Dutch police say they dismantled a large botnet this week comprising at least 17 million infected devices. After being tipped off by a researcher at the Netherlands' National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC-NL), police began an investigation, which resulted in the discovery of 200 servers underpinning the botnet's infrastructure located in the country. Cybercrime specialists at The Hague Police Unit seized a number of servers from a hosting provider for further analysis, and the provider then shut down the botnet after realizing it was being used for "criminal purposes." Botnets can be used for various types of cybercrime, but officials did not say how this botnet in particular was used. Police merely stated the general types of abuse, which include phishing, launching DDoS attacks, and online fraud. Neither the police nor the NCSC-NL revealed the botnet's name – an oddity for takedowns of this kind – and also did not detail exactly what devices were enrolled in it. However, both organizations' announcements identified poorly secured consumer-grade kit such as routers, mobile devices, and IoT hardware as common examples. Both also advised users to stop relying on default passwords for new hardware, avoid installing apps from unofficial sources, and keep software up to date. Botnets and proxies on the rise Just before the police announced the botnet takedown, NCSC-NL published a blog highlighting a rise in residential proxy networks used for malicious purposes, calling it a "worrying trend." Botnets and residential proxy networks are often mentioned in the same breath, since both require enrolling legitimate devices into a broader network, although they are typically used for different purposes. Botnets are almost exclusively malicious, with only a few benign exceptions. Folding@home, a voluntary distributed computing project, is possibly the closest clean-living comparison. Residential proxy networks are different. They're legal, and you can find large operators advertising their services on the open web, usually promoting privacy benefits, although experts agree that these networks are a problem, and are more often abused than used for good. Willingly or not – often the latter – consumers have their IP addresses enrolled into these networks, which are also used by cybercriminals to hide the true source of malicious traffic, complicating cyber incident response. These proxies can be used for DDoS attacks, similar to how botnets rely on compromised devices, as well as other trickery such as phishing, brute-force attacks, bypassing impossible travel checks, and malware distribution, among others. "The misuse of residential proxies makes it more difficult to map digital threats and attacks," NCSC-NL wrote. "As the scale of digital attacks increases, the resilience of organizations can come under pressure. "Additionally, the devices of unsuspecting users can become part of such proxy networks, often without their knowledge. In this way, consumers are unknowingly part of cybercrime." Dutch cyberattack reports hit nine-year low On Thursday, shortly after the police announced the botnet takedown and concerns about the rise of residential proxy networks, NCSC-NL published its annual Cybercrime Monitor report, which revealed cyberattacks on Dutch companies had fallen to the lowest level in nine years. According to 2024 data, the most recent available, just four percent of organizations reported an external cyberattack compared to 11 percent in 2016. The report noted the downward trend was noticeable across all company sizes. Phishing and spoofing were by far the most common types of attack, with 23 percent of organizations experiencing this to some degree. At the other end of the scale, attacks involving DDoS, data breaches, business email compromise fraud, and ransomware were each reported by around one percent of organizations. NCSC-NL linked the improvements to wider adoption of multi-factor authentication (MFA). It said the technology is effectively universal across larger organizations, with 87 percent implementing it in 2025, up from 71 percent in 2017. For smaller organizations, the uptake was even more pronounced, more than doubling to 79 percent from 29 percent eight years prior. ®
The Jacksonville Jaguars recently released a viral schedule announcement video that appeared to show their star quarterback chopping off his signature long blond hair. The clip spread quickly online, pulling in nearly 4 million views on X and triggering reactions from fans, friends, and even Lawrence’s grandmother.
The catch? It wasn’t real.
The team later confirmed the moment was partially staged, partially AI-generated and part of the joke. Even Lawrence admitted the fake looked convincing.
And that’s exactly the problem.
What started as a harmless sports prank is also a reminder of how realistic AI-generated videos have become and how easily scammers can use the same technology to fool people online.
Why Deepfake Scams Are Growing Fast
Deepfake scams use artificial intelligence to clone someone’s face, voice, or likeness to create fake videos, ads, phone calls, or social media posts that appear real.
And increasingly, scammers are using celebrities, influencers, athletes, and trusted public figures to do it.
72% of Americans say they’ve seen fake celebrity or influencer endorsements online
39% say they’ve clicked on one
1 in 10 victims lost money or personal data
Average losses reached $525 per person
Why does it work? Because scammers know familiarity lowers our guard.
When people see a recognizable face, whether it’s Trevor Lawrence, Taylor Swift, Tom Hanks, or a favorite influencer, they’re more likely to trust what they’re seeing before stopping to question it.
From Funny Sports Videos to Real Financial Scams
The Jaguars video was meant as entertainment.
But scammers are already using the same technology for fraud.
McAfee researchers recently identified a growing wave of celebrity deepfake scams involving fake giveaways, investment schemes, romance scams, and fraudulent ads.
Some recent examples include:
Fake videos of TV personalities promoting “miracle” products
Usernames with extra characters or copied profile photos
Requests for money or personal data
Especially through DMs, crypto links, gift cards, or wire transfers
How McAfee Helps Protect You
AI scams are evolving fast, but layered protection can help you stay ahead of them.
McAfee’s Scam Detector, included in all core McAfee plans, can help identify suspicious links, messages, videos, and deepfake-related scams across texts, email, and social platforms before you click.
Additional protections like Web Protection and Identity Monitoring can also help reduce your risk if scammers attempt to steal your credentials or personal information.
Other Scam News This Week
Charter Confirms Data Breach
Charter Communications confirmed a data breach tied to a third-party vendor, exposing customer information. Whenever breaches like this happen, scammers often follow up with phishing emails and fake customer support calls pretending to help affected users.
7-Eleven Data Breach Reports Surface
Reports surrounding a potential 7-Eleven data breach are circulating online. Consumers should stay alert for fake password reset emails, loyalty account phishing attempts, and scam texts impersonating retailers.
‘Tom Selleck’ Celebrity Scam Highlights Rise of AI Impersonation Fraud
A tragic case tied to an alleged Tom Selleck impersonation scam is drawing attention to the growing threat of celebrity AI fraud. Experts warn that scammers are increasingly using fake celebrity profiles, AI-generated messages, cloned voices, and deepfake videos to build trust with victims online, especially older adults.
The case underscores how emotionally manipulative and financially devastating these scams can become.
Hackers Are Exploiting AI Chatbot “Personalities”
Researchers told The Verge that attackers are beginning to manipulate chatbot behavior and personalities to trick users into unsafe actions, highlighting growing concerns around AI trust and social engineering.
Fake Inheritance Email Scams Are Getting More Convincing
A phishing scam making headlines this week uses fake inheritance notices and “unclaimed estate” emails to pressure victims into sharing personal information.
Unlike older scam emails full of spelling mistakes, newer versions look polished and professional, often using legal-sounding language, fake reference numbers, and urgent 48-hour deadlines designed to trigger panic before people stop to verify the message.
McAfee Safety Tips This Week
The next deepfake won’t always look fake. That’s what makes these scams dangerous.
