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. ®

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. ®

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.

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.

The company behind three of the UK’s busiest airports says “a quantity” of data was stolen by an extortion group during a recent “cybersecurity incident." Manchester Airports Group (MAG), which operates Manchester Airport in the North West of England, Essex’s Stansted Airport, and East Midlands Airport in Derbyshire, confirmed the attack did not involve ransomware. A MAG spokesperson confirmed the details to The Register, as well as the scale of the breach, which is currently thought to have affected 8.7 million customers. The company, whose airports served a record 66 million customers in the past financial year, said that the overwhelming majority of those affected have only had their email addresses compromised. In most cases, these email addresses were collected during the sign-up phase for the airports’ public Wi-Fi services, MAG said. It told The Register that this scenario dwarfed every other. The next most common involved data taken from customers who had made "speculative enquiries" - i.e. they entered their details in the process of booking car parking or Fast Track, but did not complete it. An even greater minority of the data came from bookings that were actually completed. The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) asked MAG not to share details of the ransom note, the extortion demands, or the group name, mainly to avoid helping those responsible gain notoriety. MAG did, however, tell us that the group's extortion demands, in this case, were considerably lower than what the group is known to ask for, per the ICO's understanding. It has not paid the extortionists. “We have informed and are working with the relevant authorities,” said MAG in a statement. “At no point has passenger safety or aviation security been compromised.” MAG said the attackers compromised one of its systems, which it did not specifically identify, and then went on to steal the files from a database hosted by a third party. Company chiefs see this attack as "a hack, not a lapse." The spokesperson said it was a sophisticated attack and not the result of a human mistake, such as staff giving away credentials. It confirmed that none of its airports experienced operational disruption as part of the attack, and that the affected system does not store bank or payment details. However, “as a precautionary measure,” it temporarily revoked access to its Manage My Booking service. Customers who want to amend or cancel a booking due within 72 hours of the statement going live are being advised to contact customer services. “We would like to reassure customers that Manchester Airport Group takes the security of customer information extremely seriously and we apologise for any inconvenience or concern caused.” Affected customers have already been contacted, including a few Reg readers who kindly alerted us to the news. While MAG continues to investigate the incident, customers are advised to be extra vigilant to potential phishing attempts, and remain assured that there is no danger of visiting MAG’s airports as a result of the cyberattack. One Reg reader griped that in addition to being charged £80 for five days of parking at Stansted, receiving the email informing him that it had also allowed his personal data to be stolen via a cybersecurity breach added insult to injury. ®

The UK’s data protection watchdog has fined a nuisance call blocking biz £190,000 ($258,000) for bombarding elderly people with hundreds of thousands of - you guessed it - nuisance calls. Elderly Aids Ltd made 758,053 unsolicited direct marketing calls between May 27, 2024, and February 10, 2025, according to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). On average, that works out as 2,916 calls per day. Busy fingers. The ICO and Telephone Preference Service (TPS), a UK service to register one’s phone number to exclude it from unwanted marketing calls, received 20 complaints during this timeframe related to Elderly Aids. It is illegal for direct marketers to call a number registered with the TPS, unless the individual has given explicit consent to that specific company to call them. All 758,053 unsolicited direct marketing calls, in this case, were made to phone numbers registered with the TPS and belonged to people who had not given their consent for Elderly Aids to contact them. Complainants commonly cited aggressive and misleading sales tactics, with callers also failing to identify themselves. One said their father was pressured into signing up to Elderly Aids’ services, which required a £139 ($188) sign-up fee, and a recurring monthly £6.99 ($9.50) payment on top of this. Andy Curry, head of investigations at the ICO, said: “Not only did this company target vulnerable people who had explicitly asked not to be called – they harassed them to sell call-blocking devices. “EAL showed a complete disregard for the law and the people they were hounding. This penalty should serve as a clear warning to any business that thinks the law does not apply to them - we will hold them to account for both exploiting people in this way and trying to avoid accountability.” Russell Roach, director of preference services at the Data & Marketing Association (DMA), concurred and encouraged responsible businesses to screen their calling lists against the TPS and Corporate TPS (CTPS) registers. “People register with the Telephone Preference Service because they want greater control over who can contact them,” he said. “Cases like this demonstrate why those protections are so important. “Anyone making live marketing calls must respect the choices people have made about their privacy. When organizations ignore those preferences and contact individuals who have explicitly opted out of receiving unsolicited sales calls, particularly those who are most vulnerable, they undermine consumer trust and risk causing significant nuisance and distress.” The ICO said Elderly Aids failed to engage with the regulator, ignoring requests for information, while continuing to make illegal marketing calls. According to public Companies House filings, the company attempted to strike itself off the register three months after it started pestering the elderly with its phone calls, although this was swiftly suspended following an objection. The ICO said that in cases where a debtor cannot pay a fine, such as those in “genuine financial hardship,” they provide payment plans. Organizations that can pay don’t face formal recovery action, and when directors attempt to skirt fines through insolvency, insolvency practitioners are called in, potentially kickstarting a multi-year recovery process. ®

