General Motors is taking what looks like a light slap on the wrist from a coalition of 35 states and the District of Columbia after agreeing to settle allegations that it collected drivers' data without proper consent and sold it to data brokers that supplied insurance companies. The Washington state AG's office said on Thursday that GM had reached a $220 million settlement with 36 attorneys general over the automaker's collection and sharing of driving data, including precise location information, speed, seatbelt use, and other metrics. According to investigators, GM sold that data to brokers, which in turn supplied it to insurance companies that could use it to set customers' premiums, without drivers' informed consent. For reference, the $220 million settlement, which will be distributed among the participating jurisdictions, equates to less than 7 percent of GM's $3.3 billion in net income attributable to stockholders for its third quarter, which ended on September 30, 2026. Don't spend it all in one place, y'all. The settlement comes more than two years after a 2024 New York Times investigation found that GM had been selling the data collected from vehicle owners through its Smart Driver program. That program, part of GM subsidiary OnStar’s offering, collected the aforementioned data and handed it back to vehicle owners in reports designed to inform better driving habits. Unbeknownst to Smart Driver subscribers, their data was also being forked over to data brokers despite GM telling customers it wouldn't share that information with insurers without their express consent. The insurers ultimately obtained the data by purchasing it from brokers with which GM had struck deals. To make matters worse, the Washington AG's office said GM incentivized dealerships to enroll customers in Smart Driver, with employees in some cases accepting terms and conditions on customers' behalf without their knowledge or consent. GM also failed to notify many drivers that their information was being collected and shared. Its OnStar app incorrectly told more than 370,000 drivers they were not enrolled in Smart Driver, even as GM continued collecting and selling their data, according to investigators. “The data GM sold was personal, identifiable, and specific,” the AG’s office said. GM canned the Smart Driver program in April 2024, just over a month after the New York Times exposed its data-sharing practices, citing customer feedback. In addition to the monetary pittance it’s handing over to the states, GM also agreed with the 36 AGs to limit the driving data it collects, better protect customer PII, and establish a "comprehensive data privacy program.” The Washington AG’s office described its settlement as “significantly stronger than any other resolution reached with GM for this conduct.” Speaking of those other terms, GM finalized its settlement of the same allegations with the Federal Trade Commission in January 2026. The FTC order required GM to obtain drivers' express consent before collecting, using, or sharing covered driving data, subject to certain exceptions. It also required the company to offer a simple way for drivers to request a copy of their data, request its deletion, and disable precise geolocation data collection where their vehicles support it. The state of California separately reached a $12.75 million settlement with GM in the matter in May; a separate case in Texas is ongoing. “This agreement … reinforces steps we’ve taken to strengthen our privacy practices,” a GM spokesperson told The Register, though the company noted that it still stands by driver data collection as a best practice. “Safer, more helpful and personalized experiences are enabled by connected vehicle data, and GM is committed to being clear about what information is used, how it’s protected, and the choices customers have about what they share,” the spokesperson added. ®

Anthropic has denied allegations that a malicious version of the official Claude Code extension published to Cursor’s marketplace was linked to any kind of compromise of its own systems. The company was forced to issue a statement after prominent figures in the cybersecurity industry alleged that the extension, which infected up to 5,000 developers, was uploaded to Cursor’s marketplace following a breach at Claudemaker Towers. Felix Rieseberg, a member of Anthropic’s technical staff, Xeeted today: "We're working with Cursor on this incident, but it wasn’t a compromise of Anthropic's systems or employee laptops. "A malicious actor used access to Cursor's marketplace to publish a tampered copy of the Claude Code extension, which we didn't build or publish. The versions on our official channels are not affected, and this only impacts Cursor users." First spotted by EDR vendor Phorion, an unknown party pushed an update to Cursor's official Claude Code extension for Visual Studio Code that contained a persistent SSH backdoor written for Windows, macOS, and Linux. According to Cursor, the extension – version 2.1.313 – was available to download for around 11 hours between 0227 and 1335 PT (0927 and 2035 UTC) on Thursday. The vendors' analyses of the implant revealed that it collected information about the host machine and user, including usernames, configured Git emails, and public IP addresses, as well as attempting to open a reverse SSH tunnel. Crucially, Cursor echoed Phorion's assessment that the package contained a critical flaw. The script responsible for opening the SSH tunnel required admin rights on macOS and Windows to do so, and in the vast majority of cases it did not have these, resulting in failure. Regardless, the extension still forwards the collected host and user data to the attacker, as well as dropping the attacker's SSH key and installing the persistence mechanism, so developers must go threat hunting in case their instance allows for the SSH tunnel to be created successfully. Simply installing the latest version of the extension is not enough to clear the persistence mechanism, either. The full details of how to remediate the issue, and links to download scripts to wipe the infection, are laid out in Cursor's account of the situation. Aside from Rieseberg's statement today, neither Cursor nor Anthropic have commented on how the malicious package made its way to the official marketplace. Anthropic's position is that a malicious actor uploaded the tampered copy to Cursor, but the latter has not outlined how it reached the marketpplace. "[We] removed the malicious version from the marketplace immediately upon detection and blocked further distribution," Cursor said in the advisory. "We followed with a full shutdown of the VSCode Marketplace out of an abundance of caution." It also ran checks to confirm no other extensions were compromised in the same way, rotated its own keys before restoring the marketplace, and worked with a cloud hosting provider to block the connection to the attacker's server, it said. ®

Thousands of GCHQ storage drives containing sensitive data have been lost for years, and the British signals intelligence agency still cannot explain where they are. According to the Investigatory Powers Commissioner’s Office’s (IPCO) annual report, the missing storage drives have been known to officials for years, and may contain data related to the Investigatory Powers Act (IPA). "I remain concerned that GCHQ has not yet established a sufficiently clear understanding of the scale, location, and recoverability of lost removable media that may contain IPA-related data, notwithstanding that the underlying issues were first drawn to my attention several years ago," wrote investigatory powers commissioner Lord Brian Leveson. "While I recognize the technical and practical challenges involved, the passage of time without a comprehensive account heightens the importance of sustained senior focus and assured remediation. Given the potential sensitivity of the material involved, I will continue to monitor progress closely.” Described as "a very significant number," the report notes that GCHQ has scoped the maximum number of potentially lost drives, but is unaware of the exact scale of the issue. The agency has embarked on "a program of further work" to locate as many of the lost devices as possible, which includes implementing an automated asset-tracking system by the end of the year. After this is up and running, it said it will be able to provide a more precise number of lost drives. A GCHQ spokesperson told The Register: "As IPCO have reported, our management system for removable media was previously not sufficiently robust to effectively track the items that were registered for use. IPCO are right to note the flaws in the data the system produced, and we have taken action against all their recommendations. "We recognize the importance of security of removable media in our systems, and have a range of measures to mitigate the risks posed by these items. The findings in the report have been addressed comprehensively, and all necessary steps to correct this issue have been taken." Peter Sommer, digital forensics expert and visiting professor at de Montfort and Birmingham City universities, told us: "Bearing in mind the sort of highly sensitive data collected and processed by GCHQ IPCO is right to be very concerned, the more so as the issue is already several years old. Vast quantities of data can be stored on the cheapest lowest cost hard disks and cards. At a much more modest level as an expert witness I know how important it is to keep careful track of the data entrusted to me." Losing important devices is not an achievement that's exclusive to GCHQ. Myriad stories like this have emerged from all corners of the public sector over the years, such as the British Minidstry of Defence misplacing USB drives containing secret information in the mid-noughties, civil servants routinely losing their BlackBerry handsets, and UK police losing thousands of devices, too. The missing storage drives comprise just one of the agency's various transgressions highlighted by IPCO in its report. There are also "significant concerns" over the lax safeguards used to restrict the UK's overseas partners when accessing bulk-intercepted data collected by GCHQ. IPCO was satisfied at how GCHQ ensured its own analysts remained compliant with safeguards around accessing confidential material related to journalism, journalistic sources, and privileged legal information. However, there were concerns around how these same safeguards were applied to its international partners, which have access to its so-called bulk data interception "product." The report notes that most partners were properly restricted from accessing such material, although an internal probe found that there were inadequate arrangements in respect to one partner and their access to journalistic material. Both GCHQ and the overseas agency committed to rectifying the situation. GCHQ was also questioned after a software bug in a web app "used by a relatively small section of the public" misidentified individuals thought to be participating in terrorist activities. The agency identified and reported the flaw in the software, which it used for "target discovery work," and although it only affected a small number of individuals, the errors led to five port stops made under the Terrorism Act and caused "serious prejudice" to the victims. A port stop, for the uninitiated, involves law enforcement detaining a suspect at a UK port, airport, train station, or within one mile of the Northern Ireland border, and can be carried out without suspicion. Once detained, individuals have a legal responsibility to provide passwords to their electronic devices, which can be seized for up to seven days, and in some cases have their biometric markers taken. Failure to comply can lead to a three-month prison term. IPCO ruled, however, that there was ultimately no error made as defined by the IPA. “This is because the activity was lawfully authorised under an interception warrant and the adoption of an unintentionally and unforeseeably imperfect target discovery methodology did not constitute such an error,” the report stated. Despite the agency’s vast technical expertise, IPCO said that the issue affecting the software was not foreseeable. GCHQ was not the only offender among the UK intelligence community (UKIC), with MI5's mishandling of the infamous Agent X case taking center stage in the report. Agent X was an anonymous MI5 informant whose real identity has never been publicly released. A secret inquiry by IPCO as well as the report revealed that MI5 managed Agent X despite knowing he was a violent misogynist obsessed with extreme violence. Lord Leveson said "the case of Agent X is as serious as anything I have dealt with as Commissioner," after MI5 gave false evidence to the High Court and Investigatory Powers Tribunal to protect a foreign neo-Nazi informant who was under police investigation for abusing his partner, referred to publicly as "Beth." ®

