The Netherlands' Tax and Customs Administration has abandoned its planned Microsoft 365 public-cloud rollout and will move to an on-premises, open-source approach, citing digital sovereignty and data control concerns. About 5,000 employees had already migrated when the Dutch Advisory Council on ICT Assessment recommended reversing the rol…
Troy Hunt's Weekly Update 521 argues that media narratives about AI as a powerful hacking tool diverge from the facts. He cites a statistic that AI has had effectively 0% impact on insurance payouts, and a Dutch individual who is reportedly being tracked down from his voice. He also points to Scott's teardown of the MAG breach, which ulti…
The FBI arrested a Canadian cybersecurity executive in Pennsylvania on October 8, 2026, in connection with its investigation into the ShinyHunters extortion group. Court records point to Edward Dubrovsky, a ransomware negotiation specialist formerly of Cypfer and now associated with CyberSteward. He faces charges of conspiracy to threaten…
A multinational advisory (CISA, NSA, FBI, AIVD, MIVD, NCSC-UK and others) warns that the Russian state-supported APT LAUNDRY BEAR (aka Void Blizzard, TA488) has compromised Western government, defense industrial base and NGO organizations running Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) since at least July 2025. The campaign uses a view-based XSS…
Dutch authorities arrested a 24-year-old, reportedly Pepijn van der Stap (alias "Umbreon"), around Sept. 16, 2026 on suspicion of aiding data thefts and extortions by ShinyHunters. Van der Stap was previously convicted in 2023 for data theft and extortion. Days after the arrest, remaining ShinyHunters members escalated, breaching the FBI …
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…
U.S. federal investigators pursuing ShinyHunters, which recently stole sensitive personnel data from the FBI recruitment site fbijobs.gov, reportedly identified executives at two ransomware negotiation firms with unusually close ties to the group. One U.S. consulting firm executive is suspected of helping operate the now-defunct extortion…
This weekly roundup covers a cluster of breaches, critical vulnerabilities and law-enforcement actions. Bluesky confirmed more than 4,500 accounts compromised in a phishing campaign using a fake government payment offer. Zeabur will shut down after a second breach this year that exposed over 3.2 million environment variable records and da…
The FBI has publicly called on remaining ShinyHunters members to surrender. Cyber division assistant director Brett Leatherman released a video thanking Dutch police for arresting a 24-year-old in Amsterdam. The FBI calls him "one of the alleged leaders" of the group, while Dutch police say only that he played a role. He is also suspected…
Kaspersky identified MovieReaper, a previously unknown modular, multi-stage crimeware framework distributed since mid-August 2026 through movie-themed torrents, including fake "The Odyssey (2026)" releases. Rather than compromising individual trackers, the actor modified the public torrent file repository itorrents.org, so trackers relyin…
The PHP security team released emergency fixes on October 21, 2026 for two critical core flaws, CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, nicknamed PHP2Shell. Both are rated CVSS v4.0 9.2 and allow unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE) as the web worker account. They can also expose process memory that may hold credentials and API keys (…