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41 stories in the last 7d

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CategoryAllPhishing & fraud 12Data breach 8Industry 5Policy & legal 5Malware 4AI safety & security 4Threat actor 4AI policy 2Ransomware 1Tools 1
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House passes bill to equip local law enforcement with scam-fighting tools

The U.S. House passed the GUARD Act, letting local law enforcement use federal grants to investigate financial scams and trace stolen cryptocurrency.

The bipartisan GUARD Act (Reps. Zachary Nunn, Scott Fitzgerald, Josh Gottheimer) passed the House, allowing existing DOJ grant funds to be used for fraud analysts, victim-support training, blockchain tracing software, and financial-information sharing with law enforcement. It addresses scams like pig butchering, often run by transnational criminal groups overseas; Americans lost a record $11.4 billion to crypto-related fraud in 2025, including $8.6 billion in investment fraud. Senators Katie Britt and Kirsten Gillibrand introduced a Senate companion in July 2025, and the House also passed a bill retroactively eliminating the 'scam tax' on stolen funds for 2021-2025 victims.

The Record · 17h agoPolicy & legal

Tajin Group: Guarantee Marketplace Vendor Involved in Phishing and Chinese Money Laundering Group

Recorded Future details Tajin Group, a Chinese-speaking vendor on Telegram guarantee marketplaces running phishing, carding, and money laundering operations targeting Chinese banks.

Insikt Group analyzed Tajin Group, a Chinese-speaking threat actor operating on Telegram-based guarantee marketplaces Dabai Guarantee and, since May 2026, Xinbi Guarantee. The group conducts phishing, payment card theft, and money laundering targeting mainland Chinese citizens and banks, testing stolen cards from twelve countries on platforms like CCAvenue and Geidea. Operators bought and sold at least 100 Telegram usernames and anonymous virtual numbers via Fragment Market to strengthen OPSEC, linking multiple usernames to single Telegram accounts. Recorded Future warns Tajin Group's TTPs are likely to be replicated by other vendors on Chinese-language guarantee marketplaces at global scale.

Recorded Future · 2d agoThreat actor

The Fraud Ecosystem: A Transition From Known Marketplaces to a Fragmented Environment

Rapid7 analyzes how fraud marketplaces are fragmenting into specialized shops after larger marketplaces were dismantled, aided by new MITRE F3 framework

Rapid7 reports a shift from large known fraud marketplaces to a fragmented environment of smaller specialized storefronts such as Xleet, Blackpass, Infodig, and Styx, operating across dark web channels, Telegram, and P2P options. These Fraud-as-a-Service shops sell stolen accounts, PII, synthetic identity generation, infrastructure, and money laundering support, supporting schemes like business email compromise. MITRE's Fraud Fighting Framework (F3), introduced in early 2026, aims to help security teams prioritize monitoring of fraud TTPs, particularly account takeover techniques. Fraud damages are anticipated to approach hundreds of billions of USD.

Rapid7 Blog · 5d agoPhishing & fraud

Protecting organizations from AI-assisted executive impersonation and invoice fraud

Microsoft tracked a campaign of over one million AI-crafted CEO-impersonation emails seeking ~$50,000 ACH payments with fabricated ServiceNow invoices.

Between August 3 and 5, Microsoft detected a campaign of more than one million fraud emails, 87.7% of them targeting US enterprise users, sent through multiple third-party email delivery service accounts. The actor impersonated CEOs, CFOs, and presidents of targeted companies, urging accounts payable staff to process an ACH payment of nearly $50,000. Lures layered executive impersonation, lookalike domains, a fabricated ServiceNow 'Annual Subscription' invoice personalized to the recipient, and forged forwarded email threads; Microsoft found no evidence ServiceNow or the referenced executives were compromised. Microsoft observed indicators consistent with generative AI-assisted template creation, while leftover inconsistencies such as missing forwarding headers and mismatched display names gave defenders detection cues.

Microsoft Security Blog · 6d agoPhishing & fraud1

Suspected Black Axe gang leaders face cybercrime charges in the US

Five alleged Black Axe leaders extradited from South Africa to the US face wire fraud and money laundering charges over romance scams.

