The Australian city of Perth is by some measures the world’s most isolated major metropolis, but is still sufficiently connected to US law enforcement authorities that the FBI was able to help Australia’s Federal Police (AFP) to find two men they believe were the masterminds of TeamPCP, a cybercrime crew that conducted prominent supply chain attacks. According to the AFP, two men aged 21 and 23 arrested on Wednesday “were principal participants in the activities of the cybercrime syndicate and received payments in cryptocurrency for their roles in the illegal activity.” An FBI Facebook post names one of the arrested men as Ruben Thomson and describes him as “the alleged leader of the cybercriminal group TeamPCP.” Australian media named the second man as 23-year-old Louis Michael Gaebler. Investigations into the pair started in April 2026, after Australian authorities and the FBI “received information from multiple cyber threat assessment companies regarding a syndicate that allegedly inserted malicious code into software available on an open-source repository, which was then unwittingly used by other developers.” Researchers detected some of those activities before April: In March, we reported that researchers spotted a supply chain attack on the open source scanner Trivy. Another of TeamPCP’s attacks was the Shai-Hulud worm, which attacks npm packages, tries to infect them and goes looking for credentials to major public clouds or services like GitHub. If the worm burrowed into its targets, it would either try to replicate to continue its attacks, or wipe the environment out of spite. The AFP’s “We cuffed ‘em!” announcement estimates that TeamPCP’s supply chain attacks “potentially compromised more than 1000 organisations globally, enabling the theft of more than 500,000 credentials, and the exfiltration of at least 300 gigabytes of data.” Australia’s Feds estimate “the financial impact includes global remediation costs estimated to be hundreds of millions of dollars.” As is often the case in such matters, the arrested men were found with electronic devices and other items which authorities seized. “A large volume of data seized is being forensically examined and the investigation remains ongoing,” the AFP wrote, adding “Further arrests and charges have not been ruled out.” Indeed, the Feds note that they arrested the two at different locations in the suburbs of Perth and searched a third property nearby. ® Bootnote: Perth is considered the site of the original “Black Swan” event, as swans there – and across much of Australia – are black. Early European explorers who explored Australia's west coast were astounded when they saw the black birds, as the “fact” that all swans are white was at the time a metaphor for the existence of absolute truths.
CRPx0, a cybercrime crew that has rapidly evolved from a scam service to a ClickFix-delivered ransomware and crypto-theft business over the summer, claims its victim count jumped from fewer than 10 in June to 48 organizations on its clear-web leak site at the time of publication. Keep in mind: criminals aren’t always the most trustworthy bunch, so take their claims with a healthy dose of salt. Still, the ransomware biz’s expanding operations, unique payload, and white-label hacking service make it one to watch, and a few recent analyses provide tips for defenders to keep the crooks out of their IT environments. Rakesh Krishnan, a threat-intel analyst who writes about cybercrime investigations on TheRavenFile blog, was one of the first researchers to publish details about CRPx0 at the beginning of the month, including previously unreleased malware samples. The operators offer a hacking service, providing “complete database extraction” from victim organizations and “optional public leak coordination upon request.” This platform also advertises full network compromise, “from initial access, through lateral movement, to full domain compromise,” plus persistent access across the victim’s infrastructure. A second, white-label, ransomware-as-a-service platform makes it really easy for wannabe crooks to get into the data-theft and extortion biz. CRPx0 builds, deploys, and configures everything from command-and-control infrastructure to the negotiation panel and malware, allowing its criminal customers to bring their own brand identity to their operations - and originally offered these services for a $10,000 one-time fee. At first, the operators promised to allow affiliates to keep 100 percent of their profits - this is unheard of in ransomware-as-a-service operations. This has since shifted to a 70-30 model, with affiliates receiving 70 percent of the extortion payments (after a one-time $333 enrollment fee) and the remaining 30 percent going to the operators. CRPx0 rules prohibit affiliates from infecting Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) member countries and organizations based in these countries. This is a pretty common rule among Russia-based ransomware operations, and in an earlier interview with The Register, Recorded Future threat intelligence analyst Allan Liska called it the “first rule of ransomware club: you don't attack organizations in the Commonwealth of Independent States.” The gang also prefers Monero (XMR) payments, rather than Bitcoin (BTC). ClickFix ransomware delivery Affiliates can also customize their own ClickFix payload delivery. The operators offer two lures, a fake Windows Update and a fake Google reCAPTCHA, to socially engineer victims into executing the initial command, according to a Ransom-ISAC research team analysis published on Thursday. The Windows lure tricks a victim into pasting a PowerShell command into the Run dialog. This drops a DLL stager chain and ultimately deploys Python-based ransomware. The macOS lure, however, uses a curl|bash command that downloads portable Python and the ransomware directly. The lures and the rest of CRPx0’s malware run on Windows and macOS, and according to the researchers, there are four payload formats: “the two HTML lures plus a standalone DLL and a standalone EXE, both of which discard the social engineering step entirely.” All four deliver the same ransomware: a 1,769-line Python script that steals high-value files before encrypting them with AES-128-CBC (Fernet). The malware moves laterally via WMI/schtasks, and delivers a ransom note that gives victims a 48-hour deadline to pay up - or see their files leaked. 