Crypto exchange Binance has paused trading after discovering unknown parties cracked one of its workers’ laptops and used it to make massive trades. Late on Thursday, US time, the company used its social media feeds to report “Our teams are aware of reports of a potential security issue and are actively investigating.” The exchange insisted “User funds are completely safe” and warned its customers “should remain cautious of scams and should not trust unofficial links, messages, or requests for account information.” The company soon froze $2.5 billion worth of assets and warned that the figure could go higher “as our teams work closely with law enforcement, issuers, blockchain intelligence firms and industry partners to trace and freeze additional assets.” To prevent the matter worsening, Binance halted all trading, deposits, and withdrawals. It also promised to cover any losses. About an hour ago at the time of writing, Binance posted an update on the incident that explains what it thinks went wrong. “Binance's initial investigation suggests that the security incident may involve a compromised DevOps engineer’s laptop, which allowed an attacker to gain access to a service container and submit unauthorized withdrawal transactions,” the post states. The company also hiked the amount it thinks is at risk to $6.3 billion and repeated its promise to cover any customer losses. The update also says Binance found no evidence of any wallet private key leak, suggesting that customers’ holdings remain secure. When they can use them again, as Binance is yet to resume trading. Binance hasn’t explained how attackers gained access to the engineer’s laptop. The scant details provided make it hard to rule out a successful phishing attack, or perhaps a supply chain attack on a package the developer used. Binance says it will spill once it knows exactly what happened. Cryptocurrency outfits have a long and inglorious history of falling victim to cyberattacks, perhaps starting with the 2011 raid on Mt Gox, to incidents allegedly perpetrated by nation-states, and, just last week, another situation possibly involving an AI-powered attacker. ®

Multiple vulnerabilities in five popular AI developer tools could allow attackers to execute code on a host machine, read and steal files, or spoof browser address bars. Researchers say flaws in OpenAI's Codex and Microsoft's VS Code remain unpatched, potentially putting developers who use affected configurations at risk. AI security startup Forever Security discovered vulnerabilities in Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Anthropic's Claude Desktop, VS Code, and Codex, and disclosed four of the flaws to the affected vendors. GitHub independently fixed the Copilot vulnerability without receiving a report from Forever Security. All five share a common security weakness: embedded browsers granted capabilities beyond those available to conventional browsers. Each tool “enriched its embedded browser beyond what a normal browser allows, and those enrichments undermined the traditional threat model - as agent input, as the authority on a tab’s own address, or as reach onto the host,” Forever researcher Gal Weizman wrote in a Thursday report. Forever dubbed this class of vulnerability “Embrace,” short for EMbedded BRowser, and said the flaws led to code execution in Cursor, data theft in Claude Desktop, Codex, and VS Code, and address bar spoofing in GitHub Copilot. Here’s what each of these looks like, starting with Cursor. Cursor: arbitrary code execution Typical web pages can’t run commands on the host computer because a web page’s JavaScript cannot talk to local apps. Cursor’s integrated browser, however, allows a page to call the agent’s composer. The agent reads this as instructions and follows them, but the instructions remain hidden from human users. This opens the coding agent up to prompt injection attacks that could allow an attacker to execute commands on the host machine. The researchers disclosed the vulnerability to Cursor on September 10, and the vendor silently patched the flaw on October 1. According to Forever, Cursor did not publish a security advisory about the issue or respond to the researchers' disclosure. Cursor also did not reply to The Register’s request for comment. GitHub Copilot: address bar spoofing Under normal browser operations, a webpage cannot change the content of the address bar. “Copilot’s browser preview works differently,” Weizman wrote. “Some pages change their address without loading a new page, and the app cannot always see that. So Copilot let the page tell the app its own address.” The app checked only whether the text looked like a web address, starting with http, https or file, but it didn’t check where the tab really pointed to. This can be abused to trick the embedded browser into displaying a spoofed URL - such as github.com/login - in the address bar, while loading a fraudulent website - like a phishing page - underneath. The researchers found the address-bar spoofing flaw in GitHub Copilot 1.1.27 on September 26. GitHub independently fixed the flaw in a later Copilot build (1.1.29) on October 13 without receiving a vulnerability report from Forever. We reached out to GitHub and did not receive a response. Claude Desktop, Codex, and VS Code: arbitrary file read All three of these vendors’ coding assistants allow local HTML files opened in the built-in browser to escape its boundaries and access other files. Both Claude Desktop and VS Code allow local pages access to their respective project folders, but the researchers found that these restrictions did not apply to web workers – a browser feature that allows JavaScript to run in a background thread, separate from the page's main thread. This means a local page can start a worker, and the worker can bypass restrictions to reach any file on the machine. Codex, however, didn’t have this same restriction, meaning a local page could read any file directly without a worker. Weizman said his team disclosed the issue to Anthropic on July 23, and the AI vendor declined the Claude Desktop bug report as invalid for a “workspace trust” gated security boundary. A day later, however, Noma Security reported the same flaw, according to Weizman, and Anthropic accepted the report as valid. Anthropic did not respond to The Register’s questions about either bug report or Forever’s timeline of events. Forever disclosed the Codex bug to OpenAI on July 27 and didn’t get a response. The flaw remains unpatched, but an OpenAI spokesperson told The Register that it's aware of the issue and working to address it. On September 10, Forever disclosed the VS Code vulnerability to Microsoft and says the vendor also labeled it as an invalid workspace trust gated security boundary issue. The researchers claim it remains unpatched. Microsoft did not respond to our request for comment.®

