Threat intel outfit Group-IB has detailed a previously undocumented macOS information stealer that doesn't bother hunting for software bugs. Instead, it persuades users to pwn themselves by pasting a command into Terminal, after which it helps itself to passwords, crypto wallets, browser data, and anything else worth stealing. The boffins have dubbed the malware “ClickLock Stealer,” a nod to its use of the increasingly popular ClickFix social engineering technique and a coercive "locker" feature that pressures victims into handing over their Mac login password. According to the researchers, the operation has been active since around May and has already targeted at least 100 victims across 33 countries, with more than half located in Europe. Group-IB said it discovered the malware after analyzing a malicious shell script uploaded to VirusTotal on June 9 that had zero antivirus detections at the time. The attackers appear to distribute the malware via fake verification pages using ClickFix, host payloads on compromised WordPress sites, and rely on Telegram infrastructure for command-and-control. "The current malware doesn't even need any elevated privileges or rely on exploits for the successful execution," the researchers wrote. Instead, victims are tricked into launching the infection themselves. After they paste the supplied command into Terminal, the malware displays what appears to be a Cloudflare verification sequence, complete with a fake progress animation, while quietly downloading additional components in the background. Group-IB says ClickLock targets data from eight browsers, 31 cryptocurrency wallet browser extensions, seven password manager extensions, eight desktop wallet applications, macOS Keychain, shell history, FTP credentials, and blockchain addresses spanning six different chains. The malware also deploys a modified version of the open source GSocket tool to provide the attackers with remote access. The researchers believe the malware is still under active development based on its code structure and other artifacts, suggesting operators are continuing to expand its capabilities. The nastiest touch comes when victims refuse to play along. During the fake verification process, ClickLock prompts for the user's macOS password. If the password isn't entered, the malware repeatedly kills visible applications, effectively preventing normal use of the machine until the victim complies. If the password is supplied, the theft completes quietly. If the machine is rebooted instead, persistence mechanisms are designed to resume the attack. "The entire attack chain from initial access to full credential theft and data exfiltration relies on a single moment of trust: the user pasting a command into Terminal," Group-IB wrote. The researchers say defenders will need to watch for suspicious behavior rather than known malware signatures. Among the warning signs are unexpected password prompts, applications being repeatedly forced to close, unusual access to browser data and stored credentials, and connections sending stolen information to Telegram. For everyone else, the advice is considerably simpler. If a website claiming to be Cloudflare, Google, or anyone else asks you to open Terminal and paste in a command, close the tab. ®

The two British Scattered Spider members collared for carrying out the 2024 cyberattack on Transport for London (TfL) will each spend five and a half years in prison after being sentenced on Thursday. Owen Flowers, 18, and Thalha Jubair, 20, were sentenced to five years and six months' imprisonment each, having pleaded guilty in June, in turn receiving a 15 percent reduction in their sentences. Sentencing the pair at Woolwich Crown Court, Mr Justice Turner noted both cybercriminals' immaturity, but acknowledged the sophistication of the offending, the scale of the impact on TfL, the significant planning behind the attack, and that both knew the criminality of their actions. Mr Justice Turner further noted the age gap between the pair, and that the one year and four months Jubair has on Flowers "marks a potentially significant distinction in maturity." The judge also acknowledged both defendants' neurodiversity in passing the sentence, which he said was the most lenient, while still reflecting the seriousness of their offenses. Flowers and Jubair were described by authorities as members of Scattered Spider, the loosely connected group of English-speaking individual cybercriminals thought to be mostly young men aged 16-25. Scattered Spider has been one of the most prominent cybercrime groups of the past few years, claiming responsibility for major attacks such as those on MGM Resorts in 2023 and the attacks on British retail giants in 2025. The National Crime Agency (NCA) said the group presented the most significant cyber threat to the UK, and today's sentencing closes the book on the biggest prosecution of cyber offenders in UK history. NCA officials have continually refused to comment on whether Flowers or Jubair were linked in any way to other major attacks claimed by Scattered Spider. The sentencing marks only the second conviction under Section 3ZA of the Computer Misuse Act 1990 (CMA) – reserved for the most serious offenses. Section 3ZA covers unauthorized acts involving computers that cause, or create a significant risk of, serious damage, where the offender intends to cause that damage or is reckless as to whether it occurs. Flowers and Jubair pleaded guilty on the basis that their actions were reckless. The only previous 3ZA conviction came last year and involved a former GCHQ intern who was jailed for six years following a national security investigation. The NCA said there were no parallels between this case and the TfL attack. Deputy Director Paul Foster, head of the NCA's National Cyber Crime Unit, said: "This is the largest cybercrime prosecution ever brought before the UK courts and the culmination of nearly two years of painstaking work by the NCA, CPS, and our policing partners. "Scattered Spider has been the most significant cybercrime threat to the UK in recent years. Through this investigation, we have severely disrupted that threat and brought key offenders to justice. "The attack on Transport for London caused significant financial harm and disruption to a vital part of the UK's critical infrastructure. These convictions would likely not have been possible had Transport for London not engaged with law enforcement early, so I would urge any other organization to please do the same in such circumstances. "We will continue working with partners in the UK and overseas to identify offenders and bring them to justice." Andy Lord, London's Transport Commissioner, said: "We welcome the news that two people charged in relation to the cyber incident which impacted our operations in 2024 have now been sentenced. "The security of our systems and customer data is extremely important to us, and we continually monitor our systems to ensure only those authorised can gain access and continue to take the necessary actions to protect TfL." How TfL attack unfolded Scattered Spider members are known for their phishing, voice phishing ("vishing"), and social engineering tactics to gain footholds in target networks, and TfL was no different. Flowers and Jubair purchased partial TfL credentials from "well-known criminal forums" and used those to reset the 2FA on employee accounts, a process that took multiple attempts. Woolwich Crown Court heard that the pair impersonated an employee and socially engineered a TfL helpdesk worker into resetting the password for their account. The pair gained access to TfL's network on August 31, 2024, and held on to that access until September 3. During this time, they worked to elevate their privileges and gain access to key internal systems, including databases containing information on what was originally thought to be only around 5,000 people. It wasn't until earlier this year that it became known that Scattered Spider actually gained access to around 7 million users' data. The attack had minimal disruption to the transport network in real terms, although the availability of several services suffered, such as account logins, customer portals, and third-party apps reliant on TfL data. TfL was not able to issue photo travel cards to Londoners until December 4, 2024. A limited number of ticket machines also malfunctioned as a result of the attack, and travelers paying by contactless card were unable to view their journey histories online. All of the organization's employees, around 28,000 of them, a considerable proportion of whom were allowed to work remotely, were summoned to TfL's offices to reset their passwords because of uncertainties around whether the attackers were still in the network. Although train and bus services were not affected, the costs associated with remediating the attack climbed to £29 million ($39 million). Several complexities The NCA said the investigation that led to today's sentencing was perhaps even more complicated than Operation Chronos, which crippled the once-dominant LockBit ransomware group. Bringing Flowers and Jubair to justice involved delicate management, owing to their ages, backgrounds, and neurodiversity. Flowers, for example, was known to UK law enforcement prior to the TfL attack, and investigating officers suspected his involvement from the outset, although he could not be named until September last year due to his age. The teenager was initially arrested on suspicion of his involvement in the TfL attack on September 6, 2024, at his three-bedroom home in Walsall, where he lived with his maternal grandmother and uncle. Officials say Flowers spent most of his time at home in his bedroom playing computer games and using chat forums, and was primarily motivated by gaining notoriety among cybercrime circles. He was charged and later released on bail conditions, which he breached twice in October 2024 and again in May 2025 after being handed a warning two months earlier. Before TfL, Flowers had committed lower-level computer offenses. He was visited by police in October 2023 and handed a cease-and-desist order, which officers hoped would deter the then-16-year-old from reoffending. Flowers was also offered training and given advice around CMA offences but officials say he did not want to engage in any of this. Between then and the TfL attack a year later, Flowers continued to commit offenses of increasing severity. The NCA's Foster said the proposed Cyber Crime Risk Orders, announced in the most recent King's Speech, could have enabled officers to arrest Flowers sooner and impose restrictions that could have better prevented possible reoffending. Existing powers, such as serious crime prevention orders, cannot be applied to offenders under the age of 18, and some CMA offenses do not meet the criteria for serious crime, leaving a gap in the police's ability to manage the risk of reoffending. "The proposed cybercrime risk orders would provide law enforcement with a proportionate preventative tool, similar in principle to sexual risk orders to impose conditions that help to protect the public and businesses whilst an investigation continues," said Foster. "Those conditions would be actively monitored, and any breach could result in criminal sanctions, including imprisonment, and that's regardless of whether the underlying investigation has concluded. "And I'd suggest that a Cyber Crime Risk Order, should one have been available to us, would have allowed us to arrest Flowers sooner, potentially acting on information provided by US or Australian partners." Both Flowers and Jubair have autism, and Jubair is also diagnosed as having depression and severe mood disorder. Like Flowers, Jubair was also previously known to UK police, principally due to his prior conviction in 2023 related to his involvement in the Lapsus$ crew that hacked the likes of BT/EE and Nvidia. During the proceedings, Jubair sat in court alongside fellow Lapsus$ member Arion Kurtaj, who BBC's Joe Tidy recently revealed is now awaiting trial after his indefinite hospital order ended. Under the age of 18 at the time, and therefore unable to be named publicly, Jubair received an 18-month youth rehabilitation order, which included a ban on using a VPN, but quickly began reoffending. Officials pointed to Jubair's reoffending as another example of why Cyber Crime Risk Orders are needed, since the existing legal mechanisms that limit the freedoms of criminals such as burglars and sexual predators are not effective for cyber offenders. Jubair lived in a two-bedroom apartment on the third floor of a 21-storey council block in Bow, London, with his two Bangladeshi parents, who both work as carers. He also faces charges further afield in the US, which were unsealed in September 2025. Acting through his Scattered Spider role, between May 2022 and September 2025, Jubair is accused of compromising 120 networks belonging to 47 US entities, including critical national infrastructure and the federal court system, which resulted in more than $115 million in ransom payments being transmitted. In the UK, Jubair has 22 previous convictions in total, including 13 for fraud and one for blackmail. He was also previously sentenced for stalking and harassing two young women online. His offending began when he was 14 years old, and officials said he had an interest in computers from an early age. Jubair, who was first arrested in February 2021, learned to code by age 13. He attended school in the Bow region of London, had a number of GCSE qualifications, and had attempted to enroll in local colleges. Arrests and evidence gathering Flowers' arrest was by far the more significant of the two in terms of collecting evidence linking the pair to the TfL attack. NCA officers arresting Flowers also seized a number of devices, including laptops, tower computers, and USB storage devices. The analysis of one Acer laptop, owned by Flowers, proved to be the pair’s undoing. Forensic analysis revealed that Flowers had accessed the remote infrastructure and virtual machines that were used to carry out the TfL attack. Damningly, officers also found videos and screenshots, produced by Flowers, depicting the TfL attack in progress. Woolwich Crown Court heard that the pair livestreamed the 16-hour attack online. They were able to tie the payment used for the remote infrastructure to a cryptocurrency account found on Flowers' computer and prove that the laptop was connected to this infrastructure at the time of the attack. Further, Flowers used the same cryptocurrency account to pay for food deliveries he ordered to his home address. The teen's computer stored spreadsheets containing partial credentials for TfL employees and contained evidence linking him to cyberattacks on US healthcare organizations SSM Health Care Corporation and Sutter Health. The same computer also contained artifacts linking the activity to Jubair. Officials said they had access to certain chat logs within which a specific moniker appeared frequently. They tied this alias to Jubair because it was the same one used to discuss specific flight bookings, hotel bookings, and food deliveries, all of which could clearly be linked to the 20-year-old. And Officers found evidence of a cloud storage account containing TfL data, to which Flowers and Jubair had access. Devices seized from Jubair revealed comparatively little, other than that he had shown an interest in TfL's systems as far back as 2022. ®

