ShinyHunters claims it has dumped the personal details of millions of Charter Communications customers after the US telecom giant apparently declined to play along with the gang's latest extortion demands. According to Have I Been Pwned, the breach exposed the personal details of 4.9 million customers, including names, email addresses, phone numbers, and physical addresses. It says a smaller subset of roughly 85,000 records originating from an internal staff directory also contained job titles. Charter appeared on the ShinyHunters leak site earlier this month, with the extortion crew claiming to have stolen more than 42 million records belonging to consumer and business customers. The listing, seen by The Register, warned: "Over 42M records containing PII have been compromised. This is a final warning to reach out by 27 May 2026 before we leak along with several annoying (digital) problems that'll come your way." After the alleged deadline passed, the criminals updated the post with a familiar message for organizations that decline to pay. "Over 42M records containing PII have been compromised. The company failed to reach an agreement with us despite our incredible patience, all the chances and offers we made. They don't care." Charter, one of the largest broadband providers in the US through its Spectrum brand, confirmed it is investigating the incident but disputed the sensitivity of the data exposed. "We are aware of the situation, following our security protocols and are working with appropriate authorities," the company said in a statement provided to multiple outlets. "No sensitive personal information (PI) or customer proprietary network information (CPNI) data was exfiltrated by the threat actor as a result of recent activity." That may be technically true, but millions of names, addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses still represent a useful haul for scammers, phishers, and identity thieves. The incident is also not Charter's first brush with high-profile intrusions. The telecom provider was among the organizations reportedly caught up in China's Salt Typhoon espionage campaign last year, alongside a growing list of US telcos. The leak lands hours after Carnival Corporation, the world's largest cruise operator, admitted that ShinyHunters had also made off with the personal data of nearly six million people, suggesting the gang has been enjoying an unusually busy week. For companies weighing whether data theft is less disruptive than ransomware, ShinyHunters keeps providing fresh case studies in why that difference may not matter much to the people whose information ends up online. ®

Carnival Corporation - the world's largest cruise operator - has confirmed a digital heist, a month after hacking crew ShinyHunters claimed to have stolen millions of customers' records. The breach, Carnival confirmed, stemmed from an April 14 social engineering attack on an employee, though the company declined to comment on the scale or name ShinyHunters. However, a company filing with the Maine attorney general's office puts the number of affected individuals at just under six million, down from the 8.7 million records previously listed by Have I Been Pwned. Carnival previously acknowledged the phishing attack at the time, but it did not say whether any data had been accessed or stolen. ShinyHunters claimed it lifted terabytes' worth of Carnival records and hinted at a breakdown in negotiations, likely related to the criminal outfit's extortion demands. "The company failed to reach an agreement with us despite our incredible patience," ShinyHunters wrote on its data leak site, adding: "They don't care." Following a "thorough and time-consuming analysis of the impacted data," Carnival confirmed that names, addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, and state identification numbers were all included in the breach. As is often the case in data theft incidents, individuals will be affected to different degrees, depending on what information they shared with the company. Carnival began sending notifications directly to affected individuals on Wednesday. Those communications include details about how recipients can redeem two years of free credit monitoring services, as is common in US breach notifications, via TransUnion. It closed its message with a promise to improve: "In addition to the comprehensive security measures the company had in place prior to the incident, it has taken steps to further safeguard its systems, including enhancing its security and monitoring controls. "The company will continue to advance its IT security and data privacy controls to stay ahead of an ever-evolving threat landscape." ®

