All news in category “Incidents and Data Breaches”

⚠️ Securonix researchers have identified a multi-stage malware campaign, tracked as PHALT#BLYX, that targets hospitality organizations during the holiday season. The attack begins with phishing emails impersonating Booking.com, using urgent, high‑value reservation charges to lure victims to a convincing clone site. Victims are coerced through fake CAPTCHA and simulated BSOD prompts to paste a PowerShell command that downloads a project file executed by MSBuild.exe, culminating in a heavily obfuscated DCRat remote access Trojan. Securonix advises staff training, strict handling of browser‑prompted commands and enhanced monitoring of trusted binaries and process behaviour.

🔍 President Donald Trump suggested that U.S. cyber operations or other technical measures were used to cut power in Caracas during strikes that preceded the capture of Nicolás Maduro. If confirmed, this would be a rare, overt instance of U.S. offensive cyber action. Such operations are typically classified, and public details, technical indicators, and independent verification remain scarce. The claim raises significant legal and diplomatic concerns.

🔒 Sedgwick has confirmed a security incident affecting its federal contractor subsidiary, Sedgwick Government Solutions. The company says the parent firm's network was not affected and that the incident involved an isolated file transfer system. Sedgwick notified law enforcement, engaged external cybersecurity experts, and reported no evidence of access to claims management servers. The TridentLocker ransomware group claims to have exfiltrated 3.39 GB of documents and posted samples on a Tor leak site.

⚠️ AI-powered VS Code forks such as Cursor, Windsurf, Google Antigravity and Trae were found recommending extensions that do not exist in the Open VSX registry, creating unclaimed namespaces attackers could register. Koi researcher Oren Yomtov showed that a single click on a suggested install (for example, a placeholder ms-ossdata.vscode-postgresql) can deploy a rogue package, and one placeholder received over 500 installs. Cursor and Google have released fixes, and the Eclipse Foundation removed non-official contributors and tightened registry safeguards. Developers should verify publishers before accepting IDE extension recommendations.

🚗 Jaguar Land Rover is still reeling from a late‑August cyber-attack that disrupted production from September through mid-November, Tata Motors reported. Retail sales in Q3 2025 fell 25.1% year‑on‑year to 79,600 vehicles, while wholesale shipments plunged 43% to 59,200 units. Tata said the incident "significantly disrupted operations," forcing factory stoppages and ongoing distribution delays, compounded by US tariffs and model phase-outs.

🔒 A former Coinbase customer service agent was arrested in Hyderabad, India, after allegedly accepting bribes from criminal gangs to access and sell sensitive customer records, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong announced. The incident, disclosed in May 2025, involved compromised support staff leaking data on nearly 70,000 customers, including IDs and financial details. Coinbase refused a US $20 million ransom and instead committed that sum to a reward fund while cooperating with law enforcement.

🔍 Cloudflare analyzed a BGP route leak observed on January 2 involving AS8048 (CANTV) redistributing prefixes originated by AS21980 (Dayco Telecom) via upstreams including AS6762 (Sparkle) and AS52320 (V.tal/GlobeNet). The pattern — with eleven similar events since December, heavy AS prepending, and an upstream provider relationship — suggests misconfigured export/import policies rather than deliberate interception. ROV would not have prevented this path-based leak; adoption of ASPA, RFC9234/OTC, and Peerlock-style checks is recommended to mitigate future leaks.

🔐 A threat actor known as Zestix is offering corporate data reportedly stolen from dozens of companies after breaching ShareFile, Nextcloud, and OwnCloud instances. Hudson Rock links initial access to credentials harvested by infostealers such as RedLine, Lumma, and Vidar, often delivered via malvertising or ClickFix campaigns. Many affected accounts lacked multi-factor authentication, enabling unauthorized access and large-scale data exfiltration.

🛑 This campaign impersonates Booking.com to redirect hospitality staff to a cloned site that triggers a full-screen fake Windows BSOD. The page instructs victims to paste and run a command that launches PowerShell, compiles a malicious .NET project via MSBuild.exe, and executes a loader. The payload disables Defender exclusions, triggers UAC prompts for elevation, and deploys DCRAT (staxs.exe) which provides remote access and can drop additional tools such as cryptocurrency miners.

🔒 Brightspeed is investigating claims that the extortion group Crimson Collective stole sensitive information belonging to more than one million customers. The U.S. broadband provider said it is rigorous in securing networks and is looking into a reported cybersecurity event, promising to keep customers, employees, and authorities informed. Crimson Collective posted on Telegram that the haul includes PII, account and payment details, and appointment/order records, and threatened to publish a sample to force a response.

