The worst problems don't always come with a warning. Sometimes they arrive through a service everyone trusts, a device someone bought, or a system nobody thought to check. By the time something looks wrong, the damage may already be done. This week had plenty of that. Trusted connections became a problem. Hardware wasn't as safe as it looked. Old bugs found new victims, and some systems were

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U.S. federal investigators pursuing the ShinyHunters hacking group that recently stole highly sensitive data from the FBI have identified executives at two different ransomware negotiation firms who maintained unusually close relations with the extortion group, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. Sources close to the investigation say one of the executives in the United States even helped ShinyHunters operate a website that pressured victims into paying a ransom.

Hackers aligned with ShinyHunters have claimed credit for dozens of major data breaches since 2019, when the group was primarily operated by cybercriminals living in France. As those original members were arrested or jailed one by one, control over the ShinyHunters brand eventually passed to “Rey,” identified last year as a teenage hacker from Amman, Jordan. According to the FBI, ShinyHunters has extorted more than $70 million from victims so far this year.

In late September, ShinyHunters hacked the FBI recruitment website fbijobs.gov and taunted the agency by threatening to publish the stolen files, which reportedly included medical and psychological records, Social Security numbers and home addresses, and information about each employee’s unit and specialization.

The FBI jobs site hack has prompted the agency to move with uncommon speed to arrest, detain and question people who had any communications with Rey or other ShinyHunters suspects. Reuters reported on October 3 that Rey had been detained by Jordanian authorities and was cooperating with the FBI.

Rey was able to assume control over the hacking group because one of its alleged senior members had just been nabbed. On the evening of September 15, 2026, authorities in the Netherlands arrested convicted hacker and ShinyHunters suspect Pepijn van der Stap. Dutch police reportedly used flash-bang grenades in an effort to stun and apprehend Van der Stap as he was logged in to various online accounts.

According to a source close to the investigation, the authorities arrested Van der Stap while he was using his Signal instant messaging account, which allowed them to read recent communications with frequent contacts — including ransomware negotiators based in Canada and the United States.

Multiple sources with knowledge of the matter told KrebsOnSecurity that Van der Stap’s messages were the key to unraveling a murder-for-hire plot that emerged immediately following his arrest. The Dutch news outlet RTL reported last month the two murders were allegedly to be committed abroad, and that there are indications Van der Stap gave the order for the attacks (there is no indication those orders were ever carried out).

On October 9, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that the FBI arrested a 54-year-old Canadian cybersecurity executive named Edward Dubrovsky in connection with the ShinyHunters investigation. Dubrovsky, who recently published a book on handling cyber extortion that recommended always engaging with the hackers, was charged with threatening to disclose stolen or hacked data and interfering with interstate commerce through extortion, according to court records. Politico reports prosecutors have asked that Dubrovsky remain in custody pending trial, and that records related to his case remain under seal.

A source close to the investigation told KrebsOnSecurity that Van der Stap’s Signal messages showed he had frequent conversations with Mr. Dubrovsky and with at least one executive at a large U.S.-based consulting firm, and that these executives often knew the details about new ShinyHunters victims before the victims themselves had even learned of the breach.

That source shared another potentially explosive finding by federal investigators: the Dutch hacker’s chats showed Mr. Dubrovsky knew ShinyHunters had stolen highly sensitive data from FBI servers, and that he never informed the bureau of the data breach prior to ShinyHunters threatening on Twitter/X to publish the agency’s deeply personal personnel files.

SHINYWIRE

KrebsOnSecurity has learned from two sources close to the ShinyHunters probe that FBI investigators believe at least one executive at a U.S.-based consulting firm played an active role in operating the now-defunct ShinyHunters victim extortion website “shinywire[.]com.” KrebsOnSecurity is not naming the U.S. company or the suspected executive(s) for now because they have not yet been charged with a crime, but it is a prestigious firm with more than 1,000 associates.

The Shinywire website was active from approximately May 3, 2026 until October 16 and had entries for nearly 100 organizations hacked by ShinyHunters. Each entry urged victims to engage with the cybercrime group and discuss terms for payment. The pages also included samples of stolen files and promised those files would be published online if the victim ignored their demands.

The following screenshot shows a cached portion of the Shinywire extortion page for Intuitive Surgical, an American medical technology company that was breached in March 2026 after an employee fell for a targeted phishing email.

