DigiCert has admitted that a botched server migration left an internal system exposed to the internet for more than a year, allowing an unauthorized user to access customer data, including passports, driver's licenses, and other identity documents. The certificate authority has begun notifying affected customers but has yet to disclose how many people had their information exposed. In an email seen by The Register, DigiCert confirmed the compromised information included names, business email addresses, phone numbers, and business addresses. Some records may also have contained passports, driver's licenses, utility bills, or other identification documents. "We are completing a review of identification documents to determine the specific individuals involved," DigiCert told those affected, adding that it would notify those people once the review was complete. DigiCert's incident report traces the blunder back to February 2025, when an internal business system was moved from a VPN-protected network to a different availability zone. That change also opened the system up to the public internet, where it sat for more than 16 months without DigiCert realizing. The archive used the same account management platform as DigiCert's customer-facing products, including a self-registration feature that was never supposed to be available on the internal system. This allowed outsiders to create accounts without multifactor authentication and, thanks to a separate permissions flaw, use them to browse archived customer records. DigiCert found the unauthorized accounts on June 18, 2026, but initially dismissed them as harmless because they weren't assigned to an application. A security researcher raised the alarm about the account creation issue three days later, but it took until July 2 for DigiCert to shut it down. Unfortunately, someone had already been poking around. It wasn't until October 12 that DigiCert began investigating whether customer information had actually been accessed. On October 19, it confirmed that an unauthorized account had accessed a subset of archived records between June 27 and July 2. DigiCert described the affected records as a "small proportion" of its archive but hasn't disclosed how many customers or individuals were caught up in the breach. The company did not respond to The Register’s questions at the time of publication. DigiCert's postmortem makes for uncomfortable reading. The server move didn't get a proper security review, monitoring failed to pick up suspicious activity, and the access controls weren't much use against self-registered accounts. The company has since switched off self-registration, tightened network access, and added monitoring that might have come in handy a few months earlier. Certificate authority operations, CertCentral, and DigiCert ONE were unaffected, the company said, adding that customer credentials and issued certificates remain secure. It also found no evidence that the unauthorized account had been used to issue, revoke, or validate certificates. That’s good news for anyone worried about their certificates, but less so for those who handed DigiCert a copy of their passport. ®

The UK government is paving the way for rules requiring essential service operators and digital providers to guard against losing control of AI agents and report incidents when safeguards fail. An amendment to the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill, which is passing through Parliament, would give ministers powers to regulate the deployment and reporting of agentic AI in certain organizations. The new clause was introduced during the bill's third reading in the House of Lords this week. In an explanatory note, ministers outlined plans for safeguards, notification of affected organizations, preservation of evidence, and government-led incident reviews. The measures would require consultation and parliamentary approval through secondary legislation. The move follows a series of incidents. Last month, OpenAI revealed that its agents repeatedly strayed beyond their intended scope, prompting the company to notify more than 100 organizations about the issues. That came after July's incident, in which an OpenAI agent accessed the internet and breached machine learning platform Hugging Face. The episode, and the potential for more damage from poorly designed AI agent deployments, have prompted MPs to question whether UK law can deal with such threats. Speaking to The Register, Stuart Davey, a partner at law firm Pinsent Masons, described the clause as "quite novel." Rather than directly imposing new duties, it would allow ministers to introduce rules and investigatory powers covering regulated organizations. Davey said that could include powers "to look where there has been such an AI agentic compromise or issue, and do some things... appoint inspectors, enter and search premises, seize and retain documents." Under the proposals, the minister could confer certain powers on regulators, requiring action from targeted organizations. Potentially affected organizations include gas and electricity suppliers, managed service providers, and cloud providers deploying AI agents for customers. Foundation model developers would not automatically fall within scope simply because they build the underlying technology. "Where there's a security or operational compromise in relation to a relevant network or information system, that would seem to capture those managed service providers or cloud computing providers who