All news with #news tag

📰 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.

🎤 Bruce Schneier has posted a current schedule of public talks for late February and March 2026. He will speak at Ontario Tech University (Oshawa) on Feb 26, the Personal AI Summit in Los Angeles on Mar 5, and at Tech Live: Cybersecurity in New York on Mar 11. He will deliver the Ross Anderson Lecture at Cambridge on Mar 19 and appears at RSAC 2026 in San Francisco on Mar 25. The page maintains this schedule and will be updated as needed.

🛡️ The Munich Security Index (MSI) 2026, released as the Munich Security Conference opened on 13 February, reports that G7 countries identified cyber-attacks as their top national risk for 2025, marking the second consecutive year at the summit of concerns. The survey found particularly high cyber-risk perception in Germany (75%), the UK (74%) and Japan (70%). In contrast, the BICS grouping now prioritizes climate change, with cyber-threats falling to eighth place.

🔒 Russia is escalating efforts to block WhatsApp and Telegram after Roskomnadzor excluded whatsapp.com and web.whatsapp.com from the national DNS and began throttling services. Authorities previously limited voice and video calls and attempted to block new registrations, while Meta has been labeled as extremist in Russia. The Kremlin is promoting the state-aligned MAX messenger as an endorsed alternative, and users currently rely on VPNs and external resolvers to maintain access amid mounting restrictions.

🔔 The Frankfurt Cyberintelligence Institute (CII) has launched the Cyber Risk Observation Service (CYROS), a smartphone warning app that consolidates security-relevant alerts on ransomware, phishing and digital sabotage. CYROS aggregates official and specialist sources — including the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI), consumer protection groups and security vendors, and will integrate SOC feeds from Datagroup. Alerts are paired with tailored guidance and are sortable by topic, life area and federal state; the app is free in app stores and alerts are also accessible online.

🖥️ Microsoft has released Windows 11, version 26H1, but the distribution is limited to new ARM-based devices such as those using Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 processors and possibly other upcoming ARM chips. This build is a platform-specific release and will not be broadly delivered through Windows Update to existing PCs. Microsoft says organizations should continue to purchase, deploy, and manage devices on broadly released versions like 24H2 and 25H2. The company also reiterated its annual update cadence, with 26H2 expected later in the year.

📅 SQLCon and FabCon run March 16–20 in Atlanta, offering one registration that grants access to both events and a blended program of SQL, Fabric, Power BI, data engineering, real‑time intelligence, and AI. The week features 50 focused SQL sessions, hands‑on workshops on Monday and Tuesday, and stacked conference sessions Wednesday through Friday to help attendees build practical plans for the year. Expect roadmap updates, live engineering demos, Ask‑the‑Expert sessions, and community meetups delivering repeatable scripts, migration patterns, and modernization guidance. Look for registration discounts and use promo code SQLCMTY200 for $200 off.

🛡️ CISA coordinated a year-long, multiagency effort to secure Super Bowl LX, working with the NFL, DHS, the FBI, state and local partners, and private vendors to protect people, venues, and critical infrastructure. Region 9 authored a tailored playbook and executed physical security assessments using the Infrastructure Survey Tool and Infrastructure Visualization Platform, conducted tabletop exercises, and delivered bombing prevention workshops and cyber hygiene training. These layered measures aimed to reduce risk, strengthen communications interoperability, and ensure resilient operations throughout gameday.

📝 Bruce Schneier reports that his name appears only incidentally in the Epstein files. He recounts a 2016 email from someone identified as “Vincenzo lozzo” addressing DDoS attacks and dismissing Schneier’s commentary as dramatizing and misunderstanding. He also notes a separate incidental mention of a Rabbi Schneier. Schneier emphasizes these mentions do not indicate any connection or wrongdoing.