Suspected Chinese attackers chained PHP2Shell with a Linux kernel privilege-escalation exploit to root 25 servers, including Palo Alto Networks firewalls linked to US government-affiliated organizations, according to Dream researchers. The snoops began exploiting these servers on October 23, targeting organizations across the US, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. The attackers also honed in on US government-affiliated firewalls. “Within hours of compromising a US government-affiliated firewall, they had tunneled into the internal network, compromised a third server using the same PHP2Shell exploit, and launched a full Active Directory attack campaign - all through a chain that started with a single unauthenticated HTTPS request to a management interface that should never have been exposed to the internet,” the Israeli AI cybersecurity startup said in a report. Plus, the attackers “likely still” have persistent, remote access to compromised organizations’ networks, Dream noted. The attackers rooted the first US government-affiliated firewall on October 23, but the device crashed shortly afterward, possibly due to around 900 MB of exploit traffic. According to Dream, it remained unresponsive despite 240 automated checks over two hours. They successfully exploited the second firewall a day later, on October 24. The compromised firewalls ran vulnerable versions of Palo Alto Networks' PAN-OS. Dream said it had been working with the vendor to investigate the compromises, and Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 researchers independently verified the attacker's tooling and confirmed Dream's reported results. To break into the firewalls, the attackers built a custom exploit chain that includes PHP2Shell and a Fragnesia kernel flaw, and ran about 40 custom post-exploitation scripts once they were inside the targeted organizations. Total attack chain in under 15 minutes PHP2Shell, comprised of CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, came to light early last week, along with fears that attackers would abuse the bugs to take down most of the internet. Despite “hundreds” of PHP2Shell proof-of-concept repositories on GitHub, the first reports of successful attacks didn’t start until Saturday. Both bugs have CVSS scores of 9.2 and can be exploited without authentication to run code on vulnerable PHP servers. The PHP2Shell exploit recovered by Dream was not a copy of any known public exploit. It “appears to have been independently developed and tailored specifically for the targeted firewall platform,” the researchers wrote. The attackers combined PHP2Shell with Fragnesia (CVE-2026-46300), a high-severity local privilege-escalation vulnerability affecting the Linux kernel's XFRM ESP-in-TCP subsystem. The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) added this Linux kernel bug to its catalog of Known Exploited Vulnerabilities on Wednesday. Both CISA and the FBI declined to comment. The miscreants developed a four-stage PHP2Shell exploit that allowed them to execute commands without authentication on vulnerable Palo Alto Networks firewalls. They then used Fragnesia to escalate their privileges and gain root access. The attackers targeted PAN-OS 12.1 and 12.2, which run PHP 8.0.30 with a high memory limit that enabled the exploit's memory-corruption stages. “The total chain - from unauthenticated HTTPS connection to persistent root webshell - completes in under 15 minutes,” the Dream team wrote. 4 steps to root Here’s how it works: First, they flood the servers with crafted multipart POST requests to corrupt PHP’s memory, and force a predictable memory layout. Then a second request forges the stale session ID length from the memory corruption part of the attack, forcing an out-of-bounds read and exposing the base address of libphp.so in the running process. The attackers then exhaust PHP's memory again to force mod_data=NULL, creating a stale reference they can forge in the final stage to execute commands as the nobody user. They use Fragnesia to escalate to root and plant a web shell in a publicly accessible directory on the firewall. After breaking in via the compromised firewalls, the attackers snooped around in Active Directory, stealing credentials and other sensitive information. With root access, the attackers also had the master key to decrypt the LDAP service account password, which they hardcoded into every subsequent script. They also enumerated every user and group in the domain via LDAP queries, and sprayed passwords against every user account. Attackers also tried to create backdoor AD accounts and attempted SAML signing key extraction - but Dream doesn’t know if these were successful. “The attack results - whether the password spray found valid credentials, whether the backdoor accounts were created, whether SAML keys were extracted - stayed on the management server's local filesystem and were not among the artifacts we recovered,” the researchers noted. AI tools in the attack The investigation also uncovered evidence that the attackers used AI tools, but noted that this was not a fully autonomous attack. The researchers found Anthropic's Claude Code installed, an AI-powered offensive security platform called aiscan configured with Chinese models DeepSeek and Kimi, and API keys for the FOFA reconnaissance service. FOFA is a Chinese internet asset search engine similar to Shodan. The attackers used it to identify about 19,000 internet-facing Palo Alto Networks firewalls worldwide. “The persistent tunnel into the US government organization is likely still running,” Dream warned. “And the attacker still has 19,000 fingerprinted targets they can revisit as they develop profiles for additional PAN-OS versions.”®

Belgium's finance and tax agency has pulled "several" digital services offline after a cyberattack on the organization. FOD Financiën confirmed the attack on Wednesday, saying that MyMinfin, the agency's main online tax portal, as well as other online services, are temporarily unavailable while they start the initial investigations. "This measure helps limit the risks and makes it possible to carry out the necessary technical interventions to ensure the security of our systems," it said in a public announcement. FOD Financiën added that "this has consequences for tax deadlines in the near future," referring to the October 31 extended deadline to submit tax filings for specific types of income, such as sole traders and earnings from foreign companies. The agency confirmed the deadline will be extended to November 16, by which time MyMinfin, the platform through which such filings would normally be submitted, should be back up and running. The detail offered up in the public statement reflects the early stage of the investigation; not much is known, although there is nothing to suggest data was compromised. "Data protection is a top priority for the FOD Financiën," it said. "At present, there are no indications that a data breach has occurred or that data has been compromised. This aspect is also being closely investigated and followed up. "In the meantime, a large part of our other applications remains available with full or partial functionality. We are closely monitoring the situation and doing everything we can to make the affected services available again as soon as possible." Spokesperson Francis Adyns told local news outlets that the attack was thwarted within hours, and that it was unable to gain access to applications or data. "The attack could not be sufficiently expanded within our environment to take over applications or gain access to data," he told Nieuwsblad. "Elements that were potentially infected were isolated. As a result, MyMinfin, Tax-on-web, and Biztax went offline, but the hacking was successfully stopped. "The various services must be restored in an isolated environment. This requires considerable time to realize, with the necessary caution to rule out new risks." ®

