Attackers are hammering servers with millions of attempts to exploit the critical PHP2Shell vulnerabilities, with Amazon revealing that someone was already going after the flaws four days before they were publicly disclosed. Cloudflare says it has recorded a staggering increase in attacks targeting the two vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, since details began circulating earlier this week. According to Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, the company spotted thousands of exploitation attempts in the 10 hours before the vulnerabilities were publicly announced. That figure jumped to tens of thousands within 45 minutes of disclosure, hundreds of thousands within two hours, and has since climbed into the millions. And the attackers aren't simply recycling the same exploit. Cloudflare said it has seen miscreants tweaking their payloads in an attempt to sneak past its web application firewall (WAF) protections, apparently using feedback from blocked requests to work out what might get through. Security outfit Hadrian also sounded the alarm on October 21, reporting that PHP2Shell was being "exploited in the wild at scale." "Most of the attacks we observe abuse PHP's session upload-progress path, and we expect more exploit paths to appear before and after the fix ships," the company warned. More worrying, some attackers appear to have started before the vulnerabilities were even public knowledge. Amazon Threat Intelligence says it detected an attempt to exploit PHP2Shell on October 17, four days before patches were released. The activity was picked up by MadPot, Amazon's network of honeypots designed to lure attackers and record what they get up to. "While the vulnerability was under embargo, the targeting of a honeypot from an anonymized IP address suggests the activity was conducted by a threat actor, though it remains unclear how the actor acquired exploit information prior to disclosure," Amazon said. The retail and cloud giant said it detected multiple proof-of-concept exploits on October 21, with the earliest appearing around 0200 UTC, some 12 hours before the patches were released. Over the following six hours, further attempts arrived from different anonymized infrastructure, using a variety of payloads. Amazon reckons this points to multiple attackers rather than a single group. Whether any of those attempts would have worked against real-world systems remains unclear. The findings add another layer to an already messy disclosure. As The Register reported on Wednesday, the PHP Foundation has accused supply-chain security vendor Chainguard of putting websites at risk by publishing patched PHP builds before the agreed disclosure deadline. However, Amazon's October 17 detection suggests at least one cybercrim was already trying to exploit the bugs days before that incident. The vulnerabilities themselves are particularly nasty. Both carry a critical 9.2 severity rating and affect PHP's handling of memory, potentially allowing unauthenticated attackers to execute malicious code on vulnerable servers. Unlike flaws in individual plugins or applications, these bugs affect the PHP runtime itself, putting a potentially enormous number of websites at risk regardless of which content management system they use. Cloudflare says it has deployed WAF protections across its free and paid plans, although it has stressed that these are no substitute for patching. With attackers already trying their luck before the fixes were available, admins may have more than just a patching backlog to worry about. Amazon is advising organizations to investigate suspicious activity dating back to at least October 17, rather than assuming their systems were safe until the vulnerabilities became public. ®

An automotive tech startup claims that its IT systems were attacked by individuals trying to steal its driving model, and that those attacks came from an IP address associated with a rival in the space. The tech startup, IQ.Lvbs, described the alleged security incident in a recent blog post. On October 3, IQ.Lvbs introduced the private beta of NovaSpark, the first model for the company's IQ.Pilot app, in the Comma.ai Discord channel. They put it in that channel because the model requires the use of Comma.ai's camera hardware, which is built for self-driving vehicles. From there, things got weird. "From October 7 to 14, we faced repeated attempts to steal NovaSpark, access users’ devices and private driving files, and exploit our sign-in system," the IQ.Lvbs blog post claims. "The first requests came from an IP assigned to Comma.ai Inc." In addition, on October 8 – shortly after the alleged attacks began – somebody banned IQ.Lvbs' team from the Comma.ai Discord channel. Posts on the IQ.Pilot Discord channel indicate that individuals doing private beta testing for IQ.Lvbs have also been banned from that channel. One of the three people involved in IQ.Lvbs, a UI/UX designer who asked to be identified only as "Cat," speculated to The Register about the reasons for the alleged hack and Discord ban. "Our model, NovaSpark, is a good deal ahead of Comma's latest small and large models, which directly threatens their core business of making AI models good enough to sell their hardware," he said. "Comma for the most part has been stagnant in their models' improvement and that was a main driver for us making NovaSpark." An October 7, 2026 Discord message from user Torq_boi, said to be Harald Schäfer, Comma.ai’s CTO, implies NovaSpark was distilled from Comma.ai's Rebellious Hope model. “I’m glad people are training models and experimenting with this stuff," the post starts. "But don’t lie to people about what you’re doing, and saying it’s not a finetune of existing comma models when it is. That’s not cool.” IQ.Lvbs disputes that assertion and says it did the work on its own. "The claim that NovaSpark is Rebellious Hope with a short fine-tune and an unchanged policy does not survive scrutiny, and we’re not sure how Comma came to that conclusion, especially considering that they do not possess NovaSpark’s model weights or ONNX," the biz said. In the log data IQ.Lvbs published to support its claims, the company flags the username haraschax as one of those associated with Comma.ai IP addresses. Schäfer uses that username on GitHub. Comma.ai and Schäfer did not respond to requests for comment sent to several different addresses. The Discord user Torq_boi in the Comma.ai channel did not respond to a DM seeking comment. Comma.ai is currently being investigated [PDF] by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to assess whether its driving automation tech contributed to five crashes and three deaths. IQ.Lvbs says it's considering legal action over the alleged hack. "We are currently reviewing our legal options and looking into involving the authorities," said Cat. ®

Multiple ransomware groups, including Qilin and Inc, have been exploiting a high-severity authentication bypass bug in Palo Alto Networks' PAN-OS, with Unit 42 investigating attacks since early June across numerous industries, such as finance, healthcare, and manufacturing. CVE-2026-0257 affects PAN-OS GlobalProtect portals and gateways, potentially allowing attackers to bypass security restrictions and establish an unauthorized VPN connection. The security vendor first disclosed and patched the bug on May 13 and initially assigned it a medium-severity rating, saying it was aware of attempts to exploit it but had not observed any malicious exploitation. That assessment quickly changed, and by the end of the month, Rapid7 researchers said they observed successful exploitation across multiple customer environments dating back to at least May 17. On Monday, Palo Alto Networks’ consulting and incident response biz, Unit 42, said ransomware crews including Qilin and Inc continue to batter the CVE. “Attackers are leveraging this vulnerability to gain an initial foothold into corporate networks, subsequently bypassing multi-factor authentication (MFA) controls to establish a VPN session,” said Andy Piazza, a senior director of threat intelligence at Unit 42. After gaining initial access, the criminals move laterally across the networks using Remote Desktop Protocol and Server Message Block (SMB), dropping additional malware for credential harvesting and data theft before ultimately deploying ransomware, Piazza warned. In its ongoing investigations, Unit 42 has spotted the ransomware criminals infecting “numerous industries, including education, financial services, healthcare, high tech, hospitality, manufacturing, professional and legal services, government, transportation and logistics, utilities and energy, and wholesale and retail." Palo Alto Networks did not respond to The Register’s inquiries about the attacks, including how many organizations have been infected. Additionally, ReliaQuest intel analysts warned that “multiple threat groups,” including Settra ransomware operators, are also exploiting the bug to gain initial access to corporate networks via unauthorized VPN sessions. “The most significant evolution in tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) following successful exploitation of CVE-2026-0257 is the direct pivot to the virtualization layer,” Piazza wrote. “In one notable case, attackers moved from the compromised VPN gateway to the vCenter management appliance. From there, they disabled security controls on ESXi hypervisors (execInstalledOnly) and used a custom tool to perform offline credential dumping directly against a domain controller's virtual disk (VMDK).” This allows the miscreants to bypass in-guest endpoint detection and response products, and represents “a highly sophisticated method” of stealing domain-wide credentials, he added. Unit 42 has also spotted criminals chaining this exploit for initial access with other vulnerabilities such as CVE-2023-27532, which targets Veeam backup infrastructure. So if you haven’t already patched vulnerable PAN-OS software, do so now - and investigate whether attackers have already gained access to your network. Check Unit 42’s indicators of compromise to assist with threat-hunting activities.®

