Russia's domestic spy agency says it has uncovered a sprawling foreign espionage operation that allegedly turned the smartphones of senior Russian officials into pocket-sized surveillance devices, though it has so far offered little in the way of evidence. In a statement Tuesday, the Federal Security Service (FSB) claimed foreign intelligence agencies implanted malware on the mobile devices of high-ranking Russian officials, allowing operators to steal data, intercept conversations, and secretly activate microphones and cameras to monitor targets and their surroundings. “This software is used to steal existing data, eavesdrop on ongoing conversations, and conduct covert acoustic and video monitoring of the environment near electronic devices, all aimed at obtaining sensitive information,” the FSB said. The agency said it had opened a criminal investigation into illegal access to computer information and the distribution of malicious software. It did not identify the alleged intelligence service responsible, disclose how many officials were affected, name the malware involved, or provide any technical indicators that would allow independent verification of the claims. As things stand, the FSB has revealed the accusation but not the proof. However, the notion that foreign intelligence agencies might target the phones of senior Russian officials is hardly farfetched. State-backed mobile surveillance campaigns have become a routine feature of modern espionage, and Moscow has spent years accusing Western intelligence services of abusing consumer technology platforms for intelligence gathering. In 2023, the FSB claimed that thousands of iPhones had been compromised in a US National Security Agency spying operation. At the time, Russian security vendor Kaspersky disclosed what became known as “Operation Triangulation”, an iPhone surveillance campaign that infected devices through iMessage. Apple denied cooperating with any government, while Kaspersky stopped short of attributing the operation to the NSA. Moscow's spy agencies are hardly strangers to offensive cyber operations themselves. Last year, the FBI warned that hackers linked to the FSB's Center 16 were exploiting a years-old Cisco vulnerability to collect configuration files from thousands of network devices associated with critical infrastructure operators. So while the FSB's latest allegations may ultimately prove accurate, they lack the technical evidence security researchers would normally expect before accepting claims of a major cyber espionage campaign. ®

Microsoft has moved to calm an increasingly noisy backlash from the security community after appearing to threaten legal action against a researcher who spent the past several weeks dumping Windows zero-days onto the internet. In a statement published on Monday, Redmond said it has "no intention to pursue action against individuals conducting or publishing security research”, a noticeably softer position than the one it adopted just days earlier when it condemned a string of public vulnerability disclosures and invoked its Digital Crimes Unit. The updated statement follows a public feud with a researcher known as Nightmare-Eclipse, who released multiple Windows zero-days along with proof-of-concept exploit code. Several of those vulnerabilities have since been exploited in the wild, turning what might have remained an obscure disclosure dispute into a much larger argument about how vendors handle security researchers. Last week, Microsoft described the publication of exploit code for unpatched flaws as "never justifiable" and warned it would work with law enforcement when criminal activity harmed customers. The statement triggered immediate criticism from parts of the security community, with researchers warning that the language risked creating a chilling effect around vulnerability research. Former Microsoft employee and security researcher Kevin Beaumont described the company's position as a "dumpster fire of its own making," while Luta Security founder Katie Moussouris, who created Microsoft's bug bounty program, told The Register the response sent mixed messages. She questioned Microsoft's decision to tout researcher compensation and recognition while responding to a researcher who claims he received neither, and argued that references to the Digital