Singapore opened SICW 2026 with a blunt message: no government, company or country can see the full picture of today's cyber threats, and artificial intelligence is now raising the stakes for defenders and attackers alike.
Speaking at the opening ceremony of the 11th Singapore International Cyber Week on 13 October 2026, Gwenda Fong, Commissioner of Cybersecurity and Chief Executive of the Cyber Security Agency of Singapore (CSA), called for stronger international cooperation as threats grow more complex.
Her address came a day after Josephine Teo, Minister for Digital Development and Information and Minister-in-charge of Cybersecurity and Smart Nation, warned that trust in digital systems is becoming harder to sustain.
This year's theme is "Cyber at a Crossroads: Shaping the New Cyber Order.
SICW 2026 Opens With a Warning
Fong, attending her first SICW as CSA chief, said Singapore's success has been built on being open and connected. That leaves its economy and society dependent on digital infrastructure, platforms and supply chains that extend well beyond its shores.
Governments, infrastructure operators, cloud providers and cybersecurity firms each see part of the threat landscape, she said, but none sees all of it.
"What appears to be an isolated incident to one organisation may in fact be part of a much larger campaign," Fong said. Assembling the picture is only half the challenge, she added. It must be done quickly enough to act before the adversary does.
AI Cuts Both Ways at SICW 2026
Fong said Singapore cannot simply keep adding analysts as threats grow in volume and sophistication. Instead, it wants AI to help defenders "see more, understand faster and to act more effectively."
But adversaries can harness AI too, operating at greater speed and scale. The real test of AI cybersecurity, she said, is making sure the technology strengthens defences rather than tilting the advantage towards attackers.
She also flagged a newer risk. As agentic AI systems gain access to data, applications and tools, they create new dependencies and vulnerabilities.
"For years, cybersecurity has required us to understand what is connected to what. In an increasingly agentic world, we must also understand what can act on what," Fong said, pointing to questions of permissions and consequences.
SICW 2026 Puts AI Risks Into Practice
Rather than only discussing what AI could mean for security, CSA is testing it in practice this year.
CSA is partnering with Google on an agentic AI cyber scenario exercise for international partners. It is working with the Singapore AI Safety Hub on a frontier AI governance workshop for officials from ASEAN and the wider Asia-Pacific. With Cloudflare, it is running hands-on training in AI-enabled cyber defence for critical infrastructure operators.
Fong pointed to the ASEAN CERT Incident Drill, held since 2006, as proof that practising together builds the habits that matter in a real crisis.
The Trust Deficit Behind SICW 2026
On 12 October, Teo described what she called a paradox. At precisely the time when more trust is needed, trust is becoming harder to sustain.
AI systems can make mistakes, be manipulated or behave in unintended ways, she said, and their capabilities are advancing faster than our understanding of the risks.
Teo cited UNC3886's campaign against Singapore's telecommunications sector as a recent example of sophisticated actors targeting critical infrastructure. Ransomware and cybercrime remain pervasive, while strategic competition is forcing harder choices on technologies, suppliers, standards and interoperability.
"We are willing to interact more, but find ourselves willing to trust less," she said.
Without trust, Teo warned, businesses will hesitate to digitalise, citizens will be wary of new technologies, and countries will be less willing to stay open and connected.
"Accountability Cannot Be Outsourced"
Teo said industry must be a partner in securing the digital ecosystem, since it builds and operates much of the infrastructure economies depend on. That means shared standards, threat intelligence sharing, incident reporting and testing new technologies before deployment.
On increasingly autonomous AI, she said human judgement, oversight or control must be retained where necessary. "Ultimately, accountability cannot be outsourced. Least of all, to machines," she said.
She outlined steps already under way. CSA released its Securing Agentic AI Addendum earlier this year to guide organisations on securing autonomous AI systems. The agency is also working with industry to prepare critical infrastructure for the transition to quantum-safe systems. In addition, leading operational technology manufacturers and technology providers have committed to attain Singapore's Cyber Trust Mark.
What Comes Next
Teo said Senior Minister K Shanmugam would launch the Singapore Cybersecurity Strategy 2026, the country's updated national strategy, the following day, with partnerships remaining central to it.
That approach will also carry into 2027, when Singapore assumes the ASEAN Chairmanship. Teo said Singapore will work with the bloc's 11 member states to strengthen collective cyber resilience, deepen practical cooperation and capacity building, and work more closely with industry.
Estonia's Minister of Justice and Digital Affairs, Liisa-Ly Pakosta, also joined the week's proceedings for a fireside chat with Fong.
Both leaders acknowledged that geopolitical competition is making cooperation harder. "Disagreement need not prevent dialogue, and competition need not preclude practical cooperation," Fong said.
Teo put it simply: trust is not built through declarations, but through candid exchanges, competence and consistent action.
Fong closed with a challenge to every delegate in the room: look beyond your own vantage point and find the people who can help you see the rest.
Morocco’s cybersecurity strategy is placing greater emphasis on proactive threat detection, critical infrastructure protection and artificial intelligence as the country strengthens its defenses against evolving cyber threats. Abdellatif Loudiyi, Minister Delegate to the Head of Government in charge of National Defense Administration, said securing information systems has become a necessity as digital transformation accelerates.
Speaking at the opening of National Cybersecurity Week in Rabat on Monday, Loudiyi stressed that cybersecurity must be integrated into institutional governance rather than treated as an additional expense. He called for stronger preparedness, early threat detection and coordinated responses to cyber incidents.
The event, organized by the General Directorate of Information Systems Security under the National Defense Administration, runs from October 12 to 14 under the theme “Cybersecurity in the service of digital transformation and development.”
Loudiyi said cyberattacks have become a tangible reality affecting countries worldwide, including developed nations. Their consequences have raised awareness among public and private institutions about the importance of cybersecurity in managing risks and protecting operations.
He argued that organizations can no longer rely on responding to incidents after they occur. Instead, they need an approach centered on preparedness, vigilance, early detection, and response.
According to the minister, these responsibilities must begin at the highest levels of institutional decision-making and extend across organizations, with each component accountable for its role.
He also emphasized that cybersecurity resilience requires continuous work. As attackers develop new methods, institutions must regularly review protection measures, assess system readiness, and adapt their defenses to emerging threats.
Five Pillars to Strengthen National Cybersecurity
The minister outlined five interconnected areas supporting Morocco’s efforts to establish a coordinated national cybersecurity framework.
These include a clear legal and regulatory framework, the development of human, technical and financial capabilities, greater public awareness and a stronger cybersecurity culture, enhanced monitoring and response capabilities, and regional and international cooperation.
Loudiyi stressed that these elements must function together to strengthen national resilience.
He also highlighted the shared responsibilities of government authorities and organizations operating information systems. While the General Directorate of Information Systems Security exercises its legally defined powers, individual system owners must protect their systems and allocate the resources required to do so.
The minister said this integration of responsibilities is essential to building a cohesive national cybersecurity system.
AI Threats and Critical Infrastructure Protection Take Priority
Looking ahead, Loudiyi identified four priorities for the next phase of Morocco’s cybersecurity efforts: training specialized cybersecurity professionals, supporting national cybersecurity companies, strengthening critical infrastructure protection, and addressing the challenges associated with artificial intelligence.
He described artificial intelligence in cybersecurity as a dual-use capability that can benefit both attackers and defenders. While attackers can use AI to support malicious activities, defenders can apply the technology to detect threats earlier and accelerate incident response.
The emphasis on specialized training also reflects the need to develop the expertise required to address increasingly complex cybersecurity challenges. Supporting national companies is another priority identified by the minister as part of the broader effort to strengthen the country's capabilities.
Loudiyi said these priorities should help Morocco prepare not only for existing threats but also for risks that may emerge as technologies and attack methods evolve.
Morocco Calls for Stronger International Cybersecurity Cooperation
Loudiyi also highlighted the role of cybersecurity cooperation in strengthening national defenses. He said Morocco remains committed to initiatives and mechanisms that promote collaboration between countries, with particular attention to its African and Arab partners.
He presented cybersecurity as a shared responsibility requiring coordination, investment in skills and a sustained culture of awareness and vigilance.
The minister concluded that a secure digital environment depends on collective efforts to protect information systems and maintain trust as digital transformation advances.
National Cybersecurity Week provides a platform for these discussions through roundtables and workshops involving decision-makers, cybersecurity experts and industry professionals. The October 12 to 14 program is intended to encourage dialogue and the exchange of views on key cybersecurity challenges and approaches to addressing them.
Hackers remotely manipulated connected refrigeration systems at hundreds of French supermarkets, reportedly pushing some fridges and freezers to 50C (122F), spoiling food and even sparking fires. According to Reuters, French Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu ordered a cybersecurity investigation into the hacks, with similar incidents reported in Spain, Portugal, Poland, Germany, and Belgium. In France, Carrefour reported 80 affected stores, Monoprix said 5% of its locations were hit, and Les Mousquetaires said refrigerators at roughly 150 Intermarche stores were heated to 50C for six hours. From the report: Supermarket cold aisles are typically run by control panels that manage an entire store's fridges and freezers and can be accessed over the internet, which lets maintenance companies adjust them from anywhere. The source close to Lecornu said ANSSI had identified a vulnerability in software supplied by Danish company Danfoss.
Danfoss said it was "aware of incidents in France affecting a limited number of refrigeration management systems." The affected units "were running outdated firmware," Danfoss said, adding that it had "long advised customers to keep supported systems updated with the latest firmware and to migrate legacy systems to current-generation solutions."
On August 9, cybersecurity firm Claroty's Team82 published research detailing vulnerabilities in the Danfoss AK-SM 800A controller. According to the report, software updates issued by Danfoss addressed issues that could have allowed attackers to bypass authentication controls and execute code on compromised devices.
An AI-driven cyber-attack similar to the OpenAI breach of Australia’s healthcare system is likely, “if not inevitable”, in the UK, according to a senior minister.
Kanishka Narayan, the UK AI minister, indicated that the British government’s own cyber defences would be bypassed by a technology that has developed highly sophisticated skills in cybersecurity.
For more than a year, The New York Times followed recipients of universal basic income programs, which Elon Musk and other tech leaders have promoted as a solution to A.I.-fueled job losses.