are using AI, and there's that loss of control," said Davey. He advised cloud and managed service providers to track whether the proposed measures become law. Evin McMullen, CEO and co-founder of AI identity and control infrastructure company AmanTrue, said the amendment recognizes loss of oversight or control as a security risk but does not itself impose new duties. "The amendment allows future regulations to introduce investigatory and enforcement powers where an incident involves an AI agent, targeting organizations running essential digital services," he said. "The deployer of an AI agent chooses its permissions, connects it to systems, and gives it access to data. When something goes wrong, the deployer is the party that will be expected to explain what happened. "Accountability stays with the organization that put the agent into the system, and ultimately with executives and the board. Whether model builders are captured will depend on how the regulations are written and whether a builder sits in a regulated category or a regulated supply chain." ®

Welcome to Friday and therefore to a fresh edition of On Call, The Register's weekly tale of tech support trials and tribulations that readers kindly share. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Mason," who told us he once worked at a hospital doing tech support for its research labs. "One of the labs was for a doctor who was one of the world's top organ transplant researchers" Mason told On Call. The doctor was also a voracious consumer of – ahem – adult entertainment, a habit that saw his PC and other machines around the lab often come down with a nasty case of malware. Mason got to clean that up, sometimes multiple times in a single week. The doctor's foibles were widely known around the hospital, as was the fact that his activities violated several workplace policies. Mason pointed this out to his boss every time he cleaned up a fresh malware outbreak but such was the doctor's status that management never intervened. And then the hospital was hit by a nasty cyber-worm that did a lot of damage. During the cleanup, Mason's colleagues found logs that showed the doctor's PC was the source of the infection, and that he had been indulging in his online hobby at the time the worm arrived. Mason assumed this would be the moment at which the doctor would finally be held accountable and face disciplinary action. Instead the doctor made a bargain with the IT department to henceforth use only a designated PC when pursuing – ahem – personal and/or intimate matters. And he would only use office PCs for actual work. The hospital's tech team rescued a PC from its e-waste pile for this job. "Get this thing going and deliver it to Doctor Pervert," Mason's boss ordered. By this stage, Mason had had enough. He escalated his protests, telling his boss that indulging this doctor was unprofessional, likely exposed the hospital to lawsuits, wasted IT department resources, and was just wrong. "What do you want to hear?" his boss replied. "The CIO told me do this or get another job." After Mason prepped that PC, he only needed to clean up malware about once a year – after the poor machine was so overrun with malware that it no longer served the doctor's purposes. Mason left the hospital while this PC was still in place. "You'll be shocked, no doubt, to learn that years later the doctor's graduate students filed a lawsuit," he told On Call. "And that the separate fun-time computer was one of the pieces of evidence that the hospital knew about his – ahem – proclivities and not just ignored them but facilitated them." Have you been asked to cover up revolting behavior? Or ignore policy? Click here to share your story with On Call. It's our policy to tell a great tech support story week, so we appreciate every contribution. ®

Nation-state actors and criminals likely exploited the PHP2SHELL vulnerability before its disclosure, according to Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince. “These vulnerabilities, like the PHP vulnerabilities that were disclosed the other day, had been in the wild for years,” Prince said on the company’s third quarter earnings call. “We're going back through our logs looking for any evidence that hackers or nation-state actors or others had been using them in the past. I know that we're going to find examples of that.” That was just one of the warnings he offered on the call, among them that some of Cloudflare’s customers believe AI agents are “a bane to their business and want to keep them away.” To explain why, Prince hypothesized that he could use an agent to find him a restaurant to eat at after he finishes his day of investor relations duties. “It might go and scour the internet and look at 1,000 different restaurants' websites, pull down 1,000 different menus, and then I might choose to only go to one of those,” he said. “The problem is that 999 of those restaurants have now had a cost that is just been applied to them, but they are not getting any benefit.” The CEO admitted that web searches have always driven some low-value traffic but feels the volume of agentic activity – which Cloudflare has previously predicted will be one thousand times greater than clicks from humans – means the problem is now at a different scale. Prince also had bad news for Kubernetes aficionados, because he thinks containers might become another casualty of the agentic age. The CEO allowed that containers are “a significant improvement over bare metal or even virtual