'Complete, professional offensive control center' On August 23, the CRPx0 operators published a v3.0 update note on the group’s clearnet leak site, promising “a complete, professional offensive control center for managing compromised remote machines from a single web dashboard.” It provides crims with tools to steal valuable files, credentials, and wallet recovery phrases and keys, while “watching stolen cryptocurrency wallet addresses flow in.” This service also provides scripts to run remote commands, and the control panel sets up “automated attack reactions that fire on their own when something valuable happens on a target.” As the operators note: “Everything is built to be operated by a human with no technical background: point-and-click panels, plain-language rules, and clear status indicators. The underlying attack engine is hidden behind a clean, dark-themed interface.” CRPx0’s hacking and ransomware services, enabling everything from crypto theft to encryptors and full network compromise, “could be a strategic move to attract new recruits, or a scam targeting a range of affiliate hopefuls seeking cybercrime services,” according to an August 12 analysis from Jade Brown, a threat researcher at Bitdefender. What defenders should do Still, “other threat actors may attempt to adopt similar techniques,” she warns. “This is a reminder that organizations should balance detection capabilities in preparation for different types of compromises, configuring technologies to detect and block malicious behavior that aligns with both crypto theft and encryption processes.” The Ransomware-ISAC team says defenders should prioritize five actions, in this order. “The first three cost nothing and blunt the entire ClickFix class of attack, not just CRPx0,” they note. First: remove the Run dialog for standard users - this will entirely block the Windows path. For macOS users: restrict Terminal via MDM for non-technical staff. Next, the threat-intel analysts advise defenders to alert on RunMRU writes containing powershell, curl or long base64 strings. “Every ClickFix victim leaves a trace at HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\RunMRU,” they wrote. “This is the highest-fidelity ClickFix detection available and it is trivial to deploy.” The team also lists adversary network indicators and suggests blocking those. Make sure to hunt for indicators and malicious behavior in the pre-encryption exfiltration window. “Data leaves before a single file is encrypted, so .crpx0 extensions and ransom notes are a post-mortem indicator, not a warning,” according to the Ransomware-ISAC. Finally, confirm backups are unreachable from the account that would be compromised, and treat anything reachable with the victim's credentials as destroyed. ®
PWNED Welcome back to PWNED, the weekly column where we explore the frightening and amusing world of foolish infosec errors. This week, it's all about a test site that exposed real information. 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 story comes courtesy of Mia Morin, Editor & AI Quality Analyst at Intimeros, a site that rates, reviews, and evaluates AI companions – yes, that means boyfriends and girlfriends, as well as other kinds of pals. The trouble started during a redesign when one of Morin’s colleagues was working on a test version of the site. The test site was supposed to be password-protected, but the colleague turned off the protection so they could show a client what they were working on. Password protection remained disabled for three weeks without anyone noticing. Then, one day, Morin noticed that the test site had been indexed by Google. Apparently, nobody thought to use a robots.txt file to exclude this beta-level domain from search. While the site was publicly accessible without password protection, anyone could see unpublished reviews, prices, and private product notes about the different AI companion services. That’s because the test site was connected to a real live version of the production database. This was all editorial content, so no user data was exposed. However, it could have allowed competitors to see everything that Intimeros was working on and to deduce their entire editorial strategy. After she noticed what was wrong, Morin took swift action to protect the test site from prying eyes. “We restored password protection, blocked search engines from indexing the draft pages and changed all the system access keys,” Morin said. “Now, we secure every test site just like our official website and run weekly automated scans to catch exposed pages.” What we can learn from this is kind of obvious. Never forget to lock down the test or staging versions of your websites. Make sure that they not only require logins, but also have tools in place to block search and AI crawling. Better still, place your staging site on a private server and require someone to use a VPN to get to it in the first place. ®
OpenAI on Wednesday revealed that reward hacking was a key driver behind the artificial intelligence (AI)-powered hack of Hugging Face last month, adding that it found evidence of misaligned behavior as early as late May.