Appointment or renewal reminder appears in victims’ calendar to lure them into logging in to fake Google, Microsoft or PayPal page
You’re preparing for the week ahead and take a look at your Google calendar. There’s an entry for a meeting that you must have completely forgotten. The note that pops up when you click on it says you’ll be reviewing a project and includes a link to more details. Confused, you follow it to find out more; the website you land on asks for logon details, and you provide them.
Unfortunately, this was not a failure of your memory but a calendar phishing scam. You have handed your name and password to fraudsters who will sell it on in a batch with other people’s details, use it to break into your work email, or to persuade you that they are contacting you from your bank, or another institution.
CNN reports:
The FBI arrested a Canadian cybersecurity executive and ransomware expert as part of the investigation of a damaging hack that exposed the sensitive data of current and former FBI employees, according to court documents and people familiar the investigation. Edward Dubrovsky was arrested in the Philadelphia area in recent days... Dubrovsky is facing charges related to extortion and making threats. He has been transferred to Texas's Eastern District for a scheduled detention hearing, according to court records and a law enforcement official.
FBI Director Kash Patel announced the arrest on Friday but did not disclose where it occurred or what role the man is suspected of playing in the hack. Patel also didn't name Dubrovsky, but CNN confirmed the defendant is believed to be tied to the FBI hack through multiple people familiar with the investigation... A LinkedIn profile under Dubrovsky's name lists years of experience in the Canadian cybersecurity industry and describes Dubrovsky as a 'globally recognized cybersecurity expert.' An Ed Dubrovsky is also the author of a book on handling ransomware negotiations with cybercriminals...
There has also been an inquest at the FBI over how such a critical security lapse happened. The FBI determined that a contractor managing the bureau's jobs portal failed to update software "explicitly issued to secure the platform," [senior FBI cyber official, Brett Leatherman said last week]. The FBI has "removed the contractor," he said. The software in question is a human-resources platform made by Oracle, ShinyHunters has said. The hackers previously used a flaw in the software to attack targets in the education sector in May and June, according to Google's Threat Intelligence Group. But months later, the FBI contractor apparently still had not applied a security patch that was available for the software.
"The inmate locator at the U.S. Bureau of Prisons website reports that a 54-year-old Edward Dubrovsky is currently being held at a federal facility in Philadelphia," reports security researcher Brian Krebs.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.
The Philadelphia Police Department said the agents had also sent in a false homicide tip. The incidents led the White House to call for better disclosure of rogue A.I. behavior.
The U.S. Department of State's Rewards for Justice (RFJ) program is offering up to $10 million for information on Zhang Yu, a Chinese national accused of hacking COVID-19 research at U.S. universities on behalf of China's Ministry of State Security (MSS). U.S. officials also describe Zhang as a key figure in the HAFNIUM hacking campaign, which compromised thousands of computers worldwide.
His alleged partner, Xu Zewei, was arrested in Italy in July 2025 and extradited to the United States in April 2026. Zhang remains at large.
Who Is Zhang Yu
Zhang is a director at Shanghai Firetech Information Science and Technology Company, Ltd. U.S. officials say he worked at the direction of the MSS Shanghai State Security Bureau (SSSB). According to RFJ, the MSS and SSSB are Chinese intelligence services responsible for domestic counterintelligence, non-military foreign intelligence, and parts of the country's political and domestic security.
[caption id="attachment_114641" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Image Source: Rewards for Justice[/caption]
The reward covers information leading to the identification or location of anyone who, while acting under the direction or control of a foreign government, takes part in malicious cyber activity against U.S. critical infrastructure in violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The State Department says Zhang's cyberattacks violated that law.
Zhang Yu and the COVID-19 Research Intrusions
Starting in early 2020, Zhang and Xu allegedly gained unauthorized access to COVID-19 research conducted by U.S.-based universities and leading immunologists and virologists in order to steal sensitive information. At the time, Xu was a general manager at Shanghai Powerock Network Co. Ltd.
Prosecutors say the two men carried out the hacks at the behest of the MSS and SSSB and reported back to supervising officers at the SSSB. In one instance, Xu allegedly confirmed to his handlers that he had compromised the network of a research university in the Southern District of Texas.
The HAFNIUM Campaign Linked to Zhang Yu
In 2021, Zhang and Xu allegedly exploited vulnerabilities in computers running Microsoft Exchange Server, software used to store and retrieve emails. These intrusions were part of the mass hacking campaign publicly known as HAFNIUM. Victims included a university and a law firm, both based in the United States.
A nine-count indictment unveiled by the Justice Department in 2025 accused both men of computer intrusions between February 2020 and June 2021, including the HAFNIUM campaign, which prosecutors described as indiscriminate.
The scale of the campaign was significant. Brett Leatherman, assistant director of the FBI's Cyber Division, said in 2025 that through HAFNIUM, the Chinese Communist Party targeted more than 60,000 U.S. entities and successfully victimized more than 12,700 of them to steal sensitive information.
Zhang Yu Remains at Large as Partner Faces U.S. Charges
Xu was arrested by Italian authorities in July 2025 while on vacation in Milan. He was extradited to the United States in April 2026, while Zhang has not been apprehended.
According to RFJ, China uses an extensive network of private companies and contractors to hack and steal information in a way that hides the government's involvement. Both men worked for private Shanghai firms while allegedly acting on behalf of state intelligence services.
RFJ is asking anyone with information on Zhang, his associates, or their malicious cyber activities to submit a tip through its Tor-based tip line. Rewards of up to $10 million are available for information that meets the program's criteria.
Let's Encrypt is continuing a push toward tighter security by reducing free SSL/TLS certificate lifetimes from 90 days to 64 days, starting February 10, 2027. For administrators already implementing modern ACME clients that support ARI (ACME Renewal Information), the change should be seamless. For those still relying on hardcoded renewal schedules or manual processes, February will be the deadline to update before certificates start expiring unexpectedly.
Starting on October 14, Let's Encrypt will begin testing the 64-day certificates, and interested users can opt in to test their setups before production goes live.
Prior to Let's Encrypt's launch in early 2016, certificates were often issued for as long as one to three years. The service started with 90-day certificates to force renewal automation that didn't previously exist. Shorter certificate validity periods limited vulnerabilities from private key thefts and encouraged accelerated HTTPS adoption across the web.
The UK state is dumping its responsibilities on our doorsteps, while green-lighting policies that lead us closer to crisis
Would you mind fixing the NHS? And while you’re at it, could you please build an anti-missile system in your garden? Then regulate the banks, replace the water mains, tax the very rich and use the proceeds to rebuild our schools. Well, come on people: what are you waiting for?
I exaggerate, but this isn’t very far from the approach taken by the government’s Prepare campaign. Crucial functions, way beyond the scope of individual action, are dumped on our doorsteps while those in power fail to act. As a result, our national resilience is arguably lower than at any time since the second world war. At the Labour conference last week, Andy Burnham promised “a Britain where people feel the country has got their back again”. To make good on that pledge, he will have to change almost everything.
A teenager from Amman, Jordan suspected of leading the prolific data theft and extortion group ShinyHunters has been detained and is reportedly cooperating with the FBI to identify other members of the hacking gang. KrebsOnSecurity has learned that the suspect, who uses the hacker handle “Rey,” was detained as ShinyHunters was in the process of extorting a business unit recently divested by the global aerospace company Boeing, which manufactures the fleet of planes used by the employer of Rey’s father — Royal Jordanian Airlines.
The logo for Jeppesen ForeFlight, a business unit divested last year by the aerospace firm Boeing.
On October 3, Reuterscited three unnamed sources saying a suspected ShinyHunters member in Amman named Saif Al-din Khader was detained by Jordanian authorities and was cooperating with the FBI. KrebsOnSecurity identified Rey as Khader in a November 2025 profile, in which the young man admitted working with multiple ransomware groups.
Rey was featured again in a September 28 exclusive about the Dutch police arresting 24-year-old convicted cybercriminal Pepijn van der Stap on suspicion of aiding in data thefts and extortions by ShinyHunters. The story noted that immediately following the Dutchman’s arrest on the evening of September 15, Rey assumed control over the ShinyHunters brand and boasted publicly about stealing highly sensitive data from the FBI and extorting the ransomware group Cl0p.
Rey taunted both the FBI and Cl0p with memes posted to his longtime account on Twitter/X, while simultaneously including images of the avatar used by Van Der Stap’s former hacker alias “Umbreon” in an apparent attempt to frame the Dutchman for both hacks.
A taunting meme uploaded to Twitter/X by Rey on Sept. 22. A giant sized version of the Pokemon character Umbreon can be seen in the bottom left.
As noted in our September 28 report, ShinyHunters gained access to the FBI site and other victims by exploiting a vulnerability (CVE-2026-35273) in PeopleSoft, a software-as-a-service platform from the tech giant Oracle that is broadly used by companies to manage hiring and human resources, benefits and payroll. Oracle quickly issued a fix for CVE-2026-35273, which ShinyHunters first began exploiting as a zero-day in June, and at the time Mandiant released web application firewall rules intended for organizations that couldn’t apply the security update quickly enough.
ShinyHunters told BleepingComputer in June that the original goal behind exploiting the PeopleSoft vulnerability was to breach the FBI’s own PeopleSoft database, but the hackers said those attacks were unsuccessful for some reason. In recent weeks, however, ShinyHunters turned to a well-known URL-encoding trick to bypass Mandiant’s suggested web application firewall rules.
In a report released Sept. 25, security experts at Mandiant and the Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) confirmed that ShinyHunters had mass-exploited the PeopleSoft vulnerability to steal data from dozens of systems across a range of industries, including higher education, technology, healthcare, agriculture, transportation and government.
Reuters reported October 5 that the FBI has removed a contractor at Accenture over their failure to patch the FBI recruitment website hacked by ShinyHunters, which exposed sensitive data on more than 5,000 FBI personnel, including each’s person’s unit and specialization, as well as medical and psychiatric records.
‘REY’ MEANS KING, AS IN ROYAL
According to two sources familiar with the ShinyHunters investigation, a navigation and digital aviation unit recently divested by the global aerospace company Boeing was among the victims that ShinyHunters was in the process of extorting when Rey was apprehended by Jordanian authorities.
Those sources said the FBI’s investigation into ShinyHunters gained renewed urgency with the group’s attempted extortion of the former Boeing unit, which allegedly included the theft of sensitive information that sources said could pose operational safety and security risks.