machines,” and said they fueled the growth of hyperscale clouds and mobile applications. But he thinks containers are already cooked. “The container-based architecture of the hyperscalers and neoclouds just can't keep up in a cost-effective way with the new agentic paradigms of today,” he argued, again citing the 1000:1 ratio of bot:human traffic Cloudflare expects to see online any year now. That’s a Cloudflare-centric view, because Prince pitched the company’s serverless “Workers” service as an alternative to containers. The company also offers products that can either block agents, ameliorate the cost and traffic impacts of agentic activity, or allow organizations to monetize traffic generated by AI. Prince said demand for those products is growing fast, claiming that since July 1st, “approximately five percent” of the web opted in to Cloudflare’s content protection products. The CEO said Meta is already a customer, and said Zuck’s new “Muse” agents will benefit Cloudflare by creating more agentic traffic that third parties want to tame. He also pointed to year-on-year revenue growth of 39 percent, which saw quarterly revenue reach a record $782.5 million. And he thinks there are better days ahead, due to the terrible state of security. “It may seem like the sky is falling with the number of new security vulnerabilities that have been reported over the last few weeks,” Prince said. “I wish I could tell you we were through the worst, but we're not.” He thinks Cloudflare can profit from security misery because the extent of its activities and client base mean it is “among the first to receive quiet disclosure of new vulnerabilities” and remediates them before disclosure. Investors thought this all made sense, and in after-hours trading sent Cloudflare shares up by around 15 percent, meaning it recovered and then improved on losses that it incurred earlier after major US indices dropped around four percent as investors who worry tech stocks are overvalued. ®

India’s Computer Emergency Response Team has warned the nation’s financial services industry of a “significant escalation” in attacks by what it describes as an “AI-assisted financial threat actor” that has re-targeted victims after they flubbed remediation efforts. CERT-IN first detected the attacks in October and issued advisory in which it warned digital lending platforms, fintech entities, payment service providers, and wallet operators that attackers were targeting internet-facing applications, exposed APIs and privileged endpoints. If the attackers found a way in, they tried to use payment APIs to steal money. On Thursday, the CERT published an update in which it said it continues to hear of successful attacks, including from outfits that tried to remediate their systems after earlier incidents. “The same entities have been deliberately re-targeted, including after incomplete remediation and attacks have been timed to coincide with holidays, weekends and other low-monitoring windows to delay detection and response,” the CERT warned. CERT-IN has decided the attackers need a name and chose “CRAFTY FALCON.” The security org has also revealed that the crew uses AI-enhanced tools including the ARTEX pen-testing tool, the Cairn attack search engine, and the CyberStrikeAI framework – all of which have been linked to users who appear to speak Chinese. CRAFTY FALCON’s tactics see it go looking for internet-exposed environments used for testing or development, where it finds artefacts such as shared credentials, tokens, or network paths that help it move into production systems. If it gets in, the crew re-writes victims’ applications so they do things like make unauthorized API calls. Victims’ defenses assume that only legitimate apps would call those APIs, so activity conducted by the re-written apps aren’t flagged as an attack. Even if victims suspect an attack, they have a lot to cope with because CERT-IN says CRAFTY FALCON creates many “functionally identical variants refined in rapid succession; a pattern consistent with AI-generated code and iterative AI-assisted development.” The crew also quickly exploits newly discovered vulnerabilities to keep its attacks fresh. Once it gets a toehold, the criminal crew makes tiny payments of about $0.01 to test if its attacks work. If those transfers work, CRAFTY FALCON makes larger payments. When the target is a cryptocurrency exchange or virtual digital asset service provider, the crew steals wallet keys and empties cryptocurrency wallets. Vendors of observability tools will be warming up their Indian sales teams today, because CERT-IN’s advice to Indian businesses includes improving their ability to log events, monitor for anomalies in real time, and send alerts. It also urged keeping test environments off the internet, and restricting access to cloud resources because CRAFTY FALCON is fond of using them to run its attacks. CERT-IN also warns that the attacks are “active and escalating” and therefore worthy of 24x7 monitoring. Interestingly, the CERT’s advisory mentions attacks on “entities” across banking, financial services, and insurance, but only names the kind of businesses mentioned above as having reported attacks. The Register points this out because India is home to literally thousands of banks, many of them small operations that sometimes lack basic infosec protections. CRAFTY FALCON therefore has a target-rich environment in India should it choose to expand its activities. ®