Here are some practical, go-to tips
Pause before clicking celebrity endorsements or viral videos
Verify accounts through official sources before trusting promotions
Never send money or personal data based on social media messages alone
Be skeptical of urgency, especially “limited time” threats
Use AI-powered scam protection tools to help identify suspicious content before you engage
Getting the location of troops at war might be as easy as buying the data from a legitimate business. America’s foreign adversaries have exploited commercial geolocation data tied to US troops, the Pentagon admits, using it to target or surveil US personnel in the Middle East. Despite that, the Defense Department hasn’t exactly moved fast to secure the information, elected officials say. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), Representative Pat Harrigan (R-NC), and a dozen other Congress critters sent a letter to DoD CIO Kirsten Davies on Thursday, demanding a change in smartphone security posture among US military branches. Included in the letter is what lawmakers describe as the first public confirmation that commercial location data has been used to target or surveil American troops in active war zones. The information was shared with Wyden’s office in April. The reason for the delay in publishing the information, Wyden’s team told The Register, was due to “markings that restricted public release,” which Wyden reportedly pushed back on, leading to Thursday’s letter and the attached responses [PDF] from the DoD confirming info purchased from commercial data brokers was used to target troops. “USCENTCOM [US Central Command] has received multiple threat reports concerning adversary exploitation of commercial location data to target or surveil US personnel in theater,” the DoD’s responses from April indicate. As for how exactly data brokers got access to the data that allowed adversaries to locate troops and their movements, they got it from the same sources as anyone else buying data from a commercial broker: Smartphone advertising profiles. According to the DoD responses included in Wyden’s letter, not only are US military personnel allowed to use personal devices within operational areas, there’s no actual policy that requires servicemembers to turn off geolocation capabilities on their devices when located in active war zones. “USCENTCOM's geolocation risk guidance directs personnel to disable geolocation functionality when not needed; periodically review device and application privacy settings; and limit public sharing of information,” the DoD said last month, while simultaneously admitting that such guidance doesn’t always fully disable geolocation on smartphones. In addition to personally-owned devices, the DoD’s own issued smartphones don’t disable advertising profiles, either. “The Personalized Advertising setting is disabled by group policy on the Mobile Device Management Server,” the DoD told Wyden’s team. “However, Ad Targeting Information is not disabled and can be edited by a user.” That’s not the most straightforward answer, and, when we asked Wyden’s team what it thought of the response, it agreed with our assessment that the Pentagon’s MDM disables the serving of personal ads to users, but doesn’t stop the transmission of device advertising IDs or other associated data. The DoD noted in the response that it’s in the process of migrating to a new MDM solution that allows location services to be completely disabled on government-issued devices and was targeting a completion date of early May, though it’s not clear whether the process has been finished yet. The Pentagon declined to answer any of our questions, only saying it would respond to Wyden, not us. It’s also not clear how effective that MDM migration will be, as the DoD appears to be phasing out government-issued devices in favor of a broader BYOD policy in at least one branch. According to a US Army press release from earlier this month, the branch is targeting the end of this month for the return of Army-managed work smartphones, as “the primary and preferred method for connectivity is the Bring Your Own Device, or BYOD, program.” CENTCOM has reportedly strengthened its geolocation controls in its area of operations; whether the average soldier, sailor, airman, and Marine is complying isn’t indicated. They’ve known about this for how long?! Failure to prevent the exposure of sensitive location data of military assets could be forgivable if it were a new problem, but according to Wyden’s letter, it’s not: The Pentagon likely knew about the issue for a decade. According to the letter, government contractors briefed military leadership about the ease of tracking smartphones owned by military members way back in 2016. “DoD officials have not treated this counterintelligence and force protection threat as a five-alarm fire,” the letter asserts, adding that the Pentagon “has known about this threat for over a decade, yet have failed to take meaningful steps to protect our men and women in uniform.” It’s not like there haven’t been plenty of examples of sloppy location data management compromising military operations, either. Data culled from workout tracking app Strava has been used to identify the workout routes of US military personnel jogging on base - and reveal the location of French President Emmanuel Macron thanks to his bodyguards’ sloppy security practices - and social media has also been flagged as an OPSEC disaster waiting to happen. Despite all those examples and briefings going back a decade, the problem has continued right up to the latest operations in Iran. “That foreign adversaries are still able to buy location data collected from the phones of U.S. personnel serving in military hotspots is a direct result of DoD leadership’s failure to prioritize this threat and implement commonsense cyber defenses,” the letter charges. Whether anything will be done about it remains to be seen. ®
The ongoing saga of Microsoft versus Nightmare Eclipse (aka Chaotic Eclipse), the disgruntled bug hunter with a deep understanding of Windows and an even deeper grudge against Microsoft, reached a fever pitch, with the researcher, who has thus far released six Windows zero-days, promising a “bone shattering” drop on July 14. Microsoft, for its part, finally responded to the security researcher and their weaponized Windows flaws with a blog post on (un)coordinated vulnerability disclosure about the now-public bugs: RedSun, UnDefend, BlueHammer, YellowKey, GreenPlasma, and MiniPlasma. Redmond says that none of these were reported via its official channels prior to being made public. Attackers began hammering three of the six - BlueHammer, RedSun, and UnDefend - soon after Nightmare published working proof-of-concept exploit code for each on now-banned GitHub (owned by Microsoft) and GitLab accounts. YellowKey, GreenPlasma, and MiniPlasma still don’t have fixes, and Microsoft has deemed “exploitation more likely” for YellowKey, aka CVE-2026-45585, citing a working POC. “We remain firmly opposed to these actions, and any disclosure outside proper coordination that could harm our customers and the digital ecosystem,” Microsoft wrote in a Wednesday blog, and then seemingly threatened legal action against Nightmare: “Uncoordinated disclosures that put proof-of-concept code for unpatched vulnerabilities into the hands of bad actors are never justifiable and have real-world consequences. Our security teams across the company work tirelessly tracking threat actors who look for weaknesses just like these to attack Microsoft and our customers. Our Digital Crimes Unit will continue bringing cases against these actors and those that enable their criminal activity – coordinating as needed with law enforcement around the world.” Microsoft did not respond to The Register’s questions, including whether its legal team planned to sue Nightmare, whether the zero-day researcher is a current or former employee, and whether Microsoft axed Nightmare’s MSRC account, meaning that the bug hunter can’t disclose vulnerabilities to the Windows giant. Nightmare, in their latest anti-Microsoft missive, claims Microsoft did just that. “When I actively asked you to communicate with me, you refused, humiliated me and made sure to insult me in front of people,” they wrote on Saturday. “You defame me in public with your CVE-2026-45585 advisory even though you literally deleted the Microsoft account I used to report bugs to you with and I got zero pennies from doing so and I still happily did like an idiot.” Nightmare also noted that “Microsoft still has chains in my hands,” preventing them from releasing “documents” yet, or anytime in June, and then warned: “Mark this date July 14th, I will make sure your bones are shattered that day.” Regardless of what does or does not happen on July 14, Nightmare has already caused chaos - and real enterprise-level damage, as systems engineer Muhammad Qasim