A test account protected by "Password1" helped an intruder steal personal data relating to 3,300 people, mostly children, in a ransomware attack that has drawn regulatory rebukes for two Welsh organizations. The Information Commission's Office (ICO) issued reprimands rather than fines to Ogi Networks Limited (ONL) and the Local Government Data Unit – Wales, also known as Data Cymru. According to the ICO, altnet ONL provided server and connectivity infrastructure, licensing, and support to Data Cymru, which helps public bodies across Wales make effective use of data. On November 1, 2024, Data Cymru suffered a ransomware attack after a miscreant exploited a test account called Test2 to infiltrate its network and encrypt 182.7 GB of data housed in a file server and an internal database server. "Before deploying the ransomware, the threat actor exfiltrated 42 GB of data from a primary domain controller, a file server and an SQL server," the ICO said on Tuesday in its reprimand of ONL [PDF]. ONL told the ICO it created the test account on January 13, 2012, during its initial project for Data Cymru. "ONL confirmed that the creation of the 'Test2' account was likely intended to test user account access before migrating 'real' users to its services," the ICO said. "When it was created, the 'Test2' account was given the password of 'Password1'." The ICO cited Bitwarden's password strength tool, which rated "Password1" as "very weak" and estimated a cracking time of less than a second. "The local administrator accounts on the three impacted systems all had the same password. This meant that once one system had been breached, the local account hashes could be collected and used by the threat actor to authenticate access to other systems on the Data Cymru network," the regulator added. "ONL confirmed that it did not carry out any reviews of local administrator accounts following their initial deployment. This meant these accounts remained active, regardless of whether they were used, and continued to use the same default passwords set at the time of their creation in January 2012, as part of ONL's initial project with Data Cymru, for more than 12.5 years." The data watchdog reprimanded ONL under Article 32 of the UK GDPR because it failed to put in place "appropriate technical and organisational measures" to ensure processing systems and services were safe, and it didn't regularly assess or evaluate those measures. It found ONL had no auditing procedures to review user accounts within Data Cymru's Active Directory. The ICO's separate reprimand of Data Cymru [PDF] also detailed failures in its security arrangements. "Password1 is not an appropriate password, it is a wide-open door to nefarious actors," said ICO head of investigations David Doodson. "This incident shows how a single weak password, attached to an account that was no longer needed, can leave the door open to a serious cyber-attack that can affect thousands. "The responsibility for these failures did not sit with one organisation alone. ONL created the test account whilst Data Cymru retained overall control of its network, including the ability to instruct ONL to create or remove accounts. Neither had put in place sufficiently clear and effective measures to ensure that old accounts were routinely identified and removed." ®

Tim Beasley, a senior incident response consultant at Semperis, was investigating a cyberattack involving Russia’s Midnight Blizzard when a package containing nesting dolls and other regional gifts showed up on his doorstep. At the time, Beasley served as the lead investigator for Microsoft’s Detection and Response Team (DART). He assumed it was from the group, which has been linked to the Kremlin’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), although the sender didn’t leave a note. “Just little souvenirs and gift basket stuff from that area of the world,” he told The Register. “We-know-where-you-are kind of stuff. It’s a real eye-opener when you get that type of thing.” While digital intrusions having physical consequences is nothing new, cybercriminals in recent years have turned to real-life harm and mental and physical trauma to force victims into paying extortion demands. Some groups even use cybercrime as a gateway drug to real-life violence. Over the summer, Europol and its partners' investigators flagged 4,340 “horrific” URLs for removal as part of an ongoing crackdown on The Com (short for community), a loosely knit network of online groups whose young members participate in a range of illicit activities including hacking, swatting, digital extortion, real-life shootings, and other physical violence. “We’ve seen violence as a service get used,” Beasley said. He’s also investigated ransomware attacks where C-suite executives receive pictures of their kids’ schools directly from the cybercriminals in an attempt to apply psychological pressure to pay the extortion fee. “I've seen threats involving people's families, from social media reconnaissance, and in our world you more and more come to expect it, which is unfortunate,” Beasley said. This type of psychological intimidation and harm against victim companies’ employees has seen an uptick in the last several years to the point where it's almost common. Thirty-seven percent of ransomware attacks involved psychological or physical threats against staff, according to Semperis’ annual ransomware risk report. The global study of 1,200 post-ransomware organizations conducted over the first half of the year found attackers threatening psychological intimidation (23 percent) and physical threats (17 percent), to force payment. They are not only targeting executives and staff, but also families of their victims. A quarter of these victims experienced doxxing – posting individuals' personal details, such as names, home and work addresses, and phone numbers online – while another 25 percent had to seek psychological and/or medical treatment in response to ransomware infections. Nearly the same number (24 percent) hired personal security teams, while 23 percent experienced swatting calls – that's when attackers phone emergency services and report a bogus incident like a bomb or active-shooter threat to trigger an armed response. Additionally, more than half (53 percent) of respondents reported that ransomware attackers carried through on threats in the past year. Some of these threats reported by ransomed organizations’ employees include: threatening texts, letters, or packages: 57 percent threats against family or friends: 37 percent physical intrusion: 19 percent abduction: 17 percent bodily harm: 13 percent stalking: 6 percent. “It's the more well-known groups,” using psychological and physical threats to force payments, Beasley said. “I've seen Scattered Spider, I've seen ShinyHunters, I've seen Lapsus$.” For what it's worth, ShinyHunters claimed in an exclusive interview with The Register that they “don't attack human beings.” They did, however, admit that “there are times in the work we do sometimes we have to push the corporate to the absolute limit to get them on the table.” The takeaway for defenders and executives from this report is to “stand your ground,” Beasley said. “Don’t buckle under the pressure, and just know that you know it's going to be okay. If you feel like you're under duress, then by all means get law enforcement involved. Don't be afraid to call the cops. Don't be afraid to get the FBI involved, sooner rather than later. And don’t pay them.” This last piece of advice is important, as once you pay, they're going to come back for more. Semperis’ report found that 69 percent of surveyed ransomware victims were targeted multiple times within the past 12 months, and 31 percent made multiple payments to attackers. “Don’t pay anything,” Beasley said. “Never pay them.”®