Victim organizations that refused to engage or negotiate after seven days would find all of their stolen data published on the ShinyHunters victim shaming blog (a website that is only reachable via the anonymity network Tor).

In a story published October 15, The Globe and Mail wrote that a few months before Edward Dubrovsky was arrested by the FBI, the Canadian cybersecurity executive alleged in court documents he had become collateral damage in a campaign by a former business partner to “destroy” another industry executive.

The story noted that Dubrovsky filed the lawsuit in Ontario this year against Daniel Tobok, the former chief executive of Cypfer, a cybersecurity firm founded in Toronto with offices in the U.S., Britain, the Netherlands, the United Arab Emirates, and Mexico. The two first became business partners in 2017 and later developed Cypfer together, where Mr. Dubrovsky was a managing partner and chief operating officer. But by 2024, the two had a falling out, with Dubrovsky accusing Tobok of gradually excluding him from business matters and making “increasingly capricious business decisions.”

Mr. Tobok reportedly denied the allegations and filed a counterclaim, accusing Mr. Dubrovsky of accessing confidential information and unfairly competing with Cypfer through work at another firm called CyberSteward Inc. He also said Mr. Dubrovsky has misrepresented himself as a Cypfer founder, and is not a shareholder.

GHOSTBYTE

According to interviews with several former colleagues of Mr. Tobok, as far back as eight years ago he was known to ransomware purveyors by a particular nickname: Ghostbyte. In 2018, a Canadian company was hacked by Dharma, a prolific Russian-language ransomware affiliate program that first surfaced in 2016. The victim company told the Dharma ransomware representative they were leaning toward paying because some of the files were unrecoverable after being locked, but that they needed a better guarantee that Dharma would keep their word if paid.

A redacted copy of the Dharma rep’s reply is pictured below, and it shows the ransomware group urged the victim to contact a person at a Canadian IT firm that helps companies seeking such guarantees. The Dharma rep recommended the victim contact the email address ghostbyte@tutanota.com.

“If you want guarantees, you can write to the IT company,” the Dharma reply advised. “Take the phone and negotiate with them. This IT company often solves such problems in Canada. You can contact them and sign a contract for services. You’ll still have to pay.”

It’s unclear if Mr. Tobok ever used that Ghostbyte address offered by the Dharma representative, and he has not responded to multiple requests for comment. However, the breach tracking service Constella Intelligence finds an email address Mr. Tobok has frequently used — dtobok@me.com — is associated with two online accounts where the chosen username was “ghostbyte,” including a Snapchat account.

Incidentally, Constella also finds the Dharma rep’s email address luckygoodlucky@tuta.io is associated with a cryptocurrency address that processed 38 transactions totaling 43 bitcoin, ~$3.5 million at today’s value (the most recent transaction for this wallet is dated February 2019).

In a statement shared on October 14, Cypfer said the company’s business does not include making or facilitating ransomware payments, and that Cypfer learned of Dubrovsky’s arrest when the news first broke in the media.

“We had no prior knowledge of Mr. Dubrovsky’s arrest,” a spokesperson told KrebsOnSecurity via email. “CYPFER has not received any outreach from law enforcement and, to our knowledge, is not the target of any law enforcement investigation.”

The statement said CyberSteward and Cypfer are separate companies with no officers, directors or employees in common, and that Cypfer was recently acquired by the Apros Group, a holding company led by Jason Hogg, a former FBI special agent and former CEO of Aon Cyber Solutions Group. In 2020, Aon aquired Cytelligence, a security consulting firm where Mr. Tobok was founder and CEO and Mr. Dubrovsky was a managing partner.

CONFLICTING INTERESTS

It is not illegal in the United States to pay hackers for an encryption key to unlock servers infected with ransomware, or in exchange for a promise to delete any stolen files and refrain from publishing them online. While victim organizations can land in legal hot water if they pay a ransom to a group that is sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department, ShinyHunters is not among the ransomware groups currently sanctioned by the United States or by any other government.

Experts say ransomware victims are typically directed by their insurance provider to work with a specific incident response firm. But not all cyber forensics and breach response companies will agree to facilitate payments to ransomware groups on behalf of their clients. As a result, once victim firms make a decision to pay, the firms that eschew rewarding extortionists are invariably replaced by companies that have no such qualms.