In a brief statement shared with KrebsOnSecurity, Boeing acknowledged the extortion attempts by ShinyHunters, and said the incident concerned data stolen from Jeppesen ForeFlight, a subsidiary that Boeing sold in November 2025 to the private equity firm Thoma Bravo for $10.55 billion.
“We are aware of claims by a threat actor regarding data allegedly associated with Boeing and our former subsidiary Jeppesen ForeFlight,” a Boeing spokesperson shared. “We are actively reviewing the matter with the Jeppesen ForeFlight team.”
A spokesperson for Jeppesen ForeFlight shared a written statement in response to questions, saying the company has seen no impact on their end. “Based on our investigation to date into this claim and proactive security posture, there was no impact to our operations or products.”
Rey’s alleged involvement in attempting to extort the former Boeing unit is noteworthy because there is strong evidence that his father works for Royal Jordanian Airlines, which is mostly controlled by the Jordanian government and operates its long-haul fleet on passenger planes built by Boeing. Rey claimed on Telegram in early 2025 that his father was an airline pilot, although that could not be independently confirmed.
However, as noted in our November 2025 profile of Rey, his family’s shared computer was at one point compromised by password-stealing malware, and the data collected by that malware clearly shows Rey’s father used the same credentials to log in at multiple online portals for Royal Jordanian Airlines employees.
Royal Jordanian Airlines has not yet responded to a request for comment. In advance of our September 28 story, KrebsOnSecurity once again emailed Rey’s father to seek comment and update him on his son’s alleged activities. Neither of the Khaders have responded. But just hours after that request was sent, Rey began deleting his various social media accounts, including the Twitter/X account he previously used to taunt the FBI, Cl0p, and other ShinyHunters victims.
Rey may have nixed many of his social media profiles, but his cybersecurity blog on GitHub somehow escaped the purge, and it shows that Rey was fixated on the leaders of the Cl0p ransomware group. In March 2026, Rey’s blog featured a lengthy post that identified two Russian men as the core developers and hackers behind Cl0p.
Rey’s blog on GitHub. This post doxes two Russian men as the core operators behind Cl0p, one of the oldest and most established ransomware groups still in operation today.
MURDER FOR HIRE?
Meanwhile, news outlets in the Netherlands reported explosive new allegations leveled at Van der Stap, whose supposed personal transformation from convicted to reformed hacker has been widely covered in the tech news media. The Dutch daily RTL reported on Sept. 29 that investigators suspect Van der Stap tried to orchestrate at least two murders. According to RTL, the murders were allegedly to be committed abroad, and there are indications Van der Stap gave the order for these attacks.
Van der Stap was released from prison after serving the better part of a four year sentence for data theft and extortion activity that prosecutors said netted between €1.5 million and €2.7 million. In an interview with KrebsOnSecurity on September 9, Van der Stap described his new role as “offensive security lead” at the Dutch cybersecurity company Neo Security, saying the job involved probing client networks for security vulnerabilities.
Neo Security’s owner Benjamin Korper told Reuters he has hired an outside firm to investigate whether Van der Stap had hacked Neo Security or its customers, but that so far investigators have found no evidence he acted against his employer or clients. Korper said Dutch forensic investigators visited his office on September 15, the night Van der Stap was arrested in a dramatic police raid that reportedly involved flash bang grenades.
A screenshot of a Sept 16 story by the Dutch news outlet at5.nl, describing a police raid on Van Der Stap’s residence that reportedly used flash-bang grenades.
Prior to his first arrest in 2023, Van der Stap was working as a software engineer at the Amsterdam-based cybersecurity startup Hadrian, while volunteering at the Dutch Institute for Vulnerability Disclosure (DIVD) — even as he was hacking into and extorting a number of large organizations.
When asked in a recent interview why anyone should believe the word of a self-described “reformed” cybercriminal who had so casually deceived countless friends, co-workers and journalists for years, Van der Stap replied that his work spoke for itself and there was nothing he could say that would convince his worst critics.
“You can throw a bunch of nice words at someone, but you can’t convince them if they don’t want to be convinced,” Van der Stap told KrebsOnSecurity on Sept. 9. “I’m doing what I can to repay victims, and that’s all I can do. If someone doesn’t want to believe me, then that’s on them.”
FRANCHISING AND BURNING A BRAND
Cybercriminals aligned with ShinyHunters have been responsible for dozens of data breaches involving billions of stolen records, and breaches claimed by the group stretch back to at least 2019. But experts say the people recently operating behind the ShinyHunters name are not the same core members that populated the group in its early days, most of whom are French citizens who have been arrested (if not also imprisoned) on at least one prior occasion for alleged cybercrime activity.
More to the point, ShinyHunters has become something of a franchise. Think the Dread Pirate Roberts character in the 1980s cult movie classic “The Princess Bride,” only succession by death is replaced with succession by arrest, and there can be multiple simultaneous Dread Pirate Robertses. Sources close to the investigation say the FBI is focusing on a remaining handful of cybercriminal freelancers or affiliates who have been feeding the group stolen credentials to various software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms used by major companies in exchange for a cut of any data ransoms later paid by victims.
In the days after the news broke of Van der Stap’s arrest, a cybercrime-focused chat server on Telegram that was allegedly operated by Rey erupted with hot takes, with most participants heaping ridicule on the teenage hacker after he publicly backed down from threats against the FBI and Cl0p, and again when the ShinyHunters’s darknet website suddenly went offline. Several commentators accused Rey of resurrecting the ShinyHunters brand after its core members were rounded up in France, and making a mockery of the group’s name and reputation ever since.
“He bought the old forum PGP key and used it to make new Breachforum websites and Telegram channels larping as ShinyHunters to ransom companies and then sell the used data or resell his forum when he goes broke,” one member recounted.
A relatively new Telegram channel called “The Battle” has been doxing and needling Rey and other alleged ShinyHunters members for several weeks, and it has gained a considerable readership among the cybercrime communities operating on Telegram. One of the coordinators of that harassment campaign repeatedly portrayed Rey as clueless greenhorn who sought to ride the coattails of a cybercriminal brand that has long enjoyed a reputation for ruthlessly selling or publishing data stolen from victim companies who refuse to give in to extortion demands.
“Rey (Saif Al-Din Khader) made a serious mistake when he started pretending to be a member of ShinyHunters,” wrote the administrators of The Battle server on Telegram. “That group had already been dismantled, with many of its members either arrested or imprisoned, yet Rey still chose to use its name while carrying out his crimes. We’re aware of claims that [Rey] caused over $200 million in damages and helped around 5–6 friend groups in the community make money by using Shiny Hunters group aliases to negotiate deals for a 25–30% cut over the past few months.”
In an interview with The Register, ShinyHunters claimed they hacked the FBI to counter the agency’s narrative in a May 2026 alert that advised victims against paying a ransom to the group, which came off looking unprofessional and capricious in the FBI’s advisory.
A flash notice on ShinyHunters released by the FBI on May 15, 2026.
The public notice warned the group has been known to pursue a number of different victim harassment strategies, from sending threatening text messages and phone calls to victims and their family members to in some cases swatting victims. The FBI warned ShinyHunters members “may also falsely claim to have sensitive or compromising information, including embarrassing photographs or videos of victims, which frequently do not exist.”
The hackers told The Register their attack on the FBI “demonstrated our technical capabilities and directly refuted the misinformation disseminated by the FBI, journalists, and industry researchers.” At the same time, the group’s leaders seemed to acknowledge that the FBI’s warning materially harmed their prospects for convincing victims to pay, saying “this was fundamentally a public relations and marketing initiative for our business.”
Attackers hijacked three top-level domains and used their control to mint counterfeit TLS certificates for Google and other large organizations, Google said Tuesday.
The attackers launched a series of attacks on the .gh, .sl, and .as country code top-level domains (ccTLDs) and then modified authoritative DNS records for selected domains within those namespaces. By controlling those DNS records, the attackers were able to pass automated domain control validation checks and obtain unauthorized certificates for “several Google domains” and “several leading global brands and widely used online services.” Google said it updated Chrome to block all certificates it identified as unauthorized, and worked with the issuing certification authorities to ensure the unauthorized certificates for Google properties were revoked.
Certificate issuance: The weak link in the chain
TLS certificates are the cryptographic credentials that underpin authentication and encryption protections for websites, mail servers, and other Internet infrastructure. These x.509 certificates use a digital signature to bind a domain name such as google.com to a public key. The public key is publicly available, while the private key is held only by the website operator. When a connection shows that the keys match, the visiting party knows it’s connected to the authentic site rather than an impostor. Possession of unauthorized certificates allows attackers to cryptographically impersonate the affected infrastructure.
We don’t accept drugs killing a few people because they cure most patients. Or a few planes crashing because most land safely. AI should be no different
OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman was asked to appear before the Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence in Australia and explain how and why their agents have been hacking into multiple government websites. Altman didn’t turn up but sent Jason Kwon, his chief strategy officer, instead to answer the committee’s many tricky questions on its first day of public hearings on Tuesday.
The committee is conducting a comprehensive inquiry into the economic, societal, regulatory, and national security implications of AI for Australia. It will report back to parliament at the end of November. This is an unusually fast pace, but then it’s an unusually fast paced technology.
ASOS says hackers gained unauthorized access to third-party platforms it uses and sent an "ASOS HACKED" push notification directly to customers, apparently as part of an extortion attempt. The clothing and beauty store says some basic personal information may have been accessed but does not believe payment-card data or passwords were affected. The BBC reports: In an email to customers on Tuesday night, the company apologized and urged customers not to engage with the notification. And it said the website and app are "operating as usual" promising customers they can "shop with confidence" while it investigates the incident. The company has not as of yet informed the UK's data watchdog, the Information Commission's Office (ICO), about any breach.
Exactly how many Asos customers received the notification on Tuesday remains unclear, but Google's Play store says the ASOS app has been downloaded to android devices more than 10 million times. The British retailer has a substantial global footprint -- serving around 17 million customers each year across more than 150 markets. Some Asos app users in Australia, France, Sweden and the Republic of Ireland had also received the notification, according to local reports on Tuesday.
