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, SaaS Security, and Cloud Management services after discovering unauthorized access to application identities. ConnectWise didn't initially identify who was responsible, but Microsoft has now pointed the finger at Storm-0940, a China-linked espionage crew that's been operating since at least 2021. The group has traditionally relied on the usual tricks, including password spraying and exploiting internet-facing applications, but this time it used AI to do some of the heavy lifting. ARTEX is an open source penetration-testing framework written in Go that uses AI agents to automate everything from reconnaissance and vulnerability discovery to credential attacks and data theft. Microsoft says Storm-0940 began using it as early as September to target organizations worldwide, including government agencies, defense contractors, banks, manufacturers, and tech firms. Between October 10 and 14, the hackers made more than 151,000 failed sign-in attempts against 327 accounts at eight organizations. Microsoft observed no successful logins from that password-spraying campaign, but then the attackers shifted to compromised ConnectWise application identities. The compromised application credentials let the attackers exploit permissions customers had already granted to ConnectWise services, without needing an interactive user login. Armed with ARTEX, Storm-0940 attempted to authenticate against more than 2,250 Microsoft 365 tenants, at times reaching 2,900 attempts a minute. Microsoft also observed AI-accelerated activity through Microsoft Graph, including reconnaissance, application credential changes, and attempts to modify privileges, potentially allowing the attackers to stick around even after the original credentials were revoked. Most attempts failed, though Microsoft says the hackers still managed to establish persistent privileged access at numerous organizations. It hasn't disclosed how many customers were compromised or whether any data was stolen, cautioning that a successful login doesn't necessarily mean information was accessed. ConnectWise CEO Manny Rivelo said the company had contained the affected application connections and was gradually restoring services, although shutting down those connections wouldn't necessarily boot out attackers who had already established a foothold in customer environments. ConnectWise has been here before. In May 2025, it admitted that a "sophisticated nation-state actor" had broken into its systems and compromised a small number of customers using its ScreenConnect remote access software. There's nothing to suggest the two attacks are linked. Nor is Storm-0940 alone in making use of ARTEX. Microsoft says it has spotted attackers from several geographic regions using the framework, which is freely available for penetration testing. The underlying techniques are nothing new – stolen credentials, password spraying, and application abuse – but Microsoft says AI helped Storm-0940 execute them faster, with some attacks progressing from initial targeting to privileged cloud access in under three hours. ®

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 pwned@sitpub.com. 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 career spanning more than 15 years, Schloss has assessed the security of numerous businesses, including a large US pharmacy retailer that he asked us not to name. He wasn’t asked to break in, just to do an audit on all of the org’s corporate switches, routers, and firewalls. “So, I come across this firewall,” Schloss said. “That is an edge firewall, meaning this is what touches the internet. This part will add its enable password, which is the term Cisco uses for administrator. It had the enable password as 'password.' Just p-a-s-s-w-o-r-d.” As Schloss noted, the enable command on Cisco devices allows the user to gain administrative rights to the firewall, controlling network traffic. If someone connected to that firewall, either via SSH or through an exploit, and got normal user privileges, they could then elevate those privileges to admin and do something like shut off all traffic from the intranet to the outside world. Schloss actually didn’t guess that the password was “password,” but instead was able to decrypt the file holding the passwords by breaking Cisco’s own protection, something he said is easy to do. “That enable password was stored as Cisco IOS type 7, which isn’t really a hash,” he said. “It’s more of a reversible encoding with a publicly known key. Even back then, it was best practice not to use it.” But even if the password were stored in a secure place, it would be very easy for a threat actor to guess. So he marked the password failure down as a “high find,” a bad type of vuln that needs to be fixed right away. When he brought the password to the company’s auditing department, they put him on a phone call with the auditing team, the entire IT team, his own manager, and others. On the packed call, the auditing team, who had commissioned Schloss’s work, was very concerned about the firewall password, but the IT team didn’t think it was a very serious problem. The two sides screamed at each other for more than an hour while Schloss and his colleagues sat there quietly, staring at their cameras. “The audit team is like ‘yeah, we gotta fix this.’ And the directors were really harping on ‘this needs to be done’ and the IT team starts firing back,” Schloss explained. “It’s like ‘Why? Who’s gonna? What does it matter? No, this isn’t a high-priority find. This is maybe a medium. Yeah, it’s bad, but it’s not that bad.’” The call dragged on so long that Schloss was unable to finish presenting his findings and recommendations. The conflict was so severe that the client continued to follow up and ask him to explain what he found again for the next three years – long after he had moved on to other projects. He later learned that the auditing department controlled the bonuses for the IT team and there was a stipulation that any “high finding” would eliminate those bonuses. So they weren’t just arguing about “password” - they were really talking about the compensation for an entire division. The lesson here is more than “don’t use the word ‘password’ as a password.” It's also about misaligned incentives. Tying security posture to compensation seems like a good way to incentivize workers to follow best practices, but it also leads them to deny responsibility and minimize mistakes when they're found. ®

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 scammers, phishers, and other miscreants. The entire infosec industry has pointed that out, urged swift adoption of better certs, and lamented the fact that implementing replacements will be a long and thankless task. eMudhra’s statement about the incident says it generated keys during “a Key Generation Ceremony (KGC) held on April 30, 2025, using FIPS 140-2 Level 3 Hardware Security Modules (HSMs).” Such hardware is the standard kit for the job and should in theory produce nicely complex keys and store them securely. But something went wrong. “A flaw in the KGC caused a wrap/unwrap step to produce a second set of weak keys alongside the original strong keys,” the statement claims. “The weak keys were the ones published to the browser root stores. eMudhra is working to establish the root cause.” The company then gets a tad defensive. “These roots and issuing CAs have gone through independent audits for two years in a row and have been in browser trust lists since mid-2025,” the statement adds, seemingly shifting some blame to auditors and other stakeholders. The announcement then points out that eMudhra’s TLS business generates just one percent of its revenue, meaning this mess won’t impact its bottom line too much. That’s nice to know for the company’s investors but rather misses the point that whoever relies on the company now has an urgent, unwanted, and costly job to do replacing certs. “eMudhra is working directly with customers who may be affected to give them replacement certificates, so that critical services are not disrupted. The company is also working with the root programs and continues its root-cause investigation,” the statement adds. The company allows that the incident “may have some reputational risks on eMudhra which cannot be quantified.” Ya think? ®

