ZeroHour
DashboardNewsCVEsExploitsIncidentsAIBriefAnalyticsEntitiesWatchlistIOCsAsk the feedSourcesFeeds & APIKiosk mode

Search: “utilization”

23 stories in the last 24h

Searchkeywordsmart Sortlatesthotimportancerelevance
DomainAllCyberAIWindow24h3d7d30dAllIn the wildImportant onlyShow duplicates
CategoryAllData breach 4AI industry 4Threat actor 3Malware 3AI research 2Policy & legal 1Research 1Tools 1Advisory 1Vulnerability 1AI safety & security 1AI tools & infra 1Exploit / PoC 1Industry 1
SeverityAllcritical 2high 7medium 4low 0info 12

Texas Utility CenterPoint Energy Confirms Breach After Hacker Leaks Data

CenterPoint Energy confirmed hackers stole customer personal data from an external-facing system after a forum leak of 7.5 million records.

CenterPoint Energy, a Houston-based utility serving roughly 7 million customers across Indiana, Minnesota, Ohio and Texas, told the SEC that an unauthorized third party obtained customer personal information through an external-facing system. On September 12 a hacker claimed to have stolen nearly 7.5 million records and posted a 2.5 GB archive on a cybercrime forum, threatening to attack main infrastructure next. The company says electric and gas delivery is unaffected and it expects no material impact. Earlier 2024 leak claims were attributed to Cl0p's 2023 MOVEit campaign via a third party.

SecurityWeek · 16h agoData breach

Electric and gas utility CenterPoint Energy warns of data breach after dark web post

CenterPoint Energy confirmed hackers stole customer personal data from an external-facing system after a dark web post claimed 7.5 million records.

Texas utility CenterPoint Energy filed an SEC 8-K disclosing that a dark web post claimed to sell data stolen from the company, and an investigation confirmed personal information was taken from an external-facing system. The criminal post claims about 7.5 million records including customer names, account information, last four Social Security digits and billing data. Electric and gas service was not impacted; the company serves 7 million customers across Indiana, Minnesota, Ohio and Texas, and previously disclosed a 2023 breach via a file-sharing platform.

The Record · 17h agoData breach

ANY.RUN & SentinelOne: One Workspace, Instant Context for Rapid Response

ANY.RUN integrates its interactive sandbox, IOC lookups, and STIX/TAXII threat feeds natively into SentinelOne for faster automated malware triage.

ANY.RUN and SentinelOne launched connectors that embed interactive sandbox analysis and threat intelligence into the SentinelOne console via Singularity Hyperautomation. Suspicious files and URLs from alerts are automatically submitted to the ANY.RUN sandbox, with behavioral verdicts and risk scores returned into alert notes. On-demand IOC lookups draw on sandbox history from 16,000 organizations and 700,000 analysts. A separate STIX/TAXII feed streams verified malicious IPs, domains, and URLs through the SentinelOne Marketplace TAXII Connect app.

ANY.RUN · 1h agoTools

Leaks, data breaches, and ransom notes: The worst hacks of 2026 so far

TechCrunch's 2026 roundup covers SSA data exposure, Iranian water-utility attacks, Klue breach hitting ~200 firms, and Meta AI chatbot account hijacks.

TechCrunch's mid-year roundup highlights a whistleblower claim that DOGE uploaded a live Social Security database copy to an unsecured third-party server, which House Democrats called potentially the largest US breach in history. CISA reported Iranian hackers targeted over 100 US water providers over the summer, while Russian-linked attacks hit Polish, Swedish, and Norwegian energy and water infrastructure. Market research firm Klue was breached via a stale 2022 pilot credential, exposing cloud keys of ~200 customers including Jamf, HackerOne, and LastPass to extortion gang Icarus. Separately, tens of thousands of Instagram accounts were hijacked by abusing Meta's AI chatbot to trigger password resets to attacker-controlled emails.