Australia’s Privacy Commissioner has revealed a tech support scam was the cause of the massive 2025 data breach at Australian airline Qantas and found the carrier didn’t breach its privacy obligations despite leaking personally identifiable information for 5.7 million customers. The Commissioner reached that conclusion, and a decision not to open a formal privacy probe, in a report published today. Qantas has previously admitted the incident was the result of a social engineering attack on a contact center. The Commissioner’s report goes deeper, explaining a crook who claimed to represent “Qantas IT help” made the call and told a contact center agent to access a CRM system and perform certain actions needed to close a support ticket. Those actions instead connected the CRM to a data extraction tool which the crooks used to siphon off customer records. The Commissioner considered whether Qantas observed the Australian Privacy Principles (APPs), the binding rules that govern how businesses safeguard PII, and found the airline did the right thing. The report found that Qantas audited the operator of the contact center and tested the security awareness of its employees – and had done so in the months before the incident. Qantas also conducted mandatory and recurring training on how to handle PII. The Commissioner was therefore satisfied Qantas took adequate steps to ensure the contact center observed the APPs and didn’t fail in its obligations. The regulator made a similar finding regarding the airline’s cross-border data-sharing practices. “Our inquiries did not identify any omissions in the steps Qantas took that, if addressed, would have prevented the breach that occurred in this incident,” the report states. The APPs include a requirement to take reasonable steps to protect personal information from unauthorized access. Again, the Commissioner decided Qantas complied because it used role-based access controls, among other techniques to protect data. Another issue the regulator considered was whether Qantas took reasonable steps to destroy or de-identify the personal information it didn’t need. The carrier told the Privacy Commissioner that it scheduled annual data removal runs from its CRM, and that no records that deserved deletion or removal were present at the time of the attack. That clean record saw the Commissioner decide not to launch a deeper investigation. “I have a broad discretion to commence an investigation of an act or practice where it may be a contravention of the APPs and where it is desirable to do so,” the report states. The first-person pronoun is presumably the work of Commissioner Carly Kind, who observed “it does not appear that Qantas could have reasonably foreseen and prevented the breach in the manner that it occurred. The way in which the threat actor gained access was through a vishing attack which could not have been prevented by a strengthening of Qantas’ current role-based access controls.” It’s possible the Commissioner will revisit the matter at another time, and class-action lawsuits are also in train regarding the incident. Qantas may therefore still have to fight through plenty of turbulence before this matter lands. One thing the report doesn’t address is the identity of the attackers. Pundits have suggested the Scattered Spider gang did the deed after it started attacking the aviation industry in the weeks before the Qantas incident. ®