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 as CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, and can allow an unauthenticated attacker to execute code on servers running PHP. This is especially serious because PHP powers huge chunks of the public web. It also adds a dose of irony to the “leak and disrupted disclosure” part of the blog, which blames Chainguard - a company that aims to secure software supply chains by hardening open source code - for the messy disclosure. The trouble, according to PHP developers, started on Tuesday around 15:00 UTC, when “two CVE IDs began circulating on online forums and social media,” along with incorrect information about the release time and CVSS severity rating. At that point, no technical details leaked. The rumors, however, prompted PHP maintainers to warn people in advance about the critical flaws, and move the planned disclosure forward a day, from Thursday to Wednesday. “Distributors were still packaging the fix, so releasing immediately would have left many users without an easy way to update,” the PHP Foundation blog says. “Moving the release forward by one day was the best compromise between acting quickly, giving people time to prepare, and making sure everyone had a simple update path when the vulnerabilities were disclosed.” A couple of hours later, Calif “mistakenly” published a video showing a proof-of-concept exploit and “additional, though limited” information about the bugs, we’re told. “Mitigation advice we started providing to a few critical infrastructure providers around Oct 20th 23:00 UTC, may have leaked as well,” the PHP blog says, but it does not name these providers. And then it throws Chainguard under the bus: “On October 21st at 07:41 UTC, more than six hours before the coordinated release, Chainguard unilaterally broke the embargo and published built images containing the fix. Like other distributors, Chainguard had received the patch in advance so its users could update the moment the vulnerabilities were disclosed. Any attacker could now study the fix in binary form while every other PHP user was still waiting for the release. This disregarded weeks of work by many parties toward a coordinated disclosure.” Chainguard CEO: 'We made the call' Chainguard CEO Dan Lorenc spoke with The Register on Wednesday, and while he doesn’t dispute the timeline, said his company "didn't leak." “These things are messy,” Lorenc said. Chainguard learned “something was coming in PHP” on Friday from one of the researchers that found the bugs, Lorenc told us. Later that night, using his company’s AI harness and a frontier model, the CEO and the Chainguard team independently found the same memory corruption vulnerabilities. All it took was a “basic prompt of ‘find bad vulnerabilities in PHP,’” Lorenc wrote in a subsequent LinkedIn post. On Saturday, Chainguard began working with the PHP maintainers, confirmed that some of its findings matched the bug reports, and helped test the patches. “The patches are crazy - this is not a simple vulnerability,” Lorenc told The Register. “It really did take them months to build a real, working patch for it. And then on Monday, the rumors started, and yesterday it just spiraled.” Some people published POCs on social media, other security vendors reported seeing real-world exploitation, and late Tuesday night Lorenc told us he decided to ship the fixes, and notified the PHP coordinated disclosure channel about his plans. “People were getting hit in advance” of the official PHP disclosure, “so we made the call to ship the fixes under that,” Lorenc said. “It's coordinated vulnerability disclosure, unless there's evidence of active exploits in the wild.” Also on Tuesday night, Chainguard published built artifacts and made them accessible to anyone, not just customers. “And then I woke up this morning and saw that this was all our fault,” Lorenc said. When asked if he would do anything differently, given the fallout from Chainguard’s early disclosure, Lorenc said no. “This process and policy is based on trying to coordinate as much as possible until shit hits the fan and people start weaponizing things,” he said. “It sucks, because we really are all on one team, and there's bad guys over there doing stuff.” Chainguard’s honeypots trapped IPs from China and Russia targeting the vulnerabilities on Wednesday, Lorenc added. “Just being told there's a vulnerability in a piece of software - even something as big as PHP - is enough to find it,” he told us. “I did that myself without any other knowledge on Friday." "I think this is kind of the new normal. People are able to build an exploit in hours without even knowing what the vulnerability is." What we know about the CVEs and how to exploit them While we still don’t know the scope of exploitation - or what will happen to vulnerable legacy systems that don’t have security fixes - threat hunters predict it’s going to be a doozy. “Successful exploitation could allow attackers to take control of affected servers, steal sensitive data, and deface the websites running on them,” Wiz researchers Sagi Tzadik, Shir Tamari, Nir Ohfeld, and Tomer Schwartz warned on Wednesday, adding the oft-quoted stat that PHP powers 70 percent of all websites in the world. “Every PHP version released in the last decade is affected by at least one of these vulnerabilities, going back to version 5.4,” the Wiz kids wrote. “Attackers can exploit them remotely, in some cases fairly easily. Immediate patching is strongly advised.” Both bugs are related to how PHP handles memory management and error handling, and both lead to remote code execution (RCE). They can cause a corrupted internal PHP state when a request ends unexpectedly, and then a later request can reuse that state, leading to memory disclosure or RCE. “Both are memory corruption vulnerabilities,” VulnCheck researcher Patrick Garrity explained. “If an attacker can shape the memory PHP trusts, they can potentially hijack what it does next, and in these cases that means remote code execution.” CVE-2026-109618 (GHSA-w8hw-w9fx-j79w) leads to RCE via out-of-memory corruption. “If a request reached PHP's memory_limit at exactly the wrong moment, PHP could leave partially initialized internal data behind and later treat it as valid, corrupting memory,” the project maintainer wrote. “On Apache with mod_php, an unauthenticated request can trigger this before any application code runs.” CVE-2026-109619 (GHSA-6wmf-4rv5-p3rp) allows RCE via stale state. “A fatal error at the wrong point could leave internal state pointing to memory that belonged to a previous request,” according to the PGP Foundation. “A later request handled by the same worker could then use that freed memory. A use-after-free and worker crash were confirmed, and the reporter demonstrated remote code execution against a real-world application running on Apache with mod_php.”®

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. “Check for /tmp/.pc_once_* (the exfil has already fired if this file exists) and /tmp/remote_code_loader.lock (the C2 daemon ran or is still running if this file exists),” advised Aikido Security malware hunter Ilyas Makari. “The same applies to anyone who ran the official Docker image litellm/litellm:1.107.0, or pulled it via the latest, main-latest, or main-stable tags.” The most recent safe version is v1.106.2. While it’s too early to tell the scale of this latest LiteLLM supply chain attack – an earlier LiteLLM compromise in March potentially exposed more than 2,500 organizations and 434,000 CI/CD pipelines worldwide, according to CloudSEK – make sure to take these measures seriously, and check environments for any indicators of compromise. Aikido, Google’s Wiz cloud security biz, and supply-chain security provider Socket have all published extensive threat-hunting and mitigation instructions for LiteLLM users and security teams, so give those a read stat. LiteLLM, developed by BerriAI, provides a common interface for LLM providers, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google Gemini, and receives about 23 million weekly downloads. This means a compromised installation can run alongside LLM provider API keys, cloud identities, and database connection strings - and expose a ton of valuable credentials, secrets, and other sensitive data to whoever uploaded the malicious package. “Teams using 1.107.0 should stop deploying it and investigate environments where Python ran after installation, including proxy containers and CI runners,” Socket researchers said on Wednesday. The malicious version was uploaded at 11:39 UTC, and according to Wiz kids Benjamin Read and Rami McCarthy, the payload originates with malicious commits made on github.com/Berri-AI/litellm, which is a hyphenated variant of the legitimate BerriAI organization. Miscreants used this repo to inject the three malicious files into the LiteLLM release pipeline. These, according to Makari, include cook.pth, which causes the second file, cook.py, to run automatically every time Python is invoked on the machine, without any additional user action. Meanwhile, cook.py contains the infostealer, and the third file, sitecustomize.py, is the RAT. Python also executes the RAT at interpreter startup, and this file spawns a background daemon that polls the attacker's infrastructure every hour for new commands to execute. Upon executing, the infostealer harvests a ton of sensitive data across 16 modules targeting browsers, cloud providers, and AI services, according to Read and McCarthy. It steals browser credentials and cookies from Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Safari, along with AWS credentials from ~/.aws/, environment variables, and EC2/ECS instance metadata (IMDS). It also collects users’ Google Cloud Platform service account keys and application default credentials, along with Microsoft Azure tokens from the CLI cache. And then it also swipes API keys for OpenAI, Anthropic, Cohere, and other LLM providers, plus SSH private keys, GPG keys, and shell history files. The malware then encrypts all of this stolen data using AES-256-CBC, wraps the encryption key with an RSA-4096 public key, and sends the encrypted data via HTTP POST to an attacker-controlled domain: http://www[.]litellm[.]dev/healthcheck. BerriAI did not respond to The Register’s inquiries. This is an emerging story, and we will continue to update it as we learn more details.®

