A 28-year-old Russian man, identified by German media only as "Vladimir K", has been arrested in Germany on suspicion of being a key member of the Qilin ransomware gang. He was first detained in Japan in May while on holiday and was extradited to Germany earlier this month. German investigators are examining possible links between him and…
Dropbox confirmed that roughly 5,000 customer accounts were accessed between 4 and 21 August after attackers abused a legacy login integration between Dropbox and Lenovo ID, Lenovo's identity system. Lenovo ID did not verify that a person registering an account actually controlled the email address used. Because Dropbox implicitly trusted…
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…
The US Coast Guard and FBI boarded the Liberian-flagged supertanker VL Prosperity mid-voyage after its network may have been compromised by a foreign actor. The vessel was carrying about 2.3 million barrels of crude oil from Egypt's Sidi Kerir terminal to Galveston, Texas. The Coast Guard reports no disruption to operations, injuries or e…
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 …
The US Department of Defense has confirmed a breach of the Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC), one of its main personnel data repositories. The breach exposed sensitive data on roughly 2.76 million people plus about 294,000 deceased individuals. Unauthorised users reportedly accessed files between October 2025 and 16 July 2026, and the i…
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…
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 487 of the Smashing Security podcast covers the hijacking of Microsoft's official X (Twitter) account, which has 13 million followers. The attackers used a Clippy theme to promote a dubious crypto coin, and a corporate apology that circulated was not from Microsoft either. There was no ransomware or data theft. The episode also co…
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…
The leaker CyberLeek, behind a series of leaks of Rockstar Games' upcoming Grand Theft Auto 6, has threatened to publish a complete, playable build of the game. The threat followed the release of about 25 minutes of new footage, which Eurogamer reviewed and judged to appear legitimate, noting it carried CyberLeek's emblem. Instead of dema…
Krybit is described as a fast-growing ransomware group that was reportedly hacked by a rival gang, retaliated, and is still extorting victims. The source is a short Fortra blog teaser by Graham Cluley, which points to a fuller article covering how the group operates, who it has targeted and how organisations can protect themselves. The te…
Two official Twitter/X accounts of Ireland's police service, Garda Síochána, were accessed by an unauthorised third party on Wednesday evening and used to post cryptocurrency-related messages. The posts claimed followers could claim free cryptocurrency through an airdrop, a lure that can trick victims into handing over wallet keys and hav…