[...] Users of the Asos app appeared to have received the alarming notification at around 10:00 BST on Tuesday. Headlined "ASOS HACKED" and addressed to the company's data protection officer and IT teams, it said: "We have fully compromised the Snowflake instance." "Engage with us, or we will leak it," it added, before linking to a Telegram channel. The message left many ASOS customers confused. [...] Meanwhile Snowflake -- whose tools are used by dozens of firms to collect, analyze and store data -- told the BBC its investigation was ongoing, but it had so far found "no compromise" of its platform.
IBM and Red Hat say their AI-powered Lightwell initiative has identified and helped remediate more than 400 previously unknown vulnerabilities across widely used Java libraries. Phoronix reports: They announced this feat today as part of their promoting Lightwell Clearinghouse to GA, which is an enterprise service for their customers to submit open-source software dependencies for priority review and remediation.
From today's announcement: "The milestone addresses a growing business risk. As autonomous AI agents become capable of combining several lower-risk software weaknesses into a more serious attack, companies need to do more than identify vulnerabilities. They need a practical way to develop, test and deploy fixes in the software that supports critical applications."
The publisher of Wikipedia said Monday that OpenAI agents attempted to hack a note-taking tool it hosts, made unauthorized edits, and sent millions of resource-intensive requests to its infrastructure, in the latest instance of OpenAI systems taking harmful and potentially dangerous actions.
The objective of some of the OpenAI agents’ actions, the Wikimedia Foundation said, was to use Wikipedia as a proxy for fetching data from third-party sites. In one case, the agents posted “malicious edits” that were intended to repurpose a citation tool as a proxy. In another, the agents made unsuccessful attempts to compromise the Wikipedia Etherpad note-taking tool so it would serve the same purpose.
The agents also made millions of automated API requests, crawled millions of pages, and made hundreds of thousands of queries to the Wikidata Query Service. The last action may have contributed to a partial shutdown of the query service in May, the publisher said.
Shares in fashion company fall nearly 10% after its app systems are accessed by ‘unidentified third party’
Asos is investigating unauthorised access to its app system after shoppers received a notification claiming hackers had “fully compromised” its data.
The online fashion retailer said basic personal information including name and contact details might have been accessed by an unidentified third party but it did not believe payment card records or passwords had been compromised.
The adoption of AI agents in millions of organizations is creating new opportunities for attackers to make them take malicious actions, such as exfiltrating database contents and sensitive business and personal information.
In the past five months, Google and four other organizations—with little in common except for their use of AI agents—have acknowledged vulnerabilities that exploit one agent inside a targeted network to spread harmful instructions to other internal agents. The technique is a special form of prompt injection that targets not the LLM but a particular agent, such as one for translation or data analysis. Guardrails inside such agents, if they exist at all, are often lax and will send the instructions to other agents down the chain. Because the latter agent explicitly trusts the first one, it follows the directions.
Unexpected and hard to mitigate
Independent researcher Syed Anas Mohiuddin tested agents from organizations including Google, JP Morgan Chase, Weviate, Rapid7, the French government's interministerial digital directorate, and the US federal government. His proof-of-concept attacks exploit trust gaps in MCP, short for Model Context Protocol. The standard is one way AI apps and agents communicate with each other inside an internal network. The illustration below shows a simplified MCP in action.
Authored By Salleh Kodri, Regional Director, Solutions Engineering, ASEAN, Cyble
For the last decade, cybersecurity has spent a lot of energy trying to solve a visibility problem. We wanted more logs. More telemetry. More threat intelligence. More detection rules. More dashboards. And to be fair, we got them.
Today, many organisations have SIEM, EDR, NDR, attack surface management, identity security, vulnerability management, cloud security and multiple threat intelligence sources. The average SOC can probably see more of its environment than at any point in the past.
Yet incidents still happen where, afterwards, somebody inevitably asks: "Did we already have the indicators?"
Quite often, the answer is yes.
That tells me the next cybersecurity problem is not simply visibility.
It is decision latency. Seeing something is one thing. Understanding what it means, deciding what matters and taking the right action before the situation changes is something else entirely. And Agentic AI is about to make that gap much more obvious.
We Are Crossing a Speed Threshold
There is a lot of discussion right now about AI-powered cyberattacks. I think we need to be careful with the hype. AI does not suddenly make every traditional attack technique obsolete, nor does it mean tomorrow's attacker will be an entirely autonomous machine. The more immediate change is simpler.
AI compresses time.
Reconnaissance can become faster. Target discovery can become faster. Vulnerability analysis can become faster. Social engineering can become personalised at a scale that was previously difficult. Infrastructure can be analysed, changed and replaced faster. And increasingly, AI systems can help determine what to do next. Agentic systems take this one step further because they are designed around a loop:
Potentially with less human involvement at every stage.
So when I think about Agentic AI in cybersecurity, I do not start with the question, "How intelligent will the AI become?" I start with another question: What happens when the attacker can make decisions faster than the defender? That, to me, is the more immediate challenge.
The SOC Does Not Have an Alert Problem. It Has a Decision Problem
In conversations with security teams across ASEAN, I rarely hear anyone asking for fewer sources of security data. They already have plenty. The problem is making sense of all of it quickly enough.
Imagine an incident where an organisation detects suspicious authentication activity. The identity platform sees one piece. The endpoint platform sees another. Threat intelligence knows something about the IP address. Attack surface management identifies an exposed service. The vulnerability platform knows there is a weakness on that asset. Digital risk monitoring may already have discovered credentials belonging to the same employee somewhere outside the organisation.
Every tool may technically be doing its job. But somebody still has to connect the dots.
Is this actually malicious? Is the account privileged? Is the asset internet-facing? Is the vulnerability exploitable? Are the credentials genuine? Has the infrastructure been associated with a known threat actor? Should we isolate the endpoint? Should we disable the account? What happens to the business if we do?
This is why I believe cybersecurity increasingly suffers from decision latency.
For years, security architecture has been optimised heavily around detection latency. How quickly can I see something?
Now the question has to become: How quickly can I understand enough of the situation to make the right decision?
If five security systems generate five different pieces of the same attack, but an analyst has to manually correlate them before anybody understands the risk, we are still operating at human speed. That becomes a bigger problem when the attacker is not.
Threat Intelligence Has to Move Closer to Action
I have spent a significant part of my career working around threat intelligence, and one thing I believe strongly is that intelligence has to change a decision. Otherwise, it risks becoming another source of information. Traditionally, threat intelligence has often followed a model like this:
Collect -> Analyse -> Report -> Distribute
There is still an important place for that, especially for strategic intelligence. But operational security requires something closer to:
Take something as simple as a leaked credential. A username and password belonging to an employee appears in an underground marketplace. On its own, that is intelligence. Useful, but incomplete.
Now imagine immediately correlating that information with the person's identity, privilege level, external applications, exposed infrastructure, endpoint activity, known vulnerabilities, suspicious infrastructure and current adversary behaviour.
The question is no longer: "Did we find a leaked credential?" It becomes: "Does this credential create a credible path into something important, and do we need to act now?"
That is a very different security outcome.
And this is where I see the real potential of AI in the SOC.
Not another AI assistant creating another summary. Not another chatbot sitting on top of another dashboard.
AI should reduce the distance between intelligence and action.
ASEAN Has its Own Reality
This conversation becomes particularly interesting when viewed from ASEAN.
One thing I have learned working across the region is that there really is no single "ASEAN cybersecurity maturity level."
Singapore is different from Malaysia. Malaysia is different from Indonesia. Indonesia is different from Thailand or the Philippines.
And even within each country, a major bank, a government agency, a telecommunications provider, a manufacturing company and a mid-sized enterprise can have completely different levels of cybersecurity maturity.
Some organisations have mature SOC operations with substantial automation. Others are still strengthening basic identity security, vulnerability management, endpoint visibility and incident response.
Yet they may ultimately face the same AI-assisted adversaries.
That creates an uncomfortable reality: ASEAN may face machine-speed threats while many organisations are still operating human-speed security processes.
We cannot solve that simply by telling everyone to hire more SOC analysts.
The talent challenge is already real.
Instead, I see AI becoming a force multiplier for analysts - handling repetitive enrichment, correlation, evidence collection and initial investigation so people can spend more time on the decisions where judgement actually matters.
But this does not mean automating everything. In fact, the more powerful our automation becomes, the more careful we need to be.
Where AI Should Not Act Matters Too
This is particularly important for critical infrastructure. ASEAN economies depend heavily on energy, manufacturing, transportation, telecommunications and other essential services.
Many of those environments include operational technology and legacy systems where the consequences of getting an automated decision wrong can be very different from traditional IT.
Automatically isolating an employee laptop suspected of compromise is one thing. Automatically interfering with a production environment, operational control system or critical service is another.
The cybersecurity decision may be technically correct and operationally disastrous. That is why I keep coming back to this principle: The faster AI can act, the more important it becomes to understand where it should not act.
Context matters. Business impact matters. Safety matters. Authority matters. That is also why I do not believe the future SOC is simply an autonomous SOC. It has to be a governed autonomous SOC.
Agentic AI Needs a Trust Architecture
It would be dangerous to interpret Agentic AI as simply giving an AI agent access to every security tool and saying, "Go and defend us." Trust has to be engineered into the architecture. I think about this in three practical levels.
Observe. Let the AI collect information, correlate events, investigate and build context. Humans retain the decision authority. Assist. Let the AI recommend an action, prepare the workflow and present the evidence. Humans approve significant actions.
Act. Allow the AI to execute predefined actions automatically - but only within clearly established policies, authority boundaries and confidence thresholds.
Most organisations will probably use all three at the same time. A low-risk containment action might be automated. Disabling a privileged identity may require approval. Taking action against a production system should probably have an even higher threshold.
The technology is actually the easier part. The harder questions are governance questions.
What agent is acting? What authority does it have? What evidence informed the decision? What is it prohibited from doing? When must it stop? When must a human become involved? And afterwards, can we explain exactly what happened and why?
Autonomy without accountability is not resilience. It is another form of risk.
'Human in the Loop' is Not Enough
I also think we need to challenge one phrase that gets used constantly in AI discussions: Human in the loop. It sounds safe. But what does it actually mean? If an AI system generates 50 recommendations during an attack and every one of them requires an analyst to click "Approve," technically we still have a human in the loop.
