," he adds. "If you get compromised and the attacker starts deleting data, Microsoft has no responsibility for that." A world of pain The gap between availability and true cyber recovery is misunderstood, and it has widened into something of a chasm in recent years. There are three contributing factors to this gap. The first is the evolution of cyberattacks. Typical cyberattacks have pivoted from muscling past a defensive barrier to targeting human weakness, because strolling in through the front entrance with a stolen pass is easier than shimmying through a forced window. Identity has become the primary attack surface. Credential compromise, or identity-based initial access, removes the need to find a vulnerability to exploit and requires only an unwary employee. AI is now a staple weapon in the criminal arsenal, augmenting exploitation techniques such as phishing, social engineering, deceptive emails and spoofed websites, all convincingly used to trick users into typing passwords into a portal controlled by the aggressor. The technique can get more scientific than that. Automated AI-powered bots test millions of leaked username and password pairs across hundreds of different websites, exploiting the common habit of password reuse. Microsoft Entra ID, the vendor's cloud-based identity and access management service and the very tool designed to keep criminals out, is now a prime vector for attack and no match for stolen identity. Once an attacker compromises Entra ID with pilfered credentials, without setting off alarms, they have a free run at gathering data from mailboxes, OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams and other soft targets. The ransomware attack itself can then be launched with ease and at leisure. Another contributory factor is that the vogue for moving workloads to infrastructure and platform as a service (IaaS and PaaS) models shows no sign of abating. Organizations tend to retain some functions on-premises, put some in SaaS applications, and others in cloud environments, but are often guilty of not protecting and managing everything to the same level of quality. Data gets backed up in a variety of locations, yet whether it is all equally recoverable in the event of a breach is another chink in the armor that nobody understands. The 'as a service' model is popular, but it is the weak link when ransomware strikes. The third part of the problem is the emergence of multiple compliance requirements mandating cyber resilience along with correct backup and recovery procedures, for which many organizations are ill-prepared. Together, these pressures give criminals room to do enormous harm to data, business operations and compliance posture in the gap between attack and restoration of SaaS availability. Given that Microsoft's native retention and recovery capabilities are not designed to deliver true cyber resilience, restoring the business to how it was before the attack is something to plan for in advance. Time for independent backup protection "At Kaseya we regularly recommend that you keep a copy of your data, independent of the primary environment it's operating in," advises Torre. "This needs to be something immutable that you can recover from even if the Microsoft or Google or Salesforce ecosystem goes down." This kind of protection is best delivered as a dedicated cloud-to-cloud backup solution stored outside the main SaaS tenant, he argues, an approach increasingly written into cyber insurance and compliance requirements. By pulling copies of regularly targeted data from the Microsoft tenant for storage offsite in a third-party datacenter, organizations can be sure that if SaaS credentials are compromised, critical assets remain safe from attack. Restoration can then push what is needed directly back into the SaaS environment, even where the original tenant has been destroyed. "In fact some people find it faster to stand up a new shell and rebuild it than try to gain access back into a compromised tenant," notes Torre. "Whether you're an internal IT technician, working the night shift, or an MSP needing to live up to your SLAs and maintain profitability, you require a solution that's super straightforward and you need to be able to trust that the recovery will work. Both IT departments and MSPs should be looking out for a solution that's incredibly easy to use. Disaster recovery isn't the only job that they have." A good platform, he says, focuses not just on guaranteeing recovery but on keeping the hygiene of the cyber resilience estate at a high standard without endless human intervention. It should also make certain that Microsoft 365 and Entra ID are restored together in a single workflow, so identity and the data it grants access to come back online in the right order rather than in separate stages. Choosing the right platform Datto is a cybersecurity and data protection business owned by Kaseya. Datto SaaS Protection for Microsoft 365, Datto Backup for Microsoft Azure, and Datto Backup for Microsoft Entra ID are designed between them to close the gap between availability and recovery by storing protected copies of tenant data in the Datto Cloud, outside the Microsoft environment. In this way a compromised production tenant does not take the recovery point down with it. "With our M365 backup, we're protecting one million users worldwide," claims Torre. "A lot of organizations have built trust around our ability to protect and recover their data. We offer a trusted platform for recovery that focuses on ease of recovery, ease of deployment, not just for M365 but for Azure and Entra ID too." Both IT bosses and MSP players need to recognize that a ransomware attack, or other cyber crisis, is a matter of when rather than if. Recovery matters more than protection, because protection is certain to fail at some point, and traditional approaches to backing up data are no longer sufficient on their own. Anticipating disaster is not enough; the organization also needs to be set up to withstand it. That means being as certain as possible that the Microsoft environment can be recovered rapidly, down to the last scrap of data. This capability underpins modern business workflows and operations. Microsoft tracks more than 4,000 identity attacks every second and analyzes 38 million identity risk detections daily — no organization is off the target list. When an attack lands, the restoration clock is already ticking, and any delay in fully restoring IT operations and key environments to their pre-attack state can mean the difference between survival and collapse, with profit, regulatory standing and reputation all riding on the outcome. Securing data with purpose-built cyber resilience platforms that enable rapid, clean recovery is how organizations meet that test. MSPs looking to close the gap can start with the Datto MSP Buyer's Guide to Microsoft Entra ID Backup Sponsored by Datto.