The UK’s comms watchdog has put forward four methods of checking netizens aren't kids – dubbed highly effective age assurance (HEAA) – as it prepares for the proposed under-16 social media ban. The regulator says some adults may not need to prove their over-16-ness to social media platforms that will make inferences about their age based on previous activity, but confirmed that "many" are likely to have to undergo the same verification process. Big Brother Watch's (BBW) Director Silkie Carlo said: "This plan for a government 'social media ban' is a national ID system by the back door. Both the government and Ofcom have admitted that children will get around the ban, which means the real effect will be normalizing adults and children alike to handing over their passports just to get online." Ofcom says four methods remain from the seven it initially outlined when the Online Safety Act (OSA) came into force last year. The seven were capable of verifying whether a subject was 18 years old, but there are fewer viable options for determining the age of 16-year-olds, it said today. The methods put forward include: Photo-ID matching: Checking information displayed on identity documents and analyzing the photo against a live image of the subject taken during the verification process Banking checks: An estimated 90 percent of 16-17-year-olds in the UK have a bank account, which they would have provided their identity documents to open. The information processed by the bank can be used to verify whether someone is aged 16 or older Digital ID services: An interesting entry, given how quickly these were circumvented once the OSA age-checking requirements came into force. These third-party services analyze a person’s photo once, and if it matches the age they claim to be, let them verify their age across other services Facial age estimation: A method that even Ofcom admitted isn’t quite reliable enough to be used on its own. The regulator said that online services can use technologies to analyze a subject’s facial features to determine their age. The same technologies also have a margin of error of a few years, so online services may wish to use a second method of HEAA to verify the results of this check. The three reserved for those aged 18 and above include credit card checks (only adults can have a credit card), mobile network checks (MNOs require proof of adulthood to remove content blocks), and email checks – using a subject’s email address to make educated guesses about their age based on the other types of services with which it is registered. Ofcom acknowledged that not every 16-year-old will have a form of photo ID, which is required for all four of its HEAA methods, so they will need to acquire one in order to access online services. It estimates that around 94 percent of 16-17-year-olds in the UK have a form of photo ID, such as a passport, driving licence, or an ID card certified by the Proof of Age Standards Scheme, and that around 150,000 have neither. BBW's Carlo added: "Hundreds of thousands of people without ID, who tend to be poorer people, and many more who don’t want to risk handing their passports over to foreign tech companies will be locked out of huge parts of the internet. "The plan will kill anonymity online, whilst the UK’s culture of speech policing is reaching a crisis point. The policy is painfully misguided, an Orwellian assault on free speech and privacy, and will make children no safer at all." 'Circumvention inevitable' Ofcom admitted that "the risk of circumvention cannot be entirely eliminated," as some children will find ways to bypass these age checks, no matter how fully they are implemented. It cited Australia sporadically in its announcement, a country that introduced an under-16 social media ban in December 2025, but has struggled with a large proportion of children devising ways to circumvent these checks. Ofcom said the UK government intends to adopt, but learn lessons from, Australia’s rollout, committing to implementing more robust measures that promote the ban’s aims. It said it has identified some mitigations that could be taken to counter circumvention, such as making it easier for users to report suspected underage social media users, and “using age inference models.” The regulator said it will closely monitor circumvention for the first 12 months after the ban is enforced to understand possible methods to prevent children from finding ways around the age checks. In May, nearly a year after the OSA’s age verification requirements kicked in, researchers found that the existing age checks proved largely ineffective at keeping under-18s away from adult content online. Some reported beating age checks with just a drawn-on moustache. England's Children's Commissioner, Dame Rachel de Souza, said recently that the OSA "has made absolutely no difference" to children’s ability to access potentially harmful online content. Commenting on today’s announcement, Ofcom chief exec Dame Melanie Dawes said that when the social media ban takes effect, it will take a whole-of-society approach to ensure the ban is upheld. ?This ban will shape the future of children’s lives online, so it’s important to get it right," she said. "It can work if social media firms do highly effective age checks properly, and we’ve set out ways that could be achieved. When it comes into force next year, we’ll be ready to take swift and firm action against any company that fails to comply. "We should expect that motivated children will seek to bypass the restrictions – just like alcohol laws can’t completely eradicate underage drinking – but there’ll be ways for platforms to mitigate this risk. This will be a huge cultural shift for our society, so it’ll take time to adjust, and everyone will have a part to play." The UK government is expected to outline the first set of regulations related to the under-16 social media ban by the end of the year, and Ofcom is in the process of developing draft guidance for platforms. ®

EXCLUSIVE Researchers identified at least 83 attacks against 61 public GitHub repositories, including popular open source projects such as Google LangExtract, Trivy, Brave browser, and MLflow, in what they suspect is a coordinated campaign to execute commands in CI/CD environments and steal credentials and access tokens. It all happened very quickly, the Radware threat hunters said in an exclusive interview with The Register. Most (77) of the malicious items were published during a 43-minute time span on September 1, with the remaining six occurring within the next two minutes. “Our guess is that the final aim was a supply-chain attack in which the attacker gains credentials for the repo, and then he has the power to change the contents – the code – as he wishes” and then push the malicious changes to others, Radware VP and researcher Gabi Nakibly told The Register. Nakibly and fellow Radware researcher Zvika Babo say they suspect a single individual is behind this supply chain campaign. This attacker used 74 different GitHub accounts, many of which had legitimate development histories, meaning they were likely compromised. "Considering that dozens of accounts posted the same type of payload, on the same day, within a narrow time window, and to the same infrastructure, it is reasonable to assess that the activity was coordinated,” the team wrote in research shared ahead of publication with The Register. A novel attack chain They discovered the campaign while investigating prompt injection in GitHub – and they told us the attack chain is part of what makes this supply-chain campaign novel, and extremely stealthy. First, the attacker publishes an issue, pull request, or comment containing malicious commands hidden in HTML comments. This ensures the content is not visible in the rendered page. Plus, a GitHub event – like a pull request or issue – can automatically trigger a workflow if the repository is configured to respond to that event, meaning the attacker can be pretty hands-off at this point. “The workflow automatically is triggered within a second, and if the workflow is indeed vulnerable, then the attack is executed successfully,” Nakibly said. The workflow incorporates attacker-controlled content directly into shell source code, and the shell executes the hidden, malicious command, which hoovers up environment variables and attempts to exfiltrate those to an attacker-controlled server. While the researchers examined logs from actual runs, and told us they found two cases containing evidence that the malicious command ran inside the automation environment, they can’t definitively say whether the attacker successfully obtained repository write permissions, modified source code, or compromised downstream software. But they're trying. “The big picture is that the attackers are trying to find every possible way to get inside the repos to get credentials,” Nakibly said. Plus, “the attacker doesn't need to compromise the repository or to have access to its codebase” to do this, Babo added. “Basically, every user with a GitHub account can try to run this attack – it's very easy to start this attack.” Which repos were affected? As of October 13, the threat hunters identified 83 GitHub items with a verified payload across 61 different repositories. The repos span AI frameworks, security tools, development infrastructure, databases, and other widely used open source software projects. The Radware report lists agno-agi/agno (42.7K stars), ToolJet/ToolJet (41.1K), google/langextract (38.9K), aquasecurity/trivy (38.4K), CopilotKit/CopilotKit (38K), and podman-container-tools/podman (33K), among the most popular. Other notable targets included QwenLM/qwen-code (28.5K), mlflow/mlflow (28.4K), discordjs/discord.js (26.8K), cilium/cilium (25.6K), brave/brave-browser (23.9K), dotnet/maui (23.3K), Homebrew/homebrew-cask (22.2K), github/docs (21K), apache/doris (16K), and PX4/PX4-Autopilot (12.8K). “These projects are used by thousands of organizations," Babo said. The researchers disclosed their findings to all of the projects’ maintainers, and most of the repositories were closed or fixed, but they can’t confirm that all of them were. This campaign follows several earlier supply chain attacks against open source security and dev tools as attackers increasingly look for new methods to steal credentials and other secrets. “There is no way to stop the attackers from attempting,” Nakibly said. “The only way is to make sure that the workflow code is resilient, and not vulnerable to such attacks." The researchers recommend applying least-privilege access to CI/CD workflows, and separating as much as possible workflows triggered by external events from jobs with elevated permissions. “Developers should treat external content as untrusted, and also limit the secrets and environment variables that are available to the workflow,” Babo said. ®

