All news in category “Incidents and Data Breaches”

🔐 Pennsylvania’s Office of Attorney General (OAG) confirmed a ransomware attack in August that encrypted files and disrupted civil and criminal court proceedings, forcing several courts to grant time extensions. The OAG said no ransom has been paid and an active multi-agency investigation is underway; it has not yet indicated whether data was exfiltrated. Most staff — about 1,200 across 17 offices — have regained email, and the main phone line and website are restored while full system recovery continues.

🔒 Amazon’s threat intelligence team disrupted a watering hole attack attributed to the Russian state‑linked group APT29 that attempted to abuse Microsoft device code authentication flows. Compromised websites injected JavaScript that redirected about 10% of visitors to attacker-controlled domains mimicking Cloudflare verification pages. Amazon reported no AWS service compromise; attackers used evasion techniques and quickly rotated infrastructure.

🔒 Google and security vendors say the Salesloft Drift supply-chain campaign is broader than initially reported. Threat actors tracked as UNC6395 harvested OAuth tokens from the Salesloft Drift integration with Salesforce and also accessed a very small number of Google Workspace accounts. Organizations should treat any tokens connected to Drift as potentially compromised, revoke and rotate credentials, review third-party integrations, and investigate connected systems for signs of unauthorized access.

🚨Seqrite Labs has uncovered a spear-phishing campaign named Operation HanKook Phantom attributed to North Korea–linked ScarCruft (APT37). The attacks use ZIP attachments containing malicious Windows LNK shortcuts that masquerade as PDFs and drop a RokRAT backdoor while displaying decoy documents. RokRAT can collect system information, execute commands, enumerate files, capture screenshots, and download further payloads, exfiltrating data via cloud services such as Dropbox, Google Cloud, pCloud, and Yandex Cloud. A second observed variant leverages fileless PowerShell and obfuscated batch scripts to deploy additional droppers and conceal network traffic as browser file uploads.

🔒 Spanish police arrested a 21-year-old suspect in Seville accused of accessing the Andalusian Education Ministry's systems to alter high school and university entrance exam grades for himself and several classmates. Authorities say at least 13 university professors' work accounts across Almería, Cádiz, Córdoba, Seville and Jaén were compromised and emails accessed. Seized computer equipment and a notebook listing manipulated grades were recovered during the search, and regional security for the Séneca platform has been tightened.

⚠️Cybercriminals are abusing Meta advertising to distribute a malicious Android app impersonating TradingView Premium. Bitdefender says the campaign, active since at least July 22, redirects Android users to a counterfeit site that serves a trojanized tw-update.apk and requests accessibility rights while simulating an OS update to capture PINs. The installed Brokewell variant escalates privileges to exfiltrate credentials and 2FA codes, hijack SMS, record screens and audio, and accept remote commands for theft and device control.

🔍 Threat actors used Google ads to promote a fraudulent AppSuite PDF Editor that silently delivered the TamperedChef infostealer. Multiple domains hosted signed installers with revoked certificates; the malicious payload was activated after a delay and is launched with the "-fullupdate" argument, checking for security agents and extracting browser secrets via DPAPI. Operators also pushed related apps such as OneStart, ManualFinder and Epibrowser, and in some cases converted hosts into residential proxies; Truesec and Expel published IoCs for detection.

🔍 In a recent Sophos report, unknown actors abused the open-source forensic tool Velociraptor to download and execute Visual Studio Code, enabling an encrypted tunnel to an attacker-controlled command-and-control server. The intruders used the Windows msiexec utility to fetch MSI installers hosted on Cloudflare Workers, staged additional tooling including a tunneling proxy and Radmin, and invoked an encoded PowerShell command to enable VS Code's tunnel option. Sophos warns that misuse of incident response tools can precede ransomware and recommends deploying EDR, monitoring for unauthorized Velociraptor activity, and hardening backup and monitoring processes.

🔒 Salt Typhoon, a persistent Chinese-aligned threat actor, has expanded operations into the Netherlands by compromising routers at smaller ISPs and hosting providers. Intelligence agencies report the group exploits known flaws in Ivanti, Palo Alto Networks, and Cisco devices to obtain long-term access and pivot through trusted provider links. Authorities urge organizations to audit configurations, disable management access, enforce public-key administrative authentication, remove default credentials, and keep vendor-recommended OS versions up to date to reduce exposure.

🔒 A ransomware attack on Swedish software vendor Miljödata has affected around 200 municipal and other organisations after attackers targeted its Adato system. Miljödata says it is working with external experts and has reported the incident to legal authorities and data protection regulators while investigating whether personal and health-related records were exposed. Police say extortionists demanded 1.5 bitcoins (about SEK 1.5M / US$165,000) and national agencies are coordinating the response.