The owner of Hobbs, Phase Eight, and Whistles is the latest fashion retailer to suffer a cyberattack, leaving several IT systems offline and customers facing order delays. South African retail giant The Foschini Group (TFG) confirmed on Tuesday that its UK business, TFG London, discovered a cybersecurity incident on October 11 that affected all three brands. Two days later, several systems remain unavailable, and the company is still trying to establish whether any personal or sensitive information has been compromised. The incident hasn’t forced stores to close, but TFG said some website functions may be unavailable. Customers have also been warned that orders placed on or after Sunday could be delayed, according to an email seen by The Telegraph. "Stores are open as normal but some of our brand's website capabilities may not be available as the investigation continues," the company said. "We apologize for any disruption and will provide additional updates to our customers as appropriate." TFG said it immediately activated its incident response and business continuity plans, brought in external cybersecurity specialists, and notified the relevant UK authorities. A spokesperson at the ICO told The Register: “We can confirm we have received a breach report from TFG Brands (London) Limited and we are assessing the information provided.” There is at least some good news for shoppers worried about their payment details. In an email to customers, TFG London said a third-party provider handles payment processing and that, based on its investigation so far, it has no reason to believe payment information is at risk. Whether other customer data has escaped into the wild is another matter. TFG said it is still investigating that possibility and will notify affected individuals or organizations if it finds evidence of a compromise. The company has yet to disclose how attackers gained access, whether ransomware was involved, or when it expects to have its systems fully restored, and did not respond to The Register’s questions. The disruption appears to be confined to the three fashion brands. TFG said its White Stuff and Inside Story businesses are unaffected, as are its operations in Africa and Australia, which run on separate IT systems. The attack comes during a particularly miserable spell for fashion retailers, which seem to be attracting cybercriminals almost as enthusiastically as shoppers chasing a sale. Last week, ASOS customers received an unexpected notification informing them that the online fashion retailer had been hacked. ASOS subsequently confirmed that an attacker had gained access to an employee account by impersonating a trusted contact and obtaining login credentials. Armed with those credentials, the attacker got into third-party platforms holding customer names and contact details. Meanwhile, H&M is reportedly investigating claims that it was targeted by the notorious ShinyHunters cybercrime group. According to The Times, the Swedish fashion giant is examining allegations involving a limited amount of company data, although it stressed that it had found no indication its systems had been compromised. No evidence currently links the incidents at TFG London, ASOS, and H&M, and the latter has not confirmed a breach. Still, with three major fashion businesses linked with cyber trouble in little more than a week, October's hottest retail trend appears to be incident response.®

The United States Department of Justice has charged a man with fraud after he allegedly told clients he could decrypt files locked up by ransomware but actually paid ransoms – and seemingly got away with it for years. The Feds allege that Zohar Pinhasi – aka “Zack Silver” and “Zack Green” – ran a Florida company called “MonsterCloud” that advised ransomware victims not to pay because it had a way to recover encrypted data. “The charges relate to Pinhasi’s claimed ability to decrypt ransomware without paying cybercriminals, purportedly using ‘proprietary tools’ and ‘advanced decryption techniques' on behalf of distressed business owners who came to his company,” according to a DoJ press release. “In fact, Pinhasi allegedly used a portion of his clients’ fees to pay off the ransomware attackers, and then kept the rest, often extracting a substantial markup.” In one case, Pinhasi allegedly charged his client $150,000, paid the $8,200 ransom, and pocketed the rest – but didn’t admit he had paid the ransom. That scheme allegedly worked so well that Pinhasi charged clients more than $19 million and paid more than $8 million in ransom payments. The DOJ’s indictment [PDF] says MonsterCloud’s website mentions its use of “advanced decryption techniques and cutting-edge technology” – the same language found on this monstercloud.com page. The site also contains this claim: “At MonsterCloud, we are not a team of IT Experts. We are the most sophisticated Counter Cyber Terrorism team in the world.” The indictment suggests MonsterCloud was nothing of the sort, and that its claims rang hollow for years. “MonsterCloud's website included ‘testimonials’ and other promotional content, including from at least one compensated spokesperson,” the indictment states. “In May 2019, one such spokesperson – an individual who had provided a paid testimonial for the MonsterCloud website – contacted the defendant Zohar Pinhasi with questions about Pinhasi’s business practices and truthfulness.” “Among other things, the spokesperson asked Pinhasi whether MonsterCloud actually had any proprietary software that would allow MonsterCloud to decrypt encrypted data. Pinhasi responded: ‘MonsterCloud doesn't hold any proprietary technology [to] decrypt the ransomware data.’” Pinhasi faces two counts of wire fraud, and one of wire fraud conspiracy. He could do twenty years on each count, if convicted. The FBI is investigating this case, and it appears further charges could follow as the indictment states Pinhasi had “multiple co-conspirators, individuals whose identities are both known and unknown to the Grand Jury, including MonsterCloud employees and contractors.” ®

A former US Army soldier has been sentenced to 70 months in prison for hacking telecoms companies, stealing sensitive records, and trying to extort more than $1 million from his victims. Cameron John Wagenius, 22, carried out the campaign while serving on active duty. He pleaded guilty in March 2025 to unlawfully transferring confidential phone records, then admitted conspiracy to commit wire fraud, computer-related extortion, and aggravated identity theft in a separate case that July. Court documents say Wagenius conspired with three others to obtain credentials for the protected networks of at least ten organizations between April 2023 and December 2024. During that period, he was stationed in South Korea and Texas. The Justice Department has not publicly identified the victims, describing them as US and overseas telecommunications companies and other organizations. Wagenius has also been linked to the 2024 Snowflake extortion campaign, which affected AT&T, Verizon, and numerous other companies, as The Register previously reported. After two suspects were arrested in connection with the Snowflake attacks, an account controlled by Wagenius claimed to possess AT&T call records belonging to Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. Using online aliases including "kiberphant0m," Wagenius and his co-conspirators obtained login credentials with a hacking tool he helped develop called SSH Brute, among other methods. They exchanged stolen credentials in Telegram group chats and discussed using them to gain unauthorized access to other parts of victims' networks. Court documents say the group traded hundreds of credentials and stole hundreds of thousands of customer records from multiple companies. Wagenius and his accomplices advertised stolen data through XSS, BreachForums, X, and Telegram. Some posts offered the information for sale, while others threatened to publish it unless victims paid. The Justice Department said the conspirators attempted to extort at least $1 million in total, successfully sold some stolen data, and used other records to commit fraud, including SIM swapping. US District Judge Lauren King told Wagenius at sentencing: "Your actions show a shocking disregard for the safety and security of the United States... You took these actions motivated by greed and a desire for notoriety." Wagenius was also ordered to pay $294,978 in restitution. ®