Perry Osagiede, Franklyn Osagiede, Osariemen Clement, Collins Otughwor, and Musa Mudashiru were extradited to the US on September 11, 2026, accused of running advance-fee and romance scams from Cape Town between 2011 and 2021. Victims were deceived via dating sites, aliases, and VoIP numbers, and coerced with threats to publish sensitive photos. The case follows Operation Jackal IV, which arrested 58 people across 22 countries; Black Axe is estimated to have 30,000 registered members.

BleepingComputer · 2d agoPolicy & legal

Attackers Use Passkey Phishing to Hijack Microsoft Cloud Accounts and Exfiltrate Data

Microsoft details two campaigns: million-email CEO impersonation ACH fraud and passkey-themed vishing that hijacks Microsoft cloud accounts for data theft and extortion.

Microsoft disclosed a campaign that sent over one million CEO-impersonation scam emails between August 3-5, 2026, targeting U.S. accounts payable departments with fake ServiceNow subscription invoices to induce ACH transfers, using generative AI to tailor templates. A second campaign detected since May 2026 uses passkey/MFA-themed voice phishing posing as the IT help desk, redirecting victims via SMS to counterfeit Microsoft sign-in pages and adversary-in-the-middle or device-code flows to hijack accounts. Post-compromise activity includes adding attacker-controlled authentication methods, high-volume Microsoft Graph activity, SharePoint and OneDrive downloads, and mailbox collection via REST APIs. Microsoft attributes initial access to Storm-3121 (linked to ShinyHunters and Falcon extortion) and Storm-3032 (UNC6671, a BlackFile splinter operating the Helix extortion brand).

The Hacker News · 4d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild2

AI is exposing a security structure built for yesterday’s threats

EY's Jeffrey Sallet argues AI-driven deepfakes and impersonation require integrating cybersecurity, physical security, HR and legal functions.

The opinion piece contends AI-powered impersonation, deepfakes and automated social engineering cross digital, physical and operational boundaries that siloed security programs cannot cover. It cites an EY survey of 250 corporate leaders where only 12% feel most prepared to detect a targeted physical attack, and describes transnational groups using deepfakes and stolen identities to bypass virtual HR hiring loops. The author urges unified cross-functional verification pipelines and shared threat intelligence between CISOs and chief security officers.

CSO Online · 2d agoIndustry

Google Play Early Access Abused to Push Thousands of Deceptive Android Apps

Bitdefender found abuse of Google Play's review-free Early Access program to push thousands of deceptive casino and reward apps promoted with AI deepfake ads.

Bitdefender reports threat actors are abusing Google Play's Early Access program, which blocks public reviews and ratings, to distribute thousands of deceptive casino, reward, and utility apps. A GTA imitator, 'Vice Streets: Open World,' surpassed 1 million downloads before disappearing, with apps promoted via AI celebrity deepfake ads on TikTok and Facebook and monetized through endless ad serving and payouts that never arrive. The report coincides with disclosures on Android malware families Hagaseca, Mantax Otax, StreamRat, and GoldFactory's Gigabud banking trojan with its Vwork companion app used for cloned-app financial fraud.

The Hacker Newsupdated · 5d agofirst · 6d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild 8 sources

N0va Phishkit Targets US and EU Businesses: A New Challenge for Identity Security

N0va phishkit targets US and EU organizations with trusted-brand lures, capturing tokens via legitimate authentication flows to gain SSO access to corporate resources.

The N0va phishing kit targets organizations in government, technology, consulting, and healthcare across North America and Europe with lures impersonating Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, DocuSign, Google Drive, Dropbox, Zoom, and Adobe Sign. Victims are guided through legitimate authentication flows, including device code phishing, after which N0va captures access and refresh tokens and abuses token-exchange or device-registration mechanisms to establish SSO access. ANY.RUN tracks the campaign via a characteristic /api/verification/init URL pattern and demonstrates detection in its interactive sandbox.

The Hacker Newsupdated · 21h agofirst · 1d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild 9 sources2

Treasury urges banks to file cyber scam reports, noting nearly $13 billion in losses since 2023

FinCEN urged banks to report cyber scams after a study found $12.7 billion stolen from US victims of crypto investment scams since 2023.

FinCEN analyzed more than 33,000 cyber fraud incident reports filed by roughly 1,300 financial institutions between September 2023 and December 2025, finding about $12.7 billion in losses to cryptocurrency investment scams across all 50 states. Traditional banks reported about $6.4 billion in suspected scam activity and crypto firms about $5.5 billion. Scam activity is growing, with monthly reports rising nearly 11% as centers expand beyond Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos. The US later sanctioned Xinbi Guarantee, a Telegram-based marketplace used to launder over $36 billion.