🛡️ Seqrite attributes a large-scale spear-phishing operation, dubbed Operation HanKook Phantom, to APT37, a North Korea–linked group targeting South Korean government and intelligence personnel. Attackers distributed malicious LNK shortcuts disguised as a legitimate National Intelligence Research Society newsletter and a statement from Kim Yo-jong, which triggered downloads and execution of payloads including RokRAT. The campaign employed in-memory execution, fileless PowerShell, XOR decryption, LOLBins and covert exfiltration techniques to blend with normal traffic and evade detection.

🛡️ Amazon says its security team detected and disrupted an opportunistic watering-hole campaign attributed to APT29 that redirected visitors from compromised sites to attacker-controlled domains mimicking Cloudflare verification pages. The threat used the Microsoft device code authentication flow to trick users into authorizing attacker-controlled devices. Amazon observed multiple evasion techniques and continued tracking as the actor migrated infrastructure.

📡 Trend Micro reports that threat actors leveraged an abandoned Sogou Zhuyin update server to distribute multiple malware families, including C6DOOR, GTELAM, DESFY, and TOSHIS. The campaign, tracked as TAOTH and identified in June 2025, used hijacked automatic updates, spear-phishing, and fake cloud/login pages to target dissidents, journalists, researchers, and business figures across East Asia. The adversary registered the lapsed domain sogouzhuyin[.]com in October 2024 and exploited third-party cloud services like Google Drive to conceal callbacks and exfiltrate data.

🛡️ Malicious updates to the Nx npm package were published on 26 August, briefly delivering AI-assisted data‑stealing malware to developer systems. The infected releases injected crafted prompts into local AI CLIs (Anthropic’s Claude, Google Gemini, Amazon Q) to locate GitHub/npm tokens, SSH keys, .env secrets and cryptocurrency wallets, then encoded and uploaded the harvest by creating public repositories under victims' accounts. StepSecurity says eight compromised versions were live for five hours and 20 minutes and that attackers subsequently weaponized stolen GitHub CLI OAuth tokens to expose and fork private organization repositories. Recommended mitigation includes revoking tokens and SSH/GPG keys, making exposed repos private, disconnecting affected users and following a full remediation plan.

🔒 Amazon's threat intelligence team identified and disrupted a watering hole campaign conducted by APT29, a group linked to Russia’s SVR. The actor compromised legitimate websites and injected obfuscated JavaScript to redirect a subset of visitors to attacker-controlled pages that mimicked Cloudflare verification. The campaign aimed to abuse Microsoft's device code authentication flow to trick users into authorizing attacker-controlled devices; Amazon isolated affected EC2 instances and coordinated with partners to disrupt infrastructure and share intelligence.

🚨 U.S. and Dutch authorities dismantled VerifTools, an illicit marketplace that produced and sold counterfeit driver's licenses, passports, and other identity documents used to bypass verification systems and facilitate fraud. Two domains and a blog were seized and redirected to an FBI splash page after servers in Amsterdam were confiscated. The FBI linked roughly $6.4 million in illicit proceeds to the service, which offered forged documents for as little as $9. Operators have since signaled a relaunch on a new domain.

🔐 TransUnion has disclosed unauthorized access to a third-party application serving its US consumer support operations, affecting nearly 4.5 million Americans. The company says the incident exposed specific personal data elements but did not include credit reports or core credit information. Detected July 30 after an intrusion on July 28, TransUnion is offering free credit monitoring and proactive fraud assistance while it enhances security controls.

🔐 Google and Mandiant warn Salesloft Drift customers that OAuth tokens tied to the Drift platform should be treated as potentially compromised. Stolen tokens for the Drift Email integration were used to access email from a small number of Google Workspace accounts on August 9, 2025; Google stressed this is not a compromise of Workspace or Alphabet. Google revoked affected tokens, disabled the Workspace–Drift integration, and is urging customers to review, revoke, and rotate credentials across all Drift-connected integrations while investigations continue.

🛡️ Cybersecurity researchers report a malvertising campaign that lures users to counterfeit sites offering a trojanized PDF installer for AppSuite PDF Editor, which drops an information stealer named TamperedChef. The installer presents a license prompt while covertly downloading the editor, setting persistence via Windows Registry autorun entries and scheduled tasks that pass --cm arguments. Analysts at Truesec and G DATA found the backdoor harvests credentials and cookies and can download additional payloads.

🔒 Google warns that the Salesloft Drift compromise is larger than first reported and included theft of OAuth tokens beyond the Salesforce integration. Threat actors used stolen tokens tied to the Drift Email integration to access a very small number of Google Workspace email accounts on August 9. Google says the tokens have been revoked, the Drift–Workspace integration is disabled, and affected customers were notified. Organizations using Drift should revoke and rotate all connected authentication tokens and review integrations for exposed secrets.