We have also recreated the bottleneck we were trying to remove. The better model may increasingly be human on the loop rather than human in every loop. Humans establish the rules. Humans define the authority. Humans establish thresholds, escalation conditions, prohibited actions and risk appetite.
Machines operate inside those boundaries. And when the uncertainty, context or consequence exceeds those boundaries, the system escalates to a person.
Machine-speed defence does not require removing humans from cybersecurity. It requires being far more precise about which decisions actually need a human.
The SOC Needs to Become a Decision System
This changes how I think about the future SOC. The traditional SOC workflow is roughly:
Signal -> Intelligence -> Context -> AI reasoning -> Decision -> Controlled action
That does not make the analyst less important. I think it makes good analysts more important.
They should spend less time copying indicators between systems and more time understanding adversary behaviour, investigating complex incidents, assessing business impact, making judgement calls and defining how autonomous systems should operate.
AI should automate the work around the analyst, not automate away the analyst's judgement. Because ultimately cybersecurity decisions are rarely purely technical.
Blocking something can interrupt a business process. Disabling an identity affects a person. Taking a system offline can affect customers. Changing something in operational technology can create physical consequences.
That context is what separates security automation from responsible security automation.
ASEAN can Leapfrog
There is also an opportunity here for ASEAN. We do not necessarily have to replicate every generation of security architecture built elsewhere. Some organisations in the region may be able to move directly from fragmented security operations toward more integrated, intelligence-driven models.
But we cannot assume AI will compensate for weak foundations.
Identity still matters. Asset visibility still matters. Security hygiene still matters. Threat intelligence still matters. Incident response still matters. And regional collaboration increasingly matters.
As our economies become more connected, cyber risk does not respect national boundaries.
A compromised supplier in one ASEAN country can affect customers in another. A threat actor targeting financial institutions may operate across several markets simultaneously. Infrastructure, cloud platforms and digital ecosystems increasingly cross borders.
That means strengthening ASEAN's cyber resilience will require more than technology. It will require information sharing, public-private cooperation, critical infrastructure resilience, cross-border incident coordination, talent development and sensible AI governance.
This is why the conversation taking place around Singapore International Cyber Week and GovWare is timely.
SICW's discussion around shaping the new cyber order, and GovWare's focus on cyber at agentic velocity, are ultimately asking variations of the same question: How do we move faster without losing control?
Trust Becomes the Control Plane
I do not think the next cybersecurity race is simply going to be: AI attacker versus AI defender. That is too simplistic. The real advantage will belong to whichever side can understand what is happening, make the right decision and act faster.
But for defenders, there is an additional requirement. We must do it without losing control of the decision itself. Speed will become a security capability. Intelligence will provide context. AI will provide scale. But trust must determine what happens next.
As cybersecurity moves closer to machine speed, our security architecture will have to move with it.
That does not mean every decision should become autonomous. And faster certainly does not automatically mean safer.
The organisations that get this right will be the ones that combine machine-speed intelligence, machine-assisted decision-making and human accountability. For me, the formula is relatively straightforward:
INTELLIGENCE + CONTEXT + AI + GOVERNANCE -> TRUSTED ACTION
Everything before the arrow helps us move faster. Everything around it determines whether we should trust the outcome. And that is ultimately what trust at machine speed has to mean.
Apple says it is changing its macOS privacy settings to stop third-party app developers from misusing them to access message histories.
Friday's announcement comes two weeks after tech columnist Jason Aten said that Meta’s new general-purpose AI agent Muse sent him an unsolicited notification referencing a thread between him and a co-worker over Apple Messages. Aten said he never granted Muse permissions to read his messages and had assumed they were off-limits. Social media last week blew up with masses of people who agreed and said the incident showed that AI assistants given access to calendars, emails, messages, shopping accounts, and other resources are akin to a skill saw or other power tool. While potentially useful, they can do real damage if not used carefully.
He said/she said
Meta CTO David Singleton joined the fray with a rebuttal that appeared solid. For Muse to access Apple Messages, a user must manually give it two privileges. One is full-disk access, a macOS system-level permission. The other is to enable a Messages connector setting in Muse.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: OpenAI has informed more than 100 organizations about incidents involving unauthorized activity tied to its AI agents, according to a blog post by the ChatGPT maker, as AI labs face mounting scrutiny over rogue AI agent activity. Here are some other details:
- The Sam Altman-led company has been conducting a broad review of the activities of its AI models after the accidental hacking of Hugging Face. - OpenAI is searching through roughly 50 petabytes of data as it works to understand the full scope of its rogue agent activity. - A string of high-profile breaches globally by rogue AI agents in recent months has sparked widespread worries within the AI industry over its ability to control the more powerful AI models now under development. - "In some cases, models used internet access in unintended ways or, in retrospect, did not have the ideal restrictions applied. Over the last several months, we have been applying new technical and operational measures to avoid similar problems, or catch them very early, and will continue this work," OpenAI said. - OpenAI previously said the review would take months to complete given the scale of the work. - The Hugging Face incident remains the most severe rogue agent activity OpenAI has identified from its AI models so far.
This weekly roundup covers a customer data breach at Spain's national rail operator, an Australian government warning about attackers hijacking corporate AI services, a patient data theft from a Polish medical software platform, phishing campaigns that turn legitimate remote management tools against their victims, and a gathering of Europe's police leaders focused on how AI is reshaping crime.Two threads run through this week's stories. Artificial intelligence is now both a target and a tool for attackers: stolen API keys are draining company budgets, and AI is reportedly being used in intrusions. Meanwhile, attackers keep exploiting trusted software, from a medical records platform to legitimate IT administration tools, to stay hidden for days or weeks.
The Cyber Express Weekly Roundup
Renfe Confirms Data Breach Through Compromised Adif Servers
Spanish rail operator Renfe confirmed on September 25 that hackers had accessed customer names and email addresses. The intrusion came through compromised servers belonging to Adif, the state-owned manager of Spain's rail infrastructure. Renfe said no financial data was exposed and train services were not disrupted. Read more…
Australia Warns of Stolen AI Keys as Hijacked Access Costs Firms Up to $600,000
The Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) has warned that attackers are taking over organizations' AI services. They get in through exposed API keys, stolen sessions, and compromised suppliers. Once inside, they burn through paid credits and generate harmful content. Where AI agents are deployed, they also use that access to reach connected systems and data. Read more…
Polish Patient Data Stolen in Cyberattack on Medyc Medical Software
Attackers exploited an SQL injection vulnerability in Medyc, a medical records platform developed by Polish vendor Qbusoft, on August 22–23. They stole patient names, PESEL national identification numbers, addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses going back to July 2024. The breach went unnoticed until September 8–9, more than two weeks later. Read more…
Phishing Campaigns Abuse MSP360 Remote Management Tool to Install ScreenConnect
Microsoft has tracked phishing campaigns that tricked victims across several industries into installing MSP360, a legitimate remote management tool. The installers were disguised as Zoom downloads, Adobe updates, invitations, and delivery notices. After gaining a foothold, the attackers installed ConnectWise ScreenConnect as a backup access channel. Read more…
Europe's Police Chiefs Warn AI Is Making Crime Faster and Larger in Scale
More than 500 police leaders from 59 countries gathered at Europol's headquarters from September 28 to 30 to discuss how AI is changing crime. Europol warned that criminals are using generative AI, deepfakes, and autonomous agents to expand fraud, cybercrime, migrant smuggling, and child exploitation. It also pointed to AI's potential to speed up police investigations. Read more…
Weekly Cybersecurity Takeaway
Artificial intelligence features in several of this week's stories, in different roles. In Australia, AI services are the target: attackers hijack them to steal paid credits and to reach connected systems through AI agents. At Europol's gathering, police leaders described AI as a force multiplier that lets criminal groups run fraud and exploitation at greater speed and scale. In the Renfe case, AI was reportedly used in the attack, though that remains unconfirmed.The other common thread is how attackers abuse what organizations already trust. In Poland, an injection flaw in widely used medical software exposed sensitive patient identifiers and went undetected for more than two weeks. Microsoft's findings show attackers installing two legitimate remote management tools so their activity looks like ordinary IT work. The Renfe breach, which reached customers through a partner organization's servers, is a reminder that an organization's exposure extends to its suppliers and infrastructure partners.Together, these developments call for practical steps. Organizations should treat AI credentials as carefully as any other privileged secret. They should watch for unexpected remote access software even when it is legitimate, and they should hold the vendors who handle their data to the same security standards they apply internally.
The Queensland government department in charge of the state's cybersecurity efforts has disclosed a loss of roughly $800,000 from a cyberattack during the last financial year. Details of the CDSB cyberattack, which involved a third-party messaging service being "misused" for financial gain, appear in the QLD cybersecurity department's latest annual report, released on Friday.The Customer Services, Open Data, and Small and Family Business department (CDSB) directs the Queensland government's cybersecurity strategy, governance, policy and investment. According to its annual report, the department lost $809,000 during the 2025-26 financial year as "a result of an external cyberattack for financial gain."
How the CDSB Cyberattack Unfolded?
The report said the breach did not reach sensitive records. No government data or sensitive information was compromised during the incident," it stated. "The department blocked the attack and engaged a third party to mitigate any further exposure."A CDSB spokesperson told Information Age that the attackers had not been paid."In July 2025, a third-party messaging service used by the Queensland government was misused to generate an inflated number of unauthorised SMS messages for financial gain," the spokesperson said in a statement."... Immediate steps were taken to contain and investigate the incident, and security controls have been further strengthened."The spokesperson added that the Queensland government "is committed to protecting the security and resilience of its systems and services."
Audit Found the QLD Cybersecurity Department 'Needs to Do More'
The incident follows a Queensland Audit Office report, released in March, which found that CDSB "needs to do more" to help the state's public sector manage third-party cybersecurity risks.Auditors found the QLD cybersecurity department was "not actively assessing and monitoring third-party cyber capability across the public sector," although improvements were in progress."The Queensland government has been slow to develop a framework to help entities manage their third-party cybersecurity risks," the audit said. It noted that the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD), the federal cybersecurity agency, "has been raising these risks since 2021."During testing, auditors gained the "highest level of access" to two Queensland government entities. They did not name either entity, to "avoid publicly identifying any security vulnerabilities."CDSB addressed the audit in its annual report. "In our cybersecurity leadership role, we agreed to all relevant recommendations and progressed actions during the reporting period, including initiatives to strengthen whole‑of‑government cybersecurity capability," it said.The report described cybersecurity as something that "remains a daily discipline" for CDSB and the wider Queensland government."Investing in, and securing Queensland's digital assets remains important, as cyber threats become more complex, and national incident data shows that malicious actors continue to target all sectors of the economy," it added.
