Threat hunters have flagged a previously undocumented Brazilian banking trojan dubbed TCLBANKER that's capable of targeting 59 banking, fintech, and cryptocurrency platforms.
The activity is being tracked by Elastic Security Labs under the moniker REF3076. The malware family is assessed to be a major update of the Maverick, which is known to leverage a worm called SORVEPOTEL to spread via
A ransomware group behind the attacks claims to have stolen 275 million records connected to students, teachers, and staff. Here's how to deal with it.
Cybersecurity researchers have discovered fraudulent apps on the official Google Play Store for Android that falsely claimed to offer access to call histories for any phone number, only to trick users into joining a subscription that provided fake data and incurred financial loss.
The 28 apps have collectively racked up more than 7.3 million downloads, with one of them alone accounting for over
A fresh Linux privilege escalation bug dubbed "Dirty Frag" has dropped into the wild with no patches, no CVE, and a public exploit that hands attackers root access across major distributions. Security researcher Hyunwoo Kim disclosed the local privilege escalation flaw on Friday after what he said was a broken embargo forced the issue into the open. Kim described Dirty Frag as a "universal LPE" affecting "all major distributions" and warned that it delivers the same kind of immediate root access as the recent CopyFail mess – only this time, defenders do not even have patches to throw at the problem. "As with the previous Copy Fail vulnerability, Dirty Frag likewise allows immediate root privilege escalation on all major distributions," Kim said. "Because the responsible disclosure schedule and embargo have been broken, no patches exist for any distribution." Dirty Frag works by chaining together two separate Linux kernel flaws. One sits in the xfrm-ESP subsystem and dates back to a January 2017 kernel commit, according to Kim, while the second vulnerability affects RxRPC functionality introduced in 2023. Together, the two bugs allegedly let unprivileged local users overwrite protected files in memory and claw their way to root. A long list of distributions in the firing line, according to Kim, including Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS Stream, Fedora, AlmaLinux, and openSUSE Tumbleweed. Separately, researchers appear to have independently reverse-engineered part of the bug chain from a publicly visible kernel fix commit before the embargo expired, adding to the disclosure mess already surrounding the flaw. One GitHub project titled "Copy Fail 2: Electric Boogaloo" claims to weaponize the ESP/xfrm side of the issue separately from Kim's full Dirty Frag chain. Kim said maintainers signed off on the disclosure of the flaw after somebody else dumped exploit details online first, collapsing the embargo before patches were finished. So now the exploit is public, the fixes are not, and Linux admins get another long week. The disclosure comes as the industry is still dealing with the fallout from CopyFail, another Linux privilege escalation bug that recently landed in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog after attackers started cashing in on it in the wild. But Dirty Frag makes the recent CopyFail chaos look relatively organized. There's still no CVE, no coordinated patch rollout, and not much in the way of mitigation. Kim published a temporary workaround that disables affected ESP and RxRPC modules before clearing the system page cache. Useful, perhaps, although "turn bits of the kernel off and hope for the best" is not usually the sort of guidance admins enjoy seeing. ®
Meta has quietly pulled the plug on encrypted Instagram DMs, meaning private messages on one of the world’s biggest social networks are no longer especially private. The change took effect today, according to a revised Meta post first published in 2022. In a statement to The Register, Meta said the feature saw limited adoption and pointed users toward WhatsApp instead. "Very few people were opting in to end-to-end encrypted messaging in DMs, so we're removing this option from Instagram in the coming months," the spokesperson said. "Anyone who wants to keep messaging with end-to-end encryption can easily do that on WhatsApp." It’s quite the reversal for a corporation that spent years telling everyone that encryption was the future of online communications, even as governments pushed back against the company’s wider rollout plans. Much of that pressure centered on child protection. Campaigners and agencies, including the NSPCC UK’s National Crime Agency, argued wider encryption would make it harder to detect grooming, child abuse material, and other criminal activity taking place over private messaging services. Privacy advocates, however, say Meta has just blown a hole in one of the few genuinely private corners of the platform. The Center for Democracy & Technology said it had urged Meta to reverse the decision, alongside members of the Global Encryption Coalition Steering Committee. “Without default encryption, millions of Instagram users are left exposed to surveillance, interception, and misuse of their private communications,” the group said. “These risks fall hardest on people who rely on secure messaging for their safety, including journalists, human rights defenders, and survivors of abuse.” Swiss privacy outfit Proton also questioned what exactly happens to existing chats once encryption disappears. Because properly implemented E2EE prevents platforms from reading message contents, the company noted that Meta has not clarified whether previously encrypted conversations will remain inaccessible, get deleted, or become readable. “For Instagram, dropping E2EE is just an example of how little regard Meta has for the privacy and safety of its community,” Proton said in a blog post. Meta has become increasingly aggressive about monetizing and analyzing user interactions. Last year, the company confirmed that interactions with Meta AI tools, including those inside private conversations, could be used for ad targeting. The company has not publicly said whether ordinary Instagram messages could eventually feed into similar systems now that encryption is gone. ®
If you have ever checked your child’s grades online, submitted a college paper through a school portal, downloaded homework assignments, or received messages from a teacher through a classroom app, there is a good chance you have used Canvas, a nationwide learning management system that was just in a massive data breach.