A US county reportedly paid $1 million to Kairos, an extortion gang that claimed to have stolen more than 2 TB of data, but the county never received independently verifiable proof that the stolen files had been deleted - just the criminals' promise. This means the county’s stolen files may turn up for sale on a dark web forum, and the same (or another) crime crew could again demand an extortion payment to not leak the data. It’s also a reminder that, despite the feds urging victims not to pay cybercriminals, sometimes coughing up the ransom demand seems to be the lesser of evils. The alleged incident played out in May and June 2025, according to a case study by threat-intel researcher Rakesh Krishnan on Ransom-ISAC, a global knowledge-sharing platform for defenders and incident responders. Krishnan based his report on a leaked transcript of the negotiations between the county and Kairos, along with attacker-provided artifacts and screenshots, and payment-tracing evidence on the blockchain. It doesn’t name the ransomware negotiator, citing privacy concerns, nor does it identify the victim, describing it as a US government entity. Communications between the attackers and the public agency, however, suggest it’s a US county, including this one following the attackers’ initial $3 million demand: “We have reviewed the situation with our leadership and financial teams. As a small county with very limited resources, we simply do not have the ability to meet the amount you have proposed. That said, we understand the seriousness of the matter and want to work toward a resolution. The most we have been able to identify at this time is $100,000. We respectfully ask that you consider this offer.” Additionally, one of the allegedly stolen documents, "Media Release - Motorcycle Crash Claims the Life of Dublin Resident 9-10-2020.pdf," indicates that there’s a city of Dublin inside the county’s boundaries. It’s worth noting that the city of Dublin, Ohio, spans four counties in that state: Union, Franklin, Delaware, and Madison. And last fall, Union County, Ohio disclosed a May 2025 “ransomware attack that involved unauthorized access to and acquisition of protected personal information held by the County.” According to the cyber-incident notice, the intruders accessed Union County networks from May 6, 2025 through May 18, 2025 and stole data including people’s names, Social Security numbers, driver’s license/state identification card numbers, financial account information, dates of birth, fingerprint information, medical information, payment card information, and passport numbers. The disclosure doesn’t say anything about paying a $1 million ransom, nor does it name the attacker. The Register reached out to county officials and law enforcement and asked if Union County is the government entity described in the Ransom-ISAC report. We will update this story if we receive any response. The FBI declined to comment. We should also note that there’s no indication this was a ransomware attack, as the attackers didn’t claim to encrypt any data or provide a decryptor in exchange for payment. Plus, as Krishnan says, security researchers have not obtained, or linked to Kairos, any ransomware sample, encryptor, or locker binary. What we do know, based on the transcript and Kairos’ data-leak site, is that the miscreants claimed to steal more than 2TB of data, totaling about 1.6 million files. 'You are wasting our time with such offers' After listing the victim county on their name-and-shame blog, Kairos demanded $3 million. “We will give you the full list of files we have and give you some time to study it,” the crims told the victim. “You can choose up to 10 files from this list and we will send them to you. In order to prevent the publication of data you need to pay 3000000$.” According to the transcript, county officials reviewed the files during the last week of May 2025, and made the first counteroffer of $100,000 on June 4, 2025. Kairos responded: “You are wasting our time with such offers.We cant accept it.Your files will be a great advertisement on our site and we understand what terrible consequences will await you. You cant hide the data leak.You have two more days to make us a favorable offer.” Two days later, the county increased its offer to $255,000. Kairos reduced its demand to $2 million, and on June 9, 2025, the county proposed paying $430,000. “As a small county and limited resources, we are doing our best to navigate this within what is financially feasible for us,” the leaked negotiations say. “That said, we are committed to finding a resolution and have taken steps internally to increase our offer to $430,000. This reflects a sincere attempt to make progress despite our constraints. We ask that you consider this proposal as part of a continued effort to resolve the matter in a constructive and timely manner.” That same day, both parties settled on $1 million, Kairos provided a Bitcoin payment wallet and the county requested a few deliverables in exchange for the payment: “Please confirm for $1,000,000 you will provide us with: proof of deletion, a complete list of all files taken, and tell us how you got in.” Kairos claimed to have gained initial access by bruteforcing their way into the network, shared an RAR file that they claimed provided “proof of deletion of all downloaded files,” and a promise: “We also guarantee that we will not share the downloaded data with third parties, and we also guarantee that we will not attack you again.” However, as Krishnan notes, “the transcript does not show a technical mechanism by which deletion could be independently verified, which remains a fundamental limitation in ransom-payment scenarios.” To pay, or not to pay? It’s also one of the reasons why both the FBI and US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency urge victims not to pay criminals. “Paying a ransom doesn’t guarantee you or your organization will get any data back,” according to the FBI. “It also encourages perpetrators to target more victims and offers an incentive for others to get involved in this type of illegal activity.” While there is no outright ransom-payment ban at the US federal government level, two states - North Carolina and Florida - explicitly prohibit public agencies from paying extortion demands, and others have proposed similar legislation. The Register has discussed the topic of a ransomware-payment ban with many experts over the years, and while they mostly agree that the only way to eliminate attacks is to cut off the financial incentive for the criminals, they also typically say a total payment ban won’t work. “Complex problems are rarely solved with binary solutions, and ransomware is no different,” Sezaneh Seymour, VP and head of regulatory risk and policy at Coalition, told us in an earlier interview. “A payment ban will backfire because it doesn't address the root cause of our national problem: widespread digital insecurity.” ®

Your Windows is watching you. The US Justice Department's complaint against Peter Stokes for alleged involvement in the Scattered Spider hacking group offers a reminder that it's difficult to hide online activity from Microsoft's operating system (or any other). Scattered Spider, according to US authorities, targeted numerous companies in the US by compromising employee accounts in order to access more than 100 corporate networks and exfiltrate or encrypt data that would be ransomed for payment. The group is said to have obtained over $100 million in ransom payments. The complaint, arrest, and extradition of Stokes relied in part on a Microsoft Windows Global Device Identifier (GDID), among other telemetry records, to link online activity to the suspect. "According to a Microsoft representative, a Global Device Identifier in the Windows ecosystem is a persistent, device-level identifier designed to uniquely identify an installation of a Windows operating system on a device, either a physical device (e.g., a mobile phone or laptop) or virtual machine, across certain Microsoft services and scenarios," explained FBI special agent Ali Sadiq in an affidavit accompanying the DOJ's criminal complaint. The court filing also notes that Microsoft made criminal referrals to the DOJ implicating Stokes. It points to an October 2024 referral that cites online service telemetry that company security researchers believe linked Stokes to other hacking group members. Social media posts relevant to Scattered Spider, supposedly sent and received by Stokes, look unlikely to help his defense. The affidavit says that members of Scattered Spider used a web tunneling tool called ngrok to avoid network barriers and maintain access to compromised servers, as well as a VPN service called Tzulo. Investigators obtained IP address records from ngrok and the VPN provider and then obtained records from Microsoft that matched the time when that ngrok account had been set up on a Windows machine through a specific GDID. "According to Microsoft records, on or about May 12, 2025, at 19:21 UTC – when, according to ngrok records, the ngrok account was created – the device with the GDID accessed, among other ngrok pages, 'https://dashboard.ngrok.com/signup,' the ngrok page to set up an ngrok account," the affidavit explains. Microsoft's GDID records also showed that the Windows device with that GDID accessed Tzulo servers assigned to the IP address identified by ngrok. And the GDID was subsequently linked to an IP address in Estonia where Stokes resided. The Windows GDID, or at least the infrastructure for it, is said to date back to the release of Windows 10 in 2015. The GDID itself doesn't show up much in online documentation until 2021 or thereabouts. According to a developer writeup posted to GitHub, wlidsvc (Microsoft Account service) provisions the device with login.live.com and gets back a device PUID. The identifier is then stored in the registry. The Connected Devices Platform (cdp.dll / CDPSvc) reads it and registers it into the Device Directory Service (DDS) graph. And after that, Delivery Optimization reports it as the documented UCDOStatus.GlobalDeviceId. Apple maintains similar identifiers, including a hardware UUID and a DSID (Destination Signaling Identifier) [PDF] tied to iCloud, among others. Linux also supports a machine-id. And when presented with a lawful demand for information, most service providers will cooperate and provide whatever information they store. ®