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 WebRTC, a technology introduced in 2011 that has since become widely used for voice and video communication over the internet. RingRTC provides Signal-specific calling functionality using WebRTC, which already encrypts media traffic, but that isn't stopping RingRTC from failing to hang up calls in certain conditions, according to the CVE report. What’s happening is, in essence, a denial-of-service attack on RingRTC’s finite state machine (FSM) event queue, which handles events involved in managing calls. If one of the people on the call saturates the FSM queue with requests, it can become overwhelmed and fail to process a hangup request, preventing the call from terminating properly. The vulnerability is classified as CWE-754, or improper checking for unusual or exceptional conditions, according to a report posted to GitHub. A conceptual proof of concept is available in the GitHub report linked above, using a Python script to simulate how flooding an event queue can prevent a hangup request from being processed. Were a malicious actor to exploit this, the person on the other end may think the call has been terminated, but either or both of their video and audio channels could still be open. The attack complexity is considered low according to the CVE, and while CISA’s known exploited vulnerabilities catalog doesn’t indicate this has been spotted in the wild, Signal users ought to ensure they’ve updated their apps - mobile and desktop - to the latest versions to ensure they don’t end up being caught on a hot mic without any notice. Comparing RingRTC 2.72.0 to the previous version indicates that Signal's fix allows the call's finite state machine (FSM) to detect termination requests independently of the event queue, while adding a timeout to prevent stalled processing from indefinitely blocking a hangup. It's not entirely clear from Signal's release notes when the fixed version of RingRTC reached the Android, iOS, and desktop versions of its apps. Signal Desktop's release history indicates that RingRTC 2.72.0 was incorporated in September, but the precise rollout dates across all platforms remain unclear. We’ve reached out to Signal to learn more, but haven’t heard back. In the meantime, best to update your installation to be sure you’re not still vulnerable. That, and watch what you say after hanging up a call. ®

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 risk highest for mod_php, with a demonstrated exploit where an unauthenticated request can trigger the attack before any application code runs." Jake Knott, head of threat intelligence at watchTowr, said: "As expected, watchTowr Intel is already observing in-the-wild exploitation of the latest PHP vulnerabilities, with a variety of vibecoded PoCs already hitting our sensors featuring a variety of 'php2shell' User-Agents. Whilst nobody has been successful to date, we don't expect that will last long." "Where immediate patching is not feasible, organizations should consider isolating internet-facing applications from public networks until a fix is available," CERT-EU said in an advisory issued ahead of the patches. The body lists both vulnerabilities with CVSS scores of 9.2. Finnish government services and websites belonging to the Dutch parliament, cybersecurity authorities, and data protection regulator were taken offline as a precaution. Privacy campaign group noyb also temporarily withdrew its website. PHP "powers WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and Magento sites, shared hosting platforms, control panels, and an awful lot of software that doesn't even advertise that it runs PHP under the hood," infosec vendor Huntress noted. That makes identifying exposed installations a substantial job. "The number of places you have to go looking to identify vulnerable PHP versions gets very big, very fast," said John Hammond, Huntress's senior principal security researcher. ®

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 of the publication of Frenos' State of AI in Security report. AI makes it easier and faster for human attackers to target critical infrastructure, gain access to utilities and manufacturing plants, and perform OT system reconnaissance. “Basic access can recon documentation, and distill through that documentation very quickly to find out critical design features of your plant and facility,” said Paul Shaver, head of OT at Armadin, during the panel. “I can download the manual for almost any automation controller, parse through that very quickly, and come up with ways that I can exploit a dedicated feature of something that was not secure by design.” Armadin is Kevin Mandia’s new security startup that uses swarms of autonomous AI agents to simulate real-world cyberattacks. Prior to joining Armadin, Shaver spent six years as the global OT practice leader at Mandia’s earlier company, Mandiant, which Google acquired in 2022. “I will fly my Mandiant flag for a second and try to steer away from the fear, uncertainty, and death of the world is coming to an end, and every script kiddie is now a very sophisticated nation-state adversary. But I’m not going to say the potential is not there, because the tools are improving such that the access to information is so much quicker.” At Armadin, and with an AI assist, “I'm very quickly building tools in days that would normally have taken me months,” Shaver said. “If it can do that for me, it's doing something similar for the folks that have a very basic skill set. I wouldn't go so far as to script kiddies yet, but as the models improve, that becomes more of a possibility in this space.” Plus, as AI lowers the technical barriers to would-be OT hackers, “it advances the timeline,” said Harry Thomas, chief technology officer and co-founder of Frenos, a security company that does AI pentesting for OT environments. “If a better-than-average script kiddie can now perform attacks,” Thomas said, “You have more threat actors out there. There's an acceleration in timeline, more attacks could be happening, and from a defensive position, you might not know who your threat actor is anymore.” Testing the power of LLMs to help plan attacks The Frenos report, published Wednesday, examined the extent to which AI could help someone plan an attack on industrial systems. To do this, it ran several AI models through 16,980 tests between October 2025 and September 2026. These included 13,884 decision attempts, 2,520 planning attempts, and 576 simulated attacks. The company won’t disclose the models or providers’ names, but said it tested six frontier models, two US open weight models, and two foreign open weight models, on three kinds of tasks: choosing one action, planning the steps to a goal, and working through a simulated scenario. Each test gave the model background information and a set of attack actions to choose from. Before choosing, each model received details about assets, networks, and known weaknesses, plus the access each action required. Frenos then checked whether the model’s choice matched the required outcome. Depending on the model, between 6 percent and 47 percent of the choices passed. These tests found that the strongest three frontier models succeeded in about 90 percent of their planning attempts – meaning they produced a workable attack plan – but these same models weren’t consistent: 60 percent, 62.9 percent, and 74.3 percent of the attack plans passed every repeat. “A plan can look sensible and still leave out something essential,” according to the report. “The models had information about the task, but some answers skipped a step or assumed access that the plan had not established.” Meanwhile, the most successful of the four open weight models – a non-US model – achieved a 36.2 percent overall success rate. That figure, however, was still higher than the overall success rates of three other US frontier models, which scored 31.9 percent, 18.8 percent, and 17.9 percent, respectively. “We're seeing that even though AI models help us accelerate our tooling, accelerate our access and knowledge transfer, they are still prone to hallucinations – aka mistakes,” Thomas said. “We still think human judgment remains essential for these AI models to make the threat actors achieve whatever mission or goal they're trying to achieve.” In these tests, no humans asked the models to correct their plans, whereas in a real-life attack, a miscreant who understood the target could spot a gap in the AI’s plan, provide more information, and ask the model to revise its answer. “On top of that, when we were testing the AI models, we used a harness that was pretty simple: Here's some information. Here's the context. Give me an answer,” Thomas said. “A more capable harness could have given these AI models more of an edge.” Based on the findings, Frenos recommends actions for OT defenders to take, starting with a layered defense. This involves segmenting networks, limiting remote access and user permissions, and testing recovery steps. “We have our business continuity plans and disaster recovery plans for a reason,” Thomas said. “Let's execute them.” ®

