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4 stories in the last 30d

Cl0p Targets 40+ Organizations Through PTC Windchill Flaw

Cl0p claims over 40 organizations including Shell and Philips were breached by exploiting critical RCE CVE-2026-12569 in PTC Windchill and FlexPLM.

Cl0p claims more than 40 organizations were victimized via CVE-2026-12569 (CVSS 9.3), a critical deserialization-based remote code execution flaw in PTC Windchill PDMlink and FlexPLM, affecting releases prior to 11.0 M030; CISA added the flaw to its KEV catalog in June. ReliaQuest found the group deployed a custom web shell that maps vault data, decrypts all credentials in the Windchill keystore, and includes a Java class loader enabling arbitrary code execution, lateral movement, persistence, and large-scale data exfiltration without extra tooling. Named victims include Shell, Philips, Fiserv, Zebra Technologies, Ingersoll Rand, Toast, Mindray, and Apple lens supplier Largan Precision, with stolen data ranging from one gigabyte to multiple terabytes per target. The campaign mirrors Cl0p's earlier mass-exploitation extortion operations against MOVEit, Cleo, GoAnywhere, and Oracle E-Business Suite.

Security Affairs · 26d agoRansomware in the wildCVE-2026-12569

GentleKiller targets more than 400 security processes across 48 products

ESET details the Gentlemen ransomware gang's in-house GentleKiller EDR-killer framework targeting over 400 security processes across 48 products, supplied to affiliates.

ESET analyzed the Gentlemen ransomware gang's in-house GentleKiller EDR-killer framework, confirmed through an internal data leak from May 2026. The framework has at least eight variants impersonating legitimate security products and abusing vulnerable or malicious kernel drivers, targeting more than 400 process names across 48 security products. Gentlemen emerged in late 2025, became one of the five most active ransomware gangs in Q1 2026, offers affiliates a 90% ransom share, and practices double extortion using Go-based and C-based ESXi encryptors. The suite also reuses outside tools including HexKiller, ThrottleBlood, and HavocKiller, unified by a shared evasion layer that mimics well-known security vendors.

Help Net Security · 23d agoRansomware in the wild

Aurora Ransomware Operators Use Cursor AI in Attacks Against 10 Targets

Aurora ransomware operators used Cursor AI running Claude Sonnet to plan and execute intrusions against dozens of organizations in nine countries.

CloudSEK and Gambit Security analyzed exposed infrastructure tied to the Russian-speaking Aurora (Aur0ra) group, revealing months of activity against more than 20 organizations across nine countries between April and July 2026, with 33 victims listed by Ransomware.Live. The operator used the Cursor agentic coding assistant to plan attacks in Russian, including an AD CS exploitation plan, and Gambit observed Cursor Agent (running Anthropic's Claude Sonnet) performing hands-on exploitation tasks such as Nmap scanning, NetExec enumeration, NTLM relay, and certificate attacks against 10 targets. Attacks begin with email bombing plus IT help desk vishing via Xray-core, followed by SMB/LDAP/WinRM/RDP lateral movement, log clearing, Defender disabling, and exfiltration; the Windows and Linux/ESXi encryptors are built from a single Zig codebase, with shadow copy deletion and VM-killing before encryption.

The Hacker News · 16d agoRansomware in the wild1

AI agents carried out every step of this ransomware attack – then left the victim an 80-page security audit

Unit 42 says a human attacker used AI agents to execute a full ransomware intrusion in under 10 hours, leaving the victim an 80-page security audit.

Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 incident responders report a human ransomware operator used frontier AI models and agentic attack frameworks to breach an enterprise in under 10 hours, work that normally takes human operators around two weeks. AI agents performed reconnaissance, breached a public API endpoint to tunnel into the network, scraped code repositories for hard-coded tokens and service passwords, then used them to steal master administrative credentials from the secret-management system for root access. Specialist pivot agents validated access to cloud, identity, CI/CD, container and SaaS environments, and the attacker hijacked CI/CD workflows to steal cloud keys and turn the victim's cloud AI services into post-compromise infrastructure. The agents left an 80-page audit detailing dozens of exploited findings.

The Register · Security · 13d agoRansomware in the wild