Queensland Tops Cybercrime Reports
The CDSB cyberattack comes against a broader backdrop of cybercrime in the state. ASD's latest Annual Cyber Threat Report found that Queensland reported the highest share of Australia's cybercrime incidents in the 2024-25 financial year.Queensland accounted for 28 per cent of national cybercrime reports. Victoria followed with 26 per cent and New South Wales with 22 per cent. ASD found these figures were "disproportionately higher" than the three states' respective populations when compared with other jurisdictions.Average losses were highest elsewhere. "The Australian Capital Territory reported the highest average self-reported financial losses – around $37,700 per cybercrime report – followed by those in New South Wales, with around $33,000," the report said.
The Pentagon is informing more than 2 million current and former military members that their personnel records storing sensitive personal information were stolen over a monthslong compromise of one of its networks. The breach is the second one in recent months to expose sensitive government information.
The records, according to one notification letter posted to Reddit, included Social Security numbers, names, addresses, sex, race, and occupational specialty. This last category could be particularly valuable to foreign adversaries because it could help their intelligence agencies in identifying high-value military personnel. Starting last October, hackers gained access to a system operated by the Defense Manpower Data Center, which collates Department of Defense personnel records. The Pentagon says that the breach compromised the records of 2.8 million living individuals.
A potential boon
The incident is the second time a major network breach in recent months has exposed sensitive US government personnel records that criminal groups or foreign adversaries could use. Last month, the ransomware group ShinyHunters claimed it hacked into FBI systems and stole records of thousands of the agency’s current or former employees. Reuters reported the job titles in the records included ones related to investigating China or Russia.
The winner of a cybersecurity contest prevailed by relying on an ‘open weight’ Chinese model — another sign that available A.I. systems could already be too powerful to easily regulate.
Pavel Gurvich, the chief executive of the cybersecurity company Tenzai. Mr. Gurvich’s firm won the HackerOne contest by using a freely available Chinese A.I. model.
Hackers have been exploiting a critical vulnerability in the Zimbra Collaboration Suite in an attempt to obtain email backups and authentication credentials of vulnerable organzations, Microsoft has warned.
The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-73570, lets attackers remotely issue operating system commands without authentication. Zimbra maintainer Synacor issued a patch on July 20, but didn’t disclose the vulnerability for more than three weeks after that. The security-focused Shadowserver Foundation said last week that its scans found that 274 separate instances of the Zimbra Collaboration Suite had been compromised. The number of servers running the software has fluctuated from 19,000 in the week following the patch to about 12,000 in the weeks following that. Currently, Shadowserver is tracking about 10,000 instances.
Look, ma, no authorization
From July 28 to August 7, Microsoft said Wednesday, the company detected two distinct scanning tools probing the Internet for vulnerable endpoints. The attackers first validated their exploit worked by sending HTTP, requests and DNS, ICMP, and out-of-band identity checks to domains hosted on public services. The probes allowed the attackers to confirm the exploit successfully executed commands on vulnerable servers without actually compromising them. Eventually, the attackers began using their command injection capability to install malicious payloads. Microsoft wrote:
For safety reasons, Gemini 4 Argon will initially be available only to some companies and organizations focused on cybersecurity defense before it is more widely released, Google said.
Right now, America.gov functions as an AI chatbot that bases its answers on official government sources. It was developed with the assistance of Google's Gemini and SpaceXAI's Grok, according to Joe Gebbia, the Airbnb co-founder who led development of the site for the Trump administration. In 2027, the site will move "from answers to actions," Gebbia said. Nevertheless, Trump encouraged Americans to start using America.gov right away. "This took a while to bring it to a point where it's so good," Trump said. "America.gov is a declaration to the world that every citizen of our nation will be treated with respect and dignity." The functionality of America.gov at launch, however, was awkward for Trump. By providing summaries of official government data and reports, it easily and comprehensively debunks many of the falsehoods that Trump frequently promotes.
Will this chatbot continue to contradict the things Trump says? Only time (and probably the results of the next few elections) will tell.
This government has already made moves to:
*Undermine government data collection and research and reporting
*Remove information on climate change, minority issues, and public health from public-facing government websites
*Delay or skew reports government reports hat contradict Trump's claims
But 75 years of data-driven governance is probably a bit hard to erase overnight.
In other government services news, via the Washington Sun:
White House Drove Users to Official App Fraught With Trackers.
he White House app shot to the top of the Apple App Store's news category last week after its new 24/7 broadcast channel, Trump TV, was swiftly positioned as a legitimate source for news while networks halted their pool coverage.
After the Trump administration mandated that federal agencies force-install the app onto all government-issued mobile devices, cybersecurity researchers noted that no public security authorization or privacy assessments required under federal law had been completed.
Pushback over the app's security apparatus forced White House developers to delegate tracking software to third-party services. But the app still includes scripts to monitor a user's location several times per minute, according to Gera, and it's unclear how that data is used by the White House or third-party services.
The app also contains a latent keylogger script sourced online from an amateur developer based in India, according to Gera and confirmed by The Sun's analysis. Keyloggers most commonly appear in surveillance malware to store written text from a device, but they also can be used as a benign tool to analyze inputs like typing frequency. While it's unlikely to work on mobile devices, Fields said, it's still concerning that the White House is using a keylogger web-sourced from an foreign coder.
App marketplaces require developers to disclose what data app developers collect from their users, which platforms like the Apple App Store enforce through a "privacy manifest."
In the app's latest version, the White House left that manifest completely blank, implying it collects no data from users despite contradicting findings from cybersecurity experts.
An unpublished feature within the White House browser extension allowed app administrators to create a political profile on a user, and included an "investigate" button to refer individuals to the Secret Service.
Loge contends that rather than using user data for political strategy, the White House is more likely to leverage the information to steer supporters driven to the app toward one of Trump's merchandise or cryptocurrency ventures.
"What we've seen is that Donald Trump is a businessman who's monetizing politics. Therefore, this app is a way to make money," Loge said. "The other people who could find this information either directly or through several layers of resale are, of course, hostile governments — foreign actors whose interests are the demise of American democracy."
***
Federal government forces all federal employees to install malware on their federal government phones, should be the headline here. Anyway, don't install any software promoted by the Trump administration. And know that whatever you ask this America.gov chatbot will definitely be collected and recorded.
Cloudflare said Tuesday it plans to issue quantum-proof TLS certificates, making it one of the first authorities to issue such certificates, which use a form of cryptography that is widely believed to withstand attacks from quantum computers.
The Internet infrastructure provider said it will use an open source platform that issues both classic TLS certificates and a post-quantum equivalent known as Merkle Tree Certificates. The hybrid certificates will be free to both paying and non-paying users. To help build the massive system and establish ubiquity across the sprawling TLS ecosystem, Cloudflare will be acquiring an already trusted certificate root from CA GlobalSign. Cloudflare said the move will let millions of websites use post-quantum certificates at the flip of a switch and without incurring any increased performance overhead.
Fundamental architectural changes ahead
Cloudflare’s plans are part of a major overhaul in the web public key infrastructure (WebPKI) required to make website encryption and authentication safe for the coming post-quantum age. A major challenge is using quantum-proof signatures that can be easily transmitted during web requests and recorded in transparency logs to ensure counterfeit certificates aren't assigned to websites. The makeover will take years to complete, because it requires the work of an untold number of engineers who design operating systems, browsers, certificate authorities, and Internet infrastructure.
AI service security is becoming an important concern for organisations as attackers find ways to access AI services through stolen credentials, compromised accounts and vulnerable applications. The Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) has warned that malicious cyber actors are obtaining unauthorised access to organisational AI services, potentially allowing them to generate harmful material, consume available credits and disrupt legitimate work.
The warning highlights how AI API keys, stolen authentication tokens, compromised user sessions and third-party access arrangements can expose AI services to misuse. Organisations must secure their own accounts, devices, applications and credentials rather than relying solely on the security measures provided by AI developers.
How AI Service Security Can Be Compromised
One route to unauthorised AI access involves exposed API keys. These credentials may be stored in source-code repositories, application configuration files or browser extensions, where attackers can obtain them. Vulnerable agent dashboards and other internet-facing applications can also expose credentials used to connect to model providers.
An attacker who obtains a valid key may be able to send requests directly to an AI service without using the organisation's legitimate application.
Phishing, information-stealing malware and compromised third-party services present additional risks. A stolen browser session can allow an attacker to act as an authenticated user without completing a new multi-factor authentication challenge. Suppliers and contractors can also introduce exposure when they hold organisational credentials or delegated access.
The impact depends on the compromised identity's permissions. Access to use a model does not necessarily grant permission to administer an account, create credentials or retrieve stored files. Organisations need to assess these privileges separately instead of assuming every credential has appropriately restricted access.
AI Agents Could Extend the Impact
The risks can extend beyond direct access to an AI model. Compromised accounts, sessions or AI agents may be able to interact with connected enterprise systems, invoke tools, access organisational data or communicate with other agents on a user's behalf.
Consequently, the practical impact of a compromised identity may reach connected systems and sensitive information, depending on the access available to that identity or agent.
Organisations should separate restricted-model access and sensitive data from routine AI use and experimental environments. Applications exposed externally should undergo security reviews, while suppliers should receive limited, auditable access.
Recent Reports Highlight AI Access Risks
Reports published in 2026 have described incidents involving exposed credentials, excessive model consumption and alleged unauthorised access to restricted AI systems.
On September 9, The Hacker News reported research from Okta that identified still-valid AI API keys and unexpired authentication tokens in data stolen from infected computers.
On September 1, The Register reported an incident in which an attacker spent three weeks consuming public-model credits worth approximately US$600,000. METR's disclosure described an authentication flaw in an internet-facing agent dashboard that enabled the theft of a model-provider API key.
Separately, Reuters, citing Bloomberg, reported on April 21 that unauthorised users had accessed Claude Mythos Preview, which was restricted to selected organisations. The reporting concerned alleged access through a vendor environment, not confirmation of a compromise of the model developer's core infrastructure.