Shahzad said on LinkedIn. “One person caused more enterprise-level damage in six weeks than most APT groups cause in a year,” Shahzad wrote. “The gap between disclosure and weaponization is now measured in hours, not days. Your patching window is shrinking fast.” Zero Day Initiative’s bug hunter-in-chief Dustin Childs, who previously spent about seven years working for Microsoft security and has decades of experience on both sides of the coordinated vulnerability disclosure (CVD) process, told The Register that Microsoft could have handled this better. And he wondered what happened between the two parties to get to this point. “CVD is a two-way street,” he said. “The vendor has some responsibility as well, so to go out publicly stating this person violated CVD without showing any of the correspondence seems bold.” Microsoft could also improve its communications to customers on “what the real risks from these bugs are and how they can defend themselves,” Childs added. “That clear direction seems to be missing.” Microsoft's 'dumpster fire' Luta Security founder and CEO Katie Moussouris, who pioneered Microsoft’s bug bounty program despite execs vowing never to pay researchers for bugs, said Redmond’s response to Nightmare sends “mixed messages.” “It confusingly claims their program ‘ensures researchers are compensated and publicly acknowledged’ in a statement answering a researcher who says he got neither,” Moussouris told The Register. “The language choices are also not deescalating. Microsoft invoked the outdated term ‘responsible disclosure,’ which I retired years ago at Microsoft because it was subjective and judgy.” This phrase, Moussouris added, “got in the way of coordination” when the two sides disagreed about how to best protect end users. “The mention of the Digital Crimes Unit in a post discussing vulnerability disclosure makes the post vaguely threatening, which seems intentional, but then they wrap up the post saying they welcome reports regardless of disclosure history,” she said. “No one except the parties involved can know for sure what happened between this researcher and Microsoft. Whatever the facts, it's hard to imagine why Microsoft would not try to deescalate, if for no other reason than avoiding the chilling effect on other researchers.” Security sleuth Kevin Beaumont, in his blog on the ongoing Microsoft-Nightmare Eclipse saga, called it a "dumpster fire of [Microsoft’s] own making.” Beaumont also used to work at Microsoft, and he noted that the Windows company previously hired a hacker called SandboxEscaper after she published zero-day POC exploits for Microsoft products - something that Redmond’s blog now describes as criminal. “If Microsoft’s tactic is to try to criminalise not following often arbitrary ‘responsible disclosure’ frameworks, good luck defending that in court - because there’s a whole clown car of prior decision making within Microsoft and facts which would emerge in that process,” Beaumont said. To be clear: neither Beaumont nor the researchers that The Reg spoke to support Nightmare’s zero-day antics. Childs called the “July 14” post “troubling” and Moussouris said the date plus “incendiary language … doesn't help organizations trying to make sense of the technical risk.” 'David and Goliath dynamic' Moussouris did add that this latest missive, taken in context with the earlier blog posts, “paint[s] a picture of someone who believes they have been pushed to this extreme. It is the sound of someone who believes every legitimate channel was closed to them: GitHub account deleted, payments withheld, credit stripped, then publicly accused of violating CVD after Microsoft cut off their ability to coordinate. The researcher's grievances are serious and specific.” Ultimately, “the bugs are Microsoft's,” Moussouris said. “They wrote the code and they own the risk to customers. Often researchers who previously work with a vendor respond in the extreme only when they feel there is no other choice. The power they hold is not at all proportionate to the vendor. This is a David and Goliath dynamic we don't like to see play out, especially since it’s users who lose when coordination negotiations fail." While it’s a very extreme - perhaps the most extreme - example of coordinated disclosure gone wrong, it’s not an isolated problem. Researchers have been complaining about CVD, and specifically Redmond’s bug disclosure habits, for years. “While some companies have improved, Microsoft has not,” Childs said. “If anything, they are seen as difficult to work with, especially if your bug is Moderate instead of Critical. I’ve had researchers tell me that they stopped looking at Microsoft altogether because they were too difficult to work with.” Plus, these types of disagreements between researchers and bug bounty programs will likely increase, as AI-assisted bug reports become the norm and vulnerabilities skyrocket. “We as an industry need to take a breath, remember there are real people involved, and that poor interactions could lead to real customer risk,” Childs said. “Real-world impact is lost far too often when disclosure goes wrong.” ®
The US military has long known that cheap fixes could stop location data from exposing its troops. It adopted almost none—and now says adversaries are using the data to target soldiers during a war.
Your Windows PC or Mac already includes built-in security features, and that’s a good thing. These tools provide an important first layer of protection against malware and other common threats users encounter every day.
But today, staying safe online is about much more than blocking viruses.
Scam texts arrive daily. Phishing emails imitate trusted brands. Fake websites are designed to steal passwords and payment information. Personal details can appear on data broker sites. AI Deepfakes are more convincing than ever. And most households use multiple devices, from laptops and phones to tablets and Chromebooks.
That’s why McAfee+ Advanced combines device security with scam protection, identity monitoring, personal info removal, web protection, and secure VPN to help protect the many parts of your digital life.
Let’s break down what built-in security does, and what McAfee does differently:
What Built-In Security Does Well
Both Windows 11 and macOS include a range of built-in security features designed to help protect your device. Depending on your operating system and the apps you use, these may include:
Malware detection and removal
Firewalls
Browser warnings about suspicious websites
Password management tools
Privacy and app permission controls
Together, these features provide an important first layer of protection and help many users stay safer online.
Why Many People Want More Than Basic Device Protection
Built-in security tools are primarily focused on protecting the device itself. However, today’s online threats often target something even more valuable: your identity, your money, and your personal information.
Recent McAfee research found that Americans receive an average of 14 scam messages every day, and more than three in four have encountered an online scam.
Threats now commonly include:
Scam texts pretending to be banks, toll agencies, and delivery companies
Fake job offers via text, email, or social media
Phishing emails
QR code scams
AI-generated voice and video impersonations
Identity theft via smishing and quishing, including hijacking entire social profiles
Exposure of personal information on data broker sites
These risks can follow you across all your devices, not just the computer sitting on your desk.
Built-In Security vs. McAfee Protection
Here are the key differences between built-in security alone, vs additional protection like McAfee.
Built-In Security Has
McAfee+ Advanced Adds
Detecting viruses and malware
Scam protection for suspicious texts, emails, links, QR codes, and deepfakes
Basic privacy controls
Secure VPN to protect your connection on public Wi-Fi
Saving passwords
Password manager with unique password generation and storage.
Warning about some risky websites
Web Protection to help block dangerous sites before they load
Security on one device
Antivirus coverage across your PCs, Macs, phones, and tablets
Doesn’t have this support
Identity monitoring, so you know when your SSN and other info is exposed. Plus personal info removal, so your old data isn’t left spread out across the web.
Why McAfee Stands Out: Speed and Comprehensive Protection
Unlike the old stereotype that stronger protection means a slower computer, independent testing shows McAfee is also the lightest on performance.
In the latest AV-Comparatives PC Performance Test, McAfee Total Protection posted the lowest system impact score of all 20 products tested: just 3.3, compared with the industry average of 12.8.
It also earned the highest possible rating, ADVANCED+. That means McAfee is not just adding more layers of protection. It is doing so while staying out of your way.