This is exactly the moment McAfee+ Advanced was built for. With our built-in Scam Detector to flag risky links, QR codes, and deepfakes; Identity Monitoring that alerts you when your data appears where it shouldn’t; and Personal Data Cleanup that removes your information from the dark web and data brokers, McAfee+ Advanced is an all-in-one solution for protection after a data breach.
Now let’s get into what you need to know about this breach:
Who Is Behind the Canvas Breach?
The ransomware group ShinyHunters is claiming responsibility for the attack. The group alleges it stole roughly 275 million records tied to nearly 9,000 schools and educational institutions worldwide.
How Did the Canvas Cyberattack Happen?
Instructure, the company behind Canvas, confirmed a cyber incident affecting its cloud-hosted environment. The attackers later posted claims about the breach on their leak site, where ransomware groups pressure organizations into paying by threatening to release stolen data publicly.
What Information Was Stolen in the Canvas Breach?
The stolen data reportedly includes:
Student names
Teacher and staff names
Email addresses
Student IDs
Course and enrollment information
School-related records
ShinyHunters claims the breach exposed roughly 275 million records and more than 231 million unique email addresses.
How Could the Canvas Data Breach Impact Families and Students?
Even if financial information was not exposed, this kind of data can still be extremely valuable to scammers. Criminals can use real school names, real classes, teacher names, and student information to create highly convincing phishing emails, fake school alerts, scholarship scams, tuition scams, or password reset messages.
A scam message referencing your child’s actual school or assignment is much harder to spot as fake.
This is what a Canvas message might look like when forwarded to your email inbox. Hackers claim to have millions of these types of messages.
This is a real message from Canvas from a community college professor after yours truly took an anthropology class for fun during the pandemic. It’s full of links to apply for programs and reach out to professors. It has exact details about courses I’ve taken.
While this correspondence is real, it’s exactly the type of messaging that scammers could fake and replicate, replacing real links with fake “paid” opportunities to pursue degrees.
Now think of the millions of messages and specific scenarios scammers have access to, to create dubious and convincing scams. That’s why protecting yourself after a breach is key.
What To Do Right Now
Here are some actions you can take immediately ot protect yourself after this breach:
Change you or your child’s Canvas password immediately, and update any other accounts where they reuse that password
Turn on multi-factor authentication(2FA) on parent and student accounts wherever the school permits it — Instructure’s own post-incident guidance specifically called out enforcing MFA as a recommended precaution
Ask your school what identity protection is being offered if sensitive data was involved
Consider placing a credit freeze on your or your child’s file to block new accounts from being opened in their name
Avoid clicking links in any messages that reference the breach, go directly to the official site instead
And that, my friends, is issue number one in this week’s This Week in Scams. Let’s get into what else is on our radar in cybersecurity and scam news.
Fake Amazon Recall Texts Are Targeting Shoppers
Your phone buzzes. It’s a text from an unknown number, but the message looks official.
“Dear Amazon Customer, we are writing to inform you that an item from your March 2026 order has been identified for recall.” There’s an order number. A link at the top of the message. A note about quality standards and a refund waiting for you.
It looks real. It has the Amazon logo, the branded formatting, even a reference to the “Amazon Customer Safety Team.” The only thing it doesn’t have? Any connection to Amazon at all.
A photo of a scam recall text I received this week. Luckily Scam Detector flags the link as risky if you try to click.
This is a fake Amazon recall scam, and it is making the rounds right now. The goal is to get you to click that link, which takes you to a site designed to harvest your login credentials, payment information, or both.