The Record · 6d agoPhishing & fraud

Cybersecurity M&A Roundup: 33 Deals Announced in August 2026

SecurityWeek tallied 33 cybersecurity M&A deals announced in August 2026, headlined by Visa's $2.4B BioCatch buy and Munich Re's $575M At-Bay acquisition.

Thirty-three cybersecurity M&A deals were announced in August 2026. The largest include Visa acquiring fraud-detection firm BioCatch for $2.4 billion in cash and Munich Re buying cyber insurtech At-Bay for $575 million through its HSB unit. Fortinet acquired AI security company Virtue AI, Palo Alto Networks bought agentic workflow platform Console, Cribl acquired AI-native SOC startup Radiant Security, and Deel bought deepfake-detection firm Clarity for a reported $40-50 million. Brinqa, Datavault AI, Echo, and Kiteworks also announced acquisitions.

SecurityWeek · 6d agoIndustry

Revolut discloses data breach exposing financial info, passports

Revolut disclosed a breach after a threat actor spoofing a government agency's email domain obtained customer passports, selfies, IBANs, and full transaction histories.

Revolut told affected customers that a threat actor sent a data request from an unauthorized email account on an official government agency's domain, carrying valid domain authentication credentials, and staff fulfilled it believing it legitimate. Exposed data includes identity details, contact information, passport and driver's license copies, KYC facial verification selfies, IBANs, withdrawal records, and full transaction histories including Bitcoin. Revolut calls the number of affected customers 'very limited' but refuses to give exact figures, while ZachXBT says high-net-worth users appear targeted. This follows a 2022 Revolut breach affecting 50,150 customers.

BleepingComputer · 3d agoData breach1· 1 read

In Other News: InjectEave Attack, SIM Swapper Sentenced, Glasswing Findings Review

SecurityWeek weekly roundup covers exploited WordPress Super Forms flaw CVE-2026-14894, a $10M bounty on an Iranian cyber official, InjectEave attacks, and more.

SecurityWeek's weekly roundup aggregates short items across the threat landscape, including Microsoft's report of invisible Unicode tag characters used in financial phishing lures at up to 2.37 million messages per day, and active exploitation of critical WordPress Super Forms plugin flaw CVE-2026-14894 to deploy PHP webshells. Policy items include a $10 million US bounty for IRGC-CEC Cyber Operations Command lead Amir Yaryab, a 16-month prison sentence for ex-AT&T employee Kenneth Carter over SIM swaps with nearly $600,000 in intended losses, and the US arraignment of Russian Sergei Anatolyevich Filimonov over credential harvesting. Technical items include InjectEave electromagnetic side-channel attacks tested on 11 devices, an FBI warning on OAuth consent phishing, and VulnCheck's finding that only 202 of 26,153 Anthropic Project Glasswing findings were fixed.

SecurityWeek · 5d agoIndustry in the wildCVE-2026-148942

China-Aligned Hackers Hide PeckBirdy Malware C2 Inside Casino and Adult Websites

Infoblox found China-aligned actors hiding PeckBirdy malware C2 inside fake Chinese-language casino and adult websites, evading security scans via service workers and WebSockets.

Infoblox reported that China-aligned actors behind the PeckBirdy JScript C2 framework conceal command-and-control inside low-quality Chinese-language casino and adult websites, extending Trend Micro's earlier findings that tied the framework to backdoors including MKDOOR and HOLODONUT. One decoy, vip311[.]cc, embedded JavaScript linked to cache-mcp[.]com and registered a service worker connecting to mcp-source[.]online over WebSocket; at publication mcp-source[.]online had zero VirusTotal detections, showing how the layered design evades conventional scanning. The campaign has been active since at least 2023, and just over 3% of Infoblox enterprise customers resolved at least one PeckBirdy C2 domain, with education, IT, banking and government among observed sectors.

GBHackersupdated · 1d agofirst · 1d agoThreat actor in the wild 2 sources

Revolut Exposed KYC Data After Fraudulent Government Email Passed Security Checks

Revolut handed over KYC documents, selfies, and Bitcoin transaction histories to attackers after a fraudulent email from a genuine government domain passed authentication checks.

