A BushidoToken journal entry reviews four 2026 UK prosecutions involving teenage offenders at the intersection of cybercrime and online extremism. In July 2026, Thalha Jubair (20) and Owen Flowers (18), part of the Scattered Spider collective, were each sentenced to five years and six months for the late August 2024 breach of Transport fo…
The UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has issued a reprimand and an enforcement notice to the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) over governance failures in its use of the third-party Auror retail crime intelligence-sharing platform. Between March 2023 and September 2024, MPS officers and staff used Auror without formal approval, …
The UK Information Commission's Office (ICO) issued reprimands, not fines, to Ogi Networks Limited (ONL) and the Local Government Data Unit – Wales (Data Cymru) after a ransomware attack on 1 November 2024. The intruder used a forgotten test account, Test2, created in January 2012 with the password "Password1", to enter Data Cymru's netwo…
F5 Labs, with Efflux sensor telemetry, profiled a persistent information-disclosure scanner operating from 78.153.140.203 in a netblock of AS202306 (HOSTGLOBAL.PLUS LTD), a UK ISP. The IP was first seen on 10 January 2025, vanished on 10 April, and returned on 11 July 2025. It scans 130 unique URLs: 80.23% are variations of /.env, 11.45% …
ESET's WeLiveSecurity warns that AI and large language models (LLMs) now automate OSINT reconnaissance at machine speed. Profiling that once took a skilled attacker hours or days can be done by low-skill actors, so ordinary internet users are now economically viable fraud targets. Fraudsters can collect public information at scale, includ…
A vehicle belonging to school photography firm Pret-a-Portrait was broken into overnight on 6-7 October, and a camera bag containing SD memory cards was stolen. The cards may hold photographs taken at Priory School in Lewes, UK, plus images of QR code cards showing pupils' names and class names. The same equipment was used for three furth…
A disruption in Google Cloud's europe-west2 region in London took several Google Cloud services offline on Tuesday. Digital bank Revolut reported a widespread outage at about the same time, including card payments and ATM withdrawals. A person familiar with the matter told Reuters the two events were connected. ING Germany also reported o…
CISA and the UK NCSC, with co-sealing partners, published advisory AA26-113A on China-nexus cyber actors' use of large, dynamic covert networks of compromised devices, mainly SOHO routers and IoT devices. These networks are shared by multiple threat actors and each may contain hundreds of thousands of endpoints. This makes static IP block…
Trend Micro disclosed its part in a multinational law enforcement operation against the LockBit ransomware group, working with the FBI and the NCA. Per the vendor, undercover infiltration helped prevent the release of the group's next malware product, LockBit-NG-Dev, and Trend customers received protection before LockBit had finished test…
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…
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…
The UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has reprimanded the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) and issued an enforcement notice. Between March 2023 and September 2024, officers registered about 500 free accounts on the retail crime platform Auror without formal procurement, a data protection impact assessment (DPIA) or data-sharing …
The UK Electoral Commission is developing an AI-powered system to alert candidates and parties to significant deepfakes within three hours of first posting. Chief executive Vijay Rangarajan announced the plan at the Conservative Party conference and cited a deepfake of Irish presidential candidate Catherine Connolly during Ireland's 2025 …
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…
On October 8, the U.K. imposed economic sanctions on Cryptomus (formerly Certa Payments and Xeltox Enterprises, rebranded as Heleket) for processing payments that benefit the Russian government and its financial institutions. The sanctions also cover the virtual payment platforms VexPay, TokenSpot and Tsunami Payments. Experts describe Cr…
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…
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…
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…
GreyNoise reports that 21 IP addresses in AS213438 (registered to ColocaTel Inc., Mahe, Seychelles) produced 1,856,167 of 2,753,274 global RDP Crawler sessions on April 7, 2026, or 67.4% of the worldwide total. Over April 5-7 the same fleet accounted for 49.7% of global RDP Crawler activity. All 21 IPs are geolocated to the Netherlands, w…
F5 Labs honeynet telemetry shows overall hostile activity rising 55.5% month over month in June 2026, a return to the levels of the earlier-year spike. Highlighted is CVE-2024-44000, an unauthenticated account takeover flaw (CVSS 9.8, CWE-522) in the LiteSpeed Cache WordPress plugin, which rose by 1,128 to 2,603 attacks (8). Scanning is i…