All news in category “Incidents and Data Breaches”

🔓AkzoNobel confirmed a security incident at a U.S. site after the Anubis ransomware group posted a partial data leak. The company says the intrusion was contained locally and the impact is limited, and it is notifying and supporting affected parties. Anubis claims about 170GB and nearly 170,000 files were stolen, including confidential agreements and passport scans.

⚠️ Users worldwide are reporting that Facebook is inaccessible, with many seeing a notice that their "account is temporarily unavailable" due to a site issue. Outages tracked by DownDetector began around 4:15 PM ET and appear global. Meta's status page, however, only lists High Disruptions for Facebook Ads Manager, Instagram Boost, and the WhatsApp Business API. Facebook has been contacted for comment; the incident remains under investigation.

🔒 In February 2026 Microsoft Defender Experts uncovered phishing campaigns that delivered digitally signed malware impersonating common workplace applications. The threat actor used an EV certificate issued to TrustConnect Software PTY LTD to sign trojanized installers (examples include msteams.exe, adobereader.exe, and invite.exe) that deployed RMM tools such as ScreenConnect, Tactical RMM, and MeshAgent. Executables reinforced legitimacy by copying to Program Files, registering services, creating Run keys, and executing encoded PowerShell to stage additional payloads and connect to attacker-controlled domains, enabling persistent remote access and lateral movement.

🔐 Microsoft warns that attackers are abusing legitimate OAuth error redirection to bypass email and browser phishing protections and deliver malware. Campaigns target government and public-sector organizations with lures such as e-signature requests, meeting invites, and financial notices that contain OAuth redirect URLs. Attackers register malicious OAuth apps and invoke silent-auth parameters or invalid scopes to trigger error redirects to attacker-controlled pages. Those pages can host credential-phishing frameworks or automatically deliver ZIP packages that launch PowerShell loaders and DLL side‑loading routines, enabling final payload execution.

🔒 Huntress researchers uncovered a campaign where attackers posed as IT support, using email spam and follow-up phone calls to coerce victims into granting remote access and visiting a counterfeit Microsoft page hosted on AWS. The fake site harvested credentials and prompted a download that executed a legitimate binary which sideloaded a malicious DLL to launch the Havoc Demon. The intrusions showed rapid lateral movement, scheduled-task persistence, and use of legitimate RMM tools as backup persistence.

🚨 Researchers at CloudSEK have uncovered a mobile espionage campaign, dubbed RedAlert, that distributes a trojanized version of Israel's official Red Alert rocket warning app via SMS phishing and sideloaded fake updates. The malicious build imitates the genuine interface and continues to deliver real alerts while running a covert surveillance payload that requests high-risk permissions such as SMS access, contacts and precise GPS. It uses advanced anti-detection techniques — including spoofing the original signing certificate, falsifying Play Store installation metadata and manipulating Android's package manager via reflection and proxy hooks — to hide secondary payloads and avoid integrity checks. Incident response guidance recommends isolating affected devices, revoking privileges, performing factory resets when necessary, and blocking known domains while restricting sideloading through mobile device management.

🔑 South Korea's National Tax Service (NTS) accidentally included a photograph in a press release that exposed a handwritten cryptocurrency mnemonic seed phrase next to a seized Ledger device. Within hours the wallet holding roughly 4 million PRTG tokens (about US $4.8M) was emptied. The NTS removed the release and issued an apology; the incident underscores that publishing a wallet's seed phrase instantly nullifies any cold-storage security.

🔒 LexisNexis has confirmed a breach after the threat actor FulcrumSec posted 2.04 GB of files allegedly exfiltrated from its AWS environment. The group says they exploited a React2Shell vulnerability in an unpatched React frontend container on February 24 to reach Redshift tables, VPC databases and plaintext Secrets Manager entries. LexisNexis characterizes the material as mostly legacy data from before 2020 and says it contained no Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, financial data, active passwords, customer search queries, client/matter data, or contracts.

🔍 Resecurity analysed a leaked Ariomex database covering 2022–2025 and concluded the exchange's records suggest potential sanctions evasion and large capital transfers linked to actors inside Iran. The review covered 11,826 verified users, identified 27 potential sanctions matches and found about 7,710 Iran-linked accounts, with roughly 70% of volume in Tether and Tron. Resecurity flagged mechanisms such as shell accounts, stablecoin routing and intermediary wallets and said it will assist regulators.

🚨 Security researchers say an open-source, AI-native offensive platform called CyberStrikeAI was used to automate mass scanning and exploitation of Fortinet FortiGate appliances, contributing to compromises of more than 600 devices across 55 countries. Team Cymru traced activity to a Russian-speaking actor after analyzing an IP address and observed 21 unique IPs running the tool between January 20 and February 26, 2026. The tool's GitHub maintainer, known as Ed1s0nZ, has published a range of exploitation and AI-jailbreak utilities and shows interactions with organizations linked to Chinese state cyber capabilities.

