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Qatar’s Digital Boom Has a Blind Spot: What the 2025-26 Threat Data Is Telling Us

Cyble's Qatar Threat Landscape Report 2025-26 finds Qilin dominated local ransomware while access brokers concentrated on Qatari BFSI and retail access sales.

Cyble's Qatar Threat Landscape Report 2025-26 describes a concentrated threat environment where Qilin accounted for essentially all observed ransomware activity in the country in 2025, including an October campaign, with The Gentleman, Everest, Crypto24, and Payload sharing the space in 2026. Access brokers are selling compromised access, with BFSI and retail accounting for more than half of underground listings, while the education sector sees the most breach and leak incidents. Exploitation activity surged for enterprise remote-access products from Microsoft, Fortinet, Ivanti, and Citrix. The report was published ahead of the CYSEC Qatar summit and cites Qatar's data privacy law and National Cyber Security Agency initiatives.

Cyble · 9d agoThreat actor in the wild

Coast Guard, FBI boarded tanker after attack by ‘foreign cyber actors’

US Coast Guard and FBI boarded an oil tanker after foreign hackers compromised its network; VL Prosperity reportedly lost communications for 30 hours.

The US Coast Guard confirmed that a specialized team including USCG Cyber Protection Team members and FBI Cyber Action Team operators boarded a tanker on August 21 after indications its network was compromised by foreign cyber actors. Bloomberg identified one vessel as VL Prosperity; Iranian state-linked outlet Mehr reported it lost communications for 30 hours after an August 7 attack while transiting the Strait of Gibraltar, with a crew member alleging attackers increased engine speed and disabled fuel and engine-oil tanks. No operational disruptions or environmental impacts were reported, no group has claimed responsibility, and Russian analysts linked the incident to US-Iran tensions. A day before the alleged attack, North Carolina Ports reported a cyberattack that forced a shift to manual operations.

The Record · 9h agoData breach in the wild 2 sources

Trump Targets Foreign Technology in New U.S. Power Grid Security Order

Trump's Executive Order 14420 declares a national emergency to restrict foreign-made bulk-power grid equipment over cyber, sabotage and supply-chain risks.

Executive Order 14420, signed August 26, declares a national emergency regarding the foreign supply of bulk-power system electric equipment to the United States. It empowers the Energy Secretary to restrict transactions with designated Covered Foreign Entities involving equipment, software, firmware, digital services, maintenance services, and remote-access capabilities. Covered equipment includes transformers, generators, inverters, RTUs, PLCs, intelligent electronic devices, and protective relays, with transmission rated 69 kV or higher in scope while local distribution is excluded. Already-installed foreign equipment may be subject to identification, isolation, monitoring, or replacement requirements, with phased compliance and pre-qualified vendor exemptions permitted.

Security Affairs · 19d agoPolicy & legal

Explainability Assistant: A Conversational XAI Interface for Interpreting Energy Consumption Models

Researchers release Explainability Assistant, an open-source conversational XAI tool using LLM function calling, lifting intent-parsing accuracy from 76.8% to 94%.

The paper introduces the Explainability Assistant, an open-source conversational XAI system for interpreting energy consumption forecasting models such as genetic-programming symbolic regressors. It uses LLM function calling instead of rigid custom grammars, achieving 94% intent-parsing accuracy versus 76.8% for prior work TalkToModel, and adapts to different ML problem types without task-specific fine-tuning. Comparative evaluation with energy domain specialists against a traditional XAI dashboard showed improved usability, with all experts preferring the conversational interface.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 6d agoAI research1

A battery storage cyberattack would look exactly like a badly tuned controller

Risk modeling suggests a few hundred compromised grid-scale batteries dispatched through cloud optimizers could trigger blackouts in Texas or Great Britain.

Centrii analysis estimates 1,500 compromised one-megawatt units (5.4% of ERCOT's ~28 GW fleet) or 400 units (about 29% of Great Britain's ~1,400-unit fleet) could destabilize the grids, with modeled damage of $12-65 billion in Texas and a national blackout costing £2-10 billion in Britain. The study puts the probability of a major attack affecting at least one million people by 2031 at 92.1%, dropping to 61.4% with IEC 62443 certification and quarterly drills, based on 10,000 Monte Carlo runs. Because hostile battery swings are phased like legitimate frequency response, control rooms would see nothing unusual; Centrii proposes hunting for a reverse-governor signature where inverter output feeds oscillations. Spain's April 2025 blackout took an expert panel until March 2026 to rule out cyberattack, partly because key plants had no recordings.

Help Net Security · 15d agoResearch

Wake-Up Call for CNI After Iranian Attack Shuts Down UK Power Plant

A cyber-attack attributed to Iran shut down a UK power plant, exposing the frailty of critical national infrastructure, security experts warn.