If you have any industrial smart freezers, look out. The US federal government is urging owners and operators to disconnect them from the internet, apply patches, change default passwords, and take other security measures to prevent the kind of attacks that have become prevalent in Europe. “We are seeing these systems targeted across critical infrastructure sectors globally, putting inventory and equipment at risk,” FBI Cyber Branch Operations Director Brett Leatherman said in a statement. Since mid-October, unknown miscreants have hacked thousands of remote-controlled refrigeration systems across hundreds of grocery stores in France, Belgium, Ireland, Luxembourg, and Sweden. The attacks increase the temperature inside fridges to highs of 50ºC (122°F), spoiling food, and sparking fires. The Register asked the FBI if it has documented any successful or attempted attacks against refrigeration and cold chain monitoring systems in America. We had not received a response to our questions at the time of publication, nor are we aware of any documented digital attacks against these systems in American supermarkets. But there are signs that stateside operators are aware of the issue. Dutch grocery giant Ahold Delhaize, which operates US supermarket chains Food Lion, Giant Food, and Stop & Shop, last month said it proactively took IT systems offline following a cyberattack that affected most of its US and European brands. Delhaize supermarkets in Europe are among those hit by the destructive freezer attacks. The Pentagon is also reportedly treating a series of freezer malfunctions that spoiled food at military bases across the US in August as a suspected cyberattack, according to Reuters, which cited four officials familiar with the matter. In a Thursday advisory, the US FBI, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Health and Human Services, and departments of Agriculture and Transportation warned organizations about the ongoing cyber threats facing operators of industrial refrigeration and cold-chain monitoring systems. “The actors may exploit vulnerabilities or weaknesses in unpatched or internet-accessible controllers to remotely alter settings and force units into continuous heating and defrost cycles, which can cause widespread inventory loss and equipment hazards,” the agencies said. Attackers exploit these flaws by bypassing authentication, injecting arbitrary code, and abusing weak configurations, according to the feds. Once criminals gain access to the systems, they can change the temperature to spoil food or temperature-controlled medications, start fires, and ultimately harm people who consume products that haven’t been stored at proper temperatures. How to stay frosty To prevent these scenarios, the government organizations urge owners and operators to “immediately” implement best practices and security protections. First and foremost on the list: do not expose industrial control systems and devices to the public internet. Iranian hackers used internet-accessible programmable logic controllers (PLCs) to break into more than 100 US water systems in July. This sort of exposed device, which often lacks password protection, is a boon to miscreants looking for an easy button to gain access to critical facilities. “Should remote access be necessary, protect it by using a firewall or edge device and updating it to the latest version to reduce security vulnerabilities,” the feds advise. Other recommended tactics include: Create a dedicated VLAN for operational technology (OT) devices, to isolate industrial devices from business networks. Replace default passwords with strong passwords and policies, turning on phishing-resistant multifactor authentication (MFA) whenever possible. Apply patches in a timely manner, and retire and replace legacy devices that no longer receive security updates from the manufacturer. Define and maintain a device and IP allow-list, and limit access to OT devices to only those on the list. Maintain and test backups. These should be kept offsite and offline. And finally: enable logging and regularly review logs for any unusual activity.®

Whether through malware or other means, devices associated with the White House network appear to be serving as residential proxy exit nodes, potentially posing security risks to one of the world's most sensitive networks. News of the security snafu comes from security firm Layer3 Intel, which reported this week that it discovered the likely illicit activity thanks to its recently launched Residential Proxy Observatory. According to Layer3 founder Sergiy Usatyuk, the White House residential proxy activity might have gone unnoticed if not for the new tool. “The observatory is just a public interface to explore the data we've been collecting for the past year,” Usatyuk told The Register in an email. For those unfamiliar with residential proxies, they're like any old proxy network that obfuscates the location of a user, except in this case their exit nodes use IP addresses associated with residential internet connections, as opposed to datacenters. While many are legitimate, others are exploited by threat actors and used in the commission of cybercrimes, as the FBI warned earlier this year. The FBI bulletin, put out in March, warns users to protect their systems against hijacking via malware, illicit SDK partnerships, VPNs with hidden service terms that repurpose user computers as exit nodes, and other threats used to turn victims into nodes without their consent. Residential proxies are commonly used by threat