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 EC spokesperson said. The second is whether it does enough to counter phishing and smishing (SMS phishing), and social engineering. "Scammers take over the account of a property owner and… portray themselves as the property owner, but also take over the contact details," she said. "So they start sending messages that people need to pay additional amounts." The Commission also suspects Booking.com is not sufficiently protecting the data of its consumers and business users. The third strand is advertising transparency: whether the platform clearly distinguishes ads from organic results, and whether it is clear about boosted listings, where property owners pay for higher ranking. Officials cited Booking.com's own admission in June 2024 of a 500-900 percent jump in travel scams over the previous 18 months. "What made us concerned is the very high figures," an official said. In the Netherlands alone, more than 1,000 fraud notifications were made in the first part of 2026, causing damage of €82,000, a tenfold increase on the previous year. “This is a real problem, and this is only the Dutch element,” the official said. “We have reports like that almost from all member states… So, we have clear elements where we find that the risk assessment was not sufficient, and as you know, the risk assessment is a key tool for us.” The Commission acknowledges that Booking.com assesses fraud using cases on its own platform and external reports, and takes internal measures in response. But “we feel that what they have done is absolutely substandard,” the official said. “Although they take measures, they could go much further, and they could have much more solid systems to prevent fraud.” “In the future we expect Booking.com to do a more diligent risk assessment,” she added. That could include addressing abuse of the reservation system, rapidly removing listings when fraud is reported, checking licenses, and changing how property owners are onboarded. A spokesperson at Booking.com told The Register: "We are cooperating fully with the European Commission and engaging constructively on its questions under the Digital Services Act (DSA). Security, trust and the protection of personal information are top priorities at Booking.com. We remain committed to working with relevant governments, regulators, law enforcement and industry partners to combat cybercrime and online fraud and protect travelers and partners." ®

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 received a report from a community member that private keys associated with eight eMudhra intermediate certificates had been compromised,” he wrote. “These keys could allow attackers to issue fraudulent HTTPS certificates for websites they do not control.” Or as Cloudflare put it, “an attacker can create a forged certificate for any domain and use it to impersonate servers to intercept or modify traffic.” Jackson has since elaborated on the incident and the response, which has thankfully seen Mozilla, Chrome, and Apple remediate the issue so their browsers won’t rely on the certificates – at least after users install an update. He also reports that eMudhra has revoked the certs, and lists many FOSS projects that have issued updates that mean they won’t recognize certs from eMudhra. That’s welcome, but sadly certs signed with these private keys are still out there and many services rely on them. Browser makers are set up to detect and reject bad certs. Others who relied on them may not be, and will likely need to dig into their environments to see if they rely on certs signed by eMudhra. Developer Geoffrey Huntley has offered some advice on automating that process. At the time of writing, eMudhra has not responded to The Register’s inquiries about the incident and its security practices. The latter question is of great interest because security researcher Scott Helme analyzed eMudhra’s certs and found one the private keys it used “is the number 4.” “Not a number that starts with 4, or the number 4 followed by a few hundred random digits, just, 4... Another one is 56, and another is 115. I know, because I recovered all of them from their public certificates on my laptop just now, and it took less than a second,” Helme wrote. Other researchers have found private keys including the numbers 66, 155, 156, 230 and 237. Those are vastly inadequate keys, because they’re easy to guess, making all certs issued by eMudhra susceptible to brute force attacks. As Helme put it: “A P-384 private key should be a random 384-bit number, which gives you 2³⁸⁴ possibilities (or roughly 10¹¹⁵), so nobody is ever going to search that.” This is a developing story and The Register will update it as more information becomes available. ®

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 bounty scheme this year as AI-generated submissions piled work onto its security team. Stenberg has previously acknowledged that not all AI-assisted reports are bad, but the workload now demands another response. "This policy change is entirely triggered by the current avalanche of vulnerability reports that keep pouring in. We see no end to them and we do not anticipate this flood to decrease within the next several months. "We are struggling as a project as all key maintainers feel strained, overloaded and brought to the brink of what we can muster. We must act to survive. This is our next step in a survival strategy. It might not be our last. We aim to not drown." Public handling would let more people assess reports, develop fixes, write advisories, and check for related problems before releases ship, Stenberg said. Handling vulnerability reports publicly won't reduce the work per report, he admits, though it could spread the load and make the resulting lessons and documentation easier to find. At least that's the theory. Public disclosure also gives attackers more time to exploit flaws before fixes arrive. The maintainer agrees this is unfortunate yet unavoidable. "We limit this practice to less than HIGH for this reason: at least these problems are not terrible." Stenberg said researchers using AI are generating unusual option combinations unlikely to occur in real applications, then treating minor discrepancies as vulnerabilities. "We can't continue down this spiraling path with our sanity intact. We don't have the bandwidth, manpower or even will to handle a never-ending vulnerability reporting stream at this pace. I believe few software projects can stand this kind of prolonged high volume deluge for extended periods. Something needs to give way." ®

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 products continued to report degraded performance. Things started going sideways on Friday, October 16, when Bullhorn flagged problems getting job postings onto Indeed. By the following morning, the platform was suffering a full-blown outage, and Bullhorn confirmed later that day that it was dealing with something rather more serious than a technical hiccup. "We have detected a cyber incident on the Bullhorn Platform. We have temporarily disabled access to our systems in order to contain the activity while we investigate further," the company said, noting that it had roped in cybersecurity specialists from CrowdStrike to help investigate the attack and restore its services. For recruitment agencies using Bullhorn, the outage meant losing access to candidate records, job applications, placements and, in some cases, the systems used to get people paid. Services began returning on Monday, but recovery has been anything but seamless. As of Tuesday morning, Bullhorn's status page still listed degraded performance across several products, including its automation tools, Talent Platform, Onboarding365 and Time & Expense. While Bullhorn is making progress getting customers back into their accounts, it has yet to answer arguably the bigger question: whether the attackers stole anything. In its customer FAQ, it said a forensic investigation is ongoing, and has not yet determined whether attackers exfiltrated customer data. Bullhorn says it will contact affected customers if the investigation finds their information was compromised, and it also warned people to watch out for opportunistic crooks looking to exploit the chaos. "Threat actors may pose as Bullhorn personnel via email, text, or phone calls, using the incident as a pretext to request credentials or sensitive information," it warned on Tuesday, stressing that its employees would never ask customers to disclose passwords, multi-factor authentication codes, or verification tokens. The company has also required password resets for users who don’t log in through SSO, while customers using API integrations have been instructed to rotate their credentials. The cause of the intrusion remains unknown, and Bullhorn has not publicly identified the attackers or confirmed whether ransomware was involved. The company didn’t respond to The Register’s questions at publication time. The outage may be coming to an end, but Bullhorn's investigation into what the attackers actually did is far from over. ®

