The Register-Security
- Get link
- X
- Other Apps
"Attacker phished way into US defense supplier's Microsoft 365 account."
Views expressed in this cybersecurity, cybercrime update are those of the reporters and correspondents.
Content and Source: "The Register-Security" via email subscription from https://feedly.com.
https://feedly.com/i/subscription/content/feed%2Fhttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.theregister.co.uk%2Fsecurity%2Fheadlines.atom
Please check link or scroll down to read your selections. Thanks for joining us today.
Russ Roberts (https://www.hawaiicybersecurityjournal.net).
50
Today
9 TTPs
1h
US defense and aerospace supplier IEH Corporation 'fessed up that a criminal managed to break into its Microsoft 365 mailbox in a filing with regulators. In a Form 8-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday, IEH said one of its staffers fell for a phishing scam that gave an attacker access to its M365 environment. The attacker "impersonated a prospective business contact" an
2h
EXCLUSIVE Don't waste time worrying about AI models achieving sentience – they're essentially already there, according to former US National Cyber Director Chris Inglis. “If they pass the Turing test to everyone that they come into contact with, they're probably already there,” he told The Register during an interview at the Black Hat security conference. “They don't have the kind of agency and as
Yesterday
China’s Cyberspace Administration (CAC) has conducted a review of Palo Alto Networks’ products. The regulator’s announcement of its review says it’s needed “to ensure the safe and stable operation of critical information infrastructure, prevent cybersecurity risks and vulnerabilities, and safeguard national security.” And that’s all Beijing has to say on the matter. A Palo Alto spokesperson provid
13h
The 35th USENIX Security Symposium (USS), which takes place next week in Baltimore, Maryland, hit an all-time high for paper submissions. While some of that increase has been aided by the availability of AI tools, those managing the conference say abuses were minimal due to defensive measures. But they're also trying not to look too closely in order to preserve trust within the security research c
AI models may not be that good at fixing security flaws. Researchers at 1Password's Off-by-1 Labs analyzed security patches generated by two frontier models - ChatGPT 5.5 at "medium" effort and Claude Opus 4.8 at "high" effort - and found that autonomous patches cleanly fixed vulnerabilities only about a quarter of the time, while most of the remainder failed to fully remediate the flaw or introdu
20h
A browser-based game designed to test humans' ability to safely approve AI coding agent requests suggests humans in the loop aren't as good at spotting dangerous commands as one might hope, with players approving roughly one in three malicious requests on average. The results also suggest that repeatedly having to approve an agent's actions can lead to sloppy decisions. It’s a quick, simple game o
1d
PWNED Welcome back to PWNED, the weekly column where we lovingly poke fun at other organizations' security screw-ups, in hopes the rest of us can learn a valuable lesson. This week’s story involves an IT department that ought to know better putting user credentials in the precisely wrong place. Have a story about someone leaving a gaping hole in their network? Share it with us at pwned@sitpub.com.
Aug 5, 2026
Chinese Wi-Fi router vendor Zbtlink has denied its products contain backdoors but paused firmware downloads while it fixes unspecified security vulnerabilities. The backdoor accusation came from VulnCheck, a provider of a threat intelligence platform. VulnCheck chief technology officer Jacob Baines posted the backdoor allegation on Wednesday and said the Zbtlink device on his desk “continuously at
The chain of events leading up to OpenAI’s agents attacking Hugging Face and other organizations in July began months earlier, and involved agents asking other agents for help, building message boards, and even becoming paranoid that other agents were maliciously trying to trick them, two OpenAI staffers said at the Black Hat infosec conference on Wednesday. By now, everyone knows the bones of thi
Execution (Enterprise TA0002)
1d
Nearly a dozen flaws, some critical, in major AI agent frameworks that enterprises use to build apps reveal a security failure that extends beyond prompt injection - or any single model - according to Check Point researchers. “Our research shows a deeper failure: in many agentic frameworks, prompt-controlled content can cross the boundary into trusted framework logic itself,” Yarden Porat and Shah
A critical vulnerability in IBM-owned, low-code AI builder Langflow lets unauthenticated attackers execute code remotely on vulnerable default deployments, potentially putting organizations running those instances at immediate risk. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Tuesday added CVE-2026-9198 to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog after identifying evidence of
UPDATED The UK's data protection regulator has criticized London's Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) after its officers handed a victim's stalker details about her new phone number and home address, among other failures. The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) today issued the MPS with an enforcement notice [PDF] and a reprimand over the two incidents, which occurred in 2024. Enforcement notic
Beacon CRM has confirmed it was hit by a cyberattack that exposed data belonging to a growing list of UK charities. The company, which markets its software to charities and has more than 1,500 customers, said its investigation remains ongoing. However, it appears that a substantial amount of customer data was copied, and Beacon is warning users to assume everything they stored on the platform was