For consumers looking for security that goes beyond basic antivirus to help protect against scams, identity theft, privacy risks, and threats across all their devices, that combination is hard to ignore.
Protection Across All Your Devices
Most people no longer rely on a single computer. A typical household may use:
Windows PCs
Macs
iPhones
Android phones
Tablets
Chromebooks
Managing security separately on every device can be difficult. McAfee+ Advanced is designed to provide coverage across your devices under one subscription, helping simplify online protection for individuals and families.
How McAfee+ Advanced Goes Beyond Built-In Security
With McAfee+ Advanced, multiple layers work together before any damage is done:
Scam Detector flags suspicious texts, emails, links, QR codes, and even deepfake videos before you engage
Secure VPN keeps your data private, especially on public Wi-Fi
Web Protection helps block risky sites, even if you do accidentally click helps block risky sites, even if you do accidentally click
Password Manager doesn’t just help you make unique, strong passwords, it keeps them stored and organized for you
Online Account Cleanup assists in taking down your old, forgotten accounts across the web
Social Privacy Manager helps you monitor and changeprivacy settings across your social platforms in just a few clicks
Together, these protections are designed to address the broader range of online risks people face every day.
So, Do Windows PCs and Macs Need Antivirus Software?
Built-in security tools provide an important starting point, but with scam attempts becoming more convincing and personal information more widely exposed, many people need a more comprehensive approach to staying safe online.
McAfee+ Advanced combines device security, scam protection, identity monitoring, privacy tools, and VPN coverage to help you browse, bank, shop, and connect with greater confidence.
PWNED Welcome, once again, to PWNED, the weekly column where we cover high-security hijinks that are at least partially the victim’s fault. This week, we have a trio of tales that involve incredibly unprofessional behavior, inappropriate use of corporate resources, and outright theft, all dealt with by IT. Have a story about someone leaving a gaping hole in their network? Share it with us at pwned@sitpub.com. Anonymity is available upon request. Our trilogy of tech exposure comes courtesy of Zach Lewis, the current CIO and CISO at the University of Health Sciences and Pharmacy in St. Louis. Before his current role, Lewis worked for various other companies in IT roles and he has some tea to spill. At one job, Lewis was working as a sysadmin when the CEO asked for help recovering photos he had accidentally deleted from a company file share. The files were accessible to anyone at the organization, and Lewis searched archived copies in Google Picasa to restore them. Unfortunately, the pictures the CEO was missing included many that were very much NSFW. “So I was called in to sit down with him and look at it. And we're just like I restore everything. We start clicking images to make sure everything's there, just doing a random subset check,” Lewis said. “And, uh, just some pornography comes up and he's sitting right next to me. I mean, right next to me, he's just like, oh yeah, that's just some of my porn.” When he was done restoring the photos, Lewis left the room. It was clear the boss had no shame and no problem with IT seeing his explicit images or with storing them where any employee could download them. They were even mixed in with official photos and family pictures. However, knowing this was bad policy and could probably lead to a lawsuit, Lewis approached human resources and told them about the problem. The HR representative instructed him to delete all the smut from the network, even though it belonged to the big boss. He did that, and fortunately, did not face any repercussions at work for deleting the big man’s cheeky pictures. He wore a top hat In another instance, Lewis was asked to look at a coworker’s computer when the employee thought he had gotten a virus on his laptop. However, the colleague cautioned IT not to look through his files. After a little while, Lewis noticed a folder filled with other subfolders that were festooned with adult images, both of naked women and of the employee himself without clothes on. All of the photos had appropriately descriptive file names too. Perhaps most embarrassing of all for the coworker is that Lewis saw his semi-naked pictures. To be fair, he was dressed in the images, as he was wearing a top hat – but nothing else. The problem, Lewis notes, is that employees treat their work computers as if they are home computers and do not think about the implications of having personal images on something that belongs to a corporation. He suggests setting a firm policy against this kind of thing and educating workers about the policy. When workers inevitably violate the policy, it’s time for a gentle reminder. “A policy is just, you know, paper, right? It's hard to enforce that,” Lewis said. “You can talk to the user in this instance. In this most recent instance with this guy in the top hat, it was ‘hey, these are company resources’ when I gave the computer back to him.” Kids’ YouTube upload exposed a potential thief In another gig, Lewis worked at a university. When one athletics coach quit, he was supposed to leave his school-issued iPad on his desk. But when the IT department came to collect the equipment, this tablet was missing. No one could find the missing iPad, but a month later, someone uploaded a new video to the school’s YouTube channel. The video featured a different coach's kids and appeared to have been uploaded from his house. Apparently, the other coach had allegedly snatched the iPad off of the first coach’s desk and given it to his kids. The kids then used the iPad to film a funny home video and upload it to YouTube, not realizing that it was connected to the school’s official YouTube account. Lewis notified HR, who called the apparent thief in. At first, he denied that the children in the video were his offspring. However, the HR agent then showed him a photo of him and his kids on social media together and he admitted, okay, he was their dad. The coach then said he didn’t know how the iPad got into his house. But he grabbed it and returned it to IT. There are a lot of problems with the iPad situation from a security perspective. First, the iPad that wasn’t turned over clearly was not locked to the point where someone else couldn’t get into it. It had access to the school’s YouTube account, so any thief could add their own content to it and it may have even had PII (personally identifiable information) about some student athletes. Bottom line: make sure departing employees hand over equipment directly to IT. Don’t let them just leave equipment on a desk. And make sure even tablets require biometric access. ®
The FBI is warning unsuspecting lawyers that their firms continue to be an active target for members of a longstanding extortion crew. Silent Ransom Group has been operating since 2022, by the FBI’s reckoning, and its latest message [PDF] about the gang comes almost exactly a year after its last. The group is still targeting US law firms and their staff, and the criminals are pretending to be company IT staff. It also warned last year that the callback phishing specialists had started physically walking into the law firms’ offices when remote social engineering attempts go south. The FBI’s latest advisory reaffirms these findings, with fresh attacks reported in Spring 2026. Law firms should be locking up their USB ports because the extortion crew is still sending members to plug in their thumb drives into the computers, for when they can’t convince employees to surrender remote access. In these scenarios, they rock up to the victim they’ve tried to phish and socially engineer from behind a phone or computer screen, continue the facade of being a company IT rep, and then claim they need to image the person's device or create a backup file to assess the damage of their own phishing email. What they’re actually doing is copying important files onto said thumb drive, which SRG will later use to extort the law firm. The FBI didn’t say exactly how many of these in-person callouts SRG has made, but it was evidently enough to include in a fresh advisory on the group’s methods and tactics. According to the advisory, these attacks were first reported in Spring 2026. SRG in brief SRG’s target industries used to be broader than just legal. The hack-and-leak group has been known to target organizations operating in various industries, but the legal sector has remained a common theme since 2023. The FBI said in its advisory on the group last year that it believes SRG consistently targets US law firms “likely due to the highly sensitive nature of legal industry data.” When they’re not sending crooks into office blocks, SRG’s primary goal is to achieve their aims through callback phishing. Using SMS messages or emails, group members would single out employees at target companies, asking them to call a number while impersonating real IT staff. If the staffer fell for the scheme, they’d call up, and the SRG IT imposter would attempt to convince them to grant access to a remote desktop session, during which they would elevate their privileges and set about stealing data to use as extortion leverage. In some cases, SRG will run WinSCP or a disguised version of Rclone to scoop up files of interest. In others, they are known to share those documents using internal file-sharing platforms such as Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive. Before the callback phishing methodology, the group would send emails claiming that a fake subscription had been authorized that would charge small sums to the target’s account each month. The email included a phone number to call in order to cancel the subscription, and once on the call, the crooks would convince the target to install remote access software, and rinse-repeat the data theft playbook. SRG