CrowdStrike, working with Google and the Shadowserver Foundation, said it has taken down the Glassworm botnet, a self-propagating, credential-stealing worm that has targeted developers and spread through poisoned software packages since early 2025. The endpoint security giant’s Counter Adversary Operations team and partners hit all four Glassworm command-and-control channels simultaneously at 1400 UTC on Tuesday, “severing the operators from their infected machines and their ability to deliver new malicious payloads,” according to CrowdStrike’s blog. Google Threat Intelligence Group chief analyst John Hultquist confirmed his company’s involvement in a social media post. “As part of our disruption efforts, we are working with partners to bring more pain to attackers, especially when we see them abusing our products or targeting our users,” Hultquist wrote. A spokesperson declined to provide additional details to The Register about Google’s role in the takedown. The disruption comes as another self-replicating worm, Mini Shai-Hulud, rips through open source code and miscreants poison GitHub repositories and npm packages in similar supply-chain attacks also targeting developers’ environments. “Glassworm marked a significant shift in the threat landscape that should serve as a wake-up call for every organization that ships or consumes software,” CrowdStrike wrote. “Adversaries are no longer just targeting products, they're targeting the developers who build them.” First spotted by endpoint security shop Koi in October 2025, Glassworm used invisible Unicode-based code injection, blockchain-based C2 infrastructure, and Google Calendar as a backup command server to turn infected developers’ machines into criminal proxy nodes. This self-replicating worm initially targeted VS Code extensions on the OpenVSX marketplace before moving on to npm and Python packages, and later poisoned more than 300 GitHub repos using stolen credentials harvested in earlier Glassworm infections. This worm appeared about a month after another self-propagating malware strain, Shai Hulud, first wormed through npm packages including those maintained by CrowdStrike. Glassworm infected all platforms - including Windows, macOS, and Linux systems - stealing credentials and other sensitive information, and also spawning its own Node.js remote access tool called GlasswormRAT. C2 architecture designed to withstand takedowns Glassworm’s C2 infrastructure used four distinct channels to complicate takedown efforts. These included the Solana blockchain, with C2 server addresses encoded in the memo fields of blockchain transactions, ensuring the C2 couldn’t be taken offline through conventional means. It also used Google Calendar event titles as dead-drop locations for Base64-encoded C2 paths. The GlasswormRAT used a decentralized BitTorrent Distributed Hash Table (DHT) for configuration data stored against hardcoded public keys. And finally, Glassworm relied on traditional C2 servers, hosted on commercial VPS providers, as the final payload delivery mechanism. Disrupting all four channels “required precision and timing,” according to CrowdStrike. “Taking down only one channel would have left the others operational, allowing the operators to quickly reconstitute.” All Glassworm-infected machines now beacon to the benign CrowdStrike-operated IP address 164.92.88[.]210. The security shop urges organizations to review network logs and endpoint telemetry for connections to this address, which indicate a Glassworm infection. ®

Crims found the soft spot in the company's security. MyPillow, the US-based bedding brand founded by election conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell, has been listed by Play ransomware extortionists as an alleged victim. The pillow shop first appeared on Play’s name-and-shame data leak site on Monday, with the gang threatening to leak stolen data by Friday if MyPillow execs don’t pay the ransom demand. While the extortionists didn’t specify how many gigabytes of data they allegedly stole from MyPillow, they claim it includes “private and personal confidential data, client documents, budget, payroll, IDs, taxes, finance information” and more, according to the dark-web post seen by The Register and shared on social media by threat-intel firm FalconFeeds. MyPillow did not immediately respond to The Register’s inquiries. We will update this story if we receive any response. As of May 2025, the FBI said Play ransomware operators had allegedly exploited about 900 organizations, and the crew’s ransomware variant consistently ranks among the top five targeting critical infrastructure. Play previously stole around 65,000 Swiss government files after breaching its IT supplier Xplain in 2023. A year later, the group hacked Microchip Technology. The American semiconductor manufacturer told regulators that the ransomware attack disrupted some of its business operations and cost it $21.4 million in expenses related to the security incident. North Korean government goons have also used Play ransomware in their intrusions. Cisco Talos' incident responders previously told The Register that Play was one of the crews that used so-called "EDR killers" to disable endpoint security products in their ransomware infections. MyPillow is probably best known for its founder and CEO's politics. Lindell is a major proponent of President Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, and is now running for Minnesota governor. ®