How Organisations Can Strengthen AI Service Security
ASD recommends several measures to reduce the risk of unauthorised access.
Organisations should maintain an inventory of AI accounts, service identities and credentials, assign an accountable owner to each, and apply least privilege by granting only the access required for each role. Unnecessary permissions should be removed promptly.
Account protection should include phishing-resistant MFA, managed and patched devices, monitoring for suspicious session activity, and approved secrets-management services for API keys. Credentials should not be exposed in code, documents, logs or prompts.
Security teams should also monitor model access, credential creation, permission changes and unusual consumption patterns. Audit logs must be protected against tampering, while tested spending, rate and consumption limits should enforce restrictions rather than merely generate alerts.
If compromise is suspected, organisations should revoke affected API keys, sessions and tokens, isolate compromised devices, preserve logs and investigate unauthorised changes. Access should be restored only after the underlying cause has been addressed.
These measures can help organisations reduce exposure while maintaining controlled access to AI services.
President Trump’s meetings with tech leaders produced some voluntary safeguards and a commitment to rebrand artificial intelligence as “super intelligence,” the term that Mr. Trump prefers.
Employees and security researchers said that they had cautioned the company on safely testing its A.I. models and strengthening its corporate infrastructure, but that OpenAI did not listen.
The ChatGPT maker unveiled agents that act as assistants, just weeks after Meta released Muse, as it faces scrutiny over incidents involving its technology.
When phishing can increasingly pass familiar checks, avoiding or limiting the damage depends on how quickly your company can detect and contain the attack
An OpenAI booth at a technology conference in San Francisco this month. The company said its new GPT-6.1 Astra model exhibited high levels of deception and a willingness to go beyond the scope of its given task.
Authorities in the Netherlands have arrested a 24-year-old convicted cybercriminal on suspicion of aiding in data thefts and extortions by the prolific hacker group ShinyHunters. In the days immediately following the suspect’s arrest, remaining ShinyHunters members dramatically escalated their attacks, stealing highly sensitive data from the FBI and extorting the Russian ransomware group Cl0p.
According to three sources familiar with the matter, the Dutch man arrested by authorities this month is Pepijn van der Stap, a convicted cybercriminal from Almere and Lelystad in the Netherlands. Van der Stap was previously convicted in 2023 in connection with a string of data thefts and extortions that prosecutors said earned between €1.5 million and €2.7 million.
At his trial in late 2023, van der Stap admitted that he lived a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde existence, secretly using the hacker handle “Umbreon” to extort victims and post their data on English language hacking communities like the now-defunct RaidForums and Breached. By day, however, van der Stap was working as a software engineer at the Amsterdam-based cybersecurity startup Hadrian, while volunteering at the Dutch Institute for Vulnerability Disclosure (DIVD), a nonprofit security research group.
Pepijn van der Stap’s alter ego “Umbreon” selling a database on RaidForums, offering information on 2.3 million people from The Netherlands in September 2021. This user’s avatar is a depiction of the Pokemon character Umbreon. Image: KELA.
Van der Stap confessed to his data theft and extortion activity, and was sentenced to four years in prison (one of which was suspended). During his trial, van der Stap opted to remain in custody for a time rather than at home, saying he could not find better treatment on the outside for his ongoing psychological issues, which he claimed included PTSD related to childhood trauma. He was released from prison in December 2025.
In an interview with KrebsOnSecurity on September 9, 2026, Van der Stap cast himself as a reformed hacker who was trying to turn his life around and make a positive contribution to society. Van der Stap is currently employed as offensive security lead at the Dutch company Neo Security, which did not respond to requests for comment.
Van der Stap said he was still dealing with civil lawsuits and restitution related to his previous cybercrime victims, and that he was trying his best to make amends. But not long after that interview, the Dutch hacker abruptly stopped replying to messages. Efforts by others close to him also repeatedly failed to elicit a response for the past two weeks.
The LinkedIn profile for Pepijn van der Stap.
According to two sources with knowledge of the matter, Van der Stap was arrested by Dutch authorities on or around September 16, and has been held in custody for questioning since. One source said a colleague of theirs personally witnessed Dutch authorities carting items out of Van der Stap’s residence.
Authorities in the Netherlands have been asking the public for help in identifying the voice in a recorded telephone call from February 2026 in which a native Dutch-speaking ShinyHunters member social engineered their way into Odido, the nation’s largest mobile telecommunications provider. In that intrusion, ShinyHunters tricked an Odido employee into logging in at a spoofed website, and then used that access to steal data on more than 6.2 million Dutch people.
Responding to Dutch news media, ShinyHunters confirmed that the suspect in the audio clip is indeed a member of the hacker collective.
“Our team member has our full support – emotionally, mentally, and financially,” the hackers said. “Everything has been arranged, including a criminal defense lawyer. We do not look down on our staff and members; we take excellent care of them,” reads a statement ShinyHunters shared with NL Times. It remains unclear if the Dutch police have matched the Odido caller to a confirmed real-life identity. The Dutch police unit handling the Odido incident did not respond to requests for comment.
The group also lashed out at the authorities in the Netherlands. “The Dutch police will need all the luck in the world – and everyone’s prayers – if they want to catch him before we carry out another large-scale data theft in the Netherlands,” the ShinyHunters statement said. “Frankly, the Dutch police are a big joke; they are incapable of doing anything. Incompetent. Irrelevant. Unimportant. Useless.”
FBI, CL0P HACKS
Just days after sources say Van der Stap was detained by Dutch authorities, ShinyHunters claimed credit for an unusually brazen breach at the FBI’s job application site apply.fbijobs.gov. According to reporting from 404 Media, the data stolen from the FBI site includes Social Security numbers and personal information on more than 5,000 officials.
404 Media and Reuters reported the FBI data included each person’s job title or team, such as special agent, threat intake examiner, major cybercrimes unit, and those investigating cyber threats from foreign state-backed actors. Reuters examined documents shared by ShinyHunters and found they included sensitive psychiatric and medical files of FBI staff. The FBI issued a brief statement confirming the hack.
ShinyHunters said it gained access to the FBI site and other victims by exploiting a recently patched vulnerability (CVE-2026-35273) in PeopleSoft, a software-as-a-service platform from the software giant Oracle that is broadly used by companies to manage hiring and human resources, benefits and payroll. Oracle quickly issued a fix for the Peoplesoft vulnerability that ShinyHunters reportedly began exploiting as a zero-day in June, and at the time Mandiant released web application firewall rules intended for organizations who couldn’t apply the security update quickly enough.
But on Friday, BleepingComputer reported that ShinyHunters used a URL-encoding trick to bypass Mandiant’s suggested web application firewall rules designed to mitigate the threat from the PeopleSoft flaw. In a report released Sept. 25, security experts at Mandiant and the Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) confirmed that ShinyHunters had mass-exploited the PeopleSoft vulnerability to steal data from dozens of systems across a range of industries, including higher education, technology, healthcare, agriculture, transportation and government.
Van der Stap’s former hacker alias Umbreon was hidden in plain sight throughout the imagery ShinyHunters used to spread news about the FBI hack: The defacement image that ShinyHunters left behind on the hacked FBI jobs site included an ASCII art design featuring the Pokemon character Umbreon. The message at the top read, “This site has been seized by ShinyHunters. rooting your systems since ’19 ;)” The image appears identical to a defacement message ShinyHunters used in their 2020 hack of the English-language cybercrime community Hackforums.
The defacement message left by ShinyHunters on the FBI jobs site included an ASCII art rendition of the Pokemon character Umbreon. Image: Bleeping Computer.
Multiple sources close to the ShinyHunters investigation said the group’s recent risky attacks against the FBI and one of Russia’s most venerated ransomware groups amounted to a major pivot away from the more measured tenor of the hacking gang’s operations. Those sources said the sudden shift came about after ShinyHunters was taken over by a teenage cybercriminal from Amman, Jordan who goes by the nickname Rey and operates as part of a cybercrime group called ScatteredLapsussHunters (SLSH), which experts say is an amalgamation of three hacking groups — Scattered Spider, LAPSUS$ and ShinyHunters.
Those sources said Rey had an ongoing beef with the Dutch hacker over control of the ShinyHunters brand and data, and that the inclusion of the oversized Umbreon Pokemon image in the FBI jobs site defacement was likely an attempt by Rey to pin the hack on the Dutchman.
Rey was first publicly identified by the cybersecurity firm KELA in March 2025. In advance of our November 2025 profile of Rey, KrebsOnSecurity messaged Rey’s father and asked for permission to interview his teenage son. Rey’s dad merely forwarded the message to his son, who admitted to participating in ransomware attacks and said he was trying to extricate himself from the SLSH hacker group.
BLAMING UMBREON
Immediately after news of the FBI jobs site hack was picked up in the media, Rey’s main account on Twitter/X (Ryan Moran/@rmoskovy) was taunting the Cl0p ransomware group and the FBI, crudely depicting them as the twin towers in New York being struck by planes labeled “cl0p drama” and “fbi breach claim.” In the foreground of the city is the giant Pokemon figure of Umbreon.
A taunting meme uploaded to Twitter/X by Rey’s now-defunct account on Sept. 22. A giant float-sized version of the Pokemon character Umbreon can be seen in the bottom left.
On Sept. 24, KrebsOnSecurity again contacted Rey’s dad, asking to interview him and his son for a story on Rey’s apparent ascendency as the head of ShinyHunters. Just hours after that request, Rey deleted his longtime Twitter/X account. Meanwhile, Rey’s dad, who works for the Royal Jordanian Airlines, has failed to respond to a half-dozen emailed requests for comment about his son’s alleged activities.
Where does the bad blood between SLSH and ShinyHunters come from? According to a story in Wired this month, ShinyHunters and SLSH members briefly partnered earlier this year to help better monetize important stolen credentials collected by TeamPCP, an upstart group that was having great success compromising global code supply chains with malicious software but hadn’t been able to profit much from their stolen data (two alleged leaders of TeamPCP were arrested last month in Australia, and in an interview the TeamPCP leader claimed they made just $20,000).
The Wired story noted how Mandiant had infiltrated TeamPCP and was secretly responsible for having the crime group’s stolen credentials burned so quickly: Mandiant was secretly feeding those credentials to the major cloud providers like Amazon and Microsoft, who quickly invalidated the stolen keys. Meanwhile, the formerly cooperating hacker groups began to blame one another for causing the credentials to become worthless.