is not known for using ransomware, but it operates a data leak site (DLS) just like any other extortion crew and charges victims to return the data they stole, threatening to leak it online if they refuse to pay. Recent alleged victims of the group have included law giant Jones Day, the legal eagles favored by US president Donald Trump during both his election campaigns. SRG listed Jones Day on its DLS, and the law firm confirmed a “cyber phishing incident” in April, but did not name SRG as the culprits. Your country needs you The FBI pleaded with the public to send it any evidence of SRG in action to aid future investigations. Of particular use would be phone numbers used to contact the crooks, copies of the phone call transcripts and phishing emails, cryptocurrency wallet information, and identifying information of the individuals who step foot in office buildings. As for how to prevent attacks from SRG or others adopting similar methods, the FBI recommended that organizations disallow connecting external drives to company-issued devices, especially those that store confidential or otherwise sensitive information. Verifying the credentials of each person walking into the building wouldn’t hurt, either. The usual advice applies for the group’s remote attacks: limiting access to sensitive data from less-secure networks and requiring phishing-resistant MFA for as many services as possible. The FBI also recommends blocking port 22 access, which would prevent encrypted remote access, and investing in robust staff training programs so they know not to let outsiders plug hardware into their machines. ®
India's Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) says defenders should endevor to patch or mitigate exploited n-day vulnerabilities within 12 hours as the cybercrime landscape continues its AI-ification. The organization's recommended half-day window applies only to bugs that affect internet-facing or "crown jewel" systems and are known to be exploited. In these cases, CERT-In told defenders to "patch, mitigate, or remove exposure within 12 hours where feasible." For other flaws, such as a standard critical vulnerability (CVSS 9.0 or higher) affecting an internal system, or a known exploited bug affecting an internal system, defenders can enjoy a much more leisurely 24-hour window. The revised suggestions come as part of a new guide released by CERT-In this week to help infosec pros better protect against AI-assisted cyberattacks. "AI-assisted cyber exploitation reduces the time required for adversaries to identify, weaponize, and exploit vulnerabilities, exposed services, weak identities, insecure APIs, and misconfigured systems," CERT-In's report reads. "As organizations become increasingly dependent on interconnected digital infrastructure, cloud ecosystems, software supply chains, operational technologies, and AI-enabled platforms, the potential impact of AI-enabled cyber threats continues to increase across sectors." CERT-In's report follows a trail of news stories in 2026 that all suggest AI is becoming an increasingly important part of cybersecurity for both attackers and defenders. The field of agentic AI has especially matured rapidly in the past year. Consumer-grade tools like OpenClaw have made it easier for non-technical users to experiment with autonomous tech, raising its profile and awareness of its capabilities. Agents are equipped with all the necessary permissions to make significant system changes, but as global intelligence agencies recently highlighted, their behavior can at times be unexpected, and they're also prone to mischief. Security pros are starting to see the potential for AI agents in their workflows, but for attackers, the technology represents an opportunity to hasten all parts of their process, from recon and exploitation to privilege escalation and data theft. CERT-In cited agentic AI as one of the core concerns behind the report's recommendations, and because of the disparate supply chains on which organizations are increasingly reliant, any vulnerability can lead to cascading damage on interconnected systems. Beyond agentic AI, the launches of frontier models such as Anthropic's Mythos and OpenAI's GPT-5.5, two certified cyber workhorses, threaten to empower attackers further with capabilities to uncover and exploit critical vulnerabilities at pace. A 12-hour window: Is it feasible? Any cybersecurity practitioner will attest to the onerous nature of the patching process, and how it's not as easy as clicking "Update," which is why a 12-hour patch window might seem initially unrealistic to some. Urgent warnings and demands for immediate patching are routinely delivered alongside critical vulnerability disclosures, but these fail to account for the downtime required to apply patches, or the testing required to prove that by applying them, everything else won't break. Microsoft has had its fair share of these cases, for example, and many readers will have borne the brunt. CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog is another prominent resource that sets patching deadlines, albeit only for federal agencies, but these are typically set at two to three weeks, or a number of days for the most serious vulnerabilities. The cybersecurity pros who spoke to The Register, weighing in on the CERT-In recommendations, agreed that 12 hours is far too short a window to properly test and deploy a patch, although they said the organization was on to something with its approach. Dray Agha, senior manager of security operations at Huntress, said that CERT-In’s recommendation to "patch, mitigate, or remove exposure within 12 hours where feasible" was solid advice, largely because of the caveat that it doesn’t necessitate a full patch within that time. "By explicitly encouraging temporary mitigations, such as isolation, access restriction, or disablement until a patch is ready, this turns the patching deadline into a highly feasible and necessary containment strategy," Agha told The Register. "And this corroborates the guidance we dispense at Huntress for critical threats: we often advise our community to deploy temporary mitigations to 'get them out of trouble' as soon as humanly possible, and then come up with a more coordinated strategy for patching that respects the business's need to function in its enterprises." Agha added that AI-assisted cyberattacks are seen every day in the wild, compressing the time taken to exploit vulnerabilities, meaning defenders must adapt to this new reality. In the pre-AI days, a 12-hour window to mitigate or patch a known exploited vulnerability was seen as excessively tight, but increased availability of advanced tooling and automation is reshaping the demands of vulnerability management. "Defenders must fundamentally reshape their operations to focus on quicker mitigations – prior to AI, at Huntress, we have seen vulnerabilities exploited within a handful of hours, let alone a full 12 hours," said Agha. He said the 12-hour guideline is less about an arbitrary clock, more about "forcing a necessary readjustment in how organizations drive their security approaches to be beyond compliance and move to a continuous defensive posture. "And this will involve the enterprise functions of the business being a part of the security posture – not just IT, thank you very much – as the consequences of AI-driven exploitation mean faster, higher impact cascading negatives on a targeted business; much better to proactively defend than reactively recover." ®
A security researcher found a foolproof way to guarantee tech conferences accept his speaker submissions: hack their systems. CVE-2026-41241 is a stored cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in pretalx, a popular open source tool that conference organizers use to manage speaker submissions and schedules, that could allow attackers to effectively take over an organizer's session. Any user controlling searchable fields – including submission titles, speaker display names, and user names or email addresses – could inject arbitrary HTML or JavaScript. When an organizer's search query matched the malicious record, the payload would execute in the organizer interface. "Once triggered, the injected script executed in the context of the pretalx organiser interface and could read the page's [Cross-Site Request Forgery] CSRF token, submit authenticated requests on the victim's behalf (including requests modifying data due to access to the CSRF token), or exfiltrate data visible to the victim," according to pretalx's security advisory. Project maintainers patched the flaw in April, and it has been fixed in pretalx 2026.1.0. Elad Meged, founding engineer and security researcher at AI penetration-testing and offensive-security startup Novee, found and disclosed the flaw when he was preparing conference speaker submissions. He noticed the exact same call for proposals (CFP) submission form appearing underneath all of these different hacker conferences and academic symposiums' logos. 