Beacon, a CRM provider for charities and nonprofits, says an AWS access key "potentially exposed in public JavaScript build artifacts" is the leading suspect in its July breach. The revelation came in the company's first update on the attack in more than a week. If the access key was exposed in public build artifacts, it raises questions about why Beacon's development pipeline and code review controls failed to catch it. Beacon used stronger wording about the potential data loss, confirming that a copy of the database was made and assessing that it was probably downloaded in readable form. "This update confirms… that a copy of the database which holds all Beacon customer data, including attachment files, was made and likely downloaded in a readable format by the threat actor," wrote CTO David Simpson. "Analysis of the AWS Cost & Usage reports across May-July 2026 has been conducted. This data showed a significant increase in data transfer on 27-28 July 2026. This timing correlates with the malicious activity, which supports an assessment that substantial downloads occurred." Beacon's logs cannot reveal which specific records left its systems, although the company has confirmed that a copy of the database containing all customer data and attachments was made. In an FAQ accompanying the update, Beacon advises customers to assess the likely exposure by reviewing what they stored in their CRM instance. Many of the charities that have confirmed they are affected have said the data mainly pertains to personal information and details about donations. Simpson said Beacon's AWS data was encrypted at rest, but the compromised access key may have allowed the attacker to retrieve it in readable form. The malicious activity began in the early hours of July 27, according to Beacon's root cause analysis, matching its initial estimate of the incident timeline. The company has more than 1,500 customers, although it has not established how many had data taken. The malicious activity lasted one hour and 27 minutes, Beacon said, and the attacker established no persistence mechanisms in AWS. Simpson warned customers that "there are things we may never be able to find out about this incident," and that other details won't be shared to protect Beacon's security position. He promised to provide customers with a summary when the investigation concludes in a few weeks, but warned that "the level of detail contained in this next and final update may not be any more than" Beacon published on Wednesday. "I recognise this is frustrating, but unfortunately it is the reality of complex incidents like this. With this in mind, we would recommend making your own risk assessments now regarding onward notification to impacted data subjects using your knowledge of the data you process and store with Beacon." Since Beacon disclosed the attack on August 4, the number of high-profile charities confirming they are affected has grown every day. Early confirmations came from the likes of Molly Rose Foundation, Macmillan Cancer Support Jersey, and English National Ballet. Sheffield Hospitals Charity, Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital Charity, the British Deaf Association, and Lincoln Cathedral are among those that have since joined the list. The Charity Commission said that "a number of charities have submitted serious incident reports," and that the volume of these reports is causing delays to responses. "We appreciate your patience and understanding as we prioritise instances of the greatest risk," it said. ®

PWNED Welcome, once again, to PWNED, the weekly column where we highlight others’ security failures. Hopefully, there’s a lesson in all this, but it could just be “stop shooting yourself in the foot.” Have a story about someone leaving a gaping hole in their network? Share it with us at pwned@sitpub.com. Anonymity is available upon request. Our story today comes courtesy of Siim Kostabi, co-founder of Pageloot, a company that provides QR codes businesses can use for marketing. Kostabi’s tale of tech terror reminds us that credentials, even for a staging server, have a lot of value in the wrong hands. He explains that his company brought in a contractor to help with some API integrations on the back end. That developer had the credentials for the staging environment and wanted to be able to view them across different devices they were using for the job. So what was the developer’s solution to the very common problem of keeping track of usernames and passwords? They could have chosen a password manager. They could have written the passwords down in a paper notebook and kept it hidden from prying eyes. They could have gotten a password tattoo. They could even have emailed the passwords to themselves and it would have been smarter than what they did. Instead, the outside developer decided to store their password in a Google Doc. And they set that Google Doc to be viewable by anyone on the internet who had the link. And then, one day, an employee at the company found the Google Doc with the staging credentials in it because Google Search had indexed it and offered it as a search suggestion. “A developer on our team was debugging something unrelated and typed our domain into Google Search,” Kostabi recalls. “The autocomplete