ZeroHour

Search: “publishing”

27,163 stories

Rhysida Publishes Berlin Government Data After €2m Extortion Demand Refused

Rhysida published 5.7 TB of Berlin state government data, including sensitive CBRN emergency plans, after the state refused a €2m ransom demand.

The Rhysida ransomware gang leaked roughly 5.7 TB — about 1.4 million files — stolen from Berlin's state network after the government declined to pay 30 bitcoins (about €2m) by the September 4 deadline. The dump reportedly includes sensitive state emergency plans for terrorist attacks and CBRN disaster scenarios in a folder titled 'AG CBRN-Rahmenplanung', plus personnel files, absence lists, payroll data, and home addresses, potentially affecting tens of thousands of people. Berlin says there are no indications the state network remains compromised and will notify affected individuals on a risk-based basis after forensic analysis.

Infosecurity Magazine · 9d agoRansomware

Berlin investigates new data leak after hackers publish stolen login credentials

Berlin investigates a fresh leak after Rhysida hackers published stolen login credentials; the city refuses to pay the ransom demand.

Berlin confirmed hackers published additional stolen data, including login credentials, from a mid-August cyberattack on two city ministries responsible for urban development/housing and transport/climate. The Rhysida ransomware group claimed the breach in late August, saying it stole 5.79 TB of data including contracts, emails, passwords and classified information; Berlin acknowledged an extortion demand but refused to pay. Berlin's data protection regulator said the leak includes personal data on public employees and possibly residents, such as names, addresses, dates of birth and bank information. Germany's BSI separately linked the campaign to the TerminalFix fake-CAPTCHA technique and the LoremIpsumLoader/AxolotLoader malware tied to financially motivated Rhysida-associated hackers, days before Berlin's Sept. 20 election.

The Record · 9d agoRansomware in the wild1

The AI ‘Ghosts’ Contaminating Academic Publishing

Samsung and University of Warsaw researchers find LLMs repeatedly generate the same fake author names, contaminating academic records with 1,655 ghost-authored DOIs.

A preprint from Samsung and the University of Warsaw, "The Ghost Couple: Correlated LLM Name Priors and Their Haunting of the Web and Academic Publishing," shows that LLMs such as Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini repeatedly generate the same fictional names like Elena Vasquez, Marcus Chen, and Aris Thorne as experts and co-authors. Researchers identified 1,655 ghost-authored records on CERN-operated Zenodo carrying real DataCite DOIs, fabricated journals, and backdated publication dates. Ghost names also form synthetic research groups on ResearchGate and are indexed without verification by Google Scholar and Semantic Scholar. The researchers suggest correlated name priors could serve as provenance signals for detecting AI-generated content.

404 Media · 20d agoAI research

Anthropic's $1.5 billion book settlement descends into chaos as authors and publishers fight over who gets paid

Authors and publishers are filing competing claims over payouts from Anthropic's $1.5 billion copyright settlement covering 482,000 pirated books.

Anthropic agreed to pay $3,000 per illegally downloaded book, affecting more than 482,000 titles, in the largest copyright settlement in US history. As payouts begin, authors, publishers, and literary agencies are filing competing claims, complicated by poor rights-reversion records; textbook authors are reportedly owed as little as 10-15 percent under their contracts. A court had ruled Anthropic's use of illegally obtained books unlawful while deeming training on legally purchased books fair use.

The Decoder · 5d agoAI policy1

Hackers publish thousands of drivers’ data after breaching Florida motor vehicle database

ShinyHunters published hundreds of thousands of records from Florida's DAVID vehicle database, including SSNs and passports, after an unpaid ransom demand.

The ShinyHunters group published hundreds of thousands of files from Florida's DAVID motor vehicle database on its leak site, saying the victim did not pay a ransom. Stolen records include vehicle ownership certificates with names, addresses, and VINs, plus a smaller number of Social Security numbers, non-US passports, and immigration documents. FLHSMV confirmed the breach, which followed theft of a police officer's credentials stored on a personal device. It comes the same month as the IDScan hack exposing over 150 million driver's license images.