The FBI on Wednesday said it disrupted a botnet and seized two platforms that Chinese-government cyberoperatives used to hack NASA, the US Senate, the Department of Energy, and several other government agencies and critical networks. The Federal Reserve, Department of Justice, Department of Health and Human Services, and the National Institutes of Health were also among those victimized by the two now-seized hacking tools: a vulnerability scanning and exploitation malware named QScan, and an obfuscation network named QTRouter. The FBI says a People’s Republic (PRC) of China-backed group called QTFY created and operated the two platforms, plus botnets of compromised IoT devices. The Bureau says QTFY’s hackers work for a private PRC company called Nanjing Xinjiuwei. “Payments from the PRC's Ministry of State Security (MSS) to Nanjing Xinjiuwei, for example, indicate that the company conducts malicious cyber activities on behalf of the PRC Government,” according to court documents. “QTFY actors include former members of the PRC's People's Liberation Army (PLA), and they use their PLA relationships to obtain contracts and subcontracts supporting offensive cyber operations,” the documents state. How to build a botnet QScan scans and automatically infects thousands of IoT devices worldwide, and then adds them to the QTRouter network of QTFY-controlled devices. The QTRouter botnet – consisting of these compromised IoT devices, plus commercial proxy service devices, and leased virtual private servers – then serves as an obfuscation network, allowing QTFY and other criminals who pay for the service to conceal the origin of their digital intrusion activities, making these communications appear to originate from local computers. On Monday, a US federal court granted seizure warrants for three domains linked to QTFY: qtproxy.xyz, qt-proxy.org, and qt-team.com. All three domains were hardcoded into both the QScan and QTRouter malware, and the court-authorized seizures made both hacking services inoperable, the Justice Department said. Hacking critical networks since 2018 (at least) The hacking services and malware have been in use since at least 2018, and as recently as this year when QTFY infrastructure compromised the US Senate, according to court documents. The FBI investigated an attempted computer intrusion at NASA in August 2019, during which the Chinese government snoops tried to exploit CVE-2019-11510, a critical vulnerability in Ivanti’s Pulse Secure VPN that allowed attackers to learn legitimate users' usernames and passwords, effectively granting them unauthorized access to protected networks. Ivanti patched the flaw in April 2019. As The Register previously reported, China also abused this bug as a zero-day to break into dozens of defense companies, government agencies, and financial organizations in America and abroad. QTFY later exploited this same CVE in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic to attack a medical center in Ohio, according to court documents. Other victims in 2019 and 2020 include unnamed financial groups in Michigan and South Korea, and a Missouri insurance agency. The insurance agency attack abused a different vulnerability: CVE-2019-19781, a critical flaw in Citrix VPN products that allowed arbitrary code execution with no account credentials. Years later, in 2024, QTFY hackers also broke into computers at three DOE National Laboratories, NIH, and a US security device manufacturer. “These entities were victims of a zero-day attack against Ivanti Cloud Services Appliance,” the court documents say. The FBI did not respond to The Register’s inquiries, including how many computers QTFY compromised, and whether the crew has ties to any of China’s "Typhoon" groups. PRC goon squad whac-a-mole This latest disruption follows a series of court-ordered seizures intended to hamstring China’s hacking activities over the last few years. In 2025, the FBI removed PlugX surveillance malware from more than 4,000 US computers that had been infected by the PRC-sponsored group Mustang Panda. A year earlier, in 2024, China’s Flax Typhoon burned down their own botnet consisting of hundreds of thousands of infected internet-of-things devices when confronted by the feds. And in late 2023, the FBI disrupted a botnet used by yet another Chinese government attack crew, Volt Typhoon, to attack US and foreign critical infrastructure. In June, however, Lumen’s Black Lotus Labs reported a “significant resurgence” of a botnet linked to Volt Typhoon, with this cluster of injected machines surging to 1,500 compromised routers and IoT devices.®