If you get a text like this, do not click the link. Go directly to amazon.com in your browser, log in, and check your orders and messages from there. Amazon does not initiate recall or refund processes through unsolicited texts with outside links.
What Is a Fake Amazon Recall Scam And How Does It Work?
A fake Amazon recall scam is a text message or email in which criminals impersonate Amazon to convince you that one of your recent orders has been flagged for a product recall. The message directs you to an external link leading to a phishing site designed to steal your Amazon credentials, credit card details, or personal information.
Red Flags To Watch For
The text comes from an unknown number, not a short code or verified sender
The link goes to a domain that is not amazon.com
The message asks you to complete a refund through an external link
Small typos or awkward phrasing appear in what looks like official communication
The greeting says “Dear Amazon Customer” rather than your actual name
What To Do If You Get One
Do not click the link
Go to amazon.com directly and check your orders and account notifications
Where McAfee Steps In (So You Don’t Have to Guess)
Scams today are layered. A fake email leads to stolen credentials. A breach leads to targeted phishing. And those follow-ups are getting harder to spot.
With McAfee+ Advanced, multiple layers work together so you’re not left figuring it out after the damage is done:
Identity Monitoring alerts you if your personal info shows up where it should not, so you can act fast
A previously undocumented Linux implant codenamed Quasar Linux RAT (QLNX) is targeting developers' systems to establish a silent foothold as well as facilitate a broad range of post-compromise functionality, such as credential harvesting, keylogging, file manipulation, clipboard monitoring, and network tunneling.
"QLNX targets developers and DevOps credentials across the software supply chain,"
Students around the world have an excuse to bunk off after hacking crew ShinyHunters did something nasty to educational SaaS Canvas. Canvas is widely used by schools and universities to communicate with students, publish and store course material, and collect assignments. An outfit called Instructure develops the software and an entry on its Status Page dated May 2 features Chief Information Security Officer Steve Proud stating the org "recently experienced a cybersecurity incident perpetrated by a criminal threat actor." "We are actively investigating this incident with the help of outside forensics experts. We are working quickly to understand the extent of the incident and actively taking steps to minimize its impact," he added. Numerous posts report that attempts to log into Canvas earlier this week failed, but did produce a notice from an entity claiming to be the notorious hacking crew ShinyHunters, who claimed the outage was only possible due to lax patching. The crew also claimed to have stolen data from institutions that use Canvas and threatened to leak it unless a "settlement" is reached by May 12. Canvas has thousands of customers, meaning any confirmed breach could have wide impact. As of Thursday evening US time, Canvas says its wares are now available "for most users" and won't offer further comment. A student of The Register's acquaintance – OK, one of my kids – shared an email advising that his uni has prevented access to Canvas while it tries to understand the situation and the risk of data leakage. We've seen multiple universities posting notices about the incident that say more or less the same thing. Most also warn students of heightened phishing risk and urge caution. Several also advise that as they require students to lodge assignments in Canvas, students can assume they have an extension on deadlines. Your correspondent's offspring does not mind this one little bit. This is an evolving story. The Register will update it as more information becomes available. ®
Meta appears to have decided Britain's Online Safety Act would be much easier to swallow if Ofcom stopped counting all the money the social media giant makes everywhere else. The Facebook and Instagram owner has launched a legal challenge against the UK comms regulator, arguing that the way Ofcom calculates fees and potential penalties under the Online Safety Act is fundamentally wrong because it relies on global turnover rather than UK-specific revenue. The law allows Ofcom to fine companies for up to 10 percent of their qualifying worldwide revenue, or £18 million, whichever is higher. For Meta, which brought in about $201 billion last year, that means the numbers stop sounding like regulatory penalties and start sounding like national infrastructure projects. Meta is now seeking a judicial review in the High Court over how Ofcom defines "qualifying worldwide revenue." The dispute boils down to three complaints. First, Meta argues that Ofcom should only consider UK revenue tied to regulated services, not the company’s global income. Second, it objects to rules that treat multiple services under the same corporate umbrella as jointly liable, potentially exposing the wider organization to larger penalties. Third, it is challenging how Ofcom aggregates revenue across services rather than assessing them individually. An Ofcom spokesperson told The Register: "Meta have initiated a judicial review in relation to online safety fees and penalties. Under the Online Safety Act, these are to be set with reference to a provider's 'Qualifying Worldwide Revenue', which we have defined based on a plain reading of the