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Three intrusions at UK criminal records office went undetected for two years

UK ICO reprimands ACRO criminal records office after three undetected intrusions over two years exposed thousands of records, including domestic violence victims.

The UK Information Commissioner's Office reprimanded ACRO Criminal Records Office after three intrusions between July 2021 and June 2023 exploited a Kentico customer portal unpatched since September 2019 and ignored Trend Micro antivirus alerts, including four quarantined Mimikatz detections. An attacker maintained persistent access for roughly seven months and staged data of nearly 11,000 people for exfiltration, though ACRO could not confirm exfiltration due to insufficient logging. ACRO notified more than 84,000 people on a precautionary basis; the Medusa ransomware group claimed the incident, and network segmentation kept attackers out of the Police National Computer.

The Record · Aug 12, 2026Data breach in the wild

Threat Brief: 3CXDesktopApp Supply Chain Attack (Updated)

Trojanized 3CXDesktopApp installers for Windows and macOS loaded RC4-encrypted shellcode delivering a backdoor to hundreds of thousands of 3CX users.

Threat actors compromised the 3CXDesktopApp build process, adding malicious libraries (ffmpeg.dll, d3dcompiler_47.dll) to installers downloaded from the developer's website. The Windows MSI loader decrypts embedded shellcode with RC4, sleeps for a random 1-4 weeks, then beacons to C2 hidden in icon files on GitHub. Unit 42 fingerprinted 247,277 IPs across 199 countries using 3CX applications and blocked shellcode execution at 127 Cortex XDR customers between March 9-30, 2023.

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

DeadLock Ransomware Uses Polygon Smart Contracts to Make Extortion Infra Harder to Disrupt

Microsoft reports DeadLock ransomware using Polygon smart contracts and Session messaging for extortion infrastructure, claiming 96 victims across Europe and the U.S.

Microsoft Threat Intelligence reports the DeadLock ransomware operation uses the Session messaging network and Polygon blockchain smart contracts to host victim chat, proxy server addresses, and its data leak blog, making takedowns harder. First detected in July 2025, the group has claimed 96 victims, mostly in Italy, Spain, Poland, Türkiye, and the U.S., with deployments by affiliates of Lynx and INC ransomware. The encryptor uses Curve25519 with XChaCha20, drops an interactive HTML recovery chat application, geofences CIS-linked countries, and clears logs and shadow copies to evade forensics.

The Hacker News · Aug 11, 2026Ransomware in the wild