All news with #news tag

🚨 Authorities dismantled the criminal proxy service SocksEscort, which enslaved thousands of residential routers worldwide to operate a large-scale proxy botnet and sold anonymous access for fraud and other crimes. U.S. and European partners executed a court-authorized disruption, seizing domains and servers and freezing roughly $3.5 million in cryptocurrency. The service relied on AVrecon malware that exploited SOHO router vulnerabilities to persistently infect devices and route traffic for criminal customers.

🔒 Apple announced that iPhone and iPad are the first and only consumer devices certified to meet the information assurance requirements of NATO nations, allowing use with classified information up to the NATO Restricted level. The company says this capability works out of the box with no special software or settings required. Coverage includes independent reporting and a Boing Boing post.

🔒The author opens this week’s Threat Source newsletter with personal reflections on being raised by a single mother, connecting those experiences to the gender imbalance in STEM and cybersecurity. He cites sobering statistics — for example, women comprise 28.2% of the global STEM workforce and occupy only 16% of CISO roles — and highlights mentorship programs like WiCyS and CTFs. Talos also summarizes a March 10 update on cyber activity tied to the Middle East conflict and provides practical defensive advice for destructive malware, DDoS, and website defacement.

🏆 At Fortinet Accelerate 2026, Fortinet honored the 2025 Partner of the Year Award winners for outstanding contributions to secure networking, cloud modernization, OT protection, and managed services across the Americas, APAC, and EMEA. Winners — from global system integrators like HCLTech and NTT DATA to distributors such as TD SYNNEX and regional leaders — demonstrated excellence in customer success, innovation, and technical execution. The awards highlight partner adoption of the Fortinet Security Fabric to reduce complexity and converge networking and security for hybrid and distributed environments. Recognition also emphasized growth in Unified SASE, SecOps, MSSP offerings, and OT security implementations.

🎤 Infosecurity Europe 2026 has revealed a major keynote programme for its 2–4 June event at ExCeL London, featuring industry founders, former intelligence leaders and elite-sport figures. Shlomo Kramer and Cynthia Kaiser headline Tuesday with sessions on technology trends and the ransomware economy, respectively, while Jason Fox will open Thursday with a resilience and decision-making keynote. Technical talks will address AI-driven cloud threats and preparations for post-quantum cryptography.

📝 Kri Dontje is a technical writer at Cisco Talos who translates complex cybersecurity research into clear, accessible documentation for diverse audiences. With a background in technical communications and early experience at a small startup, she prioritizes consistency, accuracy, and careful versioning to maintain trust in published materials. Kri emphasizes close collaboration with subject matter experts and a willingness to ask basic questions to bridge knowledge gaps, and she’s now moving into a role focused on more technical storytelling while keeping content approachable.

🏆 The CSO Cybersecurity Awards highlight exemplary security projects that deliver measurable business value and thought leadership. This year’s winners — spanning enterprises, healthcare, finance, and government — illustrate how security teams have become strategic business enablers, focusing on revenue continuity, resilience, and regulatory compliance. Registration is open for the CSO Cybersecurity Awards & Conference, May 11–13, 2026, in Nashville, where professionals can connect and celebrate the honorees.

🔍 New analysis from Orange Cyberdefence of 418 law‑enforcement actions between 2021 and mid‑2025 shows profit-driven, midcareer criminals — especially those aged 35–44 — constitute the largest share of cyber offenders. Teenagers and young adults remain present (12–17: 5%; 18–24: 21%), but activity shifts toward organised extortion, malware and money laundering with age. Experts say modern operations resemble illicit tech firms that require project management, recruitment and financial expertise.

📰 This ThreatsDay bulletin summarizes a fast-moving week of cyber activity, covering phishing, malware, large-scale scraping, privacy actions, and research that changes operational risk. Notable items include a CERT-UA–reported phishing campaign delivering SHADOWSNIFF, SALATSTEALER, and a Go backdoor; a DDR5 scraping operation used for scalping RAM inventory; and a new Chrome two‑week release cadence. The update also highlights regulatory action against Reddit and privacy steps by Samsung.