ShinyHunters, the data theft and extortion crew that has stolen sensitive information belonging to millions of cancer patients, university and K-12 students, and Carnival cruisers, wanted to preserve their reputation and keep their “business” afloat. So it hacked the FBI to make a statement, the group told The Register. “It’s a game and it’s the world we live in,” a ShinyHunters spokesperson told us. “We are just protecting our business as any other business would do. It’s about who does their job better.” On Friday, the FBI confirmed the breach to The Register, after earlier in the week saying the bureau was investigating ShinyHunters’ claims. "The FBI is aware of a cyber-criminal enterprise group claiming a compromise of the FBIJobs.gov portal and alleged impact to FBI employee personally identifiable information (PII),” an FBI spokesperson told The Register. "While the point of breach is still undetermined - whether a third-party or the FBI’s enterprise - we are actively and aggressively investigating this matter and working closely with those third-party providers that support FBIJobs.gov to mitigate any and all risk." On Tuesday, the criminals told us that they broke into the bureau via yet another Oracle PeopleSoft zero-day flaw in the FBIJobs.gov portal, which remains down as of Friday. Then, they breached the FBI’s managed servers on AWS GovCloud and swiped thousands of personnel files belonging to current, former, and prospective FBI employees. “We hold very sensitive data on almost ALL FBI Agents and individuals who filed an application with the FBI for a job,” the group claimed in a message posted online and addressed to FBI Director Kash Patel and Brett Leatherman, assistant director of the FBI’s Cyber Division. Sample files reviewed by journalists and security researchers appear to contain agents’ home addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, Social Security numbers, job titles, assigned field office, and emergency contact information. 'We refuted the misinformation disseminated by the FBI' According to a spokesperson for ShinyHunters, the FBI hack isn’t about the money, and the crew did not demand a multimillion-dollar extortion payment to not leak the agents’ personal details. “Our breach of the FBI was executed specifically to contest the allegations made against ShinyHunters in their May 2026 FLASH report,” a spokesperson told The Register. The FBI bulletin, published soon after the group breached ed-tech giant Instructure's Canvas platform and claimed to have stolen data tied to hundreds of millions of students, teachers, and staff, said ShinyHunters uses “harassment strategies, sending threatening text messages and phone calls to victims and their family members, and in some cases, swatting.” The criminals, it continued, “may falsely claim to have sensitive or compromising information, including embarrassing photographs or videos of victims, which frequently do not exist.” ShinyHunters contends this is all false. By hacking the FBI and releasing its statement about the hack, “we demonstrated our technical capabilities and directly refuted the misinformation disseminated by the FBI, journalists, and industry researchers,” the spokesperson told us in an interview. “This was fundamentally a public relations and marketing initiative for our business,” they said. 'Results-driven professionals' or criminals? ShinyHunters said it believes that “future corporate partners we engage with for payment will review this documentation, reinforcing our reputation as serious, results-driven professionals focused solely on transaction and resolution.” Most people call these "future corporate partners" victim organizations, breached by the digital thieves, and threatened with data leaks unless they pay an extortion demand. The FBI intrusion “establishes our credibility, technical superiority and excellence, and capability with future corporate stakeholders, positioning us as a professional and predictable entity focused on concluding negotiations efficiently,” the spokesperson said. It also puts a huge target on the crew, and we’d bet that the FBI, already gunning to arrest ShinyHunters members, is now doubling down on those efforts. The spokesperson said they and others in the crew started off as GnosticPlayers before rebranding as ShinyHunters in 2020, and that they have since seen the “majority” of GnosticPlayers members arrested. This business, however, is a criminal operation. We asked them why they believe people will trust the words of criminals over those of law enforcement. They said it’s due to ShinyHunters’ “unique and exceptional reputation along with over five years of history in the space…We are in a unique position and due to our vast capabilities and resources, victims are more likely to resolve the situation quickly and cheaper with us instead of going down the full disclosure route.” Think of the children We also questioned how they justify doing what they do in this “business” - breaking into IT systems, stealing data, extorting victims - considering the personal toll it takes on people, especially when the stolen files contain sensitive information about children as they did in the Canvas intrusion. ShinyHunters claims that they “don't attack human beings. We attack the corporate structure. The Business. Not human beings. The money comes out of insurance pocket. Not people’s or businesses' own. Full coverage by insurance. No personal harm is being done, only business harm that they recover from within a quarter considering the type of attack.” Ransomware and other disruptive attacks are “substantially worse and costly,” they said. “There are times in the work we do sometimes we have to push the corporate to the absolute limit to get them on the table,” they continued, noting that there was an “initial issue” with the Canvas intrusion “that we cannot comment on, but it highly relates to the misinformation we are combating. It takes a lot of convincing to bring a corporate to the table to negotiate if they think you are not trustworthy and bluffing/exaggerating what you have.” While we don’t know for sure what this issue was, ShinyHunters switched to school-by-school extortion after compromising Instructure, the company that owns the Canvas online learning platform, in late April and after the initial pay-or-leak deadline passed on May 6. They injected a ransom message into about 330 Canvas school login portals, causing Instructure to take the platform offline for a day - during final exams and Advanced Placement testing for many. Meanwhile, that PeopleSoft 0day The ed-tech company ultimately “reached an agreement” with ShinyHunters, which is corporate-speak for they paid the extortion demand. Alliance Risk CEO David Vainer previously told The Register he estimates the figure sits somewhere between $5 million and $30 million. According to ShinyHunters, the PeopleSoft preauth vulnerability that they exploited in the FBI attack still doesn’t have a patch. Oracle hasn’t responded to The Register’s questions about the zero-day, or any plans for a patch. Shiny had “no comment” about whether the gang has abused the PeopleSoft bug to compromise other organizations. But they added: “the zero-day would allow us to access similar HR/Employee personal information for other corporations who are vulnerable.” They wouldn’t put a dollar amount on how much they earn from extorting businesses, but boasted: “our revenue performance significantly outperforms both our counterparts and legitimate real life businesses. We have reason to believe in a few months or soon an upcoming financial analysis or reports tracking our earnings will reflect substantial revenue growth.” And they would not comment when asked if they worried about getting arrested and criminally charged for their digital intrusions and extortion attacks. ®

The CEO of crypto exchange Bitget has confirmed that a cyberattack with all the hallmarks of a North Korean operation resulted in approximately $387.5 million worth of digital assets being stolen from the exchange’s wallets. Bitget initially estimated the loss at $351.6 million, but later revised the figure to $387.5 million after identifying additional affected assets on Zcash and TRON that were not included in the initial estimate. Blockchain intelligence company Arkham published its preliminary observations of the attack, estimating at the time that roughly $350 million was stolen and that $228 million left Bitget’s wallets in 18 minutes, between 18:58 and 19:16 UTC. Arkham said $153 million worth of XRP was taken from a wallet it identified as a Bitget cold wallet, while the stolen assets also included $66.2 million of ETH, $34.8 million of USDT, $12.9 million of USDC, and $12.8 million of Tether Gold on Ethereum. Other affected networks included Arbitrum, Optimism, BNB Smart Chain, Avalanche, and Base. However, Chen said Bitget's cold wallets and customer balances remained unaffected, while its User Protection Fund held more than $464 million worth of assets. “To be transparent about our financial position: beyond the $464M+ Protection Fund – all held in publicly verifiable wallets – Bitget holds over $1 billion in its own assets,” Chen said. “User funds are covered on a 1:1 basis.” Chen also explained that Bitget Wallet, the company’s self-custody product, operates on infrastructure separate from its exchange, and Bitget users can still make deposits and trade their tokens, despite withdrawals being temporarily suspended while additional security checks are completed. Bitget said it also engaged incident response giant Mandiant and blockchain security outfit SlowMist to help with the investigation into the attack. Chiefs at fellow exchanges rallied around Bitget in support. “MEXC stands ready to support Bitget in any way we can,” said CEO Vugar Usi. “In moments like this, the industry is stronger when we stand together.” Binance co-CEO Richard Teng also pledged Binance's support for Bitget, saying it had shared intelligence and helped trace the stolen funds. Ben Zhou, CEO of Bybit, said his company was on standby to “help in any way we can,” noting that Bitget helped it out following the $1.5 billion Bybit theft the FBI attributed to North Korea in February 2025. How and who Root cause analyses typically take some time, although according to Chen, Bitget's security team has already identified the wallet service's backend system as the source of the unauthorized transfers. “Hackers breached a key backend system of the wallet service and exploited it to forge transfer information and invoke the authorization signing process, thereby transferring funds out,” she said. “The possibility of private key leakage can be ruled out – this means a more severe risk scenario has been eliminated. Damage control has been confirmed as complete, and there is no risk of further fund outflows from the platform. “The specific intrusion methods used by the hackers are still under technical investigation, and a full report will be released upon completion of the investigation.” Chen did not go into too much detail about the alleged links to North Korean state-sponsored attackers having a hand in the attack, but said “IP behavioral patterns and on-chain signatures” suggest it was Kim’s cronies at work. It would come as little surprise if North Korea was indeed the culprit behind the attack. The regime has a knack for hacking crypto exchanges. The aforementioned hit on Bybit was perhaps North Korea’s biggest crypto haul, although similar lucrative ventures attributed to North Korean attackers have come at the expense of DMM Bitcoin and WazirX, among others. Bitget was founded in 2018, registered in the Seychelles in 2022, and operates through regional hubs across the world. Some netizens have speculated that the timing was especially inconvenient, with the transfers detected at 18:31 UTC – 02:31 on September 25 in Singapore and China, the first day of China’s three-day Mid-Autumn Festival holiday. The festival is also widely celebrated in Singapore, although it is not a public holiday there. The Register asked Bitget whether this played a role in the attack and its remediation but it did not respond. As of Friday, Bitget is offering bounties to those who help freeze or recover the stolen funds. It said eligible participants could receive 5 percent of the funds their efforts successfully freeze or recover.®