Wired’s Andy Greenberg reported that a few weeks after partnering with TeamPCP, “ShinyHunters went rogue, carrying out its own extortions with TeamPCP’s credentials but without giving the supply-chain hackers their cut.”
Mandiant researcher Austin Larsen told KrebsOnSecurity earlier this month that ShinyHunters has been enjoying a successful extortion spree so far this year, and is on track to pull in nearly $100 million in extortion payments from cybercrime victims in 2026.
Van der Stap claims he was never motivated by money and that his earlier hacker activity was driven by a desire to have the world’s most complete collection of stolen databases. Speaking with reporters from Bloomberg in 2024, Van der Stap said that singular focus in turn fueled his desire to carry out cyberattacks.
“The hacking was very easy for me, and it wasn’t a compulsion,” he told Bloomberg. “My habit was collecting. Collecting data, organizing data, downloading data, creating folders.”
DIVD, the nonprofit security research group where Van der Stap previously served as a volunteer, disclosed on LinkedIn last week that the organization was dealing with an internal cybersecurity incident that appears to have involved the malicious use of artificial intelligence. DIVD has released few details about that incident, but a spokesperson for the nonprofit told KrebsOnSecurity it does not appear related to ShinyHunters, nor are there any signs the matter involves the work of a previous volunteer.
Update: 3:44 p.m. ET: Corrected Van der Stap’s age, which is 24 (not 23).
Update, 4:54 p.m. ET: The Dutch police have confirmed the arrest of a 24-year-old in connection with the ShinyHunters investigation. In a statement on Twitter/X, the Dutch police said the man will appear on Tuesday, September 29 before the chambers of the Rotterdam District Court, and that it will provide more information tomorrow.
Sept. 29, 9:42 a.m. ET: The Dutch news outlet RTLreports that investigators suspect Van der Stap tried to orchestrate at least two murders. RTL reported the two murders were allegedly to be committed abroad, and that there are indications the suspect gave the order for this.
The FBI released a short video message on the ShinyHunters investigation from Brett Leatherman, assistant director of the FBI’s cyber division, who thanked Dutch law enforcement partners for their assistance and urged remaining ShinyHunters members to turn themselves in.
“Arrests have a way of changing who is willing to talk, and seized infrastructure has a way of showing us who’s left,” Leatherman said. “The longer you stay in this, the more we learn about you. You know how to find us, and we know how to find you. I suggest you reach out to us while the choice is still yours.”
Dario Amodei, who is also the company’s chief executive, will join the president at the White House for a private dinner. Mr. Trump has dismissed his cautions.
Dario Amodei has warned about the safety risks of artificial intelligence for years, but President Trump has called potential serious threats from the technology a “hoax.”
The gap between technology and policymaking has gotten wider than ever with artificial intelligence, leaving a global policy vacuum as A.I. models rapidly advance.
The company did not learn until recently that its technology had meddled with websites for the Education and Commerce Departments and the Securities and Exchange Commission.
A new report by a Bay Area start-up called Parse adds details to an incident that has shocked the A.I. world and led to calls for closer government regulation.
The Pentagon had “ample support for its conclusion” that the A.I. company’s products could pose a national security risk, according to a Washington appeals court.
This weekly roundup covers a brazen breach claim against the FBI's recruitment portal, a multinational advisory exposing North Korea's fake-recruiter malware operation, a sweeping EU proposal to reshape children's access to social media, a conversation on application security in the age of AI agents, a short-lived Discord ban in the Philippines, and a multimillion-dollar hot-wallet heist at a crypto casino.From federal law enforcement to individual job seekers, this week's developments show that no target is too prominent or too small. Cybercriminals are openly taunting the agencies that pursue them, state-backed actors are turning the hiring process into an attack vector, and governments are testing how far they can push platforms on child safety, sometimes reversing course within hours.
The Cyber Express Weekly Roundup
Shiny Hunters Claims FBI Breach, Says FBIjobs Agent Data Exposed
The FBI is investigating an apparent breach after the cybercriminal group Shiny Hunters claimed to have stolen personal data belonging to thousands of federal agents, with the probe centering on the bureau's FBIjobs recruitment website. Read more...
WaterPlum Hackers Steal $10.7M in Crypto From IT Workers
A North Korean cyber actor group known as WaterPlum, also referred to as "Contagious Interview," has infected at least 30,000 devices across more than 100 countries while stealing cryptocurrency from IT professionals worldwide. Read more...
EU KIDS Act Sets New Social Media Rules for Children
The European Commission adopted the proposal on September 18, setting out rules that would prevent children under 13 from accessing social media and establish 15 as the minimum age for minors to open accounts independently. Users aged 13 to under 15 could instead access parent-managed mini accounts with limits on social contacts and up to 60 minutes of screen time per day, while platforms would bear the responsibility of proving their services are safe for children. Read more…
Harness' Rahul Sood: AppSec in the Agentic Era Is About More Than Code. It's About Authority
In this conversation, The Cyber Express spoke with Rahul Sood, the General Manager for Application Security at Harness, who leads the company's AppSec portfolio and focuses on building security for the AI era, integrated directly into modern DevOps workflows. The conversation centers on a shift in how security teams must think about AI agents: the risk no longer lies only in the code being shipped, but in what authority autonomous agents are granted once they operate inside production systems. Read more…
Ban on Discord Lifted After Platform Commits to Work With DICT and CICC
The Philippine government has lifted its ban on Discord after the platform's representatives met with officials from the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) and the Cybercrime Investigation and Coordinating Center (CICC), with the restriction removed on Thursday, Sept. 24. Read more...
Duelbits Hit by $7 Million Hack as Crypto Stolen Across Four Blockchains
Crypto casino Duelbits has shut down its platform after attackers took roughly $7 million from several of its wallets, with the stolen assets moved across four blockchains and mostly converted into Ether. The company says funds held in user accounts have not been affected, but it has not explained how the attackers got in or when the site will return. Read more...
Weekly Cybersecurity Takeaway
This week's developments span the full spectrum of cyber risk, from a criminal group openly retaliating against the FBI over a public advisory, to a state-backed operation weaponizing job interviews against developers, to a crypto platform losing millions from the very hot wallets that keep it running.Meanwhile, the policy response is moving on multiple fronts: the EU is flipping the burden of proof onto platforms to demonstrate child safety by design, and the Philippines has shown how quickly a government can block, and then restore, a major platform in exchange for enforcement commitments. At the same time, security leaders are warning that AI agents are introducing an entirely new question of who, or what, holds authority inside enterprise systems.Taken together, the stories point to an increasingly confrontational threat landscape, where attackers are bolder, trust-based processes like hiring are being exploited at scale, and institutions are experimenting with more aggressive levers to hold platforms and adversaries accountable.
Artificial intelligence systems are becoming more capable and autonomous, raising new questions about how they can be monitored, controlled and secured. Speaking before the United Nations Security Council, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman warned that the rapid pace of AI development could create significant AI security risks, particularly if systems advance faster than institutions can respond.
Altman highlighted concerns ranging from human control and autonomous AI to emerging vulnerabilities, concentrated technological power and the need for international incident reporting. He also called for stronger cooperation between governments, critical infrastructure operators and technical experts to address emerging AI threats.
Here are six key AI security risks highlighted in his remarks.
1. Losing Human Control Over Advanced AI
One of Altman’s central concerns was the possibility that humans could lose control over increasingly capable AI systems.
He warned that AI could move so quickly that people may no longer be able to understand what systems are doing or intervene when necessary. He argued that developers should not train systems unless they can make a strong case that those systems can remain under human control.
The concern becomes more significant as AI systems become capable of handling increasingly complex tasks and making decisions with less direct human involvement.
2. AI Systems Becoming More Autonomous
The growing autonomy of AI systems presents another challenge for AI cybersecurity.
Altman pointed to the possibility of AI systems improving themselves and future versions of themselves, describing this as recursive self-improvement. As the process of developing AI becomes more automated, the pace of progress could accelerate.
For security teams and policymakers, increasingly autonomous systems could make monitoring, testing and intervention more difficult.
3. Emerging Vulnerabilities and New Threats
More capable AI systems could also introduce vulnerabilities and threats that organizations and governments may not yet fully understand.
Altman called for secure channels between governments, critical infrastructure operators and technical experts to share information about emerging vulnerabilities and threats.
The remarks place information sharing at the center of preparing for AI vulnerabilities, particularly as AI becomes increasingly integrated into important systems and infrastructure.
4. AI Power Concentrating in Too Few Hands
Altman also warned about the concentration of advanced AI capabilities among a small number of companies, individuals or countries.
He argued that no single company or country should be able to use the most powerful AI systems to impose its worldview on others.
From a security perspective, concentrated control over highly capable AI could create systemic risks if a limited number of actors have disproportionate access to powerful technology.
5. The Need for Global AI Incident Reporting and Threat Sharing
Altman called for accurate and speedy AI incident reporting, including classification and reporting protocols that would allow countries to learn from failures before they become larger problems.
He also called for common standards covering AI capabilities, risk assessments, safeguards and human oversight.
Such standards, he said, could help countries compare evidence and establish a shared understanding of what effective safeguards and oversight should look like.
6. AI Development Could Outpace Existing Safety Measures
The speed of AI development itself could become a security challenge.
Altman warned that rapid progress could move faster than institutions are prepared to handle. He argued that competition between companies should not become a reason to accept excessive technological risk.
He also stressed the importance of alignment, monitoring and safety guarantees as AI systems become more capable.
For AI safety, this means ensuring that security measures and oversight develop alongside increasingly powerful systems rather than being added only after problems emerge.
AI Security Moves Into a Global Conversation
Altman’s remarks put AI security risks alongside broader questions about international cooperation, human oversight and technological governance.
His proposed approach includes global standards for measuring AI capabilities and risks, incident reporting mechanisms, and secure communication between governments, critical infrastructure operators and technical experts.
As AI systems become more autonomous and capable, the challenge will not only be what these systems can do, but whether organizations and governments can monitor, understand and respond to the risks they create.
OpenAI’s offices in San Francisco. At least four times this year, the company’s artificial intelligence hacked or tried to break into government and university websites without being instructed to do so.
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