Welcome back to PWNED, in which The Reg offers cautionary tales from folks who’ve left their doors wide open to attackers and lived to tell the tale. This week’s misadventure involves unpatched older machines and a password that was supposed to send a message to crims. Our story comes courtesy once again of leading red teamer and pen tester Dahvid Schloss of Suzu Labs. A client asked Schloss to visit a factory and check the servers there for security holes. The company had been hacked six months prior, made some adjustments, and wanted to make sure that they were bulletproof now. Schloss' mission, which he chose to accept, was to get domain admin rights. Schloss drove over to the factory where he noticed a number of Windows 7 servers were connected to the CNC milling machines, even though Windows 10 was by then Microsoft's supported desktop OS. This was to be expected, as companies with proprietary software often use legacy OSes for fear of breaking apps. At first, Schloss had a hard time breaking in because most of the servers were not connected to the domain. So there was no point in his running the EternalBlue zero-day that would have let him in. “So I've been looking through these and most of them had been disconnected from the domain, so it's the right move,” he said. “Like, yeah, you could run EternalBlue on the network, but you really weren't going to be able to get anywhere with it, cuz you get on the device and what you find: you dump LSASS [the Windows Local Security Authority Subsystem Service], you’re like ‘All right, there’s local admin creds, but the local admin creds on those devices were different from the local admin creds on the majority of workstations.” Finally, Schloss went onto one of the servers that was connected to milling machines and found that it was connected to the network and on the domain. It was vulnerable to EternalBlue and he went and dumped LSASS and found a pair of creds from WDigest, one of which looked like an admin account. But Schloss thought that it must not be a legitimate admin account when he read the password : “heyhackergof***yourself,” but written in leet speak [l337 5p34k]. The resulting string was a strong password, but Schloss assumed that the admins were playing a game with him and left this credential there for him to find. Schloss assumed it wouldn't work and sat on it for a week. During a briefing he had with the IT crew, he presented his findings and then asked who set up the admin account with this funny password. “You could see everyone kind of looking at the senior manager of IT like ‘that was you, wasn’t it,’” Schloss explained. “He’s kind of got this face. I’m like ‘oh shit, like what?’ Turns out that ‘heyhackergof***yourself’ was the actual password for his admin account." On Monday, Schloss tried the username and password combo and, lo and behold, it gave him complete control of the entire network. He was then able to get access to other passwords and many of them were also insults directed at potential hackers. Schloss understood that the team was still angry about a breach they had suffered six months prior and, should they be breached again, wanted to give the finger to the hacker who did it. Unfortunately, their system was still vulnerable because of the outdated machine that was hooked up to the domain and he was able to gain control. The lesson here is really to patch your systems and avoid using insecure legacy OSes whenever possible, because it was an old machine that let Schloss in, not a weak password. Indeed, “hackergof***yourself” in leet speak isn’t a terrible password, just an embarrassing one if it's exposed. ®

Attackers are probing a critical Oracle E-Business Suite vulnerability that can lead to remote code execution (RCE), despite Oracle issuing a patch earlier this month. Meanwhile, new analysis indicates that an Oracle PeopleSoft zero-day exploited by ShinyHunters as early as May involves three distinct vulnerabilities that can be combined to achieve RCE. Patching alone may not remove attackers from already compromised systems, particularly if they've installed web shells. First up: CVE-2026-101767, a critical, unauthenticated SQL injection bug in Oracle EBS that can lead to RCE. “Our Oracle E-Business Suite decoys recorded exploratory exploits against CVE-2026-101767, an unauthenticated SQL injection in EBS's Thin Client Framework servlet that chains to remote code execution, this morning, Oct 27,” Defused Cyber said in an X post. Horizon3 researchers found and disclosed the bug to Oracle, and the vendor patched the issue in its October release. “An attacker can send a crafted request to the vulnerable servlet to execute SQL with the privileges of the APPS database user,” Horizon3 explained at the time. “The attack chain also enables operating system command execution with the privileges of the EBS application account.” This means an unauthorized user can modify application data accessible to APPS, and execute commands. “Depending on the deployment, affected data may include financial, payroll, HR, and procurement records,” the bug hunters said. The Register reached out to Oracle with multiple questions for this story - including whether it has documented any successful exploitation of CVE-2026-101767 - and did not receive an immediate response. Moving on to the PeopleSoft-ShinyHunters fiasco: TrendAI’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) found and reported the PeopleSoft issues on June 10, and Oracle issued a patch under one vulnerability identifier: CVE-2026-35273. In early June, ShinyHunters told The Reg that the group hacked more than 100 organizations via an Oracle PeopleSoft zero-day, CVE-2026-35273. Google’s consulting and incident response biz, Mandiant, later confirmed the data theft and extortion crew exploited CVE-2026-35273 as a zero-day, mostly against schools and the education sector. By late September, however, Mandiant said ShinyHunters massively expanded its targeting, “deploying web shells on dozens of systems globally, spanning higher education, technology, IT services, healthcare, agriculture, transportation, and government.” According to ZDI bug hunter Bobby Gould, there are actually three distinct vulnerabilities across multiple PeopleSoft components, and each should receive its own CVE identifier rather than being grouped under CVE-2026-35273. Gould, along with TrendAI researchers Minh Giang and Lucas Miller, originally found and reported three distinct bugs to Oracle in June. “We are coordinating with Oracle to assign separate CVEs for each issue,” he said in a Tuesday blog. The first issue is a Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) vulnerability in the PeopleSoft Integration Gateway (PSIGW), which gives attackers a foothold in the PeopleSoft application. In June, Oracle introduced a “validateClient” method to allow PeopleSoft system administrators to restrict access to certain functionality. The SSRF bug, however, allows crims to make requests that satisfy the validation requirement to access endpoints vulnerable to RCE, Gould wrote. “While this solution does restrict access, an attacker on any trusted host can still reach PSEMHUB,” he said, referring to PeopleSoft Environment Management Hub (PSEMHUB). “Because Oracle allows localhost by default, the PSIGW SSRF provides exactly that access.” The second bug is an external control of file path vulnerability in PSEMHUB’s ExecuteProcessActivityCommand handler. This message handler is designed to allow remote clients to write log entries to the PeopleSoft server’s filesystem - but it doesn’t properly validate requests, which allows an attacker to write a web shell into a file path and achieve RCE. The third vulnerability, also in PSEMHUB, is a deserialization of untrusted data flaw. An attacker can use a file-write vulnerability to plant a malicious XML file inside a PeopleSoft directory that stores environment configuration data, then wait for PSEMHUB to initialize, such as after a service or system restart. This triggers deserialization of the malicious XML file, potentially allowing the attacker to achieve RCE. “Attackers can combine these vulnerabilities to compromise affected instances of PeopleSoft,” Gould warned.®

Ukrainian ransomware crook Artem Stryzhak has been sentenced to 70 months in the slammer by a New York federal court for his role as an affiliate of the Nefilim and Hive ransomware gangs. Prosecutors believe the cybercriminal began working with Nefilim in or around June 2021, while living in Barcelona, Spain. The Nefilim ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operation was known for targeting wealthy companies, with its operators encouraging affiliates to pursue businesses capable of paying substantial ransom demands. One of Nefilim's most high-profile attacks was on Australian logistics giant Toll Group in 2020, encrypting its files roughly three months after it suffered a separate Mailto ransomware attack. Court documents [PDF] state that Stryzhak agreed with alleged Nefilim boss Volodymyr Tymoshchuk, who remains at large, to pay the ransomware crew a 20 percent cut of the ransom proceeds he collected. Tymoshchuk told Stryzhak that his preference was for attacks to target companies based in the US, Canada, and Australia that turn over more than $100 million annually. This guidance was soon tweaked to encourage targeting companies in the same regions with more than $200 million in annual revenue. Prosecutors claim that around the time Stryzhak joined forces with Nefilim, he also signed up to the Hive ransomware operation as "one of its earliest affiliates," and used its platform to attack approximately seven victims. Hive's operators claimed they targeted circa 1,500 victims worldwide between June 2021 and January 2023. According to separate court documents [PDF], Hive's victims included a law firm and an Ohio hospital, which paid approximately $1.7 million in Bitcoin after the gang initially demanded $2 million during the COVID-19 pandemic. Before its infrastructure was seized in an international law enforcement operation in January 2023, Hive was known for attacking healthcare facilities during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as being one of the ransomware groups that battered Costa Rica in 2022. Brett Leatherman, assistant director at the FBI’s cyber branch, described Stryzhak as a “prolific cybercriminal” who played a role in groups that were responsible for more than $100 million in victim damages. “Today’s sentence reflects the seriousness of Stryzhak’s crimes and demonstrates the FBI’s global reach and extensive network of international partners,” he said. “Multiple field offices contributed to this investigation, and our work does not end here. We will continue to leverage every tool at our disposal to track down Stryzhak’s co-conspirators and hold them accountable, including Volodymyr Viktorovych Tymoshchuk.” Stryzhak was arrested by Spanish police in June 2024 before being extradited to the US in April 2025. In announcing Stryzhak's sentencing, the Justice Department took the opportunity to remind the public that rewards totaling up to $11 million are available for qualifying information about alleged Nefilim operator Volodymyr Tymoshchuk and other key ransomware suspects. ®