Clop has discovered what life is like on the receiving end of an extortion demand after rival crew ShinyHunters hijacked its leak site and demanded an eight-figure payout. The takeover surfaced over the weekend, when Clop's dark web leak site displayed a large "DOMAIN SEIZED BY SHINYHUNTERS" banner and the tagline "rooting your systems since '19 ;)." ShinyHunters told Reuters that it broke into the site on Friday by exploiting a vulnerability in the software powering it. The crew claimed this gave it extensive access to Clop's infrastructure. "We basically own them now," it said. Clop has not responded publicly, although two security researchers told Reuters that the clash appeared genuine. The Register has also viewed the defaced site, where ShinyHunters is posting increasingly colorful demands. According to ShinyHunters, the feud dates back to Clop's attacks on Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) customers last year. ShinyHunters claims it discovered the zero-day first, only for Clop to obtain the exploit and use it against corporate networks. It now wants a share of the proceeds. In a message posted on September 19, ShinyHunters demanded an eight-figure payment, claiming the sum represented 2.333 percent of its own net worth. A later update raised the demand to "all the money you made off the EBS campaign plus more AND WITH INTEREST." ShinyHunters also threatened to identify companies that allegedly paid Clop and publish the sums and Bitcoin addresses involved. ShinyHunters turned the screw again on September 21, warning that its demands would increase with every 24 hours that Clop failed to respond. It now also wants a public apology, because apparently having your dark web extortion site hijacked isn't embarrassing enough. Clop is one of the most prolific data extortion groups in cybercrime. The gang has spent years exploiting vulnerabilities in enterprise software to steal data and extort victims, most notoriously during the 2023 MOVEit campaign, which affected thousands of organizations and exposed information belonging to tens of millions of people. ShinyHunters has an extensive rap sheet of its own, having been linked to numerous large-scale data theft and extortion campaigns. Its latest target is rather more familiar with that business model than most. The potential damage to Clop goes beyond the defacement of its leak site. If ShinyHunters has the wider access it claims and publishes records of previous ransom payments, the fallout could extend to companies that believed paying Clop had kept their identities and negotiations private. For now, though, those claims remain unverified. There is also the small matter of Clop's reputation. Leak sites are intended to demonstrate that an extortion crew has both the stolen goods and control of its operation. Having yours hijacked by a rival and repurposed to demand money from you is not exactly a glowing advertisement. ShinyHunters says the price will continue rising every 24 hours until Clop responds. The extortionists have become the extorted. ®

Scammers impersonating law enforcement or government officials have cost victims more than $1.6 billion since January 2025, the FBI reports. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) received close to 61,000 complaints of this type between January 2025 and July 2026, putting the average per-complaint loss at more than $26,000. The most common type of scam is one involving criminals convincing targets to pay a sum of money to remove charges the fraudsters claim were filed against them. Typically contacting targets via unsolicited phone calls, the scammers usually claim that the target has committed or is connected to a crime, and threaten consequences such as arrest and prison time if a payment is not made. Accounting for roughly 11 percent of the complaints is a different type of scam, which involves alleging victims did not fulfill their assigned jury duty or missed a court date, then threatening them with a fine or arrest unless they pay. Of these 6,833 complaints, scammers caused losses amounting to nearly $36 million. A more profitable variant involves a more targeted approach. Scammers will complete some due diligence on a target, such as ascertaining their profession, and tailor the scam to their job. The IC3 has seen cases in which scammers contact medical practitioners, for example, claiming their medical license is expiring or that it was used in the commission of a crime. Payment is then demanded either under the guise of renewing the license or as part of an extortion attempt to "protect their professional reputation." Victims reported 3,322 instances of this kind of targeted scam, with total losses exceeding $37 million. A far less common tactic, deployed in 496 of the total complaints, saw scammers claim that documents such as driver's licenses or passports had expired and demand payment to renew them. Despite accounting for a minority of cases, criminals still netted $348,000 using this method. Finally, and arguably the most elaborate tactic the IC3 outlined, was the targeting of Americans from different ethnic communities, foreign nationals, and international students in the US. The nature of the targeting was not the aspect the criminals invested the most effort in. The general procedure was also similar to the other examples: Scammers impersonate foreign law enforcement or US-based foreign diplomatic officials, threatening to cancel the victim’s home-country passport or have them extradited. However, these scams sometimes involve video calls. The criminals are known to don a country’s law enforcement uniform, or in some cases even take the calls in movie-style sets they create to mimic real government facilities. The IC3 said that it received 1,809 complaints of this kind of targeted scam during the 19-month reporting period, with total losses exceeding $140 million. It means nearly 10 percent of the overall losses stemmed from one scam that accounted for less than 3 percent of the total complaints. Law enforcement impersonation scams are common across the world, although they may take different shapes from country to country. In the Netherlands, for example, police received more than 7,200 reports of fake police officer scams in the first half of 2026 alone, although the criminals behind them don’t hide behind a phone or keyboard. Scams in the Netherlands see fraudsters approach victims at their homes, usually targeting the elderly population, offering to safeguard their valuables while posing as a trusted authority. In reality, the criminals simply steal the jewelry, money, bank cards, and other valuables they are entrusted to protect. Cases like these have surged across the country in recent years, and aspiring crooks as young as 14 have tried to cash in on the trend. Police have invested more in public awareness campaigns as a result. The FBI reminded the public that neither it nor any other law enforcement agency will call an individual and demand payment or request personal or sensitive information. Citizens should remember to ask for credentials and make attempts to independently verify the identity of the caller, such as calling the relevant office using publicly available details and asking for the caller by name. The IC3 recently reported its most damaging year for internet scams. It released 2025’s data in April, covering all types of cybercrime, pegging total losses at $20.87 billion – the first time it has reported annual losses exceeding the $20 billion threshold. ®