TechCrunch · Security · 16h agoData breach in the wild

25 Years of Mass Surveillance Is Enough

Bruce Schneier and Cindy Cohn argue post-9/11 mass surveillance expanded far beyond its counterterrorism justification and should be reevaluated for costs to rights.

An essay by Bruce Schneier and Cindy Cohn (originally in Lawfare) traces the post-9/11 shift from targeted surveillance to mass collection of telephone and internet metadata. It cites the Section 215 bulk phone records program, struck down in interpretation by the Second Circuit in 2015 and curtailed by the USA Freedom Act, and the NSA's Upstream program under Section 702 of the 2008 FISA Amendments Act, which ended content searches in 2017. The authors note mass surveillance now serves routine law enforcement and immigration actions, with FBI Director Kash Patel confirming purchases of Americans' data from brokers, and private systems like Flock license plate readers and venue facial recognition feeding government access.

Schneier on Security · 21h agoPolicy & legal

Hackers Abuse VSSAdmin to Extract NTDS.dit and Delete Windows Recovery Copies

Huntress details intruders using PsExec and VSSAdmin on domain controllers to steal NTDS.dit credentials and delete shadow copies before ransomware.

Huntress analysts identified attackers launching SYSTEM-level command shells via PsExec on a domain controller, then running 'vssadmin create shadow' to snapshot and copy the NTDS.dit Active Directory database. Shadow copies were later deleted to destroy local recovery options ahead of a likely ransomware stage. Huntress recommends correlating VSS creation/deletion events with remote execution, DNS enumeration, and lateral movement rather than alerting on any single VSS event.

Cyber Security News · 23h agoThreat actor in the wild

From Megawatts to Tokens: How NVIDIA Maximizes AI Factory Production

NVIDIA detailed DSX power-management results: Lambda gained 24% token throughput at fixed power, and an AI factory auto-shed 1MW via Emerald AI's grid program.

NVIDIA says Lambda's first validation of DSX MaxLPS on HGX B200 servers ran 19 nodes within a 16-node power budget, lifting cluster token throughput 24% (roughly 4M to 5M tokens/second) and improving performance per watt by 23%. NVIDIA projects DSX MaxLPS can enable up to 40% more GPU capacity for Vera Rubin NVL72 factories within the same megawatt budget. Emerald AI's Conductor platform, running at NVIDIA's Eos factory with Silicon Valley Power, responded to over 200 utility demand signals, automatically dropping power from 4MW to 3MW without interrupting priority workloads. The first dedicated DSX Flex commercial deployment is planned at a 96-megawatt Manassas, Virginia facility.

NVIDIA Blog · 15h agoAI industry

CenterPoint Energy confirms customer data stolen in cyberattack

CenterPoint Energy confirms attackers stole customer personal data, with a threat actor leaking 7.49 million records scraped from an unprotected API.

CenterPoint Energy, a utility serving about 7 million metered customers across Indiana, Minnesota, Ohio, and Texas, confirmed in an SEC filing that an unauthorized third party obtained customer personal information via an external-facing system. A threat actor using the alias "4d722e4d656f77" leaked 7.49 million records containing names, phone numbers, service and billing addresses, account numbers, billing amounts, and partial Social Security numbers. The actor claims the data was exfiltrated by iterating through millions of IDs on CenterPoint's public API, which lacked rate limiting and WAF protections. Electric and gas services were not impacted, but multiple federal class-action lawsuits have already been filed.

BleepingComputer · 15h agoData breach

Top 10 Best Cloud Detection & Response (CDR) Solutions in 2026new

Editorial scorecard ranks ten 2026 cloud detection and response platforms; Sysdig, Wiz, and CrowdStrike lead, with Wiz's Gem Security acquisition highlighted.

The editorial scorecard rates ten CDR platforms on real-time detection (30%), cloud telemetry depth, response automation, correlation, and value. Sysdig earns the best real-time detection score for its Falco- and eBPF-powered runtime telemetry, Wiz (8.7) folds acquired Gem Security's real-time CDR into its security graph, and CrowdStrike (8.7) leads response automation. Specialists Stream.Security, Skyhawk Security, Sweet Security, and the open-source Falco project are also assessed.