The incident, the company said, took place during cybersecurity evaluations of several OpenAI models, and that it was mainly fueled by what it described as a "highly capable
After an affair with a fellow police officer ended, a Georgia cop used Flock to track her movements—and those of a man whose vehicle often showed up near hers, internal investigation records show.
The controversial Omarchy distro is attracting both criticism and fans – and financial support, too. Omarchy is an opinionated respin of Arch Linux and a pet project of Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson, better known as DHH. Although the first release was as recent as June last year, this week sees the release of Omarchy 4.0.1 – a security fix for the mid-August Omarchy 4 “Quattro”. Although it started out just over a year ago, Omarchy now has a sibling project Omakub, which is based on Ubuntu, and an organization behind it called Omacom. A week ago, DHH announced the launch of the Omacom Foundation with $8 million. Its founding patrons include figures behind Shopify, Stripe, Dell, Block, Cloudflare, Sesame, and 37signals - closely followed by people behind Dropbox and OpenClaw, taking the total to $10 million. The project, like the man behind it, is controversial. But that means attention, and an “opinionated distro” gets opinionated reviews. Some of the criticism is strong stuff: for instance, Merchants of Insecurity, whose top line is: “First, a PSA: Do NOT use Omarchy if you care about security of your machine even a little bit.” Author “One Happy Fellow” is not the first: last year, a member of Framework's community forums posted Omarchy is not a secure distribution and should be taken off the Linux installation options. Others like it or give it a guarded thumbs up while saying it’s not for them. There really is no such thing as bad publicity. As P. T. Barnum put it: "Say anything you like about me, but spell my name right." DHH is no stranger to controversy. We suspect he doesn’t mind at all. The Register reported in late 2025 that Framework, known for its repairable laptops, was sponsoring Omarchy and Hyprland, and in turn, multiple people criticized Framework for sponsoring such controversial projects. That piece linked to some of the criticism of DHH, but he has been attracting criticism since at least 2014. We tried it, and it does work. It has a unique UI based on the Hyprland tiling compositor and a panel and menus provided in the new release by Quickshell. This is heavily keyboard-driven, but ignores almost all existing keyboard shortcuts and UI conventions from other OSes. There are no title bars, let alone close buttons or anything like that. No middle-click or right-click app menus. The jaded take of the Reg FOSS desk, who is a big fan and advocate of keyboard-driven UIs, is that such things usually reflect ignorance of existing user interface standards. We found it a bit clunky. We had to install an additional tool, hypermon, in order to be able to make our testbed machine’s second display useful. You can’t use established pacman commands to update it – you must use the custom omarchy update script, and when trying that in a VM, we hit a known bug. On hardware, it worked fine. It’s Arch, extensively preconfigured. Lots of apps are preinstalled, and the selection is surprising and not typical of a FOSS product. The selection includes Discord and WhatsApp for communications, Docker, Obsidian for note-taking, Neovim as an editor, and OBS Studio for streaming. There are optional extras for using speech, automatic dictation via Voxtype, and other unusual features. There’s a terminal-based music player, cliamp. (We like the name of that one, and may keep it around.) There are, of course, options to add AI tools – one of the startup messages invites you to configure your preferred plastic pal who’s fun to be with LLM bot. It’s pretty big. A default install (not that there is any other kind) took 14 GB of disk space after the first update. It did install in a VM with a 16 GB virtual disk, but there wasn’t enough disk space to update the OS. It uses about 1.5 GB of memory at idle. It’s not lightweight, but then, Omarchy definitely comes with batteries included, as well as (to quote a friend’s old email signature) “bells and whistles, plus a couple of gongs. Don’t forget the horns, the custard pies and the water-powered whirling knives.” If you don’t know your way around existing environments or distros, want something fashionable and snazzy looking, and are willing and happy to jump in and learn, then this is an interesting new option. You may not agree with the politics and views behind it, but you must be able to either tolerate them – or ignore them. It works, it’s quite fast, it looks striking, and it does the job. If you just want something clean, fast, pretty, and with tiling by default, personally, we’d suggest Pop!_OS instead. ®