Spain’s data protection agency (AEPD) has reported the country’s first-ever personal data breach caused by the actions of an autonomous AI agent. Francisco Pérez Bes, president and deputy of the AEPD, said in a Monday blog post that an individual deployed an AI agent that used a “known large language model (LLM)” to carry out the attack on an organization. The agent scanned “generic files” before accessing the organization’s system, then ran vulnerability scans to find flaws that would give it read/write access to files containing personal data and invoices. Pérez Bes did not name the LLM used to support the attack, but said whoever was behind it used the agent to “successfully chain together different phases of the attack.” This demonstrates that AI-supported attacks are no longer theoretical, he added, and called on organizations to embrace defense tools that are capable of keeping pace with the speed at which agentic attacks can be executed. “Human supervision remains essential, but it must be supported by detection, containment, and response mechanisms capable of operating quickly enough,” said Pérez Bes (machine-translated). “The arrival of AI agents in the offensive arena should prompt an immediate review of security and data protection models. “Data protection officers, managers, and delegates must prepare for a scenario in which the speed of attacks will increase, but in which the same fundamentals will continue to be crucial: Understanding the processing activities, minimizing data, limiting access, correcting vulnerabilities, controlling suppliers, and being prepared to respond.” The Register asked AEPD for more information. Spain’s first AI agent attack comes as the AEPD recently recorded its busiest year for data protection complaints. According to its most recent annual report, covering 2025, the agency received 30,931 complaints – the most in its history – representing a 64 percent increase compared to the year before. And although Spain is only now getting its first taste of a security mishap caused by a naughty agent, cases involving the foremost US AI houses are already heavily documented. OpenAI’s claim in July that its agents escaped a sandbox and started attacking Hugging Face kickstarted something of a battle between it and rival Anthropic over whose agents could take the most liberties with their security. Both companies have reported several instances of their agents going rogue, escaping "secure" environments and going walkies across the internet to attack unwitting organizations. OpenAI has been circumspect about the true scale of its rogue agents’ damage, as third-party reporting showed more websites than it was letting on were taken over. Similarly, Anthropic has said that its AI agents had, in four cases now, accessed third-party systems in attacks that, if carried out by a human, could see them convicted under computer laws. ®

Someone compromised the official HBO Max Reddit account and used it to push more than 100 malicious ads serving up ClickFix attacks targeting both Windows and macOS devices with information-stealing malware. A Reddit user uncovered the infostealer ads on September 6, noting that the ad showed u/hbomax as the author — this is the verified HBO Max account — and advertised a macOS app for HBO Max. The streaming service does not offer a native client for the Mac. Anyone who clicked on the malicious ad would then be taken to a “somewhat-legitimate” looking landing page (hbomaxx[.]us) that includes a join/download button. Clicking the button produced instructions telling the user to copy and paste a command into Terminal on macOS. The Reddit security sleuth described that as “the classic infostealer/clickfix paste this command to download,” noting that they tested all of this in a sandboxed environment, and didn’t actually run the executable on their machine. “My guess is that the Reddit account is compromised,” they concluded. Three days later, Reddit paused the infostealer-dropping ads, and an admin said the social media platform’s safety and security teams were investigating what happened. HBO Max’s parent company Warner Bros. Discovery didn’t immediately respond to The Register’s inquiries about the account takeover - including who hijacked the streaming service’s Reddit account and how they did it. Maybe someone who didn’t like the House of the Dragon season 3 finale? We will update this story if and when we hear back. Researchers at Hudson Rock and ADAMnetworks analyzed the ads, and in a couple of reports said the HBO Max account hijacking was part of a “massive 48-hour malvertising blitz” that pushed 108 distinct ads using multiple software lures. They named the campaign PasteSwitch, and said it serves up targeted malware aimed at victims’ operating system - either macOS or Windows. The payloads include infostealers, malware loaders, cryptocurrency clippers, and fake cryptocurrency wallet applications. The cryptocurrency clippers - PasteSwitch delivers either AnimateClipper or ZigClipper - also provide blockchain-based command-and-control fallbacks for the attackers. They use Binance Smart Chain (BSC) contracts to dynamically fetch whatever C2 domain the crooks are using at any given time. “Between March and July 2026, researchers observed 36 mainnet changes executed by the same attacker controller address,” Hudson Rock said. “Because the C2 domain is hosted directly on the blockchain, the infrastructure demonstrates dynamic resilience, allowing the threat actors to easily rotate burned domains.” In addition to HBO Max, the attackers used developer-tool, disk-cleaner, and AI-themed lures, including fake OpenAI Codex ads, which crims have previously used to push Mac malware. Of the 108 ads, 46 used an HBO Max lure, directing app seekers to either hbomaxx[.]app or hbomax-macos[.]com. Another 36 tried to trick prospective victims via an OpenAI Codex theme (with a codex-craft[.]com) landing page. Of the rest: 15 purported to be a macOS disk utility (apple.clean-disk-guide[.]com) and 11 used other developer tools as lures (code-desktop[.]com). “The campaign proves once again why trusted distribution channels are becoming prime targets for infostealer delivery,” Hudson Rock co-founder and CTO Alon Gal said in a LinkedIn post. It also shows that miscreants continue to make heavy use of ClickFix attacks, so there’s little sign this social engineering method is going away anytime soon.®

A Ukrainian lawyer who wound up coding malware for the Conti ransomware gang has been sentenced to four years in a US prison. Oleksii Oleksiyovych Lytvynenko, 44, pleaded guilty in June to conspiracy to commit wire fraud over his role in Conti, the Russia-linked ransomware operation associated with more than 1,000 victims and at least $150 million in ransom payments. Lytvynenko took an unusual route into the ransomware business. The Ukrainian national, who later lived in Cork, Ireland, trained as a lawyer before joining Conti as an intruder and developer. According to his plea agreement [PDF], Lytvynenko operated under the handle "henry" and joined a team run by another Conti conspirator known as "silver" or "buza." He was recruited to help with coding and directed to work on a malware loader – software designed to get other malicious code running on a victim's machine. Prosecutors said his Google account showed he had also been doing some homework. Investigators found books and videos about malware and hacking alongside Conti malware, ransom notes, and stolen victim data. Prosecutors said he also used Google and ZoomInfo to research potential targets. Lytvynenko wasn't confined to writing code, according to the filing. Evidence from his online accounts showed that he possessed data stolen from eight US victims and four overseas, with the eight American victims reporting more than $1.5 million in losses. Court documents identify several Bitcoin transfers tied to his Conti work, including 0.4 BTC worth $25,042 that prosecutors traced back to one of his victims. He has been ordered to forfeit the same amount. Conti disbanded in 2022 after its internal chats and source code were leaked following the gang's public support for Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Lytvynenko apparently didn't take that as his cue to find another line of work. When Gardaí turned up at his County Cork home in July 2023, they said they found his laptop open, Cobalt Strike running and a Rocket.Chat session connected over Tor. Prosecutors said evidence recovered from the machine showed that his involvement in ransomware activity had continued after Conti disbanded. Lytvynenko was extradited from Ireland to the US in October 2025. The Justice Department says Conti attacked organizations across 47 US states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and 31 foreign countries between 2020 and 2022. By January 2022, the FBI estimated that victim payouts associated with Conti exceeded $150 million. Lytvynenko will now have four years to contemplate a career change. ®

Cybercriminals have reeled in password hashes and corresponding salts belonging to users of popular fishing app Fishbrain, opening the door to cracking attempts. Fishbrain AB, which says its eponymous app serves more than 20 million anglers, disclosed the August 19 breach to the California Attorney General's Office this week. The unknown perpetrators helped themselves to a trawl of user data, including names, dates of birth, email addresses, phone numbers, Fishbrain usernames, country information, password hashes, and salts. "Fishbrain passwords were not stored in plaintext; however, Fishbrain has determined that the compromised password hashes for some users may be susceptible to being decoded," the company said in its disclosure [PDF]. It added: "If you use your Fishbrain password for any other online accounts, you should promptly update those passwords and any associated security questions or answers. "You should also take other appropriate steps to protect any online accounts that use the same username or email address and password combination. We recommend using a strong, unique password for each of your accounts." With the hashes and salts in hand, attackers can make password guesses using their own hardware until they potentially recover the original credentials. Whether those attempts succeed depends on the strength of each password and the hashing algorithm Fishbrain used, which the company did not disclose. Fishbrain did not comment on the scale of the breach or how many of its claimed 20 million-plus users were affected. The Register asked Fishbrain for more information. After discovering the intrusion and conducting an initial forensic investigation, Fishbrain patched the vulnerability and reset every user's password. Customers must create a new one the next time they log in. Fishbrain also said it "restricted access to the affected environment," strengthened its security controls, and initiated "a broader review of our data security measures" while the investigation continues. Fisherfolk should also keep an eye out for phisherfolk using the stolen personal data to bait follow-on attacks. ®