OpenAI has published its technical report detailing "the Hugging Face incident," the compromise of the eponymous LLM repository by unreleased, ill-supervised AI models. The incident, widely reported, has prompted concern among technical types, the public, and lawmakers about how automated software was able to escape containment and hack an external organization, and about what can be done to prevent similar incidents. OpenAI's explanation addresses what happened, but its call for keeping a closer watch on AI activities won't elicit much enthusiasm. "The incident occurred during cybersecurity evaluations of several OpenAI models, and was primarily driven by a highly capable, internal-only research model comparable in scale to GPT‑5.6 Sol," the company said in a blog post. "The models, operating under reduced safeguards, took actions that were misaligned with the goals of their assigned tasks – they communicated through unauthorized channels, exploited vulnerabilities in shared infrastructure, gained internet access, and accessed third-party systems." The incident became the subject of discussion at the Black Hat security conference and elsewhere. The basic storyline begins with a notionally sandboxed AI agent trying to solve an impossible task in ExploitGym, a security benchmark test. Unable to complete the challenge, the agent explored its environment to find ways to make progress toward its goal. It figured out that it could communicate with other AI agents by using Artifactory, an internal package management system, as a message board. The agents then collaborated with each other to cheat on various ExploitGym tasks. The machine learning models eventually identified a server-side request forgery (SSRF) zero-day vulnerability in Artifactory's code and used that to gain internet access. They subsequently found exposed Hugging Face credentials. The agents then used those credentials to find and chain several security exploits that gave them full code execution on several Hugging Face servers, all in the hope of finding information to solve the ExploitGym task. "Ultimately, agents powered either by the internal-only research model, or by GPT-5.6, executed code on 41 Hugging Face production dataset server workers, obtained root access on at least one production node, accessed Hugging Face production credentials and limited internal data, and downloaded four private Hugging Face code repositories," OpenAI's technical report [PDF] explains. The details are fascinating and troubling, more so because Anthropic's and Meta's models have also acted in ways that would constitute a crime if a human took the same actions. The ChatGPT-maker identified four misalignment patterns that made things go awry: "reward hacking, persistence on seemingly impossible tasks, unauthorized communication, and agents adopting goals from one another." OpenAI has already taken steps to shore up its security, which was relaxed for its model testing. The company says it's trying to improve security and monitoring to mitigate alignment issues like how models cheat, behave when given impossible tasks, and how alignment can be maintained while multiple agents work, including over long-duration tasks. But the central issue is not that machine learning software armed with tools and a task will try every possible option, even ones its programmers failed to consider. The problem, as OpenAI acknowledges, is that people don't watch over their AI agents at all times. "We are taking this incident as a 'warning shot' that today’s model capabilities present the possibility of loss-of-control incidents," the AI biz said. "Companies that build AI systems will need to ensure that their systems always remain under meaningful human control, and that meaningful safeguards constrain their ability to cause harm." Throughout the tech industry, companies like Anthropic, AWS, Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, and Salesforce talk about "autonomous agents." But agents are no longer autonomous under persistent, meaningful human control. ®

The US government disclosed that crims targeted more than 100 internet-exposed water systems during July cyberattacks. That's the first time the feds have put a number on the digital intrusions, but they have yet to attribute the campaign, widely suspected to be linked to Iran, to a particular group. “In July 2026, CISA observed malicious cyber activity targeting over 100 internet-exposed systems in the Water and Wastewater Systems (WWS) Sector, commonly via programmable logic controllers (PLCs) connected directly to a cellular modem,” America’s lead cyber-defense agency said, adding that connecting PLCs directly to the internet “can create significant security risks.” Suspected Iranian attackers targeted water and wastewater facilities across at least a dozen states in July, including internet-exposed PLCs. While neither federal nor state officials have identified all 12, we know that the cyberattacks occurred at mostly small, rural utilities in Minnesota, Michigan, Georgia, South Dakota, and New Jersey. “This is very serious. What stands out isn't any single incident. It's the scale,” Matt Hartman, chief strategy officer at the Merlin Group and CISA’s former acting head of cyber, told The Register. “More than 100 water systems with internet-exposed assets were hit in a single month, which points to a systemic vulnerability across the sector, not a run of isolated, unlucky targets,” Hartman said. “Much of this infrastructure runs on operational technology that was built for closed, physical environments. It was never designed with the assumption that it would be reachable from the open internet.” John Gallagher, VP at Viakoo, an OT and IoT cybersecurity provider, told us that while 100 systems represent a small fraction - only about 0.5 percent - of water utilities in the US, the “real threat is that these are test runs for a larger-scale attack.” While the 100-plus water incidents occurred in July, just last week five US federal agencies warned that attackers are using AI-generated exploitation scripts to break into internet-exposed Siemens S7 Series PLCs at water, manufacturing, energy, and other critical facilities. “This appears to be a continuation of the same suite of activity we suspect is affiliated with Iran targeting PLCs,” Halcyon Ransomware Research Center SVP Cynthia Kaiser told The Register a week ago. “Iran-affiliated actors and adversaries are actively targeting a wide swath of operational technology because these PLCs underpin essential health, safety, and critical infrastructure across society,” Kaiser, a former FBI cyber division deputy assistant director, added. While third-party analysts have largely blamed Iran for the intrusions, the federal government has not attributed the attacks to anyone. “Attribution in cyber incidents is inherently difficult and often takes time. Adversaries deliberately obscure their infrastructure, reuse tools and techniques, and route activity through compromised systems, so the government needs to be diligent before publicly assigning responsibility,” Hartman said. “In this case, CISA has done the most important thing: quickly getting actionable information into the hands of water-sector operators so they can defend their systems,” he added. “From a defender’s perspective, the ‘who’ matters less in the immediate term than understanding how the attacks are occurring and taking steps to stop them.” In its advisory, CISA recommended organizations disconnect PLCs from the internet and ensure any remote access goes through a VPN or gateway device rather than connecting directly to the PLC. The cyber-defense agency also advised owner-operators to enable password protection (we suggest multi-factor authentication) and change any default passwords. Also: ensure that allowlist IPs only allow remote access from known engineering laptops or other critical OT assets.®