law. "Disappointingly, Meta are objecting to the payment of fees, and any penalties that could be levied on companies in future, that are calculated on this basis. We will robustly defend our reasoning and decisions." A Meta spokesperson told The Register: "We are committed to cooperating constructively with Ofcom as it enforces the Online Safety Act. However, we and others in the tech industry believe its decisions on the methodology to calculate fees and potential fines are disproportionate. We believe fees and penalties should be based on the services being regulated in the countries they're being regulated in. This would still allow Ofcom to impose the largest fines in UK corporate history." The case marks the latest flare-up between Silicon Valley and Britain over the Online Safety Act, which has already triggered complaints from US politicians, free speech campaigners, and tech firms unhappy about the scale of Ofcom’s new powers. The regulator has not been shy about flexing them either. It has already threatened action against Elon Musk's X over sexually explicit AI-generated images linked to Grok and, in March, issued its first fine under the regime against 4chan. Meta appears to have looked at where that enforcement road leads and decided now was the time to argue about the math. ®
The dark secret of enterprise security operations is that defenders have quietly institutionalized the practice of not looking. This is not just anecdotal, but rather backed by a recent report investigating more than 25 million security alerts, including informational and low-severity, across live enterprise environments.
The dataset behind these findings includes 10 million monitored
Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new Linux backdoor named PamDOORa that's being advertised on the Rehub Russian cybercrime forum for $1,600 by a threat actor called "darkworm."
The backdoor is designed as a Pluggable Authentication Module (PAM)-based post-exploitation toolkit that enables persistent SSH access by means of a magic password and specific TCP port combination.
With the launch of the first 16 satellites, Russia begins construction of a network for satellite internet that aims to cover the entire country by 2030. But getting there won’t be easy.
Details have emerged about a new, unpatched local privilege escalation (LPE) vulnerability impacting the Linux kernel.
Dubbed Dirty Frag, it has been described as a successor to Copy Fail (CVE-2026-31431, CVSS score: 7.8), a recently disclosed LPE flaw impacting the Linux kernel that has since come under active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability was reported to Linux kernel maintainers
Thousands of schools around the US were paralyzed on Thursday after education tech firm Instructure shut down access to its Canvas platform following a breach by hackers going by the name ShinyHunters.
An ongoing data extortion attack targeting the widely-used education technology platform Canvas disrupted classes and coursework at school districts and universities across the United States today, after a cybercrime group defaced the service’s login page with a ransom demand that threatened to leak data from 275 million students and faculty across nearly 9,000 educational institutions.
A screenshot shared by a reader showing the extortion message that was shown on the Canvas login page today.
Canvas parent firm Instructure responded to today’s defacement attacks by disabling the platform, which is used by thousands of schools, universities and businesses to manage coursework and assignments, and to communicate with students.
Instructure acknowledged a data breach earlier this week, after the cybercrime group ShinyHunters claimed responsibility and said they would leak data on tens of millions of students and faculty unless paid a ransom. The stated deadline for payment was initially set at May 6, but it was later pushed back to May 12.
In a statement on May 6, Instructure said the investigation so far shows the stolen information includes “certain identifying information of users at affected institutions, such as names, email addresses, and student ID numbers, as well as as messages among users.” The company said it found no evidence the breached data included more sensitive information, such as passwords, dates of birth, government identifiers or financial information.
The May 6 update stated that Canvas was fully operational, and that Instructure was not seeing any ongoing unauthorized activity on their platform. “At this stage, we believe the incident has been contained,” Instructure wrote.
However, by mid-day on Thursday, May 7, students and faculty at dozens of schools and universities were flooding social media sites with comments saying that a ransom demand from ShinyHunters had replaced the usual Canvas login page. Instructure responded by pulling Canvas offline and replacing the portal with the message, “Canvas is currently undergoing scheduled maintenance. Check back soon.”
“We anticipate being up soon, and will provide updates as soon as possible,” reads the current message on Instructure’s status page.
While the data stolen by ShinyHunters may or may not contain particularly sensitive information (ShinyHunters claims it includes several billion private messages among students and teachers, as well as names, phone numbers and email addresses), this attack could hardly have come at a worse time for Instructure: Many of the affected schools and universities are in the middle of final exams, and a prolonged outage could be highly damaging for the company.