Security experts say an Iranian cyber-attack forced a UK power plant offline, describing the incident as a wake-up call for critical national infrastructure operators. The attack caused physical operational disruption at an energy facility. Technical details about the intrusion path and the affected operator remain limited in initial reporting.

Infosecurity Magazine · 23d agoThreat actor in the wild

US offers $10 million for info on Iranian allegedly behind cyberattacks on critical infrastructure

State Department offers $10M reward for IRGC Cyber-Electronic Command chief Amir Yaryab over critical infrastructure cyberattacks across US, Europe, and Middle East.

The U.S. State Department posted a $10 million reward for information on senior Iranian official Amir Yaryab, who allegedly leads the IRGC's Cyber-Electronic Command (CEC) and directs hacking groups including CyberAv3ngers, Dadeh Afzar Arman (DAA), and Mehrsam Andisheh Saz Nik (MASN). These groups used malware to target defense, news, shipping, travel, energy, financial, and telecommunications sectors in the US, Europe, and the Middle East. The reward follows accusations of renewed Iranian attacks on water utilities, with over 100 entities breached across at least 12 US states since late July, and comes amid broader US-Iran tensions.

The Record · 9d agoPolicy & legal 2 sources

The complex corporate web behind a $3.2 billion AI data center

Ars Technica probes diffuse accountability behind TeraWulf's $3.2B Lake Mariner AI data center after a June fire exposed safety and job gaps.

A June fire at the Lake Mariner data center in Somerset, New York exposed missing alarms, a nonfunctioning suppression system, and dry hydrants, highlighting how responsibility is split across TeraWulf (owner-operator), Fluidstack (operator), Google (lease guarantees and equity warrants), and Anthropic (compute customer). The article details local concerns over the gap between promised 165 permanent jobs and a projected 35-40, socialized grid costs, and Governor Hochul's moratorium on hyperscaler development. Anthropic's February 2026 pledge to cover electricity price increases applies to the site but leaves other commitments unverified.

Ars Technica · AI · 9d agoAI industry

Lawmakers call on Treasury to sanction hackers-for-hire

Bipartisan US lawmakers asked Treasury to sanction three India-based hack-for-hire firms accused of long-running espionage against Americans.

Sens. Ron Wyden and Sheldon Whitehouse and Rep. Pat Harrigan urged Treasury to add Sunkissed Organic Farms (formerly Appin), BellTroX, and CyberRoot to the Entity List. The letter says the mercenary groups conducted targeted espionage against US citizens, businesses, and lawyers for over fifteen years, allegedly including work for Qatar's government such as targeting opponents of Qatar's World Cup bid and Kristi Rogers, wife of Senate candidate Mike Rogers. Adding the firms to the Entity List would restrict their access to American software, cybersecurity tools, and cloud infrastructure. The lawmakers also accuse the groups of lawfare campaigns to censor investigative reporting on their hacking activities.

CyberScoop · 7d agoThreat actor in the wild

Wicked Problem, Parsimonious Solution: Securing Electric Vehicle Charging Station Software

Position paper proposes hierarchical software quality assurance to characterize and secure EV charging station software attack surfaces.

The authors argue that charging station supply-equipment software is a largely unprotected and poorly characterized attack surface in EV charging infrastructure. They advocate applying hierarchical software quality assurance (HSQA) to this specialized software, spanning from individual vulnerabilities such as CVEs to high-level characteristics like the CIA Triad. HSQA embeds quality and security considerations across the entire software development lifecycle to assess and improve charging station software security.

arXiv cs.CR · 7d agoResearch

U.S. Offers $10 Million Reward for Iranian IRGC Cyber Chief Linked to Critical Infrastructure Attacks

The U.S. State Department offered up to $10 million for information on Amir Yaryab, an IRGC cyber chief linked to critical infrastructure attacks.

The U.S. State Department's Rewards for Justice program offers up to $10 million for information identifying or locating Amir Yaryab, who allegedly oversees the Cyber Operations Command of Iran's IRGC Cyber-Electronic Command (IRGC-CEC). Officials tie him to units called Shahid Hemmat and Shahid Shushtari conducting cyber and information campaigns against defense, telecommunications, energy, and finance sectors across the US, Europe, and the Middle East, and to groups including CyberAv3ngers and Dadeh Afzar Arman. CyberAv3ngers compromised at least 75 Unitronics Vision Series PLCs, including 34 in US water and wastewater facilities, between November 2023 and January 2024.

Cyber Security News · 8d agoPolicy & legal

Srsly Risky Biz: China's Private Sector Botnets Are Worth Disrupting

DoJ seized domains of Chinese espionage botnet platforms QScan and QTRouter, run by private firm QTFY for MSS and PLA targeting.