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 technical teams. That model is no longer sustainable. Pressure is now coming from three directions at once, as policy raises expectations for boards and senior leaders, organizational reform reshapes how services, systems and suppliers connect, and technology change, from cloud and hybrid work to AI, expands both opportunity and exposure. Together, these forces mean cyber resilience can no longer sit below board level. Public services, from healthcare and benefits to transport, education, local government and emergency response, are now so digitally dependent that a cyber incident is not simply an IT outage. It is a risk to public trust, public safety and the continuity of government itself. Recent history shows what this means in practice. The 2024 ransomware attack on Synnovis, a pathology services provider to parts of the NHS, significantly reduced the capacity to process blood, urine and specimen tests, caused disruption across south-east London and contributed to delays affecting more than 11,000 outpatient and elective procedure appointments. Incidents like this turn abstract cyber risk into real-world service disruption, making resilience a boardroom issue rather than a back-office concern. Cyber resilience is no longer a technical aspiration, but a leadership obligation shaped by policy, organizational and technology change. Policy change has made cyber resilience a leadership obligation The direction from government and the National Cyber Security Centre is clear. The Cyber Resilience Pledge asks organizations to make cyber security a board-level responsibility, register for NCSC Early Warning and take a risk-based approach to Cyber Essentials across their supply chains. The NCSC’s Cyber Governance Code of Practice reinforces the point that cyber risk must be governed like any other material organizational risk. The Cyber Security and Resilience Bill will further expand expectations across essential and digital services, strengthening incident reporting and bringing more critical suppliers into scope. This matters because the scale and impact of cyber threats facing the UK are increasing sharply. The NCSC handled 204 nationally significant cyber incidents in the year to September 2025, up from 89 the previous year. That means the UK is now experiencing an average of four nationally significant cyber attacks every week. Policy has therefore changed the boardroom question. Leaders should no longer ask only whether an organization has invested in security tools. They need to ask whether they can prove resilience, evidence accountability and continue delivering critical services when systems are under pressure, suppliers are compromised, data access is disrupted or attackers are already inside the network. Organisational change is creating hidden cyber risk The second force is organizational change. Local Government Reorganisation is redrawing structures and responsibilities across England. Rail renationalization and other shifts in public ownership are changing who owns, manages and secures critical data and systems. Departmental priorities and delivery models are also evolving under a new Prime Minister, with DSIT being dismantled and functions including digital transformation, public sector AI adoption, information resilience and online harms moving into different departments and central government structures. Every one of these transitions creates potential gaps. Systems need to be integrated. Identity and access privileges need to be reassessed. Data needs to move between teams, agencies and suppliers. Contracts and responsibilities need to be redefined. During periods of change, the attack surface expands, and accountability can become blurred. This is why cyber resilience must be built into public sector reform from the outset. The question is not simply how to restructure services efficiently. It is how to ensure citizens can continue to access those services securely throughout the transition. Reorganization without resilience is a risk to the public. Technology change demands continuous assurance The third force is technology change. Public sector work now happens across hybrid environments, shared services, cloud platforms, partner ecosystems and complex supply chains. Traditional security models were built for a more stable world of fixed offices, predictable networks, known users and clearly defined organizational boundaries. That world no longer exists. AI makes this problem more urgent. AI is already being used across the public sector to improve productivity, analyze information and support better service delivery. But without governance, organizations can quickly lose track of which tools are being used, what data they can access and whether sensitive information is being exposed. Shadow AI is not a future risk. It is a present governance challenge. Resilience in this environment requires continuous assurance. Access should not be granted simply because a user is on a trusted network. Every request should be verified based on identity, context, device posture and risk. Users should only receive the access they need, when they need it. Applications should be protected from unnecessary exposure. Data should be segmented so that compromise in one area does not automatically spread across the organization. What public sector boards should do now Making cyber resilience a board-level priority does not mean every director needs to become a technical expert. It means senior leaders need the right governance, evidence and accountability to respond to the three forces reshaping risk across the public sector. That starts with treating cyber resilience as a standing board agenda item, linked directly to service continuity, citizen trust, regulatory exposure and reform delivery. It also requires boards to understand which critical services depend on which systems, suppliers and datasets, where single points of failure exist, and how disruption in one part of the ecosystem could affect citizens’ ability to access essential services. Supply chain assurance must be part of that same conversation. Public services are delivered through ecosystems, so resilience cannot stop at the boundary of a single department, council, agency or trust. Cyber Essentials, supplier checks, contractual obligations and clear incident reporting expectations should be embedded into procurement and contract management. At the same time, public bodies need to move away from implicit trust based on networks or locations and towards continuous verification based on identity, context, device posture and risk. Users should have only the access they need, when they need it, and AI adoption should be governed before it scales so innovation does not create unmanaged routes to sensitive information. Resilience is now a test of public sector leadership The UK’s policy environment has changed. Public sector organizations are changing. Technology is changing even faster. The only way to manage that complexity is to build cyber resilience into the way public services are governed, transformed and delivered. The public sector cannot afford to treat resilience as something to retrofit after legislation tightens, reform programs are complete or AI adoption has already accelerated. It must be designed in from the outset, measured at leadership level and tested continuously. Cyber resilience is not just about protecting systems. It is about protecting the public’s ability to rely on government when policy, organizations and technology are all changing at once. That makes it a board-level priority by definition. More Information on how Zscaler supports public organizations can be found here. Contributed by Zscaler

The US Department of Homeland Security on Monday issued an order directing federal civilian agencies not to use technology products from Chinese AI lab DeepSeek, and to remove any existing implementations. The order [PDF] is broad, as it requires agencies to ditch "all DeepSeek and DeepSeek-affiliate products, and third-party products and services developed using DeepSeek implementations." Complying will be tricky as it is not clear which third-party products and services have been developed using DeepSeek's wares. Nor is it clear whether "developed using" means providing ongoing access to DeepSeek models via API or simply refers to any app vibe-coded with the help of DeepSeek. It also leaves open the question of AI gateways. Services such as OpenRouter and Vercel AI Gateway make DeepSeek's models available through APIs. And those using gateway services may find themselves using DeepSeek models without meaning to do so. OpenRouter, for example, "routes requests to the best available providers for your model." It selects what the service deems to be the best fit provider of AI services. Vercel AI Gateway does the same by default. So federal civilian agencies could be using DeepSeek models inadvertently, if they haven't taken steps to constrain their AI providers. A DHS spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment. US officials have contemplated a ban on DeepSeek since the China-based AI lab released DeepSeek-R1 in early 2025. On February 6, 2025, US Representative Darin LaHood (R-IL) and US Representative Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) introduced the No DeepSeek on Government Devices Act. The lawmakers characterised DeepSeek as a national security threat because its AI models purportedly capture data on US citizens and provide it to the Chinese government. The bill never made it out of committee, but various government agencies followed through. The US Defense community and lawmakers have already exiled DeepSeek. The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) started blocking DeepSeek on the Pentagon’s IT networks in January 2025. The US Navy, NASA, and the US House of Representatives took similar steps. So did various US states. While the DHS announcement has taken a long time to reach civilian agencies, its timing may be a boon for American AI companies which, like Anthropic, hope to soon go public. That's because open weight models represent competition, and those from China have proven particularly popular both in terms of capabilities and cost. Government agencies that cannot deploy such models (and the taxpayers who fund those agencies) may be stuck paying the prices set by favored US model makers. Concerns about the security and privacy of DeepSeek's iOS mobile app surfaced shortly after DeepSeek-R1 debuted. Several months later, a December 2025 report on the DeekSeek mobile app for Android and iOS cited similar concerns, including plaintext information leaks, links to servers run by Chinese tech firms, and shortcomings like lack of SSL pinning. These issues, however, are mainly mobile security problems that afflict many apps, particularly those that integrate third-party advertising SDKs from companies based outside the US. They don't really address the additional risks posed by the capture of text prompts and responses, or how local secrets and other sensitive information can be ingested by AI agents. Katie Moussouris, founder and CEO of Luta Security, told The Register in an email that while there are legitimate national security reasons to keep DeepSeek's app and servers away from government systems, the way this particular order is written exceeds that requirement in ways that aren't practical. "Banning DeepSeek's own app and API is workable," said Moussouris. "The problem is the ban on 'third-party products and services developed using DeepSeek implementations.' The order doesn't say what 'developed using' means. It could technically cover any model derived from DeepSeek and more importantly, any software whose developers used DeepSeek to write or test code. An AI software bill of materials doesn't record which tools developers used, so it would be no real help. Every vendor would have to attest that nothing it relies on ever touched DeepSeek. There's no practical way to verify that." Moussouris also took issue with the breadth of the order, noting that applying the rules to US-hosted versions of DeepSeek's models goes too far. "The risks the order cites are mostly about data flowing to DeepSeek's servers in China, its data collection, and its app," she said. "US hosting avoids most of those. "For the model itself, the order says only that it may contain malware or vulnerabilities, which is true of all software. NIST found DeepSeek more vulnerable to prompt injection than US models, though every model has that problem. NIST also found it easier to jailbreak, but jailbreak guardrails often get in the way of defenders." ®