International law enforcement agencies, working with CrowdStrike and Shadowserver Foundation, have disrupted Sality, a 23-year-old peer-to-peer botnet used to deliver malware to more than 15,000 machines worldwide. The botnet has operated since 2003 and distributed all types of malicious code to victims, spanning credential theft, spam distribution, proxy services, network exploitation, and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. For the past eight years, Sality’s primary payload has been EggJagger, a tool that monitors clipboards for cryptocurrency wallet addresses, then silently replaces them with attacker-controlled addresses. When a victim copies a bitcoin or ethereum address to make a payment, the malware redirects funds into the criminals’ wallets. CrowdStrike estimates Sality's operator stole at least $150,000 in cryptocurrency using EggJagger alone. On Monday, CrowdStrike's Counter Adversary Operations team, working with international law enforcement agencies and industry partners, disrupted Sality by executing a peer-to-peer sinkhole operation. This operation isolated infected machines, which broke the criminal operator’s ability to communicate with devices on its network. Once isolated, the bots can no longer receive payload download instructions or direct payload transfers, effectively breaking the botnet. “In practice, the operation targeted the data structure at the heart of every bot's network awareness: its peer list,” CrowdStrike Counter Adversary Operations team said in a technical writeup about the takedown. Each Sality bot maintains a list of known super peers – publicly reachable infected machines that form the backbone of the P2P network. Every 40 minutes, the bots check to see if their peers are still online. Peers that fail to respond are purged from the network. The counterattack took advantage of this by removing legitimate super peers in each bot’s peer list, continually isolating more infected machines in the network, and inserting purpose-built sinkhole entries into peer lists. That approach gave police and cyber operatives visibility into the operation’s progress and helped them notify victims. In addition to the sinkhole operation, the US Justice Department, FBI, and Department of Defense Office of Inspector General’s Defense Criminal Investigative Service seized Sality-linked domains in the US. Meanwhile, international law enforcement in Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania took action against additional Sality-linked domains hosted in Europe. Meanwhile, the Shadowserver Foundation is working with internet service providers and Computer Security Incident Response Teams (CSIRTs) to identify infections and aid in victim notification and remediation.®

Two major healthcare businesses, Boston Scientific and McKesson, disclosed more details over the weekend about separate cyberattacks that disrupted global operations and resulted in stolen patient data, respectively. Medical-device maker Boston Scientific, whose IT systems were hacked by unknown intruders last week, said the cyberattack remains ongoing. It also noted that pacemakers and other heart devices implanted after the August 25 breach cannot provide remote monitoring and data transmission as intended. “New remote monitoring communicators cannot be activated, thus available device data will NOT be transmitted to remote patient management systems until the communicator can be activated,” the medtech firm said in a late Friday update. This applies to all new cardiac rhythm management implants other than insertable cardiac monitors (ICM). ICM devices must be activated using the Boston Scientific Clinic Assistant app to ensure the device correctly records patients’ heart rhythms, the company added. Because of the cyberattack, “new ICMs are unable to pair to the patient remote monitoring mobile phone, therefore available episode data recorded by the ICM will NOT be transmitted to the remote monitoring system until the ICM can be paired to the patient mobile app,” according to the update. The devices will still record any episodes, and patients can transmit these to the remote monitoring system by in-person transmission via the Clinic Assistant app. This is done by selecting the “interrogate” button, according to the company. Once its IT systems are back up and running, and the heart devices can pair with home monitoring equipment, they will again transmit recorded data to the remote systems. However, the company does not have a timeline for full restoration. “We are currently working on restoring affected functions and systems access,” Boston Scientific said on Saturday. The digital intrusion also affected the firm’s manufacturing, shipping, and ordering, it noted. “We are expeditiously working towards partial restoration for the shipping of some products this week,” according to a Sunday update. “Once we can demonstrate the restoration is fully operable, we anticipate ordering and shipping will ramp up to full capacity.” Boston Scientific has hired CrowdStrike to assist with the investigation and restoration efforts, and said the attack did not affect its cloud-based systems and apps - just “certain on-premise systems” - and added that it has seen no indication of unauthorized IT activity since August 25. The firm has repeatedly declined to answer The Register’s questions about the compromise, including whether it was a ransomware infection and which criminal crew is responsible. McKesson confirms breach as ShinyHunters claims responsibility Meanwhile, in another cybersecurity incident that has been very publicly claimed by the criminal perpetrator: pharmaceutical and medical supply giant McKesson over the weekend confirmed an intrusion after ShinyHunters on Friday told The Register it broke into the company’s Snowflake and Salesforce instances and stole millions of patients’ data. “Based on our investigation thus far, including assessments by leading cybersecurity industry experts supporting our response, we’ve confirmed that the unauthorized access to certain third-party applications and the exfiltration of certain data was associated with a subset of customers within our Oncology & Multispecialty and Medical-Surgical business units,” Francisco Fraga, McKesson executive VP, chief information officer and chief technology officer, said in a Saturday statement. The medical firm did not immediately respond to The Register’s questions, including how many patients were affected and what “certain data” was stolen. McKesson supports about 3,300 oncology providers in 29 states, according to its website. Fraga’s statement noted that distribution centers remain operational and McKesson continues to ship products. The firm has “reasonable assurance” that the digital intruders have been kicked out of the third-party environments and aren’t lurking around McKesson’s systems, he added. A ShinyHunters spokesperson told us that the notorious extortion group compromised more than 284 million records of patient data, and demanded McKesson pay $55.2 million or else they would leak the stolen data. However, as Have I Been Pwned boss Troy Hunt recently reminded everyone: Don’t confuse criminals’ claims with gospel truth, and “take headline numbers with a grain of salt unless you're confident in the processes of those making the claims." This was after Hunt’s HIBP service reported 12.9 million individuals affected by retailer Carhartt’s alleged breach. This number was around half of what ShinyHunters claimed when they leaked the company’s data earlier this month. The McKesson records, according to the ShinyHunters spokesperson, include patients’ full names, home and email addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, appointment dates and notes, and sensitive illness details including cancer locations on people’s bodies. The group also claims to have swiped emails containing private information from doctors to patients. The spokesperson told us they accessed the company’s Snowflake and Salesforce instances by voice phishing “multiple employees.” This is a tried-and-true method popularized by the data-theft-and-extortion gang, which has victimized other medical providers in recent months. These include pacemaker manufacturer Medtronic in April, and cancer diagnostics business Exact Sciences in July. ®