Low-skill hacktivists are now 'enabled with the same tooling and sophistication as a state-sponsored group,' according to cybersecurity consultant Unit 42.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) said it’s responding to a “major” cybersecurity incident shortly after the Qilin ransomware gang posted the US federal law enforcement agency on its leak site. An ATF spokesperson told The Register the intruders accessed a “standalone computer system containing information about targets of ATF investigations” that wasn’t connected to any other ATF systems. “There is no indication that the incident has affected the ATF enterprise network, the ATF eForms system, or any other ATF system,” according to a statement posted on the firearms agency’s website. The spokesperson declined to answer any additional questions about the breach, including Qilin’s claims, the ransom demand, and what data was stolen or how much. “ATF is unable to comment due to an ongoing investigation,” the spokesperson said. ATF, which is housed under the US Department of Justice, said it’s “coordinating closely” with the DOJ to investigate the breach, and “immediately” blocked connections to the affected IT environment upon discovering the incident. The statement said the security breach had not affected ATF’s operations and noted that senior Justice Department officials designated the compromise as a “major incident” under federal guidelines. Shortly before ATF posted its security-incident notice on its website, Russia-linked Qilin ransomware criminals listed the firearms agency on its leak site. The post, seen by The Register and shared on social media, did not say what data Qilin claimed to have stolen, how much, or provide samples to substantiate the claim. Qilin, the notorious crew behind the 2024 attack on pathology provider Synnovis that disrupted NHS services in the UK, was one of the most prolific ransomware gangs in July, according to Comparitech. The firm, which reviews cybersecurity products and provides data analysis, counted 799 ransomware incidents last month, up from 668 in June. Qilin claimed 125 of those.® Editor's note: This story was amended post-publication with comment from ATF.
Credit: Hacktron
Vercel has released security patches for two critical-severity vulnerabilities in the Next.js web framework, both of which allow unauthenticated remote code execution, one exploitable via specially crafted AVIF image files and the other through a path traversal flaw affecting servers that use a Windows filesystem.
The Windows path traversal, tracked as CVE-2026-75604&
A fake login page. A fake security scan. A fake productivity app. Apparently, pretending to be useful is still one of the easier ways into a machine.
The rest of the week gets stranger: botnets borrowing AI, command traffic hiding in public infrastructure, malicious tools waiting before showing their real behavior, exposed systems getting scanned, and exploit windows shrinking again. Different
Schrödinger's Cat, the famous 1935 thought experiment, imagines a cat that, for reasons rooted in quantum physics we need not dwell on here, is simultaneously alive and dead. In a landscape of relentless cyberattacks and mounting infrastructural complexity, a routine backup task can appear finished, with every box ticked and every check made. The job is not actually done, however, until it has been verified as fully ready for recovery in the event of cyber disaster. A task that looks sorted can turn out, under scrutiny, to be anything but. A backup can be logged as 'complete' once data has been copied to storage, but a recoverable workload is another matter entirely. It means that when a business goes down, its workloads can be restored to their state at the point of attack with nothing lost. By the time you realize you are on the wrong side of that ambiguity, it may be too late: your data is in the hands of the bad guys, or destroyed, and this time the cat really is dead. This is not a problem to which IT bosses and managed service provider (MSP) management are entirely oblivious. Most organizations recognize to some degree that their backup may not be 100 percent watertight. Cybersecurity management specialist Kaseya recently partnered with 1105 Media to survey 200 IT professionals about the realities shaping cyber resilience planning. Some 53 percent were no more than 'somewhat confident' in their organization's ability to fully recover from a ransomware attack, and admitted their backups were supported by no better than 'limited testing'. A significant proportion had even less faith in their recovery capabilities, while only 15 percent were 'very confident' they could get back on track with no loss. Verify and survive Understanding what a verified backup means, and what role verification plays in the recovery challenge weighing on so many IT leaders, is where any sensible resilience plan begins. Backups are vital but they do not guarantee recovery on their own. What matters is confirming that a backup job will hold up in a disaster. Verification is the process of proving that backed-up data is complete, uncorrupted, and fully restorable in an emergency, offering evidence that recovery is possible during a critical outage, hardware failure or ransomware attack. It is essential whether you run an IT department or an MSP responsible for client protection: unless you can prove clients are protected, there is every chance they are not. "Backup isn't done and entrustable until you've gone in and made sure that the application actually works and can be brought back to the recovery environment," explains Brent Torre, GM of cyber resilience at Kaseya. "Historically, it's just taken too much time and resource for a lot of people to even attempt that. And where they have been verifying, they haven't been doing it regularly enough to ensure real protection." Not all approaches to verification are of equal value. IT departments still relying on intermittent manual verification are operating on blind trust: warnings thrown up by the process can be misread, failures overlooked, and the result is a dangerous