Crimes Unit made the post feel "vaguely threatening." She added that, regardless of the specifics of the dispute, Microsoft risked creating a chilling effect on other researchers considering whether to report vulnerabilities. What’s more, if Microsoft's goal was to isolate Nightmare-Eclipse, that may not be going entirely to plan. The researcher claimed over the weekend that other researchers had begun handing over vulnerabilities following Microsoft's response, including an alleged flaw dubbed "Bitskrieg" that breaks Secure Boot trust guarantees and bypasses BitLocker. Nightmare-Ecipse said the bug will be released “sometime in June”. Against that backdrop, Microsoft's Monday message read more like damage control than deterrence. "We have no intention to pursue action against individuals conducting or publishing their security research," Microsoft said, adding that legal referrals would be reserved for people engaging in malicious activity that causes harm to customers. The company also acknowledged that "some interactions have fallen short" and said it was working to learn from feedback. Notably, Microsoft stopped well short of conceding any of Nightmare-Eclipse's specific allegations. The researcher had accused Microsoft of deleting accounts used for vulnerability reporting, refusing to pay bounties, and mishandling communications through the Microsoft Security Response Center. The company has not publicly addressed those claims directly. Nobody should mistake Monday's statement for a sudden conversion to the church of full disclosure. Microsoft remains firmly of the view that researchers should report vulnerabilities privately, give vendors time to fix them, and avoid dropping working exploit code onto the internet for everyone else to play with. The problem for Redmond was that the argument had drifted well beyond the actions of one researcher. What began as a dispute over a string of Windows zero-day releases was rapidly turning into a debate about Microsoft's relationship with the security community and whether the company was comfortable invoking lawyers when that relationship soured. The updated statement looks very much like an attempt to slam the brakes on that narrative. ®

Updated Claude has gone offline on the day after its maker Anthropic filed for what is expected to be a blockbuster IPO. The popular chatbot and coding tool suffered an outage from around 0600 UTC on Tuesday, with Anthropic saying the team was investigating the issue. By 1042 UTC, the status page said a fix had been implemented and the technical team was monitoring the results. Some users continued to complain to The Register about the disruption after that point. Downdetector shows users reporting the LLM service from Anthropic was down twice momentarily yesterday. A surge in reports started from 0700 UTC today and peaked at 0948 UTC, after which they started to fall. The timing of the technical difficulties is unfortunate for Anthropic, the company founded in 2021 by former employees of OpenAI. Yesterday, the company submitted a draft registration statement to the US Securities and Exchange Commission for a proposed initial public offering (IPO) for common stock. It has yet to set the price of shares but a May funding round which raised $65 billion valued the company at around $965 billion (£717 billion), more than rival OpenAI, makers of chatbot ChatGPT. It is set to be a monster year for IPOs, with Elon Musk’s SpaceX and OpenAI also anticipated to join the frenzy. Each is expected to be valued at around $1 trillion. Claude Code has bolstered Anthropic’s reputation and has been well-received by some developers. Reportedly, Anthropic earns more in revenue despite having a fraction of the users OpenAI claims to serve. According to the Wall Street Journal, Anthropic is on the verge of reporting its first quarter of operating profit, according to people at the company who spoke anonymously. ® Updated to add at 1618 UTC, June 2: A source from Anthropic told us: "Earlier today, some users may have experienced intermittent issues or slower response times across Claude Code, Cowork, Claude.ai, and the API. Service has been fully restored, and we're grateful to our users for their patience. Customers accessing Claude through Google Cloud's Vertex AI or Amazon Bedrock were not affected."