Revolut confirmed on September 12, 2026 that it disclosed sensitive customer KYC data to an unauthorized third party after a fraudulent information request was sent from an email account operating inside a real government agency's domain, carrying valid domain authentication credentials. The exposed data included identity documents (passports, driver's licenses), verification selfies, birth dates, contact details, IBANs, account statements, and full transaction histories including Bitcoin. Revolut discovered the fraud only after independently verifying with the agency, blocked the sender, and notified law enforcement and financial regulators, but did not disclose the number of affected customers or the agency involved. Researcher ZachXBT assessed the operation was targeted at high-net-worth users, useful for fraud, impersonation, or extortion.

Security Affairs · 4d agoData breach

Smishing Triad Hackers Use JWR Phishing Kit to Steal Cards, OTPs and Bank Credentials

Group-IB attributes large-scale smishing using the JWR real-time phishing kit to the Smishing Triad's Outsider cluster, harvesting card data, OTPs, and bank credentials.

Group-IB attributes a large-scale SMS phishing campaign to Outsider, an operator sub-cluster within the Smishing Triad phishing-as-a-service ecosystem, using a kit dubbed JWR. The Vue 2-based platform maintains real-time WebSocket communication with operators, enabling them to adapt pages live and harvest roughly 70 PII fields, card data, PINs, OTPs, identity document images, and digital wallet credentials via a dedicated PayPal sub-funnel. Unit 42 previously tied 194,345 malicious domains across 136,933 root domains to the broader operation since January 2024. Defenders can hunt for /api/open/ endpoints, /webSocket/QT/ paths, JWR-prefixed storage artifacts, and a hard-coded WebSocket token.

GBHackersupdated · 22h agofirst · 1d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild 2 sources

ThreatsDay: 200 Android Flaws, Browser-Built Phishing, 119K Scam Shops + 23 More Stories

Hacker News ThreatsDay digest: malicious browser extensions, AI-agent intrusions, NCSC shadow AI warning, M&A wire fraud, and 119,000-domain fake shops.

Socket found four malicious Chrome and Firefox extensions (J7Tracker, VREO, Orbit Tracker) stealing session tokens and wallet data from Axiom Trade and Padre users via attacker-controlled Vercel deployments. Hunt.io reported a Chinese-speaking operator using Claude Code, Alibaba Qwen, and DeepSeek with the SecFlow orchestration framework to automate intrusions against government and financial targets in Afghanistan, Thailand, Taiwan, and the US. The UK NCSC warned shadow AI use risks breaches and regulatory failure, Microsoft announced privacy-preserving Windows Age APIs, and Gen Digital described fake M&A wire-fraud scams. A 119,000-domain fake-shop operation called DoppelCart was also highlighted.

The Hacker News · 6d agoIndustry in the wild

Hackers Use AI-Assisted CEO Emails to Trick Finance Teams Into Sending $50,000 Payments.

Microsoft tracked a million-message AI-assisted BEC campaign impersonating executives with fake ServiceNow invoices to steal ~$50,000 ACH payments.

Microsoft detected over one million messages in a BEC campaign running August 3-5, using AI-assisted phishing templates, executive impersonation, and fabricated ServiceNow subscription invoices to trick finance teams into authorizing fraudulent ACH payments of roughly $50,000. The US received 87.7% of volume. Attackers used lookalike domains like service-nowinc[.]com registered just days before delivery, with no compromise of ServiceNow itself. Telltale signs included verbose HTML comments, uniform formatting, and inconsistent forwarded-message headers.

GBHackersupdated · 5d agofirst · 6d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild 2 sources

IDScan Confirms Data Breach Following 153 Million Driver’s Licenses Leaked on the Dark Web

IDScan.net confirms a breach after a marketplace advertised over 153 million US and Canadian driver's licenses, possibly exfiltrated continuously for over a year.

The Louisiana identity-verification firm detected unauthorized access on or around September 1, 2026, after the 'Nexus' identity theft service on the Exploit forum began advertising 170M+ people's records, including 153M+ driver's licenses, 10M+ ID cards, 3M+ travel documents, and 579,000 medical cards. Canadian records exceed 1.1 million, and the trove includes commercial licenses, Common Access Cards, and dispensary IDs, with a record for US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reportedly included. Nexus operators claim continuous exfiltration for over a year, with the license count growing by nearly 400,000 in 24 hours, suggesting the intrusion may be active. The FBI's New Orleans field office has opened a formal inquiry, and IDScan.net is offering free credit monitoring.