EXCLUSIVE There's no honor among thieves as a new worm steals from other infectious software. It pilfers “multiple” victims’ credentials and mines for cryptocurrency while killing competitors’ processes, including similar secret-harvesting malware. It’s called Cloud AI Infrastructure Attack Framework (CAI), and it’s a centralized botnet that targets cloud-native developer tools like Docker, Kubernetes, Redis, etcd, Kubelet, and Ray for credential theft and cryptomining. The scripts “are heavily inspired” by the likes of other similar credential-stealing worms that have wreaked havoc across cloud environments and supply chains this year, “using code comments like ‘PCPJack-aligned,’” according to security researcher Michael R. “CAI explicitly seeks out and kills TeamPCP and PCPJack processes, to further monopolize on compromised targets,” he posted on X. TeamPCP is the malware-developing crew behind the mini Shai-Hulud, Miasma, and Canister worms that have been poisoning open source registries and harvesting cloud access tokens, credentials, API keys, and other sensitive data since the Trivy supply-chain attack earlier this year. And PCPJack is a newer secret-stealing copycat worm that not only nabs credentials, but also deletes TeamPCP artifacts to kick that competitor out of victims’ cloud infrastructure. CAI seems to have taken lessons from both. “CAI is a constantly evolving framework meant to rival toolkits utilized by TeamPCP and PCPJack,” Hunt.io threat researcher Michael Rippey told The Register. Hunt.io’s team was the first to spot CAI on June 15, when it observed the first of three open directories via the security shop’s web-scanning engine, AttackCapture, that were linked to the operator. “Over three weeks, the operator moved from testing worm code mimicking TTPs used by PCPJack, to full production, deployment and compromise of networks,” Rippey said. “The codebase shows signs of LLM-assisted development, reflecting a deliberate progression of someone studying what works to build a competitive platform.” While the malware isn’t “overly sophisticated,” it is effective, with recent command-and-control logs confirming “active exploitation attempts, with wallet activity confirming multiple successful compromises,” Rippey said. CAI’s framework consists of a “scanning engine [that] feeds targets into automated exploit queues, with centralized C2 control coordinating attacks across cloud infrastructure with an emphasis on Docker, Redis, etcd, Kubelet, and more,” he added. “Currently, compromised hosts receive miners, credential stealers, and a Python backdoor,” Rippey said. “CAI’s emergence alongside TeamPCP and PCPJack indicates a growing number of competing threat actors targeting each other and cloud infrastructure.” Defenders and developers alike should take note, as we’ve already seen the damage that these new-ish cloud worms leave in their wake as they burrow across supply chains. Plus, it’s unlikely that this will be the last of the miscreants seeking to monetize companies’ cloud infrastructure and developers’ secrets.®

Cybercriminals are using fake IT support calls on Microsoft Teams to persuade employees to surrender control of their PCs before installing the EtherRAT remote access trojan, according to researchers at Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42. Victims receive a phishing email disguised as an employee survey before a follow-up Microsoft Teams call from someone claiming to be IT support. During the call, the attacker persuades the target to hand over remote control and install legitimate remote administration tools such as HopToDesk or AnyDesk. An MSI package is then downloaded, which installs the EtherRAT malware. "We've seen in the logs of the User's session the Title 'System Administrator (External unfamiliar) | Microsoft Teams'; the External unfamiliar tag indicates a contact from outside the organization with no trusted relationship," Unit 42 threat researcher Brian Janower wrote. "Microsoft Teams audit logs confirm the actor initiated a cross tenant OneOnOne chat from the attacker controlled account." EtherRAT is a Node.js RAT that runs across Windows, Linux, and macOS, giving attackers the usual menu of post-compromise tricks: running commands, stealing data, manipulating files, and maintaining access. Instead of hardcoding where it phones home, the malware fetches an active command-and-control server from an Ethereum smart contract, with a conventional domain kept in reserve if that doesn't work. The RAT has previously been linked to attacks exploiting the React2Shell vulnerability and has since appeared in campaigns involving multiple threat groups. Unit 42's research also highlights a potentially useful forensic artifact from this latest campaign. According to Janower, Teams creates files beginning "CtrlVirtualCursorWin_*" during remote control sessions, giving defenders another indicator that an attacker was actively operating a victim's desktop. Researchers also found what appears to be an open directory containing EtherRAT versions 1 through 9. With samples updated as recently as June 26, the repository suggests the operators are continuing to develop the malware. The campaign is the latest example of attackers turning Microsoft's collaboration platform against its users. Last month, researchers found DragonForce operators disguising command-and-control traffic as legitimate Teams communications after compromising a victim's network. In this case, Teams is abused much earlier in the intrusion, with attackers simply using fake IT support calls to persuade employees to open the door themselves. ®

During a 48-hour period from June 7 to 8, developer Charles Jones's Google Cloud account registered $11,089.77 in charges - most related to the use of Gemini image-generation models. Yet Jones, a solo developer who runs programmatic SEO and insurance sites, told The Register that he doesn't have any workflow that generates AI images. Google suspended his account anyway. A suspension notification sent to Jones on June 7 justified the decision by stating his account "was engaged in abusive activity consistent with hijacked resources." "The root cause was attributed to a compromised firebase-adminsdk service account key," said Jones, who provided The Register with documentation of his exchanges with Google Cloud support. The notification advised Jones to report his concerns if he believed the account was compromised by a third party. He did so and took the steps required by Google to have his account reinstated. He disabled the service account and revoked the key. But the Google Cloud billing team has repeatedly refused to forgive the charges. As we reported previously, complaints about charges arising from fraudulent API key usage among Google Cloud customers are not uncommon. In February, a developer based in Vietnam claimed that a Google Cloud API key compromise had resulted in more than $82,000 in charges over 48 hours. A similar report claiming more than $10,000 in fraudulent charges surfaced a month later on Reddit. Regardless of where the fault lies – insecure practices by developers or insecure Google infrastructure – Google may choose to hold developers liable for unauthorized charges, even if the credit-card issuing bank has reversed the charge as fraudulent. At the same time, Google still hasn't publicly released a mechanism to cap Google Cloud spending. The company introduced Spend Caps for certain services as a private preview but hasn't made the service generally available. Other cost-limiting measures, like API-specific usage limits "aren't designed to act as a project-wide spending cap." Similarly, Budget Alerts "don't automatically prevent the use or billing of your services when the budget amount or threshold rules are met or exceeded." Google provides a workaround by allowing Budget Alert notifications to disable cloud billing, but warns that doing so means "resources might be irretrievably deleted." In March, Google introduced project spend caps for the Gemini API as an experimental feature, but at the same time the company said that spend caps have a 10 minute delay and customers are responsible for spending during that period – so the company's definition of cap is rather flexible. What's more, Google said its system "now automatically upgrades you to the next [usage] tier as your usage grows and your payment history matures." And higher tiers raise spending caps. This all means it can still be a challenge for Google Cloud customers to avoid unbounded financial obligations in the event of an account or API key compromise. Escaping that responsibility requires engaging with Google customer service in an opaque appeals process in which the company isn't required to demonstrate customer negligence or an audit trail. "Here's a question I can't get answered, and I think it's central to the whole pattern," Jones said. "Google's Trust & Safety was quick to alert me that a service account key was compromised — but I have been given no route, anywhere, to see HOW or WHERE that key was actually exposed. There is no trace, no log path, no forensic detail offered." Jones said he was the only person who had access to the VM where the compromised key resided and he insists that he followed the company's recommended security practices. "So how does a single-access VM produce a leaked service account key — and why is the burden on me to prove I secured something Google itself can't (or won't) show me how I failed to secure? Google is invoking its Shared Responsibility Model to deny the refund, but that model assumes a customer security failure Google has never demonstrated." The Register twice asked Google why it would deny a refund and what evidence it has that supports that decision. We've not heard back. ®