Dutch grocery giant Ahold Delhaize, which operates US supermarket chains Food Lion, Giant Food, and Stop & Shop, said it proactively took IT systems offline following a cyberattack, affecting most of its US and European brands. The multinational chain originally disclosed the incident on October 12. “Ahold Delhaize is experiencing a security issue within its network,” it said at the time, adding that security teams, working to mitigate the issues, took “some” IT systems offline. On Monday, the company confirmed that it proactively took certain IT systems, including websites and apps, offline, affecting most of its brands, and said that “malicious actions of others” caused the security issue. “Taking systems offline to help protect them was a precautionary measure that affected most of our brands across Europe and the United States,” Frans Muller, president and CEO of Ahold Delhaize, said in a Monday statement. “The investigation to date confirms this was the right decision.” At this time, all of the physical stores remain open, and the investigation hasn’t uncovered any evidence to suggest the miscreants stole any “sensitive customer, associate, or partner data,” the disclosure said. The company last week notified the Dutch National Cyber Security Centre about the digital intruders, and on Monday filed a report with the Dutch police, according to the statement. Albert Heijn’s website and app are back online, and the company expects home deliveries to resume on Friday. Belgian e-commerce is fully operational, and e-commerce services at Ahold Delhaize’s American brands (Food Lion, Giant Food, Martin’s, Hannaford, and Stop & Shop) are expected to work “in the coming days.” The Etos and Gall & Gall websites are also up and running, along with the “majority of websites and apps” across brands serving central and southeastern Europe. Ahold Delhaize did not immediately respond to The Register’s questions about the cyberattack, including whether it was linked to attacks on refrigeration controllers at hundreds of French supermarkets beginning October 11. The attacks reportedly pushed temperatures as high as 122°F (50°C), spoiling food and causing fires at some locations. This latest cyberattack is Ahold Delhaize’s second in two years. A November 2024 digital break-in disrupted brands across the organization, with some Stop & Shop stores struggling to fill prescriptions, while Food Lion employees reported delayed and missing deliveries. INC Ransom claimed responsibility for the attack at the time and leaked some documents reportedly taken from the retailer's systems. Ahold Delhaize ultimately determined more than 2.2 million people’s data - including personal, financial, and health details - had been compromised. ®

SaaS-for-managed services providers ConnectWise has initiated a “service interruption” for its some of its offerings after detecting unauthorized access. ConnectWise offers ERP tailored to the needs of managed services providers (MSPs), plus tools they can use to manage their customers’ environments. Cloud Backup is one of those tools and does what it says on the tin for data stored on-prem, in the cloud, or in SaaS services like M365 and Google Workspace. On October 16, the company published an advisory revealing that on the 15th it “identified unauthorized access to application identities within the ConnectWise Cloud Backup environment.” “The service interruption affects partners and customers using Cloud Backup, formerly known as SkyKick. Because SaaS Security and Cloud Management are integrated with Cloud Backup, those services have also been suspended out of an abundance of caution while our investigation and remediation continue,” the company advised. The suspension does not mean MSPs, or their customers, should assume that their environments were compromised, just that ConnectWise isn’t confident it can operate its services safely at this time. As of 16:00 UTC on October 18, the services remain unavailable, which means end-users can’t back up data, access their archives, or restore data. “Existing archives remain encrypted, isolated, and preserved, with no evidence of unauthorized access. Our teams continue monitoring affected environments, conducting forensic analysis and threat hunting, and carrying out remediation activities,” the company’s veep of security operations, Jason Ferguson, wrote on Reddit. ConnectWise has not offered much detail on the incident, other than to publish some indicators of compromise it thinks are tied to a handful of IP addresses and integrations with third-party apps. It has also disabled some integrations between Cloud Backup and Exchange, Teams, SharePoint Online, and its own products. Security outfit Huntress offered a starker view and wrote “A Microsoft 365 credential (API secret) belonging to ConnectWise Cloud Backup has been compromised, and Huntress has confirmed it is being used to gain unauthorized access to customers' M365 environments.” “In one Huntress partner tenant, a second ConnectWise application, ConnectWise Cloud Management - MS Teams (Application ID 24205314-2b89-4e07-a2a4-579e898a5640), gave itself Global Administrator and then added new credentials to two other applications in that tenant, one of them being a single-tenant Huntress application unique to this partner.” “Disabling M365 apps, including the abused ConnectWise apps will not remove credentials that were already added,” the firm warns. “You must review the credentials on all of your M365 applications.” ConnectWise says it “cannot discuss threat actor attribution at this time” because it is focused on “investigation, remediation, and supporting affected partners and their customers.” It has, however, called on its customers to probe any M365 environments they manage for signs of compromise. This is where things get tricky, because ConnectWise has no knowledge of those setups – as is proper because it is a platform provider and its MSP clients manage end-user relationships. It’s therefore relying on MSPs to do the right thing. MSPs are under no obligation to disclose the platforms they use to deliver their services. Indeed, for some organizations the allure of working with an MSP is to access packaged services they never need to learn or worry about. End-user organizations that may be happily oblivious about ConnectWise’s contribution to their business are therefore in an awkward position. Businesses that serve MSPs are a frequent target for attackers, who see the chance to compromise the likes of ConnectWise as a possible route to crack all of their partners and those service providers' end-users. The 2021 attack on Kaseya is the most notorious example of such an incident. ConnectWise will be hoping it doesn't take the crown. ®

