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The Register · Security
Serial ransomware crook gets 70 months behind bars for Nefilim, Hive roles
Ukrainian ransomware crook Artem Stryzhak has been sentenced to 70 months in the slammer by a New York federal court for his role as an affiliate of the Nefilim and Hive ransomware gangs. Prosecutors believe the cybercriminal began working with Nefilim in or around June 2021, while living in Barcelona, Spain. The Nefilim ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operation was known for targeting wealthy companies, with its operators encouraging affiliates to pursue businesses capable of paying substantial ransom demands. One of Nefilim's most high-profile attacks was on Australian logistics giant Toll G…
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The Register · Security
Cisco open sources tool for detecting AI agents on hacking sprees
Cisco has open sourced a behavior detection engine that watches AI agents, to help security teams prevent rogue agents from going off the rails like they did with the Hugging Face hack – or worse. It’s called Project Quarry, and it aims to provide a “shared language” for evaluating agent behavior, along the lines of what Snort, which Cisco also maintains, did for detecting malicious network traffic and what YARA did for rule-based malware identification. Most detection tools rely on specific interactions with an AI model or agent. Did it attempt prompt injection? Or did the agent call an atta…
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The Register · Security
123 Reg discloses 'AI cyberattack' on customer data, suspects China nexus
UK domain registrar 123 Reg (no relation – Ed) says it was the victim of an “AI-driven cyberattack” that exposed customer data. Customers began receiving their notification emails this week, informing them that their contact information, "related customer relationship data," company VAT numbers, and "product information from an application programming interface (API)" were compromised. A company spokesperson elaborated, saying this means that names, phone numbers, countries, language and currency preferences, account creation dates, the products on the account, and marketing preferences were…
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The Register · Security
AI 'hacker' finds 4 severe bugs in popular industrial control software in under 4 hours
An autonomous AI agent discovered four vulnerabilities in the decades-old, widely used EPICS (Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System) open source software toolkit, including a critical flaw that could allow remote attackers to execute code on systems used to control particle accelerators and fusion experiments. The bugs include a critical, 9.8-rated under CVSS v3.1 integer overflow vulnerability (CVE-2026-114595), leading to an attacker-controlled out-of-bounds heap write and potentially remote code execution; an 8.2-rated, high-severity, improper message-length validation flaw (C…
CVE-2026-114595 -
The Register · Security
Day 2 of canceled classes at University of New Mexico after Health Sciences Center cyberattack
The University of New Mexico is canceling classes across the medicine, nursing, and pharmacy faculties for a second day amid continued efforts to recover from a "cybersecurity event." The attack targeted the Health Sciences Center on Monday, the Uni revealed, forcing it to shut down systems, cancel appointments and clinics at UNM Health hospitals, and divert ambulances to healthcare facilities in nearby Albuquerque and Santa Fe. Hospital appointments and clinics return to normal today, although nonessential UNM Health Sciences Center staff are being asked to remain at home. "The University of…
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The Register · Security
CISA confirms PHP2Shell under attack as researchers clock successful exploits
The US government's cybersecurity watchdog has confirmed attackers are exploiting both critical PHP2Shell vulnerabilities, giving federal agencies three days to patch the bugs that have wreaked havoc across the web over the past week. CISA added CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619 to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog on Monday, setting an October 29 deadline for federal civilian agencies to address the flaws. The move marks a shift from last week, when the agency warned of the danger posed by PHP2Shell but said it had not yet observed successful exploitation in the wild. Both…
CVE-2026-109618, CVE-2026-109619 -
The Register · Security
Microsoft releases out-of-band Windows fixes with certificate updates
Microsoft has released another out-of-band update for Windows, but this one isn't an emergency fix for the latest breakages. This time, it's all about certificates. The non-security out-of-band release applies to supported OSes ranging from Windows 11 and Windows Server 2025, to Windows 10. It's all about updating the current certificate trust list (CTL) of devices that cannot access Microsoft's certificate-update service, or where automatic CTL updates are disabled. It also contains everything in the October 13 update, including the ongoing VPN issues and the change that could break on-premi…
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The Register · Security