In December 2024, ShinyHunters began extorting the education technology company PowerSchool, stealing private information on 62 million students and 9.5 million teachers in the U.S. and Canada. PowerSchool reportedly paid a $2.85 million ransom demand, and a “frequently asked questions” statement (PDF) about the breach says PowerSchool was assisted in that effort by CyberSteward (ShinyHunters affiliate Matthew Lane, 20, of Sterling, Mass., was sentenced in November 2025 to four years in prison for his admitted role in the PowerSchool hack).

But that ransom payment did not stop future extortion attempts using the same stolen data. By May 2025, individual school districts were reportedly receiving separate ransom demands using samples of the same stolen files. While nobody has alleged ShinyHunters was behind the second wave of extortion against PowerSchool users, the incident drives home the reality that there is no technical way to verify the threat actors have deleted the stolen data as promised, or prevent others from abusing the same records.

A number of leading cyber incident response firms, including Coveware and Unit 221B, have consistently warned victims against paying ShinyHunters, noting that “destroyed” victim data is often kept, resold or used to extort the company’s clients directly later on.

The FBI echoed those sentiments in an alert on May 15, 2026 advising victims against paying the ShinyHunters group. Meanwhile, ShinyHunters members have been harassing and threatening employees at Coveware and Unit 221B for offering this advice.

The following screenshots show just how annoyed the ShinyHunters leaders were with Coveware’s relentless advice against paying the group. The first image is from a conversation on May 6, 2026 that took place between the group’s main account on Telegram and a co-conspirator. In that chat, snippets of which were shared with KrebsOnSecurity by a trusted source, ShinyHunters complained that Coveware was harming the group’s payment rates.

“Go on my website, majority of those companies would’ve paid if it weren’t for Coveware giving them misinformation,” the ShinyHunters account wrote. “Someone (100% Coveware) is going out of their way to make sure i am not paid.”

In another conversation on April 11, 2026, the ShinyHunters Telegram account privately said they were trying to “eliminate the problem,” which they said was Coveware. Coveware declined to comment for this story.

“I’m sure the company will pay but in this specific case I am aware of Coveware and their involvement, and I’ve probably been not getting a lot of other negotiations mostly likely because Coveware keeps getting involved,” the ShinyHunters account bemoaned.

Mark Camillo is chief executive at CyberAcuView, an industry group founded in 2021 by a consortium of major cyber insurance carriers. Camillo said some firms charge a flat retainer fee, while those that specialize in helping companies negotiate a ransom payment tend to charge a percentage of the total ransom amount paid.

That latter dynamic, he said, is an inherent conflict of interest, as the negotiator has every incentive to make things more favorable to the attackers because they are financially incentivized to negotiate and pay out, and to not negotiate down on the price.

“It has come to the industry’s attention that many of the ransomware payers charge a percentage of the final payment which may or may not be disclosed,” Camillo said. “This makes no sense if they are also the negotiator. There needs to be more transparency in the process as no one in the ecosystem should be profiting purely on the size of the ransomware transaction or payment itself.”

Camillo said the firms doing this work would argue the fees are needed because there may be unexpectedly higher costs to secure larger quantities of cryptocurrency or more risk carrying the float, and because cryptocurrency exchanges may charge higher fees for high risk transactions.

“There definitely needs to be more visibility around the transaction and clarity on the increasing value of the crypto and the exchange’s percent in the transaction to get to the bottom of this and remove any misaligned incentives,” he said.

In recent months, the U.S. Department of Justice has prosecuted a number of ransomware negotiators alleged to have conspired with cybercriminals to defraud their clients. On October 7, the DOJ charged MonsterCloud CEO Zohar Pinhasi, 50, with wire fraud and conspiracy for allegedly charging customers to remediate ransomware attacks without paying the hackers. According to charging documents, Pinhasi secretly went behind his customers’ backs and paid hackers anyway, paying ransomware groups $8 million while charging customers $19 million.

In July, Angelo Martino, a 41-year-old ransomware negotiator from Land O’Lakes, Florida, was sentenced to 70 months in prison for conspiring with the Blackcat/ALPHV ransomware group to extort multiple victims. According to the DOJ, Martino was paid by BlackCat attackers to provide confidential information about the negotiating position and strategy of his employer’s clients and enable the ransomware actors to maximize the ransoms paid by the victims.