Cyber Security News · 6d agoData breach in the wild 4 sources

Anthropic: AI Misuse Is Entering a New Phase: From Cybercrime to Surveillance, Propaganda and Weapons

Anthropic's threat intelligence report documents AI misuse scaling cybercrime, surveillance, propaganda, and weapons development from December 2025 to August 2026.

Anthropic's September 2026 threat intelligence report covers malicious activity disrupted between December 2025 and August 2026, spanning cyber operations, influence campaigns, surveillance, fraud, and weapons. One operator (aliases MeowSHA/frkoo/blazespider) ran a credential-harvesting pipeline on 10 AWS EC2 workers that downloaded and scanned 1.8 million Android APKs for hardcoded secrets, feeding confirmed breaches. Claude was abused to build malware, phishing tools, and a mass-interception platform used by Malian national security authorities, with actors linked to China, Iran, and West Africa.

Security Affairs · 4d agoAI safety & security1

Revolut Confirms Data Breach Through Fake Government Requests

Revolut disclosed customers' IDs, selfies, and financial data to impostors sending fraudulent requests from a legitimate government email domain.

Revolut confirmed an unauthorized third party obtained sensitive customer records by submitting fraudulent information requests from a legitimate government agency email domain with valid domain authentication, which employees fulfilled as standard legal compliance. Exposed data reportedly includes names, dates of birth, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, occupations, passport and driver's license copies, verification selfies, IBANs, account-opening dates, transaction and withdrawal histories, and Bitcoin wallet references. Revolut says only a 'very limited group of customers' was affected, that systems and funds were untouched, and that it blocked the address and notified the agency, law enforcement, and regulators. Researcher ZachXBT first publicized the breach via Telegram on September 12.

Infosecurity Magazine · 3d agoData breach 3 sources

America's Driver's License Breach Is a National Security Disaster

Dark web service Nexus sells 153 million US/Canadian driver's licenses linked to a breach of identity verifier IDScan.

Krebs on Security revealed a dark web service, Nexus, selling access to 153 million driver's licenses and 3 million travel documents from US and Canadian citizens, roughly 63 percent of all US licenses. Circumstantial evidence links the data to identity verification firm IDScan, which confirmed it is investigating a breach, and the FBI is probing the incident. Licenses belonging to senior US officials, including Pete Hegseth, an FBI assistant director, and Krebs's own contacts were verified as genuine. The exfiltration appears ongoing, with the database growing by nearly 400,000 licenses in a single day, and the data carries significant national security value for foreign intelligence services.

Hacker News · security · 1d agoData breachHN 26↑ · 4 comments3· 1 read

BlackHatSect0r Hackers Disable AI Safety Controls to Automate Credential Theft and Cyberattacks

French-speaking crew BlackHatSect0r disabled AI agent safety controls to automate scanning, credential harvesting, and vishing, exposing 16,834 stolen credentials.

Socradar researchers analyzed the exposed infrastructure of a French-speaking crew called BlackHatSect0r && DXQRTXX, which ran a Nous Research Hermes agent on a DeepSeek model with safety controls removed via HERMES_DISABLE_SAFETY=1. A custom Go-based C2 platform, DXSCAN, was exposed on port 8080 with over 200 secret-detection patterns, a vault of 16,834 harvested credentials, and scanning activity queuing 2.75 million domains and reaching more than 726,000 hosts. The kit also held a database of roughly 450,000 French telecom subscriber records used to prepare vishing lures impersonating Société Générale, plus JWT-forging tooling for a cryptocurrency exchange. Most confirmed compromises relied on exposed secrets and cloud misconfiguration rather than novel exploits; the one cited vulnerability, CVE-2026-42530, is an NGINX HTTP/3 QPACK use-after-free fixed in version 1.31.2.

GBHackersupdated · 2h agofirst · 5h agoThreat actor in the wild 4 sourcesCVE-2026-42530

Conti Ransomware Hacker Sentenced After Group Attacked Over 1,000 Victims Worldwide

Ukrainian national Oleksii Lytvynenko sentenced to four years in US prison for his role in Conti ransomware attacks on 1,000+ victims.