The extortion message that greeted countless Canvas users today advised the affected schools to negotiate their own ransom payments to prevent the publication of their data — regardless of whether Instructure decides to pay.
“ShinyHunters has breached Instructure (again),” the extortion message read. “Instead of contacting us to resolve it they ignored us and did some ‘security patches.'”
A source close to the investigation who was not authorized to speak to the press told KrebsOnSecurity that a number of universities have already approached the cybercrime group about paying. The same source also pointed out that the ShinyHunters data leak blog no longer lists Instructure among its current extortion victims, and that the samples of data stolen from Canvas customers were removed as well. Data extortion groups like ShinyHunters will typically only remove victims from their leak sites after receiving an extortion payment or after a victim agrees to negotiate.
Dipan Mann, founder and CEO of the security firm Cloudskope, slammed Instructure for referring to today’s outage as a “scheduled maintenance” event on its status page. Mann said Shiny Hunters first demonstrated they’d breached Instructure on May 1, prompting Instructure’s Chief Information Security Officer Steve Proud to declare the following day that the incident had been contained. But Mann said today’s attack is at least the third time in the past eight months that Instructure has been breached by ShinyHunters.
In a blog post today, Mann noted that in September 2025, ShinyHunters released thousands of internal University of Pennsylvania files — donor records, internal memos, and other confidential materials — through what the Daily Pennsylvanian and other outlets later determined was, in part, a Canvas/Instructure-mediated access path.
“Penn was the named victim,” Mann wrote. “Instructure was the mechanism. The incident was treated as a Penn-specific story by most of the national press and quietly handled by Instructure as a customer-specific matter. That framing was wrong then. It is dramatically more wrong in light of the May 2026 events, which now look like the planned escalation of an attack pattern that ShinyHunters had been working against Instructure’s environment for at least eight months prior. The September 2025 Penn breach was the proof of concept. The May 1, 2026 incident was the production run. The May 7, 2026 recompromise was ShinyHunters demonstrating publicly that the May 2 ‘containment’ did not happen.”
In February, a ShinyHunters spokesperson told The Daily Pennsylvanian that Penn failed to pay a $1 million ransom demand. On March 5, ShinyHunters published 461 megabytes worth of data stolen from Penn, including thousands of files such as donor records and internal memos.
ShinyHunters is a prolific and fluid cybercriminal group that specializes in data theft and extortion. They typically gain access to companies through voice phishing and social engineering attacks that often involve impersonating IT personnel or other trusted members of a targeted organization.
Last month, ShinyHunters relieved the home security giant ADT of personal information on 5.5 million customers. The extortion group told BleepingComputer they breached the company by compromising an employee’s Okta single sign-on account in a voice phishing attack that enabled access to ADT’s Salesforce instance. BleepingComputer says ShinyHunters recently has taken credit for a number of extortion attacks against high-profile organizations, including Medtronic, Rockstar Games, McGraw Hill, 7-Eleven and the cruise line operator Carnival.
The attack on Canvas customers is just one of several major cybercrime campaigns being launched by ShinyHunters at the moment, said Charles Carmakal, chief technology officer at the Google-owned Mandiant Consulting. Carmakal declined to comment specifically on the Canvas breach, but said “there are multiple concurrent and discrete ShinyHunters intrusion and extortion campaigns happening right now.”
Cloudskope’s Mann said what happens next depends largely on whether Instructure’s customers — the universities, K-12 districts, and education ministries paying for Canvas — choose to apply pressure or absorb the breach quietly.
“The history of education-vendor incidents suggests the path of least resistance is the second one,” he concluded.
Update, May 8, 11:05 a.m. ET: Instructure has published an incident update page that includes more information about the breach. Instructure said its Canvas portal is functioning normally again, and that the hackers exploited an issue related to Free-for-Teacher accounts.
“This is the same issue that led to the unauthorized access the prior week,” Instructure wrote. “As a result, we have made the difficult decision to temporarily shut down Free-for-Teacher accounts. These accounts have been a core part of our platform, and we’re committed to resolving the issues with these accounts.”
Instructure said affected organizations were notified on May 6.
“If your organization is affected, Instructure will contact your organization’s primary contacts directly,” the update states. “Please don’t rely on third-party lists or social media posts naming potentially affected organizations as those lists aren’t verified. Instructure will confirm validated information through direct outreach to all affected organizations.”
Login