Cisco has open sourced a behavior detection engine that watches AI agents, to help security teams prevent rogue agents from going off the rails like they did with the Hugging Face hack – or worse. It’s called Project Quarry, and it aims to provide a “shared language” for evaluating agent behavior, along the lines of what Snort, which Cisco also maintains, did for detecting malicious network traffic and what YARA did for rule-based malware identification. Most detection tools rely on specific interactions with an AI model or agent. Did it attempt prompt injection? Or did the agent call an attack tool? “But what is missing is the entire context under which something may occur,” Amy Chang, head of AI threat and security research at Cisco, said in an exclusive interview with The Register. She likened this to credit card fraud detection. Without context, individual transactions such as a small test charge or a single purchase in a location far away from a card-holder's usual location may not raise any flags. “And then you try again,” making another fraudulent purchase, “and that went through, too. So now I’m gonna buy the PS5,” Chang said. “Those are the things that Quarry addresses by taking into consideration the entire agent session,” she explained. “One tool call may seem in-scope until you realize that that next step is taking that information and sending it to an attacker-controlled inbox or server.” Even data theft is a sequence and not a single agentic action. Agentic AI security firm Invariant Labs demonstrated this with a proof-of-concept attack against GitHub's MCP server that hijacked a user's agent via a malicious GitHub Issue, and coerced it into leaking data from private repositories. Simply reading a configuration file, or sending a request to an external endpoint may be legitimate agentic actions. However, combining the two can lead to data exfiltration – and shows “why action relationships matter,” wrote Chang and fellow Cisco researchers Adam Swanda, Ravikumar Balakrishnan, and Konstantin Berlin in a blog post about Quarry shared with The Register ahead of publication “A policy can produce a finding when the trace shows a sensitive file read followed within a defined window by an external send,” they wrote. “The risk comes from the relationship between the two actions, so the finding should preserve evidence from both." Quarry covers single- and multi-turn large language model conversations, agents, tool use, Model Context Protocol (MCP) interactions, and multimodal inputs. In addition to the open source code itself, the project’s GitHub repository includes installation instructions, supported Python versions, plugins for Claude Code, Codex and other MCP-compatible agents, configuration examples, rule-writing guidance, and a rule starter pack. For instance, with the rule pack, “If a base-64 encoded malware is somewhere in the tool call, that would result in a block,” Chang said. The rule format looks similar to a YARA or Snort rule, with a header that details the traffic to examine, content to match, and metadata for tracking the rule. Here’s a Quarry rule that flags an agent that reads a credentials file: While the Cisco Ai researchers have not run Quarry against data describing the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident, they suggest that if the intrusion had been read as a complete, step-by-step record of a single session, there were several points where the AI agents’ steps would have given a Quarry rule something to act on and flag for humans. For example, Quarry would probably have flagged internet access from a sandbox. “The rule can flag specific tool calls that reach an external server asset that wasn’t in the task’s allow list,” Chang said. “Another one would be credentials found and used somewhere else.” According to OpenAI’s technical report about the Hugging Face intrusion, this is exactly what happened on July 10, when an agent validated 14 exposed Hugging Face tokens with write access and shared them. “The rule would flag that there was a credential in the tool result that then called an outside service, which is likely not within the parameters of what you would want to do in this case,” Chang said. “We don't want you to go and search for credentials that may have been leaked or inadvertently exposed and then utilize them to conduct a task.” The Cisco team is quick to say that rules along are not a substitute for chain-of-thought monitors, or other forms of human oversight – but they do help record a pattern that other teams can then “review, test, and apply to their own agents,” they wrote. Herein also lies the benefit of open source, and a collective approach to defending against adversarial use of AI, Chang said. “Do we have all the answers? No,” Chang said. “We all see slices of the problem, and it’s important for us to share what we see.”®

UK domain registrar 123 Reg (no relation – Ed) says it was the victim of an “AI-driven cyberattack” that exposed customer data. Customers began receiving their notification emails this week, informing them that their contact information, "related customer relationship data," company VAT numbers, and "product information from an application programming interface (API)" were compromised. A company spokesperson elaborated, saying this means that names, phone numbers, countries, language and currency preferences, account creation dates, the products on the account, and marketing preferences were affected. 123 Reg described the September 18 intrusion as "the first known AI-driven cyberattack against our company," and told The Register that early signs point toward a China-nexus attacker. "Our investigation identified IP addresses that we assessed to be the core attacker infrastructure, which were hosted in China and Singapore, indicating a strong Chinese nexus," the spokesperson said.  "Our investigation further identified AI cyberattack 'skills' hosted on Chinese infrastructure, including copies of skills open sourced by Anthropic and several other AI exploitation frameworks and scripts." They went on to say that many of the artefacts left behind led 123 Reg to suspect that a Chinese state-sponsored group, known for abusing Claude Code in attacks against at least 30 organizations, could be behind the break-in. There is also a suspicion that the same group that hit a number of South Korea’s financial institutions using open-source Chinese AI tool ARTEX, was behind the attack on 123 Reg too. "The TA's mirror of 'anthropic_skills,' and the account naming conventions found on the Chinese servers are consistent with preparation of this class of AI-augmented operation," the spokesperson told us.  "In addition, on October 7, 2026, CrowdStrike published CSA-261162, describing an unknown, likely Chinese-speaking actor that targeted several South Korean financial organizations starting in late September 2026, which is the same period during which we were attacked. "That actor used ARTEX, an open-source Chinese-developed agentic penetration-testing tool released in July 2026, which was also observed to be used in the attack that targeted us." The GoDaddy-owned registrar reported the attack to law enforcement agencies, brought in outside cybersecurity support, and notified the FTC, as well as the data protection authorities in the UK and EU. The company spokesperson added that it worked with Singapore-based ISPs to shut down the attacker's servers in the region, which helped disrupt the attack, in addition to "other actions by us and industry partners." 123 Reg's email to customers stated the attacker's activity "was limited to reading" customer data, although the spokesperson told us "it's possible they created copies of the information," and that this is what prompted the notification. The registrar urged customers to stay alert to the potential misuse of their data, and to treat communications appearing to come from the company with caution. "If you receive a message or call and aren't sure it's from 123 Reg, go directly to our website and log in," the email said. "We will never contact you to request your password, payment details, or verification codes by email, text, or phone. "We also strongly recommend turning on two-step verification (2SV), which helps keep your account protected even if someone tricks you into sharing your password. You can find instructions for setting up 2SV in your 123 Reg account. "We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused." ®

