Four cybercriminals were arrested in Brazil, and three others were charged in Europe over allegations that they exploited a vulnerability at a service provider, allowing them to withdraw funds from Commerzbank customers' bank accounts. [...]

The Netherlands' National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) is warning that hackers are actively exploiting a macOS authentication bypass vulnerability after public exploit code emerged. [...]

France's tax authority has confirmed that an intruder accessed its systems and extracted data in June after an alleged cybercriminal advertised a purported database of 2 million taxpayers. Using the alias "ZeroBytes," the alleged crook behind the attack on the General Directorate of Public Finances (DGFiP) advertised the stolen database on a cybercrime forum on Wednesday. They claimed the database contained details of more than 2 million French taxpayers and that they gained access using stolen credentials and an MFA bypass technique. ZeroBytes also claimed to retain access to DGFiP's systems and offered to sell it alongside the database. DGFiP did not immediately answer our questions about the attacker's claims. However, in a statement released Thursday, it disputed the claim that ZeroBytes retained access. "On Wednesday, August 12, 2026, a malicious actor claimed unauthorized access to the information system of the French Public Finances Directorate, which occurred at the end of June 2026 following identity theft," it said. "Initial investigations confirm that this access, which had been severed at the end of June as part of an audit, nevertheless allowed the consultation and extraction of data concerning individuals and professionals. "Following this complaint, the French Public Finances Directorate immediately implemented new restrictions to stop the unauthorized access and prevent further unauthorized use. In-depth investigations are ongoing to determine precisely which data and number of users were affected." DGFiP said it would report the attack to French data protection watchdog CNIL and notify affected users once it had determined who they were. The intrusion is the latest in a string of security breaches affecting France's public sector this year. France's Ministry of Finance, which oversees DGFiP, admitted in February that miscreants had accessed a database containing French citizens' bank details. The attackers used stolen credentials and made off with 1.2 million records, despite the ministry saying it quickly revoked their access. A few weeks later, France's Health Ministry confirmed a cyberattack on healthtech supplier Cegedim Santé in which around 15.8 million administrative files were stolen. Around 165,000 of these contained doctors' notes, which in "very limited cases" revealed medical histories. In April, the Interior Ministry confirmed reports of an attack on France Titres, the government agency responsible for identity documents including passports and driver's licenses. The alleged culprit, reportedly a 15-year-old, advertised the stolen data online and claimed the breach affected between 18 million and 19 million people – more than a quarter of metropolitan France's population. In June, the department responsible for Tchap, France's encrypted government messaging platform, investigated a suspected breach. The alleged attackers claimed to have accessed more than 73,000 user accounts, 643,000 messages, nearly 60,000 media files, and hundreds of chat rooms. ®

Google Workspace attacks do not always begin with phishing. Stolen OAuth tokens can provide another path into Gmail, Drive, and connected systems. Material Security explains why organizations need defenses that cover the entire Workspace attack chain. [...]

A maximum-severity SAP Commerce Cloud remote code execution vulnerability patched three days ago is already being targeted in attacks, according to threat intelligence company Defused. [...]