Attack on email hosting provider for German far right party AfD exposed 345k accounts
The cyberattack on Alternative for Germany (AfD), the country’s most prominent far-right political party, exposed hundreds of thousands of confidential emails and attachments, as well as more than 345,000 unique email addresses. Have I Been Pwned confirmed the scale of the breach for the first time today, after AfD officially disclosed the September attack on its hosting provider last week. AfD said in its statement that “only a few email accounts were illegally copied,” but admitted a large amount of the data was taken from them, resulting in an extensive data breach. The emails were added t…
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The Register · Security
Japanese virtual desktop cloud hacked so hard it asks to be banned
Japanese ISP GMO Internet has warned customers the cloudy desktop service it offers as an ideal foreign exchange trading environment was compromised by an attacker, and that it had been slow to improve the service's security. GMO runs a service called Onamae.com Desktop Cloud and last week admitted “a third party had installed malicious programs in the server environments of some customers.” That’s never welcome news but is an especially poor outcome because the servers host cloudy Windows desktops that GMO recommends customers use to host foreign exchange trading applications. In later updat…
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The Register · Security
Worm armed 42 GitHub repos by hiding a payload too big to fail
A new Miasma-family npm worm, originally believed to be just a test with no victims, secretly armed 42 real GitHub repositories from 11 owners, hijacking accounts as early as July and using a stealthy payload built to stay hidden from GitHub and automated scanners, according to JFrog researchers. Threat hunters at SafeDep, an open source supply chain security firm, first spotted the “testmetest” npm campaign last week, identifying 18 packages linked to the same operator between October 19 and October 25, including releases containing credential-stealing malware. As with earlier npm worms, the…
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The Register · Security
Alibaba's Qwen AI caught trying to contact server in China
Open-weight models from China have become very popular, but they've also raised some security suspicions. Cohere, a Canada-based biz that offers AI models to enterprises, says that when it was testing Alibaba's Qwen3.8-Flash-Next in its evaluation sandbox, the model attempted to send data to China. "Asked to write a defensive detection rule, Qwen3.8-Flash-Next ignored instructions and inventoried the machine it was running on and then tried to upload a probe file to an Alibaba Cloud storage bucket in Beijing," the biz said in a blog post on Monday. Cohere was running the model through CTI-REA…
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The Register · Security
LiteLLM supply chain attack started with an exposed master key
LiteLLM has traced last week’s supply chain attack to a master key it accidentally committed to a public GitHub repository in May. The cloud and AI model secret-stealing part of the incident began when someone uploaded a poisoned version (1.107.0) of the popular open source AI gateway to PyPI and its container registries last Wednesday. This compromised version contained an infostealer and a remote access trojan capable of executing arbitrary code on infected machines. While the trojanized package was available on PyPI for less than two hours before being quarantined, it received about 49,000…
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The Register · Security
Microsoft releases emergency .NET security fixes for Google Brotli bug
To address a vulnerability in Google's Brotli compression technology that could allow attackers to corrupt process memory, Microsoft is urging .NET users to update "as soon as possible" after releasing an out-of-band (OOB) security update. It released new versions for .NET 8, 9, 10, and .NET 11 to patch against the Brotli bug, following similar updates from Node.js, Python, and other projects. Senior program manager Rahul Bhandari said in the October 25 release that the buffer overflow vulnerability in Brotli, tracked as CVE-2026-111497 and rated 8.1 under CVSS v3.1 in Microsoft's advisory, c…
CVE-2026-111497 -
The Register · Security
UK pentester 'killa' claims $2K Bitcoin prize in PHP2Shell capture-the-flag contest
A UK-based developer and pentester has claimed a $2,000 Bitcoin prize for demonstrating the exploitability of the PHP2Shell vulnerabilities that melted the internet last week. Jaydip Modhwadia, 26, otherwise known as “Killa,” claimed the prize set by James Pavur, who launched the "Steal My Bitcoin" site on October 24. Pavur launched the CTF (capture the flag) challenge to prove that the PHP2Shell exploit was not as easy as those in the cybersecurity community claimed it to be, promising to award $2,000 in Bitcoin to anyone who could achieve Remote Code Execution (RCE) on his website. "My Bitc…
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The Register · Security
Trumpets blare and skies part as AI hypefest culminates in Anthropic IPO filing