AD Rights Management Service (Part 2): Extraction, Offline Decryption, and the Unrotatable Key

Huntress research shows AD RMS SLC root key is unrotatable and never expires, so its compromise permanently exposes all RMS-protected documents.

Part 2 of Huntress's AD RMS series details server-side attacks: extracting the Server Licensor Certificate (SLC) private key and performing offline decryption of protected documents. The SLC key has no expiry or rotation mechanism, with a 255-year certificate validity (2002–2258), so whoever recovers it can decrypt every document the deployment ever protected, indefinitely. The author released SharpRMS, a unified tool combining the 2016 DisARMS client-side attacks with new server-side key extraction and decryption capabilities. The research frames the SLC as comparable to KRBTGT and the DPAPI domain backup key, though not equivalent to domain compromise.

Huntress · 6d agoResearch

Top 10 Best Mobile Device Management (MDM) Solutions in 2026

A 2026 MDM buyer guide ranks ten solutions, recommending Microsoft Intune for Microsoft 365 estates and Jamf for Apple-only environments.

A 2026 buyer guide evaluates ten mobile device management solutions, leading with Microsoft Intune as the default for Microsoft 365 organizations and Jamf for Apple estates. It recommends choosing the enrolment model before selecting a vendor and clarifying BYOD visibility to prevent privacy disputes. Kandji, Mosyle, Omnissa Workspace ONE, ManageEngine, Scalefusion, and Hexnode are covered as alternatives. Guidance ties MDM to Zero Trust data access policies via Apple User Enrolment and Android work profiles.

Cyber Security News · 7d agoIndustry

16 Typosquatted RubyGems Packages Steal Browser Credentials and Crypto Wallets

Typosquatted RubyGems packages deliver the StubMaker infostealer, stealing browser credentials, crypto wallets, and Telegram data from Windows developers.

OpenSourceMalware discovered a typosquatting campaign on August 15, 2026, tracked as StubMaker, publishing 16 malicious RubyGems packages (e.g., ubnuler, brumdler, brundlef) that imitate popular Ruby dependencies. The gems use the extconf.rb install hook to fetch a 22 MB Rust-based loader from GitHub, which launches a Go-based stealer ("wincfg") containing a DLL that bypasses Chromium's app-bound encryption to extract browser credentials, payment cards, crypto wallets and seed phrases, and Telegram Desktop data. Stolen data is uploaded as a password-protected ZIP to Gofile, with the download link sent over plain HTTP. The same actor also deployed 37 typosquatted npm packages delivering the identical loader and infostealer, and abused RubyGems' namespace reuse to republish malicious versions of yanked gems.

The Hacker News · 26d agoMalware in the wild

ShieldBreak: New Windows Zero-Day Bypasses Microsoft’s RoguePlanet Patch

Researcher Chaotic Eclipse published a PoC bypassing Microsoft's CVE-2026-50656 Defender patch, enabling SYSTEM-level code execution on fully patched Windows systems.

Security researcher Chaotic Eclipse released a proof-of-concept for ShieldBreak, a Microsoft Defender zero-day that fully bypasses the patch for CVE-2026-50656 (RoguePlanet), a race condition in the Malware Protection Engine (mpengine.dll) allowing SYSTEM-level code execution. The PoC was tested on Windows 11 25H2 and Windows Server 2025 with a 100% success rate, and Windows 10 is also vulnerable though not supported by the PoC; the flaw may also leak 8 bytes of memory. Microsoft's MSRC had criticized the researcher's repeated uncoordinated disclosures, including YellowKey (BitLocker bypass), GreenPlasma, and LegacyHive (User Profile Service LPE).

Security Affairs · Aug 12, 2026Exploit / PoCCVE-2026-50656