In early July, attackers used open source AI agents to autonomously hack government systems and energy companies, signaling to defenders that AI-powered attacks against critical infrastructure are no longer theoretical. "There is a clear and present danger," Tom Kellermann, TrendAI VP of AI security and threat research, told The Register. "As the geopolitical tension boils, systemic destructive cyberattacks launched by autonomous AI will occur," he said. "Weaponized AI will disable the safety systems of critical infrastructure, thus leading to kinetic disasters. Just like we see autonomous strike vehicles operating on the battlefield in Ukraine, we should expect autonomous weaponized AI." In fact, the prospect of attackers using AI against critical infrastructure was the top concern of every national security adviser, law enforcement official, and private-sector threat analyst The Reg spoke with at last week's Hacker Summer Camp conferences. "It's the targeting of critical infrastructure for us," Brett Leatherman, assistant director of the FBI's Cyber Division, told us during an interview at Black Hat. "We're very focused on the downstream impact targeting of critical infrastructure," Leatherman said. "That is where cyber becomes kinetic, and whether it is our water and wastewater treatment plants, whether it's the electric grid, whether it's the high-frequency trading networks and the financial networks, all of those, if the integrity of those are compromised, will have significant impact to communities and national security. So that's what keeps our teams up at night. How are we moving to secure critical infrastructure?" Where cyber becomes kinetic During the first four days of July, suspected Chinese operators aimed an attack framework built on Hermes and OpenClaw AI agents at targets in Taiwan. Across 12 "attack waves," the "near-autonomous" system deployed up to eight sub-agents, each assigned its own targets and techniques, and broke into a Taiwanese government website. Ultimately, they compromised a government email system, the country's nuclear safety agency, IT supply chain vendors, and at least seven energy sector companies, finding and exploiting misconfigurations and vulnerabilities while stealing sensitive data, credentials, and other secrets as they moved across the network. The Taiwanese government intrusion also followed a series of cyberattacks against water and wastewater utilities in the United States. While the Trump administration hasn't attributed these to a particular government or group, private sector threat hunters – including Halcyon Ransomware Research Center SVP Cynthia Kaiser, a former FBI cyber division deputy assistant director – blame Iran for these intrusions. Military conflicts spilling into cyberspace are nothing new, but these cyberattacks in America brought the war with Iran to more than 30 small-town water systems in Minnesota and targets across nearly a dozen other states. To be clear, there's no evidence that attackers used AI to hack these water utilities. Most were small, community systems that left programmable logic controllers (PLCs) directly exposed to the internet using default or weak passwords. Still, these breaches expose "40, 50 years of tech debt," former US National Cyber Director Chris Inglis told The Reg during an interview at Black Hat. This technical debt – deferred maintenance, unpatched or end-of-life systems, and delayed security updates – expands the attack surface and gives intruders more ways into critical systems, threatening operations and potentially disrupting services people rely on every day. "The water sector attacks – regardless of who is doing them – is taking advantage of unpatched vulnerabilities in the PLCs," Inglis said. "We've known about these particular vulnerabilities for years now, and yet we've not done anything about them because they're low-level, not easily accessible." Inglis added that there's no indication the digital intruders used AI to exploit these PLCs. 'There's an alligator in the boat' However, AI systems allow attackers to cash in on tech debt, and they don't need access to frontier models to do it. Free, open-weight models also excel at finding bugs in software and configurations, chaining these together, and abusing them to break software and systems. Earlier this summer, University of Toronto researchers used an unnamed publicly available open-weight model, released in 2025, to develop a computer worm that they claim spread through an enterprise test network. The self-propagating code adapted on the fly to identify known vulnerabilities and misconfigurations on target systems, then generated and executed attacks to move laterally through the network and compromise additional machines. "Commodity models can do that, and many of the vulnerabilities they find do not require access to the source code – it's in the configurations, and configurations change over time," Inglis said. When it comes to attackers abusing AI systems, "I wouldn't be worried about the frontier models," Inglis said. "Worry about the models that are already on the street. Turns out there's an alligator in the boat, and it's the commodity models." Plus, as we've seen in previous breaches, both government-backed goons and criminal groups increasingly use AI to automate reconnaissance. Security analysts worry that the technology could also help attackers acquire expertise in industrial control systems (ICS). When OT knowledge becomes a commodity "What protects ICS? More than anything, it's obscurity," said John Hultquist, chief analyst at Google Threat Intelligence Group, during a press briefing at Black Hat. "It is an obscure, esoteric, knowledge set that a handful of people – I call them uber nerds – have, and that attackers rarely have the necessary knowledge to carry out. That's no longer the case. That knowledge is simply on tap." AI tools mean miscreants don't need to be ICS or operational technology experts to carry out destructive cyberattacks on critical networks and facilities. They just have to ask an agent to learn everything about these systems and do the dirty work for them. "There have been threat actors who are capable of this at the top level, like China and Russia," Hultquist said. "But now I'm afraid the actors who are just a couple steps down – North Korea, Iran – who don't have the same focus on that technology are going to have far greater success. They're going to have the tools necessary to be as aggressive as they want to." During what was probably the most talked about Black Hat briefing of the week, OpenAI employees provided more details about how their models escaped their training pens, went rogue, and hacked Hugging Face to complete a security evaluation. We learned the AI agents spent months asking other agents for help, building message boards, developing their own communication protocols – essentially creating a hive mind to carry out the attack. "In the near future, we should expect that threat actors will intentionally deploy, optimize, weaponize, and use offensive agent collectives in the manner that we have just described here," OpenAI technical staffer Michael Dalton said. Retired general and former NSA chief Paul Nakasone, speaking to reporters at DEF CON, called the Hugging Face attack "an inflection point in terms of AI-generated, autonomous cyberattacks." "This is the challenge: that we have to, over the next several months, get the defensive side much quicker and much better than they are today," he added. Therein lies the challenge: offensive uses of AI appear to be advancing faster than autonomous defenses, and attackers don't face the legal and ethical constraints imposed on defenders. "I think we're still a ways out from having swarms of autonomous, defensive agents fighting attacks," Ryan Whelan, global head of Accenture Cyber Intelligence, told The Reg at Black Hat. "That's probably over a year out over the horizon. But I do think we're going to see it first on the adversary side, because they don't care if they break things." Kellermann quoted Victor Hugo: "Not all the armies of the history of the world can stop an idea whose time has come." "That idea," he said, "is weaponized AI. Shields up." ®

Oil giant Shell has confirmed it is investigating a potential security incident after the Clop ransomware gang claimed it stole 89GB of data. [...]