The US Department of Justice disrupted QScan, a distributed vulnerability scanning system with nearly a decade of internet scanning data, and QTRouter, a covert communications platform routing traffic through compromised IoT devices, operated by QTFY under Chinese company Nanjing Xinjiuwei Network Technology. FBI and NSA advisories say QTFY customers include China's Ministry of State Security and the People's Liberation Army, targeting federal agencies, the US Senate, hospitals, telecoms and financial institutions. This is the third Chinese state-backed botnet disrupted since December 2023, following the KV botnet (Volt Typhoon) and Raptor Train (Flax Typhoon), and a sister network, JDY, has more than doubled since the KV disruption. Separately, the Qilin ransomware group claimed a breach of the ATF's CALEA system, briefly publishing 6.3 GB of case folders and forensic data.

Risky Business News · 13d agoThreat actor1

Group of bipartisan lawmakers ask US government to ban several hack-for-hire firms

Bipartisan US lawmakers urged the Commerce Department to add hack-for-hire firms BellTroX, CyberRoot, and Appin/Sunkissed Organic Farms to the entity list.

Senators Ron Wyden and Sheldon Whitehouse and Representative Pat Harrigan asked Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to place three Indian firms on the entity list, which would bar US businesses from transacting with them. The letter says BellTroX, CyberRoot, and Sunkissed Organic Farms (formerly Appin) have conducted cyberattacks and targeted espionage against Americans for over a decade, allegedly at the behest of the Qatari government, and used foreign courts to censor reporting on their activities. Appin previously secured a global takedown order against Reuters that was later lifted, and has been linked to hacks of FIFA officials tied to Qatar's 2022 World Cup plans.

TechCrunch · Security · 7d agoPolicy & legal1

Suspected Iran-linked attack knocked UK power plant offline for days

Suspected Iranian hackers knocked a small UK power plant offline for four days in July 2026, with no noticeable impact on the national grid.

Sources told The Telegraph that a British power plant was offline for four days in July 2026 following a suspected Iranian cyberattack, reported to the National Cyber Security Centre. The UK energy minister said the incident affected a small-scale energy generator with no noticeable effect on the power supply, and energy CEOs were briefed and given further advice afterward. The attack followed warnings about Iranian cyber activity against US energy, water, and government networks, including a coordinated attack on 30+ US community water utilities.

Help Net Security · 24d agoThreat actor

xHunt Campaign: New Watering Hole Identified for Credential Harvesting

Unit 42 tied the xHunt campaign to a watering hole on a Kuwait government website used to passively harvest visitors' NTLM credential hashes.

Palo Alto Unit 42 identified a Kuwait government organization's webpage injected with hidden HTML referencing image paths on domains (microsofte-update.com, learn-service.com) tied to xHunt/Hisoka C2 infrastructure. When visitors loaded the page, Windows would attempt SMB/NetBIOS authentication to the remote share, allowing the operators to capture NTLM hashes that could be cracked or relayed. Related DNS redirect activity on xHunt infrastructure in 2019 pointed to additional credential-harvesting interest against Kuwaiti government email servers.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026Threat actor in the wild1

Large Language Models for HVAC Operations in Building Energy Systems: A Critical Review of Methods, Applications, and Deployment Readiness

Systematic review of 66 studies finds LLMs for HVAC operations are mostly research-stage, with no ready-now deployment and only four pilot-level studies.

A critical review of 66 peer-reviewed studies from 2023 to March 2026 examines LLMs for HVAC operations in building energy systems. Only four studies reach pilot-level evidence, none reports sustained operational deployment, and 63 of 66 are research-only. Conventional ML, MPC, and RL remain dominant for high-frequency control and short-horizon forecasting, and the evidence supports LLMs primarily as semantic and workflow layers rather than autonomous controllers.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 12d agoAI research

U.K. Supreme Court Opens Door for Spyware Victims to Sue Foreign States

UK Supreme Court ruled Bahrain not immune from spyware litigation, letting two dissidents pursue claims over FinSpy hacking; case returns to the High Court.

The UK Supreme Court ruled in The Kingdom of Bahrain v. Shehabi that Bahrain is not immune from litigation over its alleged use of FinSpy spyware against two Bahraini dissidents living in the UK. Citizen Lab researchers Siena Anstis, Natalia Krapiva, and Kate Pundyk, writing in Lawfare, called the decision a milestone for accountability in transnational repression. The case now returns to the UK High Court, where attribution, causation, and injury must be proven.

Citizen Lab · 14d agoPolicy & legal in the wild

Officials disrupt Chinese espionage operation that hit multiple federal agencies

FBI and DOJ seized QTFY infrastructure, disrupting a Chinese state-sponsored group that compromised federal agencies and critical infrastructure since 2018.