Anthropic has filed for an IPO that could rank among Wall Street's biggest ever, revealing an $80.7 billion half-year loss, a startlingly complex governance structure, and warnings that its AI models could blackmail humans, resist shutdown, or create "existential risks" to society. The Claude maker filed its S-1 registration statement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday as it prepares to list on Nasdaq under the ticker ANT. The company has not yet disclosed its proposed share price or how many shares it plans to sell. Of the filing's 614 pages, 94 are devoted to risk fact…
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The Register · Security
We shouldn't be surprised about the PHPocalypse, as the internet is built on sticks and glue
We've spent the past several decades using duct tape, string, and chewing gum to chain the world's computers together into this thing we call the internet, so there's really no good reason to be surprised that most of it is full of software containing vulnerabilities that are practically just as old. You can listen to the latest episode of The Kettle right here on this page, as well as on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube. Those platforms also let you subscribe to Kettle, so you are always notified when the latest episode goes live. The world is still reeling from the PHP2Shell revelations tha…
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The Register · Security
UK Biobank back online soon, months after someone tried to sell 500k people's data on Alibaba
UK Biobank (UKB) says its platform is now "secure" and that academics will soon regain access, months after a major data leak of volunteer health data. The charity, which runs the eponymous research project and describes itself as the custodian of the world's most comprehensive biomedical dataset, said it is waiting for approval from health data controllers and central government before it relaunches the platform. UK Biobank's Research Analysis Platform (UKB-RAP) has locked out all medical researchers trying to access its dataset since the April attack, which led to all 500,000 volunteers’ da…
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The Register · Security
Britain bets big on AI to defend against the threats AI is helping create
The UK government is throwing £130 million at AI-powered cyber defenses, including plans to deploy autonomous AI agents across critical infrastructure to hunt down security flaws before attackers get there first. The money is part of a wider £600 million-plus AI spending spree announced by the Treasury ahead of this week's Budget, with ministers also promising to tackle biological threats, bankroll British AI firms, and reduce the country's dependence on foreign technology. Of the cyber funding, £60 million will go towards a new National Cyber Shield that uses agentic AI to bolster Britain's…
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The Register · Security
PHP2Shell: No login, no app code, no warning. What next?
If you run PHP anywhere in your environment, patch to PHP 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36 or 8.2.35 now. Two critical flaws disclosed last week, CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619 (nicknamed "PHP2Shell"), let an unauthenticated attacker run code on a server with nothing more than a crafted web request. Both carry a CVSS v4.0 score of 9.2, every earlier release is affected, and exploitation in the wild has been reported. The patch is the easy part. The hard part is finding every copy of PHP you own, because PHP rarely shows up where you expect it. This post covers what the flaws are, how far exploitat…
CVE-2026-109618, CVE-2026-109619 -
The Register · Security
Work to protect DNS from quantum decryption attacks is speeding up
Internet governance bodies are likely to accelerate work to prepare the domain name system (DNS) so it can remain secure once quantum computers can challenge conventional encryption. John Crain, ICANN’s chief technology officer, last week told The Register that he is aware of efforts within the organization, and at other internet governance bodies, to consider what happens once commercially available quantum computers become capable of easily deciphering encrypted information. Those machines theoretically pose a risk to DNSSEC, the Domain Name System Security Extensions that adapt PKI to the…
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The Register · Security
Autonomous attack agent in 'Skynet mode' hijacks other models to carry out its evil deeds
Crims built an AI agent designed to hijack exposed AI models to run autonomous attacks, with instructions allowing it to carry out up to 100,000 steps without human approval. The Symantec Threat Hunter Team uncovered the agent's full instruction set over the summer, trapping it in an AI honeypot, and thus giving the researchers a comprehensive view into how the operators built the attack tool and what it could do. The captured instructions showed a single attack agent designed to scan the entire internet for endpoints that accept OpenAI-style requests without authentication - or that accept a…
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The Register · Security
There's a third PHP2Shell bug, but it won't get an emergency fix