The threat actor behind the GhostAction supply chain attack has expanded beyond injecting malicious GitHub Actions workflows into compromised projects to phish open-source developers and deliver a stealer malware disguised within a fake font file. The latest evolution, detailed by OpenSourceMalware, signals that the attackers are actively refining their modus operandi in response to steps

In Salesforce Agentforce, the recommended way to make an agent respond to events is a Flow: a record is created or a case is updated, and the Flow passes data into the agent's prompt. Separately, Email-to-Case and Web-to-Case turn inbound customer messages into case records; it is how airlines and hotels run support intake. Both are standard, documented, as-designed features. Chained together,

A fake Web3 accelerator has been observed pushing information stealers and backdoors to Windows and macOS systems using malicious npm packages under the pretext of offering free artificial intelligence (AI) credits for Anthropic Claude and Google Gemini, coding tools, and security audits. "The tools delivered information-stealing malware and backdoors for macOS and Windows machines," Elastic

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I have this sense that we've passed the point where "vibe coding" is a derogatory term. I have no empirical evidence for this; it's more a feeling that those weaponising the term have now accepted the inevitability and are just getting with the program. Or they've reskilled into other industries because, let's face it: you can't be a productive, competitive developer today without AI. I saw this comment from Linus Torvalds today which I thought really nailed it:

‼️ Linus Torvalds called rules against AI coding tools "UTTERLY STUPID" on the Linux kernel mailing list. He says people he respects and calls intelligent do not shy away from using new tools. https://t.co/HaQ8H4BrVc

— International Cyber Digest (@IntCyberDigest) October 17, 2026

He's always had a way with words 🙂 Anyway, here's what we're doing:

A flaw in Broadcom's Wi-Fi setup software lets an attacker within radio range run code as root on Broadcom-based routers, without the network password or any pairing step, security researcher Quentin Kaiser disclosed on October 16. He showed the attack working against home gateways supplied by three Belgian internet providers, in one case reading the Wi-Fi password off the device

An intruder reached a legacy system at OpenCode on the night of October 16 and may have exposed the third-party AI provider keys that users had saved in OpenCode Console, the company said. Console is OpenCode's optional hosted service: a workspace saves its own OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google key there, and Console uses that key to call the provider so team members can use the models without

SaaS-for-managed services providers ConnectWise has initiated a “service interruption” for its some of its offerings after detecting unauthorized access. ConnectWise offers ERP tailored to the needs of managed services providers (MSPs), plus tools they can use to manage their customers’ environments. Cloud Backup is one of those tools and does what it says on the tin for data stored on-prem, in the cloud, or in SaaS services like M365 and Google Workspace. On October 16, the company published an advisory revealing that on the 15th it “identified unauthorized access to application identities within the ConnectWise Cloud Backup environment.” “The service interruption affects partners and customers using Cloud Backup, formerly known as SkyKick. Because SaaS Security and Cloud Management are integrated with Cloud Backup, those services have also been suspended out of an abundance of caution while our investigation and remediation continue,” the company advised. The suspension does not mean MSPs, or their customers, should assume that their environments were compromised, just that ConnectWise isn’t confident it can operate its services safely at this time. As of 16:00 UTC on October 18, the services remain unavailable, which means end-users can’t back up data, access their archives, or restore data. “Existing archives remain encrypted, isolated, and preserved, with no evidence of unauthorized access. Our teams continue monitoring affected environments, conducting forensic analysis and threat hunting, and carrying out remediation activities,” the company’s veep of security operations, Jason Ferguson, wrote on Reddit. ConnectWise has not offered much detail on the incident, other than to publish some indicators of compromise it thinks are tied to a handful of IP addresses and integrations with third-party apps. It has also disabled some integrations between Cloud Backup and Exchange, Teams, SharePoint Online, and its own products. Security outfit Huntress offered a starker view and wrote “A Microsoft 365 credential (API secret) belonging to ConnectWise Cloud Backup has been compromised, and Huntress has confirmed it is being used to gain unauthorized access to customers' M365 environments.” “In one Huntress partner tenant, a second ConnectWise application, ConnectWise Cloud Management - MS Teams (Application ID 24205314-2b89-4e07-a2a4-579e898a5640), gave itself Global Administrator and then added new credentials to two other applications in that tenant, one of them being a single-tenant Huntress application unique to this partner.” “Disabling M365 apps, including the abused ConnectWise apps will not remove credentials that were already added,” the firm warns. “You must review the credentials on all of your M365 applications.” ConnectWise says it “cannot discuss threat actor attribution at this time” because it is focused on “investigation, remediation, and supporting affected partners and their customers.” It has, however, called on its customers to probe any M365 environments they manage for signs of compromise. This is where things get tricky, because ConnectWise has no knowledge of those setups – as is proper because it is a platform provider and its MSP clients manage end-user relationships. It’s therefore relying on MSPs to do the right thing. MSPs are under no obligation to disclose the platforms they use to deliver their services. Indeed, for some organizations the allure of working with an MSP is to access packaged services they never need to learn or worry about. End-user organizations that may be happily oblivious about ConnectWise’s contribution to their business are therefore in an awkward position. Businesses that serve MSPs are a frequent target for attackers, who see the chance to compromise the likes of ConnectWise as a possible route to crack all of their partners and those service providers' end-users. The 2021 attack on Kaseya is the most notorious example of such an incident. ConnectWise will be hoping it doesn't take the crown. ®