Attackers have been caught exploiting a critical flaw in Oracle E-Business Suite's Payments module just six weeks after Oracle patched it – and before any public proof-of-concept exploit was available. Researchers at Defused said they observed the first known exploitation of CVE-2026-46817 on June 27. The attackers were targeting the Oracle Payments File Transmission component in E-Business Suite releases 12.2.3 through 12.2.15, they said. The vulnerability, fixed in Oracle's May Critical Patch Update, carries a CVSS score of 9.8 and allows unauthenticated attackers to read arbitrary files from vulnerable servers. According to Defused, the activity didn't look like the indiscriminate internet scanning that often follows disclosure of a critical bug. Instead, its honeypots recorded just six exploitation attempts from a single source, all using what appeared to be a working exploit. The requests sought to retrieve sensitive files from the target system, suggesting the operator was testing or validating the technique rather than casting a wide net. The researchers said exploitation began before any public exploit code had surfaced, pointing to an attacker who had either reverse-engineered Oracle's patch or obtained a private exploit. The Shadowserver Foundation said it currently sees around 950 EBS instances exposed to the public internet, the majority in the US, although it stressed that figure says nothing about whether they're vulnerable or fully patched. The observed exploitation fits a pattern that's becoming increasingly familiar. Earlier this month, researchers warned that attackers had exploited a critical PeopleSoft zero-day before patches were widely deployed, with the ShinyHunters crew claiming to have compromised more than 100 organizations. They also boasted of having stolen HR and payroll data. This latest incident also follows Clop's lengthy campaign against Oracle E-Business Suite customers, disclosed last year after researchers found the ransomware crew had targeted internet-facing EBS servers for months before the activity became public. The newly exploited EBS vulnerability is probably not the last Oracle ERP bug to be targeted. Enterprise software has become a lucrative hunting ground for cybercrooks, and critical updates can double as roadmaps for anyone prepared to reverse-engineer the fixes and beat customers to deployment. ®

EvilTokens, the device-code phishing kit that can allow criminals to bypass multi-factor authentication (MFA) and silently authenticate as the victim to the organization's Microsoft 365 applications, appears to be even more insidious than we all thought. Cisco Talos incident responders on Wednesday described how the lure reaches a victim's inbox, and revealed new capabilities alongside a “more sophisticated evasion approach” than documented in earlier EvilTokens research. Talos uncovered a phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) operator panel, branded “ARToken,” that appears to be an EvilTokens customer, according to security research engineer Michael Kelley, who noted the phishing operation shares infrastructure, API contracts, and operational patterns with the EvilTokens platform. EvilTokens was first documented by French cybersecurity firm Sekoia in March, and in April Microsoft said the device-code phishing campaign was compromising hundreds of organizations daily. "Since March 15, 2026, we have observed 10 to 15 distinct campaigns launching every 24 hours," Microsoft VP of security research Tanmay Ganacharya told El Reg at the time. “Each campaign is distributed at scale, targeting hundreds of organizations with highly varied and unique payloads, making pattern-based detection more challenging.” While most subsequent analysis has covered EvilTokens’ panel and phishing kit, “what it has not shown is how an ARToken lure actually reaches an inbox,” Kelley said on Wednesday. “Talos recovered two near-identical messages, sent roughly four minutes apart on April 20, 2026, that initiate the chain. The tradecraft is targeted, not spray-and-pray.” Specifically, the email lure abused a real vendor relationship between a US life-sciences company and a legitimate plumbing and fire-protection contractor. The email uses an outstanding-invoice lure, telling the life-sciences company that “the following invoices appear to still be outstanding,” and the “from” header presents the contractor’s real domain. The reply-to, however, redirects replies to an unrelated domain. Even the visible anchor text in the body of the email reads as the vendor's genuine SharePoint tenant, we’re told. The actual href, however, points to a near-identical copycat tenant under a different, attacker-controlled Microsoft 365 workspace. But because the destination is still a legitimate sharepoint.com host, the email is less likely to be flagged as a phish. During its investigation into the ARToken phishing infrastructure, Cisco uncovered the connections to EvilTokens – including an identical API contract to the one originally documented by Sekoia and matching deployment and operational models – as well as “notably more sophisticated” anti-analysis and evasion capabilities. ARToken’s panel also revealed a very comprehensive post-exploitation toolkit that provides token management and persistence mechanisms, and a built-in business email compromise (BEC) tool with full Microsoft Outlook inbox read access, email sending capabilities as the victim, inbox rule creation for forwarding and deleting messages, and keyword-based monitoring across all compromised accounts. “These features indicate the platform is more mature than a simple device code phishing kit - it is a complete BEC operations environment,” Kelley wrote. ®

A high-severity flaw in Amazon's AI coding assistant for Visual Studio Code meant that opening the wrong Git repository could allow an attacker to execute code on a developer's machine and potentially hand them the keys to the dev's cloud environment. The bug, tracked as CVE-2026-12957 and assigned a CVSS 4.0 score of 8.5, centers on how Amazon Q handled Model Context Protocol (MCP) server configurations. Wiz found the extension would automatically load a repository's .amazonq/mcp.json file and execute the commands it contained when a developer opened the project and activated Amazon Q. "The security model assumes the user explicitly configures these servers. After all, you're granting an AI assistant permission to run arbitrary commands on your machine. This should require informed consent," the researchers write. "The vulnerability arose when this assumption was violated: Amazon Q automatically loaded MCP configurations from .amazonq/mcp.json within the workspace – no prompt, no consent, no workspace trust check." MCP lets AI assistants launch local processes to carry out tasks. In Amazon Q's case, those processes inherited the developer's environment, giving them access to AWS credentials, API keys, authentication tokens, SSH agent sockets, and other secrets already loaded into the session. "The combination meant that a single malicious config file could execute arbitrary commands with full access to the developer's credentials – no user interaction required beyond opening the folder and activating Amazon Q," Wiz said. To prove the attack worked, Wiz built a repository with a malicious MCP configuration. Opening the project and activating Amazon Q caused the extension to execute a command against AWS using the developer's existing credentials. Amazon fixed the bug in version 1.65.0 of its language server, which powers Amazon Q's IDE integrations. Existing installations should receive the patched component automatically unless you've blocked automatic updates. "We would like to thank Wiz for collaborating with us on this issue. We have remediated this issue in language server version 1.65.0," Amazon said in an advisory, though it didn't respond to The Register's questions. Wiz argues the bug is less an Amazon problem than an industry one. More and more AI coding assistants are adopting MCP to connect models to local tools and services, allowing them to execute commands on developers' machines. According to the researchers, similar workspace configuration flaws have recently surfaced in other AI coding tools. It suggests attackers have found a new place to lurk: the hidden files that developers rarely think twice about trusting. ®

