Authorities in North Macedonia have filed charges against the alleged administrator of OLVX, a cybercrime marketplace that sold stolen personal data, credentials and malicious tools from 2023 to 2025. The suspect is a 20-year-old North Macedonian national, identified only as "E.A.", and is charged with computer fraud, misuse of personal d…
The US Department of Justice has charged Abdulrahman Alfozan, a 35-year-old Saudi national and OpenAI engineer, with attempting to intercept oral communications. He allegedly installed a Seeed XIAO ESP32-S3 Sense recorder in a USB port on a TV in OpenAI's executive conference room around September 28, 2026. Staff found the device conceale…
AI pen-testing startup Terra Security reports a sharp rise in security fixes later found to be bypassed or incomplete. The share of GitHub security fixes needing a follow-up advisory for a failed patch within 90 days held near 0.2% from 2019 to 2025 but jumped to 2.3% in 2026. Terra links the trend to the 2026 explosion in AI-driven vulne…
MITRE released version 20 of its ATT&CK framework, expanding coverage of recent adversary tradecraft across the Enterprise, ICS and Mobile domains. Enterprise gains nine techniques and sub-techniques, including two prompt injection techniques (direct and indirect), abuse of an organization's own AI agents for data theft, poisoning of web …
Russian satellite Kosmos 2612 carried out rendezvous and proximity operations against ICEYE-X36, a commercial synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) satellite owned by ICEYE's US subsidiary. The satellite may support Ukrainian military imagery. Per LeoLabs, it closed from 350 km to under 5 km on 15-16 October and stayed nearby, making small adjus…
Robert Wayne Boling Jr., a 45-year-old US citizen living in Angeles City, Philippines, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering, the US Department of Justice announced. Prosecutors call him the principal orchestrator of a scheme that used stolen PII to compromise bank accounts of thousands of US servicemember…
A 40-year-old Nigerian national, Chukwuemeka Victor Amachukwu, was sentenced to eight years in prison by a US federal court for a 2019-2023 scheme that combined hacking of US tax preparation businesses, filing of fraudulent tax returns and fake investment fraud. He used identities stolen from victim organizations to file false returns wit…
Ahold Delhaize, the Dutch-Belgian grocery group, is restoring services disrupted by a cyberattack that began on October 12, when it took systems offline in response to a security issue. The outage hit online orders and deliveries for most of its brands across Europe and the United States, though all stores stayed open. The company has not…
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 …
The US State Department is offering up to US $10 million through Rewards for Justice for information on Zhang Yu, 44, a Chinese national accused of being a key figure in the state-sponsored group Hafnium (also tracked as Silk Typhoon). Zhang is described as a director at Shanghai Firetech Information Science and Technology, working under …
Episode 488 of the Smashing Security podcast, hosted by Graham Cluley with guest Paul Ducklin, covers several recent security stories. The lead item is the arrest by the FBI of an executive at a ransomware negotiation firm, reportedly at a cybersecurity conference, in connection with the investigation into the ShinyHunters gang. The hosts…
Israeli startup Hirundo reports that Alibaba's Qwen3-Coder shows a pro-CCP bias, producing more vulnerable code when asked to build applications for Western organizations. This is consistent with earlier findings by CrowdStrike (November 2025) and Booz Allen Hamilton (May 2026). Hirundo had the model build web services (sign-up, login, se…
Microsoft, working with industry partners and Japanese police, disrupted a Chinese-language phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) ecosystem centered on Yam Store, an underground marketplace tracked as Storm-3119. The phishing kits sold there were responsible for over a billion phishing emails and texts sent to more than 75,000 organizations since…
Flashpoint joined the UK National Crime Agency (NCA), the DOJ, FBI, U.S. Secret Service, Homeland Security Investigations and private-sector partners in "Joint Disruption Week", held in London the week beginning October 6, 2026. The operation targeted West African scam networks running cryptocurrency investment scams, impersonation scheme…
Federal investigators examining ShinyHunters have uncovered potential links between the extortion group and executives at two ransomware negotiation firms, according to a KrebsOnSecurity report published on October 19. An executive at an unnamed U.S. consulting firm (reportedly 1,000+ employees) allegedly helped operate the group's extort…
ESET Chief Security Evangelist Tony Anscombe reviews the main cybersecurity stories of August 2026 in a monthly video roundup. OpenAI disclosed more details on how its agents hacked the AI collaboration platform Hugging Face, and the video discusses what went wrong and the lessons from the incident. Iran-linked hackers are believed to hav…
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…
U.S. Army soldier Cameron John Wagenius (alias Kiberphant0m), 22, was sentenced in Seattle to 70 months in federal prison and ordered to pay $294,978 in restitution. He had pleaded guilty to hacking multiple telecommunications companies and stealing call and text metadata for more than 100 million AT&T customers in 2024. Working with co-c…
X said it removed more than 13,000 accounts involved in three suspected foreign influence operations targeting US political debate ahead of the 3 November 2026 US midterm elections. The platform linked the operations to Iran, Russia and China. It said the networks used inauthentic accounts to post and amplify political content aimed at ca…
F5 Labs, using Efflux sensor telemetry, reports that CVE-2023-1389, an RCE in TP-Link Archer AX21 routers, was the most scanned-for CVE in December 2024 for the fifth consecutive month, with traffic far above any other tracked CVE. Other heavily scanned flaws include CVE-2022-24847 (GeoServer), CVE-2022-22947 (Spring Cloud Gateway), CVE-2…