The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) is warning the public to be wary of scammers spoofing its switchboard number in an attempt to profit by calling marks from a "trustworthy" number. A member of the public reported an attempted scam on Monday afternoon. A phone call came in from what appeared to be the PSNI’s switchboard number, and the caller pretended to be a member of the force inquiring about a case in which the recipient was involved. “The caller told the person there was an investigation linked to their name involving money transfers to narcotic-related countries and was subsequently asked to provide information about their bank cards,” said the PSNI’s Inspector Walker. We don’t have any expert criminals here at The Register, but we think it would be pretty sage advice for someone looking to increasingly pass as a police representative not to be so stupid as to ask for gift cards as “part of the investigation process.” “The caller then asked them to purchase gift cards and send across the codes for those, stating that this was part of the investigation process and that the money would be returned to them,” Inspector Walker added. “This made the reporting party suspicious, however, and thankfully, the victim didn’t share any of their personal or bank details with the caller, who they then blocked.” Officials confirmed to The Register that the police’s number was spoofed, and this case was not instigated by a real member of the switchboard team. Spoofing the switchboard’s phone number marked “a very concerning situation,” Walker said, urging the public to remain vigilant to similar calls. The PSNI is continuing to make follow-up enquiries about the report, but has not yet detained any individual in connection with the attempted fraud. Anyone who falls victim to digital fraud in the UK should contact the police, their bank, and Action Fraud, all of which can offer the necessary assistance. “Our advice is that you should never disclose your personal or financial details over the phone, in person, or by email, to someone you don't know,” said Walker. “Guarding your personal and banking details is essential.” The attempted scam is the second disclosed by the PSNI in as many days. On Monday, it warned of a separate case involving an elderly woman being defrauded of a sum north of £250,000 ($336,000) after being targeted by individuals operating a fake cryptocurrency scheme. “After initially sending a relatively small amount, the woman then ‘invested’ larger amounts on a number of occasions after the criminals convinced her that she needed to send more in order to get her initial investment back,” said Detective Inspector Moffett, of the PSNI’s Serious Crime Branch. “After she unknowingly downloaded malware at their instruction, they were able to gain control of her electronic devices and, we believe, transfer further sums from her account.” Cryptocurrency investment scams are among the most pervasive in the world, with figures from the US suggesting the problem is growing increasingly severe. According to the FBI’s annual digital crimes report, it received 48 percent more complaints about crypto investment scams last year than it did the year before, with losses also rising 25 percent. Much of this pain was shouldered by those aged 60 and over, the agency added. ®

Security researchers on Monday found dozens of Red Hat npm package releases infected with the Mini Shai-Hulud worm that TeamPCP cybercriminals recently open-sourced. The new supply chain attack hit at least 32 npm package releases published under the Red Hat Cloud Services namespace, according to security researchers from Google-owned Wiz, who traced the malware to one Red Hat employee’s compromised GitHub account. They said the affected packages are downloaded around 80,000 times a week. “The compromised account pushed malicious orphan commits to two RedHatInsights repositories, bypassing code review,” the threat hunters said in a Monday blog. “This happened across two waves of activity.” Wiz considers this a “live threat,” and says its researchers are actively monitoring it for any new developments. Socket, meanwhile, counted 95 affected package versions as of 11:00:22 UTC. The supply-chain security shop continues to monitor the ongoing attack and update the artifacts list – so be sure to check it out, and if your organization or any development pipelines have installed one of the poisoned versions, assume compromise and immediately rotate credentials. The compromised versions execute a hidden payload through a preinstall hook so that the malware automatically runs during the npm install process – before a developer imports or uses the package. “Based on Socket’s analysis, the payload is designed to collect GitHub Actions secrets, npm tokens, cloud credentials, Kubernetes and Vault material, SSH keys, Git credentials, and other sensitive files,” Socket’s research team wrote on Monday. “It also includes encrypted exfiltration logic and GitHub-based fallback mechanisms, indicating that the attacker was not only attempting to steal credentials, but also potentially enable further supply chain propagation.” A Red Hat spokesperson told The Register that the IBM-owned software firm is aware of the reports. “We immediately initiated an investigation and removed the packages from the npm registry,” the spokesperson said. “The packages are strictly limited to internal development, and the malicious code was never published for customer consumption via the console.redhat.com system. While our investigation is ongoing, we have not identified any impact to customer or partner environments or Red Hat production systems.” Both security firms say the malware resembles the Mini Shai-Hulud worm – but because TeamPCP open sourced the credential-stealing tool, it’s tough to say whether