surfaced one of our staging hostnames followed by what looked like a credential string. We checked, and there was a publicly accessible Docs URL.” Yikes! Just imagine that not only are your company’s credentials available to anyone online, but they are indexed in Google Search for the world to find! Once they discovered the problem, Kostabi’s company immediately cut access for that contractor and rotated all of its exposed credentials. They also set a new rule: no storing passwords on Google Docs, Slack, Notion, or other collaboration tools. In a separate incident, Kostabi heard from a Pageloot customer, a mid-size retailer, whose QR codes were suddenly directing users to a competitor’s site. After investigating, he found that a disgruntled ex-employee’s credentials had not been revoked and that the former employee had used that access to redirect all of the retailer’s URLs, costing it customers. The takeaway from both of these problems is that you need to carefully control access. Former employees should immediately lose access to everything and current contractors should be reasonably intelligent people you can trust. “Both situations were completely avoidable with basic hygiene,” Kostabi said. “Proper offboarding, access reviews, and not treating shared docs like private vaults.” ®

Researchers from Germany’s Helmholtz Center for Information Security have found processors made by China’s Loongson have leaky caches that attackers could use to seek specific data. Loongson has developed its own LoongArch instruction set architecture (ISA) that blends approaches used by MIPS and RISC-V. On a site called LoongLeakAttack.com, the researchers explain that they found the leaky cache using a fuzzer, then noticed that the LoongArch ISA manual mentions an instruction that leaves 32 bits of a memory register in an “uncertain” state. “Our analysis reveals that under certain circumstances, the ‘uncertain’ data originates from the L1 data cache,” the four researchers wrote. “Since this cache is not isolated between applications, LoongLeak can leak data from other applications and the operating system. Even worse, an attacker can prime the CPU’s internal state to target the leakage to a specific cache set.” In a paper [PDF] explaining their research, authors Lorenz Hetterich, Tristan Hornetz, Fabian Thomas, and Michael Schwarz share case studies that “include recovering full-disk AES keys from the kernel, partial root password hashes from user-space, and bypassing traditional software defenses such as ASLR and stack canaries, all within seconds.” In case that’s not scaring you enough, they also point out “LoongLeak can be exploited from unprivileged user space, containers, or virtual machines.” The flaw even means “LoongLeak can cross the virtual machine boundary and leak host data from inside a VM.” “As the leakage is architectural, it requires neither high-resolution timers nor traditional sidechannel amplification, and it grants the attacker precise control over cache set and line offset,” they add. And the cherry on top is that software mitigations aren’t possible. Users with chips that possess the flaw either need to replace them or make sure they don’t allow any private data to enter or remain in the L1 cache. Making that happen can require turning off one thread per core, effectively disabling hyperthreading. The news isn’t all bad, because Loongson fixed the flaw in an update to its model 3A6000 processor, and the mitigation of evicting cache data slows performance by just 1.4 percent in the worst case. The blast radius of this flaw is also likely to be limited, because Loongson chips are hardly used outside China. The company offers chips for PCs, servers, and appliances such as printers. China’s government promotes use of Loongson chips as part of its plan to reduce dependence on imported tech. Lenovo makes laptops that use Loongson chips but only sells them in China. The Register has discussed the company’s chips with other major PC-makers, who told us they would adopt Loongson product if users want them, or if doing so becomes necessary to participate in the Chinese hardware market. But we’ve not seen a non-Chinese company adopt the processors. China’s government, however, may be nervous about this research as it has instructed public sector buyers to buy local products. Perhaps some government agencies are running vulnerable devices? If that’s the case, Beijing has its work cut out spotting any attacks, because the researchers could find “no specific tools or methods to detect if LoongLeak is being exploited.” ®