An autonomous AI agent discovered four vulnerabilities in the decades-old, widely used EPICS (Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System) open source software toolkit, including a critical flaw that could allow remote attackers to execute code on systems used to control particle accelerators and fusion experiments. The bugs include a critical, 9.8-rated under CVSS v3.1 integer overflow vulnerability (CVE-2026-114595), leading to an attacker-controlled out-of-bounds heap write and potentially remote code execution; an 8.2-rated, high-severity, improper message-length validation flaw (CVE-2026-114596), causing an out-of-bounds memory write and controller-process crash; a 7.5-rated, high-severity insufficient bounds checking bug (CVE-2026-114597) that allows out-of-bounds memory reads and process crashes; and a 7.5-rated, high-severity type confusion flaw (CVE-2026-114598) that can lead to denial of service and could expose adjacent memory contents. All four affect EPICS Base, which is used to operate some of the world's largest scientific research projects and facilities, and organizations should update to version 7.0.11, which includes the fixes. “Successful exploitation of these vulnerabilities could allow an attacker to cause a denial-of-service condition, corrupt memory, disclose sensitive information, or potentially execute arbitrary code,” the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) warned in a Tuesday advisory. An AI agent called Cipher independently found all four previously unknown security holes - investigating and testing the unfamiliar EPICS system, and validating the four exploits - in three hours and 49 minutes, Causal Security co-founder Shubham Raj told The Register. “The initial investigation required no human intervention, followed by one instruction authorizing deeper exploitability testing in a secure environment,” Raj said. Earlier this year, Causal Security’s Cipher, which Raj described as “a fully autonomous super hacker that can reason across the technology stack,” found multiple critical attack paths in power-grid systems used across North America and Europe, prompting an October 8 security advisory from CISA. EPICS, originally developed by Los Alamos National Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory, is used to build and remotely control distributed Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems, connecting operators to physical devices. It’s used in around 90 major scientific, university, and industrial projects and facilities globally including Argonne National Laboratory's Advanced Photon Source and ITER's fusion reactor control system. All four of these flaws illustrate how AI agents are really good at finding vulnerabilities in industrial and operational technologies - systems and equipment that used to be able to rely on obscurity to protect them from hackers - and add to defenders' concerns that it's only a matter of time until an autonomous cyberattack shuts down critical services, like power grids or water systems. These are the types of digital intrusions that can cause physical harm. Raj points to CVE-2026-114595, the critical integer-overflow vulnerability, as an example. “It allows attacker-controlled network data to cause an out-of-bounds heap memory write, with potential for remote code execution,” he told us. “EPICS controllers sit between operators and physical equipment, handling measurements, commands, and control functions,” he continued. “Operationally: Imagine a particle accelerator in the middle of an expensive experiment. An attacker could potentially crash a controller, interrupt critical measurements or control functions, and force operators to halt the experiment. That could mean lost experimental work, significant downtime, and expensive recovery.” Plus, if an attacker was able to develop an RCE exploit, this could allow them to “take control of the affected process, manipulate readings, interfere with control functions, or disrupt the equipment connected to it,” Raj said. The prerequisite for exploiting these vulns in a real scientific facility is being able to reach the vulnerable EPICS services on a facility's control network. But this could occur if the networks weren’t sufficiently segmented, or another system had access to the vulnerable EPICS network. “Once an attacker is able to find a network, which is either misconfigured or they are able to reach, it’s pretty easy to carry out the attacks,” Raj said, adding that exploitation wouldn’t require deep OT knowledge, or understanding of how particle accelerators or fusion reactors work. “Someone with conventional exploitation skills could investigate them, and increasingly capable AI systems could help develop exploits without requiring specialized OT expertise.” Manipulating specific physical processes does require additional knowledge, he added. “But an attacker doesn't need to understand the physics of a particle accelerator to disrupt the software controlling it. Crashing critical processes or interrupting monitoring and control can already have serious operational consequences. What's changing is that attackers may no longer need years of specialized expertise just to discover these weaknesses.” ®

The University of New Mexico is canceling classes across the medicine, nursing, and pharmacy faculties for a second day amid continued efforts to recover from a "cybersecurity event." The attack targeted the Health Sciences Center on Monday, the Uni revealed, forcing it to shut down systems, cancel appointments and clinics at UNM Health hospitals, and divert ambulances to healthcare facilities in nearby Albuquerque and Santa Fe. Hospital appointments and clinics return to normal today, although nonessential UNM Health Sciences Center staff are being asked to remain at home. "The University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center (HSC), which includes the UNM Health clinical delivery system, experienced a cybersecurity event Monday, Oct. 26, 2026," the university said in a statement on Monday evening. "HSC information technology security teams immediately took steps to contain the event and protect the network. They also notified state and federal law enforcement and engaged external partners to assist with the investigation. "Leadership activated an Emergency Operations Center to coordinate the response and provide guidance to HSC employees, students, and UNM Health system frontline providers." The university announced the attack at 1430 local time, immediately cancelling all remaining clinics and classes, dismissing everyone other than critical and clinical staff, and urging patients not to attend HSC facilities. It has not commented on the nature of the cyberattack, although that hasn’t stopped researchers from speculating about ransomware’s involvement. Rumors were fuelled by the newly assembled BYOD ransomware group claiming responsibility for the attack on Monday afternoon. It's important to note that just because a purported ransomware group took credit for the attack, it does not mean they actually were responsible, nor does it mean they deployed a ransomware/locker payload as part of the attack. However, the group's take on the digital raid is that it compromised 36,000 machines, "both [Active Directory] forests," two Oracle databases, the personal data belonging to every student and employee, as well as internal emails and data from other systems. As Reg readers know, a cybercriminal's word is never one to be trusted. Yet BYOD's claims about breaching Trump Mobile's customer database appear to have held up It was a bold debut, even for a ransomware crew: BYOD’s first named victim was the US president's smartphone biz, with data allegedly leaked for all 3,615 customers. A rival group, EndZone, claimed a similar breach a week earlier, and some experts suggested the two could be one and the same. In May, the Trump Mobile was found leaking thousands of people's data via a poorly secured website. The Trump Organization did not respond to our requests for more information in either of these cases. A UNM spokesperson declined to answer our additional questions, directing us back to its public statement. ®

The US government's cybersecurity watchdog has confirmed attackers are exploiting both critical PHP2Shell vulnerabilities, giving federal agencies three days to patch the bugs that have wreaked havoc across the web over the past week. CISA added CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619 to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog on Monday, setting an October 29 deadline for federal civilian agencies to address the flaws. The move marks a shift from last week, when the agency warned of the danger posed by PHP2Shell but said it had not yet observed successful exploitation in the wild. Both bugs are rated 9.2 on the CVSS scale and can be exploited without authentication to run code on vulnerable PHP servers. That's bad news given how much of the web still relies on PHP, and just how many sites could be left exposed. Patches landed on October 21, but attackers had already beaten the maintainers to it. AWS spotted attempts to exploit the flaws as early as October 17, four days before the bugs were publicly disclosed. CISA's confirmation comes amid growing evidence that attackers are doing more than simply knocking on the door. On October 24, Perplexity security researcher Adel Karimi recorded 35 successful shell executions across three honeypots running PHP 8.4.26 under Apache mod_php. The attacks came from two IP addresses and used memory exhaustion and disclosure to achieve remote code execution. The attackers then tried to contact external servers using PHP, curl, and wget, although no additional malware was successfully downloaded. Karimi's findings were consistent with exploitation of CVE-2026-109618, but he found no evidence that the second PHP2Shell flaw was involved. He also warned that the honeypots used a favorable single-worker configuration, so the results don't necessarily reflect how reliably the exploit works against production servers. Still, attackers appear to be giving it a good go. Delft University's Threat Intelligence Lab has tracked more than 50,000 PHP2Shell exploitation requests from over 600 IP addresses across 70 countries. Of those, 171 addresses went beyond probing for vulnerable servers and started sending exploit code or malware droppers. CISA's confirmation also comes after some of the earlier reports of successful PHP2Shell attacks turned out to be rather premature. Sophos walked back its initial assessment after determining that the activity it observed amounted to scanning and failed attempts, while Palo Alto Networks withdrew claims linking the vulnerabilities to an intrusion at a European government agency. CISA has not disclosed which organizations have been compromised or provided details of the attacks behind its decision to add the flaws to KEV. The listing confirms that the agency considers both vulnerabilities actively exploited, but it does not confirm how many production systems have been successfully breached. For federal agencies, the clock is now ticking. CISA is also urging organizations outside the federal government to prioritize the fixes, although the deadline does not apply to them. Admins should update to PHP 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36, or 8.2.35, depending on their release branch. Those running older, unsupported versions face the added headache of upgrading or obtaining vendor-supported fixes, while systems that cannot be secured should be taken offline until the risk is addressed. And with CISA now officially acknowledging exploitation, anyone still waiting for more proof before patching may be waiting a little too long. ®