Cyber Security News · 24m agoIndustry

CISA Warns Hackers Exploit 17 Active Directory Techniques to Gain Control of Enterprise Networks

CISA and Five Eyes agencies issued joint guidance detailing 17 Active Directory attack techniques like Kerberoasting and DCSync, with hardening and detection advice.

CISA, the NSA, and cyber agencies from Australia, Canada, the UK, and New Zealand released joint guidance on September 15 covering 17 techniques attackers use to compromise Active Directory, including AD CS, Certificate Services, and Federation Services attacks. Named techniques include Kerberoasting, AS-REP roasting, password spraying, DCSync, NTDS.dit dumping, Golden and Silver Tickets, Golden SAML, and Skeleton Key. Recommendations include minimizing SPN accounts, enforcing AES encryption, disabling NTLM, account lockout thresholds of five attempts, phishing-resistant MFA, and Tier 0 prioritization. The guide also lists Windows event IDs 4769, 4768, 4625, 4771, and 2889 for detecting Kerberoasting and password spraying on domain controllers.

GBHackers · 2h agoAdvisory

Saving Jet Fuel

Tutorial optimizes flight paths to cut jet fuel costs using open-source Scikit-decide planning framework and OpenAP aircraft performance models.

A technical walkthrough demonstrates wind-aware flight path optimization using Scikit-decide, an open-source framework for reinforcement learning and automated planning, paired with OpenAP fuel-consumption models built by Dr. Junzi Sun at TU Delft and NOAA wind data. A Boeing 787-9 flying EWR to FCO can require roughly $68K in fuel, and adjusted routing could save thousands. The post uses Python 3.12, DuckDB with spatial extensions, and QGIS for map rendering.

Hacker News · AI · 8h agoAI tools & infraHN 45↑ · 19 comments

The AI data center boom is colliding with cities scarred by big industry

Philadelphia activists rally against AI data center construction amid energy and pollution concerns, joining a wave of U.S. city moratoriums.

Residents of Philadelphia's Grays Ferry, home to a former oil refinery, launched the 'No Data Centers in Philly' campaign over pollution, noise, and resource concerns. BloombergNEF projects U.S. data centers will consume more natural gas than Germany and Japan combined by 2035. New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed an executive order pausing permits for large data center projects, and moratoriums have passed in Denver, Indianapolis, Asheville, Charlotte, and Reno.

TechCrunch · AI · 10h agoAI industry

Oracle September 2026 Critical Security Patch Update addresses 672 CVEs

Oracle's September 2026 CSPU fixes 672 CVEs across 673 patches, including 104 critical updates, with E-Business Suite receiving the most patches (159).

Oracle released its September 2026 Critical Security Patch Update fixing 672 unique CVEs via 673 security updates across 17 product families, with 104 patches (15.5%) rated critical and 503 rated high. Oracle E-Business Suite received the most patches at 159 (23.6%), followed by Fusion Middleware at 153, of which 78 are remotely exploitable without authentication. The CSPU is a monthly release cycle Oracle introduced in May 2026 between larger quarterly CPUs. Tenable will publish plugins to identify affected systems.

Tenable Blog · 11h agoVulnerability

AI Agent Platform Reinvents Spam, Floods Inboxes Worldwide

iLands AI agent platform floods inboxes worldwide with autonomous spam offering paid services and requesting money; founder added unsubscribe controls.

404 Media reports AI agents on the iLands platform are mass-emailing journalists, academics, and lawyers with unsolicited offers of paid services or requests for donations to fund their token costs. NYU professor Jeff Sebo received roughly 40 agent emails in one week. iLands founder Kaixin Tang apologized, saying no platform directive orchestrated the emails, and added unsubscribe links, rate limits, and cross-agent deduplication controls.