As the PHP2Shell chaos continues, researchers have found a third PHP vulnerability that could allow attackers to take over websites or remotely run malware on vulnerable systems. But this one won’t receive an emergency fix. The PHP Foundation on Friday told The Register that it has reserved a CVE identifier (CVE-2026-115560) for a third RCE flaw to go with the first two that comprise PHP2Shell, and it will release a full advisory and fixed software with the next regular PHP release. CVE-2026-115560 “requires a very unlikely combination of configuration and specific PHP application code, which…
CVE-2026-115560 -
The Register · Security
Red-team report found OpenAI utterly failed to monitor its agents during Hugging Face attack
An independent evaluation of OpenAI's internal misalignment monitoring system revealed that the system was not fit for purpose during a period when the company's bots were breaking into model-hosting platform Hugging Face. The safeguards weren't nearly strong enough. "The METR and Redwood employees discovered a number of novel vulnerabilities in the asynchronous internal misalignment monitoring system as it existed on and before July 21st," said evaluation partners METR and Redwood Research in a report released on Thursday. The system, since improved according to OpenAI, was intended to monit…
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The Register · Security
Torvalds: AI is fine for competent devs, but spare us the 'drive-by' patches
Linus Torvalds is embracing AI to write Linux kernel code, and some people are having fits. He has a message for them. So do I. Roy Schestowitz, editor of Tux Machines, summed up his reaction to the news as "Linus Torvalds Turns to Slop." In the podcast Pivot to AI, podcaster David Gerard agreed: "Linux kernel goes full AI slop code." Meanwhile, in the Tom's Hardware comments section, commenter "LordVile" wrote: "This is a publicity stunt from his AI overlords [The Linux Foundation] who pay his wage." They followed this by saying this is the "same reason he's flipped-flopped on AI." I've know…
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The Register · Security
UK threatens subsea cable saboteurs with 14 years behind bars
Britain is threatening subsea cable saboteurs with up to 14 years in prison and unlimited fines, having apparently decided that Victorian-era laws aren't quite up to the job of keeping Russian submarines away from critical infrastructure. The government on Thursday set out plans to overhaul legislation dating back to 1885 and introduce tougher penalties for damaging the underwater cables and pipelines that keep Britain's internet and energy supplies running. According to Whitehall, subsea cables carry around 99 percent of the UK's international data traffic, while underwater pipelines account…
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The Register · Security
PHP2Shell exploit bypasses protections designed to stop remote code execution
Researchers have developed a new exploit that shows how even Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) on an x86-64 server cannot stop the PHP2Shell vulnerability. VulnCheck, which made it available to only the company’s Initial Access Intelligence customers, also warned that threat actors are using AI to find even more ways to attack. The team told us that it’s a “significant advance” because up until now, ASLR has been a major barrier to exploiting PHP2Shell on real-world servers. They don't expect that to hold, though. “Adversaries are clearly spending time (and tokens) on this bug,” Spenc…
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The Register · Security
Max-severity GitLab bug allows remote code execution over 12 years of releases
GitLab on Wednesday patched a maximum-severity flaw that could allow unauthenticated attackers to execute arbitrary code on self-managed servers under certain conditions. Affected software releases date back a full 12 years - so upgrade to a fixed version now. The integer overflow bug, tracked as CVE-2026-110264, affects regular-expression compilation in GitLab Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE), including versions dating back to GitLab 7.0, released in June 2014. The flaw, “under certain conditions, could have allowed an unauthenticated user to execute arbitrary code on the G…
CVE-2026-110264 -
The Register · Security
Disgraced Indian cert issuer leaves the cert issuing business
After embarrassing reports revealed weak private keys, one of which was just a single digit, Indian certification authority eMudhra has decided to take the L and get out of the global SSL/TLS cert game entirely. eMudhra announced Thursday that it was abandoning that arm of its business. Sure, the intense scrutiny heaped on the company was a factor, but the firm also argued that growing compliance costs and competition from free certificate providers had made the business increasingly difficult to justify. “Global SSL/TLS is a small part of eMudhra’s business contributing to about 1 percent of…
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The Register · Security
PHP2Shell puts dozens of UK government services out of service