Microsoft has released another out-of-band update for Windows, but this one isn't an emergency fix for the latest breakages. This time, it's all about certificates. The non-security out-of-band release applies to supported OSes ranging from Windows 11 and Windows Server 2025, to Windows 10. It's all about updating the current certificate trust list (CTL) of devices that cannot access Microsoft's certificate-update service, or where automatic CTL updates are disabled. It also contains everything in the October 13 update, including the ongoing VPN issues and the change that could break on-premises Exchange Servers. There might also be oddities with Smart App Control, audio, and Remote Desktop connections for non-admin users, all of which are known issues in the October 13 update. These problems are not resolved in this patch, so be aware of this when installing it. It is also worth remembering that many devices will not need this version since the current certificate list updates usually come down through the update service. However, if that service isn't available or being used, it might be a good idea to get this out-of-band fix (while keeping the known issues in mind), since problems can occur when verifying certificates used by applications or websites. The OOB update came after Microsoft laid out its response to the compromised eMudhra certificate keys. The Indian certification authority's private keys were compromised earlier this month, requiring a massive cleanup effort. According to Microsoft, "they could potentially be used to create certificates or sign content that appeared to come from a trusted CA [certificate authority]." Like many other organizations, Microsoft moved swiftly to block the affected certificate authorities. It did so by updating its Windows Disallowed Certificate Trust List to block the affected certificates. There was also a separate CRLSet release for Edge and WebView2. According to the Windows behemoth, "On October 26, Microsoft released an out-of-band Windows update that removes seven certificates associated with the affected hierarchies: six eMudhra G3 roots and an AAA Certificate Services cross-sign, from the Windows trust list." Microsoft's out-of-band patches are usually released after the company breaks a product and needs to issue an emergency fix. This time, the revision is due to Somebody Else's Problem and a need to get a CTL update out to devices that are disconnected from CTL updates. ®

The cyberattack on Alternative for Germany (AfD), the country’s most prominent far-right political party, exposed hundreds of thousands of confidential emails and attachments, as well as more than 345,000 unique email addresses. Have I Been Pwned confirmed the scale of the breach for the first time today, after AfD officially disclosed the September attack on its hosting provider last week. AfD said in its statement that “only a few email accounts were illegally copied,” but admitted a large amount of the data was taken from them, resulting in an extensive data breach. The emails were added to what the party described as “an activist website,” which summarised the email chains into searchable topics and has led to the publication of various revelations, such as a party co-leader’s opinions on colleagues’ “deeply problematic” racial discourse. Per a report from investigative journalist Lilith Wittmann, citing conversations with the cybercriminals responsible for the hack-and-leak job and party sources, the attack was first spotted on September 9 and started with a compromise of a poorly protected WordPress site. The same report claimed the criminals gained persistent access to the servers operated by the hosting provider, identified as AfD-owned Alternita Dienstleistungs GmbH, and exfiltrated more than a terabyte of data. No official sources have verified the hackers’ claims about how the attack unfolded. The Register contacted Alternita Dienstleistungs for its take. AfD said the owners of the affected email accounts have been notified, and that it reported the attack to security authorities. “We are deeply concerned by what has happened,” the party said in an October 20 statement. “Such a digital attack is illegal and a criminal offense. Furthermore, it is an attack on the German party system and thus on democracy. “We are extremely worried that, apparently, the content of the stolen documents was analyzed using a very rudimentary AI. This analysis focused on keywords, not the context. The alleged scandals published so far do not stand up to scrutiny – a fact that, thankfully, is being confirmed by a growing number of commentators on social media.” Among the AI-generated summaries compiled by the “activist site” are chains supposedly expressing views related to Holocaust denial, racist and antisemitic rants, the 9/11 disaster, forged documents, and more. Der Spiegel sifted through the raw files and reported that party leader Alice Weidel seemingly knew about illegal donations related to the 2017 federal elections weeks before she previously said she did. The AfD's position is that the AI summaries of the emails are not to be trusted, but it has not specifically commented on the veracity of the raw email files available for download via torrent. It did not immediately respond to our request for input, but has told reporters previously that it will not comment on whether the emails, or the stories that have been written based on them, are to be trusted. ®

Japanese ISP GMO Internet has warned customers the cloudy desktop service it offers as an ideal foreign exchange trading environment was compromised by an attacker, and that it had been slow to improve the service's security. GMO runs a service called Onamae.com Desktop Cloud and last week admitted “a third party had installed malicious programs in the server environments of some customers.” That’s never welcome news but is an especially poor outcome because the servers host cloudy Windows desktops that GMO recommends customers use to host foreign exchange trading applications. In later updates the company revealed that some customers reported “unauthorized operations were performed on their trading accounts” and advised that third parties had probably seen users’ passwords for trading services. The next day, the company advised users to immediately change passwords for their trading accounts, and to do so using a device that they don’t use for trading. The company has since admitted that its Onamae.com Desktop Cloud service’s “systems had security vulnerabilities, that its environment was accessed without authorization, and that customer information was taken outside the Company.” “Some customers have also reported transactions in their trading accounts that they do not recognize.” Those transactions have GMO sufficiently worried that it contacted major trading services, asked them to forcibly terminate all active sessions, monitor for unauthorized transactions, and to block trade requests coming from the Onamae.com Desktop Cloud. Not paying, or complaining GMO said it has “received a demand for money from a person believed to be the attacker. We have also been told that, if we refuse, the attacker will take actions such as publishing information about the Company and our customers.” The attacker wants $50 million. The company won’t pay because it feels “complying would not guarantee that the obtained information is deleted or that its misuse is prevented.” Investigations into the incident continue, with GMO warning that 26,739 VDI servers may have been hit by the attack, and that users’ personal devices may be at risk. The company is offering all users a ¥5,000 ($32) condolence payment and promised to make good on any trading losses caused by the attack. This incident may have quite a blast radius, as GMO has warned that some trading apps may keep sessions alive even after passwords change. “Check your securities or FX company's guidance or your account page, and either disconnect all active sessions or ask the company's support desk to disconnect them,” GMO advised. That ¥5,000 isn’t going to get anywhere near paying for the work customers will do to sort this out. GMO CEO Masatoshi Kumagai acknowledged that in a blog post in which he described the payment as “a token of our initial sincerity towards our customers who have experienced inconvenience and worry.” “We will dedicate the full resources of our group to providing a free alternative environment for six months, fundamentally overhauling our system infrastructure, and conducting a thorough investigation into the cause and preventing recurrence with the help of external experts,” he added. But he also admitted that GMO knew the service’s security could be improved. “Our in-house white-hat hackers had previously pointed out areas for improvement to the team,” he wrote. “The team took these points to heart and was working on countermeasures.” “However, while we proceeded cautiously, considering the impact on service availability and prioritizing other issues, our response lacked sufficient depth and speed, allowing the attackers to exploit the vulnerability. I deeply regret that, despite having professionals on staff, we failed to fully translate their expertise into effective defenses as an organization.” The CEO also said GMO can’t secure itself without government help. “I've been involved in this world for 31 years, since the dawn of the internet industry,” he wrote. “The cyberspace that I built with my colleagues, believing it would bring smiles to people's faces, is now on the verge of being completely destroyed by malicious actors.” “The ease with which open weight AI models can be combined and spread into countless attack tools has transformed cyberattacks, which once required advanced skills, into an era where anyone can easily carry them out,” he added, before claiming that GMO Group’s cybersecurity operation “has confirmed that the source of an unauthorized access attack targeting approximately 20 Japanese companies was the misuse of ‘ARTEX,’ an autonomous AI penetration testing tool originally intended for defense.” Kumagai thinks public/private partnerships are needed to improve infosec across Japan. “Yesterday, we submitted a proposal to the government to ‘apply proactive cyber defense,’” he wrote. “We are by no means trying to shift the blame for our company's actions onto the government and beg for a bailout,” he wrote, but argued that unless Japan implements national-level defenses, more such incidents are unavoidable. ®