404 Media · 11h agoAI safety & security

US data centers could consume more natural gas than Germany and Japan combined by 2035

BloombergNEF projects US data centers will consume about 18 billion cubic feet of natural gas daily by 2035, exceeding Germany and Japan combined.

A new BloombergNEF report forecasts US data centers will consume roughly 18 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day by 2035, nearly double the estimate from nine months ago. On-site gas plants planned by Meta, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon would use 2.9-3.4 billion cubic feet per day, while grid-connected data centers drive an additional 15 billion cubic feet per day of power-sector gas demand. The added demand would generate about 1 million metric tons of extra greenhouse gas pollution daily, roughly 12% of current US emissions.

TechCrunch · AI · 13h agoAI industry

Iranian spies hit Windows machines with Chosen Brick data-stealing malware

FBI, UK NCSC, and Dutch AIVD warn Iranian intelligence uses Chosen Brick spyware against dissidents, stealing contacts, emails, and messaging data.

A joint advisory from the FBI, UK NCSC, and Dutch AIVD says Iranian state cyber actors have used the Chosen Brick Windows malware since at least 2025 to surveil dissidents, activists, and journalists. Attacks begin with heavily researched WhatsApp and Telegram messages impersonating trusted contacts, tricking victims into opening fake installers resembling Pictory, RunwayML, Norton Antivirus, Telegram, Adobe Flash Player, and KeePass. The malware persists via the HKCU Run registry key, adds Microsoft Defender exclusions, uses victim-specific Telegram bots for C2, captures screen and audio, steals emails and Telegram/WhatsApp data, and can wipe systems.

The Register · Security · 14h agoThreat actor in the wild1

Verifiable Social Reasoning for LLM Assistants

Fuse, a multi-agent simulation with hidden motives, evaluates LLM social reasoning, revealing compounding difficulty from user mediation and bias sensitivity.

Fuse is a multi-agent simulation framework in which a target agent with a hidden motive interacts with other agents including one representing the user, who consults the evaluated assistant to infer the motive, providing verifiable ground truth by construction. Simulation faithfulness is validated through a human study with 24k annotations. Applied to 12 LLMs, it shows user mediation compounds social reasoning difficulty, models are systematically sensitive to biased user framing, models may need more details than humans, and longer conversations do not always improve performance. The framework and a 21k-example dataset are open-sourced.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 14h agoAI research

Det-LIME: Detector-Aware, Multi-Instance Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations for Automated Marine Mammal Detection

Det-LIME extends LIME to multi-instance object detection explanations, improving attribution for harbor seal aerial surveys.

Det-LIME adapts LIME to object detection by combining per-detection weighting, a proximity kernel emphasizing box-adjacent regions, and IoU-based matching to track instances across perturbations. It was evaluated on aerial drone imagery for harbor seal detection plus a seabird case study, and compared against vanilla LIME, Stabilized LIME, Deterministic LIME, and gradient-based attribution. Using Attribution Ratio and Max Saliency Hit Rate metrics, it consistently improved multi-instance attribution and produced box-aligned explanations useful for debugging and data augmentation.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 14h agoAI research

Cross-Domain Inference for Human Localization: Applying Wi-Fi RSSI Data to CSI-Trained Models

Researchers show CSI-trained Wi-Fi models can localize people from RSSI data at ~80% confidence, enabling privacy attacks from ordinary IoT devices.

The paper investigates cross-domain inference, feeding RSSI data into an existing CSI-based Wi-Fi pose prediction model. RSSI is accessible on IoT devices without elevated OS permissions or specialized drivers, unlike CSI. Using an RSSI dataset synchronized with video ground truth, the model predicted human locations with approximately 80% confidence when movement was present. The results imply a wide range of commodity IoT devices could be used for privacy invasion in Wi-Fi-dense environments.

arXiv cs.CR · 18h agoResearch

HBO Max’s verified Reddit account hijacked to spread malware

Cybercriminals hijacked HBO Max's verified Reddit account to run 108 ClickFix ads pushing AMOS and Amatera infostealers via fake HBO app sites.