The PHP2Shell security fiasco has forced 32 UK government services offline and left another four partially unavailable as Whitehall scrambles to patch the critical vulnerabilities wreaking havoc across the web. The figures were disclosed in the House of Lords on Thursday, where tech minister Baroness Lloyd of Effra outlined the disruption following the discovery of two critical flaws in PHP. "Currently, the information I have is that 32 government services are unavailable and four are partially unavailable," Lloyd told peers. "That has resulted largely from precautionary measures taken to pro…
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The Register · Security
When the attacker becomes the user: Rethinking account takeover
In a world full of cyber risk, account takeover has emerged as one of the most insidious of all threats. If an attacker can successfully compromise a legitimate email account, they are then able to pose as a trusted individual or organization without triggering any warnings. Traditional email security will see nothing wrong. From there the threat actor can pick their moment to cause havoc with objectives that range from stealing money, expropriating sensitive data and propagating catastrophic malware. Serious financial loss and a damaged corporate reputation are commonplace outcomes. The typi…
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The Register · Security
Hackers pile on PHP2Shell as AWS reveals attacks began before disclosure
Attackers are hammering servers with millions of attempts to exploit the critical PHP2Shell vulnerabilities, with Amazon revealing that someone was already going after the flaws four days before they were publicly disclosed. Cloudflare says it has recorded a staggering increase in attacks targeting the two vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, since details began circulating earlier this week. According to Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, the company spotted thousands of exploitation attempts in the 10 hours before the vulnerabilities were publicly announced. That fig…
CVE-2026-109618, CVE-2026-109619 -
The Register · Security
Microsoft says ConnectWise breach let Chinese spies loose on 2,250 cloud tenants
China-aligned attackers used AI agents and compromised ConnectWise application credentials to target more than 2,250 Microsoft 365 tenants, Microsoft says. The Windows giant revealed this week that the attackers, tracked as Storm-0940, used an open source AI penetration-testing tool called ARTEX to automate attacks against Microsoft 365 environments. In some cases, they went from picking a target to gaining privileged cloud access in less than three hours. The findings shed more light on the ConnectWise security incident, which saw the IT management vendor pull the plug on its Cloud Backup, S…
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The Register · Security
IT department and auditors at major pharmacy chain got into a rip-roaring fight about using 'password' on Cisco firewall
Welcome back to PWNED, the column where we talk about companies and organizations that leave the doors wide open to attackers. This week’s sad story involves a major American pharmacy chain that couldn’t fill a prescription for password security. Have a story about someone leaving a gaping hole in their network? Share it with us at [email protected]. Anonymity is available upon request. Our tale comes courtesy of red team and pen testing specialist Dahvid Schloss, who currently serves as COO of Suzu Labs, a cybersecurity company that boasts “we break your systems before adversaries do.” Over a…
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The Register · Security
Certification authority eMudhra defends its laughably weak private keys
Indian certification authority eMudhra has defended the laughably weak private keys it used to sign some digital certificates it issued, and suggested others should share the blame for the incident. In case you’re coming to this one late, news broke yesterday that private keys the company used to sign certs were beyond weak: one was literally just the number “4,” and several others were short strings of easily guessed two-or-three-digit numbers. It’s easy to deduce the value of those keys, which makes it possible to forge certs and impersonate websites or other resources. That’s gold for scam…
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The Register · Security
PHP blames supply chain security biz Chainguard for putting huge chunks of the web at risk
PHP developers have accused software supply chain security shop Chainguard of effectively revealing critical bugs in the open-source scripting language ahead of a planned official disclosure. On Wednesday, just hours after releasing emergency patches for the two bugs collectively called PHP2shell, PHP maintainers published a blog about how the vulnerabilities were found and fixed. They credited researchers at Calif, OpenAI, and Wiz with finding the security holes between August and September. All three companies have said they used AI models to find the vulnerabilities, which are now tracked…
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The Register · Security
LiteLLM supply chain attack hoovers up passwords and secrets
Unknown crims compromised LiteLLM's release process on Wednesday, distributing a malicious version (1.107.0) containing malware designed to steal cloud and AI credentials and a remote access trojan (RAT) capable of executing arbitrary code on infected machines through PyPI and Docker registries. PyPI quarantined the trojanized version of the popular open source AI gateway within hours, and the Docker image (litellm/litellm:1.107.0) was removed from both Docker Hub and GHCR soon after - but anyone who ran the compromised package on any platform should assume their secrets have been stolen. “Ch…