Paulos Yibelo, the researcher who in early October claimed to have found a guest-host escape flaw in Linux KVM, the hypervisor used by most hyperscale clouds, has named the flaw PwnEscape and warned it might represent a new way to attack Linux – on top of being a 9.3-rated critical nasty in its own right. Yibelo’s work is now CVE-2026-99999. It is a scary bug because it makes a guest-host escape possible with a few malformed IPv4 packets. Such attacks are a nightmare security scenario because the whole point of virtualization is carving up hardware into isolated “guest” virtual machines that share a “host” server’s resources – without ever being able to see what other guests or the host are doing. Public clouds rely on that isolation remaining impervious. So do private clouds, because if guest/host isolation is violated, an attacker could conceivably access all the VMs on a host or pool of virtualized hardware. Attacks on a host could give an evildoer access to thousands of VMs, plus containers because many developers now run those constructs in a micro-VM to keep them isolated. PwnEscape makes it possible for guests to access the host, by sending a guest malformed IPv4 packets. As explained in a message from Red Hatter Michael S. Tsirkin in the Linux kernel stable tree, ‘If a packet with bad checksum metadata gets into the ipv4 stack, skb_checksum_help can corrupt the network header and cause a bunch of mischief.” Analysis from threat-finding firm SOC Prime details the mischief. “Linux allows network packets to carry metadata indicating where a checksum operation should begin and where its result should be written. This optimization is legitimate and widely used for checksum offloading, but the security problem arises when less-trusted guest-controlled metadata can influence a write after the packet header has already passed earlier validation stages.” “Because the disclosure could be triggered repeatedly, an attacker controlling a guest workload could potentially collect information from a security domain that the virtual machine should not be able to inspect. This represents a direct failure of the guest-host isolation boundary.” Red Hat’s report says the impact can potentially include “arbitrary code execution on the host, a system crash resulting in Denial of Service, or information disclosure of sensitive memory.” A new class of threat Paulos Yibelo, the researcher who found the flaw, thinks he stumbled upon a novel attack. “As far as we know, PwnEscape exposes an entirely new class of attacks in Linux networking: untrusted checksum metadata can rewrite security-sensitive packet fields after the kernel has already validated and acted on them, undermining assumptions across the networking stack far beyond the original VM escape,” he wrote. “The popular mental model is that VM isolation lives in the virtual-machine monitor. Much of it does. But an attacker-controlled workload does not interact only with arch/x86/kvm/. It interacts with a host OS full of optimized, highly composable interfaces.” “If the metadata crosses a trust boundary, every deferred consumer has to inherit the right invariants. And if the packet can be transformed after those invariants are checked, the invariants have to remain true in the new representation.” “That is why a bug that looks, at first, like a malformed checksum hint can become a memory disclosure and a guest-to-host escape primitive. The problem was not how difficult IPv4 is to parse. It was that different parts of Linux were allowed to trust different versions of the same packet.” That’s an important observation, because while Linux KVM is widely used, and free, it is part of Linux – a project comprised of over 40 million lines of code. A vendor named Edera, which offers a secure container runtime based on the Xen hypervisor, last week none-too-gently pointed out that’s a big attack surface and that researchers have found seven escape bugs this year alone including Januscape. AWS, which runs its cloud on KVM, says its elastic compute cloud is not at risk. Google Cloud’s method of using KVM means it is probably in the clear, too. Developers have created an upstream fix in the Linux kernel. It’s percolating into major distros like Debian, RHEL, and Ubuntu and hopefully into virtualization products that rely on KVM, such as Nutanix and Proxmox. In the age of AI, miscreants will doubtless quickly explore Yibelo’s discoveries, making PwnScape potentially quite a moment for Linux developers and users. ®

ConnectWise on Saturday said it has disabled seven ConnectWise application identities as it continues its investigation into an incident in which unknown threat actors obtained unauthorized access to the application identities and compromised Microsoft 365 tenants. The disabled identities are listed below - ConnectWise Cloud Backup - 506e08f9-6e9a-4da4-942b-a099a03644ae ConnectWise

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So-called balcony solar setups are becoming legal across the US. Here’s the latest.