TeamPCP or a copycat crew is responsible for the latest developer-targeting supply chain infection. According to Wiz, the modifications look “largely cosmetic, with references to the Dune universe replaced by Greek mythology themes (i.e ‘spartan’), while the underlying functionality and tradecraft remain substantially similar.” One of the notable changes, the security sleuths said, is that the new variant adds data collectors for Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure identities, and this new capability snarfs up all the identities that the infected machine has access to, as opposed to just stealing secrets from the cloud environments. This suggests “an increased attacker focus on gaining and leveraging access to the cloud itself,” Wiz warns. This variant also creates repositories containing the description “Miasma: The Spreading Blight.” And unlike earlier variants of the self-spreading worm that copied themselves, this one generates a uniquely encrypted payload for each infection, which makes hash-based indicators-of-compromise useful only for a specific package version. ®

The biggest threat to America’s midterm elections in November likely isn’t foreign attackers hacking US voting machines. Phishing and election-official impersonation are the bigger risks, according to Check Point, which documented more than 5,000 election-themed domains registered between April and May. These domains can be used by attackers for phishing, impersonation, fraud, misinformation, or influence activity, especially when coupled with about 17,000 exposed credentials associated with fundraising orgs, political parties, and government-related services also spotted by the security shop’s intelligence arm in May. "Election-related domains and leaked credentials represent two sides of the same problem: infrastructure and access," Danielle Hess, a cyber threat intelligence analyst at Check Point Software, told The Register. "A rise in election-themed domains not only creates more potential infrastructure that could be abused for phishing or impersonation, but also reflects a growing election-related ecosystem with more organizations, accounts, and users that can be targeted," Hess said. "When combined with a large pool of exposed credentials, attackers have more opportunities to conduct convincing and scalable election-related operations." Plus, AI gives phishing, impersonation, election misinformation and other scam operations a massive boost, making them faster, cheaper, and easier to scale. The uptick in election-related threats follows the Trump administration’s efforts to gut America’s lead cyber-defense agency and decimate its efforts to combat election-related fraud, while slashing its budget and workforce, and cutting all federal funding for the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center (EI-ISAC). According to a Monday report, Check Point has been monitoring registered domains and documented about 1,300 containing the keyword “election” and 2,957 containing “vote” in January. Three months later, between April 13 and May 14, about 1,140 newly registered domains contained the word "election," while the number containing "vote" had climbed to about 4,010. While simply registering a domain doesn’t guarantee it will be used for malicious purposes, such domains are often used for phishing pages that impersonate voter info sites or candidates themselves, and campaign donation scams, and misinformation sites designed to look like official election communications. Along these lines, the security shop documented thousands of leaked credentials in May linked to fundraising and political party websites including about 9,500 ActBlue.com (Democrats’ fundraising site) compromised credentials, 6,500 leaked WinRed.com (Republican fundraising) credentials, plus 600 from the official Republican gop.com website, 130 from democrats.org, and 150 leaked usa.gov citizen services’ site credentials. Hess told us that "it's important to note that the credential statistics reflect credentials identified on Check Point's External Risk Management (ERM) platform as of May 2026 and are not limited to credentials that were necessarily stolen or leaked during May 2026 itself." As the reports point out, the credential leaks aren't limited to one political party or specific campaigns. “Individual political campaign domains showed little to no observed credential exposure across a sample of swing-state candidates from both major political parties, reinforcing that current exposure is concentrated in centralized platforms rather than campaign-specific infrastructure,” according to the report. “A single campaign domain stood out as an exception, with around 90 leaked credentials identified,” the report continued. "The campaign domain referenced was associated with candidate Tom Kean," Hess said, referring to Rep. Tom Kean Jr. (R-NJ). "However, it's important to note the credentials were identified within infostealer malware logs, which typically reflect opportunistic compromise rather than deliberate targeting of a specific campaign. While not indicative of direct targeting, the presence of these credentials may still pose a security risk if associated accounts remain active or reused.” In addition to the political org-related credential exposure, voter information is also appearing across dark web forums ahead of the November midterms. This includes a January 30 BreachForums post advertising data - being given away for free - tied to the Fremont County, Colorado election division. The data dump included names, email addresses, IP address data, and election-related portal submission information. On April 26, the threat hunters spotted a post on criminal forum Spear[.]cx, claiming to offer a multi-state US voter database covering more than two dozen states and Washington, DC. ®