CRPx0, a cybercrime crew that has rapidly evolved from a scam service to a ClickFix-delivered ransomware and crypto-theft business over the summer, claims its victim count jumped from fewer than 10 in June to 48 organizations on its clear-web leak site at the time of publication. Keep in mind: criminals aren’t always the most trustworthy bunch, so take their claims with a healthy dose of salt. Still, the ransomware biz’s expanding operations, unique payload, and white-label hacking service make it one to watch, and a few recent analyses provide tips for defenders to keep the crooks out of their IT environments. Rakesh Krishnan, a threat-intel analyst who writes about cybercrime investigations on TheRavenFile blog, was one of the first researchers to publish details about CRPx0 at the beginning of the month, including previously unreleased malware samples. The operators offer a hacking service, providing “complete database extraction” from victim organizations and “optional public leak coordination upon request.” This platform also advertises full network compromise, “from initial access, through lateral movement, to full domain compromise,” plus persistent access across the victim’s infrastructure. A second, white-label, ransomware-as-a-service platform makes it really easy for wannabe crooks to get into the data-theft and extortion biz. CRPx0 builds, deploys, and configures everything from command-and-control infrastructure to the negotiation panel and malware, allowing its criminal customers to bring their own brand identity to their operations - and originally offered these services for a $10,000 one-time fee. At first, the operators promised to allow affiliates to keep 100 percent of their profits - this is unheard of in ransomware-as-a-service operations. This has since shifted to a 70-30 model, with affiliates receiving 70 percent of the extortion payments (after a one-time $333 enrollment fee) and the remaining 30 percent going to the operators. CRPx0 rules prohibit affiliates from infecting Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) member countries and organizations based in these countries. This is a pretty common rule among Russia-based ransomware operations, and in an earlier interview with The Register, Recorded Future threat intelligence analyst Allan Liska called it the “first rule of ransomware club: you don't attack organizations in the Commonwealth of Independent States.” The gang also prefers Monero (XMR) payments, rather than Bitcoin (BTC). ClickFix ransomware delivery Affiliates can also customize their own ClickFix payload delivery. The operators offer two lures, a fake Windows Update and a fake Google reCAPTCHA, to socially engineer victims into executing the initial command, according to a Ransom-ISAC research team analysis published on Thursday. The Windows lure tricks a victim into pasting a PowerShell command into the Run dialog. This drops a DLL stager chain and ultimately deploys Python-based ransomware. The macOS lure, however, uses a curl|bash command that downloads portable Python and the ransomware directly. The lures and the rest of CRPx0’s malware run on Windows and macOS, and according to the researchers, there are four payload formats: “the two HTML lures plus a standalone DLL and a standalone EXE, both of which discard the social engineering step entirely.” All four deliver the same ransomware: a 1,769-line Python script that steals high-value files before encrypting them with AES-128-CBC (Fernet). The malware moves laterally via WMI/schtasks, and delivers a ransom note that gives victims a 48-hour deadline to pay up - or see their files leaked. 'Complete, professional offensive control center' On August 23, the CRPx0 operators published a v3.0 update note on the group’s clearnet leak site, promising “a complete, professional offensive control center for managing compromised remote machines from a single web dashboard.” It provides crims with tools to steal valuable files, credentials, and wallet recovery phrases and keys, while “watching stolen cryptocurrency wallet addresses flow in.” This service also provides scripts to run remote commands, and the control panel sets up “automated attack reactions that fire on their own when something valuable happens on a target.” As the operators note: “Everything is built to be operated by a human with no technical background: point-and-click panels, plain-language rules, and clear status indicators. The underlying attack engine is hidden behind a clean, dark-themed interface.” CRPx0’s hacking and ransomware services, enabling everything from crypto theft to encryptors and full network compromise, “could be a strategic move to attract new recruits, or a scam targeting a range of affiliate hopefuls seeking cybercrime services,” according to an August 12 analysis from Jade Brown, a threat researcher at Bitdefender. What defenders should do Still, “other threat actors may attempt to adopt similar techniques,” she warns. “This is a reminder that organizations should balance detection capabilities in preparation for different types of compromises, configuring technologies to detect and block malicious behavior that aligns with both crypto theft and encryption processes.” The Ransomware-ISAC team says defenders should prioritize five actions, in this order. “The first three cost nothing and blunt the entire ClickFix class of attack, not just CRPx0,” they note. First: remove the Run dialog for standard users - this will entirely block the Windows path. For macOS users: restrict Terminal via MDM for non-technical staff. Next, the threat-intel analysts advise defenders to alert on RunMRU writes containing powershell, curl or long base64 strings. “Every ClickFix victim leaves a trace at HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\RunMRU,” they wrote. “This is the highest-fidelity ClickFix detection available and it is trivial to deploy.” The team also lists adversary network indicators and suggests blocking those. Make sure to hunt for indicators and malicious behavior in the pre-encryption exfiltration window. “Data leaves before a single file is encrypted, so .crpx0 extensions and ransom notes are a post-mortem indicator, not a warning,” according to the Ransomware-ISAC. Finally, confirm backups are unreachable from the account that would be compromised, and treat anything reachable with the victim's credentials as destroyed. ®

The US government disclosed that crims targeted more than 100 internet-exposed water systems during July cyberattacks. That's the first time the feds have put a number on the digital intrusions, but they have yet to attribute the campaign, widely suspected to be linked to Iran, to a particular group. “In July 2026, CISA observed malicious cyber activity targeting over 100 internet-exposed systems in the Water and Wastewater Systems (WWS) Sector, commonly via programmable logic controllers (PLCs) connected directly to a cellular modem,” America’s lead cyber-defense agency said, adding that connecting PLCs directly to the internet “can create significant security risks.” Suspected Iranian attackers targeted water and wastewater facilities across at least a dozen states in July, including internet-exposed PLCs. While neither federal nor state officials have identified all 12, we know that the cyberattacks occurred at mostly small, rural utilities in Minnesota, Michigan, Georgia, South Dakota, and New Jersey. “This is very serious. What stands out isn't any single incident. It's the scale,” Matt Hartman, chief strategy officer at the Merlin Group and CISA’s former acting head of cyber, told The Register. “More than 100 water systems with internet-exposed assets were hit in a single month, which points to a systemic vulnerability across the sector, not a run of isolated, unlucky targets,” Hartman said. “Much of this infrastructure runs on operational technology that was built for closed, physical environments. It was never designed with the assumption that it would be reachable from the open internet.” John Gallagher, VP at Viakoo, an OT and IoT cybersecurity provider, told us that while 100 systems represent a small fraction - only about 0.5 percent - of water utilities in the US, the “real threat is that these are test runs for a larger-scale attack.” While the 100-plus water incidents occurred in July, just last week five US federal agencies warned that attackers are using AI-generated exploitation scripts to break into internet-exposed Siemens S7 Series PLCs at water, manufacturing, energy, and other critical facilities. “This appears to be a continuation of the same suite of activity we suspect is affiliated with Iran targeting PLCs,” Halcyon Ransomware Research Center SVP Cynthia Kaiser told The Register a week ago. “Iran-affiliated actors and adversaries are actively targeting a wide swath of operational technology because these PLCs underpin essential health, safety, and critical infrastructure across society,” Kaiser, a former FBI cyber division deputy assistant director, added. While third-party analysts have largely blamed Iran for the intrusions, the federal government has not attributed the attacks to anyone. “Attribution in cyber incidents is inherently difficult and often takes time. Adversaries deliberately obscure their infrastructure, reuse tools and techniques, and route activity through compromised systems, so the government needs to be diligent before publicly assigning responsibility,” Hartman said. “In this case, CISA has done the most important thing: quickly getting actionable information into the hands of water-sector operators so they can defend their systems,” he added. “From a defender’s perspective, the ‘who’ matters less in the immediate term than understanding how the attacks are occurring and taking steps to stop them.” In its advisory, CISA recommended organizations disconnect PLCs from the internet and ensure any remote access goes through a VPN or gateway device rather than connecting directly to the PLC. The cyber-defense agency also advised owner-operators to enable password protection (we suggest multi-factor authentication) and change any default passwords. Also: ensure that allowlist IPs only allow remote access from known engineering laptops or other critical OT assets.®