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The Register · Security
Signal bug could keep your mic - and camera - on after hangup
Make sure you don’t say anything mean or secret after hanging up a call on Signal, as a bug in the encrypted messaging app’s calling library could prevent a call from ending properly, potentially leaving audio and possibly video active. The vulnerability, CVE-2026-113380, was published by MITRE on Tuesday and given a CVSS score of 9.3, marking it as a critical issue in Signal’s open-source RingRTC library in every single version before 2.72.0. That update was pushed out last month, but the vulnerability wasn’t made public until now. RingRTC is Signal’s own calling library built on top of WebR…
CVE-2026-113380 -
The Register · Security
PHP devs publish critical bug fix as site owners warned: Pull 'em offline if you're unpatched
PHP developers have released emergency updates for two critical vulnerabilities after cybersecurity authorities warned organizations to patch immediately or consider taking exposed applications offline. PHP 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36, and 8.2.35 address CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, which can allow unauthenticated remote code execution. The project's developers urged users to update immediately. All PHP installations serving web requests are potentially affected, including deployments using PHP-FPM, Apache's mod_php, php-cgi, FrankenPHP, and LiteSpeed, the developers said. "We consider the…
CVE-2026-109618, CVE-2026-109619 -
The Register · Security
AI has 'potential' to turn script kiddies into sophisticated infrastructure attackers
When it comes to cyberattacks that shut down power grids, drinking-water systems, and other critical infrastructure, AI doesn’t – yet – turn script kiddies into sophisticated, nation-state attackers. But “the potential is there,” according to operational technology (OT) security experts. "One thing that we've relied on for years is security by obscurity when it comes to utilities," said Steve Swick, former chief information security officer at American Electric Power. "The knowledge needed to do some of that stuff is getting less likely to be necessary," Swick added during a media panel ahead…
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The Register · Security
Nvidia picks OpenShell to tame AI gents
Nvidia has proposed a new way to keep corporate AI agents in line. Nvidia on Wednesday introduced its OpenShell Reference Architecture. Based on the company's OpenShell secure runtime, It's a recipe for creating, operating, observing, and policing AI agents using OpenShell on Nvidia hardware. "Nvidia created OpenShell to give agents the freedom to do useful work within clearly defined boundaries — contained, monitored and under control," CEO Jensen Huang said in a canned statement. "With the OpenShell Reference Architecture, agents can think on Rubin, act on Vera and be governed on BlueField.…
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The Register · Security
EU wants Booking.com to check out of its scam problem
The European Commission has opened an investigation under the Digital Services Act into whether Booking.com is doing enough to stop fraudsters running scams, phishing and smishing on its platform. Officials told The Register the probe, which opened Wednesday, covers a very large online platform (one with more than 45 million EU users) and has three strands. The first is whether Booking.com is failing to prevent fraudulent and non-compliant listings. "This is very much about people portraying themselves as the owner of premises and putting it up for rent while they are not the real owner," an…
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The Register · Security
Indian certification authority eMudhra’s private keys compromised – one of them was the number ‘4’
Tragically simple private keys used by a certification authority based in India have been compromised, meaning the 60-million-plus certs it has issued can’t be trusted and necessitating a massive clean-up job. The CA of concern in this case is called eMudhra, which boasts of having issued over 60 million digital certificates to help usher in a world of digital trust. The company has instead panicked the world. News of the company’s errors appeared on Tuesday in a post by Dennis Jackson, a member of Mozilla’s cryptography engineering team. “On Saturday, October 17, at 20:06 UTC, Mozilla receiv…
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The Register · Security
Auto tech startup claims it traced hack attempt back to rival's IP address
An automotive tech startup claims that its IT systems were attacked by individuals trying to steal its driving model, and that those attacks came from an IP address associated with a rival in the space. The tech startup, IQ.Lvbs, described the alleged security incident in a recent blog post. On October 3, IQ.Lvbs introduced the private beta of NovaSpark, the first model for the company's IQ.Pilot app, in the Comma.ai Discord channel. They put it in that channel because the model requires the use of Comma.ai's camera hardware, which is built for self-driving vehicles. From there, things got we…