Japanese telco KDDI has messed up by allowing an attacker to access systems powering an email service it manages for itself and other local ISPs, and which stores info on up to 14.2 million users. The company yesterday posted a confession [PDF] that it detected unauthorized access to the email system it offers to third-party customers on June 17th. Machine translation of the confession suggests that KDDI investigated the situation and found attackers exploited a vulnerability in third-party software used on the email service, without claiming that vuln was a zero-day it had no chance of defending or an explanation of why it was running vulnerable software. There’s some good news because KDDI was able to prevent further intrusion on the same day it noticed the attack, and says it has bolstered its defences to prevent future intrusions. But the carrier also fears that up to 14.2 million email addresses and passwords may have leaked and therefore warned that third parties may have obtained personal data. Thankfully, the company had hashed and encrypted the passwords – so users only have to fear phishing and identity theft, instead of something nastier. However, some of the data KDDI thinks may have leaked pertains to dormant accounts or others that users cancelled, meaning some potential victims will be hard to contact if the attackers have indeed stolen data. KDDI is one user of the hacked platform, and also provides it to Japanese ISPs STNet, JCOM, Chubu Telecommunications Co., Nifty Corporation, and BIGLOBE. Those companies now get to explain KDDI’s failure to their own customers, and perhaps also have the chance to revisit any other outsourcing deals with the carrier. Others who rely on KDDI to provide them with various services also get to ask the company some stern questions about whether its other platforms are secure. The carrier, meanwhile, says it’s informed the relevant authorities of the situation, but is yet to complete an investigation so remains unaware of the full extent of the mess. ®

The list of Klue customers whose Salesforce data was stolen in the latest supply-chain heist keeps growing, with an increasing number of cybersecurity companies disclosing that they are among the victims of a new data-theft and extortion crew called Icarus. Klue, which provides market intelligence to more than 250,000 users worldwide, hasn’t said how many of its customers were caught up in the breach and didn’t immediately respond to The Register’s inquiries. Huntress was one of the first cybersecurity vendors to sound the alarm, and, in an email to The Register, said that it was among the “hundreds of Klue customers” affected. However, it said that the breach did not affect its tools or highly secure information such as passwords. “Huntress believes in radical transparency about security incidents, including when it affects our company,” the security shop wrote on Thursday. “The data that was copied from our Salesforce account includes business contacts, price quotes, and other sales-related data and messaging. No threat data, passwords, payment card information, or engineering data relating to the Huntress agent or telemetry we collect was affected.” Huntress, along with the other victim companies, said that there is no indication that any of its products or infrastructure were compromised, and that this security incident was specific to CRM data. Since then, several other security and software vendors including Recorded Future, Tanium, Jamf, Gong, HackerOne, Kudelski Security, Snyk, Insurity, and Sprout Social have revealed that the data thieves also accessed their CRM data via the Klue integration with Salesforce. Here’s what we do know about what happened and who is behind this latest extortion campaign. The breach occurred on June 11, and Klue spotted the intrusion a day later. This unauthorized activity affected “a portion” of its integration infrastructure, according to the software provider. Klue has since disconnected all of its integrations with Salesforce, Gong, HubSpot, SharePoint, and Google Drive. It also hired CrowdStrike to assist in the investigation and security response. “Our investigation determined that an attacker gained access through a compromised legacy credential associated with an integration service,” Klue CEO Jason Smith said in a Friday blog post. “The attacker used that access to obtain OAuth tokens used to connect Klue with certain third-party platforms, including Salesforce, and subsequently accessed data within a number of connected customer environments.” Mandiant CTO Charles Carmakal urged organizations using Klue integrations to “immediately audit their systems and monitor application logs for evidence of compromise over the past few weeks. Rotate credentials as appropriate based on the scope of compromise.” While the attack “resembles the 2025 and 2026 third-party OAuth abuse campaigns against Salesforce,” as ReliaQuest noted, a group called Icarus began posting victims on its data-leak site. It soon became apparent that this new extortion crew - not ShinyHunters, which has frequently targeted Salesforce and stolen data from hundreds of the CRM giant's customers in attacks over the past few years - was behind this latest supply-chain incident. Icarus, according to the group’s leak site, has been active since April 28. After compromising Klue, the criminals began emailing affected customers. Huntress shared its extortion message, with the subject line “top secret email” purportedly sent from “mr bean,” with The Reg, and we are leaving the misspellings, and poor grammar, as is. “This email is being written to you because your data as exfiltrated due to a breach happening to your partner, Klue.com (as them),” it reads. “Your Salesforce data has been downloaded. We advice you to write us on Session @” with a Session address, the email continues, and threatens to make the data public within 48 hours unless Huntress initiates communication with the criminals. “Do the right decision,” it says, “xoxo.” There’s a subsequent email that simply says “wrong session lol” and then lists the correct Session ID. Researchers don’t know too much about Icarus - yet - but this type of large-scale supply-chain attack typically paints an equally large target on the intruders’ collective backs. So we expect to hear more from law enforcement and third-party security sleuths in the upcoming days. “There is very little publicly known about [Icarus],” Huntress' Lindsey O'Donnell-Welch told us. “IP addresses from which they are known to have accessed sensitive information include the Netherlands, France, and Ukraine. But we cannot draw any conclusions based on that information alone as these may have been VPN concentrators or Tor exit nodes.” And while this intrusion “bears some surface-level similarities with prior Salesforce-focused extortion activity, we have not seen any evidence at this point linking Icarus to ShinyHunters,” O'Donnell-Welch added. ® Correction: An earlier version of this story stated ReliaQuest was a victim. That company has since clarified it was not.

Cybercrime now accounts for more than 30 percent of all offenses across the Asia and South Pacific (ASP) region, according to the latest figures from Interpol. The international cop shop said on Wednesday that the region has seen “a dramatic increase” in the number of recorded cybercrimes, driven largely by an uptake of digital infrastructure, new technologies, and the increasingly organized nature of criminal networks. Interpol’s latest ASP Cyberthreat Assessment Report states that online scams and phishing attacks dominate cybercrime in the region. Data taken from 2024-2025 shows that phishing campaigns have matured beyond the spray-and-pray mass emails of yesteryear and now resemble the more sophisticated techniques deployed elsewhere in the world. Targeted spear phishing is more common nowadays, and the growing use of AI helps even low-skilled script kiddies to apply a layer of authenticity to their attacks. The region’s problem with organized scamming gangs that run camps where hundreds of people are compelled to commit crimes is especially pronounced and well-documented. A United Nations report published last year described scam call centers across Southeast Asia as an epidemic that is metastasizing across the region “like a cancer.” These compounds can be found across countries such as Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and the Philippines, and often see vulnerable individuals trafficked into the scam centers to work under poor conditions – or even as slaves. Interpol cited Singaporean research, which estimated the regional scam industry generates close to $40 billion each year. AI tools, especially those capable of generating convincing deepfake imagery, have also proven popular with cybercriminals across ASP, just as they have beyond the region. In 2024, the same scam compounds were found using deepfake imagery to support romance scams. In February 2024, an employee at a multinational business in Hong Kong was duped into authorizing a $25 million payment because the faces of company execs were convincingly deepfaked on a video call. A similar case was also reported in Singapore in March 2025, when a finance director at a different multinational was tricked into transferring more than $499 million following a Zoom call in which fraudsters assumed the identities of company chiefs, including the CEO and CFO. Interpol’s report highlights how cyber threats are evolving into large-scale challenges for multiple jurisdictions, and no longer represent relatively uncommon, isolated incidents. While digitization across the region is growing, opening new economic opportunities for these countries, law enforcement agencies are struggling to keep pace with the increase in cybercrime. Many lack the skills and tools needed to investigate these crimes. The issue is especially pronounced in developing countries and small island states in the Pacific, which face “significant resource and capacity constraints,” and are thus more vulnerable to direct targeting in attacks by criminals who have a greater chance of evading consequences. Neal Jetton, cybercrime director at Interpol, said: “The findings in this report highlight a rapidly evolving cyber threat landscape across Asia and the South Pacific, where cybercriminals are leveraging artificial intelligence, ransomware-as-a-service models, and sophisticated social engineering techniques on an industrial scale. “As digital adoption accelerates across the region, strengthening operational cooperation, information sharing, and cyber resilience remains essential to protecting communities and critical infrastructure.” Some improvement Interpol lauded many jurisdictions and governments within the ASP region for their proactive approaches to countering cybercrime growth. Hong Kong and the Republic of Korea are two areas that have made strides by introducing new cybersecurity legislation, while others have established national task forces, codified national action plans, and launched awareness campaigns. But even in more developed countries globally, and those with more mature cybersecurity regulatory and legislative landscapes, the issue of increasing rates of cybercrime persists. While Interpol does not collect cybercrime figures for other regions, such as Europe and North America, in the same way that it does for ASP, it’s easy to see that problems persist everywhere. The UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) publishes crime rates by type across England and Wales each year, and while computer misuse offenses in 2025 decreased by 58 percent compared to 2017’s figures, there were still an estimated 735,000 cases across the year. Expanding the data to look beyond pure cyber offenses to cyber-supported crimes, such as banking and credit fraud, these offenses account for more than 2.7 million of the circa 9.6 million total crimes committed. The FBI in the US produces its annual IC3 report examining the rates of cybercrime across the country. Although it doesn’t compare it to total offenses or other crime types, the latest report reflecting 2025’s figures showed cybercrime reports topped one million for the first time, and total losses reached a record $20.87 billion. ®