'One codebase serving them all' While the events are unique, with different parent companies and organizers, "underneath, it is one codebase serving them all," Meged said in research published on Wednesday and shared in advance with The Register. Meged then used the flaw to auto-apply for 40 conferences - and got accepted to present his proposed talk, "Securing Modern Web Apps," at every single one of them. While Meged did submit real entries, he did not submit a live exploit payload into the conference systems. The Novee team validated all of their findings on a local instance. They didn't do any testing on pretalx.com or a third-party-hosted instance. "The goal was to validate the vulnerable workflow in the exact real-world setup while avoiding unnecessary harm," Meged told The Register. "So, we used realistic, normal-looking talk submissions and then validated exploitability through controlled, version-specific testing." Some of the events that use pretalx-based CFP infrastructure include OffensiveCon, TROOPERS, FOSDEM, HEXACON, and Recon, he told us, stressing that this does not mean any of these conferences were actively exploited or compromised. For any conferences that used pretalx for talk submissions, but weren't accepting submissions at the time, Meged followed up with them via responsible disclosure. And yes, Meged admits that he could have had more fun with the talk title, but he wanted to make it "intentionally boring and plausible," to blend in with other proposals. "I agree something outrageous would have been funnier, but it would also have been less responsible," he said. Human led, AI agent assist Meged described the research as "human-led vulnerability research, agent-assisted at internet scale." Once they understood the type of vulnerability, any "capable web security researcher" could reproduce the exploit, he said, adding "this would not require nation-state-level skill." Scaling the attack, reliably reproducing it, and adjusting the attack chain to each real-world pretalx deployment, however, benefited from an agentic AI assist – and this wasn't "a one-off script or a prank CFP submission," he told us. "Different pretalx versions, deployment choices, and enabled features can change the behavior," Meged said. "Something that works on one instance may fail on another or require a different validation path." Plus, some conferences use hosted infrastructure, while others run their own self-hosted instances. So the security shop built an agentic fingerprinting and validation system to scan the internet for public-facing, vulnerable systems, learn as much as possible about the version and configuration, and find the best way to exploit them. 'This type of work does not scale manually' "This type of work does not scale manually," Meged said. "A human can find the core idea, understand the primitive, and make the responsible disclosure decisions. But mapping internet-wide exposure, fingerprinting many deployments, comparing versions, modeling behavior, adjusting validation logic, and organizing disclosure steps is exactly where AI agents become useful. The agents helped with discovery, fingerprinting, version comparison, environment modeling, controlled validation, note-taking, and disclosure workflow management." After finding and fingerprinting public pretalx deployments, and identifying version-specific behavior, the agents selected the best non-destructive validation path for each one. While there's no indication that attackers found and exploited the security issue before Novee's team, it's serious in that it could have granted organizer-level access to the conference call-for-proposal and scheduling system - these typically contain speaker identities, submissions, acceptance decisions, and private communications between conference organizers and speakers. Gaining access to this type of information could have allowed for targeted phishing or other trust-based attacks impersonating a well-known industry event. "With organizer-level access, an attacker could potentially read or modify submissions, interfere with the review process, impersonate conference staff, alter CFP data, or communicate with speakers and submitters from a trusted conference context," Meged said. "The most realistic abuse case is targeted phishing or lateral movement through trust. If a speaker, sponsor, reviewer, or attendee receives a link or request from what appears to be a legitimate conference system, they are much more likely to trust it," he added. "So the story is not just: Someone could get a fake talk accepted. The bigger risk is that a trusted conference platform could become a launchpad for attacks against the entire event ecosystem." Tobias Kunze, a developer who created pretalx, told The Register that Meged reported 11 security findings on April 14, he assessed all of these and classed one as a serious vulnerability and five as non-vulnerability bugs – but with fixes – and five more as non-critical or intended behavior. "Contact with Elad was very positive and professional," Kunze told us. "We discussed the severity and impact of his findings, and it was as good a report as a small open source project like pretalx can hope to receive." ®
Some internet connectivity is returning in Iran after nearly 90 days offline, web monitoring groups say. But it isn’t clear if the reconnection is permanent.
National security and digital forensics experts have called foul on Nigel Farage's "disturbing" and unsubstantiated claim that Russia was behind the leak of a story about the UK politician receiving a £5 million gift from a crypto billionaire. Sources inside Farage's right-wing Reform UK told the Mail on Sunday that the party leader believes Russian spies hacked his phone and relayed details about Christopher Harborne's gift, a matter of which only four people were aware. Farage was said to have engaged outside "counter-espionage experts" to perform a technical analysis of his device – analysis that was said to point to Russia. According to Peter Sommer, professor of digital forensics at Birmingham City University, whichever outfit was entrusted to carry out this work would have been looking for two different types of markers to prove Russia was involved. These would be either the phishing message Farage clicked on that allowed Russia to access his private communications or the malware code an attacker used to exfiltrate them. "It's obviously trivial to disguise the source of an email, so that doesn't help," Sommer told The Register. "And the second thing is if you're talking about looking for hacking codes, hackers, whether they are juveniles or people in major SIGINT systems, are likely to be stealing from each other, so there's nothing unique about a code that would say where it comes from." Sommer also highlighted that advanced intelligence powers have tools at their disposal to obfuscate the source of malicious code. The CIA's leaked Marble Framework supposedly had the ability to translate malicious code into any language, including those used by its chief adversaries. "Now, absent from that, how on Earth do you determine that this is a Russian hack?" Sommer asked. Neither Farage nor Reform UK has spoken officially on the alleged Russian phone hack. They have not specified which experts on whose conclusions they used to make the claims, they have not stated what evidence pointed to Russia's involvement, and they have not committed to making this forensic assessment available for public scrutiny. Opening up the data for verification was one of the core issues raised by Ciaran Martin, founding chief executive of the UK's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), who labeled Farage's claims "disturbing" and "without any merit." Speaking to The Guardian, Martin said that not only is the lack of clear evidence concerning, but also if Russia was behind the hack-and-leak operation, a deliberate attempt at destabilizing a foreign democracy, then it would have significant consequences for the UK's Russia policy. "An aspiring prime minister has essentially claimed that Russia has launched an unprecedentedly aggressive intervention – a malicious intervention – in British politics, and he's not produced a shred of evidence to support that claim," Martin said. "It is a very, very serious thing to allege. It would be a national security issue," he added. "If it is true, the government should be in emergency session in COBR right now, considering their response to the most serious Russian intervention in internal British affairs for years." He said the claims published by the Mail on Sunday, at present, are unsubstantiated, and if true, in normal circumstances, this would prompt a formal government response. The Reg understands that the NCSC has not been engaged by Farage or Reform UK over the matter. The National Crime Agency did not respond to questions regarding its involvement and the Metropolitan Police Service declined to comment. Reform UK did not respond to our requests for more information, nor did Nigel Farage's office. What exactly did Reform UK claim? According to sources who spoke to the Mail on Sunday, Russian spies hacked Farage's phone, ascertained details about Harborne's £5 million donation to the party leader, and leaked it to The Guardian, which first reported the story. The Guardian said at the weekend that Farage is now under "mounting pressure" to prove his claim about the Russian phone hack. There is no indication the Graun 's reporting was connected to any illegal activity or Russian spies, but Farage is implying so, telling the Mail on Sunday: "This shocking revelation brings into question The Guardian’s judgment and whether Reform can cooperate with them in future." According to the analysis of Farage's phone, carried out by the unidentified counter-espionage experts, the findings were "almost certainly linked to Moscow," the Reform UK source said. They also claimed that spear-phishing tactics were used to compromise his phone, email, and bank accounts. "It bore all the sophisticated hallmarks of a nation-state actor using destabilization techniques in the run-up to this month's local elections," the source added. Farage said: "These actions by Russia are deeply concerning and highlight the threat they pose to British security." Regarding the motive for such an attack, Reform UK believes its leader angered Russian president Vladimir Putin by previously expressing support for NATO. He has said in the past that UK forces should shoot down Russian aircraft if they enter NATO airspace, and joined controversial calls for Ukraine to be admitted to the military alliance. The party also said that Harborne may be a target for the Russian regime because he joined former prime minister Boris Johnson on a trip to Ukraine in 2022, designed to showcase the impact of Russia's invasion earlier that year. ®
Cisco's 2026 Segmentation Report analyzes 400 failed segmentation projects and identifies four distinct patterns of failure — and what teams can do about them
As Americans stew over the looming risk of job-stealing AI and data centers in their back yards, the feds are raising the alarm about a new category of threat, documents obtained by WIRED show.