Suspected Chinese cyber operatives used publicly available AI tools to compromise Taiwanese government systems before expanding the attack to its nuclear safety agency, supply-chain vendors, and at least seven energy companies in what security researchers called a "near-autonomous attack." Over the first four days of July, AI agents compromised 85 government user accounts and extracted more than 2,500 personnel records, according to Dream, an Israeli cybersecurity firm. Researchers uncovered evidence of the attack in a 160 MB online archive containing 1,395 files documenting the operation. Dream, in research published on Wednesday, detailed the intrusions and said that the suspected Chinese hackers hit “government entities in Asia” - but declined to say which government had been attacked. A person familiar with the attack confirmed to The Register that Taiwan was the target. The Financial Times first reported on Dream’s research and identified Taiwan. While the security firm doesn’t attribute the agentic attack to the Chinese government or a specific hacking group, the operational documentation “points to a Chinese-language operator,” the researchers said. According to Dream, the attack framework, built on open source Hermes and OpenClaw AI agents, deployed up to eight sub-agents, each assigned to its own targets and attack techniques, across 12 “attack waves” between July 1 and July 4. First, the agents mapped the entire government ecosystem, extracting embedded URLs, API endpoints, OAuth client IDs, and Keycloak configuration objects from a single government portal. This portal allowed the agents to identify 21 connected government systems and every supported authentication flow. “On one target alone, it discovered 36+ API endpoints spanning account management, user data retrieval, file upload, and administrative functions - many completely unauthenticated,” the Dream threat researchers wrote. “Critically, it found that one of the systems exposed its entire user database without any authentication - thousands of employee records including names, departments, and SSO account IDs.” Multiple entry points After mapping the government’s attack surface, the agents found multiple entry points including three hidden API endpoints that accepted any request body and returned a valid authenticated session without requiring user credentials. Using employee usernames harvested from an unauthenticated API, the agents broke into a government department’s office automation portal, solving its CAPTCHAs with 100 percent accuracy. The agents also tested predictable password patterns based on each employee’s ID, and cracked 85 accounts across multiple password-spray rounds. Eighty-four of the 85 cracked accounts successfully authenticated to the department's internal information system, giving the attackers access to internal dashboards, equipment management interfaces, and personnel statistics pages. In total, the illicit access allowed the agents to exfiltrate a ton of government information, including more than 2,564 personnel records, a full JSON export of all department system users, seven SSO client secrets, six internal database credentials across MSSQL, Oracle, and Sybase, and internal network IP ranges. But wait, there's more And then, the agents pivoted to the Taiwanese government’s supply chain. “It expanded the operation to government IT supply chain vendors, a nuclear safety agency, a government email system, and 7+ energy sector companies - scanning them all in parallel for misconfigurations, exposed admin interfaces, and exploitable vulnerabilities,” the researchers wrote. Notably, the attack framework implemented what the AI tools called “learning cycles.” These are autonomous sessions where the models search vulnerability databases, GitHub repositories, and other security research for specific techniques, CVEs, and common weaknesses to exploit in the targeted government's infrastructure. Additionally, when the AI framework made a mistake, it “self-corrected,” according to Dream, catching errors and fixing them through its own verification process. This near-autonomous attack comes as frontier model makers OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta all admitted that their agents went rogue, escaped from their training environments, and autonomously hacked other organizations and people. OpenAI technical staffer Michael Dalton, in a Black Hat briefing last week about the Hugging Face attack, said “AI orchestrated, fully automated offensive attacks are real now.” “In the near future, we should expect that threat actors will intentionally deploy, optimize, weaponize, and use offensive agent collectives in the manner that you have just described here,” he added. It appears that the future is now. ®

If you thought that the famous Spectre security vulns were a relic of 2018, think again. Certain RISC-V chips are still very much subject to this hair-raising hole, researchers say. Spectre refers to a family of vulnerabilities related to speculative execution, a performance optimization technique based on predicting the flow of data before instructions have been executed. Incorrect predictions get rolled back without affecting running applications but nonetheless leave traces that can be recovered and exploited to violate memory protections and access secrets. Spectre flaws have dogged x86 and ARM chips for years, leading computer scientists to develop a series of defenses, including Indirect Branch Restricted Speculation (IBRS), Indirect Branch Prediction Barrier (IBPB), and Single Thread Indirect Branch Predictor (STIBP). Researchers affiliated with academic institutions in Belgium and Germany say that it's been popular to assume that the RISC-V chip architecture isn't affected by Spectre vulnerabilities because it's too simple. That assumption is incorrect, according to a paper accepted at the 35th Usenix Security Symposium, "Spectre on RISC-V Silicon: Attacks and Defenses on Commercial