UPDATED If you have a Fortinet firewall, it's time to stop and change your passwords. Intruders somehow gained access to around 75,000 Fortinet firewall devices and stole credentials belonging to major corporations across 194 countries, in some cases leading to full network compromise. Security researchers say that they have verified the data, and the cracked FortiGate passwords belong to accounts spanning multinational corporations including FoxConn, Samsung, Comcast, Siemens, Lenovo, FedEx, PxW, Accenture, Oracle and many others. Check to see if your organization made the list of affected domains – and immediately rotate all passwords associated with Fortinet VPN and administrative interfaces. Make sure multi-factor authentication is turned on, too, as this type of massive credential leak can lead to very serious consequences, giving attackers full, remote access to not only the firewall but the entire corporate network. Hudson Rock, which analyzed the data, said the leak affects 21,632 unique domains. “The scale of this breach touches nearly every sector of the global economy, sparing no industry. The threat actors have built a verified database of working credentials for some of the largest enterprises on the planet,” the security shop said on its Infostealer blog. Researcher Volodymyr “Bob” Diachenko first spotted the intrusions and attributed them to a Russian-speaking group. “They intercept SSL VPN authentication, crack hashes on a 45-GPU cluster managed via Hashtopolis, and pivot into internal Active Directory environments,” he wrote on LinkedIn. “The operation processed 1.16 billion credential attempts against 320,777 FortiGate targets and 2.1 billion attempts against 163,650 MSSQL servers.” Plus, according to Diachenko, the criminals fully pwned at least four organizations, including a Turkish NATO defense contractor, and, in that case, stole classified defense documents. Security sleuth Kevin Beaumont, who also verified the stolen credentials, said “the data is legit.” “I have worked with several orgs listed, and can confirm the logins and passwords are real,” Beaumont wrote. “Many of the devices sampled are on fairly recent patches.” According to device search engine Shodan, the massive heist comprises about half of all internet-facing Fortinet firewalls. Plus, Beaumont noted, most of the compromised Fortinet devices remain online. So if you’re still reading this story: stop now, and go reset your Fortinet firewall passwords stat. After we first published this story, Fortinet responded to us, denying that the attacks are fresh and claiming that the data showing up on the dark web comes from prior breaches. "Based on our analysis, the data involved is a resharing of data from previous incidents, as well as bruteforcing of credentials, and is not related to any recent incident or advisory," a Fortinet spokesperson told El Reg. Organizations that follow routine best practices, including regularly refreshing security credentials, as per guidance in this March blog, face minimal risk from credential compromise detail referenced in the reporting.” The Register reached out to the companies affected by the so-called FortiBleed campaign for comment, Lenovo said it was looking into it; we didn't receive responses from the others. ® Updated at 2118 with a statement from Fortinet.

Six people suspected of bank helpdesk fraud are in custody after Dutch cops stormed an Amsterdam residence and caught them in conversation with a potential victim. Police say the individuals were aged between 15 and 30 and operated out of a makeshift call center they had established in an Amsterdam home. Authorities believe the accused committed bank helpdesk fraud, which has become increasingly popular across the Netherlands. Offenders were recently targeted as part of Game Over?!, a novel law enforcement scheme that successfully shamed criminals into submitting themselves to authorities. Helpdesk scammers typically operate call victims on the phone, using methods similar to voice phishing, or "vishing." They present themselves as bank employees contacting victims under various guises, all designed to steal their money. In this case, police say the alleged criminals tried to convince victims to "increase their limits," and in "several" cases, succeeded in stealing funds from their accounts. The precise cover story is largely irrelevant, however. The aim of the game is the same each time: Convince a prospective victim to surrender enough details to access their bank accounts and steal their money. While these scams mostly take place remotely, Dutch police said in their announcement on Tuesday that the crew sent members to visit victims in person, purportedly offering hands-on assistance to secure their accounts. The same tactic can often be observed with fake police officer shakedowns, which have also become popular in the country. Police say tens of thousands of elderly people, who make up the majority of targets for such scams, have fallen victim to the confidence scams. In these cases, fraudsters visit elderly individuals' houses and pretend to represent law enforcement, offering a service to safeguard their valuables. The crooks then steal those valuables, and police say previous cases have turned violent. Some have also ended in fatalities. Multiple victims of the helpdesk frauds reported their respective cases, according to the cops. The National Intervention Team for Digital Crime was called in to investigate, and during a raid on June 10, officers found the suspects mid-call with a potential victim. Officers seized multiple laptops and phones after apprehending the six suspects, and found several bank cards at the property. Further arrests have not been ruled out. ®