Late Sunday night, a still-unknown cybercriminal or group hacked thousands of remote-controlled refrigeration systems across hundreds of French grocery stores, spiking temperatures, spoiling food, and sparking fires. This is part of an ongoing trend of attacking physical systems that can do damage in the real world. In August, a ransomware attack disrupted building-management systems at a Canadian hospital, affecting door access controls, central HVAC monitoring, and the issuing of staff access cards. And three years ago, cyberattacks hit Las Vegas casinos, causing slot machines to go dark, preventing payment kiosks and ATMs from spitting out cash, and locking guests out of their rooms when the electronic keys stopped working. Not all digital intrusions remain in cyberspace, and attackers don’t need to encrypt files and steal data to cause chaos. Hitting physical systems often produces more severe consequences - and turns up the heat on executives to pay an extortion demand. “There was one gig where the customer was refusing to pay, and so the threat actor was like, ‘Hold my beer, have fun getting into your offices,’ and locked everybody out,” Tim Beasley, a senior incident response consultant at Semperis, told The Register. Beasley won’t name the customer, or provide any incriminating information, but said the incident response involved police smashing glass in addition to his team recovering compromised data. “The cops had to break in, and literally get into the building, breaking some windows, so the customer was able to finally get back in,” he said. We asked if the customer paid the ransom demand, and Beasley yelled: “Oh, hell, no!” A report published earlier this month by ServiceNow’s Armis Labs found increasing evidence of ransomware attackers using physical consequences as leverage in their intrusions. “Today’s BAS operate at the intersection of IT and OT worlds, creating unprecedented exposure,” the report said. Ransomware with physical consequences Building automation systems - BAS - are the critical systems that control and monitor facilities’ HVAC, lighting, energy usage, and water consumption. They also oversee badge readers, door locks, surveillance cameras, fire alarm control panels, and other physical safety equipment. As such, BAS make very attractive targets for ransomware operators looking for high-pressure ways to extort organizations into paying multi-million ransom demands. These systems also appeal to government-backed goons and hacktivists looking to ensure maximum psychological and physical impact during destructive cyberattacks. Armis Labs found 73 percent of organizations own BAS that have been used in ransomware attacks, and this same percentage have known exploited vulnerabilities in at least one of their building automation systems. Additionally, 91 percent of BAS communicate over insecure protocols - opening up an even bigger attack surface for cyber-miscreants wanting to cause physical harm. “The primary thing that we see with any attack on building management systems or physical systems: It’s a great place for the threat actor to hide,” Michael Freeman, ServiceNow’s senior director of threat research, told The Register. “It's easier for them to compromise, and it's easier for them to hide in.” BAS and operational technology (OT) in general have fewer security controls than IT systems. Most require continual uptime, which makes them harder to patch or even scan for vulnerabilities and misconfigurations as this may lead to outages. “One case in particular, against a very large financial institution, the threat actors were staying low and quiet by attacking their BMS systems, and then pivoting into the IT environment,” Freeman said. The intruders were routinely caught - and booted from - the financial institution’s IT systems, so they built backdoors into the BMS to ensure persistent access to both OT and IT networks. “We're also seeing threat actors using AI to understand more building automation systems, especially ones that are using obscure OSs like VxWorks, older Unix-type systems,” Freeman said. AI has entered the chat As multiple security experts have told us in previous interviews, security through obscurity is dead. Not only does AI make it easier for attackers to find bugs – some very obscure and decades old - but it also means criminals no longer need to be OT experts to carry out destructive cyberattacks on critical networks and facilities. Instead, they can use AI to learn all about the obscure protocols and proprietary hardware and software that historically made industrial control systems black boxes. “It’s easier to understand what the controls are,” Freeman said, using the example of an attacker trying to take down a plane, or some similar catastrophic cyberattack. Historically, even advanced, government-backed hacking squads would “be quiet, because you don't know what changing certain settings is going to do,” Freeman explained. “Now you can use AI to say, ‘If I compromise a weight and balance system for airlines, all I need to do now is move this number here to this number, and I just told the system to load heavy stuff on the right side of the plane instead of equal distribution.'” Freeman told us he has seen attackers break into airlines’ OT gear