Over 95% of the affected companies were exposed before the malicious LiteLLM packages were published.

The post Trivy, Not LiteLLM Behind the 2,500 Org Compromise appeared first on SecurityWeek.

The ShinyHunters extortion group stole personal information from 1.6 million RingCentral accounts after hacking the company in July, according to the data breach notification service Have I Been Pwned. [...]

Cryptocurrency hardware wallet maker Trezor has confirmed that a breach at one of its shipping partners exposed the personal data of more than 13,000 customers. The company's initial findings suggested the breach was limited to orders placed in certain countries during the previous 90 days. New information indicates that earlier orders may also be affected. The breach exposed the names, email addresses, phone numbers, and shipping addresses of 11,742 customers in the US, UK, Sweden, Colombia, Brazil, Italy, and Portugal who ordered Trezor products between May 10 and August 8. An additional 1,947 customers had their names, home cities, and email addresses exposed. Some members of this group may have placed their orders before May 10. "We are verifying this information and the timeframe with ShipMonk," said Trezor. ShipMonk is Trezor's logistics partner. It stores and ships products on the company's behalf and collects the information needed to fulfill orders. ShipMonk is subject to Trezor's 90-day retention policy, which requires partners to delete or anonymize customer data within 90 days of collecting it for an order. ShipMonk did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Trezor markets itself as a purveyor of secure, offline, hardware-based cryptocurrency wallets. With its products, it aims to shield customers from cyberattacks and malicious apps. While it assured customers that its own systems and devices remain secure, Trezor warned that "affected customers could experience an increase in phishing attempts." The exposed details could help criminals craft convincing phishing attempts impersonating banks, crypto exchanges, or Trezor itself. The company said it contacted affected customers directly and advised them to check any communications against information published through its official channels. "Never enter your wallet backup on a website or share it with anyone," Trezor said in an apologetic advisory. "This is the first time since Trezor was founded in 2013 that we have experienced a breach that exposed customer phone numbers and shipping addresses. "We absolutely understand how serious this is and the potential risks it poses to our customers and are deeply sorry to those affected." Trezor said in a supplementary social media post, separate from the advisory, that its "top priority" project at the moment is to establish an "Anonymous Delivery" option for customers. The service will allow buyers to complete checkout without linking their home address or real-world identity to an order. Customers using Anonymous Delivery will go through a dedicated checkout, use a nickname or label ID in place of a real name, and have their product shipped to an automated delivery locker instead of their home. The delivery will also come in unbranded packaging with a generic sender label. The carrier will only use email or SMS to send a PIN for the locker. Trezor said the service is gearing up for a September launch in the EU and by the end of the year in the US. Alas, that didn't stop Cake Wallet, a rival crypto wallet, from poking fun at Trezor. "Another rough day for self custody," it Xeeted, before suggesting crypto holders instead use an old smartphone with Cake Wallet installed because "there is no order, no shipping address, or customer data tied to the purchase." ®

Scotland's public prosecution service has warned 300 staff that their personal information may have been caught up in a cyberattack on one of its suppliers. The Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS) disclosed the incident on Thursday, saying an unnamed third-party supplier detected suspicious activity on August 5 and subsequently launched an investigation. COPFS said its own systems were not compromised and that the incident involves information provided for an online data maturity assessment completed by the prosecution service last year. The Scottish government organized the assessment, which was managed by the affected supplier. COPFS said the potentially exposed information is limited to employment-related data submitted for the exercise, including staff names, roles, and work email addresses. In a statement to The Register, a COPFS spokesperson said: "COPFS is aware that a Scottish Government partner has been subject to a data security breach. We understand that this has affected around 300 COPFS colleagues who participated in a public sector data maturity survey. "This is unconnected to casework and did not involve sensitive or confidential case information. There is no impact on the work of the prosecution service. "Colleagues have been reminded of guidance on responding to any phishing or scam attempts which may arise from this third-party breach." According to COPFS, the supplier has taken steps to secure its systems and is still investigating how the intrusion happened and precisely what information may have been accessed. COPFS said it would provide further updates if "significant new information" emerges. It is unclear whether the incident is connected to the recent exploitation of a zero-day vulnerability in business intelligence platform Metabase. The Scottish government did not answer our question about whether the affected supplier used the software. Metabase disclosed this month that attackers had exploited a previously unknown vulnerability in its cloud service, potentially allowing them to gain administrator access and reach connected databases. As we reported earlier this week, modular laptop maker Framework was among those affected. For now, the supplier breach leaves plenty of questions and few answers about who got in or what they accessed. ®