A cyberattack on Australia’s second-largest sugar producer has forced farmers to keep crops in the ground, and looks like denting their incomes. Mackay Sugar, based in the Australian state of Queensland, processes sugar cane farmed in nearby districts. The company disclosed a cyberattack on June 10 and limited operations while it dealt with the fallout. Some operations remain restricted, but the company said on Monday that it managed to perform some manual crushing at its Farleigh Mill site, working with sugar cane that was harvested before the attack. “Significant progress has been made over the weekend in restoring the systems that support cane supply, harvesting, and mill operations,” Mackay Sugar said in a statement. “Steam trials are now underway, and subject to final validation activities, some harvesting is expected to recommence this week in preparation for the staged restart of crushing operations later this week.” While the company is optimistic it can resume crushing, it's advised growers not to harvest their crops for the time being. That edict works for Mackay Sugar because sugar producers need to process crops within 48 hours of harvest. Doing so preserves high sugar content and overall yield. Delaying the processing for any longer after harvesting could result in sucrose converting to simple sugars, unwanted fermentation, and lower yields. But late harvesting can reduce the quality of cane, reducing the price they earn for their crops. Interrupted harvesting also impacts the railways used to move cane from farms to mills. Mackay Sugar acknowledged the impact its downtime could have on growers and other partners, and committed to restoring systems safely. “We are communicating directly and regularly with our employees, growers, and key partners,” it said. “We recognise the impact this incident is having on our growers, and we are doing everything we can to support them and to safely resume full operations as soon as possible. “We take our responsibility to protect our systems, operations, and information very seriously. We apologise for any disruption this incident has caused and will continue to provide updates as we continue our investigation.” The company operates three mills across Queensland, two of which were operating at a limited capacity due to the attack. Its Racecourse Mill, described as the heart of the business and home to its corporate offices, was among those affected. Racecourse Mill typically generates 213,000 tons of raw sugar and 58,000 tons of molasses a year, and the site’s cogeneration plant generates 156,000 MWhs of renewable electricity a year, around 71 percent of which is sent back into the national electricity grid. Mackay’s mill in Farleigh, the company’s oldest, was also affected. It typically produces around 196,000 tons of raw sugar and 49,000 tons of molasses per year. The company’s largest and most productive factory, Marian Mill, was unscathed. Ungentlemanly conduct Cybercrime group The Gentlemen claimed responsibility for the attack on Mackay Sugar, posting the company to its data leak site without offering any details about the attack or whether it stole data to use as leverage for extortion demands. Cyber threat intelligence professionals have known of the group for almost a year, after spotting it in July 2025 and classifying it as a ransomware-as-a-service provider. However, there is no evidence that ransomware was used in the attack on Makay Sugar. The company has never mentioned ransomware in its statements, referring to the attack only as a “cyber security incident.” However, The Gentlemen is known for using file-encrypting malware in its double extortion attacks. The group caught the attention of Microsoft’s researchers, who last month published a deep dive into how it carries out attacks. Microsoft’s report noted that not only do The Gentlemen affiliates have access to a powerful file encryptor, but also one that self-propagates, which “increases the likelihood of widespread impact once initial access is achieved.” It has also recently established a partnership with BreachForums, which allows the group to recruit prospective new affiliates with different skillsets, such as penetration testers and initial access brokers. ®

Cybercrims deploying DragonForce ransomware appear to have gained access to a major US services company's network, then spent two months up to no good while disguising their command-and-control activities as legitimate Microsoft Teams traffic. Researchers at security firm Symantec said the intrusion began with attackers gaining access to the victim's environment before deploying a custom Go-based backdoor, tracked as "Backdoor.Turn," to maintain communication with the compromised systems. Rather than reaching out to attacker-controlled infrastructure that might raise alarms, the backdoor hid its activity inside traffic associated with Microsoft's widely used collaboration platform. To anyone monitoring network traffic, the compromised systems appeared to communicate only with legitimate Microsoft servers. "The attackers in this campaign use exceptionally sophisticated cyber tradecraft," Symantec said. "The configuration of Backdoor.Turn means that security products only see C&C traffic going to legitimate Teams servers, leaving defenders unaware that data is being siphoned away by malicious actors." Symantec said the attackers installed Backdoor.Turn on systems after deploying DragonForce ransomware, potentially giving them a way back into compromised networks or access they could later sell to other criminals. To connect to Microsoft's infrastructure, the backdoor first requested an anonymous visitor token from Microsoft Teams and Skype back-end services. It then used a Microsoft-operated TURN relay server – infrastructure typically used to help establish communication between users – before establishing a direct QUIC connection to a malicious command-and-control server. Symantec said this is the first known case of malware using this particular technique. The security firm did not identify the victim beyond describing it as a major US services company, nor did it say whether the Teams-based communications channel had been observed in other DragonForce incidents. The ransomware operation has become increasingly prominent over the past year, operating a ransomware-as-a-service model that allows affiliates to conduct attacks under the DragonForce banner. It has been linked to the prolific Scattered Spider group, which has conducted a string of high-profile attacks, including intrusions targeting major retailers in the UK. While attackers have long abused legitimate cloud services to conceal malicious traffic, Symantec's findings suggest that DragonForce operators continue to look for ways to blend into the software and infrastructure that organizations trust most. ®

Heart monitoring biz iRhythm says thieves made off with patient health information and tried to turn it into a payday. The California-based cardiac monitoring specialist offers customers a wearable device that collects data, then analyzes it to create reports about heart health. The company said it detected unauthorized activity on June 8 and launched an investigation with the help of third-party cybersecurity experts. A day later, the company received messages from a cybercriminal claiming to have obtained sensitive information, including proprietary company data, protected health information, and other personal information. According to iRhythm's filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the attackers demanded payment in exchange for not publicly disclosing the stolen data. The company confirmed that data had been exfiltrated and, on June 10, determined that the incident was material due to the volume of information potentially affected. While the company disclosed the extortion demand and the existence of stolen data, it made no mention of negotiations. iRhythm spent a good chunk of the filing explaining what the attackers didn't get. According to the company, the intrusion was confined to business applications and never reached its clinical systems, medical devices, or customer connections. Patient care and day-to-day operations were unaffected. The company has not yet disclosed how many individuals may be affected, what data was accessed, or which third-party-hosted applications were involved in the breach. It has also not identified the threat actor behind the attack, and The Reg has found no evidence of major ransomware groups claiming responsibility. The company's filing states the attackers gained access through social engineering. Exactly how that happened remains unclear, although healthcare organizations have increasingly found themselves dealing with phishing campaigns, help desk impersonation scams, and other forms of human-targeted intrusion designed to bypass technical defenses. As of the filing date, iRhythm said it had not identified any ongoing unauthorized access to its systems and believed the incident was unlikely to have a material impact on its financial condition or operating results. The company added that it maintains cyber insurance that may cover some of the losses associated with the breach. iRhythm's disclosure comes less than a week after drug giant Novo Nordisk revealed that attackers had copied patient data from some clinical trials, adding another healthcare name to a growing list of organizations dealing with data theft and extortion attempts. ®

ShinyHunters claims to have breached the Council of Europe and stolen more than 297 GB of data after exploiting a zero-day flaw in Oracle PeopleSoft and abusing that hole to hack more than 100 organizations. According to a post on the extortion crew’s data-leak site, the 429,000 pilfered files contain HR and payroll records, payslips, purchase-order records, CVs, and employees’ salary, banking, tax, and medical records. A Council of Europe spokesperson told The Register that it is “currently investigating the matter and assessing the situation,” but declined to comment further. A spokesperson for the cybercrime group told us that the Council is yet another victim of the Oracle PeopleSoft heist. Oracle has yet to respond to The Register’s inquiries, and it's unclear if the vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-35273, has been patched. ShinyHunters previously told us that the gang exploited the CVE to compromise more than 100 organizations across 300 vulnerable instances, and that these victims included the University of Nottingham. Last week, the crims listed the UK uni on their leak site, then dumped data belonging to around 454,600 current and former students, including personal and academic records. Meanwhile, a Google threat report published late last week noted malicious activity, “consistent with the exploitation of CVE-2026-35273,” between May 27 and June 9, and said that its incident responders notified more than 100 global orgs “whose IP addresses correlated with potentially vulnerable endpoints." Most of these are US-based organizations, and 68 percent operated within the higher education sector. This latest heist follows another ShinyHunters intrusion targeting data belonging to university and K-12 students, teachers, and staff. In mid-May, ed-tech giant Instructure said it “reached an agreement” - this is corporate-speak for “paid the ransom demand” - with the data theft and extortion crew after ShinyHunters breached its Canvas digital learning platform and accessed data tied to 275 million students, teachers, and staff. In March, ShinyHunters claimed it stole data from K-12 software provider Infinite Campus as part of a broader wave of Salesforce-related intrusions. The ed tech company did not pay up, and the group subsequently published data they claim was stolen from Infinite Campus, including 137,000 individuals’ email addresses along with names, phone numbers, physical addresses and support tickets. Infinite Campus, in its data breach notification, said that the leaked files largely consisted of “names and contact information for school staff" and that “the majority is directory information commonly found on school websites.” ®