🔍 Google Threat Intelligence Group describes Coruna, a sophisticated iOS exploit kit containing five full exploit chains and 23 exploits that target iOS 13.0 through 17.2.1. The kit combines WebKit RCEs, PAC/PPL bypasses, and a root-capable loader called PlasmaLoader that exfiltrates financial data and cryptocurrency wallet information. GTIG observed deployments by both suspected state-backed and financially motivated actors and added affected domains to Safe Browsing. Users are urged to update iOS or enable Lockdown Mode if updates are not possible.

🐉 Silver Dragon is a China-nexus cyber espionage group focusing on government ministries and public sector organizations across Southeast Asia, with additional victims identified in Europe. The group gains access through exploitation of public-facing servers and targeted phishing campaigns. It maintains long-term persistence by hijacking legitimate Windows services and deploying a custom backdoor, GearDoor, which uses Google Drive for covert C2, blending malicious activity with trusted services to evade detection.

🚨 Amazon has confirmed that drone strikes damaged three AWS data centers in the United Arab Emirates and one in Bahrain, causing an ongoing outage that is affecting dozens of cloud services. The attacks caused structural and power damage and triggered fire suppression that resulted in additional water damage. Amazon is restoring physical infrastructure while pursuing software-based recovery paths and advising customers to back up and migrate workloads to unaffected regions.

🔒 Cybersecurity researchers disclosed Starkiller, a commercial phishing suite marketed by a group calling itself Jinkusu that proxies legitimate login pages to bypass multi-factor authentication. The platform launches a headless Chrome instance inside a Docker container and acts as an AitM reverse proxy, relaying keystrokes, form submissions and session tokens. Abnormal warns the toolkit centralizes deployment, URL masking and session monitoring to give low-skill criminals effective MFA-bypass capabilities at scale.

🔒 Cloud Imperium Games (CIG), developer of Star Citizen and Squadron 42, disclosed a breach discovered on 21 January 2026 in which attackers accessed certain backup systems. The company says unauthorized access affected limited user personal data — primarily account metadata and contact details such as username, name and date of birth. CIG states no credentials or payment information were stored in the affected systems, access was read-only, and it has found no evidence of data modification or public leakage while it continues to monitor and investigate the incident.

🔎 Zscaler ThreatLabz detected a January 2026 campaign by an Iran-nexus actor tracked as Dust Specter that impersonated Iraq’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and used compromised government infrastructure to host and distribute payloads. The operation deployed previously undocumented tooling — SplitDrop, TwinTask, TwinTalk — and a consolidated .NET RAT called GhostForm. Researchers observed emoji and unicode artifacts in decompiled code that strongly suggest generative AI assisted in development.

🔒 The University of Hawaii Cancer Center confirmed a ransomware breach that exposed data for nearly 1.2 million individuals after attackers accessed systems supporting its Epidemiology Division. Compromised files include names, Social Security numbers, driver's license numbers, and historical research health records collected in the 1990s and 2000s. UH says clinical operations, patient care, and student records were not affected and that it paid the actors for a decryption tool and to secure destruction of the stolen information.

🔒 Microsoft warned on Mar 3, 2026 of phishing campaigns that leverage OAuth redirect URLs to bypass email and browser defenses and deliver malware to government and public-sector targets without directly stealing tokens. Attackers register malicious applications and manipulate identity providers like Entra ID and Google Workspace to craft redirect links sent in emails or embedded in PDFs. The delivery chain uses ZIP -> LNK-triggered PowerShell -> MSI -> DLL sideloading to execute in-memory payloads and contact external C2; some campaigns also used AitM kits such as EvilProxy. Microsoft removed identified malicious apps and recommends limiting consent, auditing app permissions, and removing unused or overprivileged applications.

🛡️Arctic Wolf reports SloppyLemming operated from January 2025 to January 2026, targeting government and critical infrastructure organizations in Pakistan and Bangladesh. The actor used spear‑phishing PDFs and macro‑enabled Excel files to deliver two distinct toolchains: a DLL side‑loading path that deploys an in‑memory backdoor and a Rust‑based keylogger. The side‑loading route leverages ClickOnce manifests to drop a legitimate .NET binary (NGenTask.exe) and a malicious loader (mscorsvc.dll) that decrypts and runs the implant BurrowShell. The keylogger includes port scanning and network enumeration capabilities and the campaign abused Cloudflare Workers domains and Havoc/Cobalt Strike tradecraft.

⚠️ Beginning Feb. 28, 2026, Unit 42 observed a rapid escalation in cyber activity tied to Iran following joint U.S.–Israeli strikes, coinciding with an internal internet outage that reduced connectivity in Iran to 1–4%. That loss likely constrains coordinated state-aligned campaigns from inside Iran while enabling decentralized and geographically dispersed actors to increase disruptive operations. Unit 42 identified a phishing campaign using a malicious replica of the Israeli Home Front Command RedAlert APK and tracked about 60 active hacktivist groups claiming DDoS, wiper, and hack-and-leak operations. Organizations should prioritize multi-layered defenses, offline backups, strict out-of-band verification, patching, monitoring, and incident response preparedness; Palo Alto Networks and Unit 42 offer protections and services to assist.