Late Sunday night, a still-unknown cybercriminal or group hacked thousands of remote-controlled refrigeration systems across hundreds of French grocery stores, spiking temperatures, spoiling food, and sparking fires. This is part of an ongoing trend of attacking physical systems that can do damage in the real world. In August, a ransomware attack disrupted building-management systems at a Canadian hospital, affecting door access controls, central HVAC monitoring, and the issuing of staff access cards. And three years ago, cyberattacks hit Las Vegas casinos, causing slot machines to go dark, preventing payment kiosks and ATMs from spitting out cash, and locking guests out of their rooms when the electronic keys stopped working. Not all digital intrusions remain in cyberspace, and attackers don’t need to encrypt files and steal data to cause chaos. Hitting physical systems often produces more severe consequences - and turns up the heat on executives to pay an extortion demand. “There was one gig where the customer was refusing to pay, and so the threat actor was like, ‘Hold my beer, have fun getting into your offices,’ and locked everybody out,” Tim Beasley, a senior incident response consultant at Semperis, told The Register. Beasley won’t name the customer, or provide any incriminating information, but said the incident response involved police smashing glass in addition to his team recovering compromised data. “The cops had to break in, and literally get into the building, breaking some windows, so the customer was able to finally get back in,” he said. We asked if the customer paid the ransom demand, and Beasley yelled: “Oh, hell, no!” A report published earlier this month by ServiceNow’s Armis Labs found increasing evidence of ransomware attackers using physical consequences as leverage in their intrusions. “Today’s BAS operate at the intersection of IT and OT worlds, creating unprecedented exposure,” the report said. Ransomware with physical consequences Building automation systems - BAS - are the critical systems that control and monitor facilities’ HVAC, lighting, energy usage, and water consumption. They also oversee badge readers, door locks, surveillance cameras, fire alarm control panels, and other physical safety equipment. As such, BAS make very attractive targets for ransomware operators looking for high-pressure ways to extort organizations into paying multi-million ransom demands. These systems also appeal to government-backed goons and hacktivists looking to ensure maximum psychological and physical impact during destructive cyberattacks. Armis Labs found 73 percent of organizations own BAS that have been used in ransomware attacks, and this same percentage have known exploited vulnerabilities in at least one of their building automation systems. Additionally, 91 percent of BAS communicate over insecure protocols - opening up an even bigger attack surface for cyber-miscreants wanting to cause physical harm. “The primary thing that we see with any attack on building management systems or physical systems: It’s a great place for the threat actor to hide,” Michael Freeman, ServiceNow’s senior director of threat research, told The Register. “It's easier for them to compromise, and it's easier for them to hide in.” BAS and operational technology (OT) in general have fewer security controls than IT systems. Most require continual uptime, which makes them harder to patch or even scan for vulnerabilities and misconfigurations as this may lead to outages. “One case in particular, against a very large financial institution, the threat actors were staying low and quiet by attacking their BMS systems, and then pivoting into the IT environment,” Freeman said. The intruders were routinely caught - and booted from - the financial institution’s IT systems, so they built backdoors into the BMS to ensure persistent access to both OT and IT networks. “We're also seeing threat actors using AI to understand more building automation systems, especially ones that are using obscure OSs like VxWorks, older Unix-type systems,” Freeman said. AI has entered the chat As multiple security experts have told us in previous interviews, security through obscurity is dead. Not only does AI make it easier for attackers to find bugs – some very obscure and decades old - but it also means criminals no longer need to be OT experts to carry out destructive cyberattacks on critical networks and facilities. Instead, they can use AI to learn all about the obscure protocols and proprietary hardware and software that historically made industrial control systems black boxes. “It’s easier to understand what the controls are,” Freeman said, using the example of an attacker trying to take down a plane, or some similar catastrophic cyberattack. Historically, even advanced, government-backed hacking squads would “be quiet, because you don't know what changing certain settings is going to do,” Freeman explained. “Now you can use AI to say, ‘If I compromise a weight and balance system for airlines, all I need to do now is move this number here to this number, and I just told the system to load heavy stuff on the right side of the plane instead of equal distribution.'” Freeman told us he has seen attackers break into airlines’ OT gear in the past. “But they didn’t know what they were getting into, and so they left them alone,” he said. “Those do cause me concern because in the past I've helped to kick people out of those types of systems.” Industrial orgs increasingly under attack OT security provider Dragos tracks ransomware groups’ claims against industrial organizations on the criminals’ leak sites, along with publicly disclosed intrusions affecting manufacturing and other critical sectors. To be clear: claims on leak sites aren’t always accurate or even true, and the claim itself doesn’t mean operations or control systems were hit. Since 2022, however, “the numbers have been consistently increasing,” Lexie Mooney, senior threat analyst at Dragos, told The Register. The cybersecurity firm tracked 995 ransomware attacks against industrial orgs in 2023, a 49.5 percent increase from 2022. That number jumped more than 87 percent in 2024. Active ransomware groups targeting industrial orgs also grew in 2024 to 80 groups, up from 50 the year before. Dragos tracked 119 ransomware groups impacting more than 3,300 industrial organizations in 2025, and the incidents have steadily increased every quarter this year: 1,020 incidents in the first quarter of 2026 and 1,140 incidents in Q2. “The vast majority of cases are opportunistic,” Abdul Alamri, a senior threat analyst at Dragos, told us. “In some of the cases that we have seen an operational impact, either physical systems or an OT operation, it’s just the nature of the opportunism on the part of those ransomware groups.” This is partially due to the complexity of OT systems, he added. “Ransomware groups want to disrupt operations, and put pressure on the victims to pay the ransom,” Alamri said. “They don’t want to invest that time and effort to target complex systems." It’s usually quicker and easier for financially motivated crims to affect operations via IT systems - as the extortionists did in the August 2025 Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) breach, which halted manufacturing and crippled business operations for months. Internet-connected OT: the next 'low-hanging fruit' The other side of this complexity, however, is that many organizations themselves still lack visibility into their OT environments. Dragos estimates that fewer than 10 percent of OT networks worldwide currently have sufficient network monitoring in place. Plus, in 30 percent of incidents the security firm responded to in 2025, the investigations did not begin with a detection alert, but with someone noticing that “something seemed wrong” in operations. This lack of visibility, combined with threats from AI, worries Alamri. “If you compare the risk that we have seen from humans, to what we are about to face in the near future with AI agents who might continuously try to break into those systems - it’s a pretty dark future if we don't take the right measures to protect ourselves against it.” As organizations get better at patching and securing IT systems, attackers will likely look to internet-connected OT systems where digital compromises have real-world consequences, according to Matt Hayden, VP of cyber and emerging threats at General Dynamics Information Technology. “We all anticipate that as we get better at reducing the IT low-hanging fruit, OT will become a vector of much more scrutiny and much more attention,” Hayden told The Register. Before joining GDIT, Hayden served as the assistant secretary for cyber, infrastructure, risk and resilience policy at the US Department of Homeland Security. Compliance vs. security “There is a big focus on the hardware being connected for the purpose of compliance - and to make sure that, in the name of compliance, we aren't opening back doors, to devices that traditionally wouldn't have to be connected to facilitate their service,” he said, using refrigeration units as an example of one such system that is now internet-connected for compliance purposes. This was prior to the French supermarket hacks. Refrigeration units’ monitoring systems connect to the internet so their owners and operators can prove to regulators that the units maintain their uptime and temperature in accordance with regulations. “So if the health department comes by, they say, ‘Look, my refrigerator was at 27 degrees for the last 72 days,' and they have a check mark, and they get their A plus. But that simple connectivity is also a vector in which that particular refrigerant unit could be targeted for disruption,” Hayden said. About a week after our interview, criminals did exactly that. “The recently reported exploitations of commercial refrigeration units represent a significant example of devices without digital value, no sensitive data or extended enterprise access, being exploited by being connected to the internet with unpatched firmware,” Hayden told us in a subsequent email. He said he expects the attribution to be “less nation-state, and more likely those looking for targets of opportunity to identify what could be done with the unpatched systems.” “The consequences are food supply degradation at a small scale, but it is an important example of what could happen at scale very quickly with more consequential operating equipment,” Hayden said.®