🚨 Spanish and Ukrainian authorities dismantled a criminal network that exploited war-displaced Ukrainian women to run an automated online gambling and money-laundering scheme. The group financed victims' travel to Spain, coerced them into opening bank accounts and credit cards, then seized control to feed bot-driven low-odds bets. Investigators say the operation used identities from over 5,000 people across 17 nationalities and laundered an estimated €4.75 million. Authorities arrested 12 suspects, executed searches in Spain and Ukraine, and seized devices, bots, SIMs, vehicles and frozen properties.

🔒 Check Point recognized top partners across the Asia Pacific at its FY25 Sales Kickoff in Bangkok, honoring organizations that delivered exceptional customer outcomes and sustained growth. The awards spotlight partners advancing prevention-first, AI-powered cyber security amid rising AI-driven threats, expanding hybrid and cloud ecosystems, and regulatory complexity. The gathering of nearly 1,000 employees and partners underscored the company’s commitment to regional collaboration and partner-led resilience.

⚠️ 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.

🔒 The UK’s new vulnerability monitoring service (VMS) continuously scans more than 6,000 public bodies, detecting around 1,000 vulnerability types and processing roughly 400 confirmed findings a month. The service reduced median remediation for general vulnerabilities from 53 to 32 days and cut DNS fix times from 50 to eight days. VMS provides specific, actionable guidance and tracks issues until closure, while the government pairs the platform with a £210m Cyber Action Plan and a new Cyber Profession to address skills gaps.

⚠️ Anthropic has confirmed a widespread outage impacting Claude services globally. The incident was first reported on March 2, 2026, with elevated error rates, failed requests, and timeouts observed across web, mobile, and API platforms. An initial "Investigating" notice was posted at 11:49 UTC and a follow-up at 12:06 UTC states the team is still actively investigating. Users may experience inconsistent responses and no ETA has been provided.

🔐 EC-Council launched the Enterprise AI Credential Suite, introducing four role-based AI certifications alongside an updated Certified CISO v4 to strengthen executive readiness. The programs target a growing skills gap—cited as $5.5 trillion in unmanaged AI exposure and a 700,000-person U.S. reskilling shortfall—and align with U.S. AI workforce priorities. The suite maps to an Adopt. Defend. Govern. framework and includes Artificial Intelligence Essentials, CAIPM, COASP, and CRAGE to operationalize secure, responsible AI.

🔒 Spanish authorities say they arrested a 20-year-old who allegedly exploited a payment gateway to reserve luxury hotel rooms for a single euro cent. The suspect reportedly manipulated the communication between a booking site and the bank so the reservation appeared fully authorised while only €0.01 was processed. Multiple fraudulent bookings were reported by the travel agency, and one hotel lost over €20,000.

🧭 NIST has launched the AI Agent Standards Initiative via the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) to create a roadmap for developing interoperable, trustworthy autonomous AI agents. The effort will gather public input through an RFI (responses due March 9) and sector-specific listening sessions in April, and emphasizes industry-led standards, open-source work, and international engagement. Critics caution the process may be too slow to keep pace with agentic AI adoption and emerging threats.

🛡️ Operation Red Card 2.0, led by INTERPOL and law enforcement from 16 African nations between December 8, 2025 and January 30, 2026, targeted infrastructure and actors behind high-yield investment scams, mobile money fraud, and fraudulent loan apps. Authorities arrested 651 suspects, recovered over $4.3 million, confiscated 2,341 devices and disrupted 1,442 malicious IPs, domains and servers. The operation linked scams to more than $45 million in losses and identified 1,247 victims, underscoring the value of multinational cooperation against transnational cybercrime.

🕶 In episode 455 Graham Cluley and guest James Ball discuss whether major online services and cloud providers could become geopolitical leverage, asking if nations might have a viable contingency 'Plan B' for tech sovereignty. They also probe reporting that Meta may be considering facial-recognition features for its smart glasses, raising fresh privacy and surveillance concerns. The conversation blends technical detail with policy implications and public trust.

⚠️ Microsoft is investigating an outage affecting Microsoft Teams, with users in the United States and Europe reporting sign-in problems, failures joining meetings, and delays when sending or receiving chats that include inline media such as images, code snippets, and videos. The company classified the incident as a service degradation and said engineers were reviewing telemetry to isolate the root cause. Microsoft also addressed related issues that temporarily blocked the Join button and prevented some Copilot Studio agents from being added or updated.