📲 Russian-aligned threat actor UAC-0184 used the Viber messaging app to deliver malicious ZIP archives to Ukrainian military and government recipients, according to 360 Threat Intelligence Center. The archives contained LNK decoys that silently executed Hijack Loader, which retrieves a second ZIP (smoothieks.zip) via PowerShell and reconstructs the loader in memory. The loader uses DLL side-loading, module stomping, CRC32 checks for installed security products, and scheduled tasks for persistence before injecting Remcos RAT into chime.exe to enable remote control and data theft.

⚠️ Taiwan's National Security Agency reported that Chinese cyberattacks targeting the island's critical infrastructure rose 6% in 2025, averaging 2.6 million attacks per day. The assaults mainly focused on the energy sector, hospitals, banks and emergency services, and extended to the semiconductor industry, including TSMC. Attackers employed large-scale denial-of-service and man-in-the-middle techniques to disrupt operations and exfiltrate data. Many incidents reportedly coincided with Chinese military exercises and high-profile political events, while Beijing denies involvement.

🔓 Ilya Lichtenstein, convicted in the 2016 Bitfinex exchange breach, has been released from prison early and transferred to home confinement under the First Step Act. Sentenced to five years in November 2024 for money laundering tied to the attack, he served about 14 months before the transfer. Authorities previously recovered roughly 94,000 of the 119,754 stolen bitcoin, making the case one of the largest seizures in US history.

🛡️ Synthient reports the Kimwolf Android botnet has compromised more than two million devices by tunneling through residential proxy networks and embedded SDKs. The campaign, active since August 2025 and linked to AISURU by QiAnXin XLab, exploits exposed Android Debug Bridge (ADB) services—67% of infected devices had unauthenticated ADB enabled. Operators monetize infections via app installs, selling residential proxy bandwidth and DDoS services; the main payload listens on port 40860 and connects to 85.234.91[.]247:1337 for commands.

🔒 The New Zealand government has launched a review after Manage My Health, a national online patient portal, detected a cyber-attack on 30 December 2025 that may have exposed personal data for roughly 100,000–120,000 users. The vendor says the incident has been contained and the application is secure, but an alleged attacker using the alias 'Kazu' claims to have stolen over 428,000 files and demanded a $60,000 ransom. Health New Zealand, the New Zealand Police and independent forensic teams are involved while the Ministry examines data protections and third-party access across the health system.

🔒 Ledger says some customers had personal data exposed after a breach at third‑party payment processor Global‑e. The company confirmed its own network, hardware, and software were not compromised and that the leaked fields were limited to shopper names and contact information — no payment data, seed phrases, or blockchain secrets were taken. Ledger warned customers to watch for phishing attempts, never disclose their 24‑word recovery phrase, and follow any direct notifications from Global‑e for details.

🔒 NordVPN says files circulating on a hacking forum were dummy data taken from a temporary third-party automated testing environment, not from its production systems. The company says the environment was used during a trial of a potential vendor months earlier, contained only test accounts and artifacts, and was never connected to NordVPN infrastructure. NordVPN has contacted the vendor and characterized the report as a false alarm.

🔒 Resecurity says it intentionally diverted attackers into a honeypot after individuals claiming ties to the Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters (SLH) alliance posted screenshots alleging a breach. The company reports it detected reconnaissance of exposed services and steered the activity to an emulated environment populated with synthetic consumer and payment records. According to Resecurity, the adversaries interacted with the decoy, generating telemetry that revealed tooling and methods, while independent researchers have found no evidence that production systems or client data were compromised.

🔒 The European Space Agency (ESA) has acknowledged a December server compromise affecting a small number of external, non-corporate servers that support unclassified collaborative engineering activities. The agency says it has informed relevant stakeholders, implemented measures to secure potentially affected devices and launched a forensic analysis. Reports on underground forums claim over 200GB of data was stolen, including source code, CI/CD pipelines and credentials, raising supply chain and operational concerns.

🔓 Ilya Lichtenstein, convicted in connection with the 2016 Bitfinex breach, announced on X that he has been released early and credited the First Step Act for his early disposition. Federal records list his formal release date as February 9, 2026, while a Trump administration official said he is currently on home confinement. Lichtenstein said he intends to work in cybersecurity and thanked supporters, while prosecutors continue efforts to return seized assets to Bitfinex.