A solo Russian-speaking threat actor used a jailbroken Google Gemini in a fraud and credential-theft campaign targeting hardcore Trump supporters and conspiracy theorists. Between September 2025 and May 2026, the “low-skilled” scumbag using the handle bandcampro partnered with the LLM to impersonate an American veteran, run a Telegram channel (@americanpatriotus), hack admin credentials, and steal cryptocurrency, according to a threat report from TrendAI. His only "real cost" in the operation was stolen API keys. Bandcampro ultimately reached about 17,000 subscribers, used 73 likely-stolen Gemini API keys, hacked 29 WordPress admin credentials, infiltrated at least one company, and emptied at least one victim’s cryptocurrency wallets, according to TrendAI researchers Philippe Lin, Joseph C Chen, Fyodor Yarochkin, and Vladimir Kropotov. The threat-hunters detailed the campaign in a Thursday report, and said while the Telegram channel dates back five years, bandcampro’s success skyrocketed once he started using AI-generated content last fall. "We have reached an inflection point for cybercrime conspiracies,” Tom Kellermann, TrendAI’s VP of AI security and threat research, told The Register, adding that “bandcampro's conspiracy underscores the sophistication of the Russian cybercriminal community and how weaponized jailbroken LLMs are manipulated to orchestrate a systemic cybercrime campaign.” Kellermann said the attack “highlights LLMs' Achilles heel, which is the tremendous exposure to API attacks." TrendAI researchers discovered the scammer’s infrastructure in May, which exposed the full contents of the individual’s operational environment. He used Google Gemini to generate the Telegram channel text and Venice.ai to power an interactive chatbot designed to simulate a Quantum Financial System (QFS) terminal. Neither Google nor Venice responded to The Register’s requests for comment. The campaign targeted the QAnon and MAGA communities, mimicking the cryptic, anonymous “Q drop” messages at the heart of the QAnon conspiracy, but the researchers say his “use of information operation techniques was more likely for cryptocurrency fraud instead of political motives,” based on the content posted, and the stock remote access trojan (RAT) used alongside other commercial malware. On September 9, 2025, the actor posted a fake "freedom-first, self-custody wallet" called StellarMonster, with a welcome bonus of up to 1,000 XLM (about $380) on the Telegram channel. It was an executable named StellarMonSetup.exe. Malware analysis determined that in reality, StellarMonSetup.exe is a legitimate remote access tool called GoToResolve, which gives the operator a persistent remote desktop session with file access, command execution, and clipboard capture. Plus, any subscribers who used the "import your wallet" function and typed their seed phrase into the fake import screen gave the attacker their wallet keys. “At least one victim's crypto-wallet was fully compromised: password cracked, 12-word mnemonic stolen, and the owner's 40+ wallet addresses harvested across all major chains,” the researchers noted. The attacker also used an AI-powered brute-forcing tool to hack WordPress accounts, we’re told. “The script is built on the premise that people mutate familiar base passwords in predictable ways, and Gemini 2.5 Flash can model the mutations when supplied with static wordlists,” Trend wrote. In total, the AI-assisted WordPress hacking operation cracked 29 WordPress administrator accounts, including those belonging to weapons retailers, legal offices, medical practices, and small commercial sites. During his conversations with Gemini, bandcampro asked questions like: “When the bot accumulates 5,000 active users, how much can we earn from one pump-and-dump cycle?” The criminal also asked how professional crypto call centers scam North American victims and Gemini suggested Medicare and/or Health Canada fraud targeting the elderly. The Russian speaker also automated his content campaign through a pipeline he named "Quantum Patriot," a set of Python scripts that called Gemini to role-play as an American veteran patriot. The pipeline fed a preset list of newsfeeds into the LLM and Gemini rewrote them, prompted to act as an admin of an “American Patriot” channel looking for “hidden angles.” The crypto- and credential-thief also used Gemini to help him hack, set up a command-and-control framework - including a mail-testing tool, a Gmail aggregator, and an anonymous proxy on a VM in the Netherlands - steal and validate credentials, and run the chatbot. “In the anatomy of one busy working day, Gemini deployed servers, helped debug code, automated workflows, wrote a script to rotate API keys, and managed the actor’s Cloudflare tunnels,” the TrendAI researchers wrote. “The actor prompted in Russian, while the LLM reasoned and replied in English. Over one 16-hour session, the actor co-worked with Gemini end-to-end." At one point, after a nine-hour pause from the human partner, which the authors say “was likely a 9-hour sleep,” bandcampro found the bot posting every 20 minutes without a break - but with Russian slang appearing in the English posts. So he opened another session to fix it. “What previously required a team of writers, social media managers, IT workers, and malware programmers can now be automated by a single actor using a VPS, a Telegram bot, and API access to frontier models,” Trend’s team warned. ®