Medical device maker Boston Scientific’s global operations have been disrupted by an ongoing cyberattack, the company disclosed on Wednesday. According to an SEC filing, the “cybersecurity incident” affecting its IT systems started on Tuesday, and resulted in a “global disruption to the company’s operations.” Upon detecting the digital intruders, the company began an investigation with third-party infosec experts who are working to contain the threat, the filing says. The medtech firm did not immediately respond to The Register’s inquiries, including if this was a ransomware infection and what data, if any, the criminals stole after breaking into the IT systems. “The incident has caused, and is expected to continue to cause, disruptions and limitations of access to certain of the company’s information systems and business applications that support aspects of the Company’s operations, including the ability to process and ship customer orders,” Boston Scientific reported to federal regulators. The company doesn’t have a timeline for full restoration, and noted the “full scope, nature and impacts, including operational and financial impacts” of the cyberattack remain unknown. The news did, however, send Boston Scientific shares spiraling down more than 4% on Wednesday morning. At press time, none of the usual suspects had claimed responsibility for the attack. In recent months, both ransomware/extortion gangs and government-backed hackers have disrupted other medtech firms’ operations and stolen sensitive data. In March, Stryker was hit by a cyber crew with ties to Iran's intelligence agency, causing a global network outage at the company. A month later, medical-device maker Medtronic disclosed a cyberattack in a filing with federal regulators. Notorious data-theft-and-extortion group ShinyHunters claimed to be behind this intrusion, and the company in July warned patients that their names, contact details, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, and health information was stolen in the breach. ®

Workwear and fashion retailer Carhartt’s data breach was about half as bad as ShinyHunters claimed, according to Troy Hunt, who reviewed the data dump before uploading it to his Have I Been Pwned website. Hunt’s HIBP service reported 12.9 million individuals affected by the alleged breach, around half of what ShinyHunters purported when it claimed to leak the company’s data earlier this month. ShinyHunters dumped what it said was 50GB worth of Carhartt’s data on August 13 after the retailer hired what the criminals called “a very unskilled and incompetent negotiator” to haggle the crooks down from their $3.3 million extortion demand. According to Hunt, ShinyHunters data was injected with millions of lines of synthetic data, substantially padding out the number of affected individuals. “You're not going to believe this, but turns out you can't always take criminals at their word,” said Hunt, before detailing the investigative process that goes into calculating the scale of breaches that make it to the HIBP site. Hunt usually starts with HIBP's open-source email address extractor, which spat out nearly 25 million addresses, before running it through OpenClaw to analyze the contents further and sift through the mass of information, looking for anomalies. For a retailer, the AI thought that the millions of .edu and .org email domains looked off - like signs of TPC-DS synthetic data injection. Examples included michael.ware@c.edu and michelle.larue@lkvb06fkzsjv.org. The first and last names look real, but a common finding among TPC-DS-generated data is that it will use completely random strings for domains. A manual look at the data points with which these email addresses were associated further revealed these "individuals" were located in countries, such as Benin, which don’t represent dominant Carhartt markets. Further, the AI found more customers registered in Montenegro than in the US, where Carhartt is headquartered. It also found a suspiciously large proportion of customers with birth dates set in the early 1900s – unlikely given the company’s clientele is more hipster-oriented than than blue-collar nowadays. Hacking away at all the clearly bogus data, OpenClaw dropped the estimated number of genuine individuals among the data trove from 24.8 million to 13.6 million. Hunt carried on eliminating suspicious findings he noticed, such as Microsoft 365 duplicate email addresses and addresses marked for deactivation, as well as prompting OpenClaw to continue doing the same. He finally arrived at 12,933,413 accounts believed to be genuine among the ShinyHunters-leaked dataset. That’s the number that made it to the HIBP platform, which states that 83 percent of these were already gathered up in previous breaches. The moral of the story is, as Hunt says, to “take headline numbers with a grain of salt unless you're confident in the processes of those making the claims." And until trustworthy sources do the arduous work, stop treating the word of cybercriminals as gospel. The real data contains names, email addresses, phone numbers, and physical addresses. Carhartt did not respond to our request for comment on Hunt’s findings. The company is yet to comment on the breach anywhere publicly. ®