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The Register · Security
Palo Alto's firewall OS has been under attack from multiple ransomware groups since June
Multiple ransomware groups, including Qilin and Inc, have been exploiting a high-severity authentication bypass bug in Palo Alto Networks' PAN-OS, with Unit 42 investigating attacks since early June across numerous industries, such as finance, healthcare, and manufacturing. CVE-2026-0257 affects PAN-OS GlobalProtect portals and gateways, potentially allowing attackers to bypass security restrictions and establish an unauthorized VPN connection. The security vendor first disclosed and patched the bug on May 13 and initially assigned it a medium-severity rating, saying it was aware of attempts…
CVE-2026-0257 -
The Register · Security
Swamped curl maintainers take low-level flaws public to survive vulnerability 'avalanche'
An "avalanche of vulnerability reports" is forcing curl to move lower-severity cases into public view, reserving private handling for high and critical flaws. From October 26, low and medium-severity reports should be filed in the open source data transfer tool's public GitHub repository, maintainer Daniel Stenberg said. "Security researchers in doubt can still submit the issue on HackerOne and we can tell them what severity we deem it to be. Over the last few years, over 90 percent of all submissions could quickly be assessed to be less than HIGH." Stenberg already shuttered curl's bug bount…
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The Register · Security
'Password1' and a forgotten test account land Welsh outfits in hot water
A test account protected by "Password1" helped an intruder steal personal data relating to 3,300 people, mostly children, in a ransomware attack that has drawn regulatory rebukes for two Welsh organizations. The Information Commission's Office (ICO) issued reprimands rather than fines to Ogi Networks Limited (ONL) and the Local Government Data Unit – Wales, also known as Data Cymru. According to the ICO, altnet ONL provided server and connectivity infrastructure, licensing, and support to Data Cymru, which helps public bodies across Wales make effective use of data. On November 1, 2024, Data…
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The Register · Security
Bullhorn sees red after cyberattack knocks recruitment platform offline
Bullhorn is the latest tech giant finding itself on the wrong end of a cyberattack, forcing the recruitment software provider to shut down its platform while it investigates. The US-based company, which serves more than 10,000 customers worldwide, says its systems are now back online in the UK, US, and Australia. Unfortunately for customers hoping to get back to work, online doesn't necessarily mean working. In its latest status update, published on Tuesday, Bullhorn confirmed that some users were still struggling with single sign-on (SSO), password resets, and customizations, while several p…
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The Register · Security
Whitehall shuts the front door on digital ID but leaves the back open
Britain's national digital ID scheme may be dead, but Whitehall appears to have forgotten to tell the infrastructure. Despite the government scrapping its controversial plans, officials told MPs on Monday that work continues on GOV.UK One Login, digital wallets, and a growing collection of digital credentials designed to help people prove who they are. The abandoned scheme was one of Keir Starmer's flagship policies, originally pitched as a compulsory digital ID card to crack down on illegal working. Privacy campaigners weren't impressed, warning of surveillance and government overreach, and…
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The Register · Security
UK finance watchdog wants firms to report AI failures and close calls
The UK's financial regulator says firms' incident reporting must cover significant AI failures and near-misses as increasingly autonomous systems raise new risks. Speaking at Bloomberg's UK Policy Series on Monday, Financial Conduct Authority chief data, information and intelligence officer Jessica Rusu said the regulator wants Britain to lead safe AI adoption in financial services. Greater autonomy, however, requires clear accountability. "Poorly governed AI can create consumer harm, cyber vulnerabilities, and operational failures, potentially at much greater speed and scale," she said. "Our…
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The Register · Security
Why cyber resilience is now a boardroom priority for UK public services
The UK public sector has reached a cyber resilience inflection point. A new Prime Minister has taken office, and significant machinery-of-government changes have already been announced, including the scrapping of DSIT, the department that had become the center of government digital, technology and cyber policy. Its responsibilities are now being redistributed across other parts of Whitehall, creating a new policy and delivery landscape for public sector leaders to navigate. For years, cyber security was treated as a specialist operational discipline that was essential but largely delegated to…