actors to conceal command-and-control (C2) infrastructure, conduct phishing attacks, send spam, disguise malicious traffic, and the like, the FBI explained. According to Layer3, its data shows 28 distinct residential proxy services exiting into the White House network nearly every day between October 5 and November 3, with 236 separate exits in that period. Other residential proxy detection services logged the same information, Layer3 said. Most of the activity was happening in the evening, White House time, between 5 pm and midnight. That, Layer3 said, suggests someone at the White House - not a guest - has an infected device that’s serving as an exit, likely via an infected proxy SDK. If correct, that’s a problem. “Past research has shown that poorly secured proxy SDKs can allow internal network access and lateral movement,” Layer3 explained. “If an SDK on this network has the same kind of flaw, anyone buying proxy access could use it to reach internal systems.” In other words, this is a serious security risk, and one Usatyuk tells us could have been a problem for a while. “Our data retention period goes back to July 10,” the Layer3 founder explained. “Given that there was continuous activity for a matter of months and other res proxy detection services independently verified the data, it's likely that White House IPs have been used by res proxy networks for all sorts of activity for some time now.” Usatyuk said his firm’s data isn’t detailed enough to know how many machines are being used as exit nodes inside the White House network. He pointed us to an X post from security firm Synthient, which said it believes there are multiple Windows 10 and 11 devices on the White House network that likely have the Infatica SDK installed on them. Infatica offers a software development kit (SDK) that allows app developers to monetize users' internet connections by turning their devices into residential proxy exit nodes. The possibility that this software is running on devices associated with the White House network raises serious security concerns: Vulnerable proxy software could potentially provide attackers with a route into internal systems. Usatyuk told us that the most recent residential proxy activity on the White House network occurred Wednesday night, “hours after the blog went live,” but has since stopped. The US State Department contacted Layer3 Thursday morning to request a copy of the company’s logs, which Usatyuk tells us he’s sent over. “Hopefully they've figured out the situation,” Usatyuk added - and hopefully before any government secrets have been exposed. The White House didn't respond to questions for this story.®

On certain Linux systems, an attacker could gain root access by entering a password longer than 256 bytes. The vulnerability, dubbed *sshole by Wakefield researcher Özgün Kültekin, who discovered it, can only be exploited in very specific conditions. The flaw affects certain Linux systems using musl libc instead of the traditional GNU C library, and even then only those running OpenSSH's secure shell daemon without Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM) and with password authentication enabled. If those conditions are met, and at least one other account has a valid password hash, accounts that shouldn't accept passwords, such as root, key-only deployment users, and LDAP users, may be accessed by supplying a password between 257 and 1,024 characters. The targeted accounts must have an asterisk (*) in their password field, and direct root login remains subject to OpenSSH's configuration. That might seem niche, but sorry: It’s not. Musl libc is common in embedded Linux systems due to its low footprint. More critically than that, it's also the standard C library for Alpine Linux, which provides official cloud images for both AWS and Azure. Some Alpine systems running in those environments may therefore be vulnerable, depending on their configuration. Dawn of the *sshole The vulnerability in OpenSSH on musl-based Linux systems dates back to 2016, but Kültekin explains that its roots go back much further – to the BSD Unix era, actually. In 1980, Sun Microsystems cofounder and BSD Unix heavyweight Bill Joy was involved in the development of BSD Unix, whose password file contained a single asterisk in the /etc/passwd entry for the daemon user. The asterisk wasn't a password hash and effectively disabled password authentication for that account. Nowadays, password hashes typically live in /etc/shadow and contain hashed information that the system uses to verify a plaintext password entered by a user. Asterisks are still present for accounts that aren't supposed to accept password logins, but as Kültekin explains in his writeup, that isn't exactly a foolproof way to keep people out. The crypt() function, which generates password hashes for comparison with stored values, can return NULL if it can't compute a hash. Applications that fail to check that result may crash. Musl libc's developers instead chose to return a single character for certain failures, and they picked the asterisk. Musl also added SHA-512-based password hashing around the same time, which Kültekin notes gets slower the longer a password is, potentially leading to denial of service if someone floods a server with a super-long password. Musl capped passwords at 256 bytes, and you can likely see where this is going. In 2016, OpenSSH introduced a workaround to prevent attackers from enumerating valid account names through SSH. Before the