Anthropic has revealed its intention to one day release models that match the performance of its Mythos bug-finding AI to the public, once it can make them safe. In case you came in late, in early April Anthropic announced it had developed a model called Mythos that is so good at finding security vulnerabilities in programming code that the company decided to offer it only to select entities because allowing unfettered access would mean cybercriminals could quickly discover and exploit software flaws. That access program is called “Project Glasswing” and participants report it quickly finds many bugs but few that humans couldn’t find given enough time and resources. Those with access to Mythos have also sometimes said the quantity of bugs it finds somewhat overwhelms their ability to patch them all. The mere existence of Mythos has sparked a little panic – Japan’s government ordered a sweeping security review and Indian authorities demanded a patching spree at financial institutions – plus a general realization that even lesser AI models are also decent bug-finders, meaning cyber-defenders must now expect attackers will weaponize more flaws, more often. No company—including Anthropic—has developed safeguards strong enough to prevent such models from being misused Anthropic last week published an “initial update” on Project Glasswing that in its second-to-last paragraph reveals the company’s next step will see it “… work with critical partners – including US and allied governments – to expand Project Glasswing to additional partners. And in the near future, once we’ve developed the far stronger safeguards we need, we look forward to making Mythos-class models available through a general release.” The company didn’t explain what it means by “near future” and admits that “At present, no company—including Anthropic—has developed safeguards strong enough to prevent such models from being misused and potentially causing severe harm.” Further illustration of that assertion can be found earlier in the company’s post, which reveals that Anthropic has used Mythos to scan more than 1,000 open-source projects that it says “collectively underpin much of the internet – and much of our own infrastructure.” To date, Mythos has found an estimated 6,202 high-or-critical-severity vulnerabilities in these projects – and 23,019 flaws in all. The post reveals that when Mythos finds a flaw, Anthropic and its pals in the security community reproduce the issue that Mythos has found and “re-assess its severity.” “Once we’ve confirmed that a vulnerability is real, we check for whether there are already fixes in place, and write a detailed report to the software’s maintainers,” Anthropic explains. “We take considerable care here: on top of the regular challenges of maintaining open-source software, maintainers have been facing a deluge of low-quality, AI-generated bug reports. Indeed, several maintainers have told us they’re currently severely capacity constrained, and some have even asked us to slow down our rate of disclosures because they need more time to design patches.” 1,752 of the high-or-critical-rated vulnerabilities Mythos found in FOSS have gone through that process and 90.6 percent (1,587) proved to be valid flaws. Of those, 62.4 percent (1,094) “were confirmed as either high-or-critical-severity,” the post states. One of the critical flaws impacted the wolfSSL cryptography library used by billions of devices worldwide. “Mythos Preview constructed an exploit that would let an attacker forge certificates that would (for instance) allow them to host a fake website for a bank or email provider,” Anthropic wrote. “The website would look perfectly legitimate to an end user, despite being controlled by the attacker.” Thankfully, developers have already patched wolfSSL, and Anthropic said it will deliver a full technical analysis “in the coming weeks.” Keep an eye out for CVE-2026-5194 to learn more about this one. Mythos is adding to an already overloaded security ecosystem “75 of the 530 high-or-critical-severity bugs we’ve reported have now been patched, and 65 of those have been given public advisories,” the post states, then explains that low fix rate by revealing Anthropic is “still early in the 90-day window that’s set out in our Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure policy: we expect many more patches to land soon.” The company thinks it is also “likely to be undercounting patches because some vulnerabilities are patched without a public advisory.” Lastly, the flood of bugs Mythos found “is adding to an already overloaded security ecosystem.” Anthropic’s suggestion for security teams struggling to develop fixes for bugs AI discovered is, unsurprisingly, more AI such as skills that improve its Claude model’s ability to help developers. ®
OPINION Dirty Frag, Copy Fail, and Fragnesia are less a random cluster of Linux bugs and more the public unveiling of how AI tools can pry open security holes with just a prompt or two. What they also have in common is their shared abuse of a core kernel abstraction: The page cache. What does this mean for you and me? Is this the rainstorm before a downpour of killer Linux security problems, or is this just a shower? It depends on who you ask. Whatever else may be true, these problems must be addressed. As Igor Seletskiy, CEO of CloudLinux, said: "The real story here is that we typically see one or two kernel-level LPE (Linux privilege escalations) vulnerabilities that affect multiple distros/versions per year. And now we see two such vulnerabilities one week apart. We should expect this trend to continue for quite a few months, meaning companies might have to reboot servers weekly." Ouch! But is this the start of a trend? Linus Torvalds, who knows a thing or two about Linux, said at Open Source Summit North America in Minneapolis that until recently, the kernel community would quietly notify distributions about a bug and ask them to upgrade without detailing the vulnerability, and "most of the time, nobody would figure out what happened." That was then. This is now. With AI‑accelerated analysis, he recalled that "last week, we fixed the bug; within three hours, there was a blog post about the implications of that bug fix, because security people love getting attention." As a result of this kind of thing, Torvalds has changed how the Linux security community will deal with AI-discovered security holes. "AI-detected bugs are pretty much by definition not secret, and treating them on some private list is a waste of time for everybody involved – and only makes that duplication worse because the reporters can't even see each other's reports." In addition, Torvalds added, in the case of AI-discovered bugs, you need to keep in mind that just "because you found it with AI, 100 other people also found it with AI." That means we're going to hear a lot more about Linux security problems. But are they getting worse? I asked Greg Kroah-Hartman, the Linux stable kernel maintainer, and he told me: "Maybe? It's hard to tell; the 'recent' ones really are very minor, as the number of systems that have 'untrusted users' is not common anymore. I don't see any real uptick in our actual bug fixes that I can tell." He continued: "We fix bugs like that on a daily basis, it's just the rise of people wanting to 'name a bug' and release a public exploit seems to be all the rage at the moment." An important point that Chris Wright, Red Hat's CTO, made at Red Hat Summit, the week before, is that in "security, all things aren't created equal. There will always be a spectrum of vulnerabilities that will