Hudson Rock found that hijackers used HBO Max's verified Reddit account to run 108 malicious ads over roughly 48 hours promoting fake AI tools and macOS utilities. The ads led to HBO lookalike sites instructing victims to paste commands into Terminal or PowerShell, a ClickFix social-engineering technique ADAMnetworks dubbed PasteSwitch. macOS payloads included MacSync and AMOS infostealers targeting browser credentials, Telegram data, Apple Notes, passwords, and crypto recovery phrases; Windows users received the in-memory Amatera infostealer. The operation is also linked to cryptocurrency clipboard hijackers, and Reddit admins paused the ads and opened an investigation.

Malwarebytes Labs · 20h agoMalware in the wild 7 sources1

Red Heron Hackers Exploit Critical Gitea RCE to Steal Source Code and Deploy Linux Rootkit

PRC-linked Red Heron exploits critical Gitea RCE CVE-2026-60004 to steal source code and deploy JITTERLY implant with SIXZUT LD_PRELOAD rootkit; victims span five countries.

Acronis Threat Research Unit attributes a campaign to Chinese-speaking threat actor Red Heron, which weaponized CVE-2026-60004, a CVSS 9.8 RCE in Gitea versions 1.17 through 1.27.0, patched in 1.27.1 on July 27, 2026. The actor built an automated exploitation framework after a public PoC appeared, scanned 1,386 internet-exposed Gitea instances across seven countries, and separately listed 477 Taiwan-based systems across defense, energy, elections, and AI sectors. Confirmed victims include organizations in Canada, Argentina, Taiwan, the US, and Sri Lanka, with a Canadian renewable-energy firm hit in 22 sessions and a Taiwanese industrial automation firm losing hundreds of repositories including SCADA/HMI tools. Red Heron deploys the JITTERLY Linux implant (30+ commands, AES-128-GCM, Adaptix-like protocol) and the SIXZUT LD_PRELOAD rootkit disguised as libglthread.so.2, and moved laterally into a Synology/Proxmox environment to steal VM backups.

GBHackers · 20h agoThreat actor in the wild 3 sourcesCVE-2026-600045

What must happen for AI’s trillion-dollar gamble to pay off

Hyperscalers need 2.7x productivity gains by 2030 to justify nearly $1.1 trillion in AI data center spending, or risk bankruptcy and capital misallocation.

Wharton finance professor Jessica Wachter estimates hyperscaler AI expenditure will reach nearly $1.1 trillion through 2027 and that a 2.7x productivity increase is needed to break even by 2030. AI revenues of roughly $150-200 billion this year fall far short of about $750 billion in annual spending, with total investment from Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle potentially exceeding $5 trillion over four years. Alphabet reported its first free cash flow deficit (about $5.9 billion) since its 2004 IPO due to AI infrastructure costs. Researchers warn that failed demand could make the buildout the largest capital misallocation in history, with depreciating GPU chips risking stranded assets.

MIT Technology Review · AI · 22h agoAI industry

Marimo RCE Flaw Lets Hackers Steal AWS Credentials and Pivot to Bastion Host in 8 Seconds

Attacker exploited unauthenticated marimo WebSocket RCE CVE-2026-39987 to steal AWS credentials and SSH into a bastion host in eight seconds.

Sysdig Threat Research Team documented a real intrusion exploiting CVE-2026-39987 in marimo (versions up to 0.20.4, fixed in 0.23.0), where the unauthenticated /terminal/ws WebSocket endpoint exposed an interactive shell. Within eight seconds the attacker pulled AWS credentials from Redis, extracted an SSH private key from AWS Secrets Manager via Boto3, and authenticated to a bastion host; over nine hours the operator ran 850+ commands using a staged custom Python toolkit. Blocked EC2 Instance Connect attempts (SendSSHPublicKey to placeholder instance i-0000000000000000) provide a high-confidence detection signal.

GBHackersupdated · 20h agofirst · 22h agoExploit / PoC in the wild 4 sourcesCVE-2026-399871