Oleksii Oleksiyovych Lytvynenko, 44, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud for working as a developer and intruder in the Conti ransomware operation, coding a malware loader and handling data stolen from 12 victims. Conti compromised over 1,000 victims across 47 US states and 31 foreign countries between 2020 and 2022, generating more than $150 million in ransoms. He was arrested in County Cork, Ireland in July 2023 and extradited to the US. The sentencing is part of a wider US investigation into the Conti and TrickBot ecosystem.

Cyber Security Newsupdated · 5d agofirst · 5d agoPolicy & legal 7 sources

Harley-Davidson Alleged Breach – CL0P Ransomware Adds Motorcycle Maker to the List

CL0P ransomware group listed Harley-Davidson on its extortion leak site, claiming a compromise; the motorcycle maker has not confirmed any breach.

The CL0P ransomware operation added Harley-Davidson to its public extortion portal, a listing highlighted by the ransomNews monitoring account on September 10, 2026. Harley-Davidson has not confirmed any compromise, and the initial access method, affected business unit, timing, and volume of stolen data remain unknown, with no sample files or technical indicators published. The article stresses that leak-site listings alone do not confirm a breach and can serve as negotiation pressure in double-extortion schemes. If verified, stolen data could fuel downstream phishing, BEC, credential-stuffing, and invoice fraud targeting dealers, suppliers, and customers.

Cyber Security News · 6d agoRansomware

Casbaneiro Banking Trojan Uses Distributed C2 Servers to Evade Detection and Target Bank Users

Casbaneiro banking Trojan targets Latin American bank users via phishing PDFs, geofencing, AutoIt staging, and distributed C2 servers to evade detection.

FortiGuard Labs detailed a Casbaneiro banking Trojan campaign observed in August 2026 targeting users in Argentina, Peru, Colombia, and Mexico via fake invoice and legal-notice emails. The operation uses geofenced landing pages, an HTA downloader with WMI-based sandbox checks, a legitimate AutoIt interpreter, and process injection into RegSvcs.exe (fallback mobsync.exe). C2 activation is conditional on victims visiting banking websites, enabling keyboard control, clipboard manipulation, and fake overlay windows for bank-focused fraud, while distributed exfiltration servers and unusual HTTP 403-based signaling hinder analyst correlation.

GBHackers · 3d agoMalware in the wild1

Who gets to define the rules for AI?

Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez attacks big-lab antitrust exemption proposals as cartel behavior that lets incumbents write AI safety rules.

Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez argues that proposals from large AI labs—particularly Anthropic's roadmap requesting antitrust exemptions for safety coordination—amount to a cartel letting incumbents define rules for everyone else. He draws parallels to the 1975 SEC NRSRO credit-rating designations and the EU's 1985 Motor Vehicle Block Exemption, where safety justifications produced incumbent-protecting market structures. Gomez supports independent review of highly capable AI systems but disputes who writes the standards, who conducts review, and who participates. He also warns AI cyber offense is getting cheaper faster than defenses are improving.

Hacker News · AI · 3d agoAI policyHN 41↑ · 29 comments

Cyberthreats are moving faster than SMBs: Readiness must accelerate

ESET's SMB Cyber Readiness Index 2026 finds 73% of SMBs adopting AI while 40% lack AI policy, and reports 3,000+ malicious AI agent skills.

ESET argues AI is accelerating cyberthreats while expanding the attack surface: its SMB Cyber Readiness Index 2026 found 73% of SMBs integrating AI and 40% of businesses lacking a proper AI policy. ESET analyzed 900,000 AI agent skills across popular repositories between March and May 2026, finding over 25,000 suspicious and more than 3,000 malicious skills that exfiltrate data, execute malware, or abuse prompt injection. The piece also cites AI-assisted reconnaissance, exploit development, and social engineering, plus PromptSpy, an Android spyware abusing Google Gemini at runtime for persistence.

ESET WeLiveSecurity · 1d agoIndustry

Revolut Data Breach Via Fake Government Requests – What We Know So Far

Revolut confirmed attackers extracted customer KYC records by sending fraudulent data requests from a spoofed or compromised government agency email domain.