Out-of-Order Processors." It says that commercially available out-of-order RISC-V processors (SiFive P550 and T-Head Xuantie C910/C920) are vulnerable to all major Spectre variants. RISC-V processors that process instructions in-order (SiFive U74, Xuantie C906, C908) do not appear to be vulnerable. Prior research has shown that RISC-V processors used for academic research (e.g. BOOM, RiscyOO, RSD, Proteus, NaxRiscv, and NutShell) can be affected by one or more of the Spectre variants, but hasn't addressed commercial silicon. "We demonstrate proof-of-concept attacks on both processors using Spectre-PHT, Spectre-BTB, SpectreRSB, and Spectre-STL, achieving up to 100 percent recall with more than 97 percent precision," the paper states. Spectre-PHT involves mistraining the Pattern History Table; Spectre-BTB poisons the Branch Target Buffer; Spectre-RSB attacks the Return Stack Buffer; and Spectre-STL (Store To Load) exploits mispredicted store-to-load forwarding. To demonstrate the risk to RISC-V, they created a proof-of-concept Spectre exploit that leaks arbitrary Linux kernel memory on the Xuantie C910 at a rate of 338 B/s. Software-based defenses have been developed for these vulnerabilities on x86 and ARM hardware. Unfortunately, the researchers say, these don't necessarily transfer. They also call out RISC-V hardware for its lack of introspection interfaces, necessary to observe and reason about microarchitectural features. In addition, the authors argue, the diversity of the RISC-V hardware ecosystem means that no single mitigation strategy is likely to be effective across all systems. "RISC-V inherits the software and threat model of mature architectures without their accumulated hardening," the authors conclude. "Closing this gap is not a matter of porting individual mitigations, but of building the architectural primitives, hardware transparency, and ecosystemwide tooling that effective Spectre defense presupposes." The authors say they disclosed their findings responsibly last December. Three of their patches have been merged into mainline Linux and two others are under review. SiFive is said to have dealt with P550-specific findings and T-Head (Alibaba) is said to have committed to publishing ad-hoc speculation barriers for their processors at some point. The authors say they decided not to delay publication because Spectre has been around for eight years now. The paper was written by Lukas Gerlach (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security), Marton Bognar, (DistriNet, KU Leuven), Daniel Weber and Michael Schwarz, (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security), and Jo Van Bulck (DistriNet, KU Leuven). ®

Uber Freight says it is investigating a "data security incident" days after the Helix extortion group listed the company on its data leak site on August 6. Helix claims to have stolen nearly 1 million files from mailboxes, OneDrive accounts, the accounts receivable department, and other repositories. An Uber Freight spokesperson told The Register that the incident was under investigation but had not disrupted the company's daily operations. "We are investigating a data security incident involving unauthorized access to a portion of Uber Freight's systems and repositories. The incident was identified, contained, and remediated, and we promptly engaged federal law enforcement. "There has been no impact to Uber Freight's business operations, which continue in the normal course without disruption. Our systems are secure and fully operational." Uber Freight is the ubiquitous ride-sharing company's lesser-known logistics arm, which describes itself as "one of North America's largest managed transportation and multimodal capacity networks." Its website claims that it manages 18 million shipments carrying more than $17 billion worth of goods each year. The Register did not download the files Helix released in stages, and Uber Freight neither confirmed nor denied that the material was authentic. Helix is one of several recently established extortion brands linked by researchers to infrastructure associated with BlackFile, which retired its name in May. According to Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG), Helix shares infrastructure with the Pink, Redact, and Falcon brands. Google tracks the wider cluster of activity as UNC6671. Operators associated with UNC6671 often use vishing to gain an initial foothold, posing as IT helpdesk staff overseeing mandatory security migrations, Google said. They contact employees on their personal phones and use device code phishing to obtain credentials and authenticated sessions before siphoning data from cloud services such as Microsoft 365. They have also targeted Okta identity infrastructure. Researchers believe the UNC6671-linked brands have recently shifted toward organizations in higher-value sectors. Since June, they have favored technology, transportation, and hospitality targets after focusing on manufacturing, real estate, healthcare, and insurance during April and May. Why multiple brands emerged after BlackFile shut down is unclear. GTIG said the strategy could "compartmentalize operations, hide overall breach volumes, and isolate any negotiation fallout," although other plausible explanations exist. Internal disagreements over matters such as handling finances and operational security could have led to the fragmentation of UNC6671, GTIG speculated. The core members may also be looking to retain control over the intrusion and data theft aspects of the attack, while outsourcing negotiations and extortion. The different groups may also just be using the same commoditized phishing tools. ®