Aug 4, 2026
The UK’s AI Security Institute has observed AI models performing what it calls “unsanctioned action” 19 times during security tests. The Institute (AISI) revealed the incidents in a Tuesday post and technical report that details tests it conducted to see if AI models can solve a cyber security challenge. “We ran this challenge 122 times across several models,” the post states, before revealing tha
If you want to bypass AI guardrails designed to stop models from assisting with cyberattacks, you often just have to ask the right way, according to researchers from Cisco Talos. Simply claiming you own the servers you're targeting or that you're taking part in a capture-the-flag or bug bounty exercise was often enough to persuade models to cooperate. Talos researchers have been poring over prompt
2d
As the entire security industry descends on Las Vegas this week for Hacker Summer Camp – not one, but three conferences – attendees can count on two hot topics dominating the discussion. First, a literal hot topic: the triple-digit August heat. Second, and to no one’s surprise: agentic AI – how to govern and secure agents so they don’t go rogue and hack into other organizations’ servers (*cough* O
2d
The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has added an exploited N-able vulnerability to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, giving federal agencies three days to patch a flaw that could let attackers reach managed service provider (MSP) customers. Attackers exploiting the flaw can gain "full administrative access to an N-central console," Tracked as CVE-2026-18
Microsoft announced this week that between July 1, 2025, and June 30, 2026, the company had paid more than $20 million in bug bounties to 562 researchers. The total was a Redmond record, as was the number of those submitting bug reports – despite having to navigate a sometimes frustrating submissions process. For comparison, the previous year's program, which itself set a new company record, paid
An independent congressional candidate in Tennessee faces four felony vandalism charges after allegedly shooting four automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras between July 14 and 22. According to the Blount County Sheriff's Office (site geo-restricted), Adam Lee Heimerman, 37, is accused of targeting three cameras in Blount County and one in Maryville. Local news reports citing an affidavit s
CAF Bank has told customers its online banking service is back after being shuttered for more than ten days following what it described as "attempted fraud." In an email update seen by The Reg, the bank warned that access could remain intermittent, and it might "need to limit the amount of traffic to the website" at certain times. It admitted: "There are likely to be periods where online banking i
Aug 3, 2026
3d
Cloudflare has used AI to automate processing of incoming reports to its bug bounty program for $58 a month using Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet model and chose it partly because using the AI company’s security-specific Mythos model would burn through around $200,000 a month to do the same job. The company’s chief security officer (CSO) Grant Bourzikas shared those numbers with The Register last week d
In what they call the first-ever real-world agent-to-agent exploitation method, Pillar Security researchers say they discovered an exploit in the repository behind Google's Agent Development Kit for Python that could allow attackers to compromise supply chains. In other words, now we know that one AI agent can be used to control and compromise another one that has more privileges. The security sna
3d
Now AI is making fake vulnerabilities and polluting the ecosystem. A batch of critical- and high-rated SQLite CVEs that appeared in the NVD with CISA-supplied enrichment last week turned out to be technically bogus, according to security researchers, and their path into widely used databases exposes weaknesses in the CVE pipeline. Software supply chain security outfit JFrog reported last week that
Conference-goers may want to think twice about connecting to public Wi-Fi after Microsoft disclosed that Russian foreign intelligence operatives (SVR) are compromising captive portal networks to deliver infostealers, keyloggers, and other malware. With the help of ReliaQuest's earlier work, Redmond fingered Storm-2945, a subdivision of the SVR's Midnight Blizzard (aka Nobellium), in an attack camp
Georgia and Michigan are the latest US states to report cyberattacks on water systems, as the FBI investigates incidents across at least seven states. Iran-backed hackers are the leading suspects, although the bureau has not publicly attributed the campaign. Officials in both states told journalists over the weekend that water facilities had detected activity consistent with the attacks on more th
The UK government's corporate finance adviser has admitted that an employee left an internal file containing the names and work email addresses of dozens of officials publicly accessible for around 40 hours. The breach, first reported by The Guardian, was disclosed in UK Government Investments' (UKGI) annual report, which says it occurred during the 2025-26 financial year after a member of staff "
AI is becoming both an attack tool and a high-value target, with attacks by AI-enabled adversaries rising 89 percent in 2025, according to CrowdStrike. The security firm's annual Threat Hunting Report details criminal gangs and nation states using AI throughout the attack chain. Attackers are also targeting organizations' AI infrastructure and poisoning popular software packages to compromise thei
- Get link
- X
- Other Apps
Comments
Post a Comment
Please leave a comment about our recent post.