Authorities seized three domains powering QScan and QTRouter, the hacking suite of QTFY, a Chinese government-funded group operating through front company Nanjing Xinjiuwei Network Technology. Targets include the Departments of Energy, Justice, and Health and Human Services, the Federal Reserve, NASA, NIH, financial institutions, defense contractors, utilities, telecoms, and hospitals; the group exploited zero-days in Ivanti, Pulse Secure, Fortinet, Citrix, and others, intruding three DOE national labs in September 2024. QScan carried over 200 proof-of-concept exploits and processed more than two million scanning tasks in a single day in 2024.

CyberScoop · 21d agoThreat actor in the wild1

White House bans foreign-made equipment for power generation over cyber backdoor concerns

Trump executive order bans acquisition of foreign-made bulk-power system equipment over cyber backdoor and supply-chain concerns for US electricity infrastructure.

The White House issued an executive order declaring foreign-made bulk-power system electric equipment an "unusual and extraordinary threat," banning its acquisition or installation in the US. The order covers technology managing transmission lines rated at 69,000 volts or higher, substations, control rooms, power generating stations, reactors, and associated remotely accessible software and firmware. It follows recent cyberattacks on water utilities in at least 12 states, malicious activity targeting over 100 internet-exposed water and wastewater systems, and an NSA/FBI advisory on an AI-powered threat to operational technology. The Defense, Commerce, and Energy Departments have 120 days to create rules, identify countries warranting scrutiny, and inventory at-risk equipment.

The Record · 20d agoPolicy & legal

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 · 1d agoAI industry

US Sanctions Mabna Institute Hackers for Iranian Cyber-Attacks

US sanctions individuals tied to Iranian hacking-for-hire group the Mabna Institute over cyber-attacks.

The United States has imposed sanctions on individuals connected to the Mabna Institute, an Iran-based hacking-for-hire group. The move targets the actors behind Iranian cyber-attack operations. Sanctions are a government enforcement action rather than a new technical threat.

Infosecurity Magazine · 22d agoPolicy & legal

US disrupts Xinbi Guarantee marketplace fueling the cyber scam economy

US Treasury sanctions and DOJ seizures take down Xinbi Guarantee, a Telegram marketplace that processed $24B+ for cyber scams, freezing $52.8M.

The Treasury Department sanctioned the Chinese-language Telegram marketplace Xinbi Guarantee and two supporting firms, Anwen Technology (XinbiPay) and SafeW Technology, while the DOJ seized its Telegram channels and $52.8 million in USDT from 52 wallets. Blockchain intelligence firm Elliptic, which assisted the Secret Service, estimates Xinbi has processed at least $24 billion in transactions since 2022, making it the second-largest illicit online marketplace and a cornerstone of Southeast Asian cybercrime. Vendors sold money laundering, stolen personal data, deepfake technology, and other services for pig-butchering scams, with payments in Tether's USDT. The DOJ's Scam Center Task Force also dismantled 13 scam centers in Madagascar, arresting dozens of alleged leaders who were repatriated to China.

The Record · 7d agoPolicy & legal

White House Launches Pilot Program in Texas to Protect Water Infrastructure

White House launches Project Watershed 250, giving Texas water providers federal and private-sector cybersecurity resources amid rising nation-state threats to critical infrastructure.

The White House launched Project Watershed 250, a pilot program providing water providers in Texas with federal and private-sector cybersecurity resources. The initiative comes amid rising nation-state threats targeting water utilities and other critical infrastructure in the United States.

Infosecurity Magazine · 15d agoPolicy & legal

New Malware 'Rover' Targets Indian Ambassador to Afghanistan

Unit 42 reports a spearphishing attack delivering the custom Rover Trojan to India's Ambassador to Afghanistan, exploiting CVE-2010-3333 in Word.

On December 24, 2015, Unit 42 identified a targeted spearphishing email spoofing Indian Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar, sent to India's Ambassador to Afghanistan. The RTF attachment exploited CVE-2010-3333 in Microsoft Word to download a downloader from newsumbrella.net, which retrieved the Rover Trojan and DLL plugins from 46.166.165.254. Rover uses OpenCV for webcam capture, OpenAL for audio recording and libsndfile for audio files, with data exfiltration over its C2 channel; separate payload versions target Windows XP and later systems.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026Threat actor in the wildCVE-2010-3333

US Sanctions Iranian $6bn Crypto “Exchange” Shelbit

US sanctioned Iranian firm Shelbit, a fake crypto exchange that TRM Labs says handled $6bn, likely for laundering.

The US has sanctioned Shelbit, an Iranian entity presented as a cryptocurrency exchange. TRM Labs analysis indicates Shelbit was a fake exchange, with roughly $6bn in flows. Sanctions aim to disrupt Iranian illicit crypto finance channels.

Infosecurity Magazine · Aug 10, 2026Policy & legal