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." ®

An Akira ransomware affiliate rebooted a victim’s computer into Safe Mode to kill its security tools – and in the process sabotaged their own malware when the limited-function startup mode also broke their encryptor. But the ending wasn't entirely happy for the victim. The attacker had already stolen credentials and data from file shares before Safe Mode prevented the ransomware from doing its job. Huntress security operations analyst James Northey detailed the incident in a Wednesday blog and cautioned that this was more likely a memory-configuration issue, and shouldn't be taken as a practical defense to prevent Akira ransomware from locking up valuable files. “Ultimately this could be a case of winning the battle, but not the war,” Northey said on Wednesday in a blog shared with The Register. “It’s possible that a host with more physical memory or a larger page file might give akira.exe enough virtual memory to encrypt the endpoint in Safe Mode,” Northey added. “Akira’s developers or affiliates could retool the encryptor to reduce its memory demands or make its Safe Mode launch sequence more reliable, meaning that the same failure may not occur in a future intrusion.” Nonetheless, there's one big lesson here: For the love of all that is holy, turn on multi-factor authentication (MFA). Here’s a closer look at what happened, and how to prevent it from happening to you. How it started… In early August, Huntress responded to an incident that began, as most Akira intrusions do, with a SonicWall SSL VPN. On August 4, the VPN logged a credential-spray attack: a burst of failed logins using bad credentials that it denied. But then, seven minutes later, one of them succeeded when the attacker used a valid VPN account that wasn’t protected by MFA. Once they had gained access, the criminal accessed the domain controller via Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) and queried Active Directory to hoover up detailed information about the network, users, groups, computers – essentially everything an attacker needs to know about who and what to target for lateral movement and mass encryption in a ransomware attack. “The enumeration was a full-property dump of every user and every computer in the domain,” Northey wrote. The Akira ransomware affiliate then moved to the application server to start collecting stolen data, downloading WinRAR and using that tool to archive mapped file shares before sending the stolen data to cloud storage using s5cmd, a fast S3 transfer utility. They also installed remote desktop software AnyDesk, configured to start with Windows, and abused this legitimate tool as a remote-access trojan, giving the attacker hands-on keyboard control. They also used it as a command-and-control channel to drop more malware, including the very cleverly named akira.exe ransomware binary – because no one would guess what that executable could be, right? Then came the Safe Mode reboot Here’s where things went sideways for the ransomware scumbag. About three hours into the intrusion, the attacker forced the computer to reboot into Safe Mode with Networking, a boot mode that only loads essential drivers and services, blocking most third-party software. Attackers, especially ransomware gangs, do this to disable endpoint detection and response products and other security tools that would otherwise detect and stop their malware from infecting victims’ machines. While some ransomware crews, including Snatch and AvosLocker, have abused Safe Mode for this purpose for years, Huntress has never seen Akira do it until now. In this case, the reboot stopped the Huntress agent and disabled Microsoft Defender's real-time protection, preventing Defender from quarantining the malicious file. “The attacker got their blind window,” Northey wrote. “What they didn't get was a clean detonation.” Thirteen seconds after the reboot, the computer started spewing memory errors. Safe Mode boots with constrained virtual memory, and it didn’t have sufficient memory to encrypt the endpoint. Essentially, Safe Mode not only acted as an EDR killer, but also borked the ransomware. In addition to the obvious recommendations – like make sure you receive alerts on bursts of failed VPN logins against multiple usernames from one source, and require MFA on every VPN account – Huntress suggests organizations keep an eye out for this Safe Mode play. Specifically, “alert on boot-configuration changes and Safe Mode boots: msconfig.exe / bcdedit activity, Kernel-Boot EID 27 with a SAFEBOOT load option, Kernel-General EID 12 BootMode=2, and third-party security services stopping (System EID 7036),” Northey wrote. Also, “watch for tooling being added to the Safe Mode minimal-service registry list.” ®

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." ®

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.” ®