mix of false negatives that waste time and false positives that expose the organization to real risk. Manual screenshot verification is a proven way to squander a security budget , tying up highly qualified staff on needless work and pulling their expertise away from where it is genuinely needed. Nobody wants seasoned engineers spending hours reviewing screenshots, second-guessing outputs and trying to determine whether a backup worked. Where static verification methods once had a place, today's complex IT ecosystems have made them redundant. Across an estate spanning in-house systems, SaaS and cloud endpoints, basic verification cannot cope, picking up only surface-level signals and lacking the design to operate at scale. At scale, the inefficiencies of manual verification multiply and response times slow to a crawl. A minor inefficiency can quietly become a serious bottleneck without anyone noticing, and legacy methods can create the illusion that everything is working perfectly while catastrophe waits around the corner. As Torre points out, light-touch checking is unlikely to satisfy the ever-increasing regulatory burden around recovery and resilience. "Some compliance frameworks explicitly state that you must test recovery on a frequent basis," he says. "It's becoming more important than ever that organisations are able to do that." Let AI handle the heat The emerging gold standard is AI-powered screenshot verification, which replaces the best-efforts manual checking of overstretched human teams. It works by automatically booting up virtualized backups, capturing a screenshot and analyzing the image to confirm the backup ran correctly. Where rigid, rule-based checks fall short, context-aware visual AI combined with OCR accurately identifies login screens, dashboards and maintenance states, and evaluates every element with precision. The result is 99.9 percent verification accuracy and sharply reduced false positives, alongside far greater confidence in every backup. This is welcome news for IT managers facing budget shortfalls and a drought of experienced talent, and it is what MSPs need as they try to make the economics of recovery stack up. Remove the manual effort and the constant checking of false alarms, and the gains mount quickly. Human teams are free for higher-value work, SLA confidence rises, customer trust improves, and environments can scale without ballooning overheads. AI-powered verification is no longer a maybe for today's MSPs; it is the only route forward that makes sense on the P&L. The good news is that AI-powered screenshot verification does not require major up-front investment or deep internal expertise. Datto, the cybersecurity and data protection outfit owned by Kaseya, has built the latest verification technology directly into its business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) platform, so that deployment stays simple and disruption to existing workflows is minimal. This kind of AI-powered screenshot verification is designed to strip uncertainty out of the process and give IT teams confidence that backed-up data is complete and recoverable. The ideal solution does so at scale, and without adding complexity, by working within the workflows already in place. With Datto there is the further option of integrating remote monitoring and management (RMM) with the BCDR product, which enables proactive remediation through automated deployments, the merging of backup health with endpoint alerts, and virtual restores launched directly from a single management console. "It's key to have context and visibility into the backup estate through your RMM so you know that you are up to date on patching, on antivirus definitions and backups," says Torre. "With all of that integrated within the RMM solution, you have the ability to understand your risk profile across the fleet in terms of protection. You know in the event that something needs to be recovered. And you can start a backup-initiated recovery directly from the RMM platform." The gold standard to aim for, he concludes, is continuous validation and automated remediation, not the ability to look in now and again to see what is going on. The perfect verification solution , he adds, should be 'impossibly easy to use', requiring humans to exert zero cognitive effort on backup beyond deploying a new client and initiating a recovery. By giving yourself the means to distinguish between a completed backup job and a recoverable workload, you have set yourself apart from the kind of IT manager or MSP who only spots a problem after something has gone wrong. By deploying AI-powered verification, you stop treating backup as a probability and start treating it as a proof. You know what you have. Then when something goes wrong, and it will, that certainty is the only thing standing between a fast recovery and a very long night. MSPs looking to unify backup and security into a single resilience practice can start with the When Backup Meets Security in the MSP Stack whitepaper. Sponsored by Datto.
Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a vulnerability in Amazon Kiro, an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered, agentic integrated development environment (IDE), that could facilitate data exfiltration via prompt injection and Kiro Powers.
The security flaw, which does not have a CVE identifier, works against Kiro IDE 0.7.45 on Windows, according to Mindgard. The latest version of
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