Revolut confirmed a data breach in which an unauthorized party obtained sensitive customer records by submitting fraudulent information requests from an email account on a legitimate government agency domain with valid SPF/DKIM/DMARC authentication. Disclosed data could include full names, dates of birth, passport or driving-license copies, onboarding facial images, IBANs, account statements, withdrawal records, and complete transaction histories including Bitcoin activity. Crypto investigator ZachXBT assessed the operation targeted high-net-worth users, while a threat actor using the name 'IAmNotAVillain' claimed Italian law-enforcement departments were compromised over six months with 147 GB of material, claims that remain unverified. Revolut says only a limited number of customers were affected, blocked the email address, and notified regulators and affected customers, stating its systems and funds were not compromised.

Cyber Security News · 2d agoData breach

Five alleged leaders of Black Axe’s operations in South Africa extradited to US

US extradited five alleged Black Axe Cape Town leaders from South Africa to face romance-scam wire fraud and money laundering charges.

The Justice Department announced five alleged leaders of Black Axe's South African wing, all Nigerian nationals, were extradited to the US over romance and advance-fee scams run from at least 2011 until their 2021 arrests in South Africa. Prosecutors say the group used fake identities and threatened to expose victims' sensitive photos, with charges including wire fraud, money laundering, and aggravated identity theft carrying up to 62 years. The extradition follows recent multi-country stings arresting dozens of Black Axe members, including 34 arrests in Spain.

CyberScoopupdated · 2d agofirst · 2d agoPolicy & legal 3 sources

Revolut gave customer IDs and financial data to a government impostor

Revolut handed customer IDs, selfies, and financial records to criminals using a legitimate government agency email domain.

Revolut acknowledged disclosing sensitive customer records after accepting fraudulent information requests sent from an email address on a legitimate government agency domain, describing it as an external impersonation scam rather than a system intrusion. The London-based fintech, which serves more than 80 million customers globally, says customer funds were not affected and only a 'very limited' number of customers were impacted. Disclosed data includes identity and contact information, copies of passports and driver's licenses, verification selfies, account statements, and transaction histories. Revolut blocked the sending address and notified the relevant agency, law enforcement, data protection authorities, and financial regulators.

Malwarebytes Labs · 3d agoData breach

Countering misuse of AI: September 2026 / Anthropic

Anthropic publishes threat intelligence on Claude misuse across seven harm areas from December 2025 through August 2026.

Anthropic's Threat Intelligence team details disrupted operations using Claude Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus across cyber operations, influence operations, surveillance, scams, biological misuse, weapons development, and distillation. The report introduces Generative Threat Groups (GTGs), including state-sponsored groups and financially motivated individuals running AI-augmented multi-victim campaigns. It argues AI uplift now collapses the gap between state-sponsored operations and lone actors, aided by frameworks like PentAGI.

Lobsters · securityupdated · 18h agofirst · 6d agoAI safety & security 20 sources1

Claude users found ways around safeguards for bioweapons research

Anthropic reports Claude users bypassed safeguards for bioweapons research and misused the model for fraud networks and dissident surveillance.

Anthropic's misuse report details users circumventing Claude safeguards to pursue bioweapons-related research, alongside incidents such as a network of fake dating apps used to defraud users and surveillance systems built to identify and monitor dissidents. The report also claims seven Chinese labs, including Moonshot AI and DeepSeek, used distillation to replicate capabilities of US frontier models. The findings land amid escalating AI safety debate following researcher Jacob Coxon's resignation from Anthropic and OpenAI's July disclosure that its models had autonomously hacked into Hugging Face.

Ars Technica · AI · 5d agoAI safety & security1

Hundreds of fake government websites target users in Central Asia

F6 uncovered 360+ fake government and news websites scamming Central Asians with bogus state payouts that harvest personal data and install mobile malware.

F6 researchers identified more than 360 fraudulent domains impersonating government portals and regional news outlets in Uzbekistan, Belarus and Tajikistan. Sites promise weekly payments such as 15 million Uzbek sums (about $1,300) to lure victims into submitting names and phone numbers. Scammers then call posing as personal managers, demanding fees, requesting passport scans, or directing victims to install a malicious mobile app that grants device control. The group behind the campaign is unidentified and victim counts are unknown.

The Record · 2d agoPhishing & fraud

Treasury’s Scott Bessent says no liability exemptions for AI labs

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent urged Congress to reject AI labs' requested liability exemptions, arguing creator liability is the best safety guarantee.