in the past. “But they didn’t know what they were getting into, and so they left them alone,” he said. “Those do cause me concern because in the past I've helped to kick people out of those types of systems.” Industrial orgs increasingly under attack OT security provider Dragos tracks ransomware groups’ claims against industrial organizations on the criminals’ leak sites, along with publicly disclosed intrusions affecting manufacturing and other critical sectors. To be clear: claims on leak sites aren’t always accurate or even true, and the claim itself doesn’t mean operations or control systems were hit. Since 2022, however, “the numbers have been consistently increasing,” Lexie Mooney, senior threat analyst at Dragos, told The Register. The cybersecurity firm tracked 995 ransomware attacks against industrial orgs in 2023, a 49.5 percent increase from 2022. That number jumped more than 87 percent in 2024. Active ransomware groups targeting industrial orgs also grew in 2024 to 80 groups, up from 50 the year before. Dragos tracked 119 ransomware groups impacting more than 3,300 industrial organizations in 2025, and the incidents have steadily increased every quarter this year: 1,020 incidents in the first quarter of 2026 and 1,140 incidents in Q2. “The vast majority of cases are opportunistic,” Abdul Alamri, a senior threat analyst at Dragos, told us. “In some of the cases that we have seen an operational impact, either physical systems or an OT operation, it’s just the nature of the opportunism on the part of those ransomware groups.” This is partially due to the complexity of OT systems, he added. “Ransomware groups want to disrupt operations, and put pressure on the victims to pay the ransom,” Alamri said. “They don’t want to invest that time and effort to target complex systems." It’s usually quicker and easier for financially motivated crims to affect operations via IT systems - as the extortionists did in the August 2025 Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) breach, which halted manufacturing and crippled business operations for months. Internet-connected OT: the next 'low-hanging fruit' The other side of this complexity, however, is that many organizations themselves still lack visibility into their OT environments. Dragos estimates that fewer than 10 percent of OT networks worldwide currently have sufficient network monitoring in place. Plus, in 30 percent of incidents the security firm responded to in 2025, the investigations did not begin with a detection alert, but with someone noticing that “something seemed wrong” in operations. This lack of visibility, combined with threats from AI, worries Alamri. “If you compare the risk that we have seen from humans, to what we are about to face in the near future with AI agents who might continuously try to break into those systems - it’s a pretty dark future if we don't take the right measures to protect ourselves against it.” As organizations get better at patching and securing IT systems, attackers will likely look to internet-connected OT systems where digital compromises have real-world consequences, according to Matt Hayden, VP of cyber and emerging threats at General Dynamics Information Technology. “We all anticipate that as we get better at reducing the IT low-hanging fruit, OT will become a vector of much more scrutiny and much more attention,” Hayden told The Register. Before joining GDIT, Hayden served as the assistant secretary for cyber, infrastructure, risk and resilience policy at the US Department of Homeland Security. Compliance vs. security “There is a big focus on the hardware being connected for the purpose of compliance - and to make sure that, in the name of compliance, we aren't opening back doors, to devices that traditionally wouldn't have to be connected to facilitate their service,” he said, using refrigeration units as an example of one such system that is now internet-connected for compliance purposes. This was prior to the French supermarket hacks. Refrigeration units’ monitoring systems connect to the internet so their owners and operators can prove to regulators that the units maintain their uptime and temperature in accordance with regulations. “So if the health department comes by, they say, ‘Look, my refrigerator was at 27 degrees for the last 72 days,' and they have a check mark, and they get their A plus. But that simple connectivity is also a vector in which that particular refrigerant unit could be targeted for disruption,” Hayden said. About a week after our interview, criminals did exactly that. “The recently reported exploitations of commercial refrigeration units represent a significant example of devices without digital value, no sensitive data or extended enterprise access, being exploited by being connected to the internet with unpatched firmware,” Hayden told us in a subsequent email. He said he expects the attribution to be “less nation-state, and more likely those looking for targets of opportunity to identify what could be done with the unpatched systems.” “The consequences are food supply degradation at a small scale, but it is an important example of what could happen at scale very quickly with more consequential operating equipment,” Hayden said.®

And there’s no opt-out available.