change, sshd could reject authentication attempts for nonexistent users more quickly than those for valid accounts. Attempts against valid accounts took longer because the server had to hash the supplied password before rejecting it. The solution was to have sshd perform dummy password hashing for invalid users, using an appropriate hashing algorithm and salt to reduce differences in response times. On affected musl-based Linux systems, accounts marked with an asterisk instead of a password hash could be busted open by supplying a password longer than 256 bytes – a flaw dating back to 2016. Any musl-based Linux system running a vulnerable OpenSSH configuration without PAM, with password authentication enabled, at least one account marked with an asterisk, and another account with a valid password hash could be vulnerable to a *sshole attack. Luckily, OpenSSH acted fast to fix this issue, and any OpenSSH build 10.6p2 (released Thursday) or newer is protected. Alternatively, if you can’t update your OpenSSH implementation on an affected system, just disable password authentication and restart the SSH daemon and you should be all set. There’s no indication that vulnerable systems have been exploited, but if you want to check, Kültekin has included a simple CLI command in his writeup that can be used to check if any no-password accounts on a sensitive machine recently took a password. ®

Blockchain analysis outfit Chainalysis has confirmed that when attackers broke into its systems in October, they managed to grab usernames, password hashes, and live tokens. In an update written late Wednesday evening, the company, a leader in blockchain analysis which has some very high-profile global customers and partners, confirmed the impact of the attack for the first time. In previous updates, which Chainalysis has issued regularly since it detected the intrusion on October 30, it confirmed that user IDs, full names, email addresses, and organizational role labels were exposed. The news of password hashes and live tokens also being accessed reflects a worsening picture for the company. Chainalysis did not confirm the type of hashing algorithm it used to encrypt users' passwords, which makes it difficult to draw conclusions about the offline crackability of users' hashed credentials. Some users received emails instructing them to change their passwords, but Chainalysis said in its latest update that the password reset functionality is currently down. Nevertheless, users were also encouraged to change their passwords on any site where they reuse credentials. In addition to the exposed data, Chainalysis also detected "abnormal activity" on its transaction screening products, and has taken services down while "our team completes critical work." These include, but are not limited to, the Reactor blockchain investigation platform used by international law enforcement customers, the Data Solutions threat intelligence platform, and the KYT (know your transaction) anti-money laundering solution's user interface and login page. Regarding Reactor and the associated investigation data, Chainalysis said: "At this time, we continue to have no evidence that any investigations data has been accessed or Chainalysis attribution data has been manipulated." The company plans to reinstate KYT and the risk-intelligence Address Screening tool at some point today (Thursday November 5). Customers will have to provide the company’s support team or their account manager with trusted IP addresses, which will be added to an allowlist. From there, users can begin resetting their passwords. "We are working around the clock to harden our systems and bring Reactor and Data Solutions back online," Chainalysis said. "We will require additional protections to access accounts, including that every user will have to reset passwords and rotate API keys as appropriate. We will communicate these changes as necessary. "We know how business-critical these services are to our customers, and we are working expeditiously alongside our outside experts to restore them securely." Chainalysis has not yet commented on who was behind the attack, but implied that the culprits used an AI agent, and likened the attack to others that have hit "many other tech platforms in recent weeks." "This month, Chainalysis detected an external actor using offensive agentic techniques to gain unauthorized access to Chainalysis systems and internal tools," it told customers in its initial disclosure on October 30. "Our teams have been working around the clock to investigate unauthorized activity, patch vulnerabilities, and harden our systems." In Wednesday's updates, it referred to the intrusion as an "ongoing multifront cyberattack," and later, an "on-path attack," otherwise known as an attacker-in-the-middle (AitM) attack, without elaborating further about what it entailed. Per its own company description, Chainalysis counts government agencies, cryptocurrency exchanges, financial institutions, and cybersecurity companies among its customer base. It is one of the world's foremost blockchain analysis companies and is routinely engaged to assist in cyber-related law enforcement investigations. Recent cases the company was asked to support include the takedowns of crypto-laundering network AudiA6 and bulletproof hosting provider Virtualine, both of which were known facilitators of ransomware crews. It also played a role in bringing down the infamous LockBit ransomware operation, among other engagements in the interim. ®