Checkout.com said the notorious ShinyHunters threat group breached a badly decommissioned legacy cloud storage system last used by the company in 2020 and stole some merchant data. The hackers demanded a ransom, but the company instead will give the amount demanded to cybersecurity research groups.

The post ShinyHunters Compromises Legacy Cloud Storage System of Checkout.com appeared first on Security Boulevard.

ReliaQuest’s Threat Spotlight: How Automation, Customization, and Tooling Signal Next Ransomware exposes how elite Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) groups thrive. Automation, advanced tools, and attack customization attract top affiliates and drive faster, more effective ransomware operations.

The post Three Factors Determine Whether a Ransomware Group is Successful  appeared first on Security Boulevard.

Anthropic reports on a Claude user:

We recently disrupted a sophisticated cybercriminal that used Claude Code to commit large-scale theft and extortion of personal data. The actor targeted at least 17 distinct organizations, including in healthcare, the emergency services, and government and religious institutions. Rather than encrypt the stolen information with traditional ransomware, the actor threatened to expose the data publicly in order to attempt to extort victims into paying ransoms that sometimes exceeded $500,000.

The actor used AI to what we believe is an unprecedented degree. Claude Code was used to automate reconnaissance, harvesting victims’ credentials, and penetrating networks. Claude was allowed to make both tactical and strategic decisions, such as deciding which data to exfiltrate, and how to craft psychologically targeted extortion demands. Claude analyzed the exfiltrated financial data to determine appropriate ransom amounts, and generated visually alarming ransom notes that were displayed on victim machines.

This is scary. It’s a significant improvement over what was possible even a few years ago.

Read the whole Anthropic essay. They discovered North Koreans using Claude to commit remote-worker fraud, and a cybercriminal using Claude “to develop, market, and distribute several variants of ransomware, each with advanced evasion capabilities, encryption, and anti-recovery mechanisms.”