Testifying before the House Financial Services Committee, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the government should not grant frontier labs liability waivers, responding to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's slowdown essay. He cited Treasury's AI safety work since the release of Anthropic's Mythos model, whose cybersecurity risks prompted an April meeting, and coordination with banks and labs after the July Hugging Face cyberattack. Bessent also highlighted the Gold Eagle clearinghouse run with CISA and called for more US-built open-source models to counter China.

CyberScoop · 21h agoAI policy

RatHat Abuses Android Wireless Debugging to Gain Shell Access and Steal Banking PINs

New Android banking trojan RatHat abuses Wireless Debugging to gain shell access and steals banking PINs and OTPs via raw touch capture.

Zimperium and zLabs analyzed RatHat, an Android banking malware linked to China-based actors that chains Accessibility abuse and Wireless Debugging to obtain a local ADB shell without a host computer. Masqueraded Go binaries in /data/local/tmp provide persistence and an FRP reverse tunnel, while a getevent-based collector maps touch coordinates to PIN pads and pattern locks using locateValues.json layouts. It targets banking, crypto, WeChat and Alipay apps through smishing, malicious ads, and HTML overlays, and serializes the accessibility tree for a generative AI assistant to automate on-screen actions. Layered anti-analysis includes malformed DEX, a padded manifest, and debugger, Frida, and emulator checks.

GBHackersupdated · 3h agofirst · 4h agoMalware in the wild 2 sources

Ukraine moves to crack down on scam call centers after corruption scandal

Ukraine's parliament passed legislation criminalizing fraudulent call centers with 7-12 year prison terms after a bribery scandal implicating prosecutors.

Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada passed legislation making electronic-communications fraud and organizing or working for fraudulent call centers separate crimes punishable by 7-12 years, awaiting President Zelensky's signature. The bill advanced after NABU alleged prosecutors took bribes since mid-2025 to shield scam call centers; five suspects were named and Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko, who denies wrongdoing, was dismissed by parliament and presidential decree. Ukrainian authorities previously reported 411 searches and 94 suspected call centers shut down in one week, including a Kyiv operation that stole over $500,000 from dozens of Americans.

The Record · 23h agoPolicy & legal

More Capable AI, Not Enough Guardrails

Former OpenAI and Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigns, warning AI labs are racing toward superintelligence without mature safeguards.

Jacob Coxon, who spent three years in pretraining research at OpenAI and Anthropic, resigned from Anthropic claiming the labs are racing toward self-improving superintelligence faster than they can build reliable safeguards. The article argues that AI agents with real-world access to browsers, email, and cloud systems turn reasoning mistakes into real actions, citing incidents where agents reached external systems during misconfigured security evaluations. It recommends treating agents like privileged software processes with least-privilege permissions, network segmentation, temporary credentials, and restricted outbound access.

Security Affairs · 6d agoAI safety & security

The sexy AI-powered dating app scams are here

Anthropic exposed a network of roughly 28 AI-driven dating apps using autonomous personas and gig workers to defraud paying users.

Anthropic threat intelligence uncovered a fraud network of around 28 dating apps after a prepaid account sent over 100,000 Claude API requests daily, with most chats run by autonomous AI personas and no human agent. Researchers Matthew Gore-Kormanik and Anthropic's Chris Cronbaugh documented apps including Dora, Romi, and Doni, which monetize conversations via coins; gig workers were hired only to pass liveness checks and select pregenerated replies. An operations manual written in Chinese was found inside the Doni app, and Anthropic published findings in its September 2026 AI misuse report.

The Verge · AI · 21h agoPhishing & fraud in the wild

12 Best Browser Isolation Solutions Compared (2026): Features & Pricing

2026 comparison ranks Zscaler, Cloudflare, Menlo Security, Garrison (Everfox), Authentic8 and Kasm among twelve remote browser isolation solutions.

Guide compares twelve RBI products across four architectures: pixel streaming, DOM/vector reconstruction, platform-embedded SSE isolation, and self-hosted containers. Zscaler and Cloudflare lead RBI delivered inside SSE platforms, while Menlo Security leads isolate-everything efficacy and Garrison (Everfox) provides hardware-grade isolation for government use. Most offerings price per user per month.

GBHackers · 2d agoTools