surface. Some of those will be really critical and we will need to respond very quickly, so that becomes a clear priority. Others will have a longer tail of lower severity." Torvalds also added at Open Source Summit that just because you read stories about Linux and AI-discovered bugs, you shouldn't think the same thing isn't happening to proprietary software, such as Windows. "If you think that AI can't reverse engineer closed source, you're in for a surprise." In fact, he warned, "closed source is even worse in this respect, because the AI can't help you fix those problems, but the AI sure can help find those problems in the first place." He also discouraged security researchers from publishing working exploits: "When it comes to things that really are security issues, you may not want to make the exploit public… Don't be that guy who then crows about it publicly and says, 'Look, I could bring down this big company.'" Following on this theme, Christopher "CRob" Robinson, chief security architect for the Open Source Software Foundation (OpenSSF), told The Register that thanks to AI, "roughly 30 percent of reported Linux security bugs were duplicates. That's going to be another problem in this AI age, where everybody's a researcher, right, with a $20 cloud code account." That, in turn, will burden already overworked maintainers with yet more patches to deal with. Linux, Torvalds added, is something that its maintainers can handle. Smaller open source projects, however, are all too likely to be overwhelmed. The real problem, according to what the Google Threat Intelligence Group has discovered, is that the mean time to exploit (TTE) for vulnerabilities has continually decreased "from 63 days in 2018 to -1 day in 2024 and further downward to an estimated -7 days in 2025. A negative number indicates that exploitation of a vulnerability, on average, occurred before a patch was released." So what does this mean? Yes, we're going to see a lot more security vulnerabilities showing up in Linux and other open source projects. Yes, some of them will be serious, and all too many will have exploits out before the patches arrive. It's not, however, that Linux has suddenly become less secure. It's that AI eyes are much better at detecting bugs than human eyes have ever been. We will catch up, and AI can help with that, too. In the meantime, system administrators and developers will have to be more security-conscious than ever before. As Wright told The Reg, it's high time we switched from using SELinux in permissive to restrictive mode. Enforcing strict security is a pain, but what's even more of a pain is having to rebuild your containers and servers after a serious attack gets through. ®
Plus: Google publishes a live exploit for an unpatched flaw, the feds arrest two men accused of creating thousands of nonconsensual deepfake nudes, and more.
A malware-spreading scumbag swimming through GitHub pushed malicious commits to more than 5,500 repositories on Monday as part of an automated campaign called Megalodon. Similar to the earlier TeamPCP attacks that poisoned about 3,800 GitHub repositories, this new campaign has so far infected 5,561 repos with CI/CD credential-stealing malware, according to SafeDep researchers, who uncovered the predatory commits and published a full list of the compromised repositories. If a repository owner merges the commit, the malware executes inside their CI/CD pipeline and propagates further, Ox Security lead researcher Moshe Siman Tov Bustan said in a Thursday blog post. Megalodon steals AWS secret keys and Google Cloud access tokens. It also queries AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Azure metadata for instance role credentials, reads SSH private keys, Docker and Kubernetes configurations, Vault tokens, Terraform credentials, and scans source code for more than 30 secret regex patterns. Then it exfiltrates GitHub tokens, including secrets used to authenticate with cloud providers, thus allowing attackers to impersonate developers’ cloud identities, along with Bitbucket tokens. In other words: consider ALL of your CI/CD variables pwned. "We’ve entered a new supply chain attack era, and TeamPCP compromising GitHub was only the beginning,” Bustan told The Register. “What’s coming next is an endless wave, a tsunami of cyber attacks on developers worldwide.” Plus, he added, hacking GitHub “compromises the security of every company with a private repository hosted on the platform.” This new wave of supply chain attacks hitting developers’ environments won’t stop until “companies like npm and GitHub take serious action against the spread of malicious code on their servers,” Bustan said. He noted npm’s statement on X saying it “invalidated npm granular access tokens with write access that bypass 2FA” to prevent additional supply-chain attacks like Mini Shai Hulud. “That could help a little with account hijacking, but it doesn’t solve the actual problem,” Bustan said. “Malicious code is still reaching their servers, and nothing is stopping it before it does.” npm … but not TeamPCP SafeDep spotted Megalodon hidden inside a legitimate package: Tiledesk, an open source live chat and chatbot platform. The attacker backdoored versions 2.18.6 (May 19) through 2.18.12 (May 21), and the same npm maintainer published the last clean version, 2.18.5, before unknowingly publishing these newer compromised versions. “The attacker never touched the npm account,” the open source supply-chain security startup researchers said. “They compromised the GitHub repository, and the maintainer published from the poisoned source without realizing it.” While publishing malicious packages on npm is a TeamPCP signature move, Bustan said there’s no threat-intel or code-analysis evidence that connects Megalodon to the crew behind the Trivy, Checkmarx, and other recent supply-chain attacks. “Our best guess now is that it's a different threat actor copying their behavior and style, but not much of the code itself,” he told us. And despite TeamPCP open sourcing its Shai-Hulud worm and announcing a supply-chain attack competition on BreachForums, Ox doesn’t believe Megalodon is a contest entry. “We have indications that they are not participating in the TeamPCP contest due to the contest having a specific rule to add a public encryption key that the actor behind the malware could match with his private key to prove his involvement,” Bustan said. Who is built-bot? SafeDep’s threat hunters traced the malicious commit (acac5a9) to an author “build-bot,” connected to the email address build-system[@]noreply.dev with the message “ci: add build optimization step.” The author name and noreply email mimic automated CI commits, and there’s no GitHub account linked to the author and committer user fields. “Someone pushed the commit to master with no PR and no merge commit, using a compromised PAT or deploy key,” according to the researchers. They searched GitHub for other commits authored by the same email address and found 2,878 results, plus a second email, ci-bot@automated.dev, with an additional 2,841 commits. All landed May 18 during a six-hour window (11:36 to 17:48 UTC) and targeted 5,561 repositories. This includes nine compromised Tiledesk repositories: tiledesk-server, tiledesk-dashboard, tiledesk-telegram-connector, tiledesk-llm, tiledesk-docker-proxy, tiledesk-community-app, tiledesk-campaign-dashboard, tiledesk-helpcenter-template, and tiledesk-ai. Others include Black-Iron-Project with eight compromised repos, WISE-Community, and hundreds of smaller repositories. ®
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