Check Point Exposure Management researchers uncovered a large, multi-region phishing infrastructure that conceals active campaigns behind domains that look inactive. Root domains return blank or generic "Not Found" pages, while the phishing content is served only through concealed regional paths (for example /it, /de, /pa) and under speci…
Check Point Research's Q3 2026 Brand Phishing Report finds Microsoft was the most impersonated brand, at 33% of all attempts (up from 23% in Q2) and roughly four times the share of any other brand. Apple, Google, LinkedIn and Amazon completed the top five, together accounting for more than half of attempts. Dropbox (up ten places to eight…
SentinelOne analysis argues that bring your own vulnerable driver (BYOVD) succeeds because of a signing-trust gap rather than an incomplete driver list. The Windows kernel loads drivers signed with expired or revoked certificates, and a 2026 intrusion reported by Help Net Security used a decade-old forensic driver whose certificate had lo…
SentinelOne argues that "EDR killer" covers four different techniques, and a single driver-load rule leaves blind spots. The four are bring-your-own-vulnerable-driver (BYOVD), bring-your-own-installer, admin-to-kernel, and driverless suspension. The article gives hunt logic for each and recommends rolling them out in order of signal quali…
Unit 42 published research showing that an attacker with root access on a compromised Kubernetes node can misuse SPIFFE/SPIRE workload attestation to impersonate co-located workloads and harvest their SVIDs. The attacker spoofs the Linux cgroup information the SPIRE agent uses to identify callers, so the agent issues a victim workload's i…
Unit 42 analyzed an Atomic macOS (AMOS) stealer infection generated in a lab on Aug. 5, 2026, starting from a fake "macOS toolkit" instruction page hosted at getmacouscloud.com. The page tells victims to paste a command into Terminal, a ClickFix-style copy/paste technique, which downloads a Zsh script and then installs a Mach-O AMOS paylo…
Unit 42 analyzed how AWS neutralizes publicly exposed IAM access keys by automatically attaching the AWSCompromisedKeyQuarantine managed policy, and how that policy has changed since its release on Aug. 11, 2020. The mechanism relies on the GitHub secret scanning partner program, which alerts AWS when long-term keys appear in public repos…
Unit 42 (Palo Alto Networks) released OperTraitor, an open-source, LLM-powered tool that ingests RBAC configurations from installed Kubernetes operators and the OperatorHub catalog. It compares an operator's documented function with its granted privileges and assigns a 1-10 risk score. The research found abandoned, overly permissive opera…
Unit 42 investigated a months-long intrusion against a European bank, which began with unauthorized VPN-based access through a third-party-managed external gateway appliance that did not enforce strict authentication. Using compromised credentials, the attacker ran noisy, high-volume internal reconnaissance and brute-force campaigns again…
Unit 42 Threat Intelligence published its overview of the top five initial access threat vectors observed in September 2026. Adversary activity relied heavily on external edge exploitation and identity compromise, with public-facing infrastructure and legitimate credential abuse as the primary footholds for intrusion campaigns. Social eng…
Reportedly, the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Special Operations Command have disabled mobile advertising IDs on government-issued phones and computers. The move follows concerns that commercially available location data has been used to target American forces in the Middle East. It became public after Senator Ron Wyden released letters, h…
CRPx0 is a cybercrime operation that began as a scam and then pivoted into a full ransomware and cryptocurrency business. The source is a short Fortra blog teaser by Graham Cluley that points to a fuller article. The teaser gives no victim names, sectors, technical details, IOCs, CVEs, TTPs or attribution beyond the operation's name. Defe…
Kenneth Carter, 44, of Portland, Oregon, a former AT&T retail store employee, was sentenced to 16 months in federal prison for acting as the inside man for a SIM-swap gang. According to his plea agreement, the scheme ran from May 2018 to November 2019 and involved at least three co-conspirators. Carter used privileged store access to move…
Episode 484 of the Smashing Security podcast, hosted by Graham Cluley with guest Danny Palmer, covers several security stories. The lead item is audio fingerprinting: a user named Matt found that an open AliExpress page, playing silent audio at zero volume, kept his multipoint Bluetooth headphones from switching to his phone. The episode …
Malone Lam, a 22-year-old Singaporean who used the aliases "Anne Hathaway", "$$$" and "King Greavy", has pleaded guilty to leading a group that stole more than US $245 million in cryptocurrency from victims across the United States. According to the US Department of Justice, the group operated from October 2023 to May 2025 and recruited a…
Episode 485 of the Smashing Security podcast, hosted by Graham Cluley with guest Lianne Potter, covers several security stories. Researchers who wanted to test LG smart TVs for security risks got around the terms and conditions by setting up the TV while drunk, on the reasoning that they could not be bound by a contract agreed to while in…
A court in Zurich sentenced an unnamed 52-year-old Ukrainian man to 12 years and nine months in prison and banned him from Switzerland for ten years. The court found him to be the lead developer of the LockerGoga, MegaCortex and Nefilim ransomware families. Victims include Norsk Hydro, Stadler Rail (500 GB stolen in 2020, reported US $6 m…
Episode 486 of the Smashing Security podcast (host Graham Cluley, guest Dave Bittner) covers two main stories. An Auckland store's vibe-coded website reportedly let the public edit its inventory, and bogus listings appeared within hours, including socks, an $850 banana and New Zealand's national parks. A hacker collective also physically …
Dutch police arrested a 24-year-old Amsterdam man on September 15 on suspicion of playing a role in the ShinyHunters criminal organisation. Police have not named him, but Brian Krebs identified him as Pepijn van der Stap, a convicted hacker. A search of his laptop reportedly turned up details of two murders "to be committed abroad", which…
N0n is a newly emerged cyber extortion group first spotted in mid-September 2026. Within days it had published details of what it claimed were around a dozen victims on its dark web leak site, and the tally has continued to grow. The source is a short Fortra blog teaser by Graham Cluley that points to a fuller article. The teaser gives no…