A former data analyst contractor for Brightly Software has been sentenced to two years in prison for targeting his employer in a $2.5 million extortion scheme. [...]

New Zealand’s Security Intelligence Service (NZSIS) has claimed Chinese companies are building space facilities in the nation to gather military intelligence. Director-general of security Andrew Hampton yesterday made that allegation in the SIS’s annual threat environment assessment. The document points out that New Zealand’s space sector is booming, because the nation’s location makes it “an ideal place to install Ground Based Space Infrastructure (GBSI) … to track satellites and space debris, as well as for collecting a range of other scientific data.” The NZSIS has also found that GBSI is “attractive for foreign states seeking to advance military capabilities and intelligence operations.” The report offers a case study of a China-based organization called “Purple Mountain Observatory” that has “close links” to Beijing and tried to install GBSI in New Zealand. “They worked with a local company that was likely unaware of the equipment’s capability to collect intelligence of military value and would have no idea who was receiving the data,” the report states, before noting that Chinese laws mean Purple Mountain could be compelled to provide information to China’s government. The intelligence agency believes Purple Mountain “would have … willingly passed on” data it collected. “NZSIS, working with other agencies was able to disrupt this activity, but it was not the first time this organisation has attempted to install its own GBSI in New Zealand and is unlikely to be the last.” The report rates China as the only country targeting New Zealand at scale, based on activity NZSIS has been able to observe. “We have observed increased targeting of professional networking sites and online job platforms for espionage purposes by China’s military intelligence services,” the assessment finds. "PRC (People’s Republic of China) intelligence officers, or their affiliates, use an aggressive strategy where they pose as consultants or employees of think tanks, or recruitment firms. They place online job advertisements looking for analysts in foreign policy, international relations, defence or security,” the document states. “Candidates are then vetted by PRC intelligence to determine what information they have had access to and whether they would divulge it. The job offers are lucrative, but the intelligence officers often encourage their candidates to keep their government jobs both to keep the information tap running and to open up opportunities to recruit their colleagues.” The report also observes that some recent cyber-attacks were probably the work of state-backed groups trying to destabilize New Zealand. “Looking for the sharpest needle in endless giant stacks of needles” The document also addresses domestic threats, especially violent extremism. “Part of our job is to work out whether someone’s vitriolic and violent online pronouncements have any link to New Zealand,” the report states. “This is a narrow focus but the pool of information and intelligence we are working with is vast.” “We used to describe our work as finding a needle in a haystack. However, the internet has changed. Large volumes of toxic content, widespread anonymity, and hidden locations mean our job is now like looking for the sharpest needle in endless giant stacks of needles.” “Extremist rhetoric, particularly online, has become more mainstream, a development which has made it even more challenging to differentiate between genuine support for violent extremism, hateful language designed to shock, or online content created simply to drive engagement or ‘likes’.” NZSIS also has to keep an eye on encrypted messaging services and even gaming platforms, to counter violent online communities. “Algorithms on various social media platforms can link non-violent content to progressively more extreme material,” the report states. “The gateway subject matter can quickly expose people to violent extremist content that can support radicalisation.” Kiwis aren’t just recipients of this vile material. “NZSIS has observed New Zealand violent extremists use encrypted messaging systems, social media and online gaming platforms to circulate violent material including weapon tutorials and objectionable content. Their presence on these platforms, many of which are mainstream, also helps them to find like-minded individuals or supporters.” ® Bootnote: Readers interested in New Zealand’s intelligence services might enjoy 2026 comedy series New Zealand Spy, a deadpan delight.

You're not alone if you just received an "Apple Threat Notification" saying it detected a "mercenary spyware attack targeted at your iPhone." [...]

Authorities in Ukraine shut down 94 fraudulent call centers across the country that lured people into investment scams or tried to obtain access to bank accounts. [...]