The October 2026 Windows security update may break networking for some customers who are still clinging to long-deprecated NTLMv1 security. A seemingly minor change in the update could have major implications for administrators and enterprises that haven't fully moved away from the legacy technology. Before the October 2026 update, Windows permitted NTLMv1-derived credentials for Single Sign-On and generated warning events. After the update, requests to use NTLMv1-derived credentials are blocked. It comes down to the BlockNtlmSSO registry value. If it hasn't been set, Windows will now use Enforce mode (1) instead of Audit mode (0), thus blocking requests and potentially impacting Wi-Fi, Ethernet, and VPN authentication, and therefore connections. The update does not set the value of BlockNtlmSSO, and administrators can set it to 0 to temporarily allow NTLMv1-derived Single Sign-On credentials. However, Microsoft noted, "Using Audit mode reduces the protection provided by Enforce mode and should only be considered as a scoped, temporary security exception." To be clear, this is not a bug and is by design. The addition of NTLM to the deprecation list occurred in 2024, and Microsoft added audit logs for NTLMv1 usage in late August 2025. The Windows giant has made no secret of its desire to ditch the legacy technology, stating in 2023, "Our end goal is eliminating the need to use NTLM at all." The problem is NTLM's longevity. It appeared in 1993 with Windows NT 3.1, and removing it from enterprise environments has proven tricky, even though it is somewhat insecure by modern standards. Microsoft removed it from Windows 11 24H2 and Windows Server 2025, but some remnants can still be found, notably when using MS-CHAPv2-based connections, including PEAP-MSCHAPv2, and EAP-MSCHAPv2, in a domain-joined environment. Hence the introduction of the audit mode in 2025, to help administrators spot where the technology was still being used. It is now 2026, and Microsoft has taken the next step. If Credential Guard is not enabled and BlockNtlmSSO is not set to Audit mode (0), the use of NTLMv1-derived credentials will be blocked as Microsoft works "to finalize the disablement of NTLMv1." There is no indication of how long the BlockNtlmSSO workaround (setting the value to Audit mode) will work - most likely until the next major Windows release. In September, Microsoft said, "In-market versions of Windows client and Windows Server will continue to support NTLM." However, it also stated, "Our long-term objective is a Windows platform that doesn't need NTLM at all." As such, if the message wasn't already clear, the move to enforce it by default makes it impossible to miss. The technology still exists in the operating system, but it is on its way out and will be removed in a future Windows release. Problems with networking after the October 2026 Windows security update could therefore signal that migration plans are not as far along, or as complete, as administrators might have thought. ®

The US' bankruptcy courts are currently down owing to what officials are calling a “cybersecurity incident.” The Administrative Office of the US Courts said the websites and systems that support the Bankruptcy Noticing Center (BNC), which manages electronic comms related to bankruptcy cases, were pulled offline while the vendor investigates. BAE Systems runs the affected systems and websites on behalf of the Federal Judiciary, and is “working to restore operations,” according to an announcement by the US Courts on Thursday. “As a result of the incident, all access to the BNC systems and websites that BAE operates on behalf of the judiciary and the related bankruptcy noticing process are unavailable at this time, including bnc.uscourts.gov, bankruptcynotices.uscourts.gov, notices.uscourts.gov, and the National Creditor Registration Service," it said. “The incident has also halted the BNC’s production and distribution of bankruptcy notices for bankruptcy courts.” While the public notice was published on Thursday, the issues affecting the BNC systems began a few days earlier, on October 9, according to the Bankruptcy Court of the Eastern District of Texas. Alongside its own announcement, the same court published a general order indicating that for any case filed on or after September 14 with an active motion to stay, that delay would be extended by an additional 30 days. The court said it will continue to accept filings, open cases, and process documents, but said there may be a delay in the entry and service of notices and orders until the issues are resolved. The courts' ability to process electronic and paper bankruptcy notices is affected, and it applies to federal bankruptcy courts across the country. A spokesperson at BAE told The Register: "BAE Systems, Inc. operates the Bankruptcy Noticing Center (BNC) on behalf of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts (AOUSC). We are aware of a security incident that is isolated to the BNC system and have taken immediate steps to address it. We are coordinating closely with AOUSC on the response." The disruption comes at a difficult time for the US public sector, which has struggled with multiple recent cyberattacks. ShinyHunters' attack on the FBI in September is doubtless the most high-profile of these, although the Arizona Judicial Branch confirmed an attack on the state’s court systems at around the same time. Officials said the “criminal hackers or their bots” were responsible for stealing personal data and backup court files. The US Courts also said in August 2025 that it was stepping up its cybersecurity measures in response to increased targeting of its case management system. ®

An old-fashioned smash-and-grab job on a photographer’s vehicle threatens the security of pupils’ data as a UK secondary school says it faces a potential data protection pickle. Jon Curtis-Brignell, headteacher at Priory School in Lewes, said in an email this week that a company the school hired to take pupils’ annual school photos has alerted it to a data theft case after a vehicle was broken into. “Pret-a-Portrait has informed us that, overnight between 6 and 7 October, one of its vehicles was broken into and a camera bag containing SD memory cards was stolen,” Curtis-Brignell wrote. “Some of these cards may have contained photographs taken at Priory School, together with images of the QR code cards used for school photographs, which show pupils’ names and class names.” The headteacher said that the same equipment used to take the photos at Priory School was also used for three additional photography jobs after Pret-a-Portrait visited the school on October 1. Pret-a-Portrait, which has offices in the UK, Qatar, and the UAE, told the school that it believes “most, if not all” of the files containing pupils’ data will have been overwritten as a result, but it cannot be certain. Curtis-Brignell said that the potentially affected information included photographs, pupils’ names, and their “class information associated with the photography process.” Other types of data, such as addresses, contact details, financial information, medical information, and safeguarding records stored in the school’s own systems remain untouched. Nick Kerr, owner of Pret-a-Portrait, told The Register that no physical, printed photos were stored in the vehicle at the time of the break-in, and that it was not possible to determine the potential scope of the data protection violation. “As the email from Priory School explains, it is likely to be somewhere between a small subset of their pictures and none of them,” said Kerr. On a positive note, he said that there is nothing to suggest the files have been improperly accessed. “Our analysis reveals that no improper access to pictures from this job occurred in between the time of the theft and the pictures being taken offline.” Per the headteacher’s email, Pret-a-Portrait confirmed that it took a number of steps to mitigate the potential damage, including taking all school photos offline, changing the IDs used to access them, and changing its procedures so that all SD cards are wiped at the end of each commission. The company also “reviewed and strengthened its procedures following the incident,” and reported the matter to both the police and the ICO. “I appreciate that receiving an email of this nature may understandably cause concern,” Curtis-Brignell added. “We have worked closely with our Data Protection Officer and Pret-a-Portrait to understand what happened, establish the potential risk and ensure that appropriate action has been taken. “We wanted to be open with families about what has happened, while also reassuring you that there is currently no evidence that the information has been accessed or misused and that a number of steps